For Victorian writer John Ruskin, home “is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home.” The notion of a domestic sanctuary that could and would protect its inhabitants from the anxieties of the outside world was a powerful structuring myth in the Victorian era. However, luckily for the student of nineteenth century literature, the Victorian home was rather more porous than Ruskin’s description would lead us to believe: the worries and struggles of the factory, the poorhouse, the brothel, the public house, the teeming streets, etc., all found their way across the threshold to bask in the glow of the Victorian hearth. The novels and short stories we will read in this course all meditate on the concept of home just as fervently as Ruskin does, but with one key difference: All of the homes in them will open wide the doors to “terror, doubt and division,” and will give us all the fodder we need to talk about hauntings, ghosts, crypts, prisons, insanity, murder, vampires, and decadence.

Readings will include introductory material by John Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Isabella Beeton, and from there, we will move on to works by the Brontës, Hardy, Austen and Stoker. Our texts are mainly British, but we will also look to Poe and Melville as masters of these sorts of representations. This course satisfies the University’s W-requirement, and thus students will be responsible for writing and revising two 5-7 page papers, as well as writing weekly 300-500 word response postings on our Go-Post site.

Household Gods and Domestic Angels: Framing the Home
John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865; selections)
Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House” (1854; selections)
Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s Guide to Household Management (selections)

Novels and Short Stories:
Thomas Hardy, “Barbara of the House of Grebe”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Herman Melville, “My Kinsman Major Molineux”