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The Farival Twins are two fourteen-year-old girls who are staying at the summer cottages on Grand Isle. Silent except for their constant piano playing, the two represent socially acceptable girlhood and the role art is meant to play for women. Their model girlhood and purity are emphasized by the way they wear the Virgin Mary’s colors, blue and white. The Farival Twins have no distinguishing features or expressions beside their music. They consistently practice and perform two of the same pieces, one from Ferdinand Hérold’s opera Zampa and one from Franz Von Suppé’s The Poet and the Peasant. During the time the novel is set, both pieces would have been well-established and considered pleasant, appropriate music for polite company. The Twins play not for artistic or emotional expression, but to be pleasant to those around them while demonstrating that they are accomplished girls who will become accomplished young women worthy of a good marriage.
The Farival Twins act as a kind of foil to Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna’s model for artistic expression as a woman. Mademoiselle Reisz lives as a social outcast but plays piano with deep feeling, choosing deeply expressive pieces by Chopin. It makes sense, therefore, that Mademoiselle Reisz is the only character to actively express dislike of the Farival Twins’ music. She recognizes their flat relationship to art as an amusing quality to be cultivated instead of self-expression. Notably, in comparison to Mademoiselle Reisz, the Twins are barely characters, only set-dressing amongst the vacationing Creole set, brought out to amuse the guests. Their skeleton role emphasizes how small a mark women and girls are meant to make artistically and socially.
