Gender Roomours I

by Katja Kanzler, University of Leipzig, Germany

1      The scholarship on 19th-century American women's literature and culture has greatly benefited from understanding domesticity as a discursive operation. From Barbara Welter's seminal work on the 'cult of domesticity' onward, historians and literary critics have described and critiqued what they variously called the ideology, virtues, practice, or cult of domesticity. The discourses these terms reference, however, also have a spatial dimension, which surfaces most insistently in the notion of 'separate spheres' that continues to shape scholarship on antebellum gendered culture(s). For at least two decades, literary and historical scholarship alike has struggled to come to terms with the complex operations of the separate spheres paradigm in antebellum culture, as well as its equally complex reverberations in the scholarship.[1]Cf., for example, the various essays anthologized in Elbert and in Davidson and Hatcher.

2      In the following, I propose to engage the spatial dimension of antebellum domesticity by exploring architectural figurations in two texts by African American women authors. This reading, first of all, seeks to challenge prevailing assumption about the antebellum American home as a culturally coherent and cohesive space that finds its conflicts with the world outside rather than within its own. Quite to the contrary, the structures of domestic architecture allow writers to engage complex systems of social ordering, the spatial signification and enforcement of as well as the resistance against socio-cultural hierarchies. In the context of thus interrogating architecture as a system of cultural signification, I want to focus on the kitchen as the room that most centrally hosts narratives of gender and racial difference. Arguably the epicenter of domestic operations, the kitchen occupies a remarkably marginal space in most narratives of the antebellum home: It commonly figures as the domain of those members of the household who occupied the most inferior positions within the domestic hierarchy — employed, indentured, or enslaved 'servants' — while the 'work' of the mistress of the house unfolded in the parlor. The kitchen thus presents itself as antebellum domesticity's spatial unconscious, the largely concealed flip-side of discourses of bourgeois femininity. Theorizing Literary Architecture

3      Critical inquiries into the creative interplay between literature and architecture arguably find their beginning in Ellen Eve Frank's Literary Architecture (1979). Frank primarily relies on a phenomenological approach indebted to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space to explore the genealogy of, in her words, "the habit of comparison between architecture and literature" (3). As such an approach is chiefly interested in the experience of architecture as universally human and transcending boundaries of, say, gender or class, it should come as no surprise that Frank exclusively discusses canonical texts by male authors: by Walter Pater (who coined the term 'literary architecture'), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, and Henry James.

4      Subsequently, scholars have directed their attention to the multiple resonances between discourses of cultural difference and literary figurations of domestic architecture. In Dwelling in the Text, Marilyn Chandler insists on the significance of historicizing literature's architectural figurations. She points to American national narratives as an explanation for the prominent role of houses in U.S. literature. The preoccupation of narratives of the American nation with homesteading — with claiming territory by settling it, with transforming wilderness into national territory by way of domestication — reinforce more fundamental assumptions about the mutually reflective relationship between a person and his/her house. Chandler's readings suggest that literary houses lend themselves to reflecting (and refracting) several aspects of 'personhood': 'identity' figured in psychological as well as social ways, bodily appearances, histories, memories, and virtues.

5     Most significantly for my present purpose, the national narratives Chandler identifies as the center of the symbolic exchanges between characters and houses accommodate both male and female subjectivities. Thus 'homesteading' and 'domesticating' represent distinct yet complementary practices that provide a matrix for reconciling gender difference with a shared national identity. In fact, gender emerges as a key fault line in the engagement with literary houses. Chandler singles out two gender-specific master-narratives: 'masculine' home-ownership and 'feminine' housekeeping. This dual blueprint proves quite compelling as it neatly reflects the duality of dominant gender narratives.