Blueinkedfrost

Be careful what you wish for - you might get it! In this fanciful tale, Norah O'Brady is a plain looking young woman whose wish for many men to be attracted to her is granted. She eventually discovers it's not quite what she would like.

The story starts with some rather interesting details about a shop-girl's working experiences. When at work, she's subject to very strict rules about behaviour and falls afoul of the serious rule that missing a sale three times in one day causes dismissal. She is also docked pay for offences such as late arrival and forgetting her cuffs. Her employer is expected to provide food for the employees at lunchtime, though it is not good quality and she does not have sufficient time to eat it. She lives at a lodging with other female employees and an older female supervisor, with rules such as a strict curfew and no talking after hours.

The novel has some intriguing almost-supernatural elements, such as this cryptic take on what wil happen to the young girl if she stays out after nine pm.

‘Be always back before nine. It is then the hour of your greatest peril begins. Should you ever be out after nine—which the gods forbid—let no one see you enter. They will be watching for you in the front. Go to Rosemary Street at the back. Between thirteen and fourteen there is a passage. At the end there is a wall. Climb it. There are two stanchions one above the other on the right. They will help you. Drop into the yard. Go to the backdoor. You will see a spot of light shining at you. Put the key in there. Turn three times to the left. The door will open. Enter and close quickly lest your enemies be upon you. If they enter with you may God have mercy on your soul. From your affectionate uncle, Benjamin Batters.

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This is a trope I use and like reading a lot. What can it mean?

It's a reflection of the person's awful relationship with their actual father.

It's the opposite of the person's great relationship with their actual father, because they like fiction removed from their experience.

It's a commentary on patriarchy.

It's an easy source of drama, especially in a patriarchal setting (like most Earth cultures). Since fathers are generally men, they are more powerful, so this conflict automatically gives you a powerful oppressor.

It's a good way to get a young protagonist out the door and into adventure. People with a great family life are more reluctant to leave, but if their household is awful to them that's the perfect narrative reason for them to go outside and kickstart the plot.

It's a desire to avoid misogynistic tropes. Mothers who treat other people badly exist in real life and obviously it's OK to write stories reflecting that, but because our culture has a misogyny problem it can be difficult to write fictional Evil Mothers without those tropes. That leaves the male parent as the selected option for the bad guy.

It's prejudice against men. Generally, our culture has a misogyny problem, but sexism hurts men as well and a narrative that men are inherently bad and abusive just isn't true or fair.

It's a metaphor for social oppression, translated into a personal analogy.

It's a metaphor for growing into independence, where a child learns to live apart from their parents. It's just more dramatic if the parting of ways is a heroic saga of good versus evil as opposed to moving interstate for a job as an accountant.

My father and grandfather are both incredible people that I love dearly, so I'm probably in the #2 bucket!

This is a 1902 take on the case for prison abolition. It was an interesting read, I hadn't expected to find these arguments being raised in that time period. Wikipedia dates prison abolition arguments back to 1851, so I see I was wrong to assume these ideas were relatively modern.

As usual with this sort of thing, it's a little bit vague on how people will cope with the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Epsteins and Fredegondes of the world once we've got rid of police and jail and entered utopia.

Darrow traces historic injustices in prison and law and argues that most criminals don't repeat their impulsive actions so there is no point to locking them up. The fear of punishment isn't particularly effective in reducing crime, as demonstrated by the abolition of public hangings by Darrow's day (which would be expected to make people fear punishment, but which actually tended to encourage callous behaviour and attitudes). Darrow follows a crime-as-disease model, where as we started to treat kleptomania as a mental condition that needs treatment rather than jail, Darrow expects we'll find equivalent conditions for other crimes as science marches on.

Darrow targets the hypocrisy of a society where most property is in the hands of a few wealthy people, and yet most people in prison are there for property crimes and own no property themselves. This was written before the era of the white-collar criminal such as the bloke who popularised the Ponzi scheme, whom I suspect Darrow would seek to explain as pathologically mentally ill.

Darrow suggests a sort of restorative justice process, where criminals should be given opportunities to receive rewards from their labour. He uses Australia as an example here, where (some of) our convicts became good citizens (* depending on how you define 'good'). (Darrow doesn't address issues such as white Australia's relationship to its Indigenous population.)