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. 

Where the F**k did the Trunchbull bury Cory's picnic basket in Flowers in the Attic

I have recently learned the joys of my stat box. This is how I tell how you--yes, you! there! in front of the computer!--found this blog.

Here, then, are the top five burning searches that lead people to the blog-o-rama:

The Trunchbull/pictures of the Trunchbull: The Trunchbull is this blog's common name for the grandmother from Flowers in the Attic.  Alas, this blog does not discuss Matilda or any other work by Roald Dahl (even though Matilda is one of my favorite books and Roald Dahl is one of my favorite authors).  Cathy later changes her stage name to Dahl, but I'm sure that's unrelated.

what the fuck am I reading?  Brother, we've all been asking ourselves that one.

cory buried flowers attic:   It is never explicitly stated what became of Cory's body.  In Flowers, Corrine claims to have had him buried under a false name.  Later, adult!Cathy goes searching through records to find where Cory might have been buried, but finds that there weren't even any records of any male children Cory's age who died on that particular day in the state.  When Cathy confronts her mother, Corrine admits that Cory died before reaching the hospital and that she disposed of his body in a ravine. 

But then, the mysterious and confusing part kicks in (and it's part of one of Andrews's irritating habits that I'll explicate more fully when the actual scene happens): Cathy claims to have discovered a mysterious room in the attic, a room with a strong odor of decay and death.  The implication, obviously, is that Corrine hid her son's body up there and zOMG, Cory never left the attic!  The irksome thing is that we never actually see this scene happen, so it's ambiguous as to whether or not Cathy's telling the truth.  However, the accusation causes Corrine to have a full-on psychotic break, implying that there's at least a grain of truth to it.

Still a lot of questions there.  Did Cory die en route to the hospital, as Corrine claimed, and she hid him in the attic where she knew his body would never be found?  Or--and a lot of people seem to think this--did she never even bother with the hospital, simply abandoning her son in a locked, hidden room in the attic, essentially burying him alive?

Short version: we never find out what became of Cory's body, but there is a good 80% chance it was stowed in the attic of Foxworth Hall and ultimately consumed by fire when the house burned down.

case-of-the-keyhole-covers:  This search hit particularly pleases me, because it means that someone is deliberately and purposefully Googling for something that I wrote.  It's right here if anyone wants it.  I hope you're not in marketing; I say some pretty mean things about you guys in that post.

Bart Winslow flowers in the attic: Bart is Corrine's virile strapping moustachio'd sex-bomb attorney of a second husband (represented here by Magnum PI* himself, Burt Reynolds).  He will make his first real appearance later in the Petals recaps.  I have feelings about Bart.  They are not sexy feelings.

My feelings about Burt Reynolds are completely sexy.  I am not ashamed of that.

Recap of Part Three is 3/4ths done! I'm just having trouble finding some gifs that sufficiently express my trauma over the upcoming sex scene.

ETA, 2/5/2012: I edited the title to this entry, not due to any squeamishness about dropping the f-bomb in the title, but because, ironically, I was getting hits for weird and potentially illegal porn.


*Gehayi pointed out in comments that Tom Selleck played Magnum P.I.  Apparently I got my moustaches mixed up.

Petals on the Wind: The Covers

Once upon a time, when I was a mere slip of a lass, there used to be advertisements in the back of the original first-edition V.C. Andrews paperbacks from which you could, if you were so inclined, order poster-sized prints of the covers of the first three books in the Dollanganger series.  Suitable for framing and hanging over the fireplace.  I swear, this happened.

The artist for the original four Dollanganger (and My Sweet Audrina) covers was Gillian Hills, a woman whose face and life both resemble a V.C. Andrews heroine's: she was a stunning, globe-trotting blonde debutante whose C.V. includes starring roles in several reputable but mostly forgotten films (including a blink-of-the-eye cameo in A Clockwork Orange) and a career as a chanteuse.  Her music was typical girl-pop for the time, but her voice was surprisingly sweet and sultry, with a lot of emotional depth--even beyond the "everything sounds awesome in French" aspect.

Yes.  That is the woman who painted the original V.C. Andrews covers.  As much as I was surprised to be able to find any information about her at all, to find that she was such an impressive, multi-talented woman was incredible.

Petals on the Wind, Part Two: Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

So . . . where were we?

I seem to have covered most of Part One, which is basically establishing the kids with Dr. Paul.  Other than that, nothing of dire importance happened in that section.  I mean, there was a shopping montage, and it was pretty great, and Chris tried to bone his sister, which happens roughly seven hundred times in this book, and Cathy flits around in skimpy underwear a lot, which also happens about seven hundred times.

Part One, thank goodness, is fairly short.  Part Two is where we finally get our pot a-boiling.  Once more into the breech, dear friends!
 

The Show Must Go On

While I promised myself that this blog would be a space for pure scholarly reflection/snarking, and that I would not let my Real Life make any inroads into the snark, Real Life continues to happen to me.  But this time, in a good way!  And after such a long absence, I feel you deserve the fun anecdote version:

Upshot is that there were three major reasons the blog went on hiatus.  One was the tornado.  Not only did I lose access to my notes and computer for about a month's time, Your Humble Annotator kind of had more of a breakdown than she wanted to.  I really couldn't write anything for a while after that.  I was completely out of funny.

Two was my school work, plus the addition of a new job, which made more of a strain on my time than anticipated.  At least I was writing again, but my writing involved the influence of blackface minstrelsy on the commercialization of early jazz records and the patterns of reversals of fortune versus morality in Defoe's Moll Flanders. Again, not much funny to be had there.

The third problem: I, um, don't actually own the books.

I had in my possession three VCA books: Flowers in the Attic, Heaven, and My Sweet Audrina.  The rest of the series came in the form of an enormous, dubiously legal PDF of the Complete Works of V.C. Andrews, which had an alarming tendency to veer off into Cyrillic characters.  By the time I broke off the recapping, I was not so much reading as translating, piecing together sentences that were, at best, two-thirds English.  It was tedious and frustrating and may be the reason why the first second of the Petals recap had that feeling of being rushed.

So this is where I was last week, when I finally heeded my elderly mother's call to visit her.  She had just had a largely unsuccessful yard sale.  What she really wanted, of course, was for me to take some of this junk off her hands before she called the Salvation Army for the rest of it.  I ended up digging through ancient and disintegrating Avon boxes (remember those?), trying to hunt down my first-generation My Little Ponies so that I could show my Brony husband what his fandom evolved from.

Then I came to a dead halt.

In another Avon box, tucked way in the back of a closet so that they would not leak their scent of shame on the rest of the items, I found these:

Not featured: Avon box.

There's a few pretty major omissions in this set: I'm missing the final FitA book, Garden of Shadows, for one, which is sad because not only do I think that book may well be the final one touched by the pen of V.C. herself, I actually thought it was pretty okay.  Also missing is Dark Angel, the second book of the Casteel series, which features an extensive foray into one of finest Andrews tropes, the Boarding School from Hell.  Hidden by the unavoidable glare (it's a really foil-laiden cover) is Rain, in which we are treated to the Tragic Mulatto of the Andrews world, since they were running out of offensive stereotypes by that point.  Seriously, there are series here that I was only marginally aware existed (who the fuck are the DeBeers?)  I do, however, now own all the Landry series, which I originally was not going to even touch, but they are stuffed with such wacky twin-swapping shenanigans that I am nearly convinced they are genius on a level too high for me to comprehend.

I also somehow ended up with two Audrinas.  JUST LIKE IN THE BOOK!

Basically, I now I have no excuses.  I have to finish this thing.  You can thank my mother.  Actually you can thank her by taking some yard-sale goods off her hands.  She's got a pretty cool vintage console TV for only $25, if anyone's interested.

"I feel fantastic and I'm still alive . . . "

The blog continues, despite a significant gap due in part to Your Humble Annotator having a mild mental meltdown (as you do when your 'hood gets wiped off the map) and a therapeutic trip to New York City to visit an old friend and unwind from the stress of being sideswiped by an F5.  Two words: culture shock.

Nevertheless, the blog will continue shortly. I am shooting for Saturday/Sunday for Part Two of Petals on the Wind.  Stay tuned.

Petals on the Wind, Part One: The Great White Flight

Welcome, dear readers, to Petals on the Wind, already known in my house as “the book where I get to break out all my Black Swan macros.”   Nah, I kid.  Not about the macros—I’ve been stockpiling those since I started putting the site together in sole anticipation of this book—but any other comparison to Black Swan will be purely coincidental.  I haven’t even seen that movie, but I am told it is a probing if flawed analogy for an eating disorder.  This book on the other hand, is an analogy for . . .  well, no, there’s no room for analogy in Andrewsland.

I have always said that the great thing about the whole Dollanganger series is that while the characters in Flowers in the Attic can be seen as somewhat sympathetic, every problem they have in their life thereafter is no one’s fault but their own.  All three of the remaining Dollangangers go about gleefully fucking up their lives and personal relationships, and it’s hard to feel a moment’s pity for any of them.  Even Carrie, who ends up being the sacrificial lamb, would have fared far better in the company of people who took two seconds to consider that maybe having your mother lock you up for three years, being poisoned, starved, and sun-deprived, watching your identical twin die, and being a first-hand witness to the blatantly obvious sexual tension between your two older siblings—well, all of that MIGHT REQUIRE SOME PROFESSIONAL COUNSELLING.  But no.  It’s Andrewsland.  Modern psychology need not apply, unless it comes in the form of Our Heroine being wrongfully committed by her dastardly stepmother.

Mostly, though, this is the book where my sympathies swung to the grandmother.  Plainly, she was a woman possessed of a prophetic soul whose only crime was trying to save the world from these horrible people.  Because by the end of this one, Cathy lays waste to everyone and everything in her whole life, and it’s all her own fault.  As my own dear grandmother (who never once locked me in an attic) used to say, that child is too dumb to cook quick-grits.

Trust me.  In the South, them's fightin' words.

But enough of that!  Let's get this party started!

Background Blogging: Back in Business

Aaaaand we're back!

As stated in the previous post, I was in one of the heavily impacted areas of the April 27th tornadoes in Alabama.  We missed a direct hit by about a block, I'm thankful to say.  However, immediately afterward, the most modest estimate for getting electrical service back to our neighborhood was a month . . . and considering everything else going on, we felt like assholes even asking about things like internet. 

If you would like to help the tornado victims (i.e., my own personal neighbors), here's some places to start:

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to give $10 to the relief effort.

Amazon.com has a list of supplies needed in this area.  You buy and Amazon will ship directly.

You can also donate to the Alabama Food Bank.

It's hard to even give an idea of exactly how bad this thing is without physically importing you to my 'hood and walking you around for a couple blocks--and I couldn't even do that, because the National Guard is on the ground here and there's places they wouldn't let us go.  Suffice it to say that I know the world is moving on--the royal wedding, Bin Ladin's assassination--but this area is not going to recover within the next news cycle.  Please continue to keep us in your thoughts in the months ahead.

Blog-news: I posted up some comments that got stuck in moderation while I was indisposed.  If you didn't see your comments before, they should be there now!  I also got a headstart on Petals in the Wind once the power came up, and the first installment should be up on Friday if the internet holds.

Glad to be back!  Let's get this party started!

::spits on hands::

Background Blogging: Serious Business Edition

Hullo, me lovelies:

Without getting into too many details, Yr. Humble Annotator has been temporarily displaced by the recent tornadoes in Alabama.  Me and mine are fine, my house is fine, and--alas!--my gianormous file of the Complete Works of V.C. Andrews is fine, but things are very chaotic at this time, so the start of the Petals in the Wind recaps is on semi-indefinite hiatus.

Rest assured, in the next few days or weeks, things will settle down.  Sooner or later, I'll feel the need of the sort of wonky, wacky, craptastic magic that only a V.C. Andrews novel can provide, and we'll get this show on the road again.

Thanks for understanding.

With love,
The Fifth Dollanganger