Laura Vivanco
The romance genre has been accused of a frivolous attention to the details of homes and home décor. Radway finds that ‘descriptive detail [...] characterizes the mention of domestic architecture and home furnishings in romantic fiction’ (1991: 194) and concludes that ‘The genre’s characteristic attention to the incidental features of fashion and domestic interiors clearly serves to duplicate the homey environment that serves as the stage for female action in the “real” world’ (Radway 1991: 195). 
Radway’s analysis of home furnishings fails to acknowledge that descriptions of homes and domestic interiors are not simply a colourful backdrop, but may reveal much about the personalities and interests of those who live there. Coward has noted that photographs of home interiors
In my next couple of posts I'd like to focus on two novels in which a house plays an important role in the development of a romance. In each case, the home/house is both a physical object and one with symbolic, emotional meanings. Neither of the homes in the novels I'll be blogging about symbolise security, as Agnes' home does, and what I found particularly interesting was that in each novel the house served very different functions.
Radway’s analysis of home furnishings fails to acknowledge that descriptions of homes and domestic interiors are not simply a colourful backdrop, but may reveal much about the personalities and interests of those who live there. Coward has noted that photographs of home interiors
turn up in all sorts of magazines, not just the specialist home magazines. One common mode is sneaking glimpses of the rich and famous [...]. Indeed, more than all the writings about the love-lives of these personalities, ideal-home writing seems to unearth the most intimate form of revelations. (Coward 1984: 64)In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice one reads of Pemberley that:
It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something! (Chapter 43, my emphasis)Not only is Pemberley naturally handsome (as one may assume Darcy is) and an indicator of Darcy's wealth, it also reflects his character as it is described by his housekeeper. The house is 'neither formal nor falsely adorned' and Darcy, when there, is
"[...] the best landlord, and the best master [...] that ever lived; not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away like other young men." (Chapter 43)The interior expresses the same personality in more detail. Like Darcy, the rooms are handsome, elegant, rich but not ostentatious:
The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendor, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings.Clearly the interior decorating has an emotional effect on Elizabeth, and not simply because of its beauty, but also because of what it reveals about its owner’s character: it demonstrates that Darcy is rich, but also that he differs from his imperious aunt, Lady Catherine, the owner of Rosings. While the ‘splendor’ of Lady Catherine's surroundings is indicative of her pride, Darcy’s more elegant surroundings reflect his elegance of mind and perhaps suggest that his pride is moderated by other personality traits. When Elizabeth later jokes that it was after seeing Pemberley that she fell in love with Darcy, I'm not sure that there isn't an element of truth to this:
"And of this place," thought she, "I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But no" -- recollecting herself -- "that could never be: my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me; I should not have been allowed to invite them."
This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret. (Chapter 43, my emphasis).
Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"One can find many other examples in Austen's writing where character is revealed in the details of a person's choice of home and furnishings. I'll give just one more example. In Persuasion the Elliot's have had to move out of their ancestral home because they can't afford to live in it and it's been rented byAdmiral Croft whose comments on the décor of Sir Walter Elliot’s dressing-room give further proof of the latter’s vanity:
"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." (Chapter 59)
I have done very little besides sending away some of the large looking-glasses from my dressing-room, which was your father's. A very good man, and very much the gentleman I am sure; but I should think, Miss Elliot" (looking with serious reflection), "I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life. Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from oneself. (Chapter 13).I believe that homes and home furnishings can, and often do, perform similar functions in many modern romance novels, for example Jennifer Crusie's said of her forthcoming collaborative novel, Agnes and the Hitman, that 'Agnes’s plot is that she discovers somebody is trying to take her house, the symbol of her security, from her, and she fights like crazy'.
In my next couple of posts I'd like to focus on two novels in which a house plays an important role in the development of a romance. In each case, the home/house is both a physical object and one with symbolic, emotional meanings. Neither of the homes in the novels I'll be blogging about symbolise security, as Agnes' home does, and what I found particularly interesting was that in each novel the house served very different functions.
- Coward, Rosalind, 1984. Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today (London: Paladin Grafton Books).
- Radway, Janice A., 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press).
Photos courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. The first is of the interior of Chanler House (1915), Tuxedo Park, NY, designed by Russell Sturgis. The exterior can be seen here. The second photo is of the dining room of Robie House (1910), Chicago, IL, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The exterior can be seen here. I have included these photos because although the two rooms must have been built and designed relatively close together in time, the atmosphere created by the design and decor is very different in each.
Yes, and part of the issue here might be: how do we make a house, which imprisons us, into a home, which opens a space called "love"? Aren't even the bits of furniture, if shaped and fondled, reminders of our sentient self, fragmented as it might be, yearning for wholeness, love, home?
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting perspective. I'd never thought of houses as imprisoning us because I think of a need for shelter as something essential to life (i.e. as something which would be required for 'safety' in Maslow's hierarchy of needs). But yes, I can see how property/accommodation may imprison someone, perhaps because
ReplyDelete(a) it doesn't meet their needs, whether physical (e.g. if the person is disabled and can't get around the house properly) or emotional (e.g. it leaves the person feeling isolated from neighbours) or social (e.g. it's in an area which makes the person less likely to be given a job by an employer who has preconceptions about the district in which the house/home is located) and the person can't afford or otherwise get more suitable accommodation or
(b) because the person has such a huge mortgage it gives them financial worries, or
(c) because the person spends a lot of time thinking about the house and maintaining both it and its contents, to the exclusion of other tasks/relationships.
(d) because the house is also their work (e.g. if it's the ancestral home which an aristocrat must maintain and can't make many changes to, or because a person works from home running a B&B), though whether that would count as imprisoning would depend on whether or not the person loved his/her work.
And again, I hadn't really thought about people having sentimental attachments to objects (because I'm mostly attached emotionally to my books ;-) ).
Clearly different people have very different relationships with their houses and the property contained within the houses. I'm sure that must affect the characterisation in novels. The two novels I'll be looking at don't pay very much attention to the furnishings and sentimental attachment to them, but that's because in both cases the houses are undergoing building works, so furnishings are either fairly minimal or are being replaced by new ones chosen for aesthetic/intellectual reasons.
I chose the title of the post because it seemed to me that sometimes it's more a case of 'heart is where the home is' i.e. the person is emotionally attached to the home, and sometimes it's 'home is where the heart is' i.e. 'home' is any physical location where the beloved person happens to be, and without them the house is not a home.
Lovely post! I´m sure "Wuthering heights" is also a perfect example of a house which reflects the emotions and the whole atmosphere of the novel.
ReplyDeleteI do love Jane Austen, and I love that she´s a bit snob. Referring to her, Charlotte Bronte once said: "The Passions are perfectly unknown to her. Even to the feelings she vouschafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would but ruffle the elegance of her progress".
LOL about Sir Walter's looking glasses! I love that sentence!
ReplyDeleteIn P&P Pemberley also serves to show the Darcys as an established family with a long history, e.g. they were able to built a superior collection of books for their library -- in contrast to the Bingleys, who are new money, and Netherfield.
Similiarily, the description of the hero's home in Barbara Cartland's A Hazard of Hearts underlines the long history of the family as the house is assembled of many different parts: Tudor, Jacobean, etc.
In my own novels I use domestic interiors to create and emphasise the atmosphere of a scene: in The Lily Brand, Chinese decorations add to the apprehensive atmosphere of the reunion scene and foreshadow the hero's animosity: "Lillian's gaze was caught by the black dragons that curled threateningly across the bright red wallpaper and chased each other on the Chinese lanterns on the lacquered side tables. The feet of these were formed like the paws of a lion, with sharp golden claws that might tear through a man's flesh and bone."
In the novel I handed in a month ago, by contrast, the protagonists spend most of their time running around and about in the garden...
Yvonne, I've not read Wuthering Heights for a long time, so I don't remember it very well, but if Austen is 'unruffled', then Emily Bronte has characters who aren't just ruffled, they're metaphorically dishevelled and wandering around in rags as a result of their emotions ;-) And for some reason that reminds me of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca which is also very intense and of course Manderley, the house, is extremely important.
ReplyDeleteSandra, I'm not surprised that dragons got into your fiction, seeing as you've been working on them in your non-fiction. And that bit about 'claws that might tear through a man's flesh and bone' reminds me of the excerpt I read from the beginning of the book which hinted at horrible tortures being inflicted (and as I'm an easily scared reader, I didn't get further than that).
In the novel I handed in a month ago, by contrast, the protagonists spend most of their time running around and about in the garden...
I remember that Robin once pointed out (on another site) that Mary Balogh has formal scenes indoors and more emotionally open scenes outdoors. I could have got that wrong, but it makes me wonder if you're reacting against having written books with buildings/interiors having such an important role (I'm assuming that in Castle of the Wolf the Castle's important, seeing as it's in the title).
Getting off-topic here, but is there any physical violence in Castle of the Wolf? I can cope with a bit of brooding darkness and gargoyles as long as no-one's tortured.
In gothic novels, of course, the house almost counts as another character, threatening the heroine almost as much as the villain does. It gives her a domestic space to explore, but one that still makes her expand her usual range of activities. See, for instance, the description of the castle in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
ReplyDeleteAs for Jane Austen, one of the fascinating aspects of her relationship to interior vs. exterior spaces is that all representations of her unsuccessful proposals show them as being performed inside, and all representations of successful proposals show them as performed outside. Which means that production of P+P with Keira Knightley and Matthew McFadyen (which is terrible as far as being accurate and "true to the book" but enjoyable in its own right) gets Darcy's first proposal very very wrong, depicting it as they did outside in the rain.
