Domesticities and novel narratives

Abstract

The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space . . . For our house is our corner of the world . . . [A]ll really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home . . . Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1957) [H]aving settled my houshold Stuff and Habitation, made me a Table and a Chair, and all as handsome about me as I could, I began to keep my Journal. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) Robinson Crusoe, who left a comfortable middle-class home in England, finds himself stranded on a deserted island, and promptly creates a comfortable middle-class home in its midst. He makes his new corner of the world into a house – two houses, to be precise: his main “fortress” and his “country retreat,” complete with his “family” of dogs, cats, goats, and a parrot, with handy shelves, misshapen pots, raisins, and an umbrella. And when his household stuff is settled, he can begin to write. Crusoe's domestic management supplies a vignette for the eighteenth-century British novel, which in such sweeping ways is all about home: finding it, losing it, running away from it, replicating it, furnishing it, inhabiting it, remembering it, haunting it. Even the picaresque novels, “homeless” as their rogues go ranging round the world, define themselves by the absence of home, the picaro living by his wits on other people's doorsteps. The house, which houses the home, the domestic, is site of plot, character, action, setting: she is pursued through the chamber; he brandishes a sword in the hall; they meet in the parlor; they avoid each other in the garden; she drops in an elbow-chair; he eavesdrops from the closet; she points the poignard at her breast in the dining-room; they take two chapters to descend a staircase. As Amanda Vickery notes: “Universal but unexamined, homes are implicated in and backdrop to the history of power, gender, the family, privacy, consumerism, design and the decorative arts.”

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