Friday essay: I modelled myself on my sister – but why are storytellers obsessed with sisterhood?
- Written by The Conversation
“You two are like chalk and cheese!” my mother once declared to my sister and me when we were teenagers. Her happy declaration left me deeply confused, for I believed exactly the opposite.
I had modelled myself on my sister. Our voices were the same, our gestures, our intonations, our opinions. Even our friends. What on earth was my mother talking about? My sister learned French at high school and I learned German, but otherwise we were practically the same person.
There was, of course, one superficial difference: my sister was blonde and my hair was dark. The significance of this had not escaped me, even as a young child. When we danced and sang to Abba, I always had to be Frida and never Agnetha. Our real-life attributes – our hair colour – decided the casting. (Those were the rules.)
And when we travelled to Mediterranean countries with our parents as children, I sat on a block of stone somewhere, waiting for my sister’s cheeks to be released by the locals, her golden tresses returned to her shoulders. It is probably noteworthy that, as young adults, when my sister dyed her hair black, I promptly got the peroxide out and went blonde.
The semiotics of “blonde” and “brunette” had also been apparent in my favourite childhood sitcom families. In Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the good sister/cousin was always blonde (Samantha/Jeannie) and the evil alter ego was brunette (Cousin Serena and Jeannie II).
I was grateful to the fairytale Snow White and Rose Red for its positioning of the two sister-heroines as different – dark and fair, extroverted and introverted – but equally good and worthy.
The either/or sister dyad is a time-honoured literary and filmic trope. Madame de Staël’s Corinne or Italy (1807) gave the trope its first popular literary appearance, ushering in a character typology (and ethnic typology) based on hair colour.
Corinne is dark, dashing, passionate (Italian); her English half-sister Lucille is fair, obedient, modest. Both vie for the attentions of the same man, Lord Nelvil, who, by extension, is torn between the two “halves” of his own personality and desires. Incidentally, in the sixth season of Mad Men, Don Draper’s second wife plays opposite-coded twins in a soap opera: brunette Corrinne and blonde Colette.
Sister stalking
Writer and academic Leila Silvana May describes 19th-century British literature as “sister-stalking”, in its obsession with sisters. Sister characters offered contrasting mirrors not only on each other but on the vagaries of femaleness at large.
Light/dark, virgin/whore, “angel in the house” or “scribbling” bluestocking, sister dyads provided novelists with a narrative device through which versions of female difference and sameness, morality and immorality, prudence and imprudence might be played out.
Sisters became an “irresistible structuring framework” in Victorian novels, writes British author Sarah Annes Brown. “Again and again, light and dark sister heroines engage in covert competition for textual supremacy.” Within this structure, a paucity of hair pigment might signify innocence or a surplus of frivolity; too much pigment, and a woman might find herself in need of Shakespearean taming.
Novelist Wilkie Collins’ opinion on the subject is too marvellous not to quote in full:
Being an Englishman, I have, of course, an ardent attachment to anything like an established rule, simply because it is established. I know that it is a rule that, when two sisters are presented in a novel, one must be tall and dark, and the other short and light. I know that five feet eight of female flesh and blood, when accompanied by an olive complexion, black eyes and raven hair, is synonymous with strong passions and an unfortunate destiny. I know that five feet nothing, golden ringlets, soft blue eyes, and a lily brow, cannot possibly be associated by any well-constituted novelist with anything but ringing laughter, arch innocence, and final matrimonial happiness.
Women novelists of the 19th century took this structure and ran with it, spinning it into finer threads. In the process, they both refined and destabilised the trope.
Passionate Marianne and practical Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility arrive at a textual truce. Each absorbs some of her sister’s attributes, so an equilibrium is established in which neither sense nor sensibility has primacy.
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, fair-haired Cecilia turns out to be more sensible in the end than cerebral high-thinking, dark-haired Dorothea – though Dorothea remains our hero. (The reader questions all along how clever Dorothea could actually be to fall for the dreary, dismal Casaubon.)
Subversive sisters
Writer and editor Janet Phillips’s book Great Literary Sisters considers, as a matter of necessity, the sister dyads of Austen and Eliot and the ways they both comply with and subvert Wilkie Collins’s “rule”.
But she looks, too, at other configurations of sisterhood in literature: brother/sister relationships, multiple sister relationships, and even sister relationships that haunt the living from the grave (Beloved and Denver in Toni Morrison’s Beloved).
Phillips’s previous book, Great Literary Friendships (2022), cast its net wide in examining friendships in literature, reaching from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows. Great Literary Sisters takes a similarly broad approach, unconstrained by literary hierarchy, genre or target audience.
Her book drew me back to favourites of my childhood. Dorothy Edwards’ My Naughty Little Sister – the first chapter book I pulled off the shelf and discovered I could read. The Railway Children, the first novel I was led to from a television series. And Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes, a girls’ own adventure story where the drama plays out, literally, in the world of the theatre.
It made me think, too, of favourites from my adult life (E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End) and novels I have been meaning to read (Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer). Breadth of readership provides the main point of connection here.
As with Great Literary Friendships, Great Literary Sisters is not a fly-on-the-wall peek into the private relationships of authors, but a celebration of the relationships we, as readers, have with the characters in their books.
