Flowers In The Attic

“Just because we were all blond, flaxen-haired, with fair complexions […] Daddy’s best friend, pinned us a nickname, ‘the Dresden dolls”. He said we looked like those fancy porcelain people who grace whatnot shelves and fireplace mantels.” 

The Dollanganger family’s fair, doll-like coloring and similarity hints that they are the product of an incestuous union. The fact that they are ornamental, porcelain dolls rather than plastic toy dolls readily played with indicates a kind of fragile, old-fashioned quality to their beauty.

“You can’t live without money. It’s not love that makes the world go round—it’s money.” 

Corrine’s pronouncement that money is more important than love will become increasingly significant as the narrative unfolds. Born into a family of extreme wealth, and then reliant on her husband, Corrine cannot imagine a life without a man who provides for her lavishly. 

“This huge house seemed a monster, holding us in its sharp-toothed mouth. If we moved, whispered, breathed heavily, we’d be swallowed and digested.” 

The narrator, Cathy transposes her fear onto the house, which she describes in the simile of a predatory wild animal. If the children exhibit signs of life, the house will obliterate them and make it seem as though they had never existed. Next to the unknown forces of this predatory house, they feel small and powerless.

“I was the kind of child who’d always looked for fairies dancing on the grass. I wanted to believe in witches, wizards, ogres, giants, and enchanted spells. I didn’t want all the magic taken out by scientific explanation. I didn’t know at that time that I had come to live in what was virtually a strong and dark castle, ruled over by a witch and an ogre. I didn’t guess that some modern-day wizards could weave money to create a spell.”

In childhood, Cathy found enchantment in the possibility of a magical realm, and the motifs of witches and castles that she encountered in fairytales. However, following her imprisonment in grandmother’s Gothic-style house, she is learning that money can be used to impose fairy-tale like conditions and punishments. This passage also sets the scene for the crossing of fairytale and realism that defines much of the novel. 

“Thirty-three lashes, one for each year of her life. And fifteen extra lashes for each year she lived in sin with your father. Your grandfather ordered this punishment, but I was the one who applied the whip.” 

The beating that grandmother gives Corrine is a numerical chastisement of her errant flesh. The punishment borrows from the Catholic tradition of self-flagellation; whereas the numbered beatings are in the style of the quantifiable prayers said on a rosary. In the style of most of the punishments in the house, grandfather orchestrates the sentence, while grandmother delivers it. However, the children, who only see grandmother, mostly blame her for their sufferings. 

“My father is a ‘collector.’ He buys everything that is considered a unique work of art—not because he appreciates art, but he likes to own things. He would like to own everything, if possible, especially beautiful things. I used to think I was part of his collection of objets d’art… and he meant to keep me for himself, not to enjoy, but to keep others from enjoying what was his.” 

Grandfather’s tendency to want to own beautiful objects and keep them from others, thereby imprisoning them in the family home, parallels the incestuous tendencies amongst the Foxworths. The passage also reveals an unhealthily possessive attitude towards his daughter, whom he objectifies and sequesters from the world. 

“Love at first sight. Oh, that was going to happen to me, I just knew it would and he’d be as beautiful as Daddy had been, radiating beauty, touching my heart.” 

When Cathy hears the story of her parents’ romance, she begins to daydream about her own future love. However, she holds her future partner to the same standard as her father. As the novel unfolds and her imprisonment in the attic continues, this attitude becomes dangerous, as her brother, the man who most resembles her father, is the only one she sees and is readily available to her. 

“God-like, we changed the seasons in the attic. We took down the flowers and hung up autumn leaves of brown, russet, scarlet and gold. If we were still here when winter’s snowflakes fell, we’d then substitute lacy white designs that we were all four cutting out in preparation, just in case.” 

Confined in the attic, the children mark the changing seasons with their imitation-of-nature artwork. The attention with which they cut and color the leaves indicates how much they miss the natural world. The fact that they are already cutting snowflakes indicates that they no longer think that their removal from the attic is imminent and are bracing themselves for a longer stay.  

