Chapter 11 - Feminist Dwellings: Imagining the Domestic in the Twenty-first-century Literary Novel

Summary

Critical responses to the home frequently imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist writing suggest that the domestic is too compromised for a twenty-first-century feminist imaginary. Contemporary feminist dialogues are increasingly alert to the politics of the domestic and its resistance to transformational politics. Yet feminist writing has not relinquished the domestic as a site or language for imagining feminist possibility and practice. If anything, we have seen a proliferation of feminist writing interested in the domestic since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This chapter turns to three literary novels spanning the century so far: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005),Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011), and Miranda July’s First Bad Man(2015). In each novel, the homeas literary institution, holiday villa, and single-woman’s houseoffers a focal point for questions about feminist imagining that gives shape to specific textual strategies, suggesting that if twenty-first-century feminism cannot relinquish the domestic, we must learn to dwell in its compromised politics.