Terri Apter
THE SISTER KNOT
Why we fight, why we're jealous, and why we'll love each other no matter what
304pp. Norton. £16.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 39306058 4
Forty-three years ago almost to the day, I came home from nursery school to be greeted by my grandmother. “Well”, she announced, “you’ve got a little brother.” “What?” I roared, “I wanted a little sister!” No further siblings were added to our family, however, and so the state of having, if not of being, a sister, remains intriguing in its unfamiliarity. No sibling, male or female, escapes the “feeling of envy, primitive and horrifying” which their brothers and sisters can provoke, but Terri Apter’s fascinating study of sisters lays bare particular qualities in the sister relationship which are deftly summed up in the book’s subtitle, “Why we fight, why we’re jealous, and why we’ll love each other no matter what”. Apter builds on the pioneering psychoanalytic work of Juliet Mitchell and development psychology research of Judy Dunn by focusing her attention on gender in the sibling dynamic, leaving brotherly and cross-sibling relations to one side to tease out the rewards and frustrations of “sistering”, as she terms the combination of being and having a sister. In language the general reader can understand, Apter explains very clearly the results of earlier researchers, but the book’s true originality lies in the way she fleshes out the theoretical positions with qualitative data. Having interviewed seventy-six sisters from thirty-seven family groups, ranging in age from five to seventy-one, Apter brings vividly before the reader the complicated emotions, motives and behaviours involved in “sistering”. Sisters are the subject of the book, no doubt because Apter has a sister and is the mother of two daughters. But she stresses that sistering is vital to the construction of female subjectivity, even for those of us who have no sisters, in a way that “brothering”, perhaps, is not.
Siblings have been surprisingly overlooked in the psychoanalytical tradition. After scenting the importance of a childhood relationship with his nephew, who was actually a year older than the young Sigmund, Freud abandoned his interest in siblings in order to concentrate on the triangle of father, mother and baby in the Oedipus complex. When he does glance at siblings, he notes the relationship as essentially rivalrous: “His Majesty the Baby” has to compete for the all-important parental attention with older and younger siblings. The mother–child dyad has been of primary importance in post-Freudian psychoanalytical thinking. Only in the past few years have psychoanalysts – primarily Mitchell, whose work is fundamental to rethinking the sibling – begun to examine the sibling bond and its concomitant traumas.
Psychologists, in contrast, have been aware of the relevance of siblings in child development for some decades. They have uncovered both competition and solidarity within sibling groups, finding siblings in care-giving and socializing roles, as well as siblings who abuse, or encourage their siblings in deviant or risky behaviours. While child psychologists such as Dunn have cast light on the ambivalence in interactions between young siblings, less research has been done on siblings in adulthood. Following the fortunes of sibling groups over a lifespan is a complex, long-term project, but such studies as have been done suggest that siblings become less close in early adulthood when friends and romantic partners become more crucial, that intimacy in middle life depends on living close to one another and getting on with siblings’ spouses, and that the sibling bond can become very important in old age. Siblings share their memories of the past, and often take care of one another after spouses have died and when children are busy with their own lives.
Apter starts with the traumatic shock for her elder sister of the arrival of the new baby. As Juliet Mitchell has shown, the toddler has to come to terms with another girl, just like her, and who, in her mind, is capable of and intent on replacing her. The older sister has to establish herself as completely different from the new arrival; much “borderwork”, in Apter’s phrase, must be done to establish that: “I am me, I am not you”. Mitchell suggests that the younger sibling is also traumatized by the fear that another child will come along, even when the family is complete, but Apter’s interviews throw up a striking pattern: sisters tend to feel much more guilt about their mistreatment of their sisters than resentment at the way they have themselves been mistreated. Memory is highly selective; while the older sister may remember how she tried to ignore the embarrassing kid sister at school, the younger one tends to remember how her big sister defended her from playground bullies. Sisters are not doomed always to fall back on the dynamics of the nursery. Change and understanding can alter their perceptions of each other, yet established patterns are strikingly illuminated by the interview material. In the most memorable narrative, one sister talks about discovering that she is the perfect match for a younger sister whose kidneys are failing. She wants to donate a kidney to save her sister’s life, and indeed she does, but what comes across most powerfully in her account is her continuing resentment at the pressure her family put her under to make the donation, and her perception that her sister is not grateful enough for the sacrifice. The recipient sister protests her gratitude, her continuing love for her sister, and her irritation at the undercurrent of resentment, for she is clear that she would have donated her own kidney to her older sister if the situation had been reversed – because that’s what sisters do.
