ABSTRACT
Jane Rule's classic lesbian coming-out/conversion novel Desert of the Heart invites us to consider the contiguity of lesbian, gay, and queer literature with Puritan texts, specifically with the key Puritan narrative The Pilgrim's Progress, commonly acknowledged as a source text for the English as well as Anglo-American realist novel. Lesbian Bildung in Desert of the Heart disrupts Bunyan's construction of female subjectivity as an aural and biological receptacle for male authority. Desert of the Heart takes up the conventionalizing of faith, its transformation into a semiotic system whose purpose is, above all, its own circulation. Reno, Nevada, home to gambling casinos and divorce courts, explicitly recalls Bunyan's city of spiritual waste, Vanity Fair. For Evelyn Hall, who has come for a divorce, and for Ann Childs, who works in a casino, Reno insists on the conspicuous consumption of religion, the market calculation of salvation in terms of profit, loss, and utility.
