// rambling about Edith and Lucille and their respective buttlerfly/moth motifs.
It's about Edith who's been in her chrysalis her entire life - waiting to unfurl her wings, waiting to be recognized as a wonderful, intelligent, creative person by someone other than her father.
(Don't get me started on the COMPLETELY UNINTENTIONAL parallels between Vivian and Edith. Lost their mother young, raised by a single father, outcasts, writers, the victims of bullying by people who pretended to like them. I SWEAR I created Vivian before Crimson Peak came out. GdT and I are apparently on the same wavelength)
Edith is DESPERATELY waiting to metamorphose into a butterfly, and Thomas Sharpe provides that chance. She is DESPERATELY waiting for someone to see her value beyond "the only daughter of a wealthy and influential man". Literally ALL Thomas had to do was compliment her writing and show an interest in her as a person, and she was smitten. More importantly, she's desperate for someone respected to show her value to the world. See: the waltz scene. Edith walked in apologetic for her presence, and ended it thrilled by everyone's attention - and with the man who gave it to her.
Meanwhile Lucille is... jfc, where to start with Lucille? The eldest child of parents who were each abusive in their own way, desperate to both protect her little brother and to CONNECT to another person in a way she'd never been allowed (GdT's character history says she was close to their wet nurse/nurse, who was dismissed as soon as her mother found out Lucille's affection for the woman). She's every bit the moths that haunt the third floor of Allerdale Hall - hidden (in more than one way), with a beauty a decade out of fashion and overlooked, dull, a part of the background until she chooses to put herself foward. She BELONGS to Allerdale Hall in a way beautiful butterfly Edith never would and never COULD.
While Edith is dressed in bright colors, especially bright golds, Lucille's costumes are meant to blend into or evoke Allerdale Hall. She's a part of the house, the same way the moths are.
