The Evening and the Morning and the Night

Beatrice simultaneously functions as a foil of and a mentor for Lynn. Lynn and Beatrice are naturally prone to hate each other when they are close together because they are both female double DGDs and are consequently very territorial. As a mentor, she, like Lynn, is a double DGD female, and, as Beatrice describes, they both produce pheromones that help them manage other DGDs. This puts Lynn in a double bind. She doesn’t necessarily want to do the kind of work Beatrice does, but she feels morally obligated to do it. Moreover, Lynn must learn how to do this work from someone she is naturally inclined to hate. This intricate mentor and foil relationship speaks to the theme of Self-Determination and Individual Responsibility.

By the end of the story, Lynn seems anxious about turning into someone like Beatrice. On the other hand, Beatrice, older and more experienced, possesses a kind of nuanced ethical clarity that Lynn has not yet developed. She isn’t prone to the all-or-nothing absolutes that tend to feed Alan’s cynical worldview, but it is also evident that she thinks she has a clear understanding of Lynn’s path and how Lynn can best manage her relationship with Alan. She tends to understand Lynn’s relationship with Alan in terms of Lynn’s choices, not Alan’s. She seems to want the best for everyone, but her approach suggests that she doesn’t think Alan has the ability to decide for himself what his outcome will be, which means he lacks agency. This speaks to the theme of Human Nature and Social Structure.

The protagonist of the story, Lynn initially has a very cynical outlook on her life, and her transition from driven but cynical to hopeful but ambivalent propels the narrative. Her cynicism is initially informed by the trauma she endured as a teenager. She witnessed the self-mutilation and violence uncontrolled DGDs are capable of when her parents forced her to visit an institution. In addition, her father murdered her mother and took his own life when he quickly succumbed to DGD. She feels socially isolated and marginalized because of her DGD status. These experiences directly reflect the theme of Illness, Marginalization, and Institutionalization.

As the story progresses, she gradually develops a more optimistic outlook, first by moving in with a group of fellow DGDs and taking on the role of “housemother” and then through the bond she forms with Alan Chi (40), who is also double DGD and eventually her fiancé. She thinks Alan has an even more negative outlook than she does, and she feels that she couldn’t just “let him slip away” (43), but she comes to recognize that their relationship had been “as good for [her] as it seemed to have been for him” (45).

By the end of the story, after meeting Beatrice, who informs her of her rare ability, as a double DGD woman, to influence and care for other DGDs, Lynn is much more optimistic than she was at the beginning of the story. She sees that there are ways that DGDs, even uncontrolled DGDs like Alan’s mother, can lead at least somewhat fulfilling lives. However, she seems ambivalent about her future. She recognizes that she can learn to manage an institution like Dilg, to become like Beatrice. She also knows that she might not have to face the short, violent life she anticipated, as Beatrice seems to be about 60 years old.

However, she also feels that she doesn’t have a choice but to manage a retreat because of the good she could do. On the other hand, she characterizes Dilg as a “stop-gap” while they wait to get the final answers about DGDs from genetic engineering. Over the arc of the story, she has transformed from someone who imagines she has hardly any future at all to someone who fears she can’t choose her own future because of her moral obligation. The ambivalence Lynn feels is at the center of the story’s theme of Self-Determination and Individual Responsibility.

Lynn’s mother and father appear only briefly at the beginning of the story, as they died tragically when Lynn was still a teenager. We can only infer that they both inherited DGD from one parent, probably from the generation that took the cancer cure, and that their child is therefore double DGD. Even so, their brief appearance speaks to many of the themes and subtexts present throughout the story. First, Lynn notes that their religious convictions made them morally opposed to abortion, and they believed that modern science might be able to come up with more effective treatments (37). On the other hand, Beatrice characterizes the decision of any two DGDs to have children as “irresponsible,” even though she notes that they need more female double DGDs to run retreats (61).

These conflicting positions reflect the theme of Self-Determination and Individual Responsibility. Are DGDs like Lynn’s parents morally obligated to follow their religious convictions and personal values regarding the sanctity of human life, or is it more ethical to prevent the birth of children that seem destined to suffer? Their actions as parents hoping to teach their child a valuable lesson, by forcing Lynn to visit an institution for out-of-control DGDs, inflicts more trauma on Lynn than they could have anticipated. This, with the unusually violent circumstances of their deaths, even for DGDs, ultimately shapes Lynn’s distrustful and pessimistic outlook and makes her keenly aware of how violent uncontrolled DGDs can become.