Sharon Marcus

Sharon Marcus

Type
Assistant Professor Fellow
Department
English
1997-98

In Restless Houses: Domestic Architecture and Urban Culture in Paris and London, 1820- 1880, Sharon Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of English. argues against the notion of “separate spheres” and notes the intersections of the domestic and the urban in the metropolitan center of nineteenth-century France and England. She analyzes debates about apartmenthouse life in architecture pattern-books, housekeeping manuals, works of urban observation and pubic health surveys; she studies as well the deployment of the apartment house in the realist, naturalist, and sensationalist novels that represented private spaces to a reading public: Balzac (Le Cousin Pons) and Zola (Pot-Bouille) for the French side of the analysis and, for the British, ghost stories about haunted houses that indicate the British middleclass discomfort with sub-divided houses rented as lodgings.