Divided houses: Place and creative destruction in 'Howards End', 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', 'Heartbreak House', and 'The Magic Mountain'.

摘要

E. M. Forster's Howards End, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House , and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain are all concerned with crisis, particularly with events surrounding World War I. Each of the texts uses a private dwelling place as a metonyrn for the public crises of industrialization and international conflict. As privileged, orderly retreats, the dwelling places are associated with the past, with home and harmony, and they contrast with the chaos of industrial cities; however, the retreats are financed by industrial development and, in other ways, are implicated in urbanization and imperialism. The seemingly stable dwellings come to represent the process of change they oppose.; The conflicts represented in these dwelling places respond to the condition of modernity, a mode of experience in which people try to find their way through social transformations. The study follows Marshall Berman's definition of modernism as a loose grouping of ideas about how to respond to these changes. The dwelling places represent creative destruction both by their often lucrative involvement with destructive mechanical or financial power and by their quite different associations with the organic processes of growth, decay, and renewal.; This study finds pastoral references to shepherds (or such modern equivalents as gamekeepers) in some kind of exile a mode of evaluating both the order of the private estate and the disorder of the city. Behind the process of pastoral is the assumption that all people are alike, so class differences are artificial and don't really matter. In the tensions among urban chaos, privileged estate, and pastoral greenwood, the metonym of the estate as representative of the nation is broken down: the spirit of place becomes real estate and repressive financial power. In breaking down the contradictions, Forster, Lawrence, Shaw, and Mann responded to crises of the early twentieth century and, in some ways, anticipated the concerns of contemporary writers, particularly of those who apply the metonym, of a private dwelling place to a nation or to the world.