This chapter explores how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Gates Ajar (1868) challenges social norms that dictated women’s experiences of intimate and public spaces, as well as experiences of grief in the aftermath of the Civil War. It proposes viewing “heaven” as imagined by the women in the novel as a heterotopic social space. By describing a liberating space in the afterlife, the novel questions male-centered societal expectations and offers a fictional, gender-informed, political alternative to the constraints imposed on women’s intimate experiences and emotions.