In the following essay, Carmela Delia Lanza examines author Ana Castillo's deconstruction of women's physical, political, and spiritual boundaries within her novel So Far From God and explores how both the author and her characters seek to merge these arenas, connecting their domestic and public lives.

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). It is necessary, however, to begin including working-class homes and the homes of women of color in this dialectic. The subject of home space has not...