forgiveness for oblivion: THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR
it’s not a ghost story, it’s a love story
this post contains comprehensive spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor and frank discussion of death and suicidal ideation
if you’d like to avoid any of those things, turn back now
Within The Haunting of Bly Manor’s depths of horror and grief lies a clear-eyed depiction of death by suicide, which takes care to give absolution amongst anguish.
Flanagan has grappled with suicide before, including in The Haunting of Hill House and an onscreen depiction in Midnight Mass with more confliction (touched on here). Because “The Haunting Of” is a duology and the events of Hill House and Bly Manor involve Victoria Pedretti as two different characters with tragic ends, the deaths, their echos, and their meanings cannot be wholly disentangled; but this discussion addresses only the latter.
Bly Manor gives its characters (and us) the kind of joyous resolution few in a Flanagan show (or real life) gets . . . then turns to a sad end all the same.
It sneaks up on you, the quiet realisation that no matter how many happy endings we get, the final end is always death, only the cause to be determined.
Despite the act occurring offscreen, Bly Manor is explicit about suicide and its leadup, hand in hand with metaphors linking it to trauma and depression. Dani’s visions and explanations — the man in the mirror, the lady in the lake, “I don’t feel [life] all the way” — make clear her intrusive thoughts and suicidal ideation are constant. Even when they’re not directly present, fear of them looms, disrupting her professional and personal life.
Dani’s death is the end result of a specific haunting which started the episode prior, but it’s been coming for many years, and since the very first scene.
Bly Manor’s horrors are less graphic or concrete than Hill House, their faces literally shifting as the narrative does. Its out-of-order structure is fitting; don’t our own lives and stories often become clear only in flashes of learning later? When we’re too numb to feel or act ‘appropriately’ sometimes we see how things have been and what will come, but not how our current circumstances truly are. The story of those at Bly mimics that retrospect; an emotional order which only sometimes falls chronologically.
Amongst that story is a powerful, gentle absolution of suicide.
Suicide or cancer are illnesses with no moral value and a million variables; given the exact same treatments, some heal while others succumb. Society, however, will assign judgement through law and religion and social pressure. One of the most effective ways to explore pain and proclaim absolution is through art, and one of the most vivid and far-reaching art mediums is TV.
Bly Manor absolves Dani (and by extension us) of any sin she (or we) think or are told suicide is. It examines the pain we inevitably cause as a tragic, horrible side effect of our own, also-undesired pain.
It proclaims suicide not a moral crime despite its legal status in most places.
The conflation of this law with the one declaring Dani and Jamie’s union illegal is the subject for another time.
Dani’s story is one of trauma, growth, found family, and love — all throughout, mental illness’s long arms strain to put icy hands around her throat. Some people are born haunted, some are found by ghosts along the way, and Dani seems to be both.
Suicidal thoughts are nature and nurture conspiring, wrought of pain and biology and suffering and upbringing and grief and hurt. While the exact causes are different for everyone, known effects include depression, hallucinations, OCD, insomnia, physical pain, and [C]PTSD — medical, physical, psychological illnesses with etherial origins.
One of the most unfair things in the world is while the twin hauntings of horror and depression can be born of trauma, they can never be killed, no matter how much medicine or love or kindness you can find. Once that particular Beast touches us, it may retreat, but always lurks, as The Storyteller says: biding its time to spring and finally tear our throat out.
It’s so quiet but she’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t peaceful. […] I have this feeling like I’m walking through this dense overgrown jungle, and I can’t really see anything except the path in front of me. But I know there’s this thing hidden. This angry, empty, lonely beast. It’s watching me. Matching my movements. It’s just out of sight. But I can feel it. I know it’s there. And it’s waiting. She’s waiting. And at some point, she’s gonna take me.
Do you want company? While you wait for your beast in the jungle?
The first time Dani tells Jamie about her haunting, Jamie doesn’t say “that sounds crazy” or “are you sure?” but asks “is he here now?” Despite never seeing it herself, Jamie blindly, completely accepts Dani’s pain and terrors as real.
(In a move cementing her as coping-mechaniser after my own heart, Jamie then pledges to fight the ghost, joking to distract Dani and lighten the mood.)
The first time Dani kisses Jamie —‘are you sure?’ ‘yes.’ — joy lasts mere seconds before Dani sees the ghost again; a literalisation of overwhelming panic, an afterimage of trauma connected to the last person she kissed. Dani was sure, she was right, neither kept the spectre at bay.
Though perturbed (a natural, also-to-be-accepted response), Jamie never suggests Dani is lying or imagining. This faith continues over the years, which can be rare but is always important: Dani doesn’t (as none of us should — an easy thing to say but hard to learn) give her love to someone who would refute her unseen, intangible, very real pain.
Jamie allows Dani to take her time.
They try again.
The joy lasts longer this time.
Eventually, after years, and still too soon, it ends.
Dani puts herself in the lake because her trauma leads her not to merely believe but know it’s the only way to end her pain and save what she so hard loved and fought for.
Thing is, she’s right.
It’s true death is the only way the pain will end because she knows it to be true.
