human condition, I wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition. Even worse was the fact that the female condition in literature—one of whiteness and confinement—remains so unsatisfying. I was shut out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter. The heroine’s text tells us that, at best, under a minimum of structural constrictions, women are still mostly pulverized by their own lives.
But if this text exists to demonstrate that reality, then both things can always still be rewritten. The heroine’s journey, or her lack of one, serves as a reminder that whatever is dictated is not eternal, not predestined, not necessarily true. The trajectory of literary women from brave to blank to bitter is a product of material social conditions. The fact that the heroine’s journey is framed as a default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist.
In writing this I’ve started to wonder if, through refusing to identify with the heroine, I have actually entrusted myself to her—if, by prioritizing the differences between us, as the Milan women did with one another, I have been able to affirm my own identity, and perhaps hers, too. In Sexual Difference, the Milan women write about a disagreement they had while discussing Jane Austen, during which one woman said, flatly, “We are not all equal here.” The statement “had a horrible sound, in the literal sense of the term: sour, hard, stinging,” the women wrote. But “it did not take long to accept what for years we had never registered….We were not equal, we had never been equal, and we immediately discovered that we had no reason to think we were.” Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.
I cling to the Milan women’s understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.
Ecstasy
The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a $34 million campus, built in the 1980s and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership, and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered seating for a Baby Boomer choir that sang at the 9:30 service, a performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world. You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to honor you after your death.
The church was founded in 1927, and the school was formed two decades later. By the time I got there, in the