'American Horror Story' recap: Violation

Of course, they’ll never know, and neither will we. Days before Halloween, Tate claimed the suit for himself. The black-hearted dark knight broke Chad’s neck, then beat cowboy-clad Pat unconscious... and then took a fireplace poker and pummeled Pat some more ... and then pulled down Pat's pants and violated him bloody. (This violation must be explained eventually. Must.) He threw the bodies down the stairs and into basement. “This is not right,” said Norah Montgomery, logging the understatement of the night. Tate explained his objective, though not his sadism. He had promised to give Norah a baby, but Chad and Pat “were fighting and decided not to make one. Now a new family can move in and give you what you want.” Ghost Norah smiled her nutty “Babies make everything better!” smile and suddenly found it very easy to forget all about the injustice of a vicious gay bashing. Moira showed up to assist Tate in corpse disposal and offered her take on his pathology: “I think you should get over your compulsive need to please the women of this house.” Tate joked about needing a “good therapist.” His violence was about to bring him a pretty bad one. Tate and Moira resolved to frame Chad-Pat as a murder-suicide.  Tate pumped bullets into Pat, then put the gun in Chad’s hand and pointed it toward his chest, oblivious to the fact that Chad was somehow still alive and reaching out to Pat with his other hand. A bullet to the heart put an end to all that. “It’s kind of romantic,” Tate said. “Now they’ll be together forever.”

If only Tate had given Chad and Pat more time to work through their stuff, maybe they’d find the prospect of eternity together more like heaven and less like hell.

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Vivien Harmon didn’t believe she was going crazy in “Rubber Man.” She believed someone was trying to make her feel crazy. She was right, though by episode’s end, the distinction made little difference. The photo of the Montgomery family that Violet found in the attic last week was the catalyst for Vivien’s downward spiral. She was convinced that the same young woman in the 90-year-old pic was the same young woman that toured The Victorian a few eps back. Everyone in her life tried to insist otherwise, from hyper-rational Ben to supernatural-skeptic Marcy, who suggested that Vivien might be suffering from a mind-altering chemical imbalance due to her pregnancy.

Only Moira, the 28-years-dead two-faced housekeeper, supported Vivien’s belief in her own sanity. During a standout scene for actress Frances Conroy, Moira put a Feminist spin on her employer’s plight via a pretty rich literary reference. “Have you read 'The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gillman?” she asked, referring to the 1892 short story by the accomplished author and crusading social reformer.  (Click here to read the full text.) The tale tells of a new mom who believes she is suffering from a profound malady, preventing her from engaging motherhood. But her husband and her brother, both psychologists, believe she is merely afflicted with “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” They prescribe a summer of “rest care” inside a “strange” and “queer” old mansion near the ocean. The nameless woman likens the colonial to “a haunted house” but her husband won’t indulge the crazy talk. From the story: “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” Sound familiar?

Locked up inside a room with corroding yellow wallpaper, the woman’s frantic mind starts theorizing madly about her room-cum-cell. She comes to believe that the room was once a children’s nursery, and that a woman crawling around on her hands and knees is trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, along with countless other women. She becomes obsessed with freeing them by shredding the suffocating décor. At the end of the story, the woman’s husband faints after finding his wife prowling her cage-like quarters on all fours and declaring “I’ve got it out at last!” The reader is left to take the measure of the woman’s victory. Has she triumphed and become empowered – or has she been debased and dehumanized?

Moira’s summary of “The Yellow Wallpaper” was less expansive and turned Gilman’s story into a full-on liberation allegory. “Since beginning of time, men have made excuses to lock women away,” Moira sermonized. “They make up diseases. Like ‘hysteria.’ You know where that word comes from? It’s the Greek word for ‘uterus.’ In the second century, they thought it was caused by sexual deprivation. And the only possible cure was ‘hysterical paroxysm.’” In a moment that needs to be put on a loop and turned into a viral video, Frances Conroy took a dramatic pause and leaned forward and translated the term: “Orgasm.” Moira explained that until modern times, the treatment for this affliction was sexual violation. “Doctors would masturbate women in their office,” Moira seethed, “and call it ‘medicine.’”

“I had no idea,” Vivien said.

Moira wasn’t done winding up Vivien. She blasted Ben for “driving her to the edge” by cheating on her and abandoning her (and her “truant teenage daughter”) in the middle of her pregnancy. (Never mind that it was Vivien who kicked Ben out.) In doing so, Moira softened up Vivien’s fragile psyche for the paranoid conspiracy theory that would consume her brain: That Ben was trying to drive Vivien to the loony bin so he could replace her with Hayden. (Vivien likened the alleged plot to the 1944 film Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton.) Yet the maid also told Vivien that she wasn’t wrong about her experience of the house. Moira declared herself to be a believer in "lost souls" and “things unseen” and other esoteric hoo-ha like doppleganger theory, the idea that we all have a double or evil twin somewhere in the world. And The Victorian? “This house is possessed,” she said. “Things break. Disappear. Doors open for no reason. There are spirits here. Malevolent spirits.” Vivien, eyes wide with fear, nodded in agreement, perhaps despite herself. She may not have been truly going crazy, but she was quickly coming to a point where she didn’t know the difference. “Mrs. Harmon hear me,” Moira said. “You need to get out while you still can. I fear for you if you don’t.”

NEXT: Is Vivien Harmon the Greta Garbo of the musical world?