"Flowers In The Attic" By Virginia Andrews And Maternal Narcissism

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When you start reading this book, you immediately plunge into the warm bliss of a family idyll. The kind that all girls dream of when trying to get married. The house is a full bowl, adorable children with a doll-like appearance, a beautiful wife is an ideal hostess and a husband is the true head of the family. And when this ideal world collapses with the death of the Dollangedzher father, completely different events begin to unfold in front of us, and one after another terrible family secrets appear.

Many reviewers of this book (yes, and of the film of the same name) blame the wealth that caused all the events and destinies described in the book. And the main "monsters" of the unfolding drama make the head of the Foxworth family and his wife. All these factors and heroes, of course, cannot be discounted. But this, in my opinion, is far from the most important thing in the storyline of the novel.

It was much more important for me to find the answer to the question why a loving wife and mother suddenly turns into a monster, who for many years locked up her own children in the attic and, in the end, tries to poison them with rat poison? What personality traits should have been so clearly manifested and allowed the mother to solve her, in fact, exclusively material problems in such a monstrous way?

So, it is obvious that character pathologies can often remain hidden for a long time. The author of the novel managed to notice this very aptly. But in crisis periods of life, the true structure of a person's personality, as a rule, becomes clearly visible. I think that it was precisely the lack of a clear image of herself as a mother in the mother of the Dollangedzers' children that allowed her to make decisions that were fatal for them. Her diffuse identity is complicated by the phenomenon that indicates that she is a narcissistic person - a pathology that carries traits of greatness that did not allow her, as a normal mother (even at the cost of her own well-being), to take care of her children. She easily makes a choice in favor of the option offered to her - to hide the children in the attic. However, it is quite possible that she herself invents this method, because in childhood she herself was often kept in the same attic.

It was not at all a burden for a beautiful-looking woman to close her four children in the attic for a long four years (and this conclusion could have lasted not at all four years if the children had not escaped). With all this, she herself completely calmly and happily lives a full-fledged aristocratic life, practically not visiting her unfortunate children, and remembering them only when she faces the fact of exposing her crime. She gets married, travels, flashes in the gossip of the whole world, leads a secular lifestyle and feels happy, remaining completely insensitive to the suffering of her own children, knowing that in the summer the attic is unbearably hot, and in winter it is inhuman cold, that children are wasting away without the sun. light and fresh air and that sometimes they simply forget (!) to feed them at least a piece of stale bread. And after the death of a little boy - her son, whom she herself poisons, his corpse is thrown into the snow on a country road.

What could have allowed a woman-mother to remain insensitive to her own children - the most significant people in her life?

At the beginning of the description of the mother of the Dollangedzers' children, there is some suspicion that, perhaps, she refers to infantile personalities - perhaps because she looks "stuck" first to her husband, and then to her mother. And we begin to imagine an unfortunate, but magnificent in its doll beauty, victim of circumstances. However, upon further careful reading, it becomes clear that this woman is a fairly mature person and is completely unidentified with her supposed significant adults - mother or new husband. And all the decisions she makes are her decisions.

The predominance of primitive defenses in the personality structure of this woman becomes obvious - devaluation (health and life of her own children, moral and moral values) and omnipotence (allowing her to easily decide the fate of others). As a result, we see in the novel a description of a classic narcissistic personality with clear signs of insufficient integration of the images of their significant others and a violation of identity. All this manifests itself in her sphere of values, a sense of internal duty and, of course, asocial behavior that crowns this tragic family history.

But as horrible as the story of the Dollangedger-Foxworth family is, this novel is interesting to read. Especially psychologists.