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Once Deirdre has disappeared, the other four sisters at first can only hope for suitable marriages to husbands of the right class. The narrative cleverly subverts not only this marriage plot but the oedipal assumptions on which it is based. Two of the sisters marry within their class: Constance Phillipa, who is unusually tall, with a brittle manner, and has the wish to serve as a Union soldier during the Civil War, is summarily married to a short and sinister baron with a nine-hundred-year-old name, whose business is ivory and slave trading. When he attempts to rape her on the wedding night, the most effective way, he claims, of conducting the "connubial act," he discovers it is not his bride whom he has raped, but a dressmaker's dummy. Having installed this replacement, Constance Phillipa flees in disguise as a man, thus becoming "a bride but not a wife" in the words of the Victorian "lady" narrator (39). Another sister, Octavia, whose precocious development of hips and breasts, required that she wear a corset from the age of ten, marries a sadomasochistic reverend. She compliantly submits to his perverted sexual practices, which include insisting she wear a hood and pull a noose around either her neck or his. She prefers gnawing her own shoulder rather than risk "the fruits of displeasing one's husband," which include being locked in a room and drugged for hysteria by a physician complicit with the rigors of nineteenth-century hegemonic masculinity. One night during the connubial exercise, the reverend demands that Octavia pull the noose "yet tighter" around his neck. When she obliges him enthusiastically, she wins her freedom with his death. Another sister, Malvinia, avoids the marriage plot altogether by running off to win fame on the stage. She is painted by John Singer Sargent and pursued by Mark Twain, Diamond Jim Brady, and Grover Cleveland. Zinn's daughter Samantha who serves as her father's apprentice runs off with another apprentice, a man of a lower...