The house described by English writers

CHARLES DICKENS

Dickens is an early victorian novelist; in his works he condemnes the intolerance and rigidity of the Victorian age, but he is permeated with them and although he condemnes the society of his time he doesn’t have practical solutions for these problems, but after all his task is to awake common intelligence about the matters of his own country.
In the late period of his production we can see a strong criticism against the society; for example in “Hard Times” he proposes a picture of the industrial English society and the conditions of the lower working classes.

From this description we can see the parallel the author made between the house and the society. At the same time Dickens describes the setting and the character with the same characteristics.
In this case we can notice an identification between Stone Lodge and Mr. Grandgrind: the house is square, regular and it is the symble of the world in which every kind of imagination is forbidden; through this description he wants to condemn the hipocrisy and conformism of the middle classes.
The symble of the house can be refeared also to the city, Coketown: it is a pollutted city, where all the building, streets, churches are equal; from this we can perceive one of the typical consequence of the industrialisation that consists in the massification.

OSCAR WILDE

Wilde is an exponent of the aesthetic movement in which beauty is considered the gratest value and it is based in contrast with Victorian materialism and utilitarianism which reduces everything as a mere object, the only important things are sensations and the artist writes only to please himself.
One of his most important work is “The Picture Of Dorian Gray”, that is the story of a young aesthete who wants to remane young and beautiful for ever projecting his soul’s corruption on a painting that an artist, Basil Howard, made for him.

In this description we can see that the setting is described not in rality but filtered by the sensation of the aesthete. The house is not realistically described but it is idealised according to the conception of the movement and seen through the sensorial perception of the author.
The ambiguity of main character is reflected by the different kind of the environement, and we can see this in two different images: the one of the parfumed room of Dorian and the other of the dirty inn.
So we can notice that the house changes according to the fact that the aesthete tryes to find beauty in every kind of situation from the most elevated to the worste one.

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JAMES JOYCE

Joyce was an Irishman of a very large middle-class Catholic family, At the same time his opposition to the social and religious conventions was growing into open rebellion. He eventually rejected Catholicism and embraced an aesthetic philosophy. He came under the influence of Ibsen. In 1914, “Dubliners” was published: it is a collection of 15 short stories dealing with life in Dublin, linked by their common theme of the decay and stagnation of the city’s life and setting for the first time become totally urban instead of rural.
It was not very successful in commercial terms, but it attracted the interest of intelligent critics; the reason for that is due to the sociological point of view: short stories can easily become the voice of the submerged population group
Joyce’s life and works are in a sense the same thing, since his entire development as a personality is also the development of his works as style and form.
Joyce thought that the artist ought to be "invisible" in his works, in the sense that he must not express his own viewpoint. He should instead try to express the thoughts and experiences of other men. He advocated the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from all moral, religious or political pressures.
Apart from rejecting Irish nationalism, Joyce rejected Irish life totally. At the same time he set all his novels in Dublin, the capital of the country he had grown up in and rejected.because he saw it as repressive and dominated by the Church.
Joyce supported the struggle for Irish indipendence by creating a national coscience offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European cosmopolitan point of view.
In this work the house as a symbol of familiar traditions and values lost its meaning; in fact we can notice that children never live with their own parents but generally with uncles or in bording school.
In “Eveline” the house has two different connotation. First a negative one, in fact there is the description of some details (“the odour of dusty cretonne” and “the yellowing photograph”) that are the symbols of oppression and desire of leaving.
At the same time the house represents the place where Eveline found refuge and food so it assumes a positive meaning, related to her fear of leaving.
In the end Eveline decides not to go away with her boyfriend; here the house doesn’t symbolise the familiar affections, but the paralysis and the incapacity to improve her own condition.

In “The Boarding House”, the house seems to have lost all its familiarity functions, in fact it seems to be more a brothel than an ordinary house; we can find this prospective in a lot of expressions used by Joyce: the owner of the house is called “the Madam”, her daughter is called “a little perverse madonna” and the house of Mrs Mooney is frequented by “artists” of music halls and by residents,generally employed.

In this passage we can notice that there isn’t an ordinary relationship between mother and daughter, but Mrs Mooney intervenes in Polly’s life only for personal advantage.

Finally in “The Dead” there is the description of a party which also has several meanings.
Here the house is the expedient to talk about the themes of paralalysis and Irish traditions, that are expressed by the repetions of the same actions and the presence of the same usual guests.

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David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)

Lawrence lived in the period of the first world war and even if he didn’t fight this experience shocked him and made him consider the forces of modern civilisation as purely destructive.
Lawrence is a revolutionary force in the English novel, because of his view of life as something truly organic, his fight against the mechanical aspect of the industrial civilisation, his analysis of the relations between the sexes.
In “Sons And Lovers” the house symbolises the conflict between man and woman and between different social classes. We can find this aspect in the description of “The Bottoms”, the house where the main characters, the Morels live. This house has double aspects: the front is beautiful with a garden and a lot of flowers, instead the place where they really live, the back, where there is the kitchen overlooks the mines. This contrast reflect the opposite social condition between wife and husband; in fact Gertrude Copper belongs to the middle class, while Walter Morel is a young miner.
At the beginning Gertrude is attracted by this man but after the marriage the difference between the two become more and more evident and they always quarrel.

The house also conditions the behaviour of the characters; for example Clara, Paul Morel’s girlfriend, is an emancipate woman, but the house seems to have an oppressing influence on her.

