[In the following essay, Bauer investigates Gilchrist's portrayal of women in her fiction.]

“There is an old gorgeous man living right here in Jackson, Mississippi, that I have been loving and fighting with and showing off for since I was born. … My father.”¹

“It's that old daddy. … That's who we love.”²

My study of Ellen Gilchrist's fiction has illuminated for me the frustrations of women like her prototypical Rhoda Manning: women of my mother's generation who grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s within upper middle-class families and who were allowed, even encouraged, to go to college but were sent there for that MRS. degree more so than for any B.A. or B.S.—in other words, to get enough education to help attract a lawyer or doctor. These women were certainly not expected by their fathers, brothers, their intended husbands, or even their mothers to pursue a career of their own after college. Gilchrist is at her best when she writes about these Southern debutantes of the ‘50s, whose education inspired ambition but whose ambitions were thwarted by their own families.

Gilchrist does pit some of her protagonists against their communities—for example, the materialistic and xenophobic upper class of New Orleans—in several stories of her first collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, which are among her strongest works. However, in the Rhoda stories for which she is perhaps best known—also among her strongest works—her protagonist never really gets far enough out of her own house to confront society's limitations upon her. She is too busy fighting her father's, her brother's, and later her lovers' and husbands' restrictions, which keep her at home.

In an essay entitled “Reading the Father Metaphorically,” Beth Kowaleski Wallace analyzes “reading the father as if he stands for something else,”³ which is what I did In My previous study of Gilchrist's Work, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist,⁴ perceiving, at the time of that writing, the conflict the characters had with their fathers as symbolic of “the workings of [the] patriarchy” (Kowaleski-Wallace, p. 299). Kowaleski-Wallace argues that if we “scrutinize the individual father as the substitute for patriarchy with its oppressive effects, … we have implied that if only we could remove the influence of the father from his daughters' lives, we could remove the effect of patriarchy itself. … [But] even if the individual father could be ‘abolished,’ patriarchal influence would not cease to exist” (p. 297). While I agree with Kowaleski-Wallace that “the behavior of the historical, individual father—particular paternal prerogatives exercised and abused—suggest[s], on a smaller scale, the workings of patriarchy” (p. 299), I also note that in Gilchrist's fiction, it is the family, directed by the father, that stands in the way of her recurring female characters: significantly, any time one of her recurring female characters breaks her leash and ventures out into the world beyond her father's or husband's property line, she actually succeeds—until her family intrudes again, that is.

Rhoda's cousin Crystal Manning, another character recurrent in Gilchrist's short story collections; Amanda McCamey of The Annunciation; and Anna Hand of The Anna Papers also strain against that same short leash holding Rhoda in. Amanda leaves her husband's New Orleans home to study in the creative writing department at the University of Arkansas, becomes a star pupil, and is selected to translate a collection of eighteenth-century Italian poetry—and her translation is then published. Anna is a writer in New York, well known enough that a niece she doesn't even know she has checks out her books in her local library out west.⁵ Even Rhoda, who also leaves her husband, as well as her children, to study creative writing, is recognized by her professors as one of their most talented students, and at the end of the story “Music,” in Victory Over Japan,⁶ we learn that she, too, is a published writer living in New York. As these women pursue their common ambition to write, the conflicts that arise are not with professors, publishers, or a reading audience who fail to give a woman writer a chance. Tension increases when they are called home (as Rhoda is in Net of Jewels⁷), when they go home (as Anna does in The Anna Papers), or when “home” comes to them (as when Amanda's cousin Guy visits her in Fayetteville toward the end of The Annunciation⁸). And Crystal, who pursues no career outside of the home and only leaves one husband for another and then that one for a lover, is never given a respite from her fights with her controlling husbands or brother. One hears her consequential desperation when she concludes an anecdote about one of her brother's earliest triumphs over her with “[A]re you listening? Can you hear me? This is everything I know about love I'm telling you. Everything I know about everything” (Victory, [Victory Over Japan] p. 277).

