In the beginning is the end

I think JCO has a lot in common with Hawthorne AND the ability to be a lot more explicit about the stuff of life than he was.

I think that she's very interested in "coming of age" stories about young women because that is a defining moment where, you might say, women discover the connection between sex (Eros) and death. A young woman both begins life at that moment (at least the part of life that has an awareness of the larger world and a role for her in it) and senses that this is where the slide toward death begins. It's the moment in which identity or a certain kind of identity is found, discovered, granted, and the moment when the slide toward death lends a sense of melancholy, desperation, or....something, to life. As soon as life is affirmed, we become aware that life will inevitably end.

Where does the question of identity play into this? My first thoughts...that moment that I am talking about is the moment when the woman is, for herself, identified with her sexual role. That is not the only identity that she will have but it is in many ways the most defining one. Even rejecting or not having sex implies an awareness of the sexual role and reaction to it.

I see this in all three young women in our stories ("Where Are You Going..." and "Why Don't You Come Live With Me It's Time"), though I still feel that "How I Contemplated the World.." is somehow more attached to the world than the other stories, which are much more dreamlike and much more readily, at least for me, seen as allegories. BUT, here's the weird thing, everything I know about allegory requires that allegory to have some kind of transcendent meaning to refer to. I will have to think about this. Obviously, for JCO, that's not the case.