The late V. C. Andrews’ novels were something of a guilty pleasure when I was a teenager, though now the books that continue to be ghostwritten and published under her name are not so pleasurable (and inspire boredom rather than guilt). Though actually one could have said the same of some of the books that she actually wrote. As for the one that made her famous, it has to be read to be believed. Like many other soap-operatic stories, it plays to the fantasy of being beautiful, talented and oppressed – but rising above that and finding true love. The difference is that everything stays in the family, since incest has never been quite so romantic.
Setting the tone for all subsequent novels with a first-person narrator, Gothic mansion setting, religious fanatics, adorable but abused children, family secrets and warped sexuality, this potboiler novel is a good read if you’re willing to suspend all standards you have regarding plot and writing style, and maybe characterization as well. The book begins with the blissfully beautiful family of Christopher, Corrine, Chris, Cathy, Cory and Carrie (yes, it’s one of those cutesy families where every person’s name starts with the same letter, perhaps because they all conform to the Aryan ideal of fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes). Christopher, hereinafter referred to as “Daddy”, is very much in love with Corrine, also known as “Momma”.
“Did you toss and turn at night, wishing I was there? For if you didn’t, Corrine, I might want to die.”
Not words to throw around lightly. Since parental deaths are a staple of Andrews’s writing, the father of Flowers in the Attic is soon pushing up the Daisies in the Graveyard. The manner of his death is meant to be tragic, but unfortunately it just comes across as hilarious when it’s described by the cops. Apparently some drunk driver caused him to swerve, and he would have been all right, but there was some debris on the road that prevented him from moving completely out of the way. He would still have been all right if another car hadn’t struck his, causing his vehicle to tip over. He would still have been all right (albeit upside-down) if his car hadn’t burst into flames. At this point, I mentally added that he managed to crawl out of the car, and he would still have been able to escape if a Mack truck hadn’t driven over him. And despite his numerous injuries, he might still have been able to survive if a meteor hadn’t happened to strike the ground at that very spot. Ah, truly the gods were displeased with this man.
All this, by the way, happens on his birthday, with Momma and the kids waiting at home for him. The angst is laid on with a palette-knife. Cathy, the narrator, is especially heartbroken because Daddy loved her the mostest (and told her so prior to his doing an impression of a charcoal briquette). However, this nest of WASPs soon have greater problems, since they’re out of money; Momma explains that she was a spendthrift, and since she doesn’t work – her only skill is looking pretty – they now have no choice but to go and live with her fabulously wealthy parents. Said parents, though, disinherited Momma because Daddy was her half-uncle, and yes, she knew that when she married him. Heck, considering how dysfunctional this family is, maybe that’s why she married him. She tells Cathy and Chris that she will try to work her way back into her father’s good books, and since he’s dying, perhaps those books will be short with happy endings (unlike Flowers in the Attic).
The family arrives at the Gothic mansion in the middle of the night, and Grandmother lets them in, since their arrival has to be kept a secret from everyone, including the dying grandfather; she then hustles the children upstairs to sleep in a room where two double beds have already been prepared. This room has a stairway leading up to the titular attic, and she locks the children in. The next morning, Grandmother arrives with breakfast, lunch and dinner for them and it’s eventually revealed that since the dying grandfather would never have approved of progeny resulting from such an incestuous union, the children’s existence has to stay a secret until he dies. Each day, Grandmother comes in, picnic basket on one arm, bible in the other, and harangues them about decency and modesty, which is a bit unreasonable. Granted that Chris is fifteen and Cathy is thirteen, shouldn’t she put them in separate rooms if she’s so concerned that they might see each other without all their clothes on?
The children fix up the attic to look like a garden, complete with paper flowers, and Cathy practises ballet while Chris reads Gray’s Medical Anatomy, since she wants to be a ballerina and he wants to be a doctor. The five-year-old twins behave like toddlers most of the time, this being cute, and seem to be in the story solely to provide even more angst for Cathy and Chris later on down the line. Regarding Carrie’s personality, Andrews supplies details which are either boring (Carrie is obsessed with the colors red and purple, meaning she’ll have a great career as the Whore of Babylon some day) or bizarre (she loves showing off her panties if they have lace or embroidery on them, though unfortunately said panties don’t stay clean for long, since she gets diarrhea if she eats apples or grapes. Ick). We are also informed about Cory’s toilet habits – why, I can’t imagine, unless this is the author’s way of being realistic. I guess when you have incest, Gothic mansions and four adorable blond blue-eyed children locked in an attic like Mr. Rochester’s mad wife, you need whatever realism you can get.
Momma, meanwhile, flits her way through the story like the butterfly she is, charming the grandfather into putting her back into his will and assuring the children that he will pop off any day now. At first she comes to see them every day, but eventually her visits taper off, since she’s busy now with her social life. Chris takes her side, though, since he’s the Oedipus to Cathy’s Electra, and since Momma has a way of smothering him against her bosom as she hugs him. A jealous Cathy notes that this would excite even a youth of his tender years. Thankfully, although Momma is not one to wither on the vine, she seems disinclined to pursue any other members of her family, and instead dates a handsome young lawyer called Bart Winslow. She continues to shower gifts on the children, but she withdraws more and more from their lives over the next two years while Chris and Cathy find themselves taking on the roles of parents to the twins. Quite permissive parents, too, considering that this story is set in the 1950s and they’re from a conservative background; when they sunbathe in the attic, they do so collectively and naked. Because love means never having to keep your underwear on.
One of V. C. Andrews’s problems is that she wants to depict teenagers discovering their sexuality, which is all well and good, but she does so in a way that makes said teenagers look like idiots. Cathy, for instance, decides one day that she wants to look at herself naked. Does she go up to the attic with a mirror? Does she lock herself into the bathroom? No, she does a striptease in front of the mirror in the communal bedroom and better yet, doesn’t warn her brothers or sister not to come into the room for ten minutes. Naturally, Chris arrives to find her performing ballet positions in the nude. Unnaturally, he stares at her, perhaps forgetting that this nubile chick is his little sister. Operating on the principle of “the more the merrier”, the grandmother turns the key in the lock at that very moment, and rather than diving under the bed, Cathy struggles to put her dress back on, meaning that the grandmother is delighted to have finally observed the mating habits of V. C. Andrews characters. Well, delighted that she can finally exact vengeance on them. She threatens to cut Cathy’s long blond hair off.
My worst fear! I’d rather be whipped! My skin would heal, but it would take years to grow back the lovely long hair I’d cherished ever since Daddy said it was pretty, and he liked long hair on little girls.
At least she’s got her priorities straight. Better to bleed and be permanently scarred than to temporarily lose what verging-on-the-pedophilic Daddy found attractive. Chris defends Cathy’s hair, so the evil grandmother refuses to bring them any more food until Cathy loses the object of Daddy’s affection. The children go to sleep, only to find that the really evil grandmother has stolen in during the night, injected Cathy with a sedative and poured tar on her hair. In what’s starting to look like a bizarre parody of Rapunzel, Chris still refuses to cut Cathy’s hair, and instead orders her into the bathtub where he starts brewing up chemicals with his play chemistry set to dissolve the tar. He then has to answer a call of nature, but this gives him the idea that she should do the same into the bathwater. The combination of piss and vinegar finally works, and Cathy’s hair (almost a character in its own right by now) is saved. Daddy would be so happy, if only he wasn’t so dead.
With tears in his eyes, Chris then cuts off the front portion of Cathy’s hair – dear god, the horror, it’s like watching someone being maimed for life – and wraps the rest up in a towel, so the evil grandmother will think that all her hair has been cut similarly short. Grandmommie dearest, however, stays away, and their food runs out. After days of starvation, during which Chris cuts himself to feed the twins with his blood, they finally decide to escape from the attic via a rope through the window. That’s when they find the grandmother has finally brought food, so they do a mental flip-flop and stay instead. I can understand inertia and fear of the unknown, but seriously, if you were neglected, starved, drugged, tarred and interrupted in the middle of your rendition of Nude Swan Lake, would you want to hang around?
Anyway, the food includes four powdered-sugar doughnuts. Make a note of that, folks; it’ll come in handy later.
As the third year of the children’s attic sojourn dawns, Momma marries Bart Simpson – I mean, Winslow – and moves into the mansion with him, although she still keeps the children’s presence a secret. The children’s health is now suffering; the twins are small, pale and thin, although Cathy has somehow learned to get on full pointe without a ballet teacher or even a mirror. One hot night, Chris asks Cathy if she would like to go swimming in a lake nearby (because this is clearly more important than, say, going out to stockpile food in case of another involuntary diet). Naturally, they go out and splash around in their jammies, which get wet and give Cathy a nice view. Then, since we’re nowhere near the end of the book, they return to the attic. It’s good to know that the twins will be all right alone there, especially if the house catches fire from all the sizzling sexual tension.
After much goading from his better half, Chris finally decides that Momma cannot be trusted and that it’s probably going to take the grandfather another three years to finish dying, so the children make plans to escape from the house. Since they will need money, they make periodic trips out of the attic to steal coins – a few at a time – from Momma’s room, a detail which didn’t bother me when I first read the book but which puzzles me now. If you’re going to take money and run, why not just grab whatever you can, including jewelry, and go? Why drag the process out over weeks or months? Then again, one cannot expect these characters to have a great deal of sense, since Cathy, when she goes on a pickpocketing expedition solo, dresses in a short nightgown with matching panties underneath (I swear, Andrews has a panty fetish). When she gets to Momma’s room, she finds the new husband asleep in a chair. Does she :
If you guessed c, you have grasped the mindset of the typical Andrews teenage girl, who will forever be fascinated by older men, especially if they’re related to her in some way. After she’s played the role of the prince in Snow White to her little heart’s content, Cathy escapes from the room without waking her stepfather. The next day, however, it’s Chris’s turn to get money, and he overhears the stepfather telling Momma about how he dreamed that a lovely young girl with long golden hair stole into the room and kissed him as he slept. Stunned, Chris returns to the attic to find Cathy (un)dressed in her usual fashion.
