Jacob Have I Loved

“I love Rass Island, although for much of my life, I did not think I did, and it is a pure sorrow to me that, once my mother leaves, there will be no one left there with the name of Bradshaw. But there were only the two of us, my sister, Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay.”

The prologue establishes Louise as the narrator and hints at her complicated feelings about her home. In this passage, Louise makes clear that she loves Rass Island in hindsight, a fact that colors her recollections of an adolescence spent trying to escape it.

“I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn’t matter. He didn’t have any friends but me, so he wasn’t likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed. I thought it was a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes.”

Louise establishes her relationship with her only friend, Call, including her futile efforts to make him laugh—a failure that makes the Captain’s later success more bitter for Louise. Though Louise says that she only “sticks” with Call because neither of them have other friends, and because they work well together while crabbing, her later jealousy over his friendship belies this claim.

“What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.”

Louise feels her birth to have been a double disappointment: She was not born a son, and she was not the center of attention. She traces the roots of her sense of sibling rivalry to the moments of their birth. Based on this idea, Louise feels that Caroline steals everything Louise has, from their parents’ love and attention to Louise’s friends. Louise believes throughout the novel that being born first and female has doomed her to neglect and hardship.