The Lady in the Lake in "The Haunting of Bly Manor," Explained
Out October 9 on Netflix, The Haunting of Bly Manor is a modern day adaptation of A Turn of the Screw.
Among Bly Manor's many ghosts, the Lady in the Lake is by far the most foreboding—and important.
The eighth episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor unravels the Lady in the Lake's story, which is based on Henry James's short story "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes."
Warning: This post has spoilers for Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Like The Haunting of Hill House before it, Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor is set in a gorgeous, but ghost-infested, old mansion. In The Haunting of Bly Manor, an American au pair named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) contends with supernatural forces in her new home in the English countryside.
Nothing can prepare Dani for the house's scariest ghost—though Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) certainly tries to warn her. "You have to promise me that you'll stay in your room. Don't leave your room at night," Flora urges. Later, Flora and her brother, Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) go as far to lock Dani in a closet so her path doesn't intersect with the Lady in the Lake's.
Known by her nickname "the Lady in the Lake," this spectral presence poses a constant threat to Bly's residents. Anyone who crosses the ghost on her nightly stroll is doomed to be dragged back into the lake on the property. But who is she, and how did she come to have that utterly creepy, melted-down face—not to mention upper body strength?
The Haunting of Bly Manor's second-to-last episode is devoted to explaining the Lady of the Lake's story, and how she came to terrorize the English manor. The tale is adapted from Henry James' short story "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," one of many inspirations creator Mike Flanagan took from James's oeuvre.
In addition to unspooling one of the season's mysteries (but certainly not the only one), episode 8 also marks Kate Siegel's Bly Manor debut. Siegel is married to the series' creator, and appeared in the Haunting of Hill House. Her cameo was well worth the wait.
This is how Bly Manor's Lady in the Lake came to be, and why she's the most important character in the show.
Before she was the Lady in the Lake, she was Viola, the daughter of a 17th-century nobleman.
The Lady in the Lake wasn't always so waterlogged and expressionless. No, once upon a time, she was a beautiful, wealthy woman named Viola, with a penchant for grand entrances and extravagant dress.
When their father dies, Viola and her younger sister, Perdita, are left their Hampshire manor (Bly!). But they can't rest easy. Immediately, they're forced to find husbands for financial and social stability. However, they are desperate to hold onto their family home.
Enter: Arthur Lloyd, a distant cousin who is intelligent, reliable, and plays the flute. Essentially, just the kind of guy Viola and Perdita were hoping to find. Arthur and Viola marry, and Viola remains the "true authority" of Bly Manor. Mission accomplished.
Viola leaves Bly Manor to her descendants—which include Flora and Miles.
When introducing Viola's father, the series' narrator says she will "take the liberty" of calling him Mr. Willoughby. In fact, his name is Wingrave, like the family in the show. Starting with her daughter, Viola is set on keeping Bly in the family. She succeeded at her goal—her portrait still hangs at Bly.
In her first words to her daughter, Isabel, Viola touches on the show's themes of lineage and inheritance. "I have no honeyed words to speak. It is fierce out here. But you are fiercer. Bly belongs to you. And they will try to take you as they did me, but I will not let them. Instead we shall move mountains, my girl. It is you. It is me. It is us," Viola says.
The speech also contains the origins for the show's central catchphrase: "It is you. It is me. It is us." Later on, those words will stop the Lady in the Lake from carrying out an act of destruction.
Eventually, Viola gets sick—not with the plague, but with "the lung."
The Haunting of Bly Manor upholds one of the period drama genre's most enduring cliches. If a character coughs, you know to be worried. And if there's blood in the handkerchief? There's no hope.
The doctor says that Viola doesn't have the plague–which makes sense, considering the bubonic plague hit England in the 1330s. Instead, she has "the lung," a euphemism for tuberculosis.
Viola is given months to live, a diagnosis she simply doesn't accept. It's here that Bly Manor veers into the supernatural. Through sheer force of will alone, Viola refuses to die. "Tell your God that I do not go," she tells the priest who tries to give her last rites. Perdita cheers her on. And so, Viola withers away in bed, holding onto life by a thread.
Meanwhile, while raising Isabel together, Arthur and Perdita's bond takes on an undeniable twinge of attraction (one of two instances in the show of siblings dating the same person). Viola is no fool. She physically lashes out at her family members, and becomes the unofficial Queen of the Face Slap. Everyone is trapped in a grim situation.
