Dwelling in Nature

Abstract Chapter 5, “Dwelling in Nature: American Romantic Houses,” examines an American anti-house literary variant in which nature reigns supreme over the humanly built. Henry David Thoreau starts us off with his paean to the woodland site where he built a cabin. Walden celebrates the Americanness of constructing a new rather than old, small rather than large, simple rather than luxurious house, so that one’s transcendental mind can dwell unencumbered in the natural American Eden. This chapter traces the line of Thoreau’s nature-based discursive resistance to fine houses in the work of unlikely American heirs: a Robert Frost poem about a burned house rightfully giving way to nature; a poetic, iconoclastic Marilynne Robinson novel in which women overthrow the law of female domesticity by opening the family house to nature at its most ferocious—flood and fire—to their own mortal risk; and British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s book about the “magic” of a garden, American-style, to heal the illness inside an English Gothic mansion, restoring children’s spirits as well as proper inheritance.