Frontiers of privacy: The domestic enterprise of modern fiction

This study explores the overlooked influences of domestic fiction on the development of nineteenth-century literature. Although domestic novels dominated the nineteenth-century literary marketplace in America and Britain, they aroused negligible critical attention in the twentieth century until the 70s when a host of social historians persuasively reasserted their cultural significance. In the forty years since then, the number of scholarly works published on these once prominent books written by a cluster of American women authors has reached formidable proportions. Where domestic fiction was dismissed for decades as a histrionic indulgence geared towards under-educated female readers, today this popular writing and the middle-class creed associated with it are considered fundamental to the social life of Victorian America and Britain. And yet, despite the revived interest, critics have re-evaluated domestic fiction almost exclusively in terms of its ideological relevance while generally disregarding its literary impact.;It is against this arguably still-too-dismissive view of domestic fiction's creative legacy that this study claims that domestic narratives were so popular in their era that other fictional forms had to respond to them. Adaptations of the domestic plot, its incidents and characters pervade gothic narratives and the detective fiction invented in mid-century. Likewise, the first gestures towards literary modernism at the end of the century are packed with domestic motifs. To illustrate this path of influence, the first chapter analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, both of which exhibit complex interactions with the formulas of domestic plots. Hawthorne's imperative to compose in a dialogue with domestic fiction will in turn set the stage for a discussion---in subsequent chapters---of domestic legacies in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Taken together, this genealogy, spanning from Hawthorne's mid-century gothic novels and Poe's detective fiction to James's proto-modernism and Woolf's full-fledged modernism, should indicate the wide impact of the domestic genre on the literary forms developing after it and thus, hopefully, also contribute a new dimension to the body of scholarship which has already done so much counter the protracted amnesia surrounding domestic fiction.