Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

In children's literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction...

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.

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.