At Home in the East: Orientalized Homes in Romantic-Period Literature

ABSTRACT This article maps the presence and import of orientalized domestic spaces in Romantic-period fiction by focusing on Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta, T. S. Surr’s A Winter in London, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee and “The India Cabinet,” Mary Russell Mitford’s “Rosedale,” and Charles Lamb’s “Old China.” Ranging from the 1780s to the 1820s, this corpus allows us to identify a line of representations exoticizing the British house/home in order to throw into relief personal and collective projects, desires, and anxieties. By imagining orientalized domestic spaces, these works mirror the gradual diffusion of a taste for oriental interior decoration in Romantic-period Britain and, relatedly, the sociocultural pressures exerted by its imperial ventures in Asia. Thus, orientalized houses/homes function as fraught locations between East and West, as well as between word and space, or privacy and publicness. As this article demonstrates, by questioning exoticized domestic spaces from different angles, this fictional corpus problematizes Romantic-era appropriations of the East and the possibility of its containment and control inside a domestic sphere where familiarity and intimacy blend perturbingly with encroaching forms of alienness.