The Golden Gate: A Novel

In her Author’s Note, Chua writes that in her depictions of Sadie and Isabella, she was inspired by the biography of the American poet Anne Sexton, whose life and work represent the anguish of women constrained by domesticity and mental illness. The Golden Gate explores how trauma, particularly when shrouded in secrecy and the expectations of social propriety, is passed down through generations of women, manifesting as mental illness, self-destruction, and repeated cycles of harmful behavior. The intertwined fates of Mrs. Bainbridge; her daughter, Sadie; and her granddaughter Isabella suggest that these pathologies the tragic consequences of a patriarchal society that pathologizes female pain and desire. Through the Bainbridge women, Chua illustrates how unspoken suffering festers, becoming a destructive legacy passed from mother to daughter.

This inheritance began with Mrs. Bainbridge, who internalized the belief that a woman’s worth is tied to her desirability and then projected this anxiety onto her daughter. Sadie, in turn, became addicted to male attention, a need that spiraled into depression and “fits of hysteria” when her role as a wife and mother threatened her sense of self (30). These responses to society’s gendered expectations show the degree to which such expectations are unnatural; the mind and body are not built to integrate them. Nevertheless, society’s response is not compassion but control. Sadie’s husband, Roger, had her subjected to a lobotomy, a violent medical procedure intended to erase her inconvenient desires and enforce conformity. This act crystallizes the novel’s argument that female pain, when it becomes disruptive, is treated as a sickness to be surgically removed rather than understood. The nature of a lobotomy—inflicting surgical brain damage on a patient—emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of patriarchal violence, as Sadie was robbed of her personality and sense of self in the pursuit of compliance. Since this treatment is historically accurate, Chua uses Sadie as a case study to comment on societal perceptions of women’s agency more broadly. 

The trauma of being silenced and medically violated was then passed to Isabella, who was left with a mother who was a shell of her former self. Isabella’s life has become a reenactment of her mother’s and grandmother’s traumas, representing the cyclical nature of trauma. She experiences psychological “fugue states” and a compulsive need to conquer men, mirroring Sadie’s own patterns. This reflects how, without a path toward restitution, autonomy, and equality, there is no possibility for healing. This is reinforced in Mrs. Bainbridge’s murder of Wilkinson. She killed him to prevent what she saw as history repeating itself, believing that she was protecting Isabella from the same fate that destroyed Sadie. However, this murder only perpetuated the cycle of trauma and violence rather than providing a path toward healing. In this tragic act, Mrs. Bainbridge’s lifetime of repressed desire and jealousy transformed into a twisted form of protection that ultimately consumed her family, revealing how inherited secrets and pain, left unaddressed, can erupt into devastating violence.