Word: celia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fall clean-up is not all fun and games. "It's toil," pointed out Celia M. Francis '87. "I'm just here because it pays 15 cents more per hour than my summer...
...first person plural "we," is Chase's greatest and most effective innovation. The narrators are two sets of sisters--Anne and Katie, Jenny and Celia--whose lives are so intertwined it seems quite natural that their feelings and impressions are unified. "Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal" Together they play and grow, all the while watching the lives around them from a single perspective. The daughters present a wealth...
CHASE develops her feminine consciousness in the first part of the book, describing the girls' growing sexual awareness. One sister, Celia, is separated from the others by her unique beauty and innocent charm as a teenager. Celia inspires mixed admiration, envy and anticipation from the other girls, who hear their mother warn of "Endless betrayal, maidens forsaken, drowned or turned slut..."even as they witness their sister's endless stream of romances. Chase builds her feminine voice from this distinct consciousness, rooted firmly in the girls' sexuality...
...that all I she had ever had in life was kids and work and useless men and what she wanted, and had earned besides, was to be left alone." Time sweeps everything along in its great, slow spiral: Gram's farm, Uncle Dan's butcher shop, Celia's beauty. People and houses move for a while with the current, then drop away to be replaced by hazy afterimages-family gossip, family myth. This musing, brooding, backward-looking novel, the author's first, summons up scenes of middle-aged women huddling over coffee across a kitchen table...
...reflects this collective consciousness. Scenes are related by "we," never by "I." When the reader notices this he may try to isolate a single speaker by elimination: Katie has crawled under the stall door, Anne is wedged there, and Jenny is looking for a dime, so it must be Celia. But no, we have established that it is not Celia. The speaker stays hidden, and her stubborn use of the first person plural makes the point that she and the others moved about the big house like fish in a school...