Fridge / Dollanganger Series

aka: Flowersinthe Attic

Fridge Brilliance

Cathy's recall

The jury's still out on how much of an Unreliable Narrator Cathy is. (Does she overtly lie? Omit things?) But even if she's not, that doesn't mean she's an Infallible Narrator.

The passage of time impacts her telling of the story. Within the Framing Device, Cathy wrote Flowers and Petals many years after the events took place. There are several scenes written in a way that's odd at first glance, but which make a lot of sense in the context of Cathy remembering and retelling that event.

• In the very first chapter of Flowers, a police officer tells the Dollanganger family their father has died. The officer is long-winded, very confusing, tells the the graphic details of the accident in front of all the party guests and the children, and weirdly over-emphases that the crash was not Chris Sr's fault. If taken at face value, the officer has absolutely no idea how to talk to grieving family and is bad at his job to the point of farce. But if you assume the scene as Cathy tells it is the result of her piecing together her memory of that day, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. Perhaps the details of the crash were actually told to them later on. The insistence that the crash wasn't her dad's fault was surely from Cathy's internal monologue at the time. Cathy—as a child, experiencing the most traumatic event of her life up to that point—melded the details together in her head over the years.
• In the scene in Flowers when the Grandmother whips Cathy, Cathy describes the Grandmother's outfit in great detail, down to how there are 17 stones in her brooch. This is what is called a screen memory—fixating on an unimportant detail to divert from the traumatic main point and make it more bearable.
• The scene in Flowers where Chris rapes Cathy. Chris calls it rape, and in the scene itself it pretty clearly is. But Cathy—beginning later that same night, and going all the way into Petals—frames it as closer to Questionable Consent. This is a realistic (if disturbing) depiction of one of the ways people cope with trauma: by telling themselves it wasn't really that bad. In If There Be Thorns that event is brought up again when Jory reads that scene in Cathy's manuscript of Flowers in the Attic. Jory views it as rape, and is absolutely horrified that his father could do something like that. Cathy is our main narrator, and she personally has more or less retconed it—but this scene with Jory makes it very clear that that's Cathy's thing, and that the series as a whole is not retconning it.
  Jory narrating: For some reason I couldn't force myself to read beyond the time when first a brother betrayed his sister by forcing himself upon her. That this man beside me could rape his own sister when she was only fifteen was beyond my comprehension, beyond my ability to sympathize no matter how desperate his need had been, or what the circumstances had been to drive him to commit such an unholy act.
• Cathy's recall provides an alternative interpretation of what occurs when the siblings first meet Dr. Sheffield in Petals. As written, he encounters the three of them for the first time and instantly spends a long moment ogling Cathy. While Paul is obviously attracted to Cathy later, and obviously had some terrible sexual boundaries towards his late wife, it would also just be deeply weird on multiple levels for him to react that way in that moment: Cathy was 15, wearing ill-fitting clothing, malnourished, suffering from arsenic poisoning alongside her siblings, all three were clearly in distress, and oh, they had a seriously ill child with them. Even if he was a pervert, it beggars belief that his first response in that situation would be to openly stare at Cathy—if he had that little control over his urges, he'd barely be able to function in public, let alone work as a doctor. It seems more plausible that this was embellishment Cathy added years after the fact, a la Backported Development. Considering that throughout Petals and even into Thorns, Cathy makes frequent reference to sleeping with/marrying Paul because she felt she "owed" him, it seems just as likely that Cathy—a deeply traumatized teenaged girl who had already internalized some very dysfunctional ideas about men and sex (quite apart from her stuff with Chris)—was interpreting a moment of shock or confusion on Paul's part as attraction and assumed she'd have to "earn" his kindness and hospitality.

Other

• Olivia is convinced from day one that Cathy and Chris are on an incestuous trajectory. She is paranoid about it, but she also sets up the situation that is the catalyst. Much has been said by fans about how her incest prevention scheme really sucks and she Didn't Think This Through. People seem to frequently forget that the book itself is aware of this, points it out, and offers a very plausible, in-character explanation for why:
  Chris: Do you think we can live in one room, year after year, and not see each other? You helped put us here. You have locked this wing so the servants cannot enter. You want to catch us doing something you consider evil. You want Cathy and me to prove your judgment of our mother's marriage is right! Look at you, standing there in your iron-gray dress, feeling pious and self-righteous while you starve small children!
  • It's even worse when you read Garden of Shadows and realize that Olivia is one of the only two people still living who know the truth about exactly how the children's parents are related to each other. That book also reveals just where she came up with the idea of hiding them in that specific room... it worked the last time she needed it, after all.
• Chris Sr. and Corrine's attraction falls neatly within the (albeit questionable) concept of Genetic Sexual Attraction. They were separated when Chris was three and Corrine was an infant, only to be reunited when both were in their teens. Although they believed themselves to be uncle and niece, they may have actually recognized their closer kinship but misinterpreted the attraction as Love at First Sight.
• The whole attic-health thing has a heavy dose of Artistic License – Biology. If we're trying to Fan Wank it away though, traditionally the dosage of poison needed to kill someone is based on their weight and size. Since the twins were much smaller than Chris or Cathy, it would've taken much less to kill them.
• Corrine's behaviour as The Tease has some creepy implications when you become aware of her twisted relationship with Malcolm, her father figure. Though physical incest doesn't appear to have taken place, emotional incest would actually account for a lot of her behaviour as an adult.

Fridge Logic

Fridge Logic

• As punishment for her incestuous marriage, Corrine receives forty-eight deep whip cuts, going all the way down to her ankles. Yet, very soon after, Cathy describes her playing tennis, and wearing shorts and backless dresses. Not only does Corrine show no lasting injury (in Real Life, that many lashes can cut flesh from bone), but no one outside the family seems to notice the hideous, crippling scars that should have come from such a whipping?
  • As noted on the headscratchers page, she could have used makeup or the lacerations weren't deep. However, it's not said what kind of whip Olivia used, in which case, she could have lashed with some kind of switch, something that could leave a cut but not bad enough as to where it would leave behind scars.
• A lot of the drama goes out of the book when you remind yourself that these kids have had a rope ladder since the very first night. Almost as soon as they're locked in, Cathy begins to worry about what would happen in the event of a fire, and she and Chris make a Bedsheet Ladder to stash under the bed. They then spend the rest of the book coming up with excuses not to use the ladder. At their most desperate moment, during which the children are being starved and Chris is reduced to feeding the twins his blood to survive, the excuse is that Cathy and Chris are too weak to climb down the ladder with the twins on their back. This doesn't explain why either Cathy or Chris doesn't escape alone to summon help for the others. The fact that immediately after this scene, Cathy and Chris use the ladder to escape and go skinny-dipping makes it even more What the Hell, Hero?
  • Here's the thing about abuse. Cathy and Chris were still holding onto hope that their mother would come through for them. Sixteen years of affection doesn't just magically go away. And from their perspective, their situation isn't ideal but it could be worse. They have beds to sleep in and regular food—and the attic is a decent playing spot. If they escape, where do they go? They're two teenagers with no money or qualifications and a pair of very young children to also take care of. It's not until they realise that Cory was poisoned that they leave—because now they know their lives are in danger. Yeah, they could always have escaped, but for a long time they were hoping their grandfather would die soon and they'd get the inheritance. It's not getting out of the house that's the problem, it's what they do and where they go afterwards; when they do decide to escape, they make sure to steal plenty of things so they'll have money.
    Chris: And if we run away, I'll never be a doctor—you know that! Name what I can do to earn a living for us—quick, list the jobs I can get other than a dishwasher, a fruit-picker, a short-order cook—will any of those put me through college, and then through med school? And I'll have you and the twins to support, as well as myself—a ready-made family at age sixteen!
• It's cited on the main page how Corinne is in denial both about how much Chris and Cathy have grown up—failing to buy her bras, having to be reminded to explain puberty and menstruation to her—as well as how the twins have not grown up, as thanks to their deprivation, they've barely grown. But perhaps that's exactly why she's in denial about the older children. As long as she sees the twins as the same size, she can convince herself that the kids haven't been locked up that long.
  • Or conversely, that's the very reason she barely looks at the twins whenever she visits, because again, refusing to see the lack of changes in them allows her to remain in denial about what she's doing.

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