Domestic Fiction Overview: Characteristics and Notable Books

Domestic fiction is a genre that rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Sometimes referred to as sentimental fiction or women’s fiction, domestic fiction focuses on the domestic lives of young, typically middle-class women learning to make their way in the world. The plot and conflict of these books often center around courtship, family life, marriage, and childbearing.

Here is a brief historical overview of domestic fiction:

• Sedgwick’s groundbreaking work: Domestic fiction rose to popularity around the 1830s on the heels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822), considered the first domestic novel. The genre was distinct from earlier iterations of the format because it focused on individual characters’ decisions and moral character rather than their social affiliation. This shift reflected the middle-class individualism that arose with the Industrial Revolution (1733–1913). For most of the population, work life and home life became separate spheres for the first time during the Industrial Revolution. Many women began tending to the home while men went to work in newly industrialized workplaces.
• Peak popularity: As a result of this new historical reality, domestic fiction arose primarily to instruct a generation of women in the new so-called rules of womanhood: what society expected of a young girl and how she could meet those expectations. Domestic fiction, therefore, tends to be didactic and moralistic. The genre’s popularity peaked around the 1870s, shortly after the publication of Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott.
• Decline: Critics eventually came to see domestic fiction’s idealization of home life in contrast to the dog-eat-dog outside world as out of touch with the bleak realities of the world, especially with the advent of the twentieth century and the horrors of the world war. As more modern sensibilities developed—and harsh realism along with it—domestic fiction fell out of fashion, replaced by literary realism and naturalism.

Domestic fiction tends to include these tropes and features:

1. 1. Marriage: Marriage, or the pursuit of marriage, often plays a central role in domestic fiction, particularly as a symbol that the protagonist has learned to temper her own desire and ambition for the sake of her life in the home.
2. 2. A troubled domestic situation: The home lives featured in domestic novels and short stories often involve cases of abuse, neglect, and grief. Often, these horrors get resolved as the protagonist becomes the tender of the home sphere.
3. 3. Distinctions between home and the outside world: In many examples of domestic fiction, the outside world is a place of chaos and debauchery for which domestic life is the cure.
4. 4. An educational journey: To master both herself and her eventual duties, the protagonist often goes through a trial by fire and traverses a path of realization on her way to domestic bliss.

Many practitioners of nineteenth-century domestic fiction were women writers building a world based on their own experiences and perspectives. Here are some of the most famous novels of the movement:

1. 1. A New-England Tale (1822): Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale was the first domestic novel. It depicts an orphaned girl who becomes a schoolteacher.
2. 2. The Wide, Wide World (1850): One of the first true American bestsellers, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World follows Ellen Montgomery’s life as she learns to become a woman following her mother’s death.
3. 3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): Like many other examples of domestic fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s smash success Uncle Tom’s Cabin used sentimentality and depictions of domestic life to turn readers’ attention toward a moral cause, in this case: the evils of slavery.
4. 4. The Lamplighter (1854): Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter is a bestselling story of self-discipline and self-actualization on the streets of Boston.
5. 5. Little Women (1868): Perhaps the author of domestic fiction best known to contemporary audiences, Louisa May Alcott’s account of the March sisters in Little Women was a more modern, less morally prescriptive take on the genre.

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