Domestic Novel

Abstract

Given what Ian Watt long ago identified as the novel's generic emphasis on personal relationships and “private” life, almost all fiction might in some respect be classified as domestic (1957,The Rise of the Novel). But the term refers to a prominent subgenre, largely Anglo‐American (with cultural roots in evangelical Protestantism), which emerged in the eighteenth century with Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) and came to full flowering in the mid‐nineteenth century. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott are well‐known domestic authors; domestic fictions by these and a host of lesser‐known writers were published in book form and proliferated, as serial and short fiction, in numerous widely read periodicals (seeserialization). Associated with the rise of female authorship (although male writers, e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne, also wrote domestic fiction) and a female literary readership as well as the increasing respectability of the novel as literary form, domestic transforms domestic incident into plot, centering on the home and family—not only as the sphere that launches the hero, as in thebildungsromanorpicaresquenovel, but as the locus of significant narrative action; domestic fiction invests the seeming “trifles” of daily domestic life with profound emotional and cultural value (Tompkins, chap. 6). Giving fictional form to the culturally‐and historically‐specific organization of personal life known as “domesticity” (a particular model of the privatized, middle‐CLASS, nuclear family) and to the gendered spatial and social divisions between public and private that defined Victorian society, domestic fiction centered on women; indeed, this literature's emergence coincided with the “rise of the domestic woman,” a moral exemplar and embodiment of “feminine” domestic virtues of modesty, chastity, frugality, sympathy, and selfless devotion to family (Armstrong, chap. 2; seegender). While domestic texts could be comic, even satiric, in tone, many were strongly inflected by evangelical Protestantism's vision of the special moral authority and “influence” of middle‐class women; domestic fiction of this type (often called “sentimental fiction”) played a key role in abolitionism and other early nineteenth‐century movements for social reform. While most accounts identify the waning of domestic fiction after 1870, scholars have traced its sustained relevance within the modernist era and beyond (seemodernism), especially among a diverse group of women writers in Britain and America; others detect its imprint on postcolonial novelists’ politically charged portrayals of “home.”