The ‘blood’ imagery highlights that they are blood relations, and is used perhaps to epitomise the generation gap between the two sets of daughters as Saskia and Imogen were born on the day when Nora and Dora had their first period. The duck was ‘certainly well-cooked on the outside’, the duck could symbolise Saskia as her beautiful appearance conceals a venomous interior. Dora intimates’ Saskia gave me a dirty look, as if she’d know I’d show my true colours at some point during her elegant repast’ which connotes that Saskia is belittling her and considers her as socially inferior, incapable of behaving just because Dora is illegitimate.
Earlier in the novel, Carter uses intertextuality from King Lear when Peregrine articulated that ‘It’s a wise child who knows its own father, but wiser yet, the father that knows its own child.’ He is referring to Melchior, who is ‘finishing off that duck’, ‘engaging in a battle’ with Peregrine ‘as to who could eat most and praise’ Saskia the best. They are both desperate to acquire her affection but Melchior is completely oblivious to the fact that Saskia and Imogen are in fact Peregrine’s daughters, yet he is unwilling to acknowledge Nora and Dora as his own.
Dora and Nora’s envy is evident when Dora states ‘if we only we’d inherited that red, red hair,’ the incomplete sentence expresses the possibilities of life if they were born on the right side of the tracks. Furthermore, the class division is apparent as Nora and Dora had ‘Poodle-cuts’ compared to the sophisticated ‘soft chignon’ that Saskia adorned. Ironically, at Melchior’s one hundredth birthday party, there is reversal as Saskia and Imogen attend looking ridiculous.
The reader is aware that perhaps Dora is an unreliable, biased narrator as she has a snide, criticising tone and ridicules Imogen “always the fey one, had ‘dressed up to match the Downs around us’ she simpered in an eighteenth century shepherdess’s dress.” Saskia and Imogen are featured in the ‘William Hickey column’ as they are recognized as Melchior’s daughters, differently, Nora and Dora have no such status.
Wise Children has a mirrored structure and this gathering foreshadows Melchior’s party in chapter five where the relationship between the two sets of daughters balance out. Melchior, finally, acknowledges Nora and Dora as his daughters while Saskia and Imogen discover they are illegitimate, the result of Lady Atalanta’s affair with Peregrine.
