Moral Egoism vs. Duty in Blue Sisters: Selfish Survival or Sacred Obligation?
Thematic Framework: A Tension at the Heart of the Novel
In Blue Sisters, Coco Mellors presents moral egoism and duty not as simple opposites but as two forces that warp and fuse inside a family shaped by addiction, neglect, and grief. The novel’s central thematic claim can be stated this way: moral egoism—the philosophy of prioritizing one’s own desires and wellbeing over external obligations—is simultaneously a survival mechanism, a form of honesty, and a destructive addiction for women who have been taught to sacrifice themselves for others. The character who embodies this conflict most acutely is Avery Blue, the eldest sister, a recovering heroin addict and lawyer whose affair with Charlie—and her resistance to having a baby—forces her to weigh personal pleasure against her obligations to marriage, sisterhood, and the memory of her dead sister Nicky.
Avery’s struggle is not an isolated character flaw. It is woven into the novel’s examination of how the Blue sisters inherited their parents’ emotional failures and now replicate those patterns. The prologue establishes that Avery “hates authority but loves structure” and that she “would like to be all backbone, but she is tender flesh too.” This split—between the controlled, competent lawyer and the aching, dissociating woman who will “implode her life and marriage in ways she didn’t think possible”—is the engine of the moral egoism versus duty theme.
The Affair with Charlie: Pleasure as a Moral Philosophy
The most direct articulation of moral egoism comes in Chapter Six, when Avery has sex with Charlie, a poet she meets at an AA meeting. Afterward, lying in his parents’ house, she reflects on their conversation about morality. Charlie calls himself an “amoral egoist,” and when Avery presses him, he says with a shrug, “Monogamy, fidelity, heterosexuality … These aren’t words I put a lot of store in.”
For Avery, the affair is not about love or even lust in the ordinary sense. The evidence in Chapter Six makes clear what she is chasing: “It was the not-thinking she loved most, the not-thinking that she never wanted to end.” After she climaxes, she feels “pleasure locked in consort with pain. Just like plunging down the piston of a syringe.” The novel draws a direct line between her drug addiction and this affair—both are escapes from the unbearable weight of duty. The affair is moral egoism made flesh: she knows she is betraying Chiti, yet she chooses her own relief over her wife’s trust.
But the novel complicates this. Charlie is not a villain; he is also a grieving survivor. He lost a brother to leukemia and a mother to overdose. Their shared loss is what bonds them. When Avery tells him about Nicky, he responds, “I don’t get it, but I get it. You get it?” This moment suggests that moral egoism, in this context, is not pure selfishness but a desperate reaching for connection—a way to feel special and seen after Nicky’s death has made Avery feel invisible even to herself.
The Baby Question: Nicky’s Sacrifice and Avery’s Refusal
If the affair is Avery’s active pursuit of pleasure at the expense of duty, the baby question is her passive refusal of duty at the expense of her wife’s happiness and her sister’s legacy. The novel frames this through Nicky’s story. In a flashback from Chapter Six, Nicky refuses a life-saving hysterectomy because she wants to be a mother. The evidence states: “She wanted to be a mother more than she wanted to be free. Or, rather, motherhood was the form of freedom she chose.” Nicky’s choice is the opposite of moral egoism—she accepts pain and risk in service of her dream of family.
Avery, by contrast, cannot bring herself to want a child. After Nicky’s death, she promised Chiti a baby, but now she questions: “Could she love a child because her sister would have loved a child? Because Chiti would? Could that be enough for her?” Here, duty to Chiti and duty to Nicky’s memory collide with Avery’s own desire for autonomy. The novel treats this not as a simple failure of love but as a genuine philosophical dilemma. If Avery has a child she does not truly want, is she honoring Nicky or betraying herself? The evidence shows Avery sitting with this question in the chapter’s closing scene, and the answer is left unresolved—a complexity the novel refuses to flatten.
The Family Caretaker Burden: Duty as an Addiction
The third thread of moral egoism versus duty runs through Avery’s role as the eldest sister—the one who “taught all the sisters how to swim the front crawl” and who “has carried this family on my back for too many years,” as she tells Bonnie in Chapter Nine. In that fight, Avery lashes out: “Everything I do is to protect you … You know who taught me? No one! I had to pick it up myself, or I’d drown.”
This passage reveals a paradox at the heart of the theme. Avery’s duty to her sisters is genuine—she pays for the family apartment, she mediates fights, she holds them together—but it is also a role she uses to avoid her own desires. When Bonnie accuses her of giving up on Lucky, Avery explodes: “I wanted to go to Berkeley for college!” The implication is clear: Avery has sacrificed her own ambitions for the family for so long that she does not know how to want something only for herself. Her moral egoism (the affair, the refusal of a baby) is, in part, a rebellion against a lifetime of compulsory duty.
Yet the novel does not let Avery off the hook. As she prepares to visit her mother in Chapter Twelve, she feels “the worst emotional hangover of her life” after the fight with her sisters. She steals a magazine and chocolate from a newsstand, gets caught by a child, and then returns to pay for her theft, handing over her wallet. The sequence is a miniature drama of moral egoism versus duty: she steals (seeking the thrill of transgression), she is seen (the child’s gaze forces her to recognize herself as accountable to others), and she repents (choosing the harder, honest path). “A hypocrite, Lucky had called her, and she was right.” The admission is the closest the novel comes to a verdict on Avery’s behavior.