This cyclical, horrible ‘logic’ is the real horror of the disease.
Whether the story and The Storyteller believes her death was necessary or not, they still choose — this is key — to explicitly frame Dani’s suicide on her spectre’s terms, as a sacrifice. Story and Storyteller, Flanagan and Jamie, accept Dani's testament: that she doesn’t want to die but is driven to it.
The circumstances of Dani’s life wrought ghosts she cannot escape, her death is tragedy and inevitability, foregone conclusion and frustrating decision, horror and peace intertwined.
The story validates Dani’s actions, little as she, or we, or Jamie, want to believe it.
Not yet. If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us. But no-one is going anywhere. One day at a time.
I acknowledge a reading that Bly Manor frames suicide as a needless supernatural act wrapped up in ‘refusal to posses or kill’ as though the latter are the only alternatives, and thus Dani’s death as pure narrative conjuring. I don’t read it that way, partly because I don’t read Dani’s death as a result specifically and soley of Viola.
Viola is one of many differently-formed spectres which haunt Dani; the latest manifestation of PTSD magnified by genetic proclivity and nurtured by abuse and social repression. The haunting which ultimately kills Dani is actually all of them: different forms and various horrors over years wear her down to the bone.
Several episodes of Bly Manor are adaptations of individual Henry James tales, strung together with the Bly Manor frame tale; the various plots and their horrors sometimes echo original symbols (eg class), and sometimes rework metaphors. One man faces his doppelganger; other peoples’ faces slowly disappear; a butler possesses children to ultimately lure his lover to her death; a housekeeper is trapped repeating days not realising she is dead; so it goes.
Many TV critics complain it’s a drawback to feature such disparate hauntings, but it’s a feature, not a bug.
the device of ‘multiple apparition types’ actually strengthens
the overall tale’s themes and emotional throughlines
The point is, our hauntings oft appear different ways. Some terrors fade, some we can forestall, some we defeat, some we choose (more on that later). Whether we succumb or not is the tension. What we can fight to control is whether — even when numb or in pain — we become or stay a vindictively nasty person like Viola or Peter Quinn, or fight to hold true to ourselves like Hannah and Dani.
Dani’s initial spectre is the symbol of her ex-lover; over time he fades, replaced by a different horror. Dani’s ghosts haunt her in many guises and various methods, some disappear and others morph, one she chooses while another is completely outside her control — none of this means Bly Manor is incoherent. It simply understands mental illness has many faces which grow and change and adapt, as any malignant virus.
The better to kill us, my dear.
If every bit of your soul is consumed with knowledge you’re possessed with and becoming a vindictive faceless spectre which haunts dreams and kills countless others . . . then you slowly become it. Depression and PTSD’s circular logic is the horror. If I’m repeating myself while only changing the shapes slightly, so does it, until it wears us through. Throwing herself into the lake is how Dani’s sufferings will cease; not Viola, but all of them. The darkness was always going to take Dani, it was only a matter of when.
But that’s not the whole picture. A sad ending doesn’t mean a sad story; there’s so much more in what Dani chose in the meantime; love and family and bravery.
That life refreshes, and recycles, and on and on it goes. And that is so much better than that life getting crushed deep down in the dirt.
Love can help us heal, it can build bridges over the river, but love cannot erase the scars, it cannot prevent waters from rising; if we expect it to, we ask the impossible.
Just as depression is not Dani’s fault, forestalling it is not Jamie’s responsibility, or even within her capacity. It’s true Jamie’s love and their shared life helps Dani move past Edmund’s haunting, but crucially it doesn’t erase Dani’s trauma or ‘cure’ her depression.
It is impossible to love someone out of their trauma or completely conquer their demons; you can only help keep the beast at bay.
The most Jamie can do is all any of us can. Jamie can’t see the spectres, fiercely believes and is scared for and loves Dani, anyways; refuses to get chased away.
And that peace held for years . . . which, is more than some of us ever get.
Flanagan knows a true fairy tale is full of horrors, and he knows the story doesn’t end at suicide. Love is a ghost story, and Dani’s story goes on through Owen, Flora, Miles, and most of all Jamie. Their happiness comes at a cost, but they understand that and embrace this truth: loving and choosing people whose ghosts drives them to desperate acts means you, too, will be haunted.
‘Take me with you’ she cried in her heart. ‘Take me. Drag me down . . .’ Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.
It's horror in the purest sense — immensely, heartbreakingly painful for those who live on screaming you, me, us, YOU, ME, US, but cannot follow into the dark. We, they, go on despite ourselves, try to understand and still love without reserve even after someone ultimately succumbs.
Three, four, five years passed.
In the kind of very American diner I miss dearly, Dani tells Jamie they shouldn’t make plans for Christmas; it’s months away, she can’t see that far ahead. Jamie clearly wants to look ahead for both of them, but she lets it drop.
One day at a time . . . it’s what everybody’s got when you get down to it.
Once I told a girl I was getting serious with that despite my vibrant imagination, I never saw myself passing 25. As a child I genuinely couldn’t picture living there; or rather, I knew what the life expected (insisted) for me would look like, and somewhere down deep knew I wouldn’t survive it. So instead when I considered that benchmark, anything past it was a dark void. I simply accepted I would not exist past it.
