Constructing houses: The representation of home in twentieth century American autobiography

Critics of American literature have traditionally examined the use of certain settings, e.g., the wilderness and the frontier, while they have ignored or undervalued the meaning of other settings, usually associated with women. Simultaneously, cultural studies of home have focused primarily on its significance in middle-class culture. While this component of the home\u27s meaning has interpretive power in this study, it is the dialogue that takes place between the dominant ideology of home as retreat and counter-hegemonic ideals and realities which forms the backbone of the study. The dissertation employs a semiotic model to examine the complex semantic range of the sign, home, in American autobiography, as well as its textual denotation in a variety of traditional and non-traditional narratives. It argues that the setting of home has connotative possibilities and formal intricacies that can only be appreciated when we examine simultaneously its use in texts by men and women, ethnic and white. Chapter 1 discusses the home\u27s significance in America culture and in literary criticism. This chapter points out the problems inherent in isolating middle-class culture for study. Further, it examines the implications of the canonical centrality of The Education of Henry Adams to critical lack of interest in the home. Chapter 2 delineates the ideology surrounding the representation of home and its corollary activity, homemaking, in ethnic and in middle-class texts. Chapter 3 shifts the dissertation\u27s scope from the connotative to the denotative dimension of home. It examines the relation of home to description, characterization, and plot structure. Chapter 4 discusses the texts of college freshman and examines the ways in which the classroom creates an interpretive community that shapes the meaning of home in these autobiographies. In this last chapter we come face to face with the dominant ideology of home outlined in Chapter 1