Rule of Rose Mysteries

In the Women’s Lavatory of the orphanage there are five stalls.

Let’s consider the stalls from right to left, from nearer the entrance of the lavatory to furthest away from the entrance of the lavatory.

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Nearest to the entrance of the lavatory is (1) a stall without a door, piled high with sacks filled with who-knows-what, and which has boards nailed across its door frame to block access. I’m going to ignore the mystery presented by this blocked-off lavatory stall in this blog-post.

One stall further away from the entrance of the lavatory is (2) the stall in which we see Diana and Meg together in the E3/pregame video (this is the scene during which Diana deliberately presses Meg’s finger into the thorn of a rose that Meg is offering to Diana, after which Diana sucks on Meg’s wounded finger—provided we believe the illustration on the game box showing Diana sucking on a finger: from the just the E3/pregame video itself we cannot see exactly what Diana is doing… she could could just be kissing the wounded finger).

This (2) is also the same lavatory stall in which Diana and Meg are talking to each other—during the “Bird of Happiness” chapter—while Jennifer is listening from (3) the adjacent stall (one stall further from the entrance).

(3) The adjacent lavatory stall from which Jennifer is listening, during the “Bird of Happiness” chapter, is the stall with the drawing of the red bird.

One stall further from the entrance, is (4) the stall into which Gregory pulls Jennifer during the E3/pregame video.

And there is one more stall (5) that is the furthest from the entrance of the lavatory.

I propose a hypothesis that these lavatory stalls are assigned (by the Aristocrat Club) as follows:
(2) The stall of the Duchess, Diana
(3) The stall of the Countess, Eleanor
(4) The stall of the Baroness, Meg
(5) The stall for all of the other girls

In the gamescript of TheSinnerChrono (see the link in “Important Resources“), we are told that lavatory stall (2) is “their secret place” (that is, the secret place of Diana and Meg). This is just an interpretation given by TheSinnerChrono, the game itself never tells us this explicitly. And as I thought more about this interpretation, I began to wonder if it was wrong in two respects: wrong in saying that the place was secret, and wrong in saying it was “their” (in the plural sense) place.

At first I accepted that the stall was “their” place, but questioned whether it was actually a secret place.

That particular stall is certainly a place for Diana and Meg to tell secrets and do secret things, but having a lavatory stall as a secret place invites unintentional interferences by others wanting to use the stall. Unless—I thought—it is a actually a private place rather than a secret place… a lavatory stall well-known by all the girls to be the exclusive “private property” of Diana and Meg. That made more sense to me.

And notice that in the E3/pregame video, while Diana and Meg are together in the lavatory stall, Eleanor is standing in the middle of the main space of the lavatory room, facing toward the open entrance of the lavatory (connecting to the hallway), as if standing guard over the privacy of Meg and Diana (Jennifer sees the scene only because she is looking through the open lavatory door from the hallway outside of the lavatory). The stall is certainly not a secret from Eleanor. Nor would the fact that something was going on in the stall be a secret if somebody was turned away from using the lavatory by Eleanor. Privacy seems to be the issue here, not secrecy.

In the “Bird of Happiness” chapter, it may be that Meg and Diana are wanting to talk about Eleanor behind her back. At any rate, Eleanor is not around to stand guard over their privacy, which could be enough in itself to explain the “shhhhh”s and admonitions to be “quiet” before Meg and Diana enter the stall. Even in their private place, they don’t want “eavesdroppers”, so it is better if they go to their private stall secretly on this occasion.

The idea that this stall (2) was the private property of Meg and Diana opened up the possibility that the adjacent stall (3) was the private property of Eleanor, which might shed light on the presence of the red bird drawing in that stall. I liked this idea, but as I thought more about it, I began to think that the idea that Meg and Diana shared a stall, while Eleanor had one to herself, was an odd arrangement.

It then occurred to me that it seemed far more appropriate that each of the three aristocrats would have had their own private lavatory stalls, and that these stalls would be arranged according to rank.

TheSinnerChrono identifies Diana as being the one who says “Over here!” to Meg, before they enter the stall (2) in the “Bird of Happiness” chapter. I agree. And we see that it is Diana that leads the way to the stall. If the stall was Diana’s private place, it would be expected that Meg would only enter by Diana’s invitation.

Both times that we see Meg and Diana together in that stall, we see Diana as the one who sits on the toilet, which is sometimes humorously called “the throne” in English. Diana on the throne, while Meg stands or kneels, is what we would expect anyway from Diana’s superior rank and relational dominance, but it is also consistent with the idea that Diana is the master of that particular place.

And if my hypothesis about private stalls, and their assignment, is correct, then the lavatory stall with the red bird drawing is indeed Eleanor’s private lavatory stall. Perhaps we can use this as a clue to help us come to an understanding of the meaning of the red bird drawing in that stall.

What do you think of the hypothesis of assigned lavatory stalls?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Clues, Mysteries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.