Modeling Domestic Space
in 19th Century Fiction
Mark Algee-Hewitt
Svenja Guhr
Annie Lamar
Jessica Monaco
Alex Sherman
Matt Warner
Table of Contents
Domesticity and the Development of the Novel
"[Bourgeois culture] supplied motifs for the mimetic arts, motifs which were precisely of the intimately domestic variety - both as picturesque intérieur and as representing domestic and economic conditions and problems. [...] Here too we find that intimate occurrences are represented much more often, in greater detail, and more plainly than before."
Auerbach, Mimesis, 248
"This direction, of course, is towards the delineation of the domestic life and the private experience of the characters who belong to it: the two go together - we get inside their minds as well as inside their houses."
Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 181
Nineteenth Century Domesticity
"Since the novel counts among the conditions for this consumption the consumer's leisured withdrawal to the private, domestic sphere, then every novel-reading subject is constituted - willy-nilly and almost before he has read a word - within the categories of the individual, the inward, the domestic. There is no doubt that the shift in the dominant literary form from the drama to the novel at the end of the seventeenth century had to do with the latter's superior efficacy in producing and providing for privatized subjects."
D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 82
"[B]y the early decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class writers and intellectuals can be seen to take the virtues embodied by the domestic woman and to pit them against working-class culture. It took nothing less than the destruction of a much older concept of the household for industrialization to overcome working-class resistance. In time, following the example of fiction, new kinds of writing— sociological studies of factory and city, as well as new theories of natural history and political economy—established modern domesticity as the only haven from the trials of a heartless economic world."
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 16
Representations of Domestic Spaces
"As much as any other categorial abstractions, the public and the private have been fruitfully susceptible to representation through spatial metaphor and its cardinal differentials outside/inside and high/low. And although its centrality to the modern idea of privacy is obvious in any case, the historical emergence of domesticity is peculiarly accessible to the awareness of both contemporaries and modern scholars because of its spatial and structural representability.
[...]
Spatial figuration is most richly expressive in artistic and literary works, where the self-conscious representation of form is one of the most powerful aims of, and aids to, the articulation of meaning.
But formal structure achieved through language has a special and subtle kind of sensitivity that tells its own story, a truth recorded by the fact that the modern world witnesses the coalescence of not only "domestic space" but also "the domestic novel."
Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, xxi
Space and the Digital Humanities
Spatial humanities often resolves to the use of mapping software (GIS) to project novelistic events onto literal maps of the world (e.g. Evans and Wilkins, 2018, "Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940")
More recent analyses of spatialized language seek to identify when space is represented in fiction (Schumacher, 2022, Modellierung narrativer Raumindikatoren [Modeling Indicators of Narrative Space]) and what kinds of space are represented (Bologna, 2020, "A Computational Approach to Urban Space in Science Fiction")
Project Timeline - What happened so far?
(October 2022 - March 2023)
Discussions on Discussion of the Annotations, 1000 Passages Training of�“What is domestic space Revision of the Guidelines V.1.1, annotated by a Model� in fiction?” Sample Annotations 3 annotators based on Annotations� of further 30 Passages
Compilation Formulation of Alex developed Comparison of�of a Corpus, Annotation Guidelines V.1.0, a Shiny App the Annotations�Selection of and Sample Annotations for the Annotation�Sample Passages of 30 Passages of 600 Passages each�
The Draw of Domestic Space
-Modelling literary space: the domestic case
-Domestic Technology
-Space in relation to the private; privacy; domesticity
-Major historical changes
Envisioned output
pT(si[| si-n,…,si+n])
p: probability of being in domestic space
T: a whole text
si: a segment (e.g., sentence) of a text
[si-n,…,si+n]: (maybe) a window
Σ pT(si, [si-n,…,si+n]) ≤ 1
I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. � Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. � I returned to my book—Bewick's History of British Birds: the letter-press thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape— � “Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls� Boils round the naked, melancholy isles� Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge� Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Initial Research Questions
Gender and ideology: are domestic spaces just gendered spaces?
How do domestic spaces intersect with different genres? When do places like convents, schools, and ships show up as domestic space?
Dialogue: domestic or not?
How do changes in representation of domesticity resemble changes in domesticity historically (or not)? If we were to test this model on other corpora, like 20th-century fiction, when would the accuracy drop of?
The Lit Lab 19th Century British Corpus
Selection of Sample Passages
Modelling by terms alone: Jane Eyre
Modelling by terms alone: the corpus
Mean domesticity: .39
Max: .78 (John Polidori, The Vampyre [1819])
Min: .03 (Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne [1793])
But: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) at 48th (.66)
Authors in the top 100: Mrs Margaret Oliphant; Charlotte Smith; Jane Austen; Joseph Le Fanu; Maria Edgeworth; Eliza Tabor; William Thackeray; Emily Brontë
In the bottom: William Godwin; Lewis Carroll; H. G. Wells; Oscar Wilde; Thomas De Quincey; Wilkie Collins; Maria Edgeworth (again); fewer canonical authors
Example Annotation Passage
Everard turned away his eyes from the view, while a cold current seemed to pass through him, as it were a long shiver. Netherwood lies about half a mile farther in the valley, a moderately large house in a small park richly timbered. It was rebuilt towards the end of the last century, and IS therefore characterised by squareness, abundance of steps, long sash-windows and a broad expanse of red brick mellowed into reddish brown. The gardens are of the same relative style, and are screened from the north by an overhanging wood with winding walks in it, wild flowers and an old summer-house. Altogether it is a genuine old English home, very homelike and very English. The brick rebuilding is of course bad, very bad compared with what preceded it ; but one may perhaps be allowed to think that the stuccoed pastille-boxes of later date were a good deal worse, and even to question the superiorty of certain modern attempts at imitating the styles of the remote past without the genius to create or the humility to follow. The old place (for old it is, though the present house was rebuilt in the days when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister and Lord Chatham a cornet in the Blues) has a character of its own, being genuine of its kind, and impresses one with the idea of antiquity, in spite of the sash-windows.
Before context (1 sentence)
Sentence w/ target
After context (5 sentences)
“The company was rather boisterous that day over dinner; no wonder, after having been pent up in the house, doing nothing all day long.”
Aldred, WW, A Lost Cause : a Story of the Last Rebellion in Poland (1881)
Operationalization
from defining the �phenomenon “domestic space” �over its manual annotation �to its automatized detection
Pichler/Reiter (2020)
Our Concept of Domestic Space
Domestic space, not domesticity
Centrality of the home, ideally a house
Accessibility to the public
Quasi-domestic spaces (convents, etc.)
Domestic space is not a function of what is happening in the scene
First Tagging Experiments
2x 30 Passages manually annotated and discussed
-set up formal guidelines
-backgammon, beef, and salad
Backgammon, beef, and salad
She and her conjugal partner occupy the house .adorned by the e^gj, and partake together of beef, backgammon and salad in the evening ; that is to say, when the lady chooses to •do so. There is only one master in the ancestral home of the auctioneer, and that is not Mr. Sapsea. And though a vast deal of looking up takes place there daily, the devout worshipper is not Mrs. Sapsea, nee Twinkle- ton. On the contrary, malignant tongues assert that she takes little trouble to disguise the fact that she looks down upon him. But she allows no one to imitate her example, and though the discipline with which she rules him is unbending and inexorable, she cares for his bodily wants, takes him out to walk with her, pours him out his allowance of wine, mixes his grog with judicious hand (not too strong), and performs her duty towards him — though rather as a stern mother than a wife. He is not unhappy on the whole, and has become, in a wonderfully short space of time, the meekest of the meek. Only one thing seriously troubles him, to wit, that his wife has put her veto on his dressing like the Dean.
-Bianca Capello: an historical romance, by Baroness Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1843)
Flow Chart of Annotation Guidelines
Annotation Guidelines
Tagging of 1000 Passages with a Shiny App
-Random distribution across 5 annotators
-Each passage got 3 tags
-Each annotator tagged 600 passages (roughly 1 minute per passage)
Model Details
Model results (test data)
Model Coefficients plot
A highly domestic passage
"We may as well now take something," said Mr. Beckendorff, when his guests had sufficiently admired the room; "my pictures are in my dining-room‚ let us go there." So saying, and armed this time, not only with his bow, but also with his violin, he retraced his steps through the library, and crossing a small passage, which divided the house into two compartments, he opened the door into his dining-room. The moment that they entered the room, their ears were saluted, and indeed their senses ravished, by what appeared to be a concert of a thousand birds; yet none of the winged choristers were to be seen, and not even a single cage was visible. The room, which was very simply furnished, appeared at first rather gloomy; for though lighted by three windows, the silk blinds were all drawn. "And now," said Mr. Beckendorff, raising the first blind; "you shall see my pictures. At what do you estimate this Breughel?" The window, which was of stained green glass, gave to the landscape an effect similar to that generally produced by the artist mentioned.
Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey, 1826
Returning to Thornfield
Zooming out?
A non-domestic passage
After dinner, the afternoon being warm and sunny, I took my hat, and walked leisurely towards tliose gardens of which I have already spoken, where were the orchards of plum, pear, apple, and cherry, and where the old summer- house overlooked the Creek. It would be, I thought, pleasant in the gardens with no one but myself, and I could walk about among the trees, watching the grey lichen on the bark and the sober tints of the autumnal leaves, and perhaps find, in the view of the Greenwich Eeach, something new to observe and note. One whose profession is to paint ships of all kinds can never grow weary of watching them, whether at anchor or in motion ; just as one who paints figures loves to be for ever contem- plating the human figure, whether in action or in repose. The air was still and soft, the day warm, although it was already the twentieth day of October. The fruit was all picked now, and the leaves beginning to dry at tlieir stalks : because the leaves of apple, plum, and cherry do not turn brown, but drop off while they are yet green ; yet the green is quite another hue than that pre- sented in spring and sununer, and I wonder that no painter has painted the greens of autumn, as w^ell as the yellow, red, and brown. I have myself attempted a sketch, in April, showing parts of tliat long stretch of garden all the way from these gardens to Greenwich Hospital, which at that season look like a vast cloud of white and pink blossom resthig on the green branches which here and there peep out. This afternoon the tide was high.
Walter Besant, The World Went Very Well Then, 1887
The non-domesticity problem
Training set: passages with names of rooms
⇒ Good at differentiating inside and just outside; bad at finding obviously non-domestic
Debates about how to fix this: more passages (but which?); more testing
Future directions
-Q about training on non-domestic passages
-Syntax and model features
-Machine learning model
-Interested in model accuracy: using the model to find domesticity (where it isn't expected)
Modelling the difficulty of classification / disagreement
-Modelling at the scale of the novel, not the passage (e.g., thinking about decay, order, context, etc.)
Open / Current Research Question
Are we just modelling privilege?
In which social milieu does the fiction take place?
When does domesticity comparable to the British understanding of domesticity start in American Fiction? → 20th century
Changes in representation in fiction vs. changes in the concept of domesticity?
Colonial domesticity (in India)
Upper class people working from home who have a private workspace in their house → it feels domestic but is professional work space? lawyers, debts signed, discussions
Where do the concepts of privacy and domesticity differ?
"Yet it's a comfort to fancy somebody some day will like to read this rubbish."
Solly Henry, Lady Stella and her Lover (1818)
Appendix
Existing scholarship
Annotation Guidelines