ボーディングアウトする女，家庭にしがみつく男――（反）ボーディングハウス小説におけるセアラ・J・ヘイルのドメスティック・イデオロギ――

抄録

Despite past lack of awareness among scholars of the boardinghouse as a literary genre, the boardinghouse novel or what David Faflik calls “boardinghouse letters” is a significant framework because it demonstrates examples of how people responded to the emerging metropolitan domesticity in the nineteenth century. Fictions and essays surrounding the boardinghouse written by Victorian moralists and writers, however, have often given boardinghouses a negative image. Antebellum America was the golden age of home; the era stands out historically for advocating domestic ideology in which the suburban, middle-class, single household was believed to play an important role as a protector of morality and privacy against the “contagion” of the public realm. To domestic ideologues, the boardinghouse appeared to be a kind of taboo and an immoral counterpart to the idealized home. The authors of moralistic novels and prescriptive fiction warned the readers of how the “selfish” young wives, the protagonists in what we may call “anti-boardinghouse novels,” behaved foolishly by abandoning their housekeeping for “fashionable boardinghouses.“

Given the appropriateness of the term “anti-boardinghouse novels,” this essay examines Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1846 novel “Boarding Out”: A Tale of Domestic Life, arguing that she revealed the middle-class husband’s complicity with domestic ideology, and that she presented political ideas without generating controversy. This book can be read as a typical anti-boardinghouse novel, because it simply criticizes the heroine’s folly of boarding. Hale’s narrative, however, produces the paradoxical effects. Although the author’s agreement with the prohibition against the middle-class boarding seems obvious, the text also acknowledges one of the cultural realities of its period ― the development of a relationship between the individuals in the urban community in which people extended help to all who sought it, thereby demonstrating the possibility of mutual aid. With the paradoxical narrative, or “unexceptional eloquence,” Hale tells us a different story.

To readers familiar with a standard anti-boardinghouse plot, “Boarding Out” may seem somewhat strange. Hepsy, the wife of Robert Barclay, never seeks forgiveness for her boardinghouse life, defiant about her husband’s bankruptcy and the death of their child. Instead, Robert himself is the person who most abhors the boardinghouse and craves for the ideal middle-class private home. Milette Shamir’s “domestic-division plot” elucidates this. Unlike the doctrine of separate spheres, splitting and gendering the spaces within the home make two opposing realms: the parlor (the feminine space of domesticity) and the study (the husband’s private space of retirement). In antebellum America, men ruled in the study, while women oversaw the parlor. With this in mind, the study can be viewed as a site in which the masculine subjectivity could be formed and in which the patriarchal power that had been Jost in feminized spheres could be retrieved. The sacredness of Robert’s study is found most clearly in a scene in which an auction is conducted in the Barclays’ kitchen and the parlor, where strangers gather to barter for the family’s possessions. Economic intrusion into the domestic sphere leads to chaos, but only his study remains locked, and the wife, leaving home for the boardinghouse, becomes a threat to its privacy ― privacy that the husband needs to reclaim.

In the last confession Robert makes for his “transgressions,” he identifies his first misstep as his abandonment of “simplicity,” connoting republican simplicity as well as “republican motherhood.”

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