"A Girl": part 3

In part III, entitled "Land Under the Wave," we see the narrator leaving home and her mother to move out to college. There she finds herself among the smoke and sex of the city, still trying to find her way. Another female figure is introduced to us, a presumed peer  who shows the narrator the ins and outs of the party life. Up until this point there have been the mother, aunt and narrator to demonstrate what a woman in Ireland values and embodies. So far, all of these women have been simple cogs in the cycle of domestic life; they can only gain their self-worth by pleasing and unquestioningly supporting male's  sexual, religious or gender cravings. They are forced to satisfy every male craving in order to be validated.
Part III continues this theme when the girl goes home with a man that she met at a party. The girl still has no self-made identity and, therefore, no self respect until a small glimps of hope comes at chapter two's ending. She begins pondering her role at home in contrast with her role away in the city. As she wonders about creating a new world she says, "I could make. A whole other world a whole civilization in this this city that is not home? The heresy of it. But I can. And I can choose this. Shafts of sun. Life that is it" (96). Rather than constructing an identity that defies the constraint that the (male) world has put on her, she and her new friend boomerang the other way; they reach a whole new level of male-pleasing as she starts to love "feeling ruined....To fill out the corners of this person who doesn't sit in photos on the mantel next to you" (98). Her search for purpose has landed her in another place that church does not support.