The book reflects Potter's conflicted feelings about rebellion and domesticity – about her desire to flee her parents' home via a "rebellious" engagement to Norman Warne and her purchase of a domestic space that would be built with her fiancé. Kutzer points out that the tale has three settings: that of the humans, that of the doll's house, and that of the mice, and that the themes of the book include "domesticity and the role of domiciles within domesticity" and tensions about the pleasures and dangers of domesticity and of rebellion and insurrection.