Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (OUP, 1987), and Catherine Gallagher, in The Industrial Reformation of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1985), examine the modes in which the ideology of domesticity functions in the nineteenth century. Both assume that portrayals of domesticity have nothing to do with any persistent facts of human nature, but rather constitute an attempt to invent the very idea of such facts as a tool for the naturalization of attitudes that are really shaped by ‘political history’ and the class struggle. Their studies share one particular angle on the more general argument that, in nineteenth-century fiction, the focus on the domestic serves as a rhetorical evasion of social problems.

Significant though their project is, it requires no consideration of fiction's reflection of and influence on the shape of real families, or of the political impetus of the shape of family, considered not only as a discursive figure in relation to public and class politics but as a real determinant of the course of people's lives. Because, in other words, they assume that even to engage with the idea of ‘domesticity’ or ‘human nature’ already implies a displacement of the political, they overlook the political struggles that go on over the very terms of that engagement. As I have argued, however, given that that engagement is not one that any political discourse can evade, the negotiation of its terms is really the focus of the political action.