It is a compendium of novels that feature sisters centrally as characters, as well as windows onto greater political conflicts – tribal warfare and the ensuing Biafran famine in Chimamanda Adichie Ngoza’s Half of a Yellow Sun, for instance. There is heart and analysis and nostalgia here, as well as a democratic appeal to shared readerly experiences.
Sister sacrifice
Phillips groups her selected novels into five reader-friendly categories to examine different psychological aspects and trajectories of the sister relationship: Growing Up, Heroes at Home, Affairs of the Heart, Trauma and To the Rescue. These categories enable her to group otherwise unlikely literary bedfellows: The Railway Children and Catcher in the Rye; My Sister the Serial Killer and Pride and Prejudice.
In To the Rescue, Phillips considers Sir Walter Scott’s 1818 The Heart of Mid-Lothian alongside Suzanne Collins’s 2008 The Hunger Games trilogy. These are vastly different novels in time and place, but both capture the zeitgeist, as borne out in their immense popular success.
The Heart of Midlothian is based on the true 1738 story of Helen Walker, who saved her condemned sister from execution by travelling to London and petitioning the king for clemency. Scott’s Jeannie undertakes a similar trek to save her flighty but beloved sister Effie from a similar fate.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen sacrifices herself to spare her sister Primrose, when Primrose is chosen as a “tribute” for the fight-to-the-death that is the Hunger Games. Both novels show, definitively, that valour, nobility and endurance are not solely the preserve of male characters – threaten the well-being of a sister, and you will find this out.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen sacrifices herself to spare her sister Primrose.
IMDB
Both Scott’s and Collins’ sister relationships operate in the absence of an effective mother-figure. This is another motif of the sister-novel, designed to give sisters centre Sister stage and allow the true force of sisterly love and loyalty to be illuminated.
Austen’s Mrs Bennet is useless as the moral arbiter of anything, let alone the guidance of five daughters. Katniss and Primrose’s mother is desperately ill and decidedly out of action. Jeannie and Effie are raised by their widowed father. Even Marmee in Little Women is a distant, benevolent presence; more like a watchful guardian than an actively engaged, hands-on mother.
Which sister are you?
In the case of sister “broods”, Phillips analyses the ways multiple sisters complicate as well as reinforce literary tropes and stereotypes. “In fairy tales and legend,” Phillips writes, “sisters often come in threes, and the youngest seems to suffer the most.”
Whether this is true in life (and I suspect not), the youngest sister of a fairytale triad is often both the most oppressed, the most beautiful and the most virtuous, as though the gods of genetics have perfected their work, after two flawed attempts, in the creation of sister number three. (Recasting sisterhood as step-sisterhood, à la Cinderella, provides a neat biological rationale for this disconnect, as well as an opportunity to reflect on interfamilial female rivalry without disturbing sanctified notions of the family.)
The chocolate box sampler of sisters – as per Austen’s Bennet sisters and Alcott’s March sisters – has struck a particular chord for girl-readers across the decades in its promise of a “choose-your-own-identity” reading experience. Which one are you? Are you Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy? Are you Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Kitty, Lydia? Or, pivoting to Ballet Shoes: are you the dancer Fossil sister, the actress or the car mechanic?
The discrete personality types in these gangs of sisters enabled young girl readers to drape themselves in the costumes of their literary heroines, to try on different identities and temporarily situation themselves.
Literary sisters can offer a ‘choose-your-own-identity’ reading experience.
Etsy
Character territory was defined, staked and relatively unchallenged – so long as male suitors were not involved, at least. Though even in romance, sister loyalty often trumps marital obedience: in Howard’s End, Margaret will not allow the expulsion of her pregnant sister Helen from the house of her husband. Her stand against his authority is the novel’s central correction: an act of sisterly loyalty that puts other injustices right and returns the moral world to its rightful trajectory.
And what of sisters and their brothers? In the 19th century, in literature as in life, unmarried sisters were likely to be financially dependent on the tolerance and generosity of a brother. Such a sister might not only be her brother’s unpaid housekeeper but even his “helpmeet” in the absence of a wife. There is a whole thesis to be written on the politics and problematics of this scenario – and there probably has been.
Phillips gives us only one brother/sister pairing – Holden and Phoebe Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Phoebe is the lone source of stability and purpose in Holden’s frantic, confused New York City spin-out – an ally and side-kick, but also a beacon of sorts. She has a “galvanising effect” on him, Phillips writes.
Sisters are a mixed gift
Sisters do “galvanise”. We can’t choose them like we choose our friends and we can’t easily sever the bond, even when we want to. We must accept, accommodate, argue, make up, resent, renew ad infinitum.
“What a gift to know that a relationship will endure despite its ebbing and flowing, despite times when the other’s otherness leaves us feeling unbearably alone,” writes psychologist Christine Downing.
To quote the high priestess of sisterly fever-dreams, Christina Rossetti, in Goblin Market (1859):
For there is no friend like a sisterIn calm or stormy weather;To cheer one on the tedious way,To fetch one if one goes astray,To lift one if one totters down,To strengthen whilst one stands.
Great Literary Sisters reminds us to consider the special import of the sister relationship – in both our own lives and our reading lives.
