56 pages • 1 hour read
Judy BlumeSummer Sisters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Fluidity of Families
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of child abuse, sexual abuse, grooming, and suicidal ideation.
The title reveals the key theme, with Summer Sisters indicating the fluidity of families. The first summer spent together at the Vineyard fastens Caitlin and Vix for life and changes their friendship to a form of sisterhood. As the summer is a season, it doesn’t last forever—it comes and goes, and the impermanence of families produces vulnerability. The narrator explains, “After the first summer, Vix hadn’t expected Caitlin to invite her back to the Vineyard, and when she did, Vix worried that her mother wouldn’t let her go” (61). Vix’s situation is unstable and beyond her control—Caitlin and Tawny determine who will constitute her family. Caitlin advances the fluidity of families when she tells Vix, “Even though we’re summer sisters and always will be, I have another life at Mountain Day, a life apart from the two of us” (113). Caitlin and Vix remain “summer sisters,” yet Caitlin, beyond the Vineyard, turns into someone else. She’s Vix’s sister, but she’s also not her sister: She’s in flux.
Vix propels the theme when the Chappaquiddick birthday party leads to a fight that compels Vix to live on Trisha’s boat. Aware of the fluid familial relationship, Vix tells Abby, “I’ll understand if you want to give the scholarship to someone else” (182). Abby counters when she replies, “This has nothing to do with the scholarship. Nobody’s going to take anything away from you” (182). Abby places their relationship on solid ground by reassuring Vix that they won’t suddenly cut her off. Lamb links the relationship back to fluidity when he tells Bru, “We think of Vix as our daughter. We’re her Vineyard family” (214). In Lamb’s view, they’re not Vix’s permanent family: They’re her family when she’s at the Vineyard. At the Mountain Day graduation, Vix favors her “Vineyard family” over her biological family when she looks at Lamb and Abby first.
Separate from Vix’s fluctuating relationship with Caitlin’s family, families in general reflect fluidity. Parents leave and return––they divorce and remarry. Lamb and Phoebe divorce and then he marries Abby, who brings Daniel, her son, into the family. Ed and Tawny all but divorce, and Tawny starts a relationship with the “beefy” Myles after Ed begins seeing Frankie. Lanie adds two children to the family, and the Leonards lose a family member when Nathan dies. Caitlin’s family loses her when she dies. Thus, Blume highlights that even legal or biological families stay fluid. Families of all stripes are like the jigsaw puzzles Vix loves—they’re composed of myriad, movable pieces.
Innocence Versus Experience
Blume establishes the theme of innocence versus experience through Lamb and Caitlin. After Caitlin’s dad tells Vix to call her Lamb, Caitlin explains, “As in baby sheep. As in baaa baaa…” (20). Later, Caitlin uses a quote from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” in the Mountain Day yearbook. In Blake’s poetry, the lamb symbolizes innocence, while the tiger represents experience.
What propels Caitlin is experience. She wants to accumulate experiences as if they’re gold or money. Sex, for Caitlin, isn’t about love or romance but experience. Caitlin believes, “[S]ex and love not only can be separated but should be” (141). Thus, she has sex with the ski instructor to get her first time “out of the way” (141). Later, she admits that she made it up, but the lie still reflects her thinking: Sex is a series of experiences to collect. Concerning sex with the TV star, Caitlin says, “[A]nd God, Vix, he’s got an incredible Package…but once I’d satisfied my curiosity...well, we didn’t have that much to say to one another” (261). The predatory actor thus becomes another experience. Her experiences become accomplishments, and she even boasts about them during her dad’s 50th birthday when she toasts, “To Lamb…the best man I’ve ever known. And I’ve known more than my share” (243). Caitlin is proud of her success.
Caitlin also has sexual experiences with women, and she has the experience of not having sex. In other words, experience isn’t exclusively sexual. She travels the world to gain experience, and she lets Vix open her up to new experiences by getting summer jobs with her. Vix is less tenacious with regard to collecting experiences, but she doesn’t want to stay innocent either. She slowly gains sexual experience with Bru before having sex with him. She also gets to experience Harvard, life in New York City, and brief affairs with wealthy men. Maia and Paisley make it seem like Caitlin restricts Vix—as though Vix needs to get over her—but Caitlin doesn’t limit her experiences. The narrator states, “[Vix’s] life was full. It was interesting” (324).
As Blume starts detailing Caitlin and Vix’s story when they’re 12, she arguably problematizes the innocence-experience binary. As preteens, they’re already experiencing sexual feelings. While they don’t yet have the experience of adults, they’re not free of desires. “Innocence” isn’t the presence or absence of sexual desires but how and when to express them. The “summer sisters” reveal their innocence when they rub their respective “Powers” together, and they highlight their experience when they stop.
The Elusive Power of Sex
Sex dominates the thoughts of the main characters, and its elusive power causes tension and jarring situations. Caitlin, who removes love and romance from the equation, is adept at catching the elusive power of sexuality. This is evident in descriptions of her appearance: “Her hair cascaded down her back, her skin was moist and flawless, and the expression on her face dared anyone to mess with her” (139), which characterize her as a femme fatale or temptress. Through the act of sex, she finds the power to dominate men. When she gives her toast at Lamb’s 50th birthday, Sharkey notices that “every guy in the room is drooling” (243)—sex makes Caitlin captivating and magnetic.
As a teen, Caitlin already worries about what will happen when she loses the power of sex. She tells Vix that her solution is suicide: “I’m cutting out before it all falls apart...before I’m old and ugly and nobody wants me” (149). However, Blume subverts Caitlin’s notions about aging and allure by creating older women who maintain robust sex lives, such as Tawny and Phoebe.
Blume also highlights that sexuality can be as frustrating or confusing in certain contexts as it is powerful. While Caitlin intentionally provokes her brother by wearing “a short robe, loosely belted, with nothing underneath” (149), Sharkey can’t control his fantasies about Caitlin and Vix. Trisha, too, experiences confusion about sexuality, wondering about the appropriateness of taking off her clothes at a nude beach in front of Caitlin and Vix. Phoebe, like her daughter, has lots of sexual experience. She tries talking to Caitlin about approaching sex less openly, but she can’t find the right words. The Countess further illustrates a confusing side of sexuality when, in her 20s, a very young Lamb walks in on her in the bathtub and she comments on her breasts, which he stares at and tries to touch. She takes pride in her appearance and sexual power in a context that challenges norms of appropriateness, paralleling Caitlin’s proclamation about how many men she’s known at her father’s birthday party. In the story, sexuality collapses boundaries and norms––it transcends age and gender. While Caitlin is able to use sexuality to her advantage, other characters are mostly at sex’s mercy.
For her part, Vix displays a consistently thoughtful and measured approach to her sexuality: “Vix had no intention of doing it just to get it out of the way” (141). Her first time is with Bru, who becomes her long-term boyfriend. While Vix thinks about sex and “hate[s] the unpredictability of her body” (100), she approaches it deliberately. Her affairs with Luke and Will are intentional, as is her choice to have sex with Bru before his and Caitlin’s wedding.
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