第112页 Pure Heroines

If the childhood heroine accepts the future from a comfortable distance, and if the adolescent is blindly thrust toward it by forces beyond her control, the adult heroine lives within this long-anticipated future and finds it dismal, bitter, and disappointing. Her situation is generally one of premature and artificial finality, in which getting married and having children has prevented her from living the life she wants. 
We know what that one way looks like: marriage, otherhood, grace, industriousness, mandatory bliss. PRescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness - as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless, hardworking wives and mothers because that's what will make them happy, when models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women (and still, as with the term "girlboss," often defined in reference to male power even when theorized in an ostensibly emancipatory way). 
...in marriage, women had served as vehicles for families to transfer and retain wealth. 
Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domsticity. Their stories circle quesitons of love and obligation - love being, as the critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept "our culture uses [for women] to absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and transition to adulthood. "
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 shen looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resisits and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become soemthing more.