The Importance of a Room of Her Own: Female Spacial Awareness in Selected American Women's Fiction

This thesis explores the ways selected American women writers utilize spatial imagery to convey their female characters' internal and external situation. In the introductory, theoretical chapter, attention is at first paid to the representation of space in literature. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space and Marilyn R. Chandler's Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, space is presented as playing a role equal to that of characters and plot since it is perceived as both a production shaped by its inhabitants and a force that is, in turn, shaping them. Furthermore, the difference between female and male spatial awareness as depicted in American fiction written both by men and women is scrutinized with the result that, arguably, male characters have a tendency to regard their houses as mere tokens of their social status, whereas female characters tend to have a more intimate and emotional relationship to their living space. This passage is inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Finally, it is argued that women characters tend to develop their personalities in respect to the space they inhabit, and that domestic space can be for them either a space of confinement (the section dealing with this phenomenon is based on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in..