History in the House of Culture: Social Disorder and Domestic Fiction in Early Victorian England

Abstract

The British domestic novel made its appearance in fits and starts and significant gaps consequently punctuate its history. Such breaks in the development of the genre indicate when it could not deal with the important issues of the day, just as the appearance of domestic fiction in startlingly new forms tells us when this kind of novel effectively engaged its moment in history. The history of the domestic novel implies that its discontinuities were a function of the novel's place in a much larger process of meaning which continued the work of organizing and interpreting reality in other discursive modes when the fiction of courtship and marriage did not serve this purpose particularly well. By constructing a conventional history that forecloses the possibility of reading the gaps in the development of any such form, one therefore conceals the rhetorical imperatives shaping a particular work and so misrepresents the direction of literary change in general. The period of time, for example, between Austen's fiction and that of the Brontes is just such a break in the tradition of domestic fiction. Historians of the novel must scratch for examples to fill this gap or else pursue the most flagrantly formalist logic and ignore it. This gap points to historical