What are the motifs in The Dead of the House by Hannah Green?

The concepts of lineage and heredity play important roles in the book. Within a family, it is typical for some amount of a person's self-identity to be shaped both by the reality of inheritance of traits, known as heredity, as well as by the perceived notion of such, known as lineage. The difference between the two ideas of lineage and heredity is fairly straightforward, and is often referred to as nature versus nurture. Heredity implies inheritance, or the direct passage of traits through a parent to a child. Lineage is much broader and harder to quantify. It can be as simple as the idea of "coming from a good family," or something more abstract, like the idea of someone somehow being the "black sheep of the family."