Author: Hinds, Hilary

Source: Home Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, July 2009 , pp. 199-211(13)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

Abstract:

This article explores the relationship between gender, romantic love, domesticity, and disappointment in four examples of feminine middlebrow fiction of the mid-twentieth century: Rose Macaulay's Crewe Train (1926), E. M. Delafield's The Way Things Are (1927), Lettice Cooper's The New House (1936), and Mary Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies (1944). Building on the work of the literary critic Laura Quinney and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it investigates the ways in which disappointment is implicated in the reproduction of domestic femininity in particular. Exploring the female protagonists' ambivalence towards domesticity, the article traces the ways in which the prospect of disappointment is embedded within the impossibility of their situations, the irreconcilability of their competing desires, and, more generally, in their sense of their own diminishing potentiality.

Keywords: DISAPPOINTMENT; ROMANCE; GENDER; WOMEN'S MIDDLEBROW; FICTION; INTERWAR YEARS

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175174209X416607

Publication date: 2009-07-01

More about this publication?

• Home Cultures is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical understanding of the domestic sphere, its artifacts, spaces and relations, across timeframes and cultures. 'Home' is a highly fluid and contested site of human existence that reflects and reifies identities and values.
  
  In this context Home Cultures explores the relationship between body and building, consumption, material culture, the meaning of home, moving cultures and social consequences of planning and architecture.
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