Abstract
This chapter explores the interplay of replacement and rivalry between stepsisters in Jane Alison’s memoir The Sisters Antipodes, in which two seemingly identical families trade spouses. Via the tropes of father-hunger, twinning and the Double, it traces a complicated account of mirroring through the troubling relationship between the ‘metamorphic families’, with a particular focus on Jane and Jenny – stepsisters who correspond in age and colouring – following the ‘split’. Though often continents apart for extended periods of time, the girls become fierce rivals in their struggle to be top daughter to their respective – and each other’s – fathers. As they develop into womanhood, the competition grows increasingly destructive. The chapter draws attention to the wretched human economics of desire and desirability in this tragic tale of familial rearrangement.
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Notes
- 1.
While this is a memoir and thus based on real-life facts, I shall be referring to it as one would to fiction, that is, in the present tense. Note, throughout this chapter, ‘Alison’ refers to the author Jane Alison and ‘Jane’ refers to her child-self in the book.
- 2.
In fact, the parents’ birthdays are also uncannily close: ‘My father’s birthday came a week before Paul’s […] My mother’s birthday fell two weeks before Helen’s’ (35). Of course, the age gap between the girls is a problem for Jane, because Jenny will always be slightly ahead of the sororal game. Even so, Jane Alison is the storyteller here, so everything told is her version of events.
- 3.
Jane Alison (2014) has translated a selection of poetry by Ovid . In The Sisters Antipodes , alongside the numerous beautiful descriptions of landscape and nature which I simply cannot do justice to here, Alison makes extensive use of her Ovidian expertise, particularly in the way she depicts girls in various states of becoming and change, such as here (see also 186, 275).
- 4.
Actually, they have differently coloured eyes: Jane’s are blue; Jenny’s are brown.
- 5.
Of course, there are material differences between the two sets of girls, especially after Paul and Rosemary’s split. Jane and Maggy are two Cinderellas scrubbing the house, having little money for clothes, and attending a school where ‘being white was a problem’ (120). By contrast, Jenny and Patricia have their own bathrooms in a beautiful apartment, wear fashionable clothes, have their own beauty products, and attend a private school.
- 6.
The notion of the ‘Father Romance’ was the research topic of my 2013 PhD, which I am now developing into a monograph.
- 7.
Jane’s stepmother Helen also regards herself as a rival, positioning Jane as a type of Electra to her Clytemnestra.
- 8.
Aside from Jane and Jenny’s names, Alison used replacement names for all other characters in her memoir. So were the real names of the stepfather and the boyfriend also identical? Later, Jenny points out how another of Jane’s boyfriends – Anthony – ‘is exactly like Father’ [Paul] (232).
References
Alison, Jane, 2014, Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press)
Alison, Jane, 2010 [2009], The Sisters Antipodes (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Freud, Sigmund, 1977 [1909], On Sexuality: ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ and Other Works, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, tr. & ed. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Maine, Margo, 2004 [1991], Father-Hunger: Fathers, Daughters and the Pursuit of Thinness (Carlsbad, CA.,: Gürze Books)
Mitchell, Juliet, 2004, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Owen, Ursula, 1983, ed., Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (London: Virago)
Plath, Sylvia 1989 [1981], Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London & Boston: Faber & Faber)
Sabbadini, Andrea, 1988, ‘The Replacement Child’, in Contemporary Psychoanalysis 24: 528–547
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Owen, J. (2018). The Sisters Antipodes: replacement and its ripples of sibling rivalry. In: Owen, J., Segal, N. (eds) On Replacement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_6
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