‘You understand what domestic architecture ought to be, you do’: Finding Home in The Wind in the Willows

Abstract

This essay offers an analysis of the classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows (1908) by English writer Kenneth Grahame in two aspects of its engagement with domestic space. The first concerns the representation of house and home within the text itself, and discusses how this representation is linked both to Grahame’s biography and to the wider politico-cultural condition in which he was living and writing. The second concerns the ability of fiction to assume a quasi-architectural presence in the perception of the reading subject, and examines the manner in which The Wind in the Willows became a sort of reading ‘home’ (with all the ambivalent values and associations that such a concept implies) for the author of the essay. The contribution concludes by suggesting a link between the image of home as represented in the text and that assumed by the text itself in the perception of the reading subject.