Did you guys know about how Shawn Hunter has a literary podcast? Well apparently he does, because he likes to read books and stuff. And I've been listening to a couple eps (do you even call them episodes with podcasts? oh well) and generally liking it, but I was rather irritated when it came to their discussion of Flowers in the Attic and Sweet Valley High. There was a kind of automatic dismissal there that really bothered me – I hate people being snide about girl books. Those things are important to me. They are important to many girls, I'm sure. They are incredibly revealing of the culture of girlhood and the lives of girls, even the trashiest ones. And they shape us, because many of us read these books. It really rubbed me the wrong way, especially because when it came time for them to discuss a John Green book I felt there was a clear level of polite respect even amongst the criticisms that was totally missing from the discussion of FitA and SVH. Because a man wrote the Fault in Our Stars, I guess, but girl trash is girl trash.
I actually didn't read any SVH, though I did read Sweet Valley Saga, which were INCREDIBLE. They were family histories – one was the family history of the twins' mother and the other of their father. They were SO GOOD. Generation-spanning! Historical delights! And now that I think of it, incredibly similar to V.C. Andrews in many ways, particularly in the doppleganger effect she loved so much wherein family tragedies, archtypes, and situations repeat over and over across generational lines. Twins obviously were a repeating factor, one ~good and one ~bad. There was a heavily fated aspect: often the two family lines would cross paths romantically only to be tragically ripped apart until finally the twins' parents found each other. There were dark family secrets abounding too, of course.
God I have to reread those.
Perhaps it's silly but there were some specific things in that podcast FitA discussion I felt I had to dispute, even if it was only into the unread internet space of my lj. Plus I think they're fair discussion points in general. I haven't talked about Andrews in depth on my lj and I would like to, so this is as good a reason as any.
Shawnie compared it to Fifty Shades and Twilight, which I get but disagree with. Twilight was boring and unimaginative, two words which could never be applied to the Andrews canon no matter how shitty you think they are. And Fifty Shades is just drivel, so I resent that. But there is also a haze of romanticized abuse in both of those books/series that makes their popularity particularly troubling to me which I would say is not present in Andrews' work exactly – Andrews does not romanticize abuse, though she does revel in it. This is a different thing, arguably just as shitty for different reasons. At no point does Andrews say these horrible things happening are good or normal; quite the opposite. They are unequivocally awful. Yet at the same time there is a definite sense of naughty fantasy about it, getting to experience these bad things in a safe way, appealing to the parts of us that crave salaciousness; being able to enjoy the bad thing while recognizing that it is a bad thing. And though we may want to visit these things in fiction they are not necessarily things we strive for, and Andrews does not represent them as such. People (especially with the new movies) are going to ship Chris and Cathy (the lead siblings of FitA) but IMO the novels do not encourage this, as romantic as their dialogue is sometimes. It is still a bad thing and the books never, ever forget that. It is constantly presented as the result of the extreme abuse they suffered, and something that would not have happened otherwise. They do not have a gentle, romantic first time like in the Lifetime version; Chris rapes Cathy. Now, the rape stuff in these books is...well that's a post for another day, but I doubt Andrews had NO IDEA what she was doing there. Cathy is constantly resisting her attraction to Chris because she is aware that it isn't right and that they are truly fucked up for life because of what was done to all of them. And yeah, they do ~end up together~ but it's after literally every single person they loved has died (often violently) and they have no one left but each other. Just like in the attic.
Also, these are HORROR NOVELS and V.C. Andrews did not like happy endings, so you can bet if a couple ends up together, it's not supposed to be nice.
Shawn Hunter also called Cathy "passive" which I honestly balked at, because Cathy is ANYTHING BUT. Yes, she's physically trapped for the majority of the first book and she takes her sweet time getting to the vengeance part in the second, but Cathy is HARDLY passive. She is filled with rage and fire and passion and she is constantly fighting back. There's this fantastic quote about Cathy in that article I'm always shoving at everyone: "While Cathy has justification for her wrath, she has no moral structure to contain or channel it. At the same time, there’s also something admirable, even enviable, about it. Unlike the 'nice' methods of coping that young women are still routinely implored to use, Cathy never denies her rage or her sexuality (two major challenges for women of any age, let alone teenagers). Cathy is never 'nice' or 'good.' Even her love for her younger siblings is fiercely protective, never 'maternal' or sentimental. A million girl-books, like Sweet Valley High, foreground the good girl, with whom we should identify, and the bad girl, whom we resist while vicariously enjoying her badness. Andrews’s books don’t combine these two girls so much as create an entirely new paradigm: a girl who is 'good' and sympathetic but also very, very angry."
