Transcendent Daughters in Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs

Book excerpt: Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, Joseph Church's Transcendent Daughters proposes that the narrator's venture among these people in fact allegorizes an anxious daughter's return to familial origins and dramatizes her reengagement with and effort to transcend unconscious constituents of the self established during early maturation, specifically androgynous composites of an internalized hostile mother and idealized father that now severely constrict her world, most of all, her access to beneficent women.