Family
The importance of the family unit is the overarching theme of the novel. However, this theme is presented in a way that strongly asserts that a family unit is not to be relegated merely to the conventional nuclear family concept of a mother and father and children. Dicey effectively is called upon to take on the traditional gender roles of both father and mother—protector and caretaker—of her siblings. In successfully rising to the challenge to meet these expectations forced upon her, she becomes the figurehead of a thematic concept which says that the family unit is the bedrock of civilization regardless of how it is organized.
Gender Conventions
In making Dicey the sibling that becomes the de fact father figure as well as the more expected mother figure of the clan, the novel also confronts themes related to gender convention and expectations. Dicey is really still a young girl, but she takes on responsibilities stereotypically expected of grown men. She is tough without losing her tenderness, exerts aspects of masculinity while never sacrificing her femininity, and reveals an ability to both think logically and act emotionally. The conventional wisdom throughout civilization is that these are personality traits which serve to define manliness or womanliness, but Dicey blows this theory apart by revealing the fundamental idiocy of this traditional belief system.
America’s Shameful Mental Health System
The mother of the Tillerman kids who abandons them in the parking lot of a newfangled national obsession known as the indoor shopping mall is quite clearly suffering from mental illness. She will eventually be “treated” for her health condition in an asylum that basically offers only a place to stay while dying without any real understanding of the processes causing her illness. It is a portrait of a dark ages of the treatment of mental illness in America and yet the events take place in the era of disco music, jiggle TV, and the invention of the Apple computer. Liza Tillerman’s mental illness treatment takes place at the same time that audiences are heading to movie theaters to be shocked at the inhumane portrayal of the treatment of the mentally ill just two decades earlier in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
