At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850–1930 (review)

Home" and the "city" are often viewed as contradictory terms in the study of American literature. In this richly argued new work, Betsy Klimasmith dismantles this opposition through readings of American urban fiction from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Klimasmith shows how fictive constructions of urban space resonated against theories of architectural determinism that considered how individuals were shaped by their environment. This approach to the conflict between agency and social construction sheds new light on such canonical works as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Henry James's The Bostonians, and provides innovative readings of Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and Nella Larsen's Quicksand. Analyzing works of literature against the writings of urban planners, theorists of domesticity, and urban sociologists like Robert Park, Klimasmith offers a new context for the appreciation of urban fiction. The city emerges re-imagined, the site of individual, familial, and communal self-invention.

Klimasmith's focus on urban space questions the American commonplace of possessive individualism, which linked property ownership to identity formation. As migrants flocked to American cities, apartments, tenements, boarding houses, and hotels became primary residences, supplanting the notion of the rural home as domestic haven. Klimasmith's study begins in the mid-nineteenth century, in which the city is often represented as tragically anonymous space. The author counters this view in chapter one through the innovative juxtaposition of The Blithedale Romance and Ruth Hall, both of which, she argues, "explore the promise and expose the threats posed by the unfamiliar subject who develops in the city's domestic spaces" (18). For example, Hawthorne's Miles Coverdale, alienated by idyllic Blithedale, emerges as a proto-Jamesian hotel-dweller who "avoid[s] fixed identities and retain[s] the fluidity the city required" (31).

Klimasmith's feminist historicism reveals the gendered implications of urban space. By the late nineteenth century, middle-class and wealthy women enjoyed a new mobility in the urban landscape, epitomized in New York City's Central Park. A "liminal zone," Central Park is neither fully public nor commercial, letting women claim public identities without threatening their respectability (63). In her reading of The Bostonians, Klimasmith demonstrates how gender and class affect the individual construction of urban space. Verena Tarrant, who receives her first proposal in Central Park, is relentlessly modern, "transformed by any space she enters" (72). Basil Ransom's ancestral home in Mississippi, to which he seeks to take Verena after their marriage, serves as an absent icon of conventional domesticity. Through a contextualized close reading of Olive Chancellor's apartments, we learn how the wealthy young spinster bridges Ransom's idealization of privacy and Verena's absorption by the public world. While inhabiting the "permeable living spaces of the city" (69), Olive resists being fully transformed by them.

As the book moves from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, it enters territory familiar to readers of realist urban fiction: chapters three through five grapple with representations of tenement life, apartment dwellers, and hotel culture. While the larger arguments here might be more predictable than the earlier ones, the richness of this section lies in the detailed analysis Klimasmith brings to the primary texts. For example, her juxtaposition of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and Stephen Crane's Maggie demonstrates how architectural determinism is countered by the tenement dwellers' ability to reshape neighborhoods and buildings to suit their own needs. In contrast to tenement dwellers, who turned their homes into malleable urban spaces, Theodore Dreiser's heroine remakes herself with her moves from apartment to apartment. Klimasmith shifts the terms of the traditional conversation about Sister Carrie away from consumerism, recasting the novel as a narrative of Carrie's efforts to locate herself in urban space.

Carrie Meeber becomes, in Klimasmith's words, the "figure" for "urban utopianism," celebrating the city's...