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Summary: Chapter 7

Merricat decides that today is the day she’s going to get rid of Charles for good. While he struggles to fix the broken step outside, Merricat goes into his bedroom and stops their father’s watch, which Charles has taken to wearing. She then removes several objects in the room and replaces them with twigs, leaves, and scraps from outside, and pours a pitcher of water onto Charles’s bed.

Charles loses his temper when he discovers Merricat buried a box of silver dollars underground, but Constance brushes off his anger. Later, Merricat returns from wandering outside to find Charles shouting again, having seen what she did to his room. He threatens her, and Constance tries to appease him, claiming the way Merricat behaves is her fault. Constance is brought nearly to tears as his tirade continues. She is caught between Charles and Merricat, who remains silent when asked to explain herself. Uncle Julian jumps in, his memory drifting in and out; one minute he’s referring to Charles as his brother John, the next he appears to remember who Charles is and says he is a bastard. He also insists Merricat is dead, that she died of neglect in the orphanage during the trial. Fed up with both Uncle Julian and Merricat, Charles demands something be done, but Constance assures him she will clear up the room after she prepares lunch. He demands Merricat be punished, and Merricat asks if he intends to send her to bed without supper. She then runs out of the house.

She goes to the summerhouse, an ugly, uninhabited dwelling nearby that her father had built but her mother refused to visit after seeing a rat. There she has a daydream, imagining her dead family, along with Constance and Uncle Julian, sitting around the dining room table. She fantasizes about them loving and praising her and saying she must never be punished.

Analysis: Chapter 7

In this chapter, Merricat makes a direct connection between Charles and her father when the former demands she be punished, and she asks if he intends to send her to bed without supper the way her family did just before they died. This is the most explicit explanation we receive as to why Merricat might have poisoned them. She repeatedly chafes at Charles’s authority and his insistence that she be punished; it’s not hard to imagine her responding similarly, and with less impulse control, six years earlier.

After bolting from the house, Merricat fantasizes about a version of her family that is still alive. In her imagination, they idolize her and treat her as if she can do no wrong. This preoccupation with avoiding punishment for misbehavior indicates Merricat’s immaturity; she remains childlike in many ways, expecting to be adored unceasingly, the way Constance treated her before Charles arrived.

It becomes clear in this chapter why Merricat interacts with Uncle Julian entirely through Constance, and never addresses him herself: because, due to his cognitive decline, he believes her to be dead. This positions Merricat as something of a ghost, at least to Uncle Julian, a parallel to Merricat’s insistence that Charles is nothing more than a ghost. Perhaps Uncle Julian is aware that it was she who poisoned him, and maintaining that she is a ghost enables him to cope with living in the same home as the person who attempted to murder him.

It’s revealing that Charles insists Merricat has no right to bury the silver dollars because, he claims, they aren’t hers. The silver dollars certainly don’t belong to Charles but he appears to feel entitled to them, perhaps because he is seeing the Blackwood home and everything in it as belonging to him in the future, once he marries Constance. Merricat’s sees ownership quite differently; in replacing all his things with twigs and leaves from outside, she believes she alters the room’s makeup entirely, turning it into something new—a room that doesn’t belong to either Charles or her father, its previous inhabitant, foreshadowing the idea that the sisters will soon forge a new path independent of their male relatives or their past. 

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