This Woman’s Work: AHS Murder House and the Horror of Vivien Harmon

Content Warning: This article discusses sexual assault, domestic abuse (both mental and physical) miscarriages and still-births, suicide, and violence against women.

Spoilers for AHS Season 1 abound.

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So I rewatched Murder House.

AHS is something of a guilty pleasure of mine, particularly the first season, which I first watched (surprisingly recently) as a first-year undergrad. Even though it hasn’t aged well, and even though it’s horrendously problematic in terms of its portrayals of…well, everything, it still has a special place in my heart. And although I haven’t watched—and have no real interest in watching—any season later than like, Freak Show, when I heard the news that the Queen Herself (my beloved Jessica Lange) was returning for season 13, I got all nostalgic for a rewatch. And as I got my fix of edgy melodrama and mooned over Evan Peters, I was struck by something that hadn’t properly occurred to me previously: that Vivien Harmon has literally the most horrific storyline I’ve seen in a piece of media for a very long time.

I know, I know, a woman is treated badly in a Ryan Murphy production—fork found in kitchen. Literally every woman in AHS’s first season suffers unspeakably. But what I’m talking about is more than that.

If it’s been a while since you revisited Murder House, here’s a brief dot point recap of Vivien Harmon’s story arc:

· Vivien suffers a traumatic late-stage miscarriage. Soon after, she walks in on her husband Ben having sex with one of his students.

· Seeking a fresh start, Vivien, Ben, their daughter Violet move to a new house in California. Unfortunately, the house is very haunted.

· Ben frequently pressures Vivien into rekindling their sex life. Once Vivien becomes sexually receptive again, she mistakes a gimp-suit clad intruder for her husband and is subsequently raped (the gimp-suit intruder is later revealed to be Tate, Violet’s psychopathic, ghostly boyfriend).

· Vivien finds out she’s pregnant. Later, she finds out she’s pregnant with twins. Even later, in a classic soap opera twist, it’s revealed that the twins have two different fathers: Ben and Tate.

· Vivien suffers a series of traumas in the house, mostly in the form of home invasions. Her and Violet are almost murdered by true-crime nuts, and Ben’s pregnant mistress, Hayden, later invades the house and holds Vivien at knifepoint. Coupled with a difficult pregnancy—heavy bleeding, an horrific looking ultrasound scan that makes a nurse pass out in terror, and a craving for raw organs—Vivien becomes extremely stressed, which her husband (with the help of a little gaslighting from Violet) interprets as full-blown hysteria.

· Vivien realises that it wasn’t Ben in the gimp suit and insists she was raped: her family write it off as more hysteria and have her committed.

· When Ben discovers the “two different fathers” he visits Vivien at the psych ward and gleefully berates her for her “hypocrisy” and supposed infidelity—though he does later realise was raped and pulls her from the asylum.

· Upon (reluctantly) returning to the house, Vivien goes into labour. Queue a very traumatic birth sequence in which all the ghosts of the house unite to deliver her twins (fortunately, an awful lot of medical professionals have died on the property).

· I should point out, here, that numerous ghostly inhabitants have been vying for Vivien’s unborn children since the moment of conception, including Hayden, a portrayal of a gay couple that hasn’t aged terribly well (one half of which is played by Zachary Quinto—Spock, my beloved) and the house’s original owner, Nora.

· The child fathered by Ben is stillborn and bundled away by Nora, but the other, Tate’s baby, is taken out of the house by Tate’s still-living mother (Jessica Lange). Vivien, meanwhile, haemorrhages and dies in childbirth.

· Vivien gets her baby from Nora by posing as the new nanny, and the two seem to work out some kind of arrangement.

· Vivien initially stays out of Ben’s way in the hopes that he’ll leave, he’s ultimately murdered by Hayden, and the two reconcile.

· So, for those keeping count, Vivien now has to spend eternity with: her cheating husband who gleefully committed her to an asylum, her husband’s mistress, her rapist, a houseful of malevolent spirits who wanted to steal her unborn children, and an eternal baby that needs her undivided attention. Which I think may actually be my definition of hell.

In the grand scheme of everything that happens in an insane programme, Vivien’s story is often sidelined—her trauma is overlooked. I certainly overlooked it the first two times I watched it, too caught up in the edgy romance of Tate and Violet (you know, before he’s revealed as A. Vivien’s rapist and B. A literal school shooter) and the juicy melodramatics of it all.

But upon reflection, I feel like there’s a surprising poignancy to Vivien’s story. It harkens back to an entire lineage of patriarchal oppression. She lacks independence or autonomy. Her husband is able to abuse his position of power as a psychiatrist to have her committed, and can just as easily have her released on a whim. No one—with the exception of a kind but largely unhelpful security guard—believes her when she says she was raped. She dies in childbirth. She’s unable to leave either her toxic marriage or the oppressive house they inhabit. Not to be too on the nose here, but Vivien’s story isn’t just an American Horror Story: it’s a uniquely feminine one. It takes every fear that any woman has ever had, just by virtue of being female, and plays them out to their worst possible conclusions.

And of course, I am in no way suggesting that this was intentional on the part of Ryan Murphy or anyone else involved in American Horror Story: given the incredibly exploitative nature of the show, I feel like that would be giving them far too much credit. However, I think they did unintentionally create a commentary on womanhood¹ that’s actually pretty thought provoking. Especially considering how Vivien’s story is, as I’ve said, largely overshadowed by other story arcs, and frequently reduced to an episode’s B plot. Almost as if the horror of womanhood is often too ordinary, too mundane, to take centre stage.

…Okay, it was probably because the writers just didn’t give enough of a shit to provide Vivien’s trauma with the breathing room it so often deserved, but I like the whole “mundane horror of womanhood” angle, so I’m sticking with it.

1. Admittedly straight-white womanhood, but womanhood nonetheless.