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Varieties of Revelatory Experience
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19192 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,992 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
THE DARK SISTER
Rebecca Goldstein
New York: Viking
260 pp., $19.95
Rebecca Goldstein, whose previous novels are The Mind-Body Problem and The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, is a writer of wit and intelligence who brings to her fiction a wide range of literary sources. She is interested in reviving men and women who loom significant in our cultural past--Wittgenstein, for example, figures large in The Mind-Body Problem--and also in considering the philosophical issues that they present for today's readers. In The Dark Sister, Goldstein takes on the James family, William, Henry, and Alice; the events of their lives enable her to investigate the creation of a novel, the varieties of revelatory experience, and the fate of brilliant women.
The Dark Sister is part psychological thriller, in the style of Henry James' Turn of the Screw, and part nineteenth century romance, in the style of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. There are many sisters in The Dark sister: Hedda, a contemporary novelist, and her sister Stella; Alice Bonnet, a nineteenth-century spinster, and her sister Vivianna; and, of course, Alice James, sister to the notable William and Henry. Goldstein interweaves the tales of these many sisters as we follow Hedda's writing of the novel The Dark Sister, haunted by the characters she creates and haunted, too, by her relationship with Stella.
Hedda has all of the psychological but none of the physical attributes of a Jamesian heroine. She is simply too tall--six foot two--and exceedingly thin. She is, however, appropriately introspective, self-deprecating, uncertain, and solitary. She spends many hours each day staring at herself naked in the mirror, searching for an identity that seemed to elude her as she grew taller and taller, farther away from her culture's ideal of femininity. In many ways, she shares a sensibility with James himself. Despite an early experience with sex, she has remained a "quintessential virgin," a phrase she uses to describe James. And despite her resignation to her fate, she longs for some fulfillment.
Stella is in many ways her opposite: flighty where Hedda is intense, sensuous where Hedda is ascetic. Stella is the veteran of four marriages and many love affairs. She has spent years in psychoanalysis but has found no inner peace. She criticizes Hedda's writing, urges her sister to feature more sex in her novels, and enjoys reading Hedda negative
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