Will One in Twenty Really Get the Two Relationships?

Let us dispense with "OoA" as breathtaking travelogue, mood piece, presentation of sociological awakening (all of which it is) in favor of dissecting the two attachments in the context of the cultural rules and norms of just about a century ago.

For Karen, both of the attachments are "anxious" or "ambivalent" in the terms of famed, mid-century psychologist John Bowlby and his disciples. Karen may have felt "secure" with Bror, but being a budding climber out of cultural boxes, the "security" would become chafing. Karen never felt "secure" with Denys, of course, because he was simply too far out of the box for her until it was too late.

Bror was too attached to -- and dependent upon -- her, though insistent that she fit his programmed pictures of what a woman "should" be, according to the instructions implanted in his Mind of the Time.

Denys was as ambivalently attached to Karen as she was to him, but for precisely opposing reasons. She was (unconsciously) attracted to his "free-spirited" and "independent" transcendence of the cultural norms... while, however much he may have been drawn to her hormonally, Denys was as (quite consciously) disturbed and put off by her culturally normalized, conventional possessiveness.

Thus, "OoA" works -- on just one of its many levels -- as a dramatization of the conflict many, more enlightened people (as many women as men, nowadays) experience when attracted to those who are still stuck in the common cultural cave of "lover as chattel."