American Houses Afire and the Rarity of English Arson

Abstract Chapter 4, “American Houses Afire and the Rarity of English Arson,” raises to view the crucial plot of burning down the great house, pervasive in American literature and rare in English. Tracing a distinctively American cultural mythos, the chapter links house and fire from Hawthorne to popular music (“Burning Down the House”), to warnings by Black intellectuals that the nation is a house on fire, to a literary tradition in which structures embodying domination suffer this dramatic assault, enlisting nature’s power to battle tyranny. The original referent for the house-burning impulse was the slave plantation house, but incendiary narratives discussed here range from William Faulkner to Celeste Ng. The chapter then argues that English literature does not burn down its houses—except in the rare, revealing instances when it does. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an exception that stunningly proves the rule, for the wife who takes the torch to Rochester’s Thornfield Hall could never be English Jane, but rather, is the Jamaican first wife Bertha Mason Rochester—one of those crazy people from the Americas, where they do burn down houses. Bertha’s feminist, anti-colonial revolt against the great house is echoed in the metafictional assault of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Other exceptions in Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggest a pattern: English literary houses burned by the aggrieved (women) within them, unlike the American paradigm of revolutionary attack from without. The burning of the Ghormenghast library contributes an inquiry into book burning inside the great house book.