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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Domesticity and the Interior in Turn-of-the-century Utopian Fiction

Résumé

According to Robert Blatchford in Merrie England (1893), the homes of the working-class people he addresses are ‘ugly, unhealthy, inconvenient, dark, ill-built, ill-fitted, and dear’; not only that, but the very furniture of these homes make the working-class man a ‘victim’, and his wife ‘a slave to the sideboard and best parlour suite’; and for Edward Carpenter in ‘Desirable Mansions’ (1883), the bourgeois interior is a gilded prison, in which commodities themselves are an obstacle to the establishing of genuine connections across classes. The interior and the domestic, then, were matters of concern for early British socialists. Alternatives were imagined and sometimes lived, such as Carpenter’s attempt at the ‘simple life’ at Millthorpe, as well as communal living, which, according Lynn F. Pearson, ‘showed that domestic life was not immutable’ and enabled women in particular to conceive the ‘possibilities opened up by change in their lifestyles’ (The Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living, 1988). This paper, however, focuses on turn of the century interiors through the prism of utopian fictions, such as Jane Clapperton Hume’s Margaret Dunmore, or, a Socialist Home (1888) and H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1904). In Margaret Dunmore, ‘La Maison’ (as the socialist or ‘unitary’ home is called) is a space of labour, but also of intense and carefully regulated sociability in which the tensions between the individual, the family, and the collective, or between public or private action, are negotiated. Conversely, in Well’s utopia of endless mobility, both the inhabitants of utopia and Wells’s transported protagonists seem to move across a series of interiors (hotels, trains) on which they seem to leave no trace.
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Dates et versions

hal-03994866 , version 1 (17-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03994866 , version 1

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Marielle Lippmann. Domesticity and the Interior in Turn-of-the-century Utopian Fiction. Victorian and Edwardian Interiors, SFEVE, Jan 2022, Toulouse | En ligne, France. ⟨hal-03994866⟩
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