Eugenia's metamorphosis (lol)

I watched this movie when it first came out and I've been going through a costume drama marathon - I remember this movie really creeped me out when I first saw it, but I'd just sobbed my way through the last five minutes of Bright Star (seriously, press stop as soon as Keats leaves England. We all know what happened next, and it's too heart-wrenching to watch), and I needed to be cheered up by something that at least has a happy ending.

Anyway, it struck me again how much Eugenia changes in the film, but unlike a butterfly coming out of the chrysalis she becomes her mother (and as has been said here, she's like the queen ant, and for a while poor William was a drone, who didn't even get to do any fertilizing), and is trapped in that horrible parlour.

After her mother's death she's shown settling down in the parlour and having the couch moved to exactly where her mother used to lounge, and at the very end of the movie, she's actually sitting in it, with that enormous black dress enveloping her - she's as fertile as her mother was, and in twenty years time she'll be her mother's size, maybe even controlling everyone from the parlour too.

And while I felt sorry for Rowena at first, in a way, she kind of dodged a bullet (many bullets, though a woman of her time wouldn't see it that way). The top cause of women dying was childbirth, and film itself showed fertility as a kind of curse. All the children the mother had used up her strength and body until she died comparatively young, while Eugenia's own fertility forced her to trap William into a sham of a marriage.

Such a creepy film - I feel most sorry for Amy (the servant) who's stuck in that awful place with the most horrible male character I've come across in period drama, Edgar the rapist.