ABSTRACT
Domesticity was a ubiquitous concept in the nineteenth century, an urgent preoccupation in every major literary genre of the period. Yet it was not until the latter third of the twentieth century that literary scholars began to appreciate domesticity’s centrality as a fundamental organizing principle in Victorian literature and culture. This chapter tracks the emergence of domesticity as an important question in literary scholarship, surveying a range of critical responses from the past 30 years. I begin with second-wave feminist criticism, which took a more skeptical view of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and move on to material studies of family and home which reveal that Victorian women often found ways to leverage their domestic roles for increased social authority or economic gain. Next, I examine alternative approaches to family that consider questions of social class or sexuality, and I conclude with studies of domesticity that explores it within a global context.