“Funny how much you can learn from inanimate objects that a little girl once owned, and had been allowed to look at, but never touch. And then another little girl came along, and the doll house was given to her, and the glass box smashed just so she COULD touch the objects inside so she could be punished—when she broke something.” 

Cathy contemplates how the dollhouse’s first owner, grandmother, received it in a glass box so that she could look but not touch. This admonition corresponds with grandmother’s fixation on temptation and sin. Corrine, the second little girl to receive the dollhouse, was allowed to play with it, as long as she did not break its dainty parts. Given that breaking something is inevitable, Cathy’s mother, Corrine, has the threat of punishment hovering over her. This corresponds with Corrine’s childhood of endless riches, which are conditional on her obeying orders. 

“Love, it came unbidden. You couldn’t help who you fell in love with—Cupid’s arrows were ill aimed. Such ran the whispered comments between Chris and me.”

When Cathy and Chris discuss how their parents fell in love with each other, despite being related, they decide that who one falls in love with is a matter of chance that no one can help. By invoking the classical deity of Cupid, whose often misdirected arrows caused unsuitable matches, the children remove agency from their parents, and so forgive them. Although they are growing closer, Chris and Cathy do not at this stage suspect that they could repeat their parents’ crime. This is due to change in the course of the novel.

“The flaring chiffon panels of her couturier gown seemed liked wild fluttering wings, wafting sweet, flowery perfume that went ill with her fierce demeanour.” 

This passage shows how Corrine’s feminine, almost ethereal appearance with her wing-like gown and floral scent is at odds with her fury. Although her appearance is dainty and pleasing, it is a foil for extreme self-interest and the drive to safeguard her own interests. In realizing the discrepancy between her mother’s appearance and her reality, Cathy gains insight into her mother’s true nature. 

“Another year passed, much as the first did. Mother came less and less frequently, but always with the promises that kept us hoping, kept us believing our deliverance was only a few weeks away.” 

This passage reveals how Corrine tries to retain her children’s trust by dangling the hope that grandfather’s death is imminent before them. This hope keeps the children obedient for a whole two years; however, they increasingly suspect that Corrine’s word is not trustworthy. 

“How could she know that almost every night I dreamed she stole into this room while I slept and sheared me as one does a sheep? And sometimes I dreamed not only did I wake up in the mornings bald and ugly, but she cut off my breasts too.”

Cathy’s dreams about having her beautiful hair and budding breasts cut off by grandmother reflect her fears that in keeping her locked up and away from life, her grandmother is trying to eradicate her sexuality and femininity. Cathy innately feels that she has the right to grow into a woman and be seen as one; whereas grandmother would like to suppress her. The dream proves prophetic, when grandmother tries to control her Cathy’s burgeoning sexuality by attacking her hair with tar. 

“Swelling up in both of us was a turmoil of whirling emotions. Something sleeping deep inside of me had awakened, quickened, just as Aurora slept until the Prince came to put on her quiet lips a long lover’s kiss.”

When Chris kisses her while they are half-naked, Cathy experiences her sexual awakening. She compares this to the sleeping princess Aurora’s awakening from a state of slumber or sexual ignorance once a prince kisses her. However, the sinister fact of the kiss is that her brother awakened her sexual feelings, and so they are nearing the incestuous sin that grandmother set them up to commit. 

“Their bodies seemed frail flower stems too weak to support the blossoms of their heads. I waited until they fell asleep in the weak sunlight, then said in an undertone to Chris, ‘Look at the buttercups, they don’t grow. Only their heads are larger.’”

Cathy is disturbed by the realization that after two years and four months of confinement, the twins have not grown. In having heads that are large compared with their bodies, the twins retain the proportions of infants, instead of developing into healthy seven-year-olds. The over-large heads and eyes also make the twins appear doll-like, and thereby an uncanny embodiment of the Dollanganger Dresden Doll stereotype. Their lack of development also highlights the attic regime’s cruelty. 

“We accepted what she was willing to give us. We were, as she had told us she had learned to be with her father, her dutiful, obedient, and passive children. And, what’s more, she liked us this way. We were her sweet, her loving, her private ‘darlings.’” 

This passage reveals how Corrine is living out the same unhealthy pattern as her father, when she prefers her children as passive, decorative objects rather than subjects with opinions of their own. The children, who still love her, feel so traumatized by her absence that they learn to cope with the partial love and broken promises she delivers to them. 

“Perhaps he sensed my purpose, and put some extra speed into his longer legs—he bounded forward, and caught hold of my long, streaming locks, causing me to scream as I tripped and fell forward.” 

The scene in the attic where Chris pursues Cathy with the scissors and threatens to cut off her hair prefigures his later rape of her. Although the game with the scissors is ostensibly a teasing game, Cathy fears losing her already-attacked hair. Here, the hair, part of Cathy’s body and a symbol of her femininity, is attached to her power and autonomy. By making a claim on the hair, however jokingly, Chris stakes a claim on Cathy’s power and aims to dominate her. 

“It came over me all of a sudden—the impulse to kiss him—just to see if the dark moustache tickled. Just to know also, what a kiss was like from a stranger who was no blood relation at all.” 

When Cathy spies on her young stepfather in the chair, she desperately wants to kiss him. Her desire to kiss someone who is not family reflects her wish to escape the unhealthy cloistered atmosphere which is pushing her towards her brother. She also wants to step into her mother’s shoes, given that her mother is enjoying worldly sensual pleasures while she keeps Cathy confined.  

“I had the strong dancer’s legs; he had the biceps, the greater weight and height…and he had much more determination than I to use something hot, swollen and demanding, so much it stole reasoning and sanity from him. And I loved him. I wanted what he wanted—if he wanted it that much, right or wrong.”

Cathy compares her physical strength with Chris’s, and judges that he has more as a result of his size and his maleness. She agrees to have sex with him because she loves him so much that she can temporarily blind herself to right and wrong. By figuring out that Chris’s penis steals “reasoning and sanity from him,” she manages to separate her beloved brother from the lust-filled monster who pursues her relentlessly.

“And so it had come to pass, just as the grandmother predicted. Devil’s issue. Created by evil seed sown in the wrong soil, shooting up new plants to repeat the sins of the fathers. And the mothers.” 

Following her sexual encounter with Chris, Cathy feels doomed because she has fulfilled grandmother’s prediction about them. However, while Chris and Cathy may be the spawn of “evil seed,” the “wrong soil” which has deprived them of other sexual options and so forced them together, is grandmother’s responsibility. 

“What would the world think of us now? We weren’t beautiful like we used to be, only pale and sickly attic mice with long flaxen hair, wearing expensive but ill-fitting clothes, and sneakers on our feet.” 

When the time approaches for the surviving children’s escape, Cathy, who has been so longing for the real world, is suddenly afraid of what the world will think of them. She feels that life in the attic has caused them to lose their beauty, as they have become more like “mice” than humans. Their ill-fitting clothes, which have been bought for them by a mother who is increasingly ignorant of how their bodies really are, resemble the many old-fashioned costumes in the attic, rather than the apparel of well-loved children.

“Our mother was proven a liar and a cheat, a thief who’d stolen our youth, and killed Cory in the process of acquiring a fortune she didn’t want to share with children she no longer wanted, or loved.” 

When Chris tells Cathy that Corrine has lied about grandfather still being alive, and has now run off with the fortune, they are forced to confront the truth about their mother’s selfishness. The notion that Corrine has “stolen” her children’s youth is apt, as in her second marriage, away from the house, she has given herself another chance to thrive while she deprives her children of healthy growth.

“Where was that fragile, golden-fair Dresden doll I used to be? Gone. Gone like porcelain turned into steel—made into someone who would always get what she wanted, no matter who or what stood in her way.” 

When Cathy and her surviving siblings escape the house, Cathy knows that her experiences there have steeled her and made her far less fragile and dependent than the doll-like creature she used to be. She feels that she has an unbending will of “steel” and that she will fight for what she wants, regardless of obstacles.