The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [72]
The wet black eye of a seal.
Cracks of light from between the warped boards.
God exhaling clouds of geese.
Copper siphon.
Column of mercury.
Each hour hanging like a pelt from her hands.
Taken together, one image laid over another, they will make a book of maps.
The outlines of a life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Gretchen Ernster, Joan Gould, Colin Harrison, Courtney Hodell, Jessica Kirshner, Kate Medina, Christopher Potter, Jennifer Prior, and Amanda Urban.
The equations on pages 133–34 are adapted from Lewis Fry Richardson’s Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, published by Cambridge University Press in 1922. The box kite described in this work of fiction is inspired by those built by Lawrence Hargrave, whose late–nineteenth-century kite experiments in New South Wales, Australia, contributed much to aeronautical science.
In researching the early years of meteorology, the author is especially indebted to Weather Forecasting in the United States, published by the Weather Bureau in 1916; to those issues of the Monthly Weather Review published (also by the Weather Bureau) between 1913 and 1916; to Henry Helm Clayton’s 1923 text, World Weather; to Donald R. Whitnah’s A History of the United States Weather Bureau; and to Mark Monmonier’s Air Apparent.
THE SEAL WIFE
A READER’S GUIDE
Kathryn Harrison
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Kathryn Harrison has been hailed as a master of “spare narrative.” Why might the prose of The Seal Wife be characterized as “spare”? Discuss examples or particular passages that highlight this quality of Harrison’s writing. What effect does this style have on the novel as a whole, or on your ability to imagine the time and place in which it is set?
In The Seal Wife, Harrison explores the relationship between physical and emotional suffering. Bigelow is subject to the harsh Alaskan climate, to which he is unaccustomed, as well as to the simultaneous and profound effects of an unexpected obsession. How do these aspects of Bigelow’s inner and outer lives interact? How does Harrison express the theme of suffering—its causes and consequences—through other characters in the novel?
What effect does Bigelow’s realization that the Aleut is not unable to speak, but rather is unwilling, have on her overall characterization? Does this understanding affect or alter your sense of the dynamics of their relationship? If so, how?
Over the course of the novel, speech (and the lack thereof) becomes a prominent thematic thread. The Aleut allows Bigelow into her home and her bed, but never speaks, though he does so “more volubly to her than . . . to anyone else.” At what other points in the book, and through which characters, is the theme of speech explored? What might Harrison be trying to convey through her use of speech as a link in Bigelow’s relationships, especially with women?
Despite the noteworthy dearth of women at Bigelow’s Alaskan outpost, he engages in relationships with several throughout the book. Describe the novel’s key female characters, and discuss the nature of Bigelow’s relationship with each. In what ways are these women different? Similar? How does Bigelow change or grow as a result of these relationships?
The various types of power dynamics between men and women—Bigelow and the Aleut, Getz and Miriam, and so on—are at the core of The Seal Wife. Describe and discuss some of the important male/female relationships in the book. What conclusions can you draw at novel’s end about Harrison’s ideas regarding sex and power? In many of the relationships through which the theme of sex and power emerges, there is a direct correlation between speech and power. How do the various qualities of gender, sex, speech, and power interact throughout the book?
As much attention as is paid to Bigelow’s inner obsession with the Aleut, equal attention is paid to his professional passion for charting the weather, his obsession with “recording