Sunday

Sunday is the novel's governing temporal unit, the day on which the narrator's performance of normal family life becomes most strenuous and most transparently false. It is the day of the Sunday outing, the day of the Sunday before a bank holiday, the day when the rituals of domesticity — hanging out the washing, buying the baby's cake, going for a drive — are enacted with the greatest theatrical effort. Across the novel, Sunday recurs as the frame for the narrator's most violent fantasies, her most charged encounters, and her most devastating realizations. It is the day when the gap between what she is supposed to feel and what she actually feels yawns widest, and when the machinery of the normal family is most visibly grinding against her.