Sisters at the Gate: Mean Girls and Other Sibling Phenomena

Abstract

The Lot saga is a familiar one. The Lot family of Sodom and Gomorrah is visited by angels in men’s form; male citizens flock to the door of the Lot home seeking to “know” the visitors. Lot offers the citizens his daughters instead, who have not yet “known” man, but ultimately the angels decide to punish the cities with fire and brimstone. Lot, along with his wife and daughters, are spared this fate so long as none turns back to look upon the cities’ destruction while they leave. Lot’s wife however does glance backward, and as a result turns to salt. Bereft of both human community and maternal presence, Lot’s daughters seek to become mothers themselves by lying with their father (after an appropriate plying of wine to induce lethargy and forgetfulness) and reproducing the line through themselves. Daughters become mothers of their own siblings, creating a new human community from the crossing of what Juliet Mitchell calls the lateral and vertical axes of sexuality and reproduction (Mitchell 2003).