The significance of the imagery of home in the work of W. D. Howells
Description
W. D. Howells' novels deal more with the spiritual aspects of home, especially with home in the sense of loving, stable relationships, usually between husband and wife, and, to a lesser extent, between parent and child, rather than with the physical or architectural aspects of a house Yet, although home is a paradigm of security, of domestic bliss and privacy, something to be fervently sought after, Howells adds a further dimension to this concept by portraying home as a refuge which is always vulnerable to pressures from both without and within. The antithesis between home and the street, which are metaphors of order and disorder, of the known and the unknown, prevails in Howells' work. There are also the tensions between home and escape, discipline and independence. Howells' polarizing mind in respect to the notion of home reached its culmination in A Modern Instance, the structure of which rests on the polarities of entrance and exit, of being inside and being outside. In this novel the significance of home lies in its demonstration of homelessness. Contrary to the nineteenth-century middle-class tenet which held that the privacy and security of home should be conducive to self-disclosure, A Modern Instance is about exposure, thematically through lack of a stable home and linguistically through the use of language as a give-away of the psychological motives of the characters This study seeks to investigate the meaning of home in Howells' work, since the human need and efforts to feel at home in the universe are persistent themes throughout his writing career. Although in the main this dissertation deals with Howells' major fiction--A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes--I have also briefly treated Howells' travel books on Italy written during his early career, because the travel books and the novels share a common pattern of the temporary character of home in the sense of a dwelling, which is in turn linked with the notions of experimentation, exploration, and freedom