Blue Sisters

The Prologue and opening chapters of the novel foreground the intensity and ambiguity of the relationship between sisters; by focusing on a group of sisters with distinctive personalities, Coco Mellors participates in a literary tradition that includes works such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. By alternating the points of view in different chapters, Mellors allows each sister to occupy a roughly equal portion of the narrative. This narrative technique reveals the limitations of what the sisters reveal to one another: Each sister needs her own chapters because much of what she is experiencing is hidden from the others.

At the start of the novel, the three surviving sisters are living in three different countries, and this physical distance symbolizes how the emotional distance between them. New York City looms as an emotionally loaded setting for all of them since it is where they grew up and where Nicky died, but each of the sisters has now distanced herself by choosing to live elsewhere. Over the course of the novel, the closing of the geographic distance between the three women symbolically reflects the closing of the emotional gulfs between them. The sisters are highly successful in their respective fields but also tend to display different forms of repression and difficulty acknowledging their emotions (especially the profound grief triggered by Nicky’s death). Avery is the only one of the sisters engaged in a long-term relationship, but she struggles to experience authentic intimacy with her wife. In the wake of her grief, “Avery didn’t want to be understood […] not by her wife, not by anyone” (69). This tendency to retreat into isolation is something each of the sisters experiences in her own way, and the events of the novel gradually force them to lower their emotional defenses. 

Avery’s tendency toward secrecy (which will eventually culminate in adultery) is hinted at early in the novel through behaviors such as smoking and petty shoplifting (even though she is wealthy enough to buy whatever she wants). Bonnie likewise keeps secrets and conceals her true feelings from Pavel. She has long been unable to confide her attraction to him and was also unable to explain her true grief after Nicky’s death. These powerful emotions leave her feeling vulnerable, threatening to erode her carefully maintained self-control. Lucky is seemingly carefree and leading an enviable life; her nickname is ironic because she does indeed seem to have fortuitously achieved fame and fortune. Nonetheless, her excessive consumption of alcohol emerges almost immediately as a way to avoid confronting her genuine emotions. At the start of the novel, the narrator notes that Lucky “has said the words I need a drink one hundred and thirty-two times so far this year. That’s more than she’s said I love you in her entire life” (7), juxtaposing emotional intimacy and the numbing effect of inebriation. The early establishment that Lucky has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol introduces the theme of Overcoming Addiction into the novel.

In the first three chapters, Mellors uses symbolism to provide insight into each sister’s emotional state. Lucky vomits out the window while wearing an elaborate couture gown, symbolizing the juxtaposition between her seemingly glamorous exterior and her inner turmoil and pain. Lucky has the opportunity to wear an expensive garment that would be inaccessible to almost everyone, but it is meaningless to her; like the dress, Lucky has a stunningly beautiful exterior, but this doesn’t mask her inner pain. Lucky’s vomiting reveals her unhealthy relationship to alcohol (she drinks to the point of vomiting even though she is in the middle of a workday) and also symbolizes her failed attempts to contain and conceal her pain. Lucky tries to give the impression of being carefree, but just as she can’t stop herself from vomiting, she will prove unable to prevent her internal struggles from spilling forth.

After spending the night forlornly walking the beach, Bonnie comes home to find her feet stained with black tar, which she struggles to wash off. The tar symbolizes her lingering sense of guilt and responsibility after Nicky’s death. Stains from substances often symbolize a character’s feeling that they are tainted or “marked” in some way (notably, in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s inner guilt and torment is symbolized by her delusion of having blood-stained hands). Although there is a lengthy delay before she reveals this information to her sisters, Bonnie secretly blames herself for Nicky’s death since she turned down Nicky’s request to acquire pain pills, driving Nicky to illegally obtain pain medication that turned out to be tainted with fentanyl. Bonnie also carries specific trauma from the death since she was the one to find her sister, and the two of them were living together at the time. Bonnie’s struggles to wash the tar off reveals her desire to put the painful events of the past behind her, but also the impossibility of doing so.

Avery secretly smokes cigarettes; the cigarettes symbolize her desire to rebel, as well as her self-destructive impulses. Because Avery so often behaves in a responsible fashion, she finds an outlet in behavior that is bad for her. Smoking is an outlet because “it wasn’t the cigarettes that made her feel young exactly, it was the return to the hidden self” (57). The narrative clearly foreshadows that Avery is going to engage in more serious acts of self-sabotage in the future, prophesying that “in a few weeks, she will implode her life and marriage in ways she didn’t think possible” (4). The symbolism of the cigarettes contributes to this foreshadowing. Together, all of the symbolism also alludes to the theme of The Enduring Impact of Grief because even after a year has passed, the sisters are engulfed in pain and loss.