Freedom

By way of both Eugénie’s and Geneviève’s storylines, the author considers the complexities of what it means to be free. At the start of the novel, Eugénie’s life with her family in their “bourgeois Paris apartment,” appears to afford the 19-year-old freedoms that the women held inside the infamous Salpêtrière do not have (15). However, within the opening scenes of her storyline, first presented in Chapter 2, the reader learns that the entirety of Eugénie’s life has already been dictated by her father. The narrator explains that “her existence will arouse the interest of the patriarch only when a young man from a good family—that is to say a family of lawyers such as their own—asks for her hand in marriage . . . Eugénie imagines [her father’s] fury when she confesses that she does not wish...