Elizabeth Bouzonviller (ed.), “Home Sweet Home”: Places of Belonging in Anglophone Narratives
Elizabeth Bouzonviller (ed.). “Home Sweet Home”: Places of Belonging in Anglophone Narratives, Faro, Universidade do Algarve Editora, 2022, ISBN 978-989-9023-80-2
Index terms
Persons mentioned:
Rédouane Abouddahab, Marc Augé, Salhia Ben-Messahel, Corinne Bigot, William Blazek, Elizabeth Bouzonviller, Ada Cambridge, Robin Cohen, Daniel Defoe, Louise Erdrich, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Nikki Gemmell, Paul Gilroy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Nicolas Jose, Barbara Kingsolver, David Latour, Nam Le, Alice Michel, Catherine Morgan-Proux, Emmanuelle Peraldo, Alice Pung, Floriane Reviron-Piégay, Eva Sallis Hornung, Henry David Thoreau, Nathanael West, Tim Winton, Virginia WoolfFull text
1As Elizabeth Bouzonviller observes in her introduction to “Home Sweet Home”: Places of Belonging in Anglophone Narratives, “after months of repetitive lockdowns worldwide due to the unprecedented situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, pondering the issue of houses and home seems almost a zeitgeist approach as people throughout the globe have been repeatedly confronted to a life limited to this familiar restricted spatial framework” (13). This collection of essays can therefore be considered as a useful theoretical and academic addition to the important body of first-person accounts or fictional texts written by people confined to their homes during and after the pandemic.
2The goal of the collection is to define the concept of home, which is familiar, misleadingly simple and, in fact, extremely polysemous, and to examine individual and local variations in literary works from different countries and different centuries. After a general introduction, ten chapters offer case studies of literary works from Great Britain, the United States and Australia.
3Elizabeth Bouzonviller’s introduction offers a detailed history of the concept in Anglophone literature, from early eighteenth-century novels to twenty-first-century culinary memoirs. Taking us through various countries and cultures, she points out several recurring themes and motifs which can be interpreted as invariants in our conception of home. She insists, in particular, on the primacy of tensions between seemingly binary poles: literary texts about home, she argues, often involve an exploration of the tension between the public and the private, but also between freedom and constraint. Many of them show the interdependence between gender identities and the definition and perception of home. Relying on the essays included in the collection, but also on other examples from British and American literature, Bouzonviller shows that the boundaries of home are not permanently fixed but depend on the context in which they are defined. In that regard, both time and space matter: her overview points to the evolution of the concept of home in British, American and postcolonial literatures in English, and she shows that it paradoxically has the capacity to both define and challenge national and transnational identities. Another striking element in her useful study of the concept in the Anglophone world lies in its focus on literary genres: some of them provide, or so it seems, a particularly fruitful literary space for the exploration of home. Interactions between fiction and non-fiction, in particular, emerge as one of the dominant trends in literary explorations of home.
4The rest of the collection is organized in chronological order. The first essay, Emmanuelle Peraldo’s study of Robinson Crusoe, revisits Defoe’s novel and convincingly shows how it reflects the colonial and imperial context in which it was written. In Robinson Crusoe, she argues, “home is not a given but a construct” (59) which can be physical, psychological or ecological. The link between home and ecology, based on the etymology of the latter term, which comes from the Greek oikos, triggers a fruitful reflection both on Defoe’s novel and on the concept of home. Interestingly, the following chapter, David Latour’s reading of Thoreau’s Walden, starts with an etymological reminder about the word “economy”, which comes from the same Greek word. The chapter thus offers an American counterpoint, and complement, to Peraldo’s analysis, as Latour examines the close connection between Thoreau’s temporary home at Walden cabin and his writing and philosophy. Latour’s reflection about the articulation between the individual and the collective, at material and metaphorical levels, shows that home is not just a personal or individual matter but also a collective, and even cosmic, issue in Thoreau’s case. Both Latour and Peraldo insist on the complex links between human habitation and nature, or the environment, through their examination of (more or less) temporary abodes.
5The tension between permanent and impermanent homes is also at the core of the next chapter, in which William Blazek examines “rented accommodation” in novels by American writers from the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, and from the twentieth century, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West. Insisting on the polysemy of both the adjective “rented” and the noun “accommodation”, Blazek identifies a growing sense of “American rootlessness and dislocation as the accepted order” (93) in the more recent novels – which, again, testifies to the fact that conceptions of home depend on the context (temporal and spatial). Blazek focuses on narratorial choices, a key aspect of literary examinations of home: where home is concerned, narration and focalization matter.
6Floriane Reviron-Piégay’s analysis of Virginia Woolf’s “architectural metaphors of the self” in the fourth chapter of the collection takes the reader back to Great Britain and examines both real and metaphorical homes in Woolf’s fiction and essays. Starting with Woolf’s homes, Reviron-Piégay shows the importance of various conceptions of home in the elaboration of Woolf’s feminist thinking, as well as the interdependence between her fiction and her essays. Her reading of Orlando in the final section of the chapter provides a useful reflection about the unstable nature of home(s), gender and genre(s), and about the power of invention and (re-)creation.