As Crystal implies, it all starts when they're little girls, as perhaps best demonstrated in the Rhoda stories, including the first story by Gilchrist I ever read, a story entitled “Revenge” about Rhoda's successfully pole vaulting despite her brother's insistence that such is not an activity for girls. After reading the story the first time, I was overwhelmed by a sense of triumph, of empowerment; apparently, I was focusing exclusively on Rhoda's success both at pole vaulting and in proving her brother wrong. After a subsequent reading of “Revenge” some years later, I would recognize that the story is not, after all, triumphant—at least not for the protagonist, the little girl named Rhoda, who would reappear, in various stages of her life, throughout Gilchrist's canon. Rhoda suggests in this story's last line, “Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me,”⁹ that the highlight of her life occurred when she was ten years old. I have contended elsewhere that while the story's last line promises no future full of such accomplishments for Rhoda, “Revenge” is an example of the writer's accomplishments: her depiction of the limitations upon girls and women who grew up during and following World War II, and the consequences of those limitations, particularly to strong girls and women who refuse to accept those restrictions.¹⁰ Here I hone this argument, suggesting that the real force oppressing these female characters is the family. In this reading of the source of Gilchrist's characters' oppression, to paraphrase Freud, the father is just a father—the brother just a brother, the lover or husband just that.

In “Revenge,” Rhoda, her brother Dudley, and three of their male cousins are staying at their grandmother's house while their fathers are overseas, serving in World War II. Early in the story, Dudley, Sr., writes his son from Europe, directing him, first, to prepare for the Olympics—“The United States would need athletes now, not soldiers”—and second, “to take good care of [Rhoda] as [she] was [her] father's own dear sweet little girl” (In, [In the Land of Dreamy Dreams] p. 112). Dudley, Jr., puts the two instructions together, in spite of the fact that the Rhoda he is in conflict with throughout the story is no “dear sweet little girl,” and tells his sister she cannot participate in their “Olympic training.” To Rhoda's dismay, no one on the plantation overrides young Dudley's declaration that “‘This is only for boys’” (In, p. 112). Rather, their grandmother and the housekeeper suggest to Rhoda other sources of amusement considered more suitable for girls: playing with a little girl at a neighboring plantation and learning to dance. Rhoda's rage at her brother's discriminatory treatment of her is aggravated by the discrepancy between women being in charge while most of the men are away and finding no ally among those in charge.

“Revenge” is still my favorite Gilchrist story, and each time I reread it, I am still invigorated by Rhoda's triumphant pole vault at the end of the story: after a whole summer of being restricted from participating in her brother's and cousins' project just because she is a girl, she determines to find out for herself if girls “can't” pole vault—and discovers instead that at least she can. Readers familiar with Gilchrist's Rhoda stories know that this edict against participating in “boys' games” is only the first of many such attempts by Rhoda's brother to keep Rhoda in her place. He is supported in these endeavors by her father, beginning with Mr. Manning's letter from overseas reminding Dudley that it is his job as big brother to take care of his sister. Then, in the stories that take place when the siblings' father gets home from the war, Dudley, Sr., takes over trying to make a lady out of Rhoda, with the continued help of Dudley, Jr., as well as Rhoda's mother and later her husbands. In the story “Music,” for example, Rhoda's father takes her on a trip, during which he tries to get her to stop smoking, to teach her to be more respectful to her parents, and to calm her overall demeanor and behavior. In the novel Net of Jewels, after Rhoda defies her father by eloping, he alternates between bribery and blackmail to make her stay home with her children, his grandsons.