ANGER IN FEMALE CHARACTERS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. And Cathy is real. fucking. angry. She is defined by her rage and it infects every part of her life, especially in the second book. She is a pirouetting rage monster of vengeance and sex. And she has very shiny hair. That is the great thing about Andrews heroines, though: sure, the patriarchy does often win in the end (it always does in life) but on the way there these girls will be fucked up and mad about it. You won't find evolved ideas of forgiveness here.
What is joined in Cathy is split into more familiar (at first glance) opposing types in My Sweet Audrina. We have Audrina, the "good" one, who supposedly has everything come to her very easily and is much beloved and preferred by the father who has also rampantly mentally abused her. Then there is Vera, the "bad" one, who works hard to earn affection but does it in underhanded ways and everyone hates her. Literally everyone. And Vera does do legitimately awful things but it's all due to her own deep anger and desire to lash out at everyone who denies her, but especially at Audrina, who is so good and pure. And Audrina's so-called goodness is actively cultivated by her horrible father to reflect a sort of shitty feminine ideal. He trains her to suppress uncomfortable things, to swallow her feelings, to be quiet, to be kind, to revere him. Audrina becomes imperfect in his eyes when she no longer treats him as a god. Let me just take you through that again: Audrina becomes imperfect to her father when she ceases to worship him. And he spends the rest of her life trying to rework her into his pre-determined mold: a passive, obliging, feminine, demure, modest woman who will always listen to him and never betray him. He makes her into a very specific kind of female fantasy while bulldozing over any reality – and Vera, who is cruel and opinionated and lustful and who, worst of all, tells the truth all the time is of course hated and derided by everyone.
Another thing in that podcast that I thought was strange was everyone remarking on how ~none of this could ever happen!!!!11!! Like. Fucking DUH that is not the point. But also – the abuse of children, the abuse of women, these things do happen. They happen all the time. People HAVE been locked up in rooms for years and years by family members. I've also found the "unrealistic" criticism often lacking because, what? Something is only valid if it could or did happen exactly the same way in the real world? Call me Blanche Dubois but I don't want realism I want magic!
But seriously. It's a faulty criticism though I have used it myself many times; what it really shorthands to is "untrue." It's a way of saying "this felt untrue to me, to my experience on this earth, in some way." And to me, that is valid. Not everything connects to every person. But truth and realism – those are very different things.
One of the ways this was being bandied around was with the character of Christopher in FitA. They (Shawn and some other dude and a lady) found it extremely ~~~unrealistic~~~~ that a young man would allow himself to be trapped in an attic and would not physically overpower his captors. Which to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of the text, Christopher as a character, and the nature of abuse. First things first, Chris is a by-the-books kind of guy who is definitely a rule-follower but, MUCH more importantly, the only person he loves more than his sister is his mother. Chris is devoted to their mother Corrine. Even after learning exactly to what lengths she went to to hurt her children, he still makes excuses for her. At the end of the second book, he is the only Dollanganger child who visits her and remains in contact with her. Chris is a mama's boy. So even when Cathy presses him to dissent (Cathy is a freedom fighter, bless her), he won't out of loyalty to their mother. And ALSO, like all of the children, he has been abused. The grandmother, just to split fucking hairs, is physically very imposing, repeatedly stressed as so. She is an authority figure with absolute power over the children. Chris is a malnourished seventeen year old boy in emotional turmoil who has been living in one room for four years. He is whipped by the grandmother, watches his siblings be whipped and hit, sees the marks from his mother's whipping, and this is just the iceberg of shit heaped upon these kids. There is also a Stockholm element absolutely at work. At one point, Cathy and Chris quite literally break out of their room to go for a nighttime swim and then return to the attic. As a reader, maybe that seems crazy and stupid and it is, but we cannot forget these are kids. Kids who are learning that they cannot depend on anyone, but especially adults. Everyone learns this, but Andrews kids learn it in particularly fucked ways.
What I think a lot of people miss when it comes to Andrews is not only the horror, but the weirdness. I mean, people are aware that they are weird in a hilarious soap opera way, but IMO they gloss over a lot of the nastier, stranger, truly uncomfortable bits. Which are in the fairytale tradition, I think – the real fairytales, the fucked up ones. And this is why the Lifetime adaptations are inherently flawed. You'll get the incest greatest hits and all but you'll miss things like Chris feeding his blood to the twins to nourish them when they're being starved out by the grandmother. You'll miss Cathy's gory possible miscarriage in the middle of an important ballet audition. And I guarantee when they get around to My Sweet Audrina, you'll miss things like Aunt Mercy Marie's Tuesday teatimes, and that time she angrily fucked Arden Lowe on the muddy ground of the First Audrina's grave in the middle of a thunderstorm.
And that's really too bad.