At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930

Abstract

Betsy Klimasmith's At Home in the City is a genuine pleasure to read. The narrative seamlessly moves from close readings of urban novels to discussions about architectural designs of tenements and boarding houses as well as of New York's Central Park. It analyzes the interiority of urban domestic fiction then literally and figuratively goes outside, to extra-literary sources. It is as if the very structure of the book confirms its central observation: the boundedness of the rural home gave way to an urban domesticity, where home is understood in terms of permeability, interconnectedness, and the fluidity of private and public spaces. Klimasmith links Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), and particularly Zenobia's high-class lodgings, for instance, to Boston's Tremont House, which was designed to balance autonomy with connections, privacy with sociality. The next chapter pairs Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) with Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in order to demonstrate how urban networks destabilized notions of privacy and publicity, where personal interactions became public performances.