Incest Is Best

A Hard Look at the Work of V.C. Andrews

Flowers in the Attic is a great novel, by all accounts. I’ve never met anyone who read it and didn’t think it was a masterpiece. The story follows the lives of four children who, along with their mother, are left penniless after the death of their father. Desperate, the mother returns to her parents’ house, to beg forgiveness of her father. Apparently he disowned her when she married her cousin, and she now feels that it would be best if her children remain out of sight until his death.

The children, Chris, 15, Cathy, 12, and twins Cory and Carrie, 5, are given an upstairs bedroom and the attic to play in. Because the grandfather will turn them out if he discovers he has grandchildren, they have to be very quiet and make sure none of the maids hear them. The grandmother, a stern and imposing figure, brings them a tray in the morning with a day’s worth of food on it.

Corrine, the mother, swears they only have to stay in the attic for one night. Then it’s a week, then, a few more weeks. Soon they don’t know how long they’ll have to be there, as Grandfather continues to live. Corrine’s visits become less and less frequent, and she sometimes vanishes for months at a time, then returns telling fabulous tale of Europe and bearing expensive gifts. Meanwhile, the grandmother begins terrorizing the children, giving them strict lists of rules to obey and demanding that they memorize the Bible. When she catches Chris and Cathy in the bathroom at the same time, she pour hot tar over Cathy’s hair, forcing her to shave her head. In the daytime, the children play in the attic, decorating it with paper flowers and planting imaginary gardens. Cathy continues to dream of being a ballerina, and Chris a doctor.

Time passes. All the children begin to grow sickly. After two years locked in the attic, Chris and Cathy managed to steal the key from their mother during one of her visits and make a soap mold of it. With the wooden key they carve, Chris and Cathy carefully explore the house and learn that Grandfather has been dead for almost a year, Corrine is remarried and no one is planning on letting them out any time soon. They begin making nightly visits to their mother’s room and filching her pocket money for their escape.

In the meantime, they are growing up. Grandmother is obsessed with chastity, but their hormones are running amuck, and they have no one to explore with but each other. Inevitably, it seems, Chris and Cathy have sex in the attic while Cory and Carrie are asleep. It was the most brilliant portrayal of how being trapped in a fifteen foot room with your brother for three years can do to you.

Shortly afterward, Cory becomes very ill. Cathy begs the Grandmother to take him to a doctor, but she refuses. Finally Corrine agrees to take him to a hospital far away, but returns the next day with the news that he died during the ride. All the children are devastated, and Carrie is particularly traumatized. They continue to hoard money.

During one of these nightly visits, Chris overhears the butler and the maid talking about how Corrine takes a platter of doughnuts up to the attic, powdered with arsenic. They children realize that they have been eating these doughnuts for months, and that their own mother is trying to kill them. Even though they need to stay and save more money, they decide to leave immediately.

There are three more books chronicling the lives of the children, and one about the Grandmother’s life. Carrie dies young and unhappy, Cathy becomes a prima ballerina but is obsessed with getting revenge against her mother, Chris finally becomes a doctor but is still infatuated with Cathy. The second novel, Petals on the Wind, is a miserable telling of the next ten or fifteen years, following Cathy through her numerous affairs and pregnancies, and her vengeance against her mother. Eventually, after her second husband dies, she has her tubes tied and marries Chris.

The third novel, If There Be Thorns, is delicious. It follows Chris and Cathy through the eyes of Cathy’s two children, Bart and Jory, and sees how Corrine returns to take revenge on her own children. It is a terrifying story of insanity and incest. Finally, comes Seeds of Yesterday. Narrated again by Cathy, her children are grown up. Jory is a dancer, and Bart is a rich tycoon who buys the Grandmother’s house and renovates it. He causes a terrible accident which leaves Jory paralyzed, and begins teaching his brother’s two children that they are evil. Chris and Cathy finally die.

These are the only four books of V.C. Andrews I would recommend reading, because Flowers in the Attic and If There Be Thorns are both very good, and it’s always nice to finish off an entire series. I was under the impress that Flowers started Andrews career and was what allowed her to be published again, but perhaps not.

After reading this series, I started on another of her books, Ruby, and was alarmed to find the same story. Both of Ruby’s parents are dead, and she lives alone with her grandmother in a small shack. She begins seeing a boy named Paul, becomes involved with him, and then learns that he is her brother. I was absolutely stunned by this revelation, and quickly understood that Andrews appears to be obsessed with incest. I continued reading. After her grandmother’s death, Ruby learns that her father and twin sister are alive and well, and quite rich, and goes to be with them. She steels her sister’s boyfriend, Beau, and is soon pregnant with his baby. Disgraced, she returns to her grandmother’s shack, where Paul is still mourning for her, and now very rich in the oil business. They marry. Paul swears he won’t touch her and will leave her to work on her art, but soon they’re back in bed.

Meanwhile, Ruby’s sister marries Beau, and Ruby and Beau begin an affair. Gisselle falls down some stairs and enters a coma, and Ruby concocts a bizarre plan to pose as her. Paul and Beau agree, but Paul loses his mind and actually begins believing that Gisselle is Ruby. When she dies, he follows.

Dawn is even stranger. A young girl, on the cusp of womanhood, lives with her parents, older brother, and baby sister. She and the brother, Jimmy, share a bed because there is no where else to sleep in the shabby apartment. She begins seeing a very rich boy at school named Phillip, who calls her a tease and pushes her to have sex with him. Abruptly, Dawn’s mother dies and her father is arrested for kidnaping. Apparently, they were not Dawn’s parents at all, nor is Jimmy her brother. Rather, Phillip is now her brother, and she and Jimmy are not related. I’m sure you can guess what happens next. Dawn moves in with her true family, her father is sent to prison, and she hides Jimmy in a broom closet, where they begin doing all the things brothers and sisters aren’t supposed to do together. Phillip won’t let up, however, and ends up raping Dawn, which is more twisted than I thought even Andrews would get.

All the novel share a couple of common threads, the most obvious being incest. Whether is it rape or passion, there is always an exchange of bodily fluids between siblings. Having such an obsession with the topic would cause one to believe that it has been an major influence in Andrews’s life, and I noticed something interesting in this chain of thought. The V in V.C. Andrews stands for Virginia, but the C is never specified. Is it possible that it stands for Catherine, and this is a hidden indication that Andrews is in fact Cathy from Flowers in the Attic? Certainly, she is more interested in incest than any other novelist I’ve ever heard of, and she’s able to write about it in such a way that it seems about natural and inevitable. Why would anyone want to meet somebody when they could fall for a guy who’d known them all their lives?

Perhaps her novels and the relationships between brothers and sisters are many different interpretations of how Andrews perceives whatever odd experience in her life cause her to write so graphically about incest. She can see herself as having been thrown into him, innocent of any knowledge concerning their relationship, or even raped by him, depending on the story you pick up. Yet the novels don’t pull together a complete picture of this occurrence, of the inspiration for the repeated story. Another common thread is the main character, who is always the same. They are always young, pretty, about to blossom, and gifted with a special talent for some art. With Cathy it was dancing, Ruby–painting, and Dawn–singing. Their personalities are completely identical, to the point where one character could be interchanged with another and have no affect on the story. This occurs again with another character, the mother. Sweet and beautiful, irresponsible and thoughtless. Over and over we see this character, which is odd because Andrews is perfectly capable of coming up with new, interesting characters. None of her male leads are the same, all are different. Chris, Bart, Julian, Phillip, Jimmy, Paul, and Beau are all examples of her writing skill. Are the repeated characters of the girl, her mother, and her grandmother all pieces of the puzzle behind the name V.C. Andrews?

Is this an indication of V.C. Andrews’s personality? I don’t know, it’s really impossible to tell without having met and known her. But it does seem likely that a character she wrote over and over in many different guises would eventually have to come back to her own experiences. Who else could she focus on for such a long time? How could she help but take a ride into her hidden psyche?

The last refrain found over and over in these books is rich and poor. Her basic take on the thought is, "I as happier when I was living in poverty and screwing my brother than I am in this rich place with my evil relatives." I don’t know if sub-plot has any actual importance concerning Andrews’s life; if it does then she was probably happier before writing Flowers in the Attic, which sold almost forty million copies.

In the front of Dawn is an interest note to the reader, penned by Andrews’s family. It says that she has died, and since then the family has worked with a ghostwriter to continue writing V.C. Andrews novels. The reference sounds almost like a genre and not an author, as if incest-romance now has its own shelf in the bookstore. "Beginning with the final book in the Casteel series we have been working closely with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia’s stories and to expand upon them by creating additional novels inspired by her wonderful storytelling genius."

Dawn was published in 1990, but I noticed in my copy of Flowers in the Attic a very disturbing mention on the copyright page. "Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews’ stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius."

Of which this is one? Does that imply that Flowers in the Attic was ghostwritten? Flowers was first published in 1979; when exactly did this woman die? If what I understand to be her first novel was written by someone else, isn’t it reasonable to assume that everything published after it was not Virginia’s work either? The note in Dawn says that Virginia Andrews spent every waking moment writing, and that it was her pride and joy. What exactly was she writing if not these books with her name on the cover?

Let’s say that she did write Flowers, and every else published before 1990. Why does the Andrews family continue to publish more books under her name? There’s the money, obviously, but when people are buying the books because of her reputation, why not change the content so that the sibling characters are no longer sleeping together? Is this some kind of gesture to Virginia, that they are respecting what became her life’s work?

The family isn’t saying, and there is no clear answer. Obviously, her decedents would prefer that it not get out about her and her brother, or whatever other incident prompted her to write what she wrote, because of its frowned upon and scandalous nature. For that reason, I doubt we will ever learn the full story of Virginia’s life. Her life no, but the person she was, possibly. All we have to do is look to the autobiography she wrote over and over. . .

January 25, 1998

Kaitlin Willihnganz