Themes

Theme of women

Gardens, flowers (p35) Cow and ‘little bull calf is sleek now..’ p10 Birth: babies, calf, lambs “Why would I marry…. But more than these I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it”. P55 “Mrs Hancock and her daughters – I –laws wearily followed behind their husbands : I saw them that afternoon through Anys eyes shackled to their menfolk as surely as the plough-horse to the shares.” P57 Colonel Henry Bradford: “He seemed to take a perverse amusement in belittling his wife.” ‘She though still beautiful had become brittle after long years of such treatment.” P58 ‘…tensed like a cur waiting for the boot.’ Whores – Aphra about Anys: ‘You’ve sent the way the men old and young, sniff around her as is she were a bitch in heat.” P39 Lovers Sinners Saints ? ?  Jane Martin, Jane Martin “…Puritan in her ways thinking that laughter and fun are ungodly”. 24 Anna comments on Viccars story of prostitutes picking the King’s pockets. P28 (ie. prostitutes work hard) Anna tries on dress ‘ …embarrassed to be caught so immodestly preening.’ Aphra is jealous of Anys p40 Viccar’s songs of prostitutes p28 P56 ‘Nell the only girl in the Hancock family was so strictly kept by her many brothers….” Witchcraft accusations: p38 “I knew how easy it is for widow to be turned witch in the common mind.” P31 ‘the thought stirred me, so that my skin flushed and my throat tightened.’ P32 ‘..I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other’s roasting pan reminds her she is ravenous.’ ‘..that though I loved the touch of my children’s little hands there was another kind of touch – hard and insistent – for which my body hungered’. …his idea of love-making was a swift and sweaty tumble, a spasm and then sleep.” P25 P53: Anys telling Anna she slept with George “Drink up ”You‘ll feel better. It was naught more to either of us than a meal to a hungry traveller.” P54 ‘why cultivate a garden with only one plant in it?’ Happiness I got from my sons …burst upon me as the first spring thaw’ p7 P33 description of sleeping babies – lots. “I put my face to their necks and breathed the yeasty scent of them. God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so. Lambing where Jamie helps Anna pull out the lamb. P67 Anna and boys in the creek. ‘I stroked the fine downy hair on Tom’s head and watched Jamie splashing in the cool water.” Amazing description of her children – beautiful!!!!!!!!! In this same passage Anna says after she watches a dragon fly kill a wasp, “So it goes, I thought idly. A birth and a death, each unlooked for.” (pathetic fallacy for her own children.) When Jamie spills the rose petals over her she thinks, ‘”This moment is my miracle.” ‘For I loved Tom from the moment I first reached down and touched the crown of his head, all wet and bloody as it was…’ p77 ‘I knew it was true that fear of losing him has marched beside that love, every moment of that short time I had him with me.’ 78 P87 ‘It was as if a deep fog had settled on me and everything around me, and I groped my way from one chore to the next without really seeing anything clearly.’ Description of Elinor on p35. “her frail body was paired with a sinewy mind capable of violent enthusiasms and possessed of a driving energy to make and do.” There was something in her that could not or would not see the distinctions that the world wished to make between weak and strong, between women and men, labourer and lord.” Elinor teaches Anna to read p4 P36: “when she discovered that I hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds” Anna teaches herself to read. P36 Two Annas “…the other was Anna Frith, a woman who had faced more terrors than many warriors”. P15 P48: Anna about Anys: I liked her too because it tales a kind of courage to care so little for what people whisper, especially in a place as small as this.” Also about how competent Anys is in the birthing room. P 55 ‘’..and I had to own that I admired her for listening to her own heart rather than having her life ruled by other’s conventions.’ P85 Elinor sits with one family and then another, hour after hour as their relatives succumb to the plague. Elizabeth Bradford ‘sour faced and spoiled’ p11 P111 Maggie is cast out fromt eh Bradfords. ‘My life this is,..she said…and now I’m to turn me back and walk away with nothing.’ Elinor: p38 how she mothered the village “the whole parish benefited form her baroness”. Mem Gowdie was the cunning woman to whom all looked for remedies and poultices and help with confinements. “And yet Mem helped us as she could for pence or payment in kind as each of us was set to manage it, while the surgeons would not stir without the clank of shillings to line their pockets.” ‘May the seven directions guide this work. May it be pleasing to my grandmothers, the ancient ones. So mote it be.’ P84 P120 ‘My own mother died in her childbed when I was four”. ‘He used a thatcher’s hook.’ P121 ‘A woman must do real work to get her baby born.’ (no poppy drug) P122 Anna delivers her first baby. Much commentary about women knowing women’s bodies “use your motherhands.”
 * Symbols women are associated with **
 * Marriage **
 * Women’s attitudes to themselves/eachother **
 * Men’s attitudes to women **
 * Scapegoats **
 * Sexuality **
 * Motherhood **
 * Strength **
 * Class issues **
 * Healers/nurturers **
 * Childbirth **