Olivia Foxworth: a Case of Mind Control

This character is a synonym of violence in the novel, Olivia herself has been a  victim of abuse and mind control at various points in her life which lead her to become a religious fanatic, specially influenced by the old testament in the Bible. This will mean suffering  and abuse for the Dollanganger siblings during their confinement to the point of things getting very overwhelming. For the most part is very difficult to understand her sadistic behaviour as she become accomplice of murdr.

Since the beginning of  the Dollangangers stay at Foxworth Hall, she gave to  the siblings a list of rules to follow and if they were to disobey, they would be accordingly punished. Some of these rules are the following:

One: You are always to be fully dressed.

Two: You will never take the Lord's name in vain, and will always say grace before each meal. And if I am not in the room to see that you do this, you may be sure that He above will be listening and watching.

Three: you are never to open the draperies, not even to peek out.

Four: You will never speak to me unless I speak to you First.

These rules are the beginning of the mind control that the children  would suffer at Foxworth Hall: submission, shame, and fear would become the norm in this room.  The most striking thing is how the sunlight is forbidden and how they will be in darkness, fear and submission. The rest of the rules have the same tone and are just a  violent  attempt of mind control.

The following is an image of the siblings after one episode in which Olivia rejects one of the presents given to her. In general this shows how they feel about the rejection, they suffer at this house.




Scene at Foxworth Hall

 

Looking into the Minds of Sociopaths

Many can classify Olivia, Corrine and Malcolm Foxworth’s behavior  in this novel as that of a sociopath,  another book where I found a similar situation is in The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. The author  of this novel like Virginia C. Andrews explored the subject of sociopaths and how dangerous they can be to the people around them. These two books are not for the faint of heart but they do give a realistic portrayal of sociopathic behavior. Corrine and Olivia are not serial killers and do not  pose a threat for people in general, but in the scenario given in Flowers in the Attic they show their cruelest and most basic side in dealing with the Dollanganger siblings.   These women  do not want to think what they do is wrong, so they look for refuge in religion, debauchery and eccentricities to forget about their secret lives as tortures of the children in the novel. In the case of Corrine, she mentally is trying to pretend that they do not exist, so she chooses to murder their children in a slow  manner as a way of trying not to deal with the fact she is commiting infantacide. Olivia is for the reader a little bit mystifying because we don't know much about her past, but is hinted that she may have been a mind control victim in her childhood.

Flowers in the Attic: Escaping the House of Incest

"She led me into the house of incest. It was the only house which was not included in the twelve houses of the zodiac. it could neither be reached by the route of the milky way, not by the glass ship through whose transparent bottom one could follow the outline of the lost continents, nor by following the arrows pointing the direction of the wind, nor by following the voice of the mountain echos."

                                                 Anais Nin (The House of Incest)

 The House of Incest by Anais Nin and Flowers in the Attic by V.C Andrews are two titles that you may not hear in the same sentence very frequently; in fact, most of V.C  Andrews readers may not be aware of Anais Nin’s work, and vice versa.  But the content in these two books share a lot of peculiar and interesting similarities.   In appearance, they are very different, The House of Incest doesn’t tell the story of a family, and it’s instead a very surrealistic and metaphorical work about the narrator trying to escape a dream in which she is trapped. Flowers in the Attic doesn’t give the appearance of a surrealistic and metaphorical novel as Anais’s book. For example, the  subject of incest is not dealt  in  The House of Incest  in a literal way, like it’s the case of Flowers in the Attic where you have a explicit  case of incest between the members of the Dollanganger family.    Anais Nin uses  the word incest  to refer to  selfish love, and loving in others what you see of yourself.  Although there is a passage in the book where she gives an explicit example referring to the character of Lot in the Bible:

                             " Stumbling from room to room I came into the room of paintings, and there sat Lot with his hand upon his daughter's breast while the city burned behind them, cracking open and falling into the sea. There where h sat with his daughter the Oriental rug was red and stiff, but the turmoil which shook them showed through the rocks splitting around them, through the earth yawning beneath their feet, through the trees flaming up like torches, through the sky smoking and smouldering red, all cracking with the joy and the terror of their love. Joy of the father's hand upon the daughter's breast, the joy of the fear racking her. Her costume tightly pressed around her so that her breasts heave and swell under his fingers, while the city is rent by lightning, and splits under the teeth of fire, great blocks of gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity, and falling into the sea with the hissof the eternally damned. No cry of horror from Lot and his daughter but from the city in flames, from an unquenchable desire of father and daughter, of brother and sister, mother and son."
p. 52ff. (The House of Incest)

