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Daughter Of Fortune Sparknotes

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Daughter Of Fortune Sparknotes
Daughter of Fortune is an inspiring piece of literature that captivates its audience by opening its doors to the life of a young Chilean girl who travels a long journey desperately to find her lover, Joaquin Andieta, in California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Eliza Sommers, when pregnant, endangered her life by smuggling herself on the obscure bottom of a ship headed to California, a society where people where driven crazy by gold fever. Eliza was raised in a British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by Rose Sommers, her British foster mother, in a stern British household, with multiple privileges common to a 19th century, upper-class British family. But once she escaped from what seemed safe for a woman, Eliza awoke to the challenge of herself in a scary man's world of hardships and reality in California before she refined herself into an independent and influential woman after going through what she went through.
Many significant historical aspects of Daughter of Fortune were shown mainly by the expansion of its geographical …show more content…
Tao Chi'en, a Chinese doctor, represented the Chinese aspect of this novel. Following Chinese tradition, Tao married a woman who had bounded feet which was seen as a sign of beauty, but she died because of her deteriorated health. Tao was taken into the ship that was headed to California where he met Eliza. Tao would become her friend and companion throughout part of her journey and at the end, her lover. This demonstrates how two bipolar cultures (Chile and China) are bounded together under the circumstances of the vulnerability of gender and race. Both learned to overcome their cultural and physical aspects in ways that their cultures would have never
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