Paradoxically, Rhoda's father is proud of his daughter's talent, strength, and independence, even as he strives to maintain his control over her. Similarly, boys and later men are first attracted to the spirited natures of Rhoda and characters like her, but then are either intimidated by these women or they determine to tame them. This pattern begins for Rhoda when she is a teenager, in the story “Perils of the Nile” (in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams), in which her friend Bebber Dyson admires her unique and brazen personality but is ultimately more attracted to her soft-spoken, less self-centered mother who “looked straight at him out of sad blue eyes while he talked about himself” (In, p. 131, emphasis added). Ultimately, though, controlling someone like Rhoda's mother is not as appealing to the men in Rhoda's life as taming Rhoda, turning her into her mother. As Rhoda realizes at the end of “Perils of the Nile,” her ambition to be queen [of the Nile, hence the story's title] has its drawbacks: such ambition presents a challenge, particularly to men who believe that “queen” should only be a title for the wife of the king. As she matures, Rhoda will continue to find that most of the men attracted to her provocative nature will ultimately pick up where her father left off, trying to break her spirit enough to keep her at home and in his control—Daddy's princess rather than Queen of the Nile.

Unfortunately, Rhoda has a difficult time resisting these men. She tries through them to resolve the paradox of her relationship with her father, to be both a good daughter and one who earns her father's approval. Probably the best alternative theory I have heard for the Oedipal/Electra complexes is that the issue is not that women are attracted to men like their fathers and men to women like their mothers. Rather, we are attracted to people similar in character to the parent with whom we have an unresolved conflict and thus the one who will give us opportunities to try to resolve the conflict we can't resolve at home. Psychologist James L. Framo reports that including the “family of origin” during marriage counseling reveals “bilateral, hidden agendas of the marriage contract—such as what, from the previous family, [they were] trying to work out in their choice of this particular person as a mate.”¹¹ Framo concludes from these findings that “[o]ne's current intimates, one's spouse and children, are shadowy stand-ins for old ghosts, the embodiment of old introjects” (p. 197). Thus, Framo argues, “[t]he relationship problems” one would have with such intimates “are reconstructions and elaborations of earlier conflict paradigms from the family of origin (p. 173).

In short, we are attracted to people who are familiar¹²—which explains most of Rhoda's choices of lovers and husbands and thus why she continues to have to fight her battles within her own house. The men in Rhoda's life are, like her father, torn between their attraction to her nature and the challenge it presents to their own self-images. They rise to these challenges, and Rhoda's conflict continues unresolved. So how is Rhoda—or any of Gilchrist's Rhoda-like characters with dominating families—to break this cycle of oppression? Changing the father's nature is no less feasible than changing anyone else's:¹³ consider the reaction one of Rhoda's friends might have to her saying, “he'll change,” if she were talking about a lover she was staying with in spite of her unhappiness. It is usually the goal in such cases to make the “victim” realize that the lover is not going to change—well, neither will the parent. The goal, then, is to quit needing the parent's approval, so as to quit being devastated when it is withheld. Once this goal is accomplished, one is less likely to fall prey to “familiar” manipulators.

In one of her more recent works, Sarah Conley, Gilchrist remarks on the common phenomenon of “‘the fate of the strong … be[ing] the prey of the weak or unhealthy’”: “‘Of course they gravitate to you and want to latch on to you,’” the title character of that novel is warned, to which she responds, “‘How do I protect myself? … One can't just leave the world and not love people.’”¹⁴ Her therapist then advises, “‘You keep the proper distance. … That is more difficult than it seems because they are always thinking about you. Devising ways to move into your sphere, to get closer, to make you guilty’” (p. 151).

In her much earlier novel, The Annunciation, Gilchrist's Amanda McCamey is ultimately able to “keep the proper distance” from the oppressive members of her family. She begins by leaving her husband, though that is not so difficult since he is not very “familiar”; he is completely different from her cousin Guy—her first love, first lover, the father of a baby she had when she was only fourteen. It is more difficult to resist Guy when he comes back into her life.

