Sex Roles

The story is explicitly about women, but it touches on sex roles only indirectly. Berriault does not compare women's roles in society to men's so much as she explores women's common life experiences. At the hospital, Angela observes women in crisis and transition as she assigns them to new places, or "beds," at public institutions. Seeing the various women on the ward, all in their beds, makes Angela think back on formative moments in her own life—a visit with her mother, a suicide attempt, her first lover, the birth of a child. This leads her to form a theory about women's place in the world. "Now I see women as inseparable from their beds," she tells Dan. "Maybe beds are where women belong. Half the women in the world are right now in their bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether...