47 pages • 1 hour read
V. C. AndrewsFlowers In The Attic
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Doll
The doll, an inanimate replica of the human form, which child’s play manipulates and imbues with life, is a recurrent motif in the novel. The word “doll” heads Dollanganger, the fictitious surname of Cathy’s nuclear family, and is appropriate because the blond, beautiful family considers itself the perfect prototype of humanity, and the male and female prototypes of mother and father duplicate in the aspects of daughter and son in a manner that resembles a doll factory. Indeed, the family is nicknamed the “Dresden dolls” after an old, European porcelain doll manufacturer (7). Given that the theme of incest runs throughout the novel, this doubling of prototypes creates an ominous tone that sets Cathy and Chris on the same path as their parents.
The doll gains further resonance for Corrine, who following her husband’s death, considers herself “a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she’d have a man to take care of her” (27). As a spoilt daddy’s girl and indulged housewife, Corrine lives out the cliché of a grown woman kept like doll in a patriarchal society (27). When Corrine, as a little girl, inherited her own dollhouse, and got to be in charge of a miniature household, she was whipped for breaking “a very handsome young man doll” when she tried to take off his coat and judged as sinful for “wanting to see what was underneath the clothes” (190). Corrine’s parents’ mistrust of her intentions led them to treat her like an object rather than an agent, and so she would come to wholly rely on men for power and approval rather than on her own abilities.
By the end of the novel, Cathy refuses the doll prototype, explicitly stating that “that fragile, golden-fair Dresden doll I used to be” was “gone like porcelain turned into steel,” and that she will be active in creating her destiny (410). However, arguably Corrine, who has gone to such ruthless lengths to ensure that she stays written into her father’s will, has also swapped her porcelain for steel. While she is determined to live out her days in luxury without having to work herself, and therefore resemble a well-dressed doll in one respect; Corrine has also had to cultivate her own hardness and cunning, and so broken the passive doll prototype.
By the end of the novel, Cory and Carrie resemble dystopian dolls, with their listless constitutions and overlarge heads and eyes, which become “dark and hollowed out” (299). It is in the twins that the doll motif becomes the most sinister, as their evolution into underdeveloped miniatures exhibits the full cruelty of parental neglect. While life in the attic has made Cory dead and inanimate as a doll; living, but undersized Carrie has to be dressed and carried out of there in a similarly doll-like manner. Without her beloved twin, Carrie is unsure of whether she wishes to continue living as an animate human-being.
The Attic
The fabled attic where the four children spend many of their days confined is a constant motif in the novel and is of mixed positive and negative significance. On the one hand, it is a place of decaying matter, where the Foxworth family’s obsolete clothing and furniture gathers dust and vermin. The air is “murky; it had […] an unpleasant odor of decay, of old rotting things, of dead things” (61). Stiflingly hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter, the attic is a place where the real plants the children bring up there die, and the younger siblings’ bodies grow frail from a lack of fresh air. The older siblings are themselves swept into the attic’s decadence, as they lose their virginity to each other and repeat their parents’ incestuous relationship.
However, the attic, which “stretched for miles” (61), is also a vast place that engenders the children’s creativity and sense of wonder. The description of how “everything seemed to move, to shimmer, especially in the darker, gloomier corners” (61), is seductive, and implies that the darkness is not the malign force it initially seems, and that there could be possibilities for growth and development within it. Certainly, unlike the bedroom, which grandmother can enter at any time, the attic is off limits to her owing to her claustrophobia, and therefore is a space of relative freedom and transgression. Up there, the children protest their separation from the seasons by creating paper decorations that mark the passage of time, and Cathy and Chris, who escape onto the roof for some fresh air, have grown so “accustomed to high places, the roof, the many ropes attached to the rafter beams” that they have the impression that they could be trapeze artists following their escape (369).
Having endured the harsh conditions of the attic, Cathy feels resilient to whatever life throws at her, as the multigenerational “wisdom” of the attic “was in my bones, etched on my brain, part of my flesh” (410). Thus, while the attic threatens to reduce the children to the condition of unseen mice—vermin who must quietly die with arsenic—it also sharpens the survivors’ appetite for being “somebodies” and thereby mattering on a grand scale (421). Indeed, before she leaves, Cathy insists on documenting the Dollanganger children’s presence in the attic, on a chalkboard, so that they can make their mark on the historic space that has so marked them. With this gesture, she also emphasizes the children’s resistance to disappearing, as their ghosts too may haunt the attic.
Hair
Hair is a constant motif in the novel, and variously comes to symbolize beauty, sexuality, power, and bodily autonomy. In the first instance, the Foxworth family’s blondeness, which not only defines the younger Dollanganger family but the thinning-haired grandfather and grandmother too, marks them out as of a piece, and even speaks to the homogeneous nature of their coupling.
Still for Cathy, her blonde hair is a marker of genetic pride, as she believes that it is “prettier […] than what most girls had” and regards it is a key part of her identity and increasing sexual allure as she enters puberty (326). She notes that unlike the plants which languish in the attic, her and her siblings’ hair continues to grow. She brushes and curls her own waist-length hair with care, and likens herself to fairytale “damsels in distress” who “always had long, long, blonde hair” (324). Deeming herself “princess-like” and worthy of being rescued by a handsome prince, in the manner of the fairytale heroine Rapunzel, she enjoys the way that Chris seemed “impressed and dazzled” by her hair, “just as he had been when he gazed so long at Momma’s swelling bosom” (204). The love and care that Cathy bestows on her hair shows that despite her current state of captivity, she is preparing for a life where she will be able to flaunt her beauty as an object of male admiration.
Cathy’s hair becomes the target of grandmother’s ire, when she is caught preening naked before Chris. Grandmother threatens Cathy’s hair first with scissors, and then attacks it with tar to try to subdue her granddaughter’s vanity and sense of power over men. Arguably, grandmother, whose real hair is fair and sparse between her steel-grey wig, wants to give Cathy the same bald, pathetic appearance as her unadorned self. Cathy, who feels that her true power lies in being pretty, will stop at nothing to ensure that she keeps her hair, and will even sacrifice her weak twin siblings’ food ration in this endeavor. Here, in a similar manner to Corrine, Cathy puts her sense of herself as a sexual being ahead of the health of vulnerable dependents, as if by retaining her hair, she is able to retain the power which is important to her above all else.
On another occasion, Cathy thinks that sexually-frustrated Chris will feel manlier if he allows her to cut his overgrown blond locks in a short style that is symbolic of traditional masculinity. Her theory proves correct, when Chris feels like a “blond Prince Valiant” after his haircut (325). However, Chris, a former guardian and rescuer of Cathy’s hair from grandmother’s predation, turns into a predator himself as he chases her with the scissors and threatens her with a haircut. The struggle that ensues as Cathy determines to save her hair, with all of its symbolism of her rescued beauty and autonomy, ends with Chris’s scissors violently spearing her side. Here, Chris’s attack on Cathy’s hair is a precursor to his attack on her body when he later rapes her.
Finally, Bart Winslow’s dark hair, which comes up every time he appears, is significant as a symbol of healthy, heterogeneous genes, which are different from those of the Foxworth family, who are blond products of inbreeding. Both Corrine and Cathy are sexually attracted to Bart’s dark-haired difference, and when Corrine runs off to create a new life with Bart, she would appear to be victorious in escaping the family’s unhealthy blond homogeny. Cathy, left behind and forced into an incestuous relationship with her blond brother, realizes that “there had to be some other prince for me to bring about a happy ending,” and acknowledges that however radiant her family’s blondness is, someone with a different hair color would be a more wholesome choice of partner (284).
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By V. C. Andrews
