The Beet Queen

The characters in the novel are also riven by rivalries. While Karl and Mary do not compete for the attentions of Adelaide—Mary is too stubborn and practical to engage in what she knows would be a losing battle—they do compete to define their collective memory of who their mother was. After Adelaide disappears in the plane with The Great Omar, Karl chooses to imagine her as the victim of a kidnapping. This irks Mary, who knows the truth and wishes the plane might crash and kill her mother as punishment for abandoning the children. This difference in their reactions to the foundational trauma of both their lives illustrates the difference in their personalities. Where Karl is hapless and vulnerable, Mary is pragmatic and capable, and she views Karl’s vulnerability as another burden she must bear. When the two are separated on their first night in Argus, Mary feels the burden lifted, and consciously or not, she chooses not to look for him, guaranteeing that his absent presence will continue to haunt her for many years to come.

The contrast between Mary and Karl could not be starker. Where she is short and squat, with plain looks at best, Karl is tall and willowy, with a dark handsomeness. While Mary enjoys the visits from Adelaide’s male friend, “Karl hate[s] Mr. Ober’s visits” (6), envying the attention his mother gives the interloper, whom he does not yet realize is his father. When Adelaide is giving birth to the baby, Mary waits with rapt attention, excited for her new sibling, but Karl faints upon hearing his mother scream. Mary’s unperturbed reaction to this—“I had given up on reviving Karl each time he fainted” (8)—indicates that this level of sensitivity is common in Karl. Mary will have no truck with what she sees as weakness. When Adelaide rejects the baby, giving it only the barest of necessities, Mary coddles the infant. She loves the baby, though Karl sees the boy as another rival in his quest to dominate Adelaide’s affections. When Mary wants to follow the man who says he will have his wife feed the baby after Adelaide flies away, Karl panics and insists that Mary stay with him. She must make a difficult choice that, in the end, costs her both of her brothers.

The rivalry that develops between Mary and Sita is even more intense both because it has generational force and because it takes place in close quarters and over long periods of time. Sita becomes a kind of surrogate sibling for Mary, and their competition for the friendship of Celestine—and for all the attention and love Sita feels is her due—cements an antagonism that will linger for the rest of their lives. Aunt Fritzie, Adelaide’s sister, has no respect or affection for this woman who abandoned her children. She, like Mary, is practical and suffers no nonsense; Sita’s hatred for Mary stems, in part, from the fact that her own mother favors Mary because they are similar. Her father, too, favors Mary, though his affection derives largely from the pity he feels for the child. The final challenge to the girls’ relationship comes as Celestine’s growing bond with Mary means she spends less time with her former best friend, Sita. Later in life, both Mary and Sita begin to realize that they have always cared more for each other than they’ve ever been willing to admit. For example, Mary says, “[M]aybe I was closer to Sita than I ever was to Celestine” (66), and later, when Sita moves away to Fargo, she says, “I missed Sita more than I thought I would” (78). Sita, too, expresses compassion for the circumstances that brought Mary into her home—yet she never allows herself to show such empathy.

As soon as Celestine’s daughter, Dot, is born, she becomes the focal point for all the long-standing rivalries among the novel’s adult characters. For example, Sita develops a close relationship with Dot, effectively stealing her from her mother and from Mary in order to punish them both for having abandoned her—as she sees it—when they were children: “For an instant I had taken Dot away from them both the same way Mary stole Celestine” (288). Old grudges maintain their generational power. Dot herself continues to be relatively oblivious to the amount of love that surrounds her—though she does understand the power of enthrallment. She recognizes, even if mostly unconsciously, the degree to which she is being used as a pawn in the rivalries of the adults, and as a result she “gr[ows] angrier each year, frightening [the adults], making havoc, causing danger to herself” (301). Further, “[i]n her worst moods, the world was out to destroy Dot” (303). Too much indulgence and not enough discipline—not to mention the psychological impact of growing up without a father and the generational traumas that she has inherited—has turned Dot into a difficult character, at best.

Still, Dot presents an opportunity for the adults to redeem their own traumatic childhoods, and thus the primary rivalry in the book eventually forms between Mary and Celestine over the capricious love of Dot. Mary admits that they spoiled her—Dot’s first word is “MORE”—and, as a result, “[they] were making a selfish girl” (181). This is because, as Mary also admits, “[they] were thorough in living through her, in living [their] childhoods over” (181). Thus, Dot becomes an object of contention. While Mary believes that “Dot and [she] had a mental connection” (180), Celestine “see[s] too much of [her]self in Dot” (215). Celestine grows tired of Mary’s interference with the raising of Dot. While Celestine, as the mother, wants to teach Dot the difference between right and wrong, between lying and telling the truth, Mary, as the aunt, wants to indulge her every whim and serve as her friend and confidante. Wallace witnesses the worst of this competition and tries not to worry: “I think that Dot’s behavior was partly the result of Celestine and Mary’s squabbling. Sometimes I thought the friction between the two would grind Dot to dust, but instead she hardened between them, grew tough” (233). In the end, though, Celestine need not worry. When Dot is hurt or humiliated—at the Christmas play or at the Beet Queen ceremony—she runs toward her mother, that primal force.