Gothic Memory and Dark Nostalgia in Lifetime’s Flowers in the Attic (2014)

In fact, anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of both nineteenth-century women and their twentieth-century descendants. [...] heroines who characteristically inhabit mysteriously intricate or uncomfortably stifling houses are often seen as captured, fettered, trapped, even buried alive. (Gilbert and Gubar 1979) Huge, dim, dirty, dusty, this attic stretched for miles! The farthest walls were so distant they seemed hazy, out of focus. The air was not clear, but murky; it had an odour, an unpleasant odour of decay, of old rotting things, of dead things left unburied. (Andrews 1979) In 1979, just as the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was about to settle into the placid conservatism of the Reaganite eighties, women writers were thinking about the intersection of space, power, and history in new ways. Whether producing scholarly treatises or chilling potboilers, women reflected on the spatialization of patriarchal structures and the myriad ways in which powerlessness, alienation, and gendered violence might congeal into the solid form of wooden frames, brick walls, and high, barred windows. Images of terror and captivity proliferated just as wildly in academic treatises as they did in the cheap paperback novels that lined the shelves of grocery stores and pharmacies, addressing themselves implicitly to harried housewives, working women on their lunch breaks, and teenage girls in search of salacious reading material.