Honestly I was downloading fanfics for my new fandom for most of this episode thinking to myself, “wow this is boring and not nearly as subversive and clever as the Clue movie upon which it is clearly based,” (I mean the pipe & rope props were cool shout outs kinda, but w/e) but then something made me pause. I heard a phrase spoken almost verbatim by Sam as the title of my Reichenbach meta on demon!Dean:
“Being a monster is a choice”
and bingo! I got it. Olivia is a Dean parallel. Which is really interesting when you take into consideration that she’s lived in what amounts to a closet with a bunch of outdated memorabilia from someone else’s life and a literal skeleton (I mean the corpse of the maid, of course). Hello Bunny/ John Winchester parallels and how a monster may have a choice in becoming something vile but he also has a lot of help along the way. Two people who live in the relics of someone else’s life who must pay for discretions not their own and hide who they really are while desperately trying to justify that it was all done out of love for them? One could say Dean and Olivia were raised to be monsters.
It’s a classic Greek tragedy in which the very attempt to stop something actually ensures that it will happen. We call that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But are they really monsters? Olivia didn’t come across as evil, just a little drunk at being finally released from her prison, she was never taught to reign in what others deemed monstrous, just shoved aside and hidden away as a shameful secret like some sort of hysterical woman from a 19th century novel (bring on the Jane Eyre parallels!). When she finally came out she was confused, desperate, jealous, scared, and fighting with animal instincts to survive and protect her mother’s memory, to salvage whatever she could of the identity her mother had given her which was the only thing that should have been of any worth in a hollow home filled with all the ostentatiousness of wealth but none of the literal value. Costume jewelry and stainless steel masquerading as gems and silver that are only a nominal step up from Lucky Charms (Something Wicked) standing in for nutrition. Love is the true treasure but it came with conditions when it should be unconditional and there was never enough of it. Nothing nourishing enough to grow and sustain a healthy, emotionally functional adult.
And remember Dean gave most of these crumbs of love to his brother. He probably didn’t even get much of the soggy pieces of tasteless cereal that make the marshmallow charms so appealing in contrast.
And yet that love shared with his brother is in many ways what saved him and why Olivia died. She had no one. Is untethered and unable to sift the real from the fake, while Dean has both Sam and Cas to help him see true worth, not to mention the specter of Bobby.
But we all know that since Dean has been ostensibly released from demonhood he is a bit of a ticking time bomb. I’ve written before that in many ways demon!Dean was a healthier person because he allowed himself to be selfish and angry in a way human Dean has swallowed and internalized for forever. Human Dean got shoved back into his closet, his place in the world, his prison. But the true bit of hope in this episode, all bits of allusion to what ‘coming out of the closet’ means colloquially and also character-growth wise after an episode wherein Destiel was canonically acknowledged aside, is that it isn’t without symbolism that Dean was given Bobby’s key, the one who found Olivia’s hidden attic, and unlocked it.
Do you understand what this means? It’s pretty big.
This is lovely, and I hope it’s okay if I tack on some meta to the end.
There are so many levels of meaning to the attic. One, like you said, is the representation of a cluttered mind. Connected to that is a more modern meaning; the attic is where we put the things we don’t use anymore. In this episode it’s filled with childrens’ toys, things that the characters have outgrown and perhaps forgotten, but yet remain. On those levels the attic is not a prison, but merely a sectioned, isolated area.
Third is the Madwoman in the Attic, typified in Jane Eyre. I’m using this excellent essay as a reference on this subject. The Madwoman in the Attic metaphor was vitally relevant to the psychology of the women of that era –
Jane and Bertha illustrate “the psychic split between the lady who submits to male dicta and the lunatic who rebels.”
To survive in the society that set such strict rules for women, women fragmented themselves into these two parts, and metaphorically locked one part of themselves away. *
And oh how I love the way they’re using this uniquely feminine metaphor for Dean.
Typically the family locks away the shameful secret, the “bad” Madwoman, but Dean’s family is different, and they locked away everything good in him. The caring, loving, feminine side of him can only be expressed through the masculine pursuit of hunting (like in this moment , when I fell in love with Dean). He’s split between being Mary’s son and John’s son.
