Madwoman

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, gender discrimination, and mental illness.

Clove has used networks of female solidarity to help her navigate escape from situations in multiple situations in her life, including when she initially fled from her abusive father as well as when she left the butcher in San Francisco. However, the novel also explores women who were unable to escape their abusive situations, either due to external pressure or internal motivation. The intergenerational patterns of female survival, as well as the failures that some of the mothers exhibit when trying to help their children, reveal how survival strategies and trauma responses have effects across generations.

Bieker establishes this theme through the central mother-daughter relationship, where survival strategies both connect and separate Clove and her mother. The mother’s reliance on truth telling contrasts with the daughter’s strategic deployment of lies, yet both approaches emerged from the same need: surviving male violence, specifically the abuse that Clove’s father inflicted on their lives. This divergence in survival tactics led to their physical separation but ultimately reveals their deep connection through shared protective instincts; Bieker exemplifies this through the mother’s willingness to accept imprisonment for a crime she did not commit to protect her daughter and Clove’s willingness to reveal the painful truth to her family.