Sylvie knows Helen, but she really doesn’t. Most of Sylvie’s memories of Helen are from years back as teens and children, and it appears that she didn’t really have interactions with, none in fact, upon her marriage. Mr. Mitchell said in class that “memory plays a crucial role in the coming of age process”. But, it is important to keep in mind that memory, by its nature, is fragmented. Be that as it may, I still believe that Sylvie tries her best to to describe Helen. But there are many problems due to which her answer to Lucille isn’t the most specific. First off, Sylvie doesn’t have an immediate answer because she wasn’t expecting this question: as Ruth says, Lucille asks rather “abruptly”. Then, of course, we have to keep in mind that since Sylvie wasn’t too close to her sister, she doesn’t really have much to say about her. And the little that she knows, it’s hard for her to talk about, since her sister committed suicide.
Lucille is obviously unhappy with Sylvie’s generic and vague responses. And the reason for that is because Lucille wants to know what her mother was “really like”. But, how is Sylvie supposed to know what “really like” means? And that’s the core of the problem. While Sylvie is Ruth and Lucille’s aunt she has never met them, and they haven’t met her. That’s precisely why Ruth’s plan to “wait [to ask Sylvie about our mother] till we knew her better]” is pretty solid: as Sylvie gets to know the girls better, she might have be able to better answer the questions as well.
This is where it gets interesting,though: Ruth isn’t as bummed about this as Lucille, in fact, she is somewhat amazed by this answer. Typical Ruth, she doesn’t really react to this. But let’s take that with a grain of salt, because Ruth doesn’t seem to react to much at all: whether it be talking about her “putative” father in parentheses or the death of her grandfather, grandmother, or mother as a small change in the world, Ruth always skids through emotional experiences as if they don’t really affect her. She is glad that Sylvie at least didn’t avoid the question (like all the other adults do when the girls bring up the topic of Helen) and that Sylvie tried to answer to the best of her ability.
Monday, March 30th
There are a lot of different factors that go into Sylvie's subpar answer to Lucille's question, as you point out here, and at first it was my reaction to blame Sylvie for not trying harder, for not remembering her sister. But, now that I've thought about it a bit more, and read this post, I think I can forgive Sylvie because I can see the situation better from her perspective. While she could have used her memory from her childhood and adolescence-- because I do think she and Helen were quite close as they were living together and isolated from most of the town-- she also was not given much warning and Lucille had high expectations.
ReplyDeleteIt interesting that as I was reading this blog post, I started to connect Ruth's and Lucille's relationship to the possible Sylvie's and Helen's relationship. This is all speculation, but as Isabel said, it's possible that Sylvie and Helen could have been quite close when they were young. And like Ruth and Lucille, the two may have grown apart. Likewise, Ruth and Lucille are beginning to grow apart. (Ruth representing Sylvie, and I guess Lucille could represent Helen).
ReplyDeleteYou make an interesting point about Lucille caring more about not having clear image of her mother. I think it's similar to her need to aspire to permanence and normalcy. She, like most people (and unlike Ruth/Sylvie), seems to feel the need to have control over and understand concrete things, where as Ruth has come to terms with the fact that memory and perception only present us with these tiny, usually incorrect blurbs of the world. To Lucille, Helen needs to be permanent and real, and getting to know her through Sylvie is a way to hold on to her, but for Ruth, Helen may as well be a thing of the past.
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