In the following essay on "Leaving the Yellow House," Lippit proposes that the character Hattie is the one exception to Bellows's treatment of female characters in his fiction.

Charles Newman asserts that "there is not a single woman in all of Saul Bellow's work whose active search for identity is viewed compassionately, while every vice of his male introspectives is given some genuine imperative." While I agree, in the final analysis, with Mr. Newman's remark and with his subsequent comment that "this attitude is generally indicative of serious writing since the war," I believe that Bellow's "Leaving the Yellow House" (1957) provides an exception; Hattie, the protagonist of this work, is a female searcher. "Leaving the Yellow House" is also exceptional in its desert setting, for Bellow has consistently presented dramas of people living in the modern metropolis. Despite the difference in sex and setting, however, "Leaving the...