The Two Sisters: Dark and Fair, Kind and Unkind. the History of a Story in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Abstract

The two sisters: dark and fair, kind and unkind. The history of a story in the nineteenth-century British novel The thesis traces the story of two contrasting heroines, usually sisters, who are tested and tried in a similar way. One does everything right, the other does everything wrong, and the good (kind) sister is rewarded, the bad (unkind) sister is punished. Because the story is originally a fairy tale (AT480) the thesis begins with examination of some of the earliest recorded forms of the tale. Proceeding through general discussions of a number of texts, supported by more detailed examination of particular examples, the thesis shows that many didactic fictions produced about 1800 show a remarkably similar plot line, although in the realistic mode of the novel of courtship. Virtue is rewarded by marriage, vice punished by failed sexual relations, social isolation, and even death. Scott's novels often also deploy a comparable pair of heroines, distinguished by their colouring: the unkind sister is dark, the kind sister fair. Drawing on these forerunners, mid-Victorian novelists like Collins, the Brontes and Eliot very commonly present a pair of sister heroines. They become a standard format through which to deal with the 'woman question', whether from a radical or conservative standpoint. In the oral folktale, however, the unkind sister has typically been marked as masculine, and the fair heroine has exemplified the feminine. Some Victorian novelists begin to use the display of difference between the dark and fair heroines as a playful simulacrum of the sexual difference, a way of testing, sometimes undermining, the prevalent theory of gender. The figure of the dark sister is crucial in this process, for it is she who cuts herself loose from the norms of gender ideology. The pair of sisters are therefore a particular form of the 'double' which has long been recognised as a favoured nineteenth-century metaphor for fractured or uncertain human identity. A brief investigation of Victorian ideas about sisterhood shows why the sibling tends to be a favoured form of double. Feminist novelists towards the end of the century rarely use the format, favouring a solitary heroine. But Schreiner and Grand make original use of the two-sister formula in dealing with typical concerns of the agitation for women’s rights at that time: prostitution, venereal disease, the future of the race, marriage and motherhood. By way of their paired heroines these authors produce millennial visions of a new age brought about by reform of sexual relations.