“The moonlight is shining on you and I can see the shape of your body through your clothes.”
Before Cathy can thank him for this fraternal compliment, however, Chris’s jealousy gets the better of him and he shouts that she’ll never belong to any other man, because she’s his and he’s going to make her his. He then proceeds to rape her, though one can’t exactly call it rape since Cathy says, “I wanted what he wanted – if he wanted it that much.” Then they cry together, while Chris apologizes and says that he’ll castrate himself before he lets this happen again. Dude, it’s a little late for that kind of damage control. I mean, you’re supposed to be the doctor here. Anyway, after The Passion of the Chris, they decide to high-tail it out of there. Though by now I’ve realized that the attic is their Gilligan’s Island – they’re never going to be able to leave it until the last chapter – so the next obstacle to be thrown their way is Cory’s illness (maybe he caught an STD from Carrie). He keeps throwing up, even though he’s had nothing to eat but a powdered-sugar doughnut (dum dum DUM).
Learning that Cory is very ill, the grandmother fetches Momma, who doesn’t want to take him to a hospital at first; she gives in after Cathy screams that she’ll find a way to let the dying grandfather know about the fruits of the non-branching family tree. Later on, she returns to the room alone to inform the children that Cory had pneumonia and died. Carrie goes into a near-catatonic state at the news, which unfortunately comes as something of a relief, since her previous demonstrations of emotion involved either complaining or screaming her head off. Chris and Cathy decide to leave (again) but Chris makes one last trip to Momma’s bedroom to steal. He finds that Momma and Bart Winslow have packed up and left (why, we aren’t told), so there’s nothing to take except for the engagement and wedding rings that Daddy gave her, which she has left behind. Is there no limit to this woman’s perfidy? He then overhears two servants gossiping, which is when he learns two startling facts.
The surprise was greater when I read this at fifteen. Now I’m just thinking how convenient it was that the servants helpfully spelled out the details of the dying grandfather’s will, including the part where Momma inherited his wealth, but would lose it all if she was ever proven to have had children from her first marriage. Hence the poison, which the children might have avoided had they fled the house as soon as possible. And that also begs the question – if you want your four children to die as soon and as efficiently as possible, why use arsenic? Not only did it produce a slow, unpleasant death, it allowed three of the victims to escape alive, thereby putting Momma’s inheritance in jeopardy. Then again, we’ve been reminded before that she isn’t the brightest bulb in the house, so I suppose this sloppiness is only to be expected. Chris returns to the attic and cries in Cathy’s lap, then tells her that they’re leaving, with one more toilet reference for the road, since the catatonic Carrie refuses to cooperate.
I carried her into the bathroom and used tissue when she refused to do even that.
Man, that sets my mind at ease. I know I would have been on the edge of my chair during their escape, wondering if Carrie had managed to go to the bathroom first. Since any readers still continuing with the book are now assured that no one will be cross-legged in need of a pee, the children slip out of the house and make their way to the train station, where Chris asks Cathy if they should go to the police with the powdered-sugar doughnuts. Chris, are you sure you haven’t castrated yourself already? Because you’re coming across as pretty passive. Cathy decides that although it would be great to have Momma and the evil grandmother in prison for murder, she and her siblings would lose their privacy and maybe even be split up. And seriously, who would want to be parted from a brother like Chris? Momma has already made her childless bed, and she can lie in it, while Cathy and Chris go on to fulfil their dreams and maybe someday show Momma just how much she threw away. As for Carrie, she’ll, I dunno, muddle through somehow, even though she doesn’t have a loving brother to lean on (or do anything else with).
I can see why this novel appealed to me when I was younger. It strikes a chord that teenagers will appreciate – the feeling of being powerless in the face of adult decisions, especially unfair ones. I’m sure many teenagers would also like to be as gorgeous and talented as the Barbie-esque hero and heroine, who bravely escape their tormentors and set out into the wide world. Lucky for them that they don’t need school or classes in ballet. Or realism, for that matter.
On the minus side, everything goes into this literary stewpot – money, incest, whipping, starvation, murder – and yet the narrative style is as soft and fluffy as pink cotton candy, flavored with numerous exclamation marks and typical teenagerish expressions like “Golly-lolly” and “Good golly-day!” Perhaps that’s its appeal. You wouldn’t want to scare or disgust the readers too much, after all. Though I’m sure that if Cathy, Chris and Carrie could have seen what V. C. Andrews had planned for their equally melodramatic future, they would have stayed in the attic, or perhaps flushed themselves down the toilet together.