I return to the mid-20th Century for some domestic thrillers

In an effort to shape my promiscuous reading habits, I hit on the idea to go on a course of mid-century domestic thrillers by women for the summer. The advantage of this program is that it allows me to re-read "The Price of Salt" by Patricia Highsmith and "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier.

I'm not rating selections now, but will when I've done.

Anyhow, first up is ...

Cassandra at the Wedding
by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is deeply attached to her twin sister Judith. They live together in San Francisco, own a piano together, and Cassandra has their whole life together planned. Judith has been in New York City for nine months, has met a young doctor, and plans to marry him. Cassandra is feeling angry, lonely, betrayed, and is drinking too much. She may also have more than sisterly feelings about Judith; she talks frequently about being afraid of men, she has no boyfriends, and Judith refers to a series of Cassandra's women friends whom she seems to take up and cast off as she might a series of lovers. But if Baker does mean to imply something sexual, she keeps it oblique.

The story is told in alternate first-person sections by Cassandra and Judith, which makes the novel wink back and forth between darkness and light. But it’s not always clear which is the book's dark sister. Cassandra’s attachment to Judith seems unhealthy. But Judith’s decision to marry seems precipitous, a running away from her genteel and alcoholic father, blinkered grandmother, and memory of the twins’ mother, long dead of lung cancer, but lurking around the periphery of the story in memories in that echo Cassandra’s volatility and frustration.

The climax of the book resolves far too quickly. (SPOILER: Cassandra tries to commit suicide on the wedding night, and Judith’s fiancé must bring her around with emetics, colonics, and a stomach pump. She recovers from all this quicker than from a hangover 24 hours earlier. I admit this marred the ending for me somewhat. There is also a very strange sense that--not to put too fine a point on this--Doctor Finch consummates his relationship with Cassandra before his wife, an observation Judith herself suggests.) But there is a long and interesting denouement in which Cassandra gets the last word, reflecting on her upbringing, considering her economic privileges, thinking more empathetically about others, looking afresh at her scholarly efforts.

Written in 1962, a year before Betty Friedan gave voice to “the problem that has no name,” Cassandra seems to be on the road to envisioning a self-directed life; Judith disappears into matrimony and is never heard from again. Baker doesn’t imply that Judith’s story has a sad ending so much as a very conventional one. For all her selfishness, dramatics, and quirks—in fact, because of them—Cassandra is the one Baker wants us to be interested in.