My mother read Flowers in the Attic when she was still in primary school. I think I too was in primary school when at the kitchen table she joked about arsenic doughnuts, and I dared to question where the idea had come from. This was the first time that I was forced to acknowledge that people with a blood relation could have a relationship of such extreme deviance from what is viewed as moral in society. The sibling incest had scared me enough, so when I finally read the books for myself I was positively gobsmacked by just how many layers more V. C. Andrews had included in her novels. I should have expected it, of course, as I was used to seeing odd family relationships in media referred to as ‘a bit Flowers-y.’ But incest is just that taboo, that until it’s something you’re looking for, you have no desire to find it. Still, I think the disgust from that night at the dinner table stuck with me. It was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch that really got me thinking about the purpose of incest; not because the incest was explicit on the page, but I was able to identify why I got that feeling that it was there in the underbelly of the text.
I’m trained in teaching English to kids aged 11 ton 18. While my main desire going into teaching was to help children to develop an appreciation for and a positive relationship to reading, child welfare increasingly became a focus for me. For some kids with difficult home lives, school was able to act as an escape. However, for some it was just an added pressure, building up and waiting to explode. It is, more often than not, the role that the parent plays to the child that results in the child’s behaviour and emotions. There were other observations, too, such as which of the girls were obsessed with having children, or which always had to be in a ‘relationship’ even at such a young age. There is a desperation to have someone you can trust and rely on, someone to always be on your team. Human connection is always important, but for some of us it can be a key part of our survival.
In The Goldfinch, Theodore Decker loses his mother in an disaster that he blames himself for them being at the site of at only thirteen years old. Before the fatalities, he sees a girl who he is then able to cross paths with in his future and he believes he should marry. Too, he is very nearly adopted by the mother of a childhood friend. After years away from this family, when he finally returns home he becomes engaged to his near-adoptive mother’s only daughter, despite her being almost the opposite of what he shows to be ‘his type.’ This is only furthered the relationship he has in his teen years, proving his sexuality to certainly not be heterosexual. Not to mention, before his engagement, he often sees prostitutes who are much older than him. It is my analysis that all positive relationships Theodore Decker have with women rely on him being able to connect them to his mother, or to act as a stand-in for his mother. With his fiancée, for example, it is clear to me that he is only committing to this relationship in order to be close to the closest woman in his life to a maternal figure by having her become in mother-in-law.
Attachment is a recognised pattern in relationships for people with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). For some, ACEs result in attachment difficulties such as struggling to form and maintain positive relationships.[1] For others, it can result in unhealthy attachments to those they believe to be safe or important in their lives due to anxiety and insecurity.[2] John Bowlby developed Attachment Theory in 1969, noting the importance of trust in a care-giver as something required to survive in nature.[3] It is this reliance that leads to the deviance of the two elder Dollenganger children in Flowers in the Attic.
To be trapped in an attic for years on end with the idea of the crime of incest being beaten both out and into you is one hell of an Adverse Childhood Experience. Being told of how perfect a man, who just so happens to be identical to your brother, your father is, alongside yourself being a Dollenganger-doppelgänger for your mother who your brother fawns over so, with no one else to trust or grow close to? No matter how hard you try, it’s hard to blame Cathy and Chris for the relationship that they developed. In both The Goldfinch and Flowers in the Attic we witness children who cling to their lost care-givers and the replacements that they find in unconventional ways. And, for both authors, these are not the only times that such relationships manifest. In Petals on the Wind, Cathy is drawn to her new adoptive father, who she attempts (and somewhat successfully) seduces. While she holds the fear that this will ruin her new family, she is unable to navigate her love and trust in anyway other than sexual due to what she learned while growing up confined to the attic. In Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History, we read of two twins who lost their parents at a young age and thus clung to each other in such a way that they became sexually intimate. Though, for these characters, it is implied that the incestuous desire is or becomes one sided and thus sexually abusive. It can be argued that Cathy and Chris’s relationship begins as abusive too, as while in the attic Chris rapes Cathy. While Cathy claims that it cannot have been rape due to her not fighting Chris off, as well as having had some indecent thoughts of her own towards her brother, we as readers should be aware that without explicit consent from both parties such intercourse is certainly rape.
My intentions with my research are primarily to look at why incest is used in literature and media that may be classed as Gothic. A starting idea is that incest is such a societal taboo with roots in abuse that it is a realistic element of horror for readers — incest provides a ‘shock factor.’ But this cannot be all. There is a wider social commentary that can be found in depictions of incestuous relationships and desire. In Flowers in the Attic, V. C. Andrews does not ignore the role of gender in Cathy’s relationships. She views her mother as a sex symbol, and believes that in order to have control, like her mother, she must be sexually assertive and be desired by men. We see this too with Camilla in The Secret History: every male character that she is friends with (other than the homosexual Francis) is sexually attracted to her, and because of this she can use it to her advantage to be safe in their dangerous cohort. In The Goldfinch, gender is instead looked at by how Theo views women in his life. If he does not understand them or see beauty in them, he treats them with very little respect or pays no attention to them at all. If, however, he can see his mother in them, he does his best to force them into a care-taker role even in his adulthood. While rooted in his childhood trauma, this is also a reflection of his underlying misogynistic views towards women. Another element of social commentary that can be found in depictions of incest is the changing views on child development in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the United States, attention to Child Protection grew massively in the 1960s. News publications highlighting the 1962 publication “The Battered-Child Syndrome” from paediatrician Henry Kempe allowed for national awareness of the effects of childhood abuse.[4] In 1979, the same year that Flowers in the Attic was published, Lenore E. Walker developed the theory of the cycle of abuse.[5] It is clear that the US widely had a growing interest in the protection of the most vulnerable in their society, and why shouldn’t this impact the fiction being developed and consumed?
Though I am based in Scotland, most of the texts I am looking to cover are from the United States, and thus it is social commentary based there that I will primarily be discussing this academic year. There is plenty of space for external research, however, in such a complex subject. I do believe that this blog will encapsulate my research both in my academic career as well as my personal interests. To conclude this introduction to my ongoing studies, I ask you to consider yourself why else incestuous themes may have had a resurgence in the late twentieth century? So far we have looked briefly at the social context of attitudes towards women as well as growing interest in child welfare, but with such a topic I am certain we will continue to analyse and discover.
Footnotes:
[1] “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Attachment,” NHS, accessed September 29, 2025, https://mft.nhs.uk/rmch/services/camhs/young-people/adverse-childhood-experiences-aces-and-attachment/. https://mft.nhs.uk/rmch/services/camhs/young-people/adverse-childhood-experiences-aces-and-attachment/.
[2] Jamie Glass, “Do Childhood Attachment and Adverse Childhood Experiences Predict Adulthood Attachment?,” (Masters thesis, University of South Carolina Aiken, 2021), 55. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=aiken_psychology_theses.
[3] John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 2nd ed. (Basic Books, 1982), Volume I: Attachment, 183. https://mindsplain.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ATTACHMENT_AND_LOSS_VOLUME_I_ATTACHMENT.pdf.
[4] John E. B. Myers, “A Short History of Child Protection in America,” Family Law Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2008): 455. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25740668.
[5] Lenore E. Walker, “Battered Women: A Psychosociological Study of Domestic Violence,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 4, no. 3 (2008): 136-138. https://doi.org/10.1177/036168438000400101.
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