If There Be Thorns, Part One: Your Whole Life Is a Lie

Since posting the Prelude, the If There Be Thorns fans came out of the woodwork.  I'm so pleased, but also slightly relieved, because I found myself saying uncharacteristically positive things about this book and I was afraid people would think the Andrews estate had sent me a nasty letter or something.  I legitimately try to laud the positive aspects of the books when I stumble across them, but Petals was a long, hard slog for me and by the time I reached that fuck-you-I-ain't-gotta-explain-shit ending, I'd pretty much given up on redemption.

Probably a much bigger issue is that the word "crazy" as applied to mental illness gets bantered around very casually.  There is nothing like labeling a character generic "crazy" to make me start analyzing.  While I do have some background in psychology, I am not qualified or licensed to make diagnoses, even for fictional characters.  If I make a giant mistake with the psych stuff, please call me out on it.

Petals on the Wind, Part Nine: You Really Didn't Think This Revenge Thing Through, Did You?

Greetings to the thousand extra page views per day I've been getting since Lifetime released Flowers in the Attic! 

 I feel I should warn you right now: if you love these books unconditionally, this blog is probably going to disappoint or upset you.  Here at the VCABlogorama, our love for the works of V.C. Andrews is as conditional as it is genuine, and we do a lot of snarking and criticizing.  The lesson of V.C. Andrews' novels is that people sometimes do terrible things out of love.  We snark because we love.    And hey!  At least I'm not poisoning anyone's doughnuts!*

But to serious matters.

This section is a little . . . rapey.  I dare say this is about as rapey as these books get, at least until we get to My Sweet Audrina (where I advise you to slip on some hip-waders because we're going to be wallowing in it).  It is almost impossible to get through this section without devolving into babbling Lovecraftian incoherence about how rape is portrayed in this section.  Therefore, trigger warning:

You have been warned by Trigger!

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being an Andrews Character

I'm not really expecting a lot of diversity from my V.C. Andrews.  She was a lily-white lady writing pretty, sexy novels to appeal to other lily-white ladies at a time, albeit a relatively recent time (within the past thirty years), when the very idea of racial diversity in media was a concept tossed about by high-minded academics in the company of other high-minded academics, most of them white and all of them very probably drunk.  Moreover, the very book that made V.C. Andrews famous took place in a locked room and featured a grand total of six major characters.  There's not a lot of wiggle-room for representation within those perimeters.

But she tried, God love her, she tried.  The very few people of color in Andrewsland are by and large kind, cheerful, generous people who do their best to ease the lives of the (invariably young, white, and clueless) heroines.  When both Heaven and her mother feel out of place in the rambling halls of Farthinggate, they are welcomed into the kitchen by the jovial Rye Whiskey, who dispenses home-cooking and advice.  The Dollangangers are led to safety by the mute housekeeper, Henny Beech. 

Taken all together, it points to a kind of genteel racism, the logic of which goes something like this: I am a white writer, and as such have no experience with persons of color as individuals.  It's not that I don't like them--heavens no!  It is just that I fear that I, ensconced in my whiteness, can never do justice to their inner nobility, and also because I am secretly terrified of being called a racist.  Therefore I will go out of my way to include them in my work, and furthermore, I will make them dear and kind and decent and well-nigh saintly, prescribing to no negative stereotypes.  How can that possibly be racist?  It's a Scarlett O'Hara attitude, pointing out that the slaves at Tara get a ham every Christmas while never addressing the moral question that there are slaves at Tara.  The trouble with genteel racism is that in the end, it feels as if the author expects a pat on the head for acknowledging the very existence of anyone who isn't white.

A Possible Influence? The Works of Margery Lawrence

While working on the next entry for this blog, I came across this quote: "he forced upon me what should only be given in love."  This line regards Julian raping Cathy in the upcoming section and is--I thought--a classic example of Andrews' strangely coy descriptions of all things sexual.

Except I took a closer look, and it isn't.    

In fact, this line is a direct quote from a 1930 novel,  The Madonna of Seven Moons, by Margery Lawrence.  The only difference between Madonna and Petals is that the Madonna quote is in third person, while Petals is of course in first person.  Criterion describes the film adaptation of Madonna of Seven Moons as a "lurid tale of sex and psychosis" about a woman who was raped by gypsies.

The little I found on a quick research of Margery Lawrence is that she was a writer of occult mysteries in the 1940s.  She was very much into spiritualism and published a couple of books on the subject; she prefaced some of her (obviously fictional) Gothic works with a disclaimer stating that they were true stories with the names changed for privacy.  Cambridge University's Orlando index, which catalogs the works of female British authors, describes her work thusly:  Female sexuality looms large in her work and she often places female characters in impossible predicaments, often involving social convention, money, or class.

It's too little info to make a connection to Andrews, but I did find it interesting that the most outstanding conventions of this woman's work sound like things that could be said of Our Gal Ginny.  It sounds as if Lawrence could have very well be an influence on Andrews, and the direct quote strongly implies that Andrews read The Madonna of Seven Moons. 

I feel it necessary to point out that I do not imply Andrews may have plagiarized this other author.  One lifted line does not a plagiarist make.  Writers brains are like flypaper for unique phrases, which tend to get regurgitated without our realizing it.  Recently in my own fiction, I had to go back and edit the opening of a scene when I realized it too closely resembled the opening of a similar scene in a published novel.  I'm sure that if I had to bear down to catch a whole three paragraphs, a line or two here and there has probably slipped under my radar.  That's how we writers roll.

Margery Lawrence's works are sadly out-of-print, and the few copies available are antiques far out of my price range.  She seems to be well-known enough to have a Wikipedia article, but obscure enough that I can't find any scholarly papers on her work--and believe me, us desperate English majors will dig up writers you've never heard of in order to stand out in our field.  I do not have quite enough time to do any in-depth research investigating other potential links between the two authors. But if there's a thesis anywhere in this, I call dibs.

I Chase the Wild, Elusive Butterfly of Andrews: a short essay with no immediate application

There is an astonishingly tiny universe of biographical information about V.C. Andrews.  A significant proportion seems to be obfuscation disseminated by Andrews herself.  For example, she liked to understate her real age even after her biographical information became widely available.  As Andrews remained a very youthful-looking woman right up to the end of her life, she could get away with the ruse.  There are two apparent origins for this small vanity: one, as told by E.D. Huntley in V.C. Andrews: a Critical Companion* states that young Andrews may have lost some friends when they discovered she was nineteen, rather than sixteen, and that thereafter she always knocked a few years off her age.  The other is the notorious People interview that essentially ended all interviews with Andrews.  People reported Andrews' age accurately as fifty-six.  Andrews, furious, fired off a letter to a fan where she claimed to be "twenty years younger."

I don't call this lying. I call it a small, understandable vanity.  God knows she's not the only woman in the world who ever misrepresented her own age.  But even with limited insight into Andrews' psyche, one knows that she never did anything for just one reason.  Perhaps, feeling that she had lost out on her young adulthood through illness and immobility, she decided to celebrate a second youth once she had the money and power to do so.  Perhaps she wanted to be as young and glamorous as the women in her writings, either for emotional reasons or to sell her image to the public.  Perhaps she had been understating her age for so long that she really believed she was thirty-six.  Whatever her reasons, I personally find this a sweet, sympathetic fib, a deception that harmed no one. 

Knowing that the mutability of age that is a prominent theme in Andrews' work, it is hard not to read a direct parallel with the author's life.  Cathy sets twenty-six candles into Paul's birthday cake because that is the age she wishes him to be.  Vera in My Sweet Audrina changes her age to reflect however she's feeling that day, from sixteen to twenty to thirteen; Audrina herself has no ability to determine the ages of others and must rely on what they choose to tell her, with each individual choosing to remain the age they like best.  In Heaven, Kitty, a glamorous thirty-five, is obsessed with looking twenty.  And in arguably the most famous example, Heaven's grandmother Jillian literally suffers a complete mental breakdown when confronted with her true age, accompanied with the gripping image of her youth peeling from her face like the layers of an onion.  These examples are simply the ones that come to mind immediately; I can think of half a dozen others.

For all the ribbing I give to Andrews' stylistic quirks, the truth as I see it is that that she was a woman who wrote close to her own bones.  Because there is such an obvious personal component in her novels, coupled by the lack of concrete information with the woman herself, it is hard not to read too much into the text, if only to satisfy one's curiosity for a woman who deliberately made herself elusive.  In this way, Andrews begins to remind me of the shadowy, long-dead mother figures in both the Dollanganger and the Casteel series.  (The first) Corrine Foxworth and Leigh Van Voreen hover over both these sagas without physically manifesting**, influencing from beyond the grave the course of the heroines' lives.  Both families are haunted by the legacies of these beautiful, dead woman.  Somehow, I don't think this interpretation would have displeased Andrews herself.         










*Yes, there are critical guides to Andrews' work written by people who are not me.  

**Well, Leigh does but we'll get to that later.

Petals on the Wind, Part Six: In Which We are Going to Carry On as if Nothing Happen

After confronting Julian with her upcoming nuptials, Cathy goes back home for--oh look, another Christmas.  Considering that this book culminates in a dramatic Christmas Eve face-off, I'd like to say that making Christmas a constant touch-point is Andrews's way of foreshadowing, but I think she just really really enjoys gift-porn. 

"Thank God I had Paul to escape to," Cathy gushes.  "And I wasn't going to let Julian take the joy from this Christmas.  For this was the time Paul and I had agreed to announce our engagement, and the only person who could ruin my happiness now was Chris."  AND HE WILL.

Petals on the Wind: Baseless Speculation on Andrews, Education, and the Rise of the Boarding School from Hell

We're getting up on Carrie's time in the Boarding School from Hell.  The following was originally appended to that review, but it ran a little long, so I'm putting it here.  It's mostly my thoughts upon V.C. Andrews and a recurrent motif.


Andrews herself suffered a crippling back injury while still in high school.*  She spent the rest of her teenage years--and indeed, the rest of her life--at home with her mother.  Andrews was academically gifted while in school, skipping a couple of grades and winning a scholarship.  After leaving school, she received an art degree via correspondence course, and later she became a very well-read, self-educated woman.  But she never had the full experience of public education, which at that time had only recently become a widespread, mandatory thing.  Mandatory public education through high school was a huge step in creating the modern concept of the teenager, of extended childhood, and of youth culture; prior to then, you only went to high school if you intended to go to college.  In a way, Andrews was a girl interrupted, cut off from that important source of social interaction, peer groups, and popular culture.     
 
Likewise, her heroines tend to hang around the house a lot.  They pass through school completely unscathed, with no friends, homework, extra-curricular activities, or diplomas to show for it.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but school just isn't as interesting as staying home and fucking your brother.  As if to compensate, all her heroines invariably have innate skills that make education redundant.  Cathy is naturally good at dancing, even without formal training.  Audrina's intuition allows her to successfully game the stock market.**  Heaven, the only one who seriously pursues education, happens to be so bright that she can cruise through school without much effort, leaving her time open for sexy plot-related pursuits.

It became something of an Andrews cliche--the What Amazing Talent Will This Heroine Have? game--but considering that the author herself became an extremely successful author and artist without the benefit of education and everything that comes with it, perhaps this was an aspect that Andrews took for granted. 

Cathy's entire high school experience (and her ballet training) is summed up with a few generic, easily-skimmed paragraphs.  She makes exactly one friend, who is never mentioned again.  Audrina, whose stated life-goals include attending school like a normal girl, spends one chapter establishing that school does, in fact, exist.  Later in the same chapter, she also makes a single friend, whose name we never learn.

Heaven, who latches onto education as the only way of ever improving her lot in life, has several scenes of the children at school and includes an almost pathetically heartrending description of her gratitude at receiving special permission to take schoolbooks home to study.  The book even devotes time to Heaven's teacher, who has taken a personal interest in Heaven's family situation.  It's significant as one of the few times in the novels where an adult female is portrayed as anything other than a threat to the heroine.  As soon as Heaven is removed from that situation, however, her education becomes so much wallpaper, to only emerge again when she herself experiences the Boarding School from Hell.

Finally, in almost every book, the Andrews heroine ends up completely marginalizing both her magical, special talent and her education simply because her family is always, always rich.  She never needs to work for a living.  The "magical talent" becomes a sideline, a hobby.  Cathy probably comes closest to actually using her talent for profit when she becomes a successful stage performer, and later teaches ballet to children, but by the time she is a full adult, her husband supports the family.  It's kind of a let-down, really.  One of the reasons we presumably root for these women is because they do have something special to give to the world.  To have their hard work undermined by something as crass as millions upon millions of dollars kind of gives an idea of the true value of their talent: rather than unlimited wealth freeing them to pursue their dreams, the heroines simply give up their dreams in exchange for a life amongst the leisure class.

One could argue that this is also the primary lesson of the entirety of Flowers in the Attic: that the children, as well as their mother, were willing to sacrifice something intangible and precious--their normal lives--in exchange for a shot at never having to work for a living, and the subsequent danger and emptiness of that decision.  It's hard to say if this lesson, coming as it does from a woman who did make a successful career of what could arguably be described as her art, is meant to be a warning to us all, or if it is uncomfortably cold, cynical, and unsettling.


*Andrews constantly gave out in interviews that she was twenty years younger than she was, a fiction that would have made her about sixteen in the early 1960s . . . thus making her precisely Cathy's age. If any of you ever wondered if Cathy was supposed to be an analogue for the author, consider that suspicion confirmed.


