The father's death
In many ways, the father's death represents freedom to Gertrude, because her experience of him was one of fear and abuse. He was controlling and cruel, but still his father, so the confusion of his abuse has ended. After he passes, the father's death becomes a sign for the emotional dilemmas of the book as Gertrude attempts to understand herself. Although he is gone, the damage he did will linger, and she can never rid herself of his influence because he is quite literally part of her.
Marriage as a goal
Instead of allowing life to take its course, Gertrude's family and community teaches her that marriage is a critical part of succeeding in life. Instead of being a good thing, marriage represents her desire to be accepted. She feels that marriage is like a carrot on a stick, the sign of a job well done. She wants to be loved so that she can feel valuable, because she struggles to understand her self worth because of the abuse of her father.
The salvation of love
Love is paired with the Christian motif of salvation, because she feels that Trueman (whose name is symbolically suggestive) might bring her freedom from the grips of her loneliness and frustration. He does so, but he also shares his religion with her, and she begins to identify with the love of Jesus Christ. She becomes integrated in a Christian family and encounters the opposite of her father's abuse, a love that would compel someone to die for her. She is freed from depression by an encounter with sacrificial love, and she undergoes a philosophical transformation.
The motif of reward
When she decides to take up Trueman's offer to become a new kind of person who focuses on making a positive difference, she finds that there are built in rewards for doing the "right" things. She decides to focus her energy on becoming a virtuous person, not for moral goodness's sake necessarily, but because she discovers that there is consistent reward for focusing on helping others. She stakes a claim of identity in helpfulness.
The sacred wound of poverty
Because Gertrude was made to suffer so thoroughly from the life of poverty she lived with her abusive father, her character becomes shaped by the archetypal journey from poverty to a kind of wealth. She views others through true empathy because she has experienced the bottom of the barrel so to speak, and this informs her understanding of love. Love can be seen as an overflowing of her own compassion for self, because she has to forgive her brokenness by seeing herself as the product of her environment.