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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965)

American-born English poet, literary critic, dramatist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature; he is best known for his poem The Waste Land, one of the most widely discussed literary works of the early 20th century. Eliot found inspiration in French Symbolist poetry, in the Metaphysical poets and in Dante and Bergson.
His long poem in five parts, “The Waste Land” , is an erudite work that vividly expresses his conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. Eliot believed that modern society lacked a vital sense of community. The waste land of the poem is the modern European culture, which had come too far from its spiritual roots. In Eliot's poem, human beings are isolated, and sexual relations are sterile and meaningless. Because of the variety and relative obscurity of Eliot's allusions, readers must work through the poem's footnotes several times to appreciate it, but the general impression of isolation, decadence, and sterility comes through in every reading.

The first part, "The Burial Of The Dead" can be read as a metaphor for the conditions of contemporary man whose life is empty, alienating and similar to death; for example he presents a contemporary image of London crowds moving along the streets blankly as if dead; London is the symbol of the society and consequently of the family. Through this image we can notice the theme of dishumanisation.

In the third section, "The Fire Sermon" , Tiresias narrates a banal and loveless scene of seduction of a typist by her "lover". The scene is squalid and passionless; the sexual act is meaningless to both participants. Here the house doesn’t symbolise sentimental love, but only a place where people have sexual intercourse with no passions. The description only takes into account some details (for example the sofa) to point out that there is no “home have, only abettic, sterile shelter.

After the coversion to anglicanism he wrote “Four Quartets” a sequence of four compositions, divided in five parts each.
In the first part “Burnt Norton” the poet comments on the possible relationship of present, past and future stating that this division may only be an illusion and that all time may be eternaly present.

The garden seems to represent a trasposition of Eden and symbolises a stately house which is the image of the “might have been”, that is to say apparently lost opportunity that in reality in this place can be founded again; so the garden is a symbolic place where every possibility can be chosen.

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Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)

Huxley was one of the most versatile English writers of the 20th century in fact he published novels, travelbooks, short stories, biographies, essays. He focused the attention on the negative aspect of the modern civilisation and its corrupted rationalism; he was also influenced by the alienating effect of the world war.
Huxley in “Brave New World” portrayes an unnatural world without mothers and fathers, where most people are produced in factories, a place full of faceless human clones.
It is a typical anti-utopic novel; the author describes a futuristic society that has an alarming effect of dehumanization. This occurs through the absence of spirituality and family, the obsession with physical pleasure, and the misuse of technology. In this world, each person is raised in a test tube rather than a mother's womb, and the government controls every stage of their development, from embryo to maturity. Each new human is placed into a certain class, such as Alpha, Beta, and so on. The embryos are manipulated chemically to stimulate or to retard their physical and mental growth. By repeating phrases over and over while the children sleep, the government can condition each person to accept his role in the world around him and to behave in what the government deems to be a "safe" manner.


When children grow up, men and women live togheter and it is considered immoral to go out with the same person more than one time; the sense of community is given through some religious rituals that are sort of orgyes and also through the use of innocuous drug, “the soma” which help people to feel always happy. This creates a society full of human clones, completely devoid of personality.

In this perfect society there are no houses, no family because people live in groups, society become the house itself, a house where there is no freedom.
On the contary there are houses, families in the New Mexican Reservation, but here people live in a very primitive and wild way;

The only one, John, who represents the real man being a link between these two wordls doesn’t find a place to express himself, in fact he decides to suicide.

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George Orwell (1903 – 1950)

Orwell was a prolific book-rewiewer, critic, political journalist and pamphleteer in the tradition of the author Swift and Defoe. His themes was a vision of human fraternity, the misery, the poverty and deprivation. He insisted on tolerance, justice and decency in human relatioship againist the violation of liberty and helping his readers to recognise tyranny in all its forms.
First that he died he wrote “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, his most original novel published in 1949.
The novel describes a future England,under a vast totalitarian system including north America and the British Empire, and extending over a third of the globe. The main character is Winston Smith, and the country he lives in called Oceania is run under a government called INGSOC(English Socialism). The controllers are called "The Party." The Party is divided into two sections, The Inner Party, and The Outer Party. The "Rich" and the "middle-class." There is a third group of people called "The Proles," or "The Proletariat" which are the poor, and considered to be animals by the party. The main leader of this government is “Big Brother”. Winston is starting a diary. In any other time this would have been considered normal, however in his time it is not. All events in this time are alterable. The party controls the past, present, and future.
In this novel the house become the symbol of the oppression of the regime, in fact there are “telescreens” that spy every moment of the people’s life.
The description of the house is given through the positions of the telescreens that whatch everything and can also perceive people speaking, apart from the little table where Winston can creates a sort of refuge , a place of intimity.

This oppressing situation of the house influences everyone, even the children that seem to absorb this situation of violence; for example when Winston goes to Mrs. Parson to control the sink in the kitchen, the little Parson began to scream with a toy pistol in their hands “You’re a traitor”, “you’re a thought-criminal!I’ll schot you, I’ll vaporise you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!”; Winston is struck by the violence in the eyes of these little boys, but above all by the justification their mother gives for this behaviour that consists in their disappoint because they didn’t assist at the hang of some Eurasian prisoners.

Winston’s love story with Julia can’t be lived in this contest, in fact their meeting are in the conutry or in a simple rented room outside the city. It’s a little bleak place but is the only one where the two lovers can have a place of intimity.