“A Car of Her Own”: The Reinvention of Female Subjectivity against the Traditional American Dream in All Fours

Abstract

Published in May 2024, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade which has triggered a cascade of abortion bans across nearly half the states, Miranda July’s All Fours has emerged as a cultural touchstone for women rethinking marriage, desire, and midlife freedom. Recent critical reception highlights the novel’s provocative engagement with perimenopause and ethical non-monogamy, positioning it not merely as a road narrative but as a radical examination of female aging. With automobility as its theoretical perspective, this paper identifies both psychological and spatial mobility as the primary means by which the unnamed protagonist enacts her female subjectivity, thereby challenging the gendered assumptions embedded in classic American road narratives. The paper further re-examines the traditional American Dream by analyzing the dualistic individualism embodied in this novel. Drawing on recent interviews where July discusses giving women “permission to blow up their lives”, this study proposes alternative measures of female upward mobility. This study concludes that All Fours redefines female upward mobility not as escaping domestic roles, but as renegotiating them through temporal autonomy and relational interdependence. True success, as July implies, lies in striking a balance between personal desire and communal care, thereby offering a more sustainable, humane worldview for middle-aged women in the 21st century.