The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James (review)

Charles Hatten's The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James will be a welcome contribution for readers interested in the development of and modern retreat from domestic narratives. In it Hatten explores

a genealogy of emergent modernism within Victorian literature … examining one of modernism's defining themes as the problematic relation between the sexes caused by gender roles, a theme often expressed through the rejection of domestic idealization as a literary mode and its replacement by the representation of the family as a matrix of individual alienation.

(257)

In the attempt to trace this genealogy in domestic narratives, illustrating the genre and movements involved, this book will satisfy readers—Hatten provides an insightful reading of well-chosen texts to indicate the extent to which an increasing alienation from the family (as traditionally defined) resulted with the individualism and identity-commodification of industrialization. The argument suffers, however, from a lack of engaging recent gender theory, especially in the development of the equally important premise that alienation resulted from changing gender roles.

Through his first two chapters, Hatten argues that, in order to establish himself as a mainstream author within an industrializing society, and yet to distance himself from women readers associated with the genre, Charles Dickens developed and popularized a revised familial ideology and technique that allowed for social criticism to be deflected into a seemingly private (domestic) sphere. In an analysis of Dombey and Sons and Barnaby Rudge, with occasional asides on The Christmas Carol (which this reader greatly appreciated as especially resonant evidence), Hatten shows a process whereby,

As Dickens's desire for high literary status comes in tension with the critical disesteem that female-centered sentimental novels fell into, and as he became aware of the limitations of domesticity as a realistic picture of families and as a tool for critiquing bourgeois society, his novels become increasingly conflicted in their affirmations of happy familial closures and ever more distanced from an idealized view of domesticity.

(85)

In chapter 3, which I enjoyed as one of the more interesting interpretations offered in the book, Hatten describes

how Eliot, reacting particularly against Dickens, but ultimately against the rigidities of the domestic mode generally, writes in The Mill on the Floss (1860) British fiction's first great novel that radically subverts orthodox and gender ideology in a fully developed realist mode. This novel subtly questions the oversimplification and caricatures of the entire domestic genre.

(35)

Though I disagree with Hatten's choice in applying "radical" to Eliot, he provides a clear close reading to demonstrate his view. The next chapter provides analysis of Daniel Deronda in a closer investigation of marital alienation as well as individual isolation from community, demonstrating "the problem of the power of the marketplace to coerce and dehumanize individuals and social relationships" (36).

These previous chapters set up a concrete critical context for reading Henry James, especially The Wings of the Dove, in chapter 5, highlighting the particularly antifamilial, antifeminist agenda James used in his modernization of domestic realism. Here I found interesting but somewhat problematic Hatten's return to the theme of "symbolic prostitution," which had initially been discussed with Dickens: "The image of the prostitute was thus available in the culture to express increasing fin de siècle anxieties about the reifications that were salient in a modern industrial society and the profound tensions everywhere visible over class and gender inequalities" (238). It is worth remarking that this trivializing use of prostitution as metaphor (especially for such aesthetic commodity-relations as a writer's to the public/market) is taken up by the two antifeminists of the writers that Hatten has chosen to cover—reflecting their own financial, if not gendered, privilege to make such a concrete degradation abstract. Perhaps Hatten identifies too closely with these authors when he later uses the term "spiritual prostitution" (256), although he does eventually qualify that "neither...