Domestic Individualism

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender class and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity Brown brilliantly alters for literary critics feminists and cultural historians the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed.

In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism Brown traces how the values of interiority order privacy and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe Hawthorne Melville Fern and Gilman and by examining other contemporary cultural modes—abolitionism consumerism architecture interior decorating motherhood mesmerism hysteria and agoraphobia—she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One: Stowe's Domestit Reformations
1. Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin
2. Sentimental Possession

Part Two: Hawthorne's Gothic Revival
3. Women's Work and Bodies in The House of the Seven Gahfrs
4. The Mesmerized Spectator

Part Three: Melville's Misanthropy
5. Anti-sentimentalism and Authorship in Pierre
6. The Empire of Agoraphobia

Afterword
Notes
Index