Why Three is a Magic Number

Consider this:

Olga, Marina, Irina (Chekov's Three Sisters)

Goneril, Regan, Cordelia (Shakespeare's King Lear)

Athropos, Lachesis, Clotho (the Three Fates of Greek Mythology)

Anastasia, Drizzella, Cinderella (French folk tale by way of Disney)

Elinor, Marianne, Margaret (Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility)

Scarlett, Suellen, Carreen (Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind)

Rachel, Leah, Addy (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible)

Barbara, Ivy, Karen (Tracy Letts's August: Osage County)

See a pattern?

While reading Eleanor Brown's new novel, The Weird Sisters, which features its own trio of sisters, I thought about how often triad of sisters pop up in literature. The title of Brown's book is reference, in and of itself, to the three witches that haunt Shakespeare's MacBeth.

The narrative here follows the three daughters of a Shakespeare professor who's named them after three of the Bard's famous female characters. Rosalind from As You Like It, Bianca from The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia (from King Lear). The author makes a clever connection between the personality of the girls and the qualities of the literary characters. Brown has several compelling things to say about family and the restrictive roles siblings must play. Birth order dictates behavior as does past behavior and parental expectations. The Andreas sisters are plagued by all these forces and spend the length of the book trying to slip out from under the pressure of family.

Only when a priest from a neighboring church tells Bean (nickname of Bianca) that there's a way out do these girls get smart. Here's what Father Aidan has to say:

We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done—maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.... Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself.... There are times in our lives when we have to realize out past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

Pretty smart, I guess, but also very convenient. When you need wisdom in your novel, just put in a priest to tell your characters exactly what they need to hear. But, The Weird Sisters entertains with its spunky voice and its quirky details that allow for three richly drawn women. More than anything, though, the book made me think about the odd phenomenon of the three sisters. Back to the point.

Three, of course, is a magic number.

Three represents unity, the harmony of the opposites, wholeness. A shape or form cannot be created without the third side. But considering yin and yang,  a third element represents disruption, which may just connect to conflict, the driving force of every narrative. And what's more, the number three is said to represent creativity, fecundity and fertility—note that a woman's pregnancy is split into trimesters, three segments of three months. So, the number three is tinged with the spirit of femininity.

Thinking about the sisters listed above, and Eleanor Brown's characters, it's clear that each different member of a family triangle possesses different, often conflicting, characteristics. Is this what these authors are up to? Exploring how three different people will react to a central problem, experience or challenge? Revealing three separate methods of solving a fictional dilemma? Do three sisters give a wholeness to the family, a unity, a shape? Is three more interesting than two or four?

Whatever the case, we have them, all these three sisters. And we have them a lot.

Full disclosure: In the book I'm writing (I'm calling it There You Are for the time being), I've also created three sisters: two full sisters and one half-sister named Joan, Phoebe and Kimberly. It just happened, though. I didn't think "Oh, yeah. If you're going to have sisters, you've got to have three." Or "Shakespeare did it, so I'll do it." These three characters just came out from the world of my imagination.

But maybe they did, because three is indeed a magical number, floating around in my creative consciousness as it does for every writer. Wow. Weird.

Postscript: One of the sister teams listed above is actually part of a foursome. But the fourth sister doesn't make it through the first act so I'm kinda still right. Can you pick the offending sisters out of the bunch?