Date of Award
Spring 6-12-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts
First Advisor
Clark Davis
Second Advisor
Eleanor McNees
Third Advisor
Graham Foust
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Keywords
Domestic architecture, Symbolism, The Spoils of Poynton, The Good Soldier, The Years
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Great House in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction not as a decorative backdrop, but as a spatial form through which fiction thinks about memory, perception, social relation, and interior life. Focusing on Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1897), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), and Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), I argue that domestic architecture becomes a formal principle that organizes modern subjectivity. Across these texts, the Great House moves from archive, to structure, to agent: first preserving affective and ethical history through objects and arrangement, then shaping perception and misrecognition, and finally acting upon social relations themselves. Modernist inwardness, in this sense, does not emerge apart from spatial form but through it.
Chapter One, “The House as Archive,” reads The Spoils of Poynton as a novel in which objects function as material repositories of memory, devotion, and ethical conflict. Poynton becomes a material archive where stewardship, possession, and aesthetic arrangement collapse into one another. Drawing on Thing Theory and material culture studies, I argue that James presents the house as a site where objects exceed decorative symbolism and exert agency over human relationships.
Chapter Two, “The House as Structure,” turns to The Good Soldier, where domestic architecture becomes an epistemological form. Bramshaw Teleragh and the novel’s other iii interiors organize Dowell’s delayed recognition and narrative wandering. Ford transforms the Great House from a site of aesthetic coherence into a structure of uncertainty, producing confession without absolution and devotion without belief.
Chapter Three, “The House as Agent,” examines The Years, where Woolf’s thresholds, windows, rented interiors, telephones, and cellars reshape social relations under modernity. The Victorian house no longer stabilizes hierarchy; instead, domestic space actively produces interruption, instability, and new forms of contact.
Together, these novels reveal that the Great House does not simply represent the decline of an older social order. Rather, it functions as a formal mechanism through which fiction registers the transformation of interior life itself. The house preserves history, organizes perception, and ultimately acts upon the lives within it.
Copyright Date
6-2026
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
Eric Mills
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
179 pgs
File Size
746 KB
Recommended Citation
Mill, Eric, "“This Must Be the Place”: The House from Archive to Agent in James, Ford, and Woolf" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2732.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2732