He isn’t the only character who does this either. Yes, he is a product of his culture, but he often questions it, and breaks it, and exists outside it. We can see this in Tao Chi’en’s identity as a Chinese physician. These social constraints are understood and then they are bent, twisted, and shifted by the characters in the story. The novel also handles race and identity in a way that seemed far above its time. Even Rose Sommers, Eliza’s surrogate mother and the essence of a proper English lady, is sex-positive and progressive in surprising ways. It is dangerous, complicated, and at other times toxically dull to be anything but a white man, in the outward society of the novel, yet almost all of the characters who don’t fit into this category find a way to circumvent their identities in rebellious ways both large and small. The novel takes place in Chile, England, and then California, and the suffocating realities of the social structure are clearly noted. First, the book takes the colonialist patriarchy of the mid-19th century and laughs at it.
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