Sandra, I'm not surprised that dragons got into your fiction, seeing as you've been working on them in your non-fiction.
ReplyDelete*lol* Yes, those dragons have made a habit of sneaking into my stories. In Castle of the Wolf, there is Beowulf and Tolkien's "Farmer Giles of Ham". :)
And that bit about 'claws that might tear through a man's flesh and bone' reminds me of the excerpt I read from the beginning of the book which hinted at horrible tortures being inflicted
Yes, indeed, this is echoing the beginning of the book, in particular the villainess's dogs hunting people.
I could have got that wrong, but it makes me wonder if you're reacting against having written books with buildings/interiors having such an important role (I'm assuming that in Castle of the Wolf the Castle's important, seeing as it's in the title)
You could be right about that since for the most part, the story of CotW is set almost exclusively in the castle (though the characters do some running around in the forest, too), which, come to think of it, makes the story somewhat claustrophobic.
What you said about Mary Balogh certainly makes sense, as a Regency drawing room is much more formal space and setting than a garden.
Getting off-topic here, but is there any physical violence in Castle of the Wolf? I can cope with a bit of brooding darkness and gargoyles as long as no-one's tortured.
No, no evil stepmothers, whips or torture in that one. There's a mouse mummy, but apart from that, most of the gothicness is stomped to dust. Literally. *g*
Sarah, thanks for that tidbit about Austen's proposal scenes. That latest adaptation could easily lead you to believe the film makers were pretty clueless about Austen, her time and her story. After all, they cut the most important sentence of that first proposal scene -- "if you had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner" (quoting from memory).
Hello--I've been enjoying the lively discussion on this blog! I thank Eric and Sarah for mentioning the blog at the PCA conference--I've been quietly reading since then.
ReplyDeleteI've done some work with fashion in chick-lit and authors like Wharton and Dreiser, and while writing about Wharton I also used some of her ideas about the importance of decorating a home, from *The Decoration of Houses,* which she co-wrote with Ogden Codman Jr. One of the primary ideas of Wharton's home creating aesthetic is a consistency between home interiors and exteriors, an aesthetic that also matches many of the conventions of the sentimental genre...a genre that one could argue is also a literary "mother" of the modern day romance novels.
I'm wondering if there's a connection between the building work the homes are undergoing and any "building work" the primary characters are experiencing in the novels you're studying? In that case the houses would function on both the exterior and interior levels, and there you could find consistency between the inner and outer. Or not, which would move the novels away from a sentimental model and call into question that consistency, which could also explain the lack of sentimental attachment to the homes, moving into the realm of a more post-modern sensibility...
As for Jane Austen, one of the fascinating aspects of her relationship to interior vs. exterior spaces is that all representations of her unsuccessful proposals show them as being performed inside, and all representations of successful proposals show them as performed outside.
ReplyDeleteI'd never noticed that. I wonder if it ties in with the idea that there's a link between nature and physicality/passion (which comes through in reactions to Lizzie's walking through the mud, and her walking in general). Although, of course, a lot (most?) of Austen's landscapes are ones which have been modified by human beings, whether that's because they're in agricultural use, or are more formal, landscaped parkland. When Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth stroll in Bath and decide to marry, they're walking in a park. In fact, the one character I can think of who does like the wild, unmodified outdoors is Marianne. I may be misremembering, but I think she's gone for a 'walk on the wild side' literally and metaphorically on the day that she first meets Willoghby after twisting her ankle. And in her despair later on she again comes into contact with wild nature and almost dies from the illness she contracts.
So it seems as though reason is required to 'landscape' wild sensibility/passion.
Welcome to the blog Dharmagirl! I'm glad you've been enjoying it.
I'm wondering if there's a connection between the building work the homes are undergoing and any "building work" the primary characters are experiencing in the novels you're studying?
Yes, that's what I found. In one novel the metaphor is about building relationships and in the other it's about the construction of a public persona versus the construction of self identity.
And we probably should remember Hester Prynne out in the woods with her wild child Pearl. Or Porphyria's Lover who comes in from the wild storm, lets her hair down, lights a fire, arouses her male lover, only to be strangled in his house for her expression of natural desire.Which brings us perhaps to another , but related (?), question: Why do sex scenes in cars or planes, or even on the beach, seem to "edge out" sex scenes in the house? Or do they?
ReplyDeleteFYI: Chanler House, Tuxedo Park, NY, was designed by Bruce Price.
ReplyDeleteThe link to the photo of the exterior is not Chanler House in Tuxedo, it is some other home.