ABSTRACT
Naturalizing the domestic sphere is one method of redefining the home employed by Willa Cather and Toni Morrison. Home is a complex place; it confines, constricts, contains, comforts. Recognizing the multiple spaces and landscapes female writers occupy and recreate in their fiction is crucial to literary criticism. Race and the power structures lurking behind racism are key factors in the experience of domestic space. The plantation layout of Sapphira and the Slave Girl casually introduces the racial division of space. Perhaps the most intimate personal space in a home is the bedroom. Private and protected, it is a place for reverie and self-revelation in Lather’s writing. Sleeping spaces serve to reinforce the vulnerable status of Nancy in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Connected to the house, not by familial, but rather economic ties, the slave has no real space of her own.
