Flowers in the Attic: A Barometer for The Moral Degradation of Society

Truly, when I was very young, way back in the 80s, I believed all of life would be like one long and perfect summer day. After all, it did start out that way...Ooops, a bit of plagiarizing from my favorite guilty pleasure, Flowers In the Attic.  Yes, that's right.  You can start making fun, but it's really nostalgic when I reread this literary *ahem* gem.  I can't help remembering the first time I read it, stuck in the back seat of my folks' car on a drive to the beach, devouring every page in disbelief, not knowing that there existed in this world books I may like that weren't set in Sweet Valley.  But at least this book had characters who were also blond and perfect, and it even had twins, too.  There was just the little parts about devil's spawn, incest, and being locked in some attic that kind of changed it up a bit from the usual Jessica and Elizabeth shenanigans.

This book, when I was growing up, was sort of the gateway drug for every young girl into the smutty novels that were to become par for the course during summer vacations.  Almost every girl I knew somehow found in her hands, during her 7th grade year, a worn, dog-eared copy of Flowers in the Attic, given to her with hushed instructions to not let her parents know what the book was about.  And so, for many girls like me, it was our first example of sex, albeit between Cathy and her brother, Chris (ewwww!  No, make that EWWWWWW!!).  I wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies, so I hadn't even seen a sex scene at this point.  All I knew about sex was what other kids told me, and the lame stuff we learned about when they told us about our periods at school (which, in turn, I really first learned about from Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret).

For those of you not in the know, the book is about a family of four Hitler's Dream Children blond, perfect, beautiful kids whose idyllic life is suddenly thrown for a loop when their beloved blond, handsome, daddy dies in a car accident.  Aww heck, I'm too lazy to write it all out...here's what Amazon says:

After a tragic accident leaves them fatherless, four children return to their mother's mysterious family mansion hoping for an inheritance. But when they are imprisoned and abandoned by their evil grandmother, the children must survive a nightmare of brutal cruelty, forbidden passion and a final shocking discovery that will shatter their innocence forever.



The four kids, all haunted and locked up and stuff

 In the title of this post I said that Flowers in the Attic is actually a barometer of sorts that measures the moral degradation of society.  It's true.  I mentioned earlier that when I was a kid, we hid the book from our parents, or at least hid what it was about.  It was something that made it all the more great because it was taboo.  But now we are in an era where taboos are a thing of the past and anything goes, and I found this out at the library one day.  Back when I was young, you had to go into the "horror" section of the library (it even had the little skull sticker on the spine of the book) to find Flowers, even though it was mostly read by young girls in their early teens.  But someone knew that it had sex, abuse, torture, and incest in it, so it would just be wrong to put it anywhere else.  Today?  Not so much.  It's there, smack-dab in the middle of the Young Adult section now!   Yikes!! Good golly day*, is NOTHING sacred anymore?
 
Oh, but it get even better.  If you look at the top of this post, you'll see the original book cover to Flowers.  Now check out the newest cover:
 

 
Yeah, that's right.  They don't even pretend that Cathy and Chris don't hook-up.  But not only that, they make the cover look like some teen romance!!  At least in the book the hook-up is shameful to the kids, they feel sick about it.  But this cover!!  THIS COVER makes it look like incest between siblings is just another sweet teen aged right-of-passage.  It's Rome all over again, I tell you!
 
I really feel bad for kids these days.  No longer are they given the wonderful taste of taboos.  That was one of my favorite things about adolescence...getting to get away with things my parents knew weren't healthy or good for me.  Now, not so much, as Flowers in the Attic has inadvertently shown us.  I for one plan to put up some boundaries with my kids, if just so they can have the fun of knocking them down, just a little.
 
*Cathy's favorite saying in the book, to show she's a kid of the 50s