Friend of My Youth

The narrator and her mother interpret the story of the Grieves sisters very differently. The narrator’s mother sees Flora as saintly and tragic, while the narrator views her far more skeptically. To the narrator, there is nothing inherently noble about Flora’s self-sacrifice and renunciation of sex; rather, she believes that Flora must secretly be spiteful and bitter. The narrator has grown up in a climate of greater sexual freedom than her mother has, even though they have both grown up in isolated small towns. For the mother, it is sex that is the danger for women, while for the narrator it is domesticity.

Both Flora Grieves and the narrator’s own mother represent extreme versions of this domesticity. Flora has chosen to remain with her family, despite her fiancé’s betrayal of her with her younger sister; not only this, but she has devoted herself to caring for her younger sister in her sickness. She is motivated by her piety, as well as by a sense of family loyalty. While the narrator’s mother is not religious to the degree that Flora is, she does share some of Flora’s strictness. It is illness that has confined her to her own home, but to the narrator her mother’s illness has only made her a more extreme version of herself: “I felt a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking, an incontestable crippled-mother power, which would capture and choke me” (20).