The father
In this story, the Daughter of Venice is the daughter of a high ranking government official in old Venice. Donata loves her life and her home, but she is fed up with the limitations of her life as royalty. Although she belongs to a power family, she is actually not powerful in her home dynamic. She is the first victim of her father's patriarchal dominion in Italy. She does not hate his power, though. She merely resents it until she decides to break his rules so long as she can do it playfully and get away with it. This plot verges on allegory.
The convent culture
The girls are also socially powerless because of archaic opinions about sexuality and gender. The culture of the time is that a family would marry their first daughter off to another family, and send any subsequent girls to a convent, never to be touched or loved by any man. This strange obsession with virginity leaves the sisters in dire straights, they feel, because all three daughters long for love. In the end, they stage a scandal that will allow them all to be happily married, and it works.
Adventure and becoming
Donata explores her identity through experience, forming a motif. Her freedom is not derived from her ability to do battle or challenge someone in court or something; no, she derives her power from her own desire to do what she wants. The question is whether anyone can stop her. On a day when she was feeling powerful, free, curious, and untouchable, she gets herself hurt. She ends up feeling obligated to a Jewish boy named Noe who helps her getting back on her feet. By the end, she is her full adult identity; the motif is bildungsroman.
The other sisters
Together, these sisters form a matrix that can be seen as representative. There is a common literary motif where groups of women are symbols of fate, and this can also be seen that way. As co-sufferers of the same patriarchy, the women experience a vibrant community amongst themselves. The sisters often whine and gossip together, and toward the end of the novel, they have to cooperate so none of them get sent to some convent or something. The sisters can be seen as a symbol for community and fate.
The duality of youth and maturity
This book is not about a "wife," per say; it is about a Daughter. But by the end, she is a wife-to-be. She is also a philosopher-to-be with a future in education. The novel can seen as a depiction of transition, a twilight era in Donata's life. Although day by day, her life changes, this novel sees her entire character evolve. She does not really even notice it, but the reader sees it happening. At the start, the girls are just co-conspirators in their own family dynamic, but by the end of the novel, all the youths are properly married adults with their own fates and identities.
