Inside the Hidden World of Christian Patriarchy: One Woman’s Journey to Freedom

Inside the Hidden World of Christian Patriarchy: One Woman’s Journey to Freedom

Later in the text, her husband forces their son to kill the puppies born under the kitchen table. When Levings reaches out to comfort their oldest child, “…his forearm cuffed my cheek. The force knocked me to the wood floor, shocked and dizzy” (215). Suffering is swiftly processed into certainty and action. Left with “…one concrete, glaringly harsh truth: I could not live like this anymore” (216), the conclusion is unambiguous, efficient, and final: she must leave. She cannot stay.

A Well-Trained Wife does not reveal the inner texture of Levings’s emotions and resists the visibility demanded of fundamentalist women. Yet the swiftness with which pain becomes resolution reveals how thoroughly fundamentalism persists as an entrenched worldview. Even her decision to leave it behind is shaped by binaries, by a belief that suffering must serve a purpose, and by the demand to produce a single, clear, directive meaning. Her narrative restraint, then, reflects both agency and aftermath.

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