Modernism and Domesticity: From Conrad's Eastern Road to Stein's Empty Spaces in the Home

Abstract

Gertrude Stein suggested that nineteenth-century English literature is composed of phrases rather than sentences or paragraphs and that its primary function is to explain the relationship between England's inside, or daily life on the island, and its outside, which she defines as everything England owns. This chapter discusses the relationship between domesticity and imperial expansion in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. It explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between an American modernity and the categories of woman and domesticity in Stein's work. The chapter is concerned with the relationship between domesticity and empire, but in the United States and its empire rather than in Britain or its colonies. Although imperialist ventures in Asia were dominated by Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, by the turn of the century, the United States had annexed Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and the Philippines.