‘A Literature of Belonging’: Re-writing the Domestic Novel

Abstract

When Sir Thomas Bertram returns to Mansfield Park from Antigua he enjoys, if only for a short while, ‘the delight of his sensations in being again in his own dear house, in the centre of his family after such a separation’ (149). Houses and household economies always hold an important place in Austen’s novels, but Mansfield Park seems set on exploring the complex of desires and experiences evoked in ‘being at home’. As soon as Sir Thomas goes to his ‘own dear room’ (152) he finds furniture moved and other signs of change made in his absence which make his house no longer homely. Fanny Price’s homecoming is more distressing, beginning with her father barely acknowledging her presence. Soon she realises, with pain and guilt, that the family home is ‘the very reverse of what she would have wished’ (322). These are moments which concentrate the essential concerns of the domestic novel, whether realist or modernist, which relate familiar, everyday experience - at Mansfield Park or in Mrs Dalloway’s Westminster -with belonging and identity.

Not all migrants are powerless. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the newfound land, imagining it afresh.

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses