ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the curious aesthetic dualities in Grand's most important novel, The Heavenly Twins, and the particular ideological dilemmas they express. Criticism of the novel has understandably overlooked these formal complexities because of the admittedly spectacular histrionics of the novel's plot. Grand's complementary heroines, Evadne and Angelica, embody this dilemma—suggesting one of many dimensions to the novel's dominant metaphor of twinship. Evadne is so much a “realist” that, as an adolescent reader, she overtly rejects literature itself in favor of scientific truth. Grand's disjunctive form thus does more than simply anticipate modernist aesthetics. It also gives her ways to portray the conflicting literary choices facing late-century feminists as a doomed set of options, for such choices have become an occasion for linking together the drawbacks of opposed female mentalities with particular literary forms.