When she was pregnant the first time, Amanda had been coerced—by the family—to give their baby up for adoption, mainly so that Guy's promising future would not be handicapped. She gave in then, for Guy's sake. Thirty years later, “called home” for their grandmother's funeral, she still has difficulty resisting Guy. Finally, though, not long afterwards (in the interim having left her husband to pursue her own dreams), when Guy intrudes upon Amanda's life in Fayetteville with a plan to resume their relationship and make themselves known to their daughter and grandson, she finally sees him as he really is: “He turned her face up to his with his hands and all the pain and longing of his life was there for her to see. It seemed to Amanda that all her life Guy had been turning that lonely face up to her, asking her to get him warm with the light that was in her” (p. 289). After this epiphany, Amanda berates Guy for coming back into her life and dredging up the past. When he apologizes to her, she asserts, “‘You aren't sorry or you wouldn't have done this to me. You're just sorry I won't give in to you. You've figured out a way to be miserable and you want me to keep you company’” (p. 291).

Amanda determines right then that she will “live in the present, and in the future … right here on this mountain with this life I made for myself and finish finding out who I am” (pp. 291-292). As her novel draws to a close after a forty-something Amanda gives birth to a second baby, she projects an image of herself that goes beyond Rhoda's Cleopatra fantasy: Amanda sees herself, not just as a queen but as a goddess. She evokes The Lord's Prayer in the novel's final paragraph, transforming it into an assertion of self-reliance and self-worth. “My will be done” (p. 353), she begins, reminding the reader that she once complied with her family's will to take away her baby and has suffered for it ever since. Amanda may have been following the example of God the Father when she gave up her first-born for her family, but her decision to keep her second child and her assertion of her own will following the birth of this child is more in keeping with “a Goddess-centered context,” as defined by Carol P. Christ:

In a Goddess-centered context … the will is valued. A woman is encouraged to know her will, to believe that her will is valid, and to believe that her will can be achieved in the world, three powers traditionally denied to her in patriarchy. In a Goddess-centered framework, a woman's will is not subordinated to the Lord God as king and ruler, nor to men as his representatives. Thus a woman is not reduced to waiting and acquiescing in the wills of others as she is in patriarchy.¹⁵

Indeed, resuming her prayer, Amanda says, “My life on my terms … leading to my lands forever and ever and ever, hallowed be my name, goddammnit, my kingdom come, my will be done, amen, so be it, Amanda” (p. 353).¹⁶

Amanda's prayer to herself might be viewed as a self-blessing ritual, as defined by Zsuzsanna E. Budapest, founder of the Sisterhood of the Wicca and the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1: “It is a woman's own blessing on herself; her own divinity is honored in a ritual with herself. It is a self-affirmation … and a very powerful ritual.”¹⁷ Budapest goes on to explain why self-blessing is so significant for women: “In self-blessing, you affirm the divine you. Self-blessing is very important for women, because too many of us have internalized our own oppression. It is important for us to change the influences working in our deep minds” (p. 271).

Considering, for example, Amanda's earlier allusions to Narcissus in the novel, a prayer to herself is certainly reflective of positive development. Shortly before conceiving her second child, Amanda had explained to the man who would father this child the value of “‘[l]oving yourself, not letting your self-esteem be in the hands of other people’” (p. 230); but until the birth of their child, she has not been able to practice this dictum, probably because she was taught early on that self-love is selfish and thus “bad.” When she was just a child, “[s]he would stand on the bank [of the bayou] or lie on the pier looking down at her reflection in the water, thinking about the story of Narcissus, who was turned into a flower for liking to look at himself too much. She would stare down into the water hating and fearing the gods who had such powers, wondering how far she dared go to challenge them” (p. 11). Also from her childhood, Amanda recalls a Narcissus-like story her grandmother would tell her of “an old dog [that] … lost his bone by trying to bite the reflection of it in the water” (p. 52). Thinking about that story as an adult, Amanda responded, “Old greedy yellow dog … Poor old dumb thing” (p. 52). The first memory—of her fascination with the story of Narcissus—reveals the negative lesson that the story of Narcissus is supposed to have taught Amanda about the consequences of self-adoration, but it reveals, too, Amanda's early spirit of rebellion, which promises an ability to overcome Southern mores that support women's self-deprecation. This spirit was for a long time squelched, however, by Amanda's acceptance of her grandmother's lesson on the value of self-denial implied by her story of the greedy dog. In accepting the lessons damning narcissism in both stories, Amanda had failed to recognize that such warnings against vanity and greed could be taken too far and used to support the subjugation of women like herself. She was supposed to adore her cousin Guy, not herself, and later she was supposed to adore him from a distance, allowing him to pursue his future free of the consequences of their actions. The only bone she was expected to reach for was a successful, appropriate husband.

