As I read Lily Martindale’s story, I found myself hung up on some of the smaller, more insignificant details - a beautiful image here and there, a name I couldn’t quite remember, a character’s profession. One in particular that comes to mind is the scene we discussed briefly at the beginning of class, the suicide attempt of Eleanor’s grandmother. The graphic image took me by surprise, and I didn’t know enough about any of the characters yet to assign any sort of meaning to the event. I thought maybe it was just a sad, but for the most part irrelevant detail to the overall plot.
When the event was mentioned a second time however, I thought there must have been a reason we were supposed to remember it. If not commit it to memory, we were to at the very least think about it more than once. As someone who is fascinated by the brain and consequently, its pathologies, I supposed that this might set up a family precedent for a character who would struggle with mental illness later on in the novel. However, as it turned out, Eleanor was the one who triumphed in the face of tragedy. She thrived in all areas of life: her social life, career, marriage, and took full responsibility for taking care of those around her.
Mental illness is partially genetic, and like in many other aspects of our lives, the genes involved will affect our behavior if and when they are activated. It’s not nearly as black and white as some hereditary diseases, like Huntington’s disease. For the child of a person affected with Huntington’s disease, he or she has a 50% chance of inheriting it. Mental disorders, on the other hand, are genetically predisposed, but don’t guarantee that a person will struggle with whatever illness has affected their family. Instead, stressful environments at any given time in their lives might bring out pathologies for those who carry those particular genes. This is an oversimplified summary of the science behind this topic, but I found it curious that this detail didn’t fall within my expectations in this story. Given the trajectory of the young girls’ paths, I would have expected such a traumatic detail to belong in Lily’s family history, not Eleanor’s. I hate that I think about it this way, that one ailment belonged to someone else, but the scientist in me can’t help but reject this piece of the Hill’s family history.
In case you have any interest in Gregor Mendel:
Interesting thoughts. I wonder if one point of including the grandmother's suicide is to suggest a sense of generational differences for women. My own sense is that women of the early and middle 20th Century had it much harder than those of Eleanor's generation. These women were often very well educated, but were still confined to very narrow conceptions of what it was proper for women to do. They often abandoned their own career and personal aspirations the instant that they got married or pregnant.
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