The various illustrative anecdotes are sensitively handled and the sisters speak vividly for themselves. In another family, three sisters have to reconfigure their relationship when one of them is raped; the victim needs a great deal of care and understanding from her sisters. They indeed offer unconditional and loving support, but one confesses to feeling furious with her sister for having made herself vulnerable and getting herself so badly hurt. The cost of protecting and loving one’s sister begins to be reckoned here; that sisterly instinct, Apter warns, meshes with the powerful social norms which constrain women to be caretakers, sometimes at the expense of their own self-interest and their own identities.
Rape and kidney failure are extreme examples, however; much more familiar will be the “prolonged and heated arguments” between Apter’s daughters when collecting conkers, about which specimens were superior and who had the right to claim them. Once home, of course, the conker hoard would be forgotten until, now mouldy and useless, it would be thrown away. Or, Dymphna, now aged eleven, recalls how her older sister would always challenge her to race to the car. She always lost, but she could never refuse the challenge, even though she knew it would always end in tears of frustrated fury. “The times when she ‘lost’ and her sister ‘won’ never felt insignificant because they carried symbolic weight”, Apter concludes.
Even the girl who has no sister will instinctively try to “sister”. Apter adduces Jane Austen’s Emma (whose older sister is largely absent from her life) and her recruitment of poor Harriet Smith to the role of younger sister. Sistering inflects women’s interactions with other women, driving the passion and volatility of female friendships. The dynamics of the teenage female clique, the sudden unreasoning pang of envy at another woman’s success, the fear that female colleagues are plotting to surpass you, all find their origins in the girl’s struggle to differentiate herself from her sisters. Apter offers a partly evolutionary explanation of sibling behaviour: drawing on ornithology, she notes that the child or nestling’s drive to secure sufficient resources from the parents to thrive explains why equal shares of cake or of kingdoms can never be enough. Though there are Darwinian reasons for children’s bickering, Apter also notes that this functions as an attention-getting strategy; any parent will recognize how children can subconsciously co-operate in staging a quarrel when the adults seem to be too deeply absorbed in their own affairs. Evolution explains the powerful protective instinct too; siblings share a percentage of genetic material and are thus motivated to make sacrifices for one another; an instinct compounded by socially imposed norms for sibling interaction.
Why just sisters? Apter justifies her concentration on one half of the world’s sibling population by noting the systematic omission of women from much psychoanalytic literature. Male psychology – the Oedipus complex, for example – is still taken to be the norm, and girls’ development either assumed to be identical, or categorized as deviant. In two studies published as late as 1997 and 1998, Apter notes, “it is still possible to present brand new theories of sibling effects and peer influence on human developments with reference to brothers and to men, while noting in passing that girls and women are ‘an anomaly,’ or that one’s conclusions could never be supported by studying girls”. And she argues persuasively that the social ideals for women as empathetic and caring need to be balanced by their struggle for differentiation and control. Relationships between women, sometimes romanticized in popular thinking as loving and unconditionally supportive, can also be hypocritical, envious and bitchy. Attention to the “sister knot” of the book’s title, Apter suggests, uncovers the complexities of sistering, a drive which forms the basis for women’s other social relationships – particularly with other women, but also with men. Her account culminates in a nuanced understanding of how sisterhood goes beyond the family, permeating women’s social and individual identities.
The Sister Knot has enormous explanatory value, both for those who have sisters and those who do not. Every sister to whom I mentioned this book regaled me with an instant, but considered, assessment of her role vis-à-vis her sisters, their jealousies and generosities, and the sense that sisters are involved in an endless dialogue with one another about family and character, made possible by shared history and by the elusive tie of blood. The Sister Knot – despite the love I have for my brother – confirms that my four-year-old’s instinctive apprehension was a sound one: a sister, challenging, infuriating, infinitely loving and lovable would have been a wonderful creature to live one’s life alongside.
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Carolyne Larrington's most recent book is King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and her sisters in Arthurian tradition, published last year.
