Freedom

Throughout A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, the author uses Eddy’s reflections on his mother’s life in order to consider the ways in which freedom relates to the individual’s happiness. The author initiates these thematic explorations via Eddy’s surprising encounter with and response to an old photograph of his mother. Eddy is so taken with the image of Monique as a 20-year-old young woman, because “everything about the snapshot—her pose, her gaze, the movement of her hair—evokes freedom, the infinite possibilities ahead of her, and perhaps, also, happiness” (3, 4). These evocations are surprising to Eddy because he has primarily known his mother by way of her entrapment and her related misery. Ever since she became pregnant and married at the age of 18, Monique has lived a life dictated by others. She has therefore had no agency over her circumstances, her body...