Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College English Honors Projects English Department Spring 4-26-2017 Private Deaths: The mpI ossibilities of Home in the Modernist Novel Ava Bindas Macalester College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/english_honors Part of the American Literature Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Other Architecture Commons Recommended Citation Bindas, Ava, "Private Deaths: The mposI sibilities of Home in the Modernist Novel" (2017). English Honors Projects. 35. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/english_honors/35 This Honors Project - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Private Deaths: The Impossibilities of Home in the Modernist Novel Ava Bindas Advisor: Andrea Kaston Tange Honors Thesis English Department Macalester College April 26, 2017 Abstract This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic space coalesce to situate women’s bodies in liminal, unlivable homes.