Incest is a very taboo subject that creates shock and even disgust in the reader. Although , it was precisely this reaction what made  this subject very appealing to many artist and writers, specially the 19^th Romantics, which saw in incest  a perfect theme for them to fit with ideas about death  and sex .   Famous works that deal with this subject is Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A family Chronicle and Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart.  But did Nin’s work influence Flowers in the Attic?  An influence  can be assumed , even though the conexion  may  not be  very explicit,  Anais’s book is a very personal  work influenced by things that happened to her and also very controversial like Andrew’s novel. It is a well known fact  that Anaïs Nin was having an incestuous relationship with her father when she published her book, members of her family were supposedly horrified about this because they thought that the book was going to be  an exposé  of their relationship.  But it was not the case, even though there is a reference to Lot’s incestuous relationship with her daughter  in her work.  Besides the obvious resemblance between Nin and Andrews’ books  in respect to the title House of Incest  which can be seen in the form of a house where family members have love affairs accompanied also by all the negative connotations  that this title brings to mind, there are other similarities between  these two works that  caught my attention and I think may be a good field for further  analysis.

 Another interpretation of  The House of Incest  is that trying to live in a self-created world full of pleasure, instead of living in the real world full of pleasure and pain is a mistake.  Self created worlds are full of demons and always degenerate into nightmares.  The world in Flowers in the Attic is one that in a way  fits this decription.  On one side, you have Catherine, the narrator, who live in a room which is hinted to be the closest thing to hell, and her mother  Corrine is on a  very  different plane where she enjoys all the benefits that money can give, luxurious trips, expensive clothes and gifts, a handsome and younger husband, people’s attention and admiration, everything but piece of mind. Corrine’s created world full of pleasure is in reality the worst type of nightmare since she is living a double life and in neither of these two lives she can be fully herself, she is always putting an act. I think House of Incest can be a book  used as reference when analyzing  the mental state that the characters in Flowers in the Attic find themselves completely absorbed, like the narrator in The House of Incest, every character in Flowers in the Attic are looking for dramatic ways to escape their reality .  The Dollanganger siblings want definetely to escape Foxworth Hall where they are being slowly and painfully murdered, and Corrine wants to escape her past and start a new life with her new husband. In reality, it’s not that simple because lives are going to be destroyed  in order for  Corrine to achieve her ideal world.

 The House of Incest  is an excellent book, and Anais Nin is a very intuitive and extremely talented writer as Andrews, both have different ways of exploring the human psyche, but both definitely accomplished to create realistic messages for their audience.

Drawing a Portrait: Christopher Dollanganger

Figure Drawing is always an exiting pastime, here I will be attempting to do  a portrait of Christopher Dollanganger from Flowers in the Attic.


Christopher is the oldest sibling, and in the novel Chris is the one who has the strongest conexion with her mother: Corrine Foxworth. He is described in the book as someone with attractive features, and a boyish attitude. I tried to look for a face with this characteristics, and this is what I ended up sketching.

Christopher is also blond with cerulean blue eyes like Cathy, Cory and Carrie.  I tried to draw him when he was around sixteen, seventeen years old. This is the pencil I used,  charcoal B57-2b for the shading,

       

 I also used a conventional pencil to initially draw the face.  It took my quite some time, but it was very fun, If you are trying to learn to draw, or if you draw already, you’ll know that have your eraser in hand is very important, it helps to improve the quality of your drawing, I always make mistakes, and everyone who draws that I know also make mistakes, but erasing and trying again is always a good option.  Here I started drawing

Thinking about the character that you are drawing, helps you to focus more. Things that I consider about   Christopher  is that he is very authoritative sometimes to the point of being a little bit condescending to Cathy, I noticed.  so I think a face that shows a little bit of petulance may be also  appropriate for Chris, even though he is mainly described to be very optimitistic. But, I am not buying it, I think he knows how to hide his fellings very well.

So it seems that Chis hair is very curly to the point of being a mess, at some point in the novel, he gets a haircut by Cathy.  I wanted to put hints of blond hair and give the impression of coarse hair.

