The Thirteenth Tale

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-7

Part 1, Chapters 8-15

Part 2, Chapters 16-22

Part 2, Chapters 23-29

Part 2, Chapters 30-36

Part 2, Chapters 37-44

Part 3, Chapters 45-48

Part 4, Chapters 49-52

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Bond Between Twins

Throughout The Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield explores the bond between twins and the effect of their separation. She illustrates this through the relationship between the Angelfield twins, Emmeline and Adeline, as well as through Margaret and her dead twin, Moira. The fact that both Vida and Margaret are, in Margaret’s words, “lone twins” is what finally convinces Margaret to take the job as Vida’s biographer, placing this theme firmly as a central concern of the novel.

At Angelfield, Emmeline and Adeline live entirely in their own world during their childhood. As the Missus says, “They don’t know that anyone is alive but themselves” (83). The twins live in a self-contained world until Hester comes to Angelfield, and to her, it even seems as though they are each one half of a whole person: “Where an ordinary, healthy person will feel a whole range of different emotions, display a great variety of behaviors, the twins, you might say, have divided the range of emotions and behaviors into two and taken one set each” (178). Emmeline has a healthy appetite, is quiet and docile, and shows interest in her schoolwork, while Adeline is thin and never eats, wild, violent, and withdrawn. In fact, Hester undertakes the separation of the twins because of her suspicion that Emmeline’s presence is hindering Adeline’s development. She theorizes that, upon separation, Adeline will be given the space to develop the other half of herself.

However, Hester does not consider what separating the twins will do to them. Setterfield conveys the seriousness of the separation through Margaret’s eyes, as she understands the devastation of being separated from her own twin: “The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake […] As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living” (183). While the twins are separated, “They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls” (185). When they are united upon Hester’s departure, “they lay in bed, nose to nose, gazing cross-eyed at each other […] And with the transfusion that took place via that twenty-four-hour-long gaze, the connection that had been broken, healed. And like any wound that heals, it left its scar” (195). This scar, from the separation of twins, is something that Margaret has intimate experience with as well. Setterfield uses Margaret’s experience to emphasize this theme further, as she is a twin who was separated and never reunited.

As Margaret listens to the story of the Angelfield twins, she is grappling with her own relationship to her twin. Margaret was born a conjoined twin, and when the doctors separated them, Margaret’s twin died. Margaret has felt this loss throughout her life, even before she discovered proof of her twin’s existence. With this discovery, she understands her own behaviors that have never made sense before: “Pressing my hands to my right side, I bowed my head, nose almost to shoulder […] Too familiar to be pondered until now, my discovery revealed its meaning. I was looking for my twin. Where she should have been. By my side” (21). Margaret claims to have always known that there was something missing: “there had always been a feeling. The knowledge, too familiar to have ever needed words, that there was something. An altered quality in the air to my right. A coagulation of light. Something peculiar to me that set empty space vibrating. My pale shadow” (21). For Margaret, her separation from her twin is, and always has been, torture.

Margaret feels her sister’s absence always, and the scar on her side from their separation is a constant reminder. She often dreams of her twin, and when she wakes, she feels the scar on her torso as a physical wound. She often feels “a familiar hot chill at [her] side” (160). Toward the end of the novel, when Margaret faints with fever, she attributes it to her sister coming to take her to the “other side,” yet Margaret feels a great relief: “[T]he light that is my sister embraces me, possesses me, relieves me of consciousness. At last” (298). At the end of the novel, Margaret at last separates herself fully from her twin and moves forward alone: “I would not see her again this side of the grave. My life was my own” (406). With these words, Margaret moves past the pain of losing her twin and reclaims her own future.

The Function of Fairy-Tale Elements within Gothic Novels

Gothic literature frequently references fairy tales; indeed, gothic stories often resemble fairy tales very closely and use many of the same conventions. Setterfield uses this blurred boundary to deepen the meaning of The Thirteenth Tale by utilizing such fairy tale conventions as the rule of three, the foundling child, and cottages hidden deep in the woods.

One of the first fairy-tale references comes early in the novel, with Vida’s introduction of the rule of three. The rule of three is present throughout fairy tales, from Cinderella attending three balls, to Goldilocks and the three bears. Setterfield sprinkles the text with small references to the rule of three, such as the three doors that Margaret opens at Angelfield, or the three days during which she is overcome by fever, but several instances are more significant. Notably, the third time that Mrs. Love turns a heel twice, she discovers Aurelius on her doorstep. Even Mrs. Love notes the significance of this: “Once I’d done it and lost my young man. Twice and I’d lost my sister. Now a third time. I had no one left to lose. There was only me now” (266). She understands the portent of the rule of three, and Setterfield uses this to emphasize the magical arrival of Aurelius on her doorstep. Perhaps the most significant application of the rule of three in the novel comes with the revelation that there are three girls living at Angelfield, not two; therefore, the instances of the rule of three from earlier in the novel foreshadow this revelation.

