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47 pages 1 hour read

V. C. Andrews

Flowers In The Attic

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1979

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Character Analysis

Cathy Dollanganger

The novel’s first-person narrator, Cathy, is 12 years old at the outset of its action, and almost 16 at the end. Cathy, who hopes to become a prima ballerina, is beautiful, graceful, and vain about her looks, especially her blond hair, which “cascaded down past my waist, and I knew it gleamed from all the brushing I gave it every day” (204). Aware that she is Corrine’s doppelgänger in looks, Cathy regards her mother enviously and suspiciously when Corrine treats herself to a second coming-out at Grandfather’s expense, while she keeps Cathy locked away in the attic. Cathy’s entertainment of romantic fantasies in the books she reads and the television she watches cause her to seek male approval for her beauty, and blossoming sexuality. As a result, while she does not directly seek out sex from Chris, she invites his comments and reactions to her changing body. Ultimately, however, Cathy, who has a premonition that she will fall in love at first sight, longs to go out into the world and meet the men in it. However, confined in the attic, Chris is her only option, and she is destined to repeat her mother’s pattern of falling in love with a relative.

Still, Cathy is more direct and responsible than her mother, automatically taking responsibility for Chris’s and the twins’ welfare, when her mother’s care is inadequate. By the end of the novel, she has “mountain high” ambition, and vows that “not fate, not God, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do or dominate me in any way” (410). While Cathy often compares herself as “gloomy, doubtful […] moody” compared to “cock-eyed optimist” (37) Chris, her doubts about her mother’s sincerity are well-founded, and her frightening dreams about her mother’s wrong-doing are premonitions. Cathy is thus shown as having an intuition that functions on a deeper level than intellect, which makes her a suitable heroine for a novel of sensationalist plot twists.

Christopher Dollanganger

Christopher Dollanganger, who changes his name to Chris once his father has died, is 14 at the beginning of the novel, and about 18 at the end. Tall, blond, and handsome, Chris is the spitting image of his father, and therefore his mother’s favorite child. On the surface, Chris, who has high hopes of becoming a doctor, is intellectual, cheerful, and helpful in educating the twins and bringing up Cathy’s mood. He is also intrepid in his missions of gaining temporary relief from captivity, whether through straying into the house after the Christmas party, or devising a plan for him and Cathy to escape to the lake.

However, he displays an unhealthy passion for his female relatives, nuzzling his mother’s bosom, and making her “his goddess of all female perfection”; while the constant and exclusive presence of Cathy, who resembles Corrine, tortures him (233). He is the first to make sexual overtures, creepily spying on a naked Cathy from “the deep shadows of the closet” (240), initiating kisses and taunting her about her breasts. His rape of Cathy directly stems from his jealousy of her attraction to Bart Winslow, and it is an action he has felt “tempted” to perform “many a time” (365). While Cathy excuses away Chris’s actions by referring to his manly “strong physical needs,” which have heightened owing to her predisposition to wearing “skimpy clothes,” there is an underlying predatory element in his pursuit of her (366). After the act, Chris is remorseful, and makes no further sexual overtures on Cathy, although he confesses that he will always love her and that he thinks that “it’s too late for me to love or trust anyone else” (370). Chris’s unhealthy lust towards his sister is strong at the end of the novel, and looks set to continue into the sequel. 

Corrine Dollanganger (née Foxworth)

Corrine Dollanganger, the favorite child of wealthy Malcolm Foxworth, faced disinheritance following her marriage to her half-uncle, Chris. Blond, fair-skinned Corrine knows how to dress and style herself, so that she can “turn herself from just a pretty woman into a creature so ravishingly beautiful she didn’t look real” (7). Corrine is in many ways her own doll, and her talents extend to creating the illusion of perfect beauty. She protests that she is “a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she’d have a man to take care of her,” and so acquires no enterprising skills (27). As a spoiled child, and mid-20th-century housewife, Corrine is both a reflection of her historical context and her sense of entitlement to riches without hard work. Her profligacy led to the repossession of the home she made with Chris; while following his death, her greed drives her to ensure that she is rewritten into her father’s will, no matter what it costs her children.