With this aspect of Amanda's past in mind—that she grew up in a family where women are not supposed to think too highly of themselves or want too much for themselves—the reader should realize that Amanda's closing prayer is a victorious pendulum swing away from such attitudes. Her prayer of self-adulation with its reference to “My life leading to my lands forever and ever” puts Amanda on a par with the rebellious survivor Scarlett O'Hara. At the end of her novel, Scarlett plans to return to Tara, “her lands,” to gather together her strengths in order to face her most recent tragedy: the loss of Rhett Butler, who has just announced that he is leaving her. Like Scarlett, Amanda summons her own inner strength to overcome her many losses, even while the Ashleys and Rhetts in her life are destroyed.

Anna Hand, too, has learned to maintain “the proper distance” from her family and her home in order to pursue her own ambitions, rather than those of her family for her, and to live according to her own values, rather than any imposed upon her by her family. Anna seems to have found a way to deal with her conflicts with her dominating father and thus reject the related belief that her value as a woman depends on the opinions of the men in her life. By the time in Anna's life covered by The Anna Papers, she has put behind her the experience of several miscarriages and disappointing marriages and has focused her attention on her career. Her success as a writer seems connected to her ability to follow her own rules of living: shirking familial obligations if need be (even when she goes home to North Carolina during the novel, she refuses to answer the phone or doorbell when she is writing), choosing her lovers according to her own whims without regard for whether her family would approve of them (one of her current lovers is married, the other a college student about twenty years younger than she). When she visits her family in The Anna Papers, she does so of her own accord, rather than in response to any summons. Having sensed that she is ill (she is ultimately diagnosed as having cancer), she is going home to try to share with her family, in particular, her sister and nieces, what she has learned “on the outside” about living a fulfilled life.

Linda Schierse Leonard might interpret Anna's character as what she terms the “Armored Amazon”:

such women often identify on the ego level with the masculine or fathering functions themselves. Since their fathers didn't give them what they needed, they find they have to do it themselves. So they build up a strong masculine ego identity through achievement or fighting for a cause or being in control and laying down the law themselves … But this masculine identity is often a protective shell, an armor against the pain of abandonment or rejection by their fathers, an armor against their own softness, weakness, and vulnerability. The armor protects them positively insofar as it helps them develop professionally and enables them to have a voice in the world of affairs. But insofar as the armor shields them from their own feminine feelings and their soft side, these women tend to become alienated from their own creativity, from healthy relationships with men, and from the spontaneity and vitality of living in the moment.¹⁸

Since Anna is apparently in touch with her creativity and able to live “in the moment,” I would suggest that she does not quite fit Leonard's description of the armored Amazon—that is, in the “unfamiliar” world of her professional life. But her relationships with men are not exactly healthy—at the time of the novel, as indicated above, she is involved with two men, one married, the other, being much younger than she, perhaps a substitute for the children she has been unable to have or reminiscent of the younger siblings whose lives she once controlled. Therefore, it is not surprising that, as with other Gilchrist characters, once Anna goes home, tension arises between herself and family members who do not approve of her lifestyle or values—not only her father but also her mother, brothers, and sisters. She gets sucked back into her role in the family and becomes completely involved with and consumed by her parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews.

