| A variety of nineteenth-century texts (novels, architectural guides, housing-reform pamphlets, and physiological treatises) figured the human mind as physical space, and, in ideal form, as domestic space with psychic functions compartmentalized in rooms, closets, and cupboards. The work this metaphor performed across a wide range of discourses, but especially in the novel, rendered it more desirable to the middle classes of Victorian England than competing imaginings of the psyche. In the rhetoric of housing reform and in novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, those who violate the boundaries of a proper self and home---most often working-class man and women of any class---threaten the cults of capitalism and domesticity, and are therefore represented as in need of mental partitions, structural means of containing oneself and keeping one's self at home. Model characters such as Esther Summerson, the "pattern young lady" in Charles Dickens's Bleak House , maintain psychic and domestic integrity by using discrete mental spaces to quarantine internal disorder and disruptive forces from the world beyond.; Modern readers tend to take this mental topography for granted; Sigmund Freud suggested that Victorian novelists had preceded psychologists and psychoanalysts in "recognizing" the spatial and domestic relations between the differentiated functions of a coherent mind. My dissertation historicizes what to many is a natural model of the psyche by tracing its production within specific social formations. I examine the ways in which the right use of "mental cupboards" becomes essential to the individual's successful negotiation of the cities of industrial capitalism in texts such as Gaskell's North and South and Dickens's Little Dorrit.; But this domestic model does not exist without resistance; in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke contests the limitations of a housed and partitioned mind and embraces a conception of the self as a part of boundless, organic life---a Romantic vision of the psyche with its own political implications. As I suggest by way of conclusion, writers such as Freud and Virginia Woolf carried the competition between these metaphors of mind into the twentieth century. |
