( ＃´ー´ )旦
Hold my drink real quick while I spoil a 44 year-old VC Andrews novel and pick a fight with a Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia's plot synopsis for My Sweet Audrina concludes with "She tries to leave by herself but decides to stay and replace the painful memories with new ones that will be based on honesty and love."
I'm sorry, what? Who wrote this? Did they read the same book I did?!
Love?
Honesty??
My Sweet Audrina doesn't have a happy ending. It's not some positive new beginning where Audrina vows to bury the pain of her past and from it grow some new, beautiful future with her family. She's TRAPPED. It always seemed to me that that was the whole point.
Her manipulative, self-centered father (and by extension her similarly myopic and abusive husband) won. The house won. The trauma, ultimately, won.
The phrase "decides to stay" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this summary. It doesn't communicate how desperate Audrina is to leave Whitefern. How she's shaking and practically falling apart as she tries to drive away. She begs in her mind for her sister Sylvia to "let her go". To release her from the responsibility of a child she has been forced to mother for more than a decade, and who will continue to need her constant care. Neither of the the two men in that house are going to be doing anything to help care for Sylvia, that's for sure.
Conveniently missing from the Wikipedia plot synopsis is the critical context that Audrina has something of a premonition as she sees Sylvia staring at her through the window. She fears that "something will happen" to her father (read: Sylvia will blind him with her prisms and pitch his creepy ass down the stairs, or some such untimely fate) and that Sylvia--who is already suspected by others to be violent--will be locked up forever as a result.
Additionally important is that Audrina tries to take Sylvia with her, but Sylvia refuses to go, once again forcing Audrina's independence to "harm" someone else. This is a pattern in their family. Audrina's father, her husband, Vera to an extent, and now Sylvia all have deliberately positioned Audrina's autonomy as a direct attack on them, and can't she see how she's hurting them?!
Audrina returns to Whitefern in despair, in resignation. Sylvia has hammered the final nail into Audrina's prison cell door, trapping her through guilt and responsibility.
"NO! I screamed mentally...Don't, Sylvia! Let me go! I did the best I could for you, gave you years and years of my life...! Give me the chance to live and find myself, please!"
Young girls being deliberately burdened by their parents with younger siblings who trap them is a common theme in Andrews' work. It was critical to the incestuous attic-time codependency that glued Catherine to her brother in Flowers in the Attic and it's back to rear it's ugly head in Audrina, as well.
Audrina does not go back to Whitefern with hope in her heart. And yes, as the Wikipedia summary concludes, she does finally "feel she has become the first Audrina", but in a depressing way.
Other than "pureness", the only difference between Pre-Assault Audrina 1 and Post-Memory Shenanigans Audrina 2 is the level of sycophantic obedience Audrina displays towards her father. At the end of the novel, by saying she feels she is truly back to being Audrina 1, she is admitting that she has fully regressed to being at her father's beck and call. It's not a happy moment of identity reclamation, it's an admission of failure. Audrina tried so desperately to floor that Mercedes away from Whitefern and finally learn "who she was", the implication being that she wants to become her own person, divorced from her father, family and past Audrina. Settling back into "The First Audrina" is an outright failure.
"Louder sounded the wind chimes, clamoring, making my head ache so badly I wanted to scream, scream--but I had no voice."
This physical and mental anguish is what precedes Audrina "deciding to stay". Her declaration of feeling noble and clean is directly paired with the admission:
"There was no place for me to run."
The "accepting peace" Audrina feels as she "automatically" falls back into pace with her husband and returns home doesn't strike me as genuine peace, but more like total submission.
The Wikipedia summary for this novel is so strange. It's not a generic, un-interpretive flyover of the book's events, but neither is it a detailed analysis. It's an overly long synopsis that somehow breezes past or outright skips entire relevant moments while zooming into unnecessary details at other times, interjecting bafflingly off-base assumptions.
And just in case it wasn't obvious, I'm not actually mad a whatever netizen penned this summary. (つ﹏<。) That would be insane. The summary is fine, lol. Mostly it's just gotten me thinking...
How can different people read the same work of fiction and come away with such different interpretations? (I ask rhetorically, understanding how obvious the answer is.)
How can information and ideas that seemed so incredibly vital to me be "skimmed over" by someone else? This summary completely ignores Audrina's final fate of entrapment--can't even bother a cursory clause admitting to how Audrina feels resigned and pinned down--yet devotes an entire sentence to Vera lying about being more loved by Damian early in the book.
How did the person who wrote this summary completely miss Audrina caring for Sylvia? This huge part of the story, tending to a developmentally challenged child who has been cut off from all actual medical attention, is mentioned nowhere in this summary. In fact, the only allusion to Sylvia's care is a cursory mention about Aunt Ellsbeth caring for her, which in the context of the story was actually just Audrina's aunt begrudgingly helping Audrina by babysitting Sylvia during school hours so Audrina could attend class. That's it. And the book goes to great lengths to make it clear the Audrina comes home every day to find Sylvia filthy and hungry. It's Audrina who teaches her sister to speak, to walk, to use the restroom instead of a diaper.
Why did the hundreds of pages devoted to this relationship and how it wore down Audrina merit not a single mention yet the comparatively unimportant plot point of the "psychic" showing up for a few paragraphs to predict Sylvia will be born neither a boy nor a girl gets top billing?
Perhaps this summary was cooked from half-forgotten memories by someone who read the book thirty years ago. Or maybe it was written by a single child who breezed right past all the lingering trauma of being placed in the sole care of a needy sibling while a perfectly capable parent sits on their ass and does nothing. Or perhaps the writer had personal reasons for sympathizing more heavily with the men in the story, conveniently neglecting to actually describe Arden's numerous sexual assaults for what they were. ("[Audrina] is not prepared for sexual intimacy, [so] her wedding night is disastrous" is one way to put it, I suppose.)
It's a wonderful thing, actually, different takes on a work. Because there's no better opportunity to hone your own thoughts than being confronted with someone else's analysis or description and finding it so off-base, so...borderline offensive, that it prompts your brain to really dig in and think about what you just read.
Overthink, even? Probably. But you have to dust the 🕸️cobwebs🕸️ off your brain and use it once and awhile. So thanks, Random Wikipedia Editor. Truly. Thanks, bro.
