“There is no hate such as that born out of love betrayed” (Cathy, 283) this statement could summarize this whole book, appropriately called Flowers in the Attic for several reasons, since the strong hatred throughout this novel is indeed created from what was once love.
Told from the perspective of the teenage daughter Cathy, In this novel, four siblings are locked in a secluded attic in the childhood home of their mother, after the death of their father. The children are told they will only have to remain here until their grandfather has died and left his entire estate to their mother. However, as the years pass and the children have been locked away for more than three years, they begin to doubt their mother's devotion to their safety and begin searching for a way to escape.
A large theme in the novel is that womanhood is often established by an abrupt, random crisis, sometimes at an unusually early age.
Cathy the narrator of the story, she becomes a surrogate mother to her younger twin siblings. She is noble in her suffering and achingly honest in her yearning "I wanted what every teenager wants," Cathy says. "Freedom to develop into a woman, freedom to have full control over my life!" (Cathy, 383). Which Cathy was unable to have due to the isolation of being locked in the attic, blossoming into pubescent womanhood she starts getting sexual feelings towards men, and since there is no one else than her brother around, who is also in the middle of puberty, she starts developing sexual feelings for him, which both act upon which of course isn’t right. She acts as a mother to the twins raising them, feeding them and schooling them since the mother is too busy falling in love and going on trips with a new lover, and barely visiting her kids anymore. After one of the children dies in the attic due to poisoning at the hands of the mother, Cathy decides to escape which is hard to do since they have tried many times but have failed at every attempt.
The...