Alcorn, Taylor R

English

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University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Honors Theses and Capstones Student Scholarship Spring 2020 Nineteenth-Century Female Protagonists Resisting Architectural Confinement Taylor R. Alcorn University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/honors  Part of the Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Alcorn, Taylor R., "Nineteenth-Century Female Protagonists Resisting Architectural Confinement" (2020). Honors Theses and Capstones. 528. https://scholars.unh.edu/honors/528 This Senior Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses and Capstones by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.             Nineteenth-Century Female Protagonists Resisting Architectural Confinement  Summary of Undergraduate Honors Thesis Advisor: Brigitte Bailey Taylor Alcorn May 20th, 2020             Summary  Nineteenth century homes, especially those of middle and upper-class families, were designed with gender segregation in mind: rooms for men on one side of the home and rooms for women on the other. The act of limiting a person to a certain area within a building is called architectural confinement. Women were limited to certain rooms like the kitchen, bedrooms, and dining room, thus limiting the domestic sphere that was supposedly theirs. It was common for women to remain in the domestic sphere, only leaving the home to visit friends within their social class. This study analyzes three novels in which two women leave domesticity to explore a multitude of spaces, and one who remains in the domestic sphere due to social expectations.  Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë are three novels that place a female protagonist in at least two domestic spaces. Anne from Persuasion and Cassandra from The Morgesons both navigate through multiple domestic and open spaces, which provides them with a new perspective and the agency to make decisions regarding positions within their own space. They achieve self-growth and achieve their desires with the men they love.  On the other hand, Catherine from Wuthering Heights makes choices based on societal expectations, and instead of navigating multiple domestic spaces to obtain agency, she obtains freedom from domesticity only in death.  Austen, Stoddard, and Brontë demonstrate the importance of women navigating multiple spaces, domestic and open, in order to obtain the agency to make choices based on personal desire.   Please contact me at ta1033@wildcats.unh.edu with any questions.  

Nineteenth-Century Female Protagonists Resisting Architectural Confinement

https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1526&amp;context=honors

Nineteenth-Century Female Protagonists Resisting Architectural Confinement

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