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TOWARDS A GEOMETRY OF COMFORT: HARRIET MARTINEAU'S “I WAS OUTGROWING MY SHELL” AS POETICS OF SPACE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2016

Clara Ranghetti
Clara Ranghetti*
Affiliation:
Luisago, Italy
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Extract

We understand little of Harriet Martineau, I am convinced, if we do not see how roots and wings formed the coordinates of both her subjectivity and writing, affecting all the choices she made and all the reasons she gave for those choices. Inextricably bound together like the knot in a rope, her attraction to houses as signs of self must be given equal weight with the experiences of move and travel she wrote of again and again. Emblematic in this sense was perhaps Martineau's own emphatic assessment of herself in a March 1844 letter to Mrs Romilly written during the monotony and impotence of her Tynemouth confinement, in which she described, in terms of a symbolic geography, her sense of being apart and undeniably privileged: “a sort of pioneer in the regions of pain,” this is how she termed herself, “whose mission is to make the way somewhat easier, or at least more direct to those who come after” (Martineau 2007, 2: 262).

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 951 - 971
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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