Ghost Stories, Love Stories, and the Ladies of Bly Manor
For many episodes, I held my breath, expecting Dani and Jamie to be caught together and subjected to the Lady of the Lake because of their relationship.
Jamie and Dani hop into the truck to leave. When Jamie asks Dani, “You all right, poppins?” and turns the key, I wait for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” to play, the camera to pan over a glittering San Junipero at night.
Yet, this is obviously not the case. We’re not in fictional San Junipero, but fictional England. Jamie and Dani belong to the eighties of The Haunting of Bly Manor, not the eighties of horror science fiction series Black Mirror. These shows are worlds apart — the only connection they share is that they explore lesbian romance in the 1980s through speculative genres — and for me to long for the dreamy ending of San Junipero says more about me than Bly Manor. I’m a sucker for these love stories at the heart of the horror.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is the second installment in Mike Flanagan’s anthology series. The first season reimagined Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, and its second iteration updated the uncanny children and gothic manor of Henry James’s story, “The Turn of the Screw,” to the 1980s, full of shoulder pads and high-waisted jeans.
In the show, Dani Clayton, a young American woman, moves to Bly Manor to nanny for the wealthy orphans, Miles and Flora Wingrave, whose parents died in an accident. Their Uncle Henry remains in London, relegating the care of his charges to Dani, the nanny; Jamie, the gardener; Hannah, the housekeeper; and Owen, the cook. Sometimes, the four spend nights drinking fireside and we remember they’re young people and this house has become their entire world.
As the show progresses, it pivots from James’s original. The first few episodes are faithful reproductions. Miles, the spooky kid, got kicked out of his posh British boarding school. Flora’s dolls seem to be alive. In the story, the children drive the governess to madness, and the ghosts exist as manifestations of the cruelties they commit against her; they could be real, but the text conceals them in ambiguity. Yet in the show, the ghosts are dead and well, communing with the house’s inhabitants as if they were alive. And then there’s the Lady of the Lake, who drags unwitting humans underwater.
The show received some criticism for its messaging on motherhood and patriarchal family structures; in order to save Flora from Viola, the Lady of the Lake, Dani welcomes the lady’s spirit inside of her. Her sacrifice lifts the curse from Bly Manor, the children’s uncle returns, and patriarchal order is restored.
However, what I am interested in is the show’s messaging on queer love. For many episodes, I held my breath, expecting Dani and Jamie to be caught together and subjected to the Lady of the Lake because of their relationship. Horror can be a vengeful god, smiting characters for their transgressions, for disrupting the conservative order that must be restored over the course of the series. While Uncle Henry is reinstalled as the head of house by the end of the show, Dani and Jamie are never punished for their queerness. Though the show received criticism for falling into the “bury your gays” trope, I think it’s up to something different. Dani and Jamie leave the house behind and have an opportunity to build a life together.
What emerges is a touching love story. As Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya points out in her review for The AV Club, the show’s pacing is a bit off and builds to an anticlimax. Yet, there’s something compelling, thematically fine-tuned, to the sacrifice Dani makes when she walks into the lake. It stands in contrast to the other tragic relationship that ended in the lovers trapped as ghosts in the house. Though Dani and Jamie are doomed, Upadhyaya posits, their dynamic is “more equitable and genuinely romantic.”
Jamie and Dani are doomed, and here I can see the problematic aspects of Bury Your Gays acting upon their love story. Yet both in this story and in San Junipero, I find myself bowled over by these relationships. So, I wonder, how can we depict queer death and destruction without damaging resonance? Is this show successful in how it does this?
Dani carries the ghost of Viola within her for years, and she and Jamie build a life together through the nineties and early aughts, selling flowers, sharing rings because they can’t technically get married but don’t really care. They define their own version of queer domesticity, adjusting the confines of the household to suit their relationship.
Part of this adjustment accounts for the latent “beast in the jungle,” Viola, whose image begins to surface when Dani looks at her reflection in the water or a shop window. The presence of Viola seems to ask who else is in the room. What ghosts do we carry from our past? What other selves might we as queer people carry inside of us? Interpreted this way, the show’s finale messages on illness and grief. Viola ultimately becomes too much for Dani to sequester and she takes her own life, drowning herself in the lake at Bly Manor.
For years after, Jamie checks the sink and the tub nightly for her reflection, hoping to find Dani. She leaves the door ajar in case Dani finds her way back. Like James’s story, the series is structured as a frame story, and we learn that Jamie is the woman recounting the story of Bly Manor.
The Haunting of Bly Manor queers “The Turn of the Screw.” It reimagines the life of the unnamed governess. It animates the ghosts who were understood as markers of insanity. Maybe the ghosts are real, or maybe this is all Jamie’s invention, a story she tells herself after losing the one she loved. While maybe she could have moved on and found new love later in life, she holds on — what happens when people get stuck in old love? Do they tell ghost stories as grand as these? Is this the question at the heart of the series?
It’s hard to say. Perhaps some of the storytelling is off. The pacing could be better, and the messaging on motherhood and gender politics is fundamentally flawed. Yet, I still feel power in the pull Jamie feels to this gothic house. Maybe Bly Manor uses its ghosts to depict illness and grief for queer people together for years. Or maybe this is another story of a doomed gay couple; welcoming Viola into herself as the price Dani pays for a few years of queer domestic bliss. Though Jamie narrates this story the night before Flora’s wedding, it’s Dani’s sacrifice that allows Flora to live, preserving the straight couple and their union at the show’s ending. What plays out is not only sacrificial motherhood, but some form of sacrificial homosexuality.
Be that as it may, I still find myself crying when I watch Jamie and Dani through their years together. Maybe the show could have given their relationship more room to blossom, but with what we’re given, I feel so much begin to flourish. I find myself convinced this ghost story is a love story, too.