At the time of this conversation I had in fact passed 25, by rejecting every part of what that preordained life entailed. But though I’d seemed to conquer and my imagination for fiction was if anything more active, I still struggled to conceptualise my actual future. I felt utterly helpless to plan vacations or birthday events or a future for myself, including with her; one day at a time was all I was capable of.
The fact this upset my girlfriend genuinely surprised me. I realised (far too late) her tears were an expression of love. My blasé presentation of what I considered obvious poured salt water over a wound I’d sliced open.
Illness, depression, and trauma can turn people into nasty vindictive Lady of the Lake types; we may (and should!) think well of ourselves to fight that kind of transformative evil.
But it’s not true success if we become oblivious of ourselves and those we love.
Fighting your own beast while loving someone who is stalked is boon and burden: you understand easier and more specifically, but the dread is clearer and deeper and makes you angrier. I’ve warded the worst off so far, I continue to fight, so why can’t you! It’s a twisted game of whose haunting is closer, which will deal a fatal blow first and strengthen the others’ beast.
Jamie and Dani are on different sides of dealing with depression and ideation: one’s own and another’s, a clear split very neat and helpful in story or metaphor.
Sometimes, often, we’re living both sides of the coin.
To do both is something you choose, and something I’d never have chosen.
Yet I did, and do, and here we are.
It's true we sometimes choose our hauntings. It doesn't mean we want to, we beg to let the cup pass from us, but we decide to pay the price all the same, and would again. Whether choosing what we think is right, or what feel we must, or to save our loved ones, we often choose trauma which will intensify the horrors we’ve had before, or bring new ones.
Further and future pain is exactly what Dani embraces when she goes in the lake to rescue Flora. It’s what Jamie chooses when she accepts Dani’s proposals, and every day after.
Dani’s choice isn’t better or worse than Jamie’s because she’s been haunted before and fully knows what she’s taking into herself. Her choice isn’t necessarily easier or harder. But it is different.
Jamie accepts a life entwined with Dani raises chances of her future ghost story to near certainty. When indeed it comes, she welcomes it — not initially, no, she screams and rails and begs, as any human does. But eventually. She understands all true love stories eventually become ghost stories.
To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them, is worth the pain of losing them.
Not everyone fully understands how the hauntings of depression and suicide work, but that does not mean they cannot love you fully; don’t romanticise the pain so you ever doubt that.
Easier said than done, of course.
The closer the beast, the harder to believe this truth and the harder to speak your own; another cruel irony. It may or may not feel as though it helps to tell your loved ones in detail what’s going on, but it does help you, and it helps them. But oh, how utterly, terribly difficult and exhausting it is.
As years pass, Dani learns how to be open about her struggle. She stays with Jamie, puts down roots, and thinks maybe, maybe, she can avoid disaster happily forever after.
Out of the blue, on a sunny day, the beast returns.
We could have so many more years together. Dani. We could have so many more years.
Together they had 13 years of wonderful, difficult, exquisite, mundane, love.
Then Jamie is left to be utterly destroyed, in a way as or perhaps more devastating; who can say? What Jamie lives on with is the horror she accepted part and parcel with Dani.
Jamie’s choice, too, was sacrifice.
Flanagan knows shaming isn’t the answer. He knows art around suicide is often about the pain of the survivors (valid and needed), prevention or mitigation (worthy if not always well managed), or condemnation (fuck out of here). This is a fourth thing.
He knows Dani doesn’t need ‘forgiveness’ for dying by suicide more than she would for dying of cancer or being hit by a truck. But she would feel she does. Those who face dying this way often want that solace.
He knows living with these kinds of terrible spectres for any time, let alone decades, is a struggle and a success. He knows he’s making a horror.
Bly Manor portrays Jamie’s grief and raging despair as real and valid. But that can coexist with what else Flanagan offers: a sort of preemptive forgiveness.
absolution, freely given, to anyone who needs
Those who die by suicide often go with a deep fear the anger of those left behind may obscure all else: the love and joy and truths we held with them when alive.
It’s a tricky tightrope acknowledging Dani is right while declaring the sentiment preached by her demons is wrong, but Bly Manor walks it.
It’s another balancing act to portray how those who live on — who survive us, what a terrible phrase — can be desperate and devastated while ultimately understanding, emerging from dark swirling depths with love still strong. Jamie embodies it.
Bly Manor holds forth the belief love over time can overwhelm hurt and anger, even when the grief persists. It presents the dichotomy that life is worth fighting for and you should and must, then when you’re too exhausted to fight or even let others fight for you, we can accept it.
Flanagan sits beside us and offers the most solace any one can to those watching and waiting for our beasts in the jungle. His framing of Dani’s death as inevitable could be read as abject despair or utter nihilism. I see it as a gift.
Still one for the future, held in reserve.
Just in case the peace can last a little longer, happily ever after, a few more years, one day at a time.
I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural. Beautiful. And it all breaks down and rises back up and breaks down again. And every living thing grows out of every dying thing. We leave more life behind to take our place.