Many fairy-tale elements surround Aurelius’s character and his personal history. He was, in his own words, a “foundling,” or abandoned child, left on the doorstep of a kindly grandmotherly woman who lives in a small cottage in the woods, aptly named Mrs. Love. Vida peeked through her window before, and saw it as the perfect home for the baby she was forced to abandon. In Mrs. Love’s story, retold by Aurelius, there is more of the magic one might expect in a fairy tale. The three heels that Mrs. Love accidentally turns illustrate the rule of three and appear to prognosticate the deaths of her loved ones. When she turns the third heel, she assumes the death will be her own because she has no one else to lose. Instead, she finds Aurelius on her doorstep, anonymous but smelling of smoke, too much of a coincidence with the flames of Angelfield glowing in the distance. However, Aurelius is not the only foundling to appear in the text: As a child, Vida is another foundling, appearing, as John-the-dig put it, “like a weed between two strawberries” (357). Apparently abandoned by her mother, she survived on her own in the forest, and later, on the Angelfield grounds.

Further, when Margaret first discovers Emmeline in the winter garden, she then becomes determined to find her. She does so not by investigating the interior of the house but by traveling along the outside of the house, entering “an ever-widening thicket of densely grown, mature shrubs. Their gnarled stems caught my ankles; I had to wrap my scarf around my face to avoid being scratched” (264). These brambles evoke fairy tales from Sleeping Beauty to Rapunzel, with Margaret as the hero who is finding their way through the undergrowth. When Margaret does find Emmeline, she sees her through “a window, overgrown with ivy, and with such a denseness of evergreen leaf between it and the garden that the glimmer of light escaping from it would never be noticed” (264). Once again, Setterfield has created a magical, fairy-tale scene with a dark edge that reinforces the style and tone of the novel.

Perhaps the most obvious way that Setterfield invokes the fairy tale is through her repeated use of the phrase “once upon a time.” When Vida meets with Margaret for the first time, she begins with, “Once upon a time there was a haunted house—” (48). When Margaret discovers the truth of Vida’s story, she echoes this with, “Once upon a time there were two baby girls…Or alternatively: Once upon a time there were three” (349). Setterfield’s use of these elements invokes the magic and danger so often intertwined in fairy tales, which supports the mystical darkness of gothic novels.

Margaret as a Gothic Heroine

In many ways, the character of Margaret operates as the heroine of a classic gothic novel like Jane Eyre. Similar to the character of Jane, Margaret is smart, studious, and reserved. However, she becomes increasingly emotional and overwrought as she grapples with uncomfortable truths and revelations about her own past. When the novel begins, Margaret is placed firmly within her unhappy reality. Her mother has never recovered from the death of Margaret’s twin, and Margaret is grappling with her own loss of her twin, which was kept a secret from her. She is lonely, feeling a type of abandonment due to the absence of her twin. Both this lonely unhappiness and the feeling of abandonment are characteristic of the protagonist of a gothic novel. Margaret has always felt the presence of her twin, and that feeling will grow stronger as the novel continues, until she is forced to have some kind of reckoning with her twin. When it happens at the end, a truly supernatural experience, Margaret lets go of the ghost of her sister and moves forward in her life.

Another feature of the gothic heroine is high emotion, to the point of being overwrought, and this is something that Setterfield builds in Margaret’s character. By the end of the novel, she has not been eating and is seeing visions, which culminates in her losing consciousness and being feverish and ill for several days. Tellingly, the symptoms for this “ailment” that Dr. Clifton lists are all characteristics of a classic gothic heroine: “symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits” (302). As an antidote, Dr. Clifton prescribes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes for what he calls “an ailment that afflicts ladies of romantic imagination” (302), which he attributes to Margaret’s frequent rereading of her favorite books, all gothic classics. This humorous “prescription” allows Setterfield to acknowledge Margaret’s somewhat overdramatic illness with the idea that the strict rationality of Sherlock might help Margaret recover from her emotional onslaught. As the novel continues, Margaret eats less and less as she becomes more involved in Vida’s story and more emotional about her relationship with her own absent twin. Setterfield uses this interaction with Dr. Clifton to show Margaret’s state of mind and health from a different perspective, and to highlight the parallels between Margaret and the classic gothic heroine.

Margaret’s increasingly emotional state eventually peaks in a feverish illness filled with intense visions, another hallmark of the gothic heroine:

In a shallow sleep I saw strange visions. Hester and my father and the twins and my mother, visions in which everyone had someone else’s face, in which everyone was someone else disguised, and even my own face was disturbing to me as it shifted and altered, something myself, sometimes another (295).

When her fever finally breaks, Margaret gains clarity, and she begins to feel more like her previously even-keeled self. The gothic elements of Vida’s story, the atmosphere of her home, Margaret’s struggle with the guilt and fear inspired by her twin’s death, and the specter of the Angelfield ruins all conspired to separate Margaret from the stability of her home and identity, transforming her into a classic gothic heroine.