this post contains comprehensive spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor and frank (not graphic) 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 an onscreen depiction in Midnight Mass with more confliction (touched on here). Despite the act itself occurring offscreen, Bly Manor is more 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 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 show’s very first scene.
Bly Manor is a different type of horror than you might expect from the promos; indeed, though the horrors are inevitable, their faces are literally always shifting. It gives its characters (and us) the kind of 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.
Bly Manor’s out-of-order structure is fitting; don’t our stories often become clear only in flashes of learning later? When 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 here mimics that retrospect; in emotional order which only sometimes falls chronologically.
Amongst all that 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, thus it’s necessary to explore and proclaim absolution. One of the most effective ways to explore and proclaim is through art, and one of the most vivid and far-reaching art mediums is TV.
So here we are.
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 deep dive).
Dani’s story is 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 wrought of pain and biology and suffering and upbringing and grief and hurt, nature and nurture conspiring. 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 The 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?” She asks “is he here now?” Despite never seeing it herself, Jamie blindly, completely accepts Dani’s pain as real.
(In a move cementing her as coping-mechaniser after my own heart, Jamie then pledges to fight the ghost, and jokes 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.
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 shouldn’t — 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 death 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 treats Dani’s suicide as a selfless supernatural act wrapped up in refusal to posses Jamie, and thus a pure narrative conjuring. I don’t read it that way, partly because I don’t read Dani’s death as a result specifically (or at least solely) 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.
Many TV critics complain it’s a drawback Bly Manor has such disparate hauntings: 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.
Several episodes 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. But the device of multiple types of apparitions is not merely a writing tool but a way of strengthening the overall tale’s thematic and emotional throughline:
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 are in control of is whether even when numb and in pain we become or stay a vindictive, 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 haunting. Dani’s ghosts appear 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, and 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.
Just as depression is not Dani’s fault, forestalling it is not Jamie’s responsibility, or even within her capacity.
Love can help us heal, it can build bridges over the river. Love cannot erase the scars, it cannot prevent waters from rising; if we expect it to, we ask the impossible, setting ourselves up for failure and our loved ones up for more guilt. It’s true Jamie’s love and their shared life helps Dani move past Edmund’s haunting, but crucially, realistically, it doesn’t erase Dani’s trauma or ‘cure’ her depression.
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.
It is impossible to love someone out of their trauma or completely conquer their demons; you can only help keep the beast at bay.
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. That happiness is contingent on embracing the truth that 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 think 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. Not because as a child I thought 25 was “old”, but I genuinely couldn’t picture what my life looked like there. I knew I wouldn’t survive the life expected for me, so when I considered that benchmark, I simply accepted I would not exist past it.
At the time of this conversation I had in fact passed 25, but though 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 fact poured salt water over a wound I’d opened.
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.
Jamie and Dani are different sides of dealing with depression and ideation: one’s own and another’s, very neat and helpful telling a story or metaphor.
Sometimes, often, we’re both.
Fighting your own beast and loving someone who is stalked by one can be boon and burden: you can understand easier, but also let it make you angrier. I fought the worst off so far, so must you! You can encourage them more specifically, but the deep dread is also clearer. It’s a twisted game of whose haunting is closer, will deal a fatal blow first, and strengthen my own beast. It’s something you choose, it’s 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.
It’s exactly what Dani does 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.
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 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 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 much art around suicide is interested in the pain of the survivors (valid and needed), prevention or mitigation (worthy if not always well managed), or condemnation (fuck out of here).
He knows Dani doesn’t need ‘forgiveness’ for dying by suicide more than she would for dying of cancer or by being hit by a truck.
He knows living with these kinds of horrors 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 the survivors can be desperate and devastated while ultimately understanding, never losing their love amidst those swirling depths. Jamie embodies it.
Bly Manor holds forth the belief love and 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.