It’s no coincidence that our Dean-Gone-Dark parallels are so often women.** Like Olivia, Dean has been deprived and isolated so long, and hurt so much, that like in Hell he wants to dish out some of that pain himself. John’s side of him broke after thirty years in Hell. Now it’s been thirty years on Earth, and Mary’s side of him is breaking too.
And Sam doesn’t know. Sam doesn’t know. He knows the attic exists, perhaps, but he never saw it, and he doesn’t hold the key to it, and he doesn’t have the right tools to deal with what’s hidden there.
—-
*Look at the contrast against The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, from the same era. It also features a shameful secret that’s locked away; but the secret here is a young boy, whose only shame is being too physically weak to inherit, and instead of being locked in the attic, he’s placed in a garden, a place of growth. He’s cut off from society, but not from life. What would Olivia have been if she’d been in that story instead of Jane Eyre? What could Dean have been?
**Tasha the werewolf; Adina; Tessa; Abaddon; Joy, the werewolf from 9.12; and Alex and Mother in 9.19; just to name a few.
FOOTNOTE: This isn’t the only feminine metaphor they’re using for Dean! Dean is the cheating wife, too, like Mindy and Amber — but he thinks he’s Lester. He’s a mother for Sam and a handmaiden for Charlie, but becomes a knight for Crowley. He thinks he’s Han Solo – the uncaring flyboy, the rolling stone – but the truth is he has a crush on Han Solo, and he’s actually Leia. He’s the Princess Buttercup to Castiel’s Wesley, but everyone thinks he’s the six-fingered man. (Crowley is Prince Humperdink. It really, really fits.)
and guys, Dean becomes a woman in act two. Temporarily. Marie said so.
!!! Thank you @rainbowshoelaceswag for bringing my attention to this—I got to 10.06 kinda late and missed all the meta on it! Both OP and this addition are super awesome and insightful, and thank you also for referencing my meta! I’m going to just be super self-aggrandizing and comment that I also wrote a meta about Dean as the angel in the house instead of the madwoman in the attic a while back, so this makes a perfect companion to it. Dean and female-coding, always always alwayssssss. Like I’ve talked about a little bit before, Dean’s MoC/demon storyline is a path for Dean to bust out of the passivity and obedience of his feminine-angel self. He is totally 100% doing the angel/madwoman duality thing, and I’m so into it. I actually can’t believe that I didn’t write that in my “Reichenbach“ meta when I was talking about Dean acting in opposition to the masculine caricatures of Lester and Cole, and the tasks set him by John—
Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures which both their authors and their authors’ submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable. […] Indeed, much of the poetry and fiction written by women conjures up this mad creature so that female authors can come to terms with their own uniquely female feelings of fragmentation, their own keen sense of the discrepancies between what they are and what they are supposed to be. (Gilbert and Gubar)
Yeah, yeah, “keen sense of the discrepancies between what they are and what they are supposed to be,” ugh, Dean, sweetheart.
(excuse me while I go back into my metas to add links to these things!)
OH YES. I just remembered, we had this “madwoman in the attic” metaphor back in season 4, too – or something similar at least. In 4.11 “Family Remains”, it was a shameful-secret girl who’d been locked in the basement her whole life, and Dean explicitly told us that she was a metaphor for what happened to him in Hell.
But now it’s connected to his actual life, and there’s nothing else it could be a metaphor for. mmmmm I am so here for it.
Interesting stuff.
I would add another use of the word "attic” that opens up even more of the parallels being illustrated.
Attic can be used as a metaphor for what is going on in your head. Which implies that in this metaphor, Olivia, as the monster, was released from her cage of the attic and created a little havoc. Philip the butler covered every thing up, literally slipping it under a rug, and packed the monster back in its attic/cage. But it was only a temporary solution. Without knowing it, Dean let the monster back out of it’s attic/cage, where she proceeded to systematically destroy the people around her.
All this implies that “the monster” is still in Dean’s head and has potential to be released, perhaps without strict intention to do so.
It also ties nicely into all of those metaphors we’ve been seeing about decapitation being associated with Dean. That losing his head (haha) isn’t to be interpreted quite so literally, but that he’s at risk of losing control over what is in his head.
And with that, I’ll leave you with this image:
Hearseeno 