Children and Tiger Natures

When reading these final sections of The Grey Woman, one in particular kind of struck me, and it was when the woman finally gives birth to her child, she states “my poor worse than fatherless child. It was a girl, as I had prayed for. I had feared lest a boy might have something of the tiger nature of its father, but a girl seemed all my own”. I find it interesting that she says that she had wished for a female child because she was then all her own, as if the girl, just by being a girl would then not be able to inherit the attributes of her father as a male child would, and would then be completely like her mother. I guess this sort of struck me in the sense that of course there is the possibility that the little girl could end up just as her father, but it also sort of continues this line of thinking with the child and the monstrous that has popped up in various places throughout the semester, as usually children are the figures of innocence, but here even with birth, the male child would possibly be marked as a monster. Of course this also has to do a lot with gender, but I just found that passage intriguing, especially if to go by what has happened within the story, the female child could end up later on in life in just as poor a situation as her mother for her gender, but that outcome was not considered. But these are just some thoughts I had.