Open AccessAfbrydelsens kronotopi i britisk litteratur, 1840-1870
Author(s) -
Maria Damkjær
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
k and k/kandk
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2246-2589
pISSN - 0905-6998
DOI - 10.7146/kok.v45i123.96835
Subject(s) - temporality , temporalities , narrative , historicism , plot (graphics) , chronotope , history , politics , realism , reading (process) , middle class , literature , sociology , aesthetics , close reading , art , philosophy , epistemology , political science , law , statistics , mathematics
Bakhtin’s chronotope is not only a meeting between time and space, but often also a meeting between a number of contrasting temporalities. This article discusses the topos of domestic interruption, which lays bare the temporal politics of the nineteenth-century middle-class home. It was a commonplace in the nineteenth century that women’s time in the home was interruptible and porous. When Victorian writers described everyday interruptions, they showed the contrast between plot time and an underlying marginalised domestic time. In an analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864-1866), combined with a new historicist reading of Victorian advice literature, this article argues that narrative marginalisation was paradoxically a viable strategy for showing an otherwise invisible temporality. In the background, peeping out whenever the plot interrupts, is an enduring and ongoing time, mediated by unnamed and underrepresented servants, that gives the middle-class home temporal depth and realism.