Themes
The main theme of this hyper
story is the relationship, in every aspect: sexual, ethic, etc., between women
and men: That is an eternal topic from the beginning of the ages, but in this
case is settled in Oregon, North America in 1995. As the writer says in the
subtitle, making a metaphor, it is about “the war of sexes”. It is a story
written by a woman and addressed to everyone who wants to guess the
difficulties between the two genres and has the desire to get “cutting edges”,
I mean, everyone who wishes to learn how to put on other’s skin and understand
the different sensibilities.
Seeing the evolution of the
female characters, you can understand the great effort they make to approach to
the masculine characters.
Other minor themes involving
the main one are: The relationships between mothers and daughters that have
always a conflictive point, in spite of the different generations we can refer
to.
Feminism: How women must make a great effort to demonstrate they
are able to play a similar role in the society than men. Some women, from every
social class, suffer from some men a physical or psychological bad behaviour,
what represents a huge problem for them. When men write about rape, it is
usually seen as erotic, and when women write about rape, it is seen as
unrealistic, but the real truth is that rape is not erotic, it is just the
demonstration of the “strong sex’s brutality and degradation over the women’s
fear.
Political background: The sixties in North America, and specially
the year 1968, brought up new changes to people’s life because, in part, of
women evolution.
Ideology: This story shows a non-conservative thinking of seeing
life. The author has not got this idea from an innate knowledge, but from a
continuous learning during her life that makes her to change whatever thing she
finds discriminative towards the female genre. It can be said that its ideology
is political incorrect, but only from the point of view of the age, I mean, it
was incorrect to fight for women’s rights in the ‘60s, but, obviously, that ideology is jus correct nowadays,
because many women have got the right of having that ideology before.
I, as a reader, have felt
greatly identified with every female character
in the story, with the younger ones because I have always quarrel with my
mother so that she would allow me to get the rights that I believed I deserved;
and with the older ones because they have got an egalitarian place in their
discriminative society. In spite of being settled in the very recent age of the
‘90s, the whole plot
is in temporal, because shows the women’s fight to get their rights.
Lay-out Literary resources
My way of reading Answer
Conclusion