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Summary: Chapter 8

Merricat returns to the house to find Charles in the kitchen, ranting about her behavior to Constance. Constance tells Merricat to wash her face and comb her hair for dinner. Merricat obliges, but first she makes a detour to Charles’s room, which Constance has cleaned. Merricat spies Charles’s pipe, still burning, on the bedside table atop a saucer. She sweeps both the pipe and saucer into a wastebasket, which is full of newspapers Charles purchased in the village.

Merricat goes back downstairs, and Charles smells smoke. Suspicious that Merricat may have done something, he goes up to his room and discovers the flames. He sprints out of the house to get help in the village, and instructs Constance and Merricat to get their money out of the safe. Since the fire is moving slowly, Constance helps Uncle Julian to his room to gather his papers, and when she comes out, Merricat ushers her to the porch just as a fire engine arrives. The fire chief, Jim Donell, leads the charge into the house.

Merricat and Constance conceal themselves as best they can behind thick vines on the porch as the yard fills with people from the village who have come to watch the fire. They can hear Charles among them, demanding someone get the safe out of the study. An unnamed woman in the crowd shouts to let the house burn. When the firefighters succeed in putting the fire out, the crowd appears disappointed. Jim Donell emerges, removes his fireman’s hat, picks up a rock, and hurls it through a window. Everybody in the crowd laughs, then surges forward into the Blackwood home, where they begin destroying everything.

Merricat realizes they need to move, and pulls Constance along with her as the villagers continue their destruction, some of them calling out the rhyme about Constance offering Merricat a poisoned cup of tea. As the sisters hesitate to go further than the steps, Helen Clarke and her husband Jim arrive, along with Dr. Levy. Jim Clarke berates the villagers, calling them “drunken fools,” and Helen Clarke watches in helpless horror. Dr. Levy enters the house to look for Uncle Julian. Merricat and Constance attempt to flee, but the villagers emerging from the house spot them. Though they don’t touch either sister, the villagers impede their progress, jumping in front of them and taunting them. Finally, Jim Clarke orders them all to stop and announces that Uncle Julian has died. Charles asks if Constance killed him, and Dr. Levy says no, that Julian’s heart simply failed.

The villagers, at Jim Clarke’s urging, begin to disperse, and Merricat leads Constance to her hiding place near the creek where Jonas has been waiting for them. She says she is going to put death in all the villagers’ food, and Constance asks, “The way you did before?” This marks the first time either sister has acknowledged that Merricat poisoned the family, and Merricat hesitates before saying yes.

Analysis: Chapter 8

When Merricat sets the house on fire, she does it in a way that symbolically places the onus on Charles, suggesting his very presence is the catalyst for the destruction. Merricat’s inner monologue doesn’t reveal whether she sets the fire intentionally, or what she thinks will happen when she does it. Given her preoccupation with cleaning, her impulse to get rid of the pipe and to cleanse the room of Charles’s presence feels very in character. However, given her inclination towards violence, deliberately setting the house on fire also feels very in character. She claims she had “known all day” that she would find something on the nightstand, which could suggest premeditated arson but could just as easily refer to her annoyance with the messes Charles makes.

What the Blackwoods prioritize during the fire speaks volumes. Charles consistently prioritizes the money in the safe over the lives of his cousins and uncle, emphasizing his greed. Uncle Julian is determined to retrieve his papers, his only method of making sense of the world. Merricat and Constance appear more distressed over how much of a mess the will make than the loss of the house itself, and they initially refuse to leave the porch of a burning building than reveal themselves to the villagers.

They are ultimately proven to be justified in their fear. After the fire is put out, Jim Donell removes his helmet, thereby stripping himself of his responsibilities as fire chief and allowing himself to become part of the mob forming in the yard. The villagers’ hatred bubbles over, resulting in their storming of the Blackwood home, a culmination of decades of bitterness. They destroy the house and objects within, symbols of the Blackwoods’ wealth and superiority. The fact that they do so while chanting the rhyme about Constance putting poison in Merricat’s cup of tea suggests the villagers also hold a grudge against Constance for supposedly getting away with murder.

Though the villagers are initially described as nameless and faceless, merely voices in an anonymous crowd, they come into focus as they provoke Merricat and Constance. Even Stella, whom Merricat didn’t previously dislike, appears to laugh at them along with the Harris boys. The Clarkes and Dr. Levy emerge as symbols of rationality; Helen Clarke can do little but watch fearfully, but Jim Clarke and Dr. Levy inform the crowd of Uncle Julian’s death, forcing everyone back to reality.

Merricat’s confession to Constance that she did indeed poison their family is perhaps less shocking than the fact that Constance already knew. Throughout the story, there are many hints that it was actually Merricat, not Constance, who committed the murders—so many, in fact, that the reader might have actually started to wonder if Jackson was positioning Merricat as the murderer only to later reveal it was Constance all along. Playing with readers’ expectations allows Jackson to hit the reader not only with Merricat’s confession, but Constance’s as well. 

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