Nina’s attempted murder-suicide

Nina’s attempted murder-suicide is the traumatic event behind the town’s story that she is dangerous and mentally unstable. As Millie Calloway learns it, Nina drugged her infant daughter, Cecelia Winchester, placed her in a bathtub with the water running, and then took pills herself. The account also casts a long shadow over Nina’s later struggle to leave Andrew Winchester: her past gives him a credible threat with which to discredit her and keep her daughter within his reach.

The Account Millie Hears

Millie learns the story while looking for information about why people call Nina crazy. Amanda responds with a tale that, she says, everyone knows. Her account is not presented as an eyewitness testimony: it reaches Millie as community knowledge, delivered in a conversation about Nina’s reputation. Amanda says Cecelia was a baby at the time and suggests that the police arrived only just in time. She describes Nina as having drugged Cecelia, put her in a tub under running water, and taken a quantity of pills herself.

Andrew, Amanda says, was at his office in the city. Concerned when he could not get through to Nina, he called the police. The reported chain of events places his failed attempts to reach his wife before the emergency response, and presents his call as the action that brought help. The story therefore establishes both the immediate peril to Cecelia and the circumstances through which the family’s crisis became known to others.

Millie’s Reaction and Nina’s Public Image

Millie is shaken by the account. She had expected some minor domestic quarrel or social slight to explain the town’s description of Nina; instead, she hears that Nina tried to kill her daughter and herself. Millie’s physical distress intensifies, and she struggles to reconcile the story with what she believes she has seen: Nina appears to love Cecelia deeply. That contradiction does not make Millie dismiss the report. She has heard it from enough people to believe that the town cannot simply be mistaken, even as the account remains painful and difficult for her to fit with Nina’s visible care for her child.

The exchange also marks a difference between Millie and the people repeating the story. Amanda uses a degrading colloquial term for the psychiatric institution where Nina was held. Millie winces: she has spent the previous decade incarcerated herself and recognizes the ease with which other people turn institutionalization into a slur. The incident explains why Nina’s psychiatric history circulates as gossip, but the scene also shows how that history can flatten her into a public label. Millie’s response holds two facts in tension: the reported act was horrific, and the woman she sees with Cecelia does not seem reducible to it.

The Incident’s Long Shadow in the Marriage

Nina’s account of her marriage shows how her past becomes leverage. She believes Andrew could tell the police that she had taken Cecelia and intended to harm her again, relying on Nina’s mental-health history to make that accusation persuasive. That fear helps explain why leaving is not simply a matter of deciding to go: she has tried bargaining to leave with Cecelia and only the clothes they wear, but believes Andrew can recast her escape as a renewed danger to their daughter. Nina also looks for Andrew’s former fiancée, Kathleen, hoping another person might corroborate her account of him. She cannot identify or find her, and eventually gives up.

Nina’s efforts to manage Andrew’s behavior fail in opposite directions. She first performs the part of the perfect wife, cooking, keeping the house immaculate, and concealing her revulsion during sex, hoping to avoid giving him grounds to send her to the attic. When this changes nothing, she tries to repel him instead. Andrew’s punishments remain unpredictable: on average he sends her to the attic every other month, though sometimes more often, and once six months pass without a punishment. She never knows what transgression he will claim or what treatment awaits her there.

Cecelia is drawn into the system of control. Andrew makes Nina answer for the child’s behavior, and Cecelia learns that refusing the itchy, frilly dresses he has bought, or getting them dirty, may mean her mother disappears for days. Nina accepts punishment rather than risk its being redirected onto her daughter. Andrew also keeps peanut butter in the pantry despite Cecelia’s allergy, replaces jars Nina discards, and sometimes puts a small amount in Cecelia’s dinner, causing welts. Against this later pattern of threats to Cecelia, the earlier bathtub incident is not merely a piece of Nina’s reputation: it is part of the history Andrew can invoke to make Nina fear that the child will be taken from her or harmed again.

Narrative Significance

The event reaches the reader through layered accounts: Amanda repeats what the town says, while Nina’s later reflections reveal how her mental-health history shapes the danger she faces in trying to leave. The distinction matters. Millie first encounters a frightening story about Nina; later, Nina’s experience shows how the same history can be used to make her appear untrustworthy when she describes Andrew’s abuse. The evidence of her past does not erase the severity of the attempted drowning and overdose, but neither does it explain away Andrew’s subsequent control.

The episode thus gives Nina’s public image a concrete origin while making that image consequential in the present of her marriage. Her fear that the authorities will believe she is again a danger to Cecelia narrows her options; Andrew’s threats and punishments keep that fear active. In the broader account of Nina’s captivity, even the attic’s soundproofing and Andrew’s hidden camera underline how little access she has to help or privacy. The attempted murder-suicide is therefore both a crisis in the family’s past and a vulnerability that Andrew can exploit long afterward.