The Power of Love in The Haunting of Bly Manor
As the adult Flora says in the final moments of the series, The Haunting of Bly Manor is not a ghost story, it is a love story. The second installment of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting anthology series is just as much of a hit as The Haunting of Hill House. Bly Manor is based on the classic gothic novella “Turn of the Screw” and follows an American au pair named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) who cares for two children, Flora and Miles, in England after the sudden death of their parents. Throughout the series, Dani meets and develops relationships with all of the members of the manor as they come to interact with the ghosts who live among them.
Once again, rather than sticking solely to the conventions of traditional horror films to tell his story, Mike Flanagan uses horrific and supernatural elements as a device to explore themes of everlasting love and memory. The narrative weaves through moments in time, making a showcase of what is most valuable to each character. The ghosts of the children’s former caretaker, Rebecca, and her lover, Peter, both have the ability to possess the living and choose to regularly inhabit the bodies of Flora and Miles respectively. While the bodies of the children are possessed, their spirits are tucked inside of a memory from their past. For Flora, she reunites with her now dead mother, finding solace in an impossible situation. These characters are brought back to their own identity through the power of love and connection with those they care about.
Jamie, the manor’s gardener and romantic partner of Dani, narrates the story in the present day at Flora’s wedding. After the curse at the manor is broken by Dani, who invites the spirit of the original owner’s daughter Viola to possess her, all members of the manor’s staff move away from the house and push forward in their lives. With Flora and Miles having been so young at the time of haunting, they no longer remember who Jamie and Dani are or what they look like. Jamie chooses to tell everyone their story to signal to Flora that after all this time, she still cares about her and is able to keep Dani’s memory alive through this great act of love.
Once the spirit of Viola is absorbed into Dani’s body, herself and Jamie are both hyper-aware that at some point, Dani’s spirit will no longer exist and she will die. Dani is cautious at first, not making too many plans for the future and staying present in the moment with Jamie as much as she can. Their bond is unbreakable and the strength they both get through love that big is enough to keep Dani alive for years. After five years of happiness, Dani begins to see the outline of Viola when she looks into reflective surfaces, and knows then that she is getting closer to the end of her time. She hides this information from Jamie to protect her, and keeps pushing off the inevitable to stay by her side. After Dani tells Jamie about her visions, Jamie works with her, comforting her after scares, and encouraging her to enjoy their current time together. Their relationship exists as equals, and what ultimately haunts Dani the most is no longer being around to support Jamie.
Viola is the original ghost of the manor who dies many years earlier at the hands of her sister. After a diagnosis of a deadly lung disease, her sister Perdita becomes impatient with her as she grows increasingly angry about being secluded from her husband and daughter, Isabel. Perdita smothers Viola to death, marries her husband, and becomes the guardian of Isabel. Viola’s final wish is for her daughter to inherit her clothing, so she stores her own spirit inside a chest with her items. She anxiously awaits to reunite with her daughter in the future, but Perdita interrupts these plans by purging the chest, so the spirit of Viola kills her. Though it may appear that all of these actions are out of spite, the leading motivator for Viola is the love of her daughter and her sole objective is to be reunited. This love turns vicious, showing a counter to the love of the workers in the house. In pursuit of her daughter, she kills anyone in her path, dragging them to the depths of the manor’s lake, trapping their souls at the house. When Dani intercepts this path and sacrifices her own future for the sake of saving the children, Jamie, and their friends, this is done out of a place of wanting to protect her loved ones. Once Viola takes control of her body, the curse is broken and no one else is trapped at the manor other than herself.
The supposed scary figures throughout the house are ghosts without faces who haunt the ,anor. These ghosts were people who had previously lived in the house and that time has all but erased. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the real terror of the manor is not the ghosts, but it is the reality of becoming forgotten in the future. Their faces have been erased due to their irrelevance to the people presently residing in the house. Their identity has disappeared, as if they had never existed.
In this world, the phrase is repeated that although someone may be dead, because someone else loved them, their spirit lives on through storytelling. The stakes at the manor are life or death in the emotional sense. Those who are dead must keep coming back to their memories so that their loved ones may keep their impact on the world alive and well.
These circumstances are unique for the horror genre. The entire genre revolves around fear and death, but Mike Flanagan redefines the specifics of that fear. When we love someone, we are committed to carrying on with our own lives once we lose them, which all of the characters do in this series. We are afraid that if we are not physically present to someone, then we will come to not exist at all. But these characters remind us that this isn’t true: to love someone is to ensure that they are never gone. An incredible nuance that Flanagan introduces, turning a genre about violence into one about compassion.
All of the women who work in the house are caretakers in one way or another, spreading their capacity for empathy and relationship building to the children and the others around them. However, their ability to do this is never used against them or is never demonized. They may face the inevitability of death, but that does not take away the power that they claimed for themselves in life. All of them are fully developed, three dimensional characters with ambitions of their own, while maintaining these attributes that make them strong. These traits that are traditionally attributed to women and used to make them appear weaker are flipped on their head, valuing this work as not inherent, but something that is earned by being a good person.
The ensemble of the women of Bly Manor drive the story and the love that they put into those around them is to be celebrated as the heart of the series. In the end, even when some have passed on, they will never be gone. – Taylor Hunsberger