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“Mary Katherine must never be punished. Must never be sent to bed without her dinner. Mary Katherine will never allow herself to do anything inviting punishment.”

In Chapter 7, Merricat runs off when Charles demands she be punished, retreating to the family’s abandoned summerhouse in the woods. There she fantasizes about an alternative version of reality in which her dead family members are still alive. They praise her endlessly and claim she can do no wrong. This fantasy underscores the childlike aspects of her personality; at eighteen, she still wants to be the “most loved” daughter, to receive compliments and presents and to never be sent to bed without supper. She implies in this scene, and during the confrontation with Charles, that her parents sent her to bed without supper the night she poisoned the whole family. According to Constance, Merricat was frequently getting into trouble for misbehavior. It’s possible this is what prompted her to kill them; Merricat, as we see through the course of her narration, has a habit of wishing death upon those she doesn’t like.

This is the closest we get to receiving a motive for the murders; indeed, her mother’s insistence that Merricat must never “allow” herself to do anything inviting punishment offers a glimpse into the logic by which Merricat governs herself and may suggest she feels guilty. We see throughout the text that there are many rules by which Merricat must abide, and we learn later that she set these rules herself. Perhaps Merricat sees the murders as the inevitable result of her having been punished; if she had not been punished, no one would have died, and so Merricat seeks to avoid situations in which she will be punished and become forced to retaliate.

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