Bodies in the 'house of fiction': The architecture of domestic and narrative spaces by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot

One of the most common plots of the nineteenth-century novel almost always includes a heroine in the domestic space of a house. The country house, the townhouse, the cottage, the farmhouse and the parsonage are all domestic spaces that come to figure prominently in the construction of the "domestic novel," hence the name of this subgenre. There is a way in which the body of heroine and the space of domesticity interact in the space of the novel in such a manner so as to produce an inextricable relationship between spaces, bodies and the space of the novel. The interrelatedness of body, space and the novel are represented both in "real," material architecture and imaginary, fictional narrative of the nineteenth-century. This dissertation examines how the material spaces and bodies are interpolated into the narrative spaces of three novels by women: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and Middlemarch by George Eliot.;Any examination of space, body and the novel requires an interdisciplinary method of analysis. To that end this examination employs the sources and analytical methods of a number of disciplines including architectural history, landscape geography, feminist cultural studies and literary criticism. For example, a discussion of architectural pattern books, biographies and histories of architects and architectural designs of the nineteenth-century reveals the effect of architecture on the construction of and in the novel. These methods of examination have led to certain conclusions: that architectural spaces within the novel and the space of the novel give material and aesthetic expression to culture and history; and that the space of the novel as both textual and architectural produce new bodies and buildings most demonstratively constructed by the women writers in the novels examined in this dissertation. Finally, while the importance of documenting a history of women writing remains paramount, more critical to literary and cultural studies including architecture is a documentation of women building, a history that still needs to be written.