While home, Anna at one point contemplates her father's influence upon her:

That glorious old man, she thought. My God, I love him. Every man I ever loved is just a replay of those emotions. I remember every word he's ever said to me. Indelible, never to be erased. Not to mention all those goddamn handwritten letters of advice that have followed me around the world. Those goddamn yellow legal pads. Every time I ever saw one I thought a piece of advice was going to jump out and grab me by the throat. Whatever goes on between that old man and me is the real thing.

(p. 136)

Anna's awareness of her father's influence upon her life, particularly her choices of men who allow her to “replay those emotions,” is what ultimately distinguishes her from Rhoda. It is the kind of insight that Amanda finally had about Guy.

Like Amanda and Anna, Rhoda ventures out, as mentioned previously, in pursuit of her own ambitions, which are, when Rhoda is repeatedly coerced to return home, thwarted by her family. After Rhoda's freshman year at Vanderbilt University, where she wins a prize for her writing and excels on the swim team, her father persuades her to transfer to the University of Alabama so that she will be close to home where he “‘can keep an eye on [her]’” (Net, [Net of Jewels] p. 69). Though a talented writer with the promise of a career ahead of her, Rhoda drops out of college after eloping, then has several children right away. She divorces this husband but continues to focus most of her energy toward finding a mate rather than on the writing she still longs to do. In one of the most recent Rhoda stories (in The Age of Miracles¹⁹ collection), Gilchrist suggests that Rhoda does finally let go of her need for her father's approval and relates this supposed truce with her father to her successful career: In this story, a “pushing sixty”-year-old Rhoda, who introduces herself as an established writer, explains that she decided to move to Jackson some years back (when she was around fifty) “to make my peace with my old man. ‘The finest man I've ever known,’ as I wrote in the dedication to a book of poems. I don't think he ever read them” (Age, [The Age of Miracles] p. 3). She says this last so straightforwardly that one might consider the possibility that she has finally gotten “the proper distance,” finally accepted that she cannot change her father and thus stopped trying to resolve her conflict with him, stopped caring so much about pleasing him, let go of her need for his approval. I don't know if I'm buying it, though. I have some difficulty with her calling a father she suspects hasn't even read his own daughter's work “one of the finest” men she's known. I think she's still deluding herself.

And now, so is her creator. Many of Gilchrist's recent plots surround women who reach maturity in the 1980s and pursue their careers in the 1990s. The decline in the quality of Gilchrist's work since The Anna Papers, published in 1988 (and it is important to realize that since then she has continued to average a book every two years), is related to the author's attempt to write about women of her sons' and grandchildren's generation. I argued in my book that Gilchrist has become too attached to her characters and her readers and thus will not let anything bad happen to the former group and will compromise her fiction to please the latter group (bringing a character who dies in The Annunciation back to life in a later short story, for example, after getting complaints from her readers). Here I pose an additional reason for the decline in quality: not only is Gilchrist playing fairy godmother to her characters, protecting them from any harm, but also she is setting these characters in Never Never Land, the Enchanted Forest, a land far, far away, where the sexual revolution has ended and women have the freedom and social approval to be and do anything they want. In truth, as my generation of middle-class, educated Southern daughters who grew up in the ‘70s and pursued their careers in the ‘80s and ‘90s knows, not much has changed within the dominating Southern family.²⁰ It is certainly true that in the 1980s and ‘90s, women had more rights and privileges in the U.S. and less social censure, even in its Southern states. But as long as Southern families continue to prize compliant daughters willing to compromise their own ambitions for duty to their families, then the conflict continues unresolved. Having a career may be more accessible to us and more socially acceptable in the world at large, but as we grow up we are still fed the fairy-tale code of conduct: “Be a good girl, and you'll meet your handsome prince and live happily ever after.” Reading the recent Gilchrist fiction in which the young women are successful both in their careers and in finding love—and manage to work out the problem of balancing them with little conflict (as in her 1997 novel, Sarah Conley), my mother accuses Gilchrist of going over to the other side. I would say, rather, that saddened by the idea of her granddaughters facing the same oppression she suffered, Ellen Gilchrist is now seeking a safe distance in escapist fairy tales.