7The next three chapters problematize gender as well, but with totally different perspectives. Rédouane Abouddahab’s chapter about Hemingway analyses the “impossibility of home” (p142) in Hemingway’s fiction, examining the link between home and the maternal – both seen in terms of lack, absence, or negativity. After a general introduction highlighting the absence of mothers and “homely” homes in Hemingway’s works, Abouddahab offers a close reading of a short story, “Soldier’s Home”, in which the rejection of home and the rejection of the mother become equivalents, reflecting Hemingway’s own rejection of home at the “cultural (or ideological) and affective” levels (164) – which sheds light on his exile and on the links he developed with his adopted “homes”. Elizabeth Bouzonviller’s study of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s relationship to home in Chapter 6 similarly tackles the issue of American exile, and also echoes Chapter 3 in its focus on the couple’s restlessness, but also on the gendered asymmetry of their relationship to unstable homes. Relying on Marc Augé’s definition of “non-places”, Bouzonviller analyses the anonymous and impermanent hotels and flats in which the Fitzgeralds live in the light of their respective works, showing that “Scott’s life narratives never forget the American scene” (177), maintaining an American anchorage even during the couple’s transatlantic travels, while Zelda’s autobiographical essays testify to her position as a woman artist caught between the impersonality or collectiveness of married life and her personal position. Their respective genders thus affect their perception of home in relatively conventional ways, leading Scott to focus on the collective while Zelda is more interested in the intimate. While the Fitzgeralds’ relationship to their American “home” resulted in a sense of restlessness, reflecting “the American spirit of the age” (187), in Chapter 7, Catherine Morgan-Proux shows that displacement can also become synonymous with connection, offering a counterpoint to the previous chapter. He contribution focuses on the impact of various journeys on Northern American women’s sense of home, with a female-centred perspective. She analyses two late-twentieth-century novels by American writers, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, showing that paradoxically home is “an essential component of the road trip” (199), and that the intimate but moving space of the car plays a prominent part in creating a sense of home for the female characters of the two novels.
8The final three chapters broaden the cultural and geographical scope of the novel: Alice Michel’s and Salhia Ben Messahel’s contributions both focus on Australia at two different moments of its history. In Chapter 8, Michel analyses the works of Ada Cambridge, who was a major literary figure at the end of the nineteenth century. Through this example, Michel explores the complex meaning of home for Australian settlers of British descent, which testifies to “the complexity of the exile’s experience in relation to home” (208). As in previous contributions, Michel’s chapter insists on the tension between the private and the public, on the specificity of gendered experiences of home, and on the “social constraints weighing on women” (225). Chapter 9 testifies to the evolution of Australian society: examining recent Australian fiction, Salhia Ben Messahel interrogates the meaning of home for Australian subjects with diasporic or displaced identities, focusing on some conflicts and tensions that underlie these identities. She thus shows the “shifting nature of home” in various works by writers Tim Winton, Nikki Gemmell, Eva Sallis Hornung, Nicolas Jose, Nam Le and Alice Pung. What is particularly salient in her analysis of these works, in spite of their diversity, is the impact of various diasporic and/or geographical displacements on personal and literary identities. In the tenth and final chapter of “Home Sweet Home”, Corinne Bigot also analyses the complexity of diasporic affiliations through a recent and popular genre, the transnational culinary memoir, in which writers explore “their complex relationships with home, family and identity” (258). The authors’ affective relationship to food becomes a way to convey their complex, and sometimes conflictual, relationship to various familial, collective and cultural identities. Bigot insists on the importance of family, but also on the “haunted” nature of home(s) in these culinary memoirs. What also underlies the chapter is the notion of choice, since the process of selection or erasure contributes to creating, or recreating, identities and homes in these memoirs.
9On the whole, “Home Sweet Home” offers an engaging overview of a vast and complex notion. The final index helps to navigate through the chapters, even if a general bibliography might have been useful to complement the individual ones included at the end of each chapter. Considering the size and multiple nature of the Anglophone world, the study cannot hope, and does not pretend, to be exhaustive: major contributions to reflections about diasporic experience like Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” or Robin Cohen’s analyses of “global diasporas” are thus not mentioned at all. All the contributions resonate with one another and offer a useful contribution to the study of home in literature. The collection can appeal to readers interested in the conceptualization of the notion of home, but also to people working on the individual artists or works analysed in each chapter.
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References
Electronic reference
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, “Elizabeth Bouzonviller (ed.), “Home Sweet Home”: Places of Belonging in Anglophone Narratives”, Miranda [Online], 27 | 2023, Online since 27 March 2023, connection on 23 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/53276; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.53276
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