The Uninhabitable Space of Home

Abstract

By locating the reader uncomfortably within its circumscribed fictional world, Home highlights the confining cultural and narrative structures through which the everyday dynamics of family are often experienced and represented. In its refusal to provide mechanisms of imaginative transcendence that would transport the reader out of the Boughtons’ oppressive dwelling or make it more hospitable, the novel renders domestic and narrative space equally uncomfortable. Using narrative theory, cultural studies explorations of family and memory, and feminist theories of gender and space, this chapter explores how Home unsettles the culturally sanctioned idea of home as an escape from the contesting ideologies of the larger world even as it reveals the force of our investment in a domestic ideal that legislates, sanctions, and naturalizes scripted performances of the ordinary.