We are Bound for the Promised Land
The extract text from A. E. Watterson’s novel ‘We are Bound for the Promised Land’ is about Eilean who is a young girl. She lives with her parents and her two sisters Mary and Fiona. The sisters and Eilean work on the farm with their mother, while the father is a priest. The family is a very traditional and religious family. A priest is a person who works at the church and helps people, listens to them and talks to them about there’s personal or religious problems. You can describe a priest as a soft and gentle person. Eilean’s father doesn’t act kind and gentle at home. He is very dominant and everything has to be like he wishes at home. “There are no buts about it. It needs to be done.” There is no place for the other family member’s opinions, they have to follow the father’s order and ask him for permission. Everyone in the family obey the father except Eilean. She is the most individual person in the family who goes against her father. In page three of the text ‘We are Bound for the Promised Land’ Angus describes Eilean and Lewis as cowards, but Eilean tells him that she is not a coward and not afraid. She promises to take with them to the beach at a Sunday, to prove that she is not a coward or afraid.
Angus and Lewis are Eilean’s friends. They spent time together and her father doesn’t like it. “Katie MacInnes and her friends are lovely girls, you should try to be a bit more like them”. He says. The father doesn’t like that his daughter spends time with Angus and Lewis but instead he wants her to be a bit more like Katie and her friends. Eilean doesn’t want to hang out with Katie and her friends, or to be like them. She likes to be friends with Angus and Lewis.
Eilean acts like a boy when she is with Angus and Lewis. She is confident about herself. She hits Angus when he says something, she doesn’t like, about her. She is a strong person because she can stand up against her father, without being afraid of the consequences, even though her father slaps her on the cheek when he is mad at her.
The MacLeod family is an ideal family where the father decides all the decisions and works, and the mother is a housewife. Eilean’s father works at the church and her mother is a housewife. She is home all day and does house work. The children help at home when they are not at school. Eilean goes to school but in the text it doesn’t say that the sisters as well go to school.
“Mother can I peel off the skins of my potatoes, or is it a sin? Mary asked” Eilean’s sisters, Fiona and Mary, are not as loud as their sister Eilean. They only ask about the most important they should know, otherwise they don’t question anything else, as far as we are concerned about the text. However, Eilean is much louder, and doesn’t obey her orders without questioning her duties. In line 41-55 Eilean keeps saying ‘but’ until her father gets mad at her. The mother doesn’t say much in the text, she just tells Eilean to do what her father wants her to do. The family is divided in those who obey the father and Eilean who doesn’t obey him. She doesn’t feel connected to any of them, and she is different from them. She fantasizes about how it is in town in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
Eilean dreams about freedom and a big town life. She is a stranger in the society she lives in. She lives in a farm, in a smaller town, in Scotland with her parents and sisters. Everything is silent and harmonic in the society she lives in. People are religious, but she is different and strange in the society she lives in. In the end of the story she breaks the ideal tradition about being home at a Sunday and goes out to go to the beach with Angus and Lewis to improve that nothing scares her. The ending line repeats we are bound for the promised land. Eilean proves that she is not bound to any one, when she leaves. “Oh who will come and go with us?” She doesn’t stay or follow them on their track, instead she starts making her own track.
The main themes in this story can be the following: A girl who struggles in her family and society because she is different than the ideal girl. A girl who searches for freedom, and breaks out of her father’s wings. Typical family live vs. finding your own identity and way of living.

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[ 1 ]. We are Bound for the Promise Land. Line 42
[ 2 ]. We are Bound for the Promise Land. Line 46-47
[ 3 ]. We are Bound for the Promise Land. Line 157
[ 4 ]. We are Bound for the Promise Land. Line 174-175