Burning Silk: a novel by Destiny Kinal. Synopsis.

Catherine and Elisabeth Duladier, daughters of the French Huguenot family known as Duladier Silk Enterprises, are dedicated to the krafft of manufacturing flawless silk thread through the precarious agency of silkworm and mulberry. Bound by arcane rituals handed down by generations of female ancestors, the two live dual lives – one as traditional wives and mothers, and one as priestesses of the silk. Catherine, the family’s maitresse de la soie, is bound by tradition to withdraw every spring into the magnanerie, where she enters into union with the silkworms as they live out their miraculous transformation. Elisabeth, her steward, is charged with guarding and sustaining her sister should she ‘suffer in the silk’.

The world of the Duladier women is full of secrets – there are runaway slaves in the basement, and scandal in Catherine’s past – but the most dangerous is their service to the Black Madonna, whose mystic threads connect them irrevocably to the marriage of silkworm and mulberry. In this world, telepathy is the norm, sacrifices are made, and anything can happen, including pairings and passions that fly in the face of early nineteenth century norms.

When the family relocates from Hesse, Germany, to Pennsylvania, it plunges into a metamorphosis as dramatic as that of the silkworm itself, from larva to pupa to moth. The consequences of the Duladier’s breeding experiment between wild native silkmoth and its domesticated European cousin mirror the period of cultural transformation in which they occur. As the Huguenot men struggle to reconcile their masculine pride with the spiritual authority of the Duladier women and the matrilineal traditions of the native Montour’s, their Quaker neighbors not only find their mulberry bushes stripped but their social mores challenged by the relentless demands of the silk.

The native community watches in quiet amazement as Elisabeth’s husband, Wilhelm, maddened by thwarted lust, jeopardizes the entire family, exposing their secrets to their investors. Catherine’s unorthodox love affair with Regina, her activist Quaker neighbor, proves stronger than the strictures of the ‘Old Text’ by which they live, and everyone, including Catherine’s husband Philip, is challenged to evolve and flourish. Although the novel ends in Regina’s untimely death and a threat to the continuity of the silk enterprise, we sense that the story will continue as native Americans, Huguenots, and Quakers are fused into a single family with historic fault lines.

Burning Silk is permeated by the scent of passion – the need to meld and procreate as Old World mates with New. By the close of Burning Silk, it is clear that the Duladier’s fierce line will endure through the fires of their breeding experiments. Sex is the engine that drives both worm and human to escape the mundane and to reach for perfection. From the imperious demands of the male moth, or Imago, as it seeks the female Phalene, to the obsessive sexual burning of Catherine en magnanerie this is a novel about transformation, compulsion and ultimately about genetic destiny.

Meticulously researched, and ranging in tone from lyrical to muscular, Burning Silk is a masterly work of literary fiction, crossing boundaries to confound our comfortable suppositions about the past, a book to engage every reader.