How Does 'Flowers In The Attic' End?

Oh man! Reading ‘Flowers in the Attic’ was such a mix of fear and fascination for me. The ending of this book is one of those that you will remember for a long time after you finished reading the book. The Dollanganger siblings had been locked up in the attic for years and in the end they managed to escape the Foxworth manor. However, each of them had been changed for life and some more than others. The siblings had been so manipulated by their grandmother that they in the end poisoned their own mother Corrine in a twisted attempt of revenge. And even that wasn’t perfect, because the poison didn’t immediately kill Corrine. Instead, it disfigured her, exactly as she had done to her children before. Symbolically speaking, there is beauty for beauty and betrayal for betrayal. After having been locked up in the attic for so long, the children of Corrine finally escape the Foxworth Hall. Yet, they are not whole. Cory, the youngest of the siblings, slowly dies from the poison that he and his siblings had been subjected to for years before. Chris is torn apart by the guilt he is carrying and it will be a huge obstacle for him in his life. And Cathy writes a book about their horrible experience in the Foxworth attic. It must have been so cathartic for her, yet so awful and so very sorrowful at the same time. The experience in the attic had been so terrible that it will haunt her for the rest of her life.

The epilogue jumps forward in time to find Cathy all grown up, still entwined in a tortured relationship with Chris. The two have established themselves in the world, but the house of their childhood horrors is never far from their minds. In the end, it’s reduced to ashes in a fiery conflagration that’s been building for years. While the burning of Foxworth Hall is fitting as it is the symbol of the deepest pains that the Dollanganger children suffered, it also stands as a metaphor for the destruction of pain and the 'ills of the past. V.C. Andrews never gave her readers any neat closure as to the fate of her 'villains'. Nor did she heal her heroes of their psychological and physical wounds. Instead, she depicted life in all of its realistic messiness. And in the end, it is that very same messiness that makes Flowers in the Attic such an enduring work of fiction. The last image that the reader is left with is that of Cathy, standing in the middle of the burned out rubble of Foxworth Hall. She is free. But that freedom comes at a great cost and leaves its own set of scars. The book raises an important question that has yet to be fully answered: Can one ever fully escape the past? Will it not always follow in some form or another?

The hypocrisy of the grandmother’s Bible-thumping finally gets its comeuppance in a somewhat satisfying way. As opposed to God judging her with a lightning bolt in the heavens above, her judgment is of this world – purely financial. A stroke is finally her judgment. All her money and power mean nothing to her in her fear of hell. She’s left a helpless, weakened old woman with no power to do anything – to terrorize anyone – helpless. That Cathy doesn’t actively torment her is perhaps the most delicious morsel of all this. The simple removal of her control is all that this fundamentalist character deserves. A very quiet, very real defeat for someone who consistently shrieked and wailed at the top of her lungs for so long.

It was an interesting aspect of the ending that was opposite of many readers of the book. As I stated earlier, many of the readers wanted Cathy to burn down Foxworth Hall. This would have been such a cathartic scene but again, Andrews was correct in not giving her readers that. What she did give them was more real. By having Cathy finally own Foxworth Hall, Andrews is portraying the compulsive relationship that trauma survivors have with the source of their pain. Most do not destroy it, in fact they find themselves returning to it again and again, trying to find a way to master it. This is what Cathy is attempting to do by returning to the house and owning it. It’s doomed but so human.

The quietest tragedy in the book is that of Carrie White. The dramatic event of Cory’s death is contrasted with the slow disintegration of Carrie White over the final pages. It becomes clear that some people are too delicate to survive certain kinds of evil. While Cathy and Chris, for all their evil, are able to survive in a world that is too bright, too loud, too ferocious for them, Carrie is not. Her disintegration brings with it the awful question of whether survival is a virtue or simply something that some people are better equipped to do than others. The book never answers this question.