Glendoline

Glendoline, the sister of Lydia Vance, is presented as a forceful talker, an aspiring novelist, and a figure whose theatrical self-description becomes the centerpiece of a family camping trip in Muleshead, Utah. Her appearances are brief, but they connect domestic friction with the book’s recurring scrutiny of sexual talk and literary ambition: she takes up space through speech, then makes that speech part of her identity as a writer and “Wild Woman of the Mountains.”

Identity and Introduction

Glendoline first appears at Lydia’s apartment after the doorbell rings. The narrator identifies her as Lydia’s sister, and Glendoline immediately settles in and begins talking. The account makes her conversational intensity the defining fact of the visit: the narrator stops listening, yet experiences her speech as an ongoing barrage, while Glendoline appears unaware that she is intruding or that the visit might have gone on long enough.

When the narrator finally asks when she will leave, the exchange turns into an argument between the sisters. Both stand and gesture, their voices rise, and they threaten physical harm. Glendoline eventually twists away through the screen door and continues protesting as she retreats to her apartment at the back of the court. The scene establishes her not through private reflection but through her effect on a room: she enters, dominates its sound, and leaves after a confrontation that Lydia and the narrator do not resolve by joining in.

The Muleshead Camping Trip

Later, the narrator agrees to accompany Lydia to Muleshead, Utah, in order to pacify her. The sisters own much of the land there, inherited from their father. Glendoline is already camping in the woods, where she has pitched a tent and is writing a novel called The Wild Woman of the Mountains. Lydia and the narrator arrive first among the sisters expected to join them, bringing a pup tent; on the first night, they squeeze into it together as mosquitoes crowd in around them.

The next morning, Glendoline and Lydia cook breakfast beside the campfire. The narrator has bought forty dollars’ worth of groceries, including several six-packs of beer, and keeps the beer cooling in a mountain spring. After the meal, he helps with the dishes. Glendoline then reads aloud from her novel. The narrator judges the writing as not wholly bad but unprofessional and in need of substantial polishing; in his view, its central mistake is assuming that readers will be as fascinated by her life as she is. His reaction registers both the existence of her literary ambition and the dismissive perspective through which the episode presents it.

After the reading, the narrator retrieves three bottles of beer from the spring. The women decline to drink, and the conversation moves from the novel to men, parties, dancing, and sex. Glendoline’s talk again becomes the event’s dominant feature: she speaks continuously for more than an hour about sex, waves her arms, and identifies herself aloud as the mountain’s “Wild Woman,” calling for a man with the courage to take her. The declaration turns her novel’s title into a performed persona, linking her writing, her talk, and her desire to be seen as an exceptional character in her own life.

Speech, Self-Presentation, and Conflict

Glendoline’s repeated verbal excess binds the two episodes together. At Lydia’s apartment, her talk disregards the limits of a visit; in the mountains, it extends across a long stretch of conversation and centers on her own erotic declarations. In both settings, other people’s responses are framed by the narrator’s impatience: first he asks her to leave, then he asks Lydia to go for a walk. Lydia refuses the latter request because she wants to read a book titled Love and Orgasm: A Revolutionary Guide to Sexual Fulfillment. The narrator leaves alone for the spring, where he drinks another beer.

That departure gives the camping episode its sharper contrast. Glendoline and Lydia remain engaged with discussions and reading about sex, while the narrator objects to making sex a subject of continual conversation, describing it as something people turn into a destructive toy. His judgment is not a neutral account of Glendoline; it is part of the characterization’s narrow, openly dismissive narrative lens. The reader sees her considerable confidence and verbal energy, but receives no independent account of her motives or an opportunity to hear her novel beyond the narrator’s brief assessment.

Literary Role and Significance

Glendoline’s identity as a writer is concrete but lightly developed: she is composing a novel in the woods and is willing to read it aloud to the group. The narrator treats that choice as evidence of poor judgment, while the title The Wild Woman of the Mountains also echoes her dramatic announcement at the campfire. The overlap makes the novel more than a biographical detail: it shows her presenting herself in life through the same heightened image that names her work.

Her scenes also place competing forms of attention beside one another. Glendoline seeks an audience for both her prose and her stories about sex; the narrator repeatedly withdraws from that demand, first by ceasing to listen and later by walking away with a beer. Lydia, meanwhile, remains present for the novel reading and chooses a book about sexual fulfillment. The episodes therefore make Glendoline a catalyst for friction between the sisters and the narrator, while the camping trip gives her a vivid, if filtered, profile as a would-be novelist whose public self-image is more assured than the narrator believes her writing warrants.