And I ended up  with this. Well I may not have done the best drawing, but  doing this portrait helped me to visualize and understand better the Chris that V.C Andrews created. I was left with the idea that he was most likely an Adonis, after reading all the references of beauty in the Dollanganger family and Cathy's descriptions of her brother. But most importantly is that he was very ambitious and his goal in life was to be a doctor.

Cathy and Christopher have many interests in common they both enjoy reading, and philosophysing. Christopher is specially good at painting using watercolors and is very studious and dedicated to learning more about medicine. He is psychologically a very healthy character, but the stress of living at Foxworth Hall took the best of him and eventually led him to abusive behavior towards his sister. Although the level of complexity of this relationship may not be suitable for everyone, one can infer that some of his behavior was the result of  the mind control  that was taking place at Foxworth Hall. The Gothic Horror commentator  Cosette Kies says that the intimacy between the siblings in the novel is not that of abuse but rather of forbidden lust. This subject may have Freudian undertones that deserve better exploration.

Flowers in the Attic: Corrine Foxworth

Corrine Foxworth, the mother of the Dollanganger siblings,  has become the worst mother in the history of literature, check this list http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/05/worst-mothers-in-literature.html. for corroboration. This character very well deserves the title since She  deprived her children from any contact with the outside world for more than three years.  And then she gradually started poisoning them.   Most people would say that her ambitions and desire to escape her reality are the main causes for her to want to murder her children. And this maybe just the reason, she was a loving mother or at least a caring mother before her husband passed away and then she had to take her children to live with her parents at Foxworth.

Infantacide and child abuse is a very serious issue explored in Flowers in the Attic which makes the novel very hard to digest, because most of the violence in the book is directed towards children that can not defend themselves. For this reason, some critics have called Flowers in the Attic  a "ferocious fairy tale" (V.C Andrews critical Companion) because  we get to see allusions throughout the novel to fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White & Cinderella.  But, unlike fairy tales in which good children always survive at the end, in Flowers in the Attic, the Dollangangers siblings can suffer unbearable torments and even die.     

The Dollanganger's situation is very harrowing, although they live in a luxurious estate where their mother  is always giving them expensive gifts, they can not enyoy the outdoors, and the food that they eat is very plain and repettive for most of the time. And as the Dollanganger children stay at Foxworth Hall grows more dangerous, the gifts start growing more expensive and unnecessary.

The danger of the Dollangangers dying in the novel  is specially  hinted in two incidents: the grandmother's gift to the children of a pot of chrysanthemums and her rejection of the tapestry the children did for her. Althought it is Corrine who ultimately poisons the children with arsenic, the grandmother is the vehicle who takes the poison to the children. This gift of flowers  that represent autumn- that season when blosooms die- and her refusal of their offering seems to imply that she is not expecting the children to live long.

Flowers in the Attic is a book that makes you think about the real motivations behind people's actions. As I read the book, I always wondered why Olivia Foxworth someone that is so religious, would accept to be an accomplice of murder. Why not just deny to Corrine and her children entrance to Foxworth Hall? It is also disturbingly hinted that Corrine may have known from the very beginning that her children were going to die in the room. It seems that the grandmother is not really motivated by religion for her cruel behaviour against her children, obviously she has other reasons more related to personal failures to behave in this bitter, sadistic way.


Sketch of Corrine

                                

Corrine, on her part,  is heavily influenced on one side by the inheritance, but also her relationship with Bart Winslow, the young and attractive lawyer, plays an important role in her decision of not leaving Foxworth Hall and saving in this way the life of her children. Soon after her honey moon, she started sending the poisoned doughnouts to her children, one thing to notice is that this was months before the codicil was read. Corrine's cruelty, cowardice and immaturity makes you angry because she could have asked other people for help, but instead she prefers to stay with her younger husband and her exorbitant inheritance.

The World of Carrie

Carrie is one of the twins in Flowers in the Attic,  Cathy describes her as  a very cute, " doll like" talkative girl who loves to play with  her teacups and dolls.  Here,  I tried to draw a portrait that transmitted her vivacious personality using pencils.

I'll post more portraits of her and her siblings as well. Something I really like from the Dollanganger twins like the way they cared for each other.