While Corrine is affectionate towards her children at the beginning of their confinement, given her knowledge of her parents’ characters, it would have been naive of her to assume that they would have behaved differently with regard to the family she created with Chris. As the text is written from Cathy’s point of view, and not Corrine’s, it is difficult to be certain of what Corrine’s motives were at the beginning of the children’s attic stay. However, guided by Cathy’s suspicions, the reader begins to mistrust Corrine before the full evidence of her evil plan is before them.

As Corrine rebuilds her relationship with her father, who made her “wait on him hand and foot” while he was still alive, she becomes the ultimate dutiful daughter, even as it conflicts with her responsibilities as a mother (400). She sacrifices her own children and the possibility of having future offspring, in order to comply with the terms that will secure her riches. As the time between Corrine’s visits to the children increase and she displays increasing indifference to the languishing twins, she hardens her heart towards them, even as she makes them gifts of clothes and books, which shows how out of touch she is with their bodies and tastes. Her emotional outburst when Chris and Cathy confront her about her absences and neglectful parenting indicate that she feels a measure of guilt about her actions; all the while committing the ultimate crime of poisoning her children with arsenic. Despite her murderous behavior, Corrine is a weak character, given her inability to conceive of life without a man to support her. Cathy’s assertion at the end of the novel, that she will be in control of her own life and money, displays her wish to be entirely unlike her mother.

Chris Dollanganger (senior)

The children’s father, Chris Dollanganger, is the “perfect” Aryan specimen, being tall, blond, athletic, tanned, and “wholesome” (5). Unlike his wife, who grew up relying on riches and was unable to budget, Chris, the much-younger son of a second marriage, experienced poverty, when his older, half-brother Malcolm (the children’s grandfather) turned him and his mother Alicia out of the mansion, and deprived Chris of his rightful fortune. Following his mother’s death, Chris reentered the Foxworth mansion, and was treated as a son by his half-brother and his wife, who even went as far as sending him to Yale. However, when he elopes with his half-niece Corrine, Chris experiences a fall from grace, as he is disowned and forced to start again in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, where he becomes a PR man for a computer manufacturing firm. Charming, intelligent, and warm, Chris becomes Cathy’s idea of a perfect man; while the story of her parents’ “love at first sight” creates the desire to replicate their experience (95). Arguably, Cathy’s continued reverence for her father causes her to indulge and form romantic notions about her brother, the ever-present adolescent boy who most resembles him. 

Carrie Dollanganger

Carrie, Cathy’s female fraternal twin, looks like a doll “come alive,” having inherited the familial blonde hair, porcelain skin, and blue eyes (9). The more extraverted of the twins, “Carrie was born opinionated” and garrulous, with a “sweet little bird voice” (48). Her visceral reactions of screaming and kicking, when she is placed in captivity, communicate the full horror of what is happening to the Dollanganger children. While Carrie showed all signs of growing into a confident young girl, her time in the attic changes her so that she is developmentally backward, sickly, and fearful. She therefore acts as a barometer of what happens to a healthy child following captivity and abuse. At the end of the novel, when her beloved brother has died, she “had to be persuaded to want a life without Cory”, even when her initial wish of going outdoors has come to pass (423). At the end of the novel, Andrews intimates that the trauma Carrie has endured in captivity continues. 

Cory Dollanganger

From the outset, Cory, who is “a still water that ran deep,” is quieter and more fragile than his twin sister (49). Following the trauma of being moved to the attic, he regresses to wetting the bed, and is prone to sickness. Although all the children eat the arsenic-laced powdered doughnuts, Cory, the most vulnerable, is the one who is poisoned to death. When he adopts a pet mouse, and calls him Mickey, grandmother says “a pet like that suits you” (289), and this proves prophetic, when he and the other siblings come to resemble mice, more than children, owing to the conditions of captivity. Nevertheless, during his stay in the attic, Cory develops a rich inner life, and exhibits the musical talent and sensibility of Corrine’s deceased elder brothers, Malcolm and Joel. However, Cory does not receive the music lessons that could help him make the most of his talent, and coincidentally his fate of dying in an accident also echoes Malcolm and Joel’s. 

Grandmother

Corrine’s mother is almost a caricature of sternness and hostility, with her enormous stature, her “mouth like a thin, crooked knife slash,” her “grey taffeta” dress, and her bosom “like twin hills of concrete” (39). An old-testament ideologue, with a fear of the flesh, grandmother is obsessed with cleanliness and sexual propriety, as is evidenced in her tautological house rules, which repeatedly express not looking at or being alone with members of the other sex. A preoccupation with sexual transgression belies grandmother’s piety, as she imagines the sins that Cathy and Chris commit before they have even entered their heads. For example, when she catches Cathy taking a glass of water up to Chris, who is painting, she demands: “has he asked you to pose for him—without clothes?” (142). Arguably, grandmother’s constant allusions to the crime Chris and Cathy could commit, along with the conditions of confinement and puberty, sends them on their way to an incestuous relationship. The children learn from Corrine that grandmother’s parenting style echoes the strictures of her upbringing; for example, when she received a punishment of confinement, and received a beautiful dollhouse in a glass cube so that she could not play with it. Grandmother is therefore determined to repeat the same cruelty that she endured as a child.

Still, grandmother is not as impenetrable as she seems. Beneath the wig of steel gray, the color that is her trademark, her hair is “short baby fuzz,” a symbol of her age and frailty (393). She seems genuinely remorseful for the way she has treated the children, when she prays aloud and asks the Lord to be forgiven for her sins. Also, it is her and not Corrine who agrees to Cathy’s entreaty to take Cory to hospital, implying that Corrine has overtaken her in cruelty towards the children. This revelation also bears merit by Chris’s hypothesis that it was Corrine and not grandmother who prepared the arsenic doughnuts.  

Grandfather

Corrine’s father Malcolm is the tyrant who writes Corrine out of his will, after she has transgressed by marrying his half-brother. His possessiveness over his last, remaining child is extreme, as he ideally prefers her to remain unmarried and childless. Still, he spoils Corrine by buying her the clothes and luxuries that keep her in the height of style and beauty, and therefore, trains her to be unable to live a life without the kind of luxury he can provide. He controls his daughter by first writing her out of his will, and then setting the strict and sacrificial terms and conditions by which she can finally inherit. Thus, Malcolm seeks to exert the control he has come to rely on in life from beyond the grave. Moreover, his ruthlessness is evident in the trophy room, where the spoils of his fierce hunts are visible, and in his control over his musically-gifted sons, whom he pushed into business positions, because he judged their preferences as effeminate.

While Corrine promises the children that grandfather is decrepit and imminently “dying of heart disease” (27), his physicality and influence are actually far stronger than she allows them to believe. Although he is “fragile-looking,” he is “still unnaturally handsome for a man […] who was near dead” (198). Malcolm’s continuing life is held up as the barrier between the children and their freedom; however, towards the end of the novel, when Chris discovers that grandfather has been dead for months, it is Corrine’s judgement that keeps the children locked up, and not her father’s. Therefore it is Corrine, and not Malcolm, who emerges as chief oppressor by the end of the novel. 

Bart Winslow

Young, handsome, “charming” Bart Winslow ends up being Corrine’s trophy, when she persuades her father to allow her to marry him without being disinherited (315). When Bart enters Corrine’s life, in the winter of the children’s first year in captivity, her warmth and affection transfers from her children to him. Although Bart likes Corrine, he is also intrigued by her family’s extreme wealth and fame; for example, when he wants to see the “fabulous swan bed” that allegedly belonged to a French courtesan (213).

However, once the couple are married, Bart grows ill-accustomed to living with Corrine’s parents in the house, and sees his residency there as a type of captivity in its own right. Moreover, he is paranoid that someone has been stealing his money. For Cathy, who spies Bart asleep on one of her stealing missions, this dark-haired man, younger than her mother, represents the healthy, heterogeneous dating options which her mother has denied Cathy by keeping her locked up. She deems that “a fresh virgin” like herself would be a better option for youthful Bart than an older woman who has already lived a sexual and maternal life (354). When she contemplates “sensual lips that must kiss my mother… everywhere,” Cathy dares to take something of the pleasure she assumes her mother enjoys by kissing Bart herself (353). Bart therefore becomes the ultimate symbol of Corrine’s thriving, while her children languish and are destined to repeat the same incestuous relationships as her. 

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