Entrapment

The author uses her main character Amanda Wordlaw’s restlessness and discontentment as a throughway into her explorations concerning entrapment. At the start of the novel, Amanda leaves her life in the States in order to pursue a new career “writing travel books” (11). She stops “writing erotic fiction,” leaves her husband Lantis and her young daughter Panda, and starts living a peripatetic lifestyle (11). Abandoning her seemingly stable version of reality as a wife and mother conveys Amanda’s feelings of constriction and limitation. In one scene from Book III, “Of Pilgrims, Self-Centered Bitches (Peregrine Women?), and Hard Nuts,” Chapter 58, Amanda is convinced that Ernest calls her a pilgrim. When she asks for clarification later, he corrects her saying, “No, I called you ‘peregrine,’” which is “one of those birds that never stays in one place” (168). Although both the pilgrim and the peregrine are mobile creatures, they...