My dissertation, Household Matters: Objects and the Literary Domestic, 1849-1963, reads encounters between women and household objects throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts to uncover a history of the subversive and creative potential of the quotidian object. Domestic objects, such as handicrafts, dolls, and textiles, fill the pages of texts, but are often dismissed as mere background color, or as irrelevant holdovers from a patriarchal era unworthy of serious study.

However, the work of writers from Charles Dickens, Henry James, and George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Alice B. Toklas reveals the ways that these objects could be a form of expression both rewarding and rebellious. Both cultural history and literary analysis, this project argues that these mundane objects reveal the tension between cultural ideals of domesticity and gender and women’s use of domestic space and its objects for their own creative expression and self-fulfillment.