The Anti-House Imagination in American Literature and Culture

Abstract Chapter 2, “The Anti-House Imagination in American Literature and Culture,” reveals a persistent hostility toward great houses as an under-recognized legacy of the era of revolution and Romanticism, differentiating American from English literature since its origins. Frederick Douglass’s figure of the “Great House Farm” opens the examination of despotic houses, condemning slavery’s house. Nathaniel Hawthorne presents a northern house built on the founding American sin of murderous land theft—hinting at a wider guilt over the exploitation of Native lands. Anne Bradstreet’s poem about a beloved home lost in a fire points to a Puritan strand of house antipathy: the vanity of attachment to an earthly, not heavenly house. As the nation prospered and Americans developed an affinity for the impressive house as achieved American Dream—for in real life, Americans love great big houses—the collective unconscious curated by literature has continued to treat large, imposing houses as fundamentally un-American outposts of inherited inequity. A favorite American plot, by contrast, is the Gatsby/Beverly Hillbillies story of the lucky aspirant who acquires a mansion to cap his economic ascent; a most-loved twist opens the doors of that new-won house, democratizing it for an American crowd. An Ann Patchett novel stages the intersection of entangled, contradictory American myths: the animus against great houses, the vaunted American Dreamhouse, and the urge toward unencumbered mobility. A coda closes the English-U.S. comparison, considering written responses by American visitors to actual English great houses—some more enamored than others, chief among them Henry James.