"[It]'s the fate of the strong . . . to be the prey of the weak or unhealthy. . . . Of course they gravitate to you and want to latch on to you. . . . " 
   "'How do I protect myself? . . . One can't just leave the world and not love people." 
   "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." (151)

I was tempted to title this paper "What I Learned from Reading My Own Book," since I saw it as an opportunity to articulate one aspect of the work of Ellen Gilchrist that only became completely clear to me when I read the page proofs.  My study of Gilchrist's fiction has illuminated for me the frustrations of women like her prototypical Rhoda Manning:  women of my mother's generation, class, and education who were allowed, even encouraged to go to college, but were sent there for that MRS degree more so than for any BA or BS--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. 

While in her New Orleans stories of the collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, which I still argue are among her strongest works, Gilchrist pits her protagonists against society, in particular, the materialistic and xenophobic upper class of New Orleans, in her Rhoda stories, 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 mother's, her brother's, and later her lovers' and husbands' (that's husbands plural, by the way) restrictions, which keep her at home. 

Rhoda's cousins 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.  It is interesting to note, too (even if it is too late to put it in my book), that any time one of these women 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:  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. . . .