Notes

1. Ellen Gilchrist, Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 155.

2. Ellen Gilchrist, The Anna Papers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), p. 86.

3. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Reading the Father Metaphorically,” in Refiguring the Father. New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, ed. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Ad Feminam: Women and Literature Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 297.

4. Margaret Donovan Bauer, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999).

5. In The Anna Papers, Anna's niece Olivia de Havilland Hand discovers Anna's books, notes their common last names, and sees a resemblance to herself in the photograph of Anna. She knows her father, whom she has never met, is from North Carolina, which she finds out Anna, too, is from, and contacts Anna to find out if they might be related.

6. Ellen Gilchrist. Victory Over Japan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).

7. Ellen Gilchrist. Net of Jewels (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992).

8. Ellen Gilchrist. The Annunciation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983).

9. Ellen Gilchrist. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), p. 124.

10. What precedes in this paragraph is almost directly from the introductory chapter of my book, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist. Some of the discussion of “Revenge” that follows is also in the book, although, as indicated, the argument is redirected. Similarly, parts of discussions of other works covered in this paper appear in the book, though the thesis of this paper goes beyond how the material was previously employed.

11. James L. Framo, Explorations in Marital and Family Therapy: Selected Papers of James L. Framo (New York: Springer, 1982), p. 177.

12. In commenting upon our choice of the “false safety” of “familiarity,” psychologist Robert W. Firestone's theories regarding the consequences of what he calls the “fantasy bond” are similar to Framo's (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses [New York: Human Sciences, 1986], p. 36). Firestone explains, “Most people attempt to replicate these primitive connections (referring to the fantasy, or idealized bonds children have with their parents) in their most important associations, using their loved ones as symbolic substitutes for the parental figures. They tend to relive the early experiences in their families with new people to the detriment of their present-day relationships (p. 57).

13. As Framo points out, “some children cannot get their parents to love them even if they sacrificed their life” (p. 197). Again relating conflicts left unresolved with a member of the family of origin to one's choice of mate, Framo notes that “the yearning for the love and acceptance of parents … underlies the search for all other loves and is probably the basis of the ecstasy promised by romantic love and the devastation following rejection” (p. 188).

14. Ellen Gilchrist. Sarah Conley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), p. 151.

15. Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (New York: Harper, 1979), p. 284, Christ's italics.

16. To illuminate further the significance of Amanda's revision of the Lord's Prayer—substituting the first for the second person pronouns—one might look at Carol Christ's analysis of the original prayer, excerpted below:

    “Thy will be done …” Did I realize that as a good daughter, my role was to fulfill the will of my father, later my boyfriend, finally my husband? Did I realize that my will was not meant to be done in my family or my society?

    “On earth as it is in heaven …” Did I realize that I was participating in the legitimation of a world where all publicly acknowledged power is in the hands of men (Carol P. Christ. Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987], p. 94).

    Christ's deconstruction of the line “Forgive us our debts (trespasses) …” is applicable to Rhoda's conflict with her father and sibling rivalry with her brother: “I think I grasped the message that before the Father we are all guilty. Did I somehow understand that my sin was being born female in a society where fathers and sons were preferred? Did I comprehend that I could be forgiven the original sin of femaleness by gaining the approval of men?” (Laughter, pp. 94-95).

17. Zsuzsanna E. Budapest, “Self-Blessing Ritual,” Womanspirit Rising, p. 269.

18. Linda Schierse Leonard, The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship (Boston: Shambhala, 1982), p. 17.

19. Ellen Gilchrist. The Age of Miracles (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

20. It is interesting to note that Gilchrist has three sons, no daughters. Thus, she did not have to witness her own daughters suffering the continued frustration that my generation of Southern daughters endures as we pursue careers: paraphrasing and quoting one of my friends and colleagues, society may now sanction women doing it all, “but there are still only twenty-four hours in the day.”