In the quiet anticipation threaded through “The Haunting of Bly Manor” hides a lesson that promises to linger behind the closed eyelids of viewers long after the images of the manor’s ghosts have faded from our minds. Maybe you won’t hear it until the final episode of the season, or maybe you’ll pick up on it as soon as the children of the manor talk about their dead parents to their new au pair. One day, the season whispers, the person that you love most in the world will have to die.
One of the two children at the manor—Flora Wingrave, portrayed by Amelie Bea Smith—speaks about the loss of her parents to her au pair. Bly Manor’s au pair, Dani—Victoria Pedretti—offers the soft, helpless placation that bystanders to grief are prone to offering; she promises Flora that her parents will always be with her. But no, Flora says. They won’t. They are dead. We can pretend, though, if it would make you feel better.
This particular engulfing ache, easy to imagine as an individual with willful ties of love to several other living beings, swallows the entirety of Bly Manor and roots itself in the compartment of the mind where our darkest fears fester. Neither loss nor love can exist without the other.
Spirits of Bly hide in the manor’s shadows, but the true threat of the dead bubbles up from where it originated in what once were their lives. One hardened with anger from the collapse of a familial relationship, another miserable with the lost potential for a new start, a third brokenhearted by missed opportunities to confess a love. Each ghost has lived a life of their own and, beyond the jolt of fear that accompanies the appearance of a silent apparition, the buried stories of the lives of the dead are more violently affecting than any manufactured scare might otherwise be.
Inhabitants of Bly that roam the house as living beings offer viewers the lens through which we are to examine death. The housekeeper, gardener, cook, au pair and two children ground us in real, lived experience. They must each recall something that every person knows in their chest but tries to forget; that to live is to keep the constant fear of loss quiet beneath the exhilaration of life and, once the loss happens, there is nothing to do but acknowledge it. To live is to face the fear and to push ahead anyway in the wake of your own misery.
Bly manor tells us the stories of the dead while exploring the journeys of the living. Each soul in the manor has experienced loss before or will experience loss in the arc of the season. Each soul in the manor will fumble through love, perhaps misplaced, and fail or thrive in the wake of their personal development
“The Haunting of Bly Manor” is not a ghost story, as the final episode explicitly states; it is a story of love. The arcs of the season’s characters promise viewers that love for another person is self-sacrifice. To fall in love is to never know how long you’ll have with the person you care about before you lose them. To spare yourself from this loss, though, is to deprive yourself of the love—the overwhelming urge to be with another person, to protect them, to take care of them until you are forced to part. And it is worth it, “The Haunting of Bly Manor” declares. Love them until you must lose them or be forced to experience the misery of the dead—the lost opportunities, the silent desolation of permanent solitude. Love is worth the loss.