Gina Berriault’s protagonist is a struggling young actress who has just begun a day job as a social worker in the women’s ward of a city hospital. With no qualifications or experience, she finds it hard to maintain clinical detachment and begins to identify with the suffering, often troubled women in the ward. She reflects on turning points in her own life, and concludes that women are shaped by the beds (a metaphor for common life experiences) they have chosen, or someone else has chosen for them, to lie in. Themes: empathy, choice vs. superstition/destiny, identity, aloneness, connection.
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