The Brother-Sister Conversations: Echoes of the Theme
A secondary but revealing extension of the theme appears in the way Avery’s bond with Charlie mirrors the unresolved conversations she had with Nicky. In the flashback in Chapter Six, Avery sits on a bench with Nicky at the Turtle Pond in Central Park, watching ducks. Nicky confesses she was bitten by a duck at age four and hid it from their mother because “she was always so exasperated when we needed anything. I think I knew, even then, it was better to deal with it myself.” This moment shows that the Blue sisters learned—from early childhood—that their emotional needs were an imposition. Duty was demanded, but vulnerability was punished. Avery’s later moral egoism is, in part, a rebellion against this early conditioning.
Charlie understands this intuitively because he, too, was a caretaker child. He tells Avery about his brother’s death from leukemia: “I still think of myself as one of three, even though it’s just been me and my sister since I was seven. It’s like this invisible limb no one knows I have.” In their conversations, moral egoism becomes a shared language for two people who were never allowed to be children. The novel suggests that when duty is forced on the young, the adult rebellion can look like pure selfishness—but it is also a delayed form of self-rescue.
Character and Symbol Connections
The theme of moral egoism versus duty radiates outward to the other sisters as well. Bonnie, the former world‑class boxer, embodies a different version of the conflict. Her calling to boxing is a form of disciplined self-focus that borders on egoism—she “worships at the altar of discipline” and pursued her career at the expense of relationships. But after her devastating loss and Nicky’s death, she abandons boxing to care for Lucky and the family. Her return to the Golden Ring gym in Chapter Five, where she “enters, imagining Nicky’s hand in hers,” is a moment where duty to Nicky’s memory and her own calling merge.
Lucky, the youngest, is the most overtly selfish sister in the early chapters—she parties, drinks, vomits out a window onto a runway, and calls her sisters only when she needs rescuing. But her arc shows the same pattern: her self-destruction is a cry for the care she never received. The blue butterflies she keeps framed are a symbol of how memory holds the sisters together even when individual desires pull them apart.
The pink Smeg refrigerator is a domestic symbol that recurs in the sisters’ childhood home—a marker of the normal, nurturing family life they never had. The step-jab of Bonnie’s boxing training becomes a rhythm of discipline that stands in opposition to the chaos of addiction and selfish impulse.
Complexity and Contradiction: The Novel’s Refusal to Judge
What makes Blue Sisters thematically rich is that it does not resolve the tension between moral egoism and duty. Avery’s affair destroys her marriage—by the epilogue, she is leaving a wife named Fatima (not Chiti), suggesting the marriage to Chiti ended. Yet the epilogue also shows Avery as a law professor, present at Bonnie’s daughter’s birth, participating in the family again. She has not renounced duty entirely; she has renegotiated its terms.
Similarly, Avery’s refusal to have a baby is never condemned by the narrative. The novel honors Nicky’s choice to pursue motherhood at great personal cost without requiring Avery to make the same choice. The epilogue’s hopeful tone—the sisters gathered around baby Nicole, feeling “their warmth and love”—suggests that duty and egoism may not be final opposites. The family persists, changed but together, because each sister has found a way to balance her own needs with her obligations to the others.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Charlie’s philosophy of “moral egoism” function in relation to Avery’s addiction history? Charlie’s moral egoism provides Avery with a justification for pursuing pleasure without guilt. The novel draws a direct parallel between the high of the affair and the high of heroin: both produce “not-thinking” and “pleasure locked in consort with pain.” Avery’s addiction was always about escaping emotional weight, and moral egoism gives her a philosophical framework to continue that escape while staying sober. The irony is that Charlie himself is a newcomer in recovery, and his philosophy may be a rationalization for his own impulsiveness.
2. In what way does Nicky’s choice to refuse a hysterectomy complicate the novel’s treatment of duty? Nicky chooses duty to her future child over her own health and life. She wants to be a mother “more than she wanted to be free.” This choice is the opposite of moral egoism—it is self-sacrifice. But the novel also shows that Nicky was addicted to the fantasy of a normal, pain-free life, which includes motherhood. Her duty was partly a surrender to the same fantasy of normalcy that Avery has always resisted. The novel thus refuses to present either pure duty or pure egoism as the virtuous option.
3. How does Avery’s theft at Grand Central Terminal in Chapter Twelve dramatize the conflict between moral egoism and duty? Avery steals a magazine, gum, and a chocolate bar—small luxuries—for the thrill of transgression, which she recognizes as the same “rush” she felt during the affair. When a child sees her, she is forced to confront herself as accountable to others. She returns to pay, hands over her wallet, and confesses. The scene shows that Avery’s moral egoism (stealing for pleasure) cannot survive the gaze of an innocent. The child represents the future—the next generation she might harm if she continues treating her desires as the only law.
4. How does the setting of the Turtle Pond scene (Chapter Six) illuminate the origins of the sisters’ relationship to duty? In the flashback to Nicky at age four hiding a duck bite from their mother, the novel reveals that the Blue sisters learned early that their needs were an imposition. Nicky says she “thought I’d get in trouble” because their mother “was always so exasperated when we needed anything.” This moment shows that the sisters were forced into premature self-reliance. Duty was never freely chosen; it was demanded. Avery’s later moral egoism is a reaction against this childhood of enforced caretaking.
5. Does the epilogue resolve or deepen the tension between moral egoism and duty? Explain. The epilogue deepens the tension by showing its effects ten years later. Avery has left her wife (now Fatima, not Chiti), suggesting her marriage ended, perhaps because she could not reconcile duty and desire. Yet she is present at Bonnie’s daughter’s birth, participating in family ritual. Baby Nicole, named after Nicky, represents a new generation that will inherit both the family’s love and its dysfunction. The epilogue does not declare a winner in the battle between egoism and duty; it shows that the sisters have found a precarious balance that allows them to stay together while honoring their separate paths.