"It Caught on Fire": Flowers in the Attic, Gothic Melodrama, and Me

When I was fourteen or fifteen, my mom paid her coworker a quarter for a cardboard box of V. C. Andrews novels and gave me the lot.¹

I only read Flowers in the Attic, though I passed the books around my ninth-grade English class (a teen girl tradition I happened on completely by accident). My friend Emily read all the sequels.

On a related note, Emily was also a traitor, because when our teacher mentioned Flowers in the Attic with predictable disdain, she instantly called out, “Lauren read it!”

I, likewise a traitor, retorted, “Emily liked it!”

But Emily was an honest traitor, which is more than you could say about me. I did like Flowers in the Attic, even if I never made it through Petals in the Wind, let alone If There Be Thorns and on and on. I still kind of like Flowers in the Attic. I’ve reread it twice as an adult, and for all its painful, winceworthy prose², I respond to the storytelling and the commitment. This is about characters put into, and thoroughly warped by, an extreme situation, and Andrews does not believe in exploring that situation with guardrails.

I don’t mean just the brother-sister incest, which has effectively synonymous with the book over the years, but all of it. In a scene that has stayed with me for life, when the children’s grandmother punishes the children by denying them food for days on end, Chris, the eldest, eventually cuts his wrist to feed his younger siblings his blood. Say what you will about Andrews’s style, her sense of substance rarely missed. Whenever she got the chance to ground the heightened, almost feverish reality of this novel in intimately familiar specifics and sensations, she took it. All the Gothic touches–the vast house, the fire-and-brimstone religion, the murder attempts, the incestuous turducken–coexist alongside, and come alive through, the most mundane and, crucially, often domestic details.

The domestic is, after all, all the children have. It’s how they stay alive and (somewhat) sane, decorating their attic with paper flowers, treasuring tutus, and bemoaning lukewarm potato salad in their daily rations. I like domestic novels, but it can be hard, outside of a Laura Ingalls Wilder-like close-up on old-fashioned processes, to find examples that give this kind of detail. Andrews, via her narrator Cathy, provides an almost mind-numbing amount. She has to: the bedroom in Foxworth Hall, and the attic above it, become nearly Cathy’s entire world, with almost every stake and payoff realized within their walls. Everything here matters.

This combination of high drama and prosaic detail can, at its best, give the novel an almost hallucinatory power. One of my clearest memories of having had the flu when I was very young is staring at my own bedroom door, watching it apparently swell and shrink: the uncanny is literally Unheimliche, un-home-like, the home made strange. Here it’s not only strange but hostile and all-consuming, and a child dies from eating powdered sugar donuts laced with arsenic. The horror is cozy and close-in, a treat from someone you believed in.³ In V. C. Andrews, it’s never stranger danger.

Of course, no one, not even Andrews, can sustain this pitch for so long without lapsing into unintentional comedy. Take a look at this early passage, when the police inform Corrine Dollanganger of her husband’s death:

“According to the accounts, which we’ve recorded, there was a motorist driving a blue Ford weaving in and out of the lefthand lane, apparently drunk, and he crashed head-on into your husband’s car. But it seems your husband must have seen the accident coming, for he swerved to avoid a head-on collision, but a piece of machinery had fallen from another car, or truck, and this kept him from completing his correct defensive driving maneuver, which would have saved his life. But as it was, your husband’s much heavier car turned over several times, and still he might have survived, but an oncoming truck, unable to stop, crashed into his car, and again the Cadillac spun over … and then … it caught on fire.”

Like Christopher Dollanganger Sr. in this multi-part car crash sequence, I am dying. What is the funniest part here? The punchline? The cop apparently deciding that it’s worth specifying that, hey, it could have been a truck and not a car that dropped that piece of machinery? The praise for her husband’s “correct defensive driving maneuver”? The pacing in general? This is comedy gold.

Even the incest is paced like that car crash, especially if you come to it knowing that Chris and Cathy, pent-up and sexually frustrated and desperately lonely and reliant on each other, will eventually have dubiously consensual sex (Chris, who feels horribly guilty about initiating it, calls it rape; Cathy refuses to). Okay, so this is the brother-sister incest book. But wait! Their dad is also their mom’s half-uncle! And Chris keeps approvingly describing his mother’s figure! And when Cathy finally steals down from her prison to kiss someone else, it’s her new stepfather! As Kit Whitfield notes in her excellent (and influential, at least for me) essay on Flowers in the Attic and Twilight, even the “innocent” family relationships develop queasily sexual overtones. You have all of this, and only then do you get the consummation between Chris and Cathy. And then … it caught on fire.

Flowers in the Attic is lurid Gothic melodrama and one of the starkest examples of the domestic thriller ever, an absolute landmark in a genre that sometimes tries to have better taste than to acknowledge it. It’s bad, good, and so bad it’s good all at the same time, and it’s memorable in every mode. I never needed more than one book of this, but I rather admire it, and I remain glad I had it. In a world of unending discourse on what children should or should not be reading–as they often read less and less at all–I have to say that 25 cents for a box of V. C. Andrews was a ridiculously good deal for a teenage girl. High school feels like it has exactly this much melodrama anyway, so there’s no better time to immerse yourself in this hothouse and carnival funhouse mirroring of your life and feelings.

So I apologize for my years-old lie. I always liked it too.

1. Yes, she did know the thing everyone knows about Flowers in the Attic. I will always appreciate that my parents were usually chill about letting me read and watch things, outside of drawing the line at Buffy (sympathetic demons and also lesbians) and being retroactively bothered by James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (still not clear on that one. Maybe it was because of the ’81 adaptation). ↩︎
2. Faith: it’s all bound up to love and trust. Where does one end and the other start, and how do you tell when love is the blindest of all? or My anguish was always like a mountain of rage, for example. (I mean, it’s not all like that, but more of it’s like that than you’d want, certainly.) ↩︎
3. One of the most emotionally powerful arcs is watching first Cathy and then Chris lose faith in their glamorous, once-doting mother as her claims that she’s suffering too and will free them from the attic as soon as she can get less and less convincing as her visits get few and far between. By the time she’s selfishly demanding their praise and affection even as she keeps them locked up, and even after they’ve been starved, she’s effectively replaced the steely but straightforward grandmother as the villain of the piece.
   
   It’s the perversion of the home again: she’s the one they held close, so she’s the one who can really hurt and betray them, not the grandmother they never knew as anything but an enemy. The scene where she comes to tell the children she’s gotten remarried and expects their congratulations while they can only numbly hope her “good news” relates to their freedom is one a lot of authors would be happy to have written: Andrews is more than okay at purpose-driven dialogue, especially from characters without a trace of self-awareness. ↩︎