SOURCE: “Hearing the Voices: Women and Home and Ana Castillo's So Far from God,” in MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 65–80.

In the following essay, Lanza examines both the physical and the abstract idea of “home” in So Far from God.

I tie up my hair into loose braids, and trust only what I have built with my own hands.

—Lorna Dee Cervantes

In the nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott made subjects of objects when she wrote her domestic novel Little Women, which centered on four sisters and their mother during the American Civil War. Alcott created a home for the March girls that was removed from the world of war and male supremacy. In the twentieth century most critics who have devoted their attention to home space and domestic ritual have concentrated on white, middle-class homes (Matthews xvi). It is necessary, however, to begin including working-class homes and...