Narrative surplus and feminist form in May Sinclair’s The Three Sisters

This essay examines May Sinclair’s 1914 novel The Three Sisters, developing a theorization of “surplus” to name key threads that run between Sinclair’s feminist social critique and her formal experiments. The dynamics of constraint and excess that “surplus” captures, I argue, inform not only the sociohistorical and psychological conditions of Sinclair’s female characters, but also the distinctive methods through which Sinclair explores the limits and possibilities of her own novelistic resources. My analysis deepens our sense for Sinclair’s innovative formal techniques by attending to a set of aesthetic strategies through which she adopts inherited scripts – in particular the marriage plot and the descriptive language of feminine type – in order to stretch, strain, exceed, and exhaust them. The various ways in which the social world diminishes or undervalues female autonomy and subjectivity emerge not only as a thematic concern in Sinclair’s work, but as a generative problem for narrative form.