Domesticity and Design in American Women's Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman (review)

In Domesticity and Design in American Women's Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman employs domesticity as a category of analysis to approach four well-studied women authors and some of their under-examined texts. With sources including novels, short stories, magazine articles, letters, domestic manuals, interior design manuals, and even architectural plans, Hellman aims to extend earlier investigations into "spatial and domestic agency in nineteenth-century American women's literature" by focusing on the "social and domestic reform" commitments of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton (p. 2). Hellman probes the relationship between each woman's domestic and artistic practices to reveal that all four authors used domestic concerns to promote social and political issues, thereby imbuing their use of the domestic with "universal" significance (p. 8).

Hellman argues that in House and Home Papers (1865), The American Woman's Home (1869), and Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Stowe seems to endorse conservative notions of domesticity "while subtly advancing radical reform of women's roles at home and in the world" (p. 29). For example, Stowe's "disparaging characterization" of the frivolous Lillie Seymour in Pink and White Tyranny should not be read as a tirade against Lillie's failure to adhere to the gendered norms of female domesticity (p. 27). Rather, the character of Lillie functions as a critique of "the social order that constructs her" and prevents women from using the domestic realm to better their families and society and to make contributions to the greater good (p. 27). With similarly unexpected progressive ends in mind, Alcott advances a covert material feminist reform agenda by "provid[ing] her readers with the principles of sentimental fiction even as she subverts contemporary domestic and gender ideologies" (p. 50). Hidden in the ostensibly conventional plots of Hospital Sketches (1863), Little Women (1868), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886) are depictions of communal child-rearing, cooking, and education—alternative domestic arrangements that would better suit the reality of women's lives.

In the monograph's most provocative chapter, Hellman argues that Cather's "nomadic occupation of space" calls for a "twentieth-century addendum" to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (pp. 76, 65). Because Cather's artistic productivity depended on constant domestic relocation and the occasional self-imposed attic confinement, Cather's failed women artists are not proxy renderings of what Gilbert and Gubar might have called her "anxiety of authorship" but are instead more accurately interpreted as representations of her "anxiety linked to domestic stability" (p. 76).¹ While Katharine Gaylord in "A Death in the Desert" (1905) and Thea Kronberg in The Song of the Lark (1915) never find domestic or artistic security, eventually Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House (1925) finds "transient success" as Cather's "garreted male surrogate" (p. 76).

Although Wharton's design manual The Decoration of Houses (1897) upheld domestic appropriateness for the upper classes, the fiction that Hellman discusses—The House of Mirth (1905), "The Fullness of Life" (1893), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920), and Hudson River Bracketed (1929)—divulges a deep concern for the "displaced, disenfranchised, and disregarded" (p. 106). This concern is fully realized in her Scribner's Magazine accounts of World War I's effects on "domestic, civic, and religious structures" in France, along with her relief work on behalf of French refugees, indicating that for Wharton "the domestic sphere is reconceived in the context of war as a universally human, rather than gendered, condition" (pp. 96, 7). Indeed, Hellman's study of these four authors unsettles the comfortable boundaries that categorize the domestic as personal, private, and female and shows...