**More fun facts: V.C. Andrews herself was an avid player of the stock market.  She had a ticker machine installed in her mother's home and frequently relied on her own "intuition" to make successful investments.

Petal on the Wind, Part Three: Every Man in This Book is a Freakin' Rapist

I, um, kind of had a complete meltdown in this section?  I apologize in advance, and really, I tried to make it as relevant as possible to the subject at hand, since it touched on a theme that is going to carry on through the remainder of . . . well, all of the books.  Because when I say "every man in this book is a rapist," I'm not talking in the Andrea Dworkin all-sex-is-rape sense.  I mean that literally every man in this book is a freakin' rapist.  

Wait, I take it back.  There is one man who is not a freakin' rapist.  But he's very much a sideline character, he only appears for one chapter, and he vanishes without a trace immediately afterwards.  I say this like he's some big mystery character, but really, he's just so inconsequential that I can't be arsed.*

So, in a nutshell, we're going to be talking about rape, a conversation that was bound to happen considering that every man in this book is a freakin' rapist.  I don't know how we avoided it this long, honestly. 

The Case of the Keyhole Covers

I think that it is pretty significant that when I went a-Googling "keyhole covers" and "stepback covers," the very first page was full of references to V.C. Andrews covers.* Everyone who is aware of V.C. Andrews remembers the keyhole covers: a small die-cut hole on the cover that reveals part of an illustration, or stepback, beneath. Later covers have covers cut slightly smaller than the book, allowing a long peek at the edge of the stepback , but to be honest, they're just not as fun. There are also fake-out stepbacks where the cover is standard size, but has a fake stepback image printed on it. Least fun of all are the editions where the inner illustration is simply printed on the back cover.

For a long time, they were a hallmark of a V.C. Andrews novel: a cover you could stick your finger through without ruining the resale value on eBay. And now, like Pushing Daisies and those whole-wheat Chicken Caesar wraps I really liked, they are gone. How did it happen?

FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC: the Prelude

What better place to begin than the book that started it all? Flowers in the Attic, also known as "Deflowered in the Attic" (but only because I just called it that OH MY WIT), is the book that introduced us to the incestuous genetic cesspool that is the Dollanganger Saga.

V.C. Andrews shopped this book as a true story, and a couple of her relatives have backed up that story over the years. The legend goes that when V.C. was spending one of her several stays in a hospital, she was taken with a handsome young doctor who confided that he had belonged to a wealthy local family that locked him and his siblings in an attic for many, many years. V.C. always insisted that the family was much too wealthy and important for the story to ever be verified, but in her original pitch letter, she described the book as "the fictionalized version of a true story" and claimed it was "not truly fiction."

Yet in another story, which appears in an excerpt from an interview published in the front of later editions shortly after her death, V.C. also claimed that her inspiration came from a dream: "I dreamed I was rich and famous--and I saw flowers growing in an attic." Based on certain details about Andrews, I am inclined to believe that this was literally a dream.

Andrews appears to have been--um. How should I put this? A very sensitive woman. Of the kind that straddles the line between genuine mysticism and New Age kookiness. Like your aunt who gets those weird newspapers. You don't have to look much further than her fiction to see that. She even seems to have been a bit of a mystic, in a thoroughly conventional, late-seventies/early-eighties Linda Goodman's Sun Signs sort of way. In her famous "Faces of Fear" interview, she stated her belief that she was an "old soul" who had lived many previous lives, and who often had precognitive dreams. I think likely what we're looking at is a combination of the two stories: that Andrews did meet her handsome young doctor, that he might have told her that he had had an unhappy childhood, and that she then had her dream and may have interpreted to mean that the doctor had been locked in an attic as a child.

Would she have believed her own interpretation? To the point that she would state it boldly and upfront to a potential publisher? Possibly; she appears to have placed great weight on her abilities. Did her publishers take her explanation as fact? Probably not. But I also think that if you're going to publish a novel in the lurid late 70s, with things like Mommie Dearest and Looking for Mr. Goodbar coming out only a few years before, the old based-on-a-true-story-so-shocking-I-mustn't-give-you-any-more-details line can't hurt your sales any.

Do I believe it's a true story? No way. If only for this reason: in this day and age of reality entertainment, open discussion of child abuse, Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer*, and talk-show culture, someone would have come forward by now. So far, there's been no one, even an obvious crazy trying to pitch a Lifetime movie. Andrews and/or her publicist seems to have cooled toward this claim over the years; once Andrews became a brand-name writer, the based-on-a-true-story angle was quietly shelved.

Therefore, I think we can get over our guilt that we are potentially lapping up the lifeblood of innocent children and dive right into this horror-show, don't you?



*No, I don't believe that was a true story either.