White Oleander takes place during the protagonist Astrid’s adolescence as she goes from being a young girl to a grown woman. It explores issues of femininity, what it means to be a woman, and the specific struggles women endure. Astrid’s mother is her first and, for many years, only example of womanhood. Astrid looks up to and emulates Ingrid, seeing her as strong, wise, and independent, and wanting to be like her someday. Ingrid believes that women should refrain from attachment and hold themselves up, remaining at odds with the world and ever above it. She muses on the importance of challenging norms and following one’s own drives in one of her letters to Astrid:

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal the fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.