TRANSCENDING THE LIMITATIONS OF 19TH CENTURY WOMEN’S DOMESTIC SPHERE AND FICTION: ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS’ CONTRIBUTION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2024.i28.3Keywords:
Domestic fiction, 19th-century American literature, women’s literature, houses, Elizabeth Stuart PhelpsAbstract
Nineteenth-century literature written by women has traditionally been associated exclusively with the domestic space. Most upper middle-class white women of that period were similarly confined within the limits of their home environments. However, this article critically examines and questions the sometimes too hermetic interpretations of the role that the domestic realm played in the lives and literary works of nineteenth-century women writers. Specifically, it portrays how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), instead of assuming submissively those domestic restrictions, strove to transcend them and shared her innovative initiatives with her contemporary women through her writings. To achieve this objective, this work analyses new female attitudes and the actual houses and domestic environments inhabited by Phelps and some of her female characters. It focuses on how they endeavoured to escape from these settings or to transform them into contexts that might favour their professional lives, instead of passively accepting them as inevitable obstacles to their true vocations.
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Accepted 2024-09-10
Published 2024-09-27
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