In Dwelling in Possibility: American Literature, Architecture, and Domestic Innovation, 1850-1900, I read fictional houses as material culture objects whose design, fabrication, and patterns of use make visible changing social relations at particular historical moments. Challenging teleological accounts of nineteenth-century domesticity as a coherent precursor against which modern experimentation defined itself, I locate innovative transformations of domestic space that emerge from and alter particular architectural forms and the social practices they generate and maintain. To flesh out the social and architectural context of literary lodgings, I have assembled an archive of materials from Historic American Buildings Survey photographs to U.S. Census data on changing residential patterns. My four chapters distinguish emergent forms of dwelling that imagine new, but not necessarily positive, possibilities for remaking social relations within existing domestic spaces.

My first chapter argues that the titular house in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is a converted boarding-house that refashions an extendable family unit out of intimate, mixed domestic-commercial space. In Chapter 2, I examine how Tom Sawyer’s interactions with light in McDougal’s Cave raises questions about the power of narrative to domesticate the truly innovative during encounters with the unknown in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). My third chapter contends that the pueblo-cottage-haciendas in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1885) envision a multicultural California even as their repeated seizure indicates a dooming inability to repel an Anglo-American incursion. Finally, I argue that the middle-class cottage owned by free people of color in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) iterates the class and racial hierarchies its plantation-style architecture was designed to enforce. By taking overlooked details of dwelling seriously, my project challenges progressive accounts of American domesticity, extends the canon revisions of the domestic novel, and develops new rapport between literary and material culture studies.