Domesticity and Design in American Women's Lives and Literature
explores the ways in which four American women writers from the
mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century inhabited domestic
space and portrayed it in their work. Hellman explores independent
female authors who had intriguing and autonomous relationships with
home, relocating frequently either to begin the creative processes
of designing and decorating anew or to avoid domestic obligation
altogether by remaining in transit. She also looks at how women
authors wrote female characters into existence who had strikingly
different relationships with home, and contended with profound
burdens of housekeeping in an oppressive domestic sphere. The
disjunction between the authors' individual existences and the
characters to whom they gave life reveals multiple narratives about
women at home in nineteenth- and twentieth- century America. This
interdisciplinary inquiry undertakes a dual treatment of
domesticity in an effort to synthesize a more complete
understanding of the relationships between social history and
literary accomplishment. Syncretising domestic literature with
domestic practice, Hellman appraises the ways in which the authors
appropriate domestic rhetoric to address issues of political
import: economy, health, and social welfare in the case of Stowe,
material feminism for Alcott, the landscape for Cather, and World
War I for Wharton.
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