“They seem to be nice children.”
“Very quiet.”
“Not as pretty as Helen was.”
“The one has pretty hair.” (31-32)
There was a little silence, and then Sylvie hesitantly put her icy hand on my head and said, “You're Ruthie. And you're Lucille. Lucille has the lovely red hair.” (45)There is a fairly good case that Lucille's red hair is a symbol related to her eventual flight from Ruth and Sylvie. I have been musing how transience is also to some degree a trait in the Foster family tree.
I constructed this family tree diagram and categorized each member using colors.
| Key: |
| Domesticity |
| Death |
| Transience |
| Absence |
(We get the full name "Lucille Stone" on page 217.)
I'm not sure we can equate the deaths with transience (especially considering that Edmund Foster built the house) but they are related phenomena, overlapping, for example, when Sylvie walks out onto the train bridge. My original plan was to include absence with transience but Molly and Reginald to our knowledge don't move around. Fisher is a complete unknown, so I matched his type with Sylvie.
Sylvie's hair is light brown (11). Reginald Stone is "apparently a pale fellow with sleek black hair" (14). No one else in the family has red hair that we are told. Red hair is a recessive trait, technically, and it is unlikely that Robinson took formal genetics into account as she crafted her fiction novel, so we don't know where Lucille's red hair actually came from. To use a similar analogy, transience/premature death/absence/weirdness would be a dominant trait in the Foster line that Lucille does not have.
So then what does it mean that Ruth and Lucille can't agree on what color hair their mother had? With your taxonomy in mind, the disagreement could be connected to the larger question of "what kind of person" Helen was (as, late in the novel, Ruth and Lucille have quite different people in mind when they think of their mother--Lucille's mother died in an accident).
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