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Home and Away
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3 Home and Away Hegemony and Naturalization If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these halfdozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan.” —Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles Something curious begins to happen in early nineteenth-century depictions of private domesticity. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, novelists , and others, had celebrated home as an enclosed, self-sustaining refuge, unchanging and impervious to the foreign. But homes in early nineteenthcentury fiction take on a less idyllic aspect. Writers start to condemn them as enclosed, self-sustaining refuges, unchanging and impervious to the foreign. Home becomes boring and suffocating. At both the private and national levels , its profound inwardness feels more and more claustrophobic and solipsistic rather than safe and nurturing. In the 1790s, Robert Southey chose an epigraph from Hesiod’s Works and Days for his “Hymn to the Penates”: “That which is in the HOUSE is better since what is outside is damaging” (Poetical Works 5: 485 n. 3). Ann Radcliffe offers this reflection in her Journey Made in the Summer of 1794: “An Englishman . . . cannot help considering the natural security of his country, and rejoicing, that, even if the strong and plain policy of neglecting all foreign consequences, and avoiding all foreign interests . . . except the commercial ones, which may be maintained by a navy, should for ever be rejected, still his home cannot be invaded; and, though MacKenzie, rev pages.indd 125 MacKenzie, rev pages.indd 125 12/5/12 3:58 PM 12/5/12 3:58 PM 126 Be It Ever So Humble the expence of wars should make poverty general, the immediate horrors of them cannot enter the cities, or the cottages of an island” (187).1 The Englishwoman ’s home prior to the turn of the century is a bulwark of self-fortification and her homeland provides sturdier ramparts still, though the whole retains the appearance of a warm, embowered cottage.2 The priest, poet, and Clapham Sect abolitionist Thomas Gisborne, in his 1797 Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, warns that facility of access and intercourse expose women . . . to the danger of acquiring a habit of continual visiting, and the other habits which St. Paul justly ascribes to those who have contracted the former. “They learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house . . .” Domestic business is interrupted; vigilance as to family concerns is suspended; industry, reflection, mental and religious improvement are deserted and forgotten. The mind grows listless; home becomes dull; the carriage is ordered afresh; and a remedy for the evil is sought from the very cause which produced it. (285–86) Gisborne exhorts women to follow St. Paul’s admonition to be “keepers at home” (283), where domestic employments will guard against idleness and the temptation to become “tatlers also and busy-bodies, speaking things which they ought not” (286). His admonitions sound very like the kind of rhetoric that had been applied to paupers wandering between parishes earlier in the century. But a year earlier, Edmund Burke had already begun to chafe against the turn inward: “If we look to nothing but our domestick condition, the state of the nation is full even to plethory; but if we imagine that this country can long maintain it’s blood and it’s food, as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane” (“Regicide Peace” 195). Passages like that one appear to renounce a mood for which Burke had advocated in the Reflections: “Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security” (92). Homeland security has, for Burke, shaded into paranoid excess.3 The turn against hermetic domestic regimes does not occur in a wholesale historical shift or a discrete historical moment. Indeed, what I am...