Flowers In The Attic

Cathy looks on the Pennsylvania childhood home that she shared with her golden PR man father, Chris, her beautiful mother, Corrine, her older brother Christopher, and younger twin siblings Cory and Carrie, as “one long and perfect summer” (5). However, 12-year-old Cathy’s perfect life shatters when her father dies in a road accident. Cathy, who has a close relationship with her father, is devastated, and in denial. She must face the truth, however, when her mother tells her that owing to her own taste for luxury, the family spent beyond their means, and so creditors will repossess their house and belongings. Corrine, who has been writing to her wealthy parents in Virginia, breaks the news that the family will go live with them. She reveals that the children’s true last name is Foxworth, not Dollanganger, which was their father’s invention. Corrine reveals that owing to an indiscretion she committed when she was 18, her father cut her out of the will. However, now that her father is dying without other heirs, she hopes to reconquer his affections and be written back into his will.

The chapter ends with Cathy bidding farewell to her childhood room and possessions. She has the premonition that she will live “in a thousand rooms or more” before she dies (30).

After taking the train to Virginia, Corinne and her children get off at a depot in the middle of the night. Corrine’s bags have been taken to Charlottesville where she will pick them up the next day. The family has to walk to the house in the middle of the night, because the grandfather does not know about the children, and Corrine wants to greet him first. It is difficult managing the suitcases and the young twins, and Corrine ominously orders Cathy to wake the younger children up, because “Lord knows, they’d better walk outside while they still can” (35).

After several hours’ hard walk, the family arrives at a grand house, and meet the massive, severe woman who turns out to be their grandmother. The grandmother marches them upstairs and demands that the four children will stay in a locked room and be silent so that no-one knows they are there. The older children are responsible for making sure that the younger children stay quiet, and if they fail, they will be punished. On the day that the servants are due to clean that particular wing of the house, the children must stay in the attic. The grandmother insists that Christopher and Cathy cannot share a double-bed, as she makes a snide remark about Corrine and her half-uncle, who were not as innocent as she thought. 

Corrine tells the children that she will eventually win her father’s favor, and that they will have command of the house and its riches, but that it may take longer than she originally thought. She asks Christopher and Cathy to make the situation a game for the younger children, so they can better tolerate it. 

The children wake up in the new room, where they are not even allowed to draw the drapes. Their grandmother enters with all of their meals for the day, and charges Cathy with dividing up the food evenly between breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then, Christopher reads grandmother’s 22 house rules. Among them is ample emphasis on reading the Bible, the separation of the two sexes, and leaving no trace of their existence. Cathy gathers that they “were going to be locked up here for a long, long time” (58), while Christopher hopes that their supposedly intelligent millionaire grandfather could not be as evil as he seemed, and that he had simply married an insane woman.

The children go to the attic, while the servants clean their room. It is a vast, hot, dusty space, which contains broken toys, bug-eaten books, costumes, and pictures of sad-eyed relatives. A woman in one photograph even resembles their mother. The twins protest against being in the attic, and demand to go outside, so that Christopher and Cathy have to insist that they pretend they are outside. There is some playful banter between Christopher and Cathy, especially as the former insists the latter grows up and shows off on the attic rafters.

Back in the room, Chris, as he now likes to be called, and Cathy, break grandmother’s rule about no boys and girls using the bathroom together, as they bathe the twins together, and are present while each other is bathing. They talk about their plans for grandfather’s riches when they inherit them, and Chris even strokes Cathy’s wet back.

They have to trick the twins into nap time, and the hours pass very slowly. Their mother arrives accompanied by the grandmother, and the children panic, knowing that they have broken her rules.

A fight ensues between grandmother and the twins. When grandmother demands that Corrine should chastise her wailing children, the twins initially kick and bite her in protest. Grandmother eventually retaliates, picking the twins up by their scruffs and throwing them down on the floor. She then demands that Corrine should remove her blouse, to show the wounds inflicted on her. While Corrine hesitates, grandmother goes off on a diatribe about how Corrine and her “half-uncle did make exceedingly beautiful children […] although they should have never been born” (85), and in this statement implies that the children’s deceased father, Chris, is their mother’s half-uncle. Corrine threatens her mother with taking her family away, so that she never lays eyes on them again, and her mother in turn challenges her. Cathy also hopes that her mother will let them all leave, but something in Corrine breaks and she obeys her mother. She shows the children her back, where there are “thirty-three lashes, one for each year of her life. And fifteen extra lashes for each year she lived in sin with your father” (87). This is intended as a warning to the children against breaking the rules. When grandmother leaves, the older children look enquiringly at Corrine and wonder why she has brought them to this house that “was no safe harbor, no refuge, no sanctuary” (89).

Corrine tells her children how the Foxworth estate was due to pass to their father, Chris, who was the son of Corrine’s grandfather and a young woman called Alicia. When the grandfather died, Malcolm Foxworth, Corrine’s father took over the estate and essentially took charge of Chris’s fortune. When Alicia died, and Chris came to the house, when he was 17, he and Corrine instantly fell in love. They hid their love away, until Corrine was 18 and they eloped. On eloping, the devout grandparents disinherited both Chris and Corrine and insisted that the resulting offspring would be deformed Devil’s spawn. Corrine, however, is proud to say that her children are beautiful and the opposite of the grandparents’ predictions.

Corrine’s plan is to go into town and learn to become a secretary and move the children to an apartment with her. From this position, she will try to win back the love of a father who once idolized her as “part of his collection of objets d’art” (94). She meanwhile simultaneously entreats the children to follow their grandmother’s rules, while not believing a word she says about them. When their mother goes, Catherine asks Chris whether their parents could “have done something” to stop falling in love (107). Chris responds that he prefers not to think about that, as it makes him uneasy.

The days drag monotonously for the children, who look forward to their mother’s visits. On one occasion, when Corrine sneaks backs gifts and food for her children, she looks healthy and tanned, because she has been out sailing. When Cathy asks her whether grandfather knows of the children’s existence, Corrine confesses an aspect of the truth that she originally held back. She states that in a portion of a letter, grandfather said that it was better that Chris was dead, and that the one positive note about the marriage was that it had not “created any devil’s issue” (122). Therefore, Corrine’s favor with her father depends on his not knowing about the children. Chris trusts that his mother will find a way to tell grandfather, but Cathy mistrusts Corrine’s intentions. 

The children realize that they will only leave the attic when their grandfather dies. As they will be living there for the foreseeable future, they clean and decorate it with paper flowers and autumn leaves when the season changes. The older children teach the younger ones and vow to nurture their talents. While grandmother peers into the bedroom regularly, she never makes it up to the attic because she is claustrophobic.

Meanwhile, Corrine resumes the full flow of her social life, and even mentions some eligible bachelors, although she tells the children she is not dating. Cathy makes some snarky remarks about how long it is taking her mother to gain secretarial skills. Corrine dismisses these observations, but buys Cathy, who is an aspiring ballerina, a tutu and a Swan Lake headdress. Christopher mounts a barre for her, and she begins to practice vigorously. As Christopher watches her practice, and she teaches him to dance, the sexual tension mounts between the two of them. In the autumn, all four children sunbathe naked and tell their mother about it. She dismisses them as childishly innocent, but warns of trouble if grandmother finds out.

When Cory becomes unconscious from a lack of oxygen during a game of hide and seek, and the older children have to save him from death, they realize that like the gifts of real plants that their grandmother and mother have brought to the attic, they too stand a chance of sickening and dying there.