The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [73]
When the heavy sun appears, rolling sullenly along the horizon, it reveals landscapes of unutterable splendor, ice glazing every twig, turning gravel to diamonds, garbage to ransoms. . . . But what he described as grandeur in last year’s letters to his mother and sister now strikes him as threatening, the inlet’s water black and violent, heaving under a mantle of splinteredice.
In such passages, Harrison uses richly metaphorical language to describe the Alaskan landscape as seen through Bigelow’s eyes. While such descriptions provide a vivid sense of setting, they also provoke questions of physical realism versus emotional perspective. How might Bigelow’s literal vision of his surroundings be a reflection or projection of his inner state at any given moment in the book? Find and discuss a few passages throughout the novel that illuminate this relationship. How does Harrison’s depiction of the landscape change in relation to Bigelow’s emotional evolution? What other “realistic” aspects of Bigelow’s surroundings (other characters, professional pursuits, and so on) provide a mirror for his inner narrative?
Discuss the title of the novel. In terms of its mythic implications, what might it convey about the story and its characters? A parallel is drawn throughout the book, particularly at its end, between the Aleut and a captured seal. What implications does this comparison have for the outcome of Bigelow and the Aleut’s relationship and story? How might the Aleut’s consistent qualities of self-possession and self-awareness be reconciled with the implied conclusion?
Bigelow seems to have achieved a sense of balance and resolve by the end of the novel, a composure at the other extreme of the emotional spectrum from the air of obsession that permeates the book. Discuss the arc of Bigelow’s character development. What does his emotional evolution imply about the relationships between his emotional and professional pursuits? How does he use potentially self-destructive feelings and behaviors to achieve creative success and emotional balance? How do you feel about the end of the novel?
SUGGESTED READING FROM THE AUTHOR
Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
KATHRYN HARRISON is the author of the novels The Binding Chair, Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water. She has also written a memoir, The Kiss, and an essay collection, Seeking Rapture. Her personal essays, including some from Seeking Rapture, have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children. She can be reached at thebindingchair@yahoo.com.
Also by Kathryn Harrison
SEEKING RAPTURE
THE BINDING CHAIR
THE KISS
POISON
EXPOSURE
THICKER THAN WATER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2002 by Kathryn Harrison
Reader’s guide copyright © 2003 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The
Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
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