Finally, Viola dies—because Perdita kills her.
Perdita tells herself that she suffocates Viola as an act of mercy, but the narrator calls her on that act of self deception. "The word was not mercy...the word had always been enough," the narrator says. She's free to do as she pleases—a.k.a. marry Arthur.
Unbeknownst to Perdita, Viola doesn't really die. As we learn, no one really dies at Bly. She's trapped in a room. Sleeping and waking, over and over. Waiting to be unleashed.
The Lady in the Lake is born after Perdita opens the trunk.
Opening a container and unleashing chaos? It's a real Pandora, or Perdita, move. On the sixth anniversary of Viola's death, Perdita opens the trunk full of Viola's valuables, meant to be given to Isabel—and no one else. Out comes a pair of ghastly hands, which strangle Viola to death.
Believing something supernatural is at work, Arthur drops the trunk in the lake. In doing so, Arthur condemns Viola, still trapped in the trunk, to the lake's murky the depths.
Even in this gruesome position, Viola won't drop her whole "refusing to die" schtick. Stubbornly, she decides to stay on the Earth. "She made her own gravity. Gravity of will, that would change the gravity of Bly forever," the narrator explains. Instead of dying, Viola becomes a powerful ghost.
Each night, she leaves the water and brings people back to the lake with her "gravitational pull."
And so, the Lady in the Lake begins a routine that would persist for centuries. Each evening, she emerges from the lake, and walks the same path to the bedroom that she once shared with her husband and daughter. She hopes the nightmare will end, but it never does.
As the years go by, Viola's memories erode (as does her face). She no longer understands why she was walking to the bedroom—only that she has to. Anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with Viola is dragged to the lake, too. They all have the misfortune of dying at Bly.
That explains all the people in the attic, and Flora's dollhouse.
What happens in Bly Manor stays in Bly Manor—including death. The Lady in the Lake's victims all live in the attic, and are consigned to a kind of twilight consciousness. Their bodies and minds orbit through the same memories, as their physical forms fade. When they want, they can interact with the physical world, too. Flora keeps track of their whereabouts in her doll house.
Further, not only Viola's victims meet this fate—anyone who dies on Bly Manor's grounds are subject to the lady's gravitational pull. For example, Hannah (T'Nia Miller), the housekeeper, dies on the grounds, but is not killed by the Lady in the Lake. Still, she's trapped as a ghost, unable to move on.
Despite all that, the Lady in the Lake isn't quite a villain.
Yes, Viola is an absolute menace—but she's not really a villain. She's trapped, just like her victims. In fact, she'd been trapped from the start. As a woman in the 17th century, Viola was forced into finding a husband in order to maintain her family home. She was rendered powerless by illness. Later, she's physically trapped in a borderland between living and dead.
It's only through defiance that Viola achieves any sort of freedom. One almost has to admire her degree of strength. She is so stubborn she defies physics, and the laws of space and time. Are we fans of the Lady in the Lake? We wouldn't go that far, but we admire her iron force of will.
In the end, Dani takes over as the Lady in the Lake 2.0.
The Haunting of Bly Manor ends with a grim passing of the torch. After centuries of wreaking havoc at Bly, the Lady in the Lake cedes her position to a new person: Dani, the American au pair.
In the final episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor, Dani is captured by the Lady in the Lake, as Flora had feared. Thanks to some ingenious maneuvering (and the uttering of Viola's line, "It's you, it's me, it's us,") Dani and Flora escape from the interaction unscathed. Dani and Jamie (Amelia Eve) leave Bly, and begin a happy life as a couple.
Over the years, Dani remains haunted by the Lady in the Lake, whose reflection appears in bodies of water. Dani fears that she's slowly becoming the Lady in the Lake. One evening, Dani wakes up with her hands around Jamie, strangling her the same way Viola did Perdita.
At that moment, Dani knows she must return to Bly, and finish what began all those years ago. By the time Jamie tracks her down, Dani has already taken her mantle at the bottom of the lake. She is the Lady in the Lake, with one major difference: She won't take new victims. Her iron will bends toward mercy and kindness. Unlike Viola, who wanted to trap people, she will let them live.
The Haunting of Bly Manor's resolution is solidly on the border of bitter and sweet, scary and sentimental. And, much like The Haunting of Hill House that came before it, it's definitely haunting.
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