Housetelling: Rendering the American Dream House in American literature, 1840-1930

My dissertation provides the first full-length study of the moral interpretations of the American Dream House and its inhabitants. Drawing upon early American architectural pattern books, I delineate the architectural morality theories popularized by such writers as A. J. Downing. I demonstrate that these nineteenth-century architects contended that the American Dream House ought to be designed in ways they considered moral; a well-designed house would promote both well-behaved children and a strongly moral nation.; I then argue that the literature of the period dramatizes these allegedly auspicious and inauspicious house designs and analyzes their effects upon the inhabitants, with special attention to their effects upon women characters. I concentrate on the writers Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edgar Allan Poe, William Dean Howells, Susan Warner, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Sinclair Lewis, as well as the legend of Lizzie Borden. Analyzing how certain writers materially rendered morality, my dissertation contributes to feminist considerations of property ownership.