Flowers In The Attic

The relationship between mothers and daughters is fraught in the novel, as all three generations—grandmother, Corrine, and Cathy, are rivals for male attention and power. The pattern of a mother depriving her daughter in order to thrive herself repeats, as mothers model strictures and propriety to their daughters but give them little love.

The pattern of daughterly deprivation began with grandmother, who as a young girl received a beautiful dollhouse that a glass barrier prevented her from touching, and her parents locked her in a closet for punishment, leaving her with lifelong claustrophobia. As a mother, grandmother loved her sons, but not Corrine, who was instead the spoiled favorite of her husband, Malcolm. Just as grandmother was deprived of playing with her dollhouse, she also put her fanatical religious beliefs in the way of Corrine’s own thriving, as “every day, normal pleasures that were right for other people were made sinful for us” (92). By keeping Corrine as sheltered and unconnected to the world of bodily pleasure as possible, grandmother jealously ensures that her daughter who is “what most boys and men considered beautiful” (93) does not get to enjoy her youth any more than she did.

While pre-confinement Cathy was allowed her share of fun, an element of rivalry and mutual suspicion exists between mother and daughter from the outset. Corrine acknowledges that Cathy’s father, Chris, “thought you were something very special” (17). Twelve-year-old Cathy retorts that her father favored her because she resembles her mother and feels “some of that envy I always had, because I came in second after her” (17). Here, Cathy, who jealously admires her beautiful mother, feels second to her in looks and in the estimation of her father and brother, even as she recognizes that she resembles her mother. In an ideal world, Cathy would be first in both, and she most feels the direct competition with her mother, when she is pale and wilting in the attic, and her mother is growing in beauty from her contact with the outside world. As Cathy enters puberty and sees herself becoming more beautiful, she increasingly feels that her mother is stealing her youth, and that in marrying young Bart, Corrine is enjoying the kind of male attention that ought to be her own.

When Cathy spies on Bart in one of her missions to steal from her mother, she imagines how Corrine and Bart touch each other in private, and thinks how, “though our mother was exceptionally beautiful […] he could have had somebody younger. A fresh virgin who’d never loved anyone else, nor slept with another man” (354). Cathy, who is wearing her “transparent blue nightie” (352), feels that she herself could be a better choice for Bart. Indeed, when Bart remembers Cathy, along with the kiss she gives him, the daughter does become a potential rival to the mother. Cathy, in the style of Aurora, the fairytale heroine she compares herself to, has to remain shut away, to halt her potential of taking Corrine’s place.

Cathy’s acute observations of how her mother thrives, along with her envy, cause her to be suspicious and ask the kind of questions that make Corrine mistrust her. While Corrine holds Chris close and pets him, she chastises Cathy and keeps her at a distance. On the occasion when Chris is the one who transgresses by roaming about the house after the Christmas party, Corrine punishes Cathy first, and more violently. Cathy assumes that her mother thinks that “most certainly her precious older son, whom she favored above all, would never betray her without my devilish influence” (206). While Cathy has been suspicious of her mother’s motivations all along, the incident where Corrine punishes her and Chris for Chris’s straying is a turning point, as it makes Cathy see Corrine less as her collaborator than as grandmother’s lying co-captor.

Indeed, former mother-daughter rivals, Corrine and grandmother do work together to keep the children captive and hidden from grandfather, and stop at nothing to ensure that Corrine gets back into his will. While the older women are operating under the umbrella of patriarchy, as the punishing terms of Grandfather’s will dictate that Corrine can only benefit at the expense of her children, Corrine is so unable to imagine a life outside of a man’s protection and money that she plays to the system. By cheating, and keeping her children locked up as though they do not exist, Corrine maintains the illusion of having been a perfect daughter. While grandmother’s remorse appears in her insistence that Cory goes to the hospital and her subsequent prayers for forgiveness, she too collaborates to reinforce the inhumane terms of her husband’s will. It is only Cathy, who eventually gives up on the thought of living at the expense of a wealthy man, and vows to make money and fame on her own terms, who sets out to free herself from patriarchy.

Nevertheless, in writing her exposé, she intends to “grind the knife that I hope to wield” (4) and thereby punish her mother and grandmother for the trouble they have caused her. Moreover, she indulges fantasies of “Momma and grandmother locked up in jail […] only grey mice in cages, shut up like us,” and implores the assistance of a patriarchal God in bringing about justice (420). While Cathy wants to liberate herself from dependence on a man, she sets her sights most on the women she wants to punish, rather than on the whole unjust patriarchal system that keeps all women subservient. This gives Andrews’s story the quality of an old-fashioned fairytale rather than a modern feminist narrative, as intergenerational female rivalry rather than collaboration as the dominant note.