last post for wench

So I finished this book over a month ago so its been hard to keep going back to it and over it to re-think what I read in January. Had I been "close reading" consciously at that point it may have been easier but I was really still doing it unconsciously and am still working on trying to do it period. Anyway, so I keep trying to rethink what really was the theme of the book. It wasn't slavery really, that would be too trite, too easily summed up because the conflicts were about slavery but yet were so similar to the conflicts of woman today that I don't think that was the real theme. Lizzies real conflict was whether or not to stay in a relationship with an unequal power structure where she is very much the "other woman". Very similar to many modern relationships that are not formed in "real slavery" but are mimicking it none the less. I think the theme is relationships, with men and with other women. When to stay and when to go, trying to figure out what you want from your life and your relationships and what you will accept in order to get it. For a book dealing with a dark subject matter the tone is fairly light. Lizzie, the narrator, is a slave but doesn't project the same despair in her station as the other woman because she loves her master. I don;t think she really feels like a slave. The only dissatisfaction you really sense from Lizzie is that she wants to make sure her children are free in case something happens to her. On the other hand, Drayles wife, Fran has gone through bouts of making Lizzies children her "pets" when she feels the need to fulfill her maternal urges. All in all Lizzie is not a dark character. She exudes a lightness not expected in such a character, a naivety bordering on simpleness. An unquestioning character, and for all that she is the most educated slave in the book she is oddly innocent compared to most of them. She accepts the fate of slavery, rape, abuse mental and physical as just part of her lot in life, in such a way that although she should be jaded from, she really isn't; and that in the end, is why she stayed, because I don;t think she really thinks of herself as a slave. She would I believe be more easily identified with the mistress of a married man today. Always being pacified, insecure in love but too in love to leave, waiting forchance to be number one.