Moving in Together

Abstract Chapter 14, “Moving in Together: American Utopian Communal House Texts,” forms a companion piece to the previous chapter, also examining texts that reimagine great American houses to new purpose. But novels in this chapter, by a multiethnic group of American women writers, enlist not decrepit but impressive, well-kept houses in a quintessentially American plot: characters collaborate to turn the great house of the nation into a welcoming, inclusive, non-exploitative house for everyone. Could there be a better analogue for a national experiment in building a more perfect democracy? These ambitious (but sadly doomed) collective housing experiments take place in novels by Lore Segal, Gish Jen, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. Segal’s and Jen’s works take wistful, liberal mid-twentieth-century characters into hopeful seasons in big, communal houses, while Johnson’s speculative novella builds a near-future dystopia upon recent events, sending a group of refugees from racist assault and climate crisis in Charlottesville, VA, to shelter in a national monument, the preserved mansion of a slave-owning president who championed liberty and equality. Though fueled by hope, none of these tentative utopias can keep outside the walls of the reclaimed great house the consequences of the race and power relations foundational to its construction.