American Houses: Constructions of History and Domesticity

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln's assertion that house divided against itself cannot stand founds his politics of Union, for as he went on to explain, do not expect the house to fall -but I do expect it will cease to be divided. The questions of how literally we ought to understand the conventional metaphor of a national household and how we are to assess the implications of domestic unity and domestic division prove central to both Douglas Anderson's and Gillian Brown's extremely different books. Anderson surveys canonical American literature from John Winthrop's Modell of Christian Charity to Henry James's Portrait of a Lady to reveal the remarkably durable imaginative tradition (1) of representing American communal life as a familial and domestic endeavor. Brown interweaves the writings of Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville with a variety of nonliterary sources (the architecture of country houses or manuals on mesmerism) to produce a historically specific account of how the material conditions of mid-nineteenth-century structure American individualism. Reading these books together raises the further question of what the stakes of may be for the American literary history of the 1990s. Lincoln's expectations for national unity are predicated on his assumption that the American home was inherently a site of harmony rather than of discord and differences. The cult of domesticity that informed nineteenth-century discourses about the home reified these benign expectations. As Catherine Beecher explained, in contrast to the mercantile, and morally suspect, authority of man, the home-centered dominion of woman may be based on influence that the heart is proud to acknowledge (53). Indeed the century's celebration of the domestic hearth, and its concomitant relegation of women to increasingly housebound activities, has been understood by feminist historians as a means of combating the anxieties raised by the competition and flux of America's burgeoning capitalism.1 In such accounts the secure and sanctified home figured as a A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature