The other side of the window : an essay on structural iconography in English and American fiction
Authors:   , Lawson Jessie Edminster 
Published: June 2024

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the structural and symbolic function of the window as a major motif in certain works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American fiction. Within this body of literature the window characteristically serves as a vehicle for exploring the psychological and philosophical ramifications of one root problem: the nature of the relationship between the perceiving subject and the object--be it another single individual or a whole ideological universe--that he or she perceives. In effect, the window provides an external correlative to the very conditions of one's being, since, like the eye, it permits one to see what lies beyond the self, yet at the same time constitutes a barrier between the self and the world. As I explain in the first chapter, the organization of the study is the result of my efforts to develop a structural approach to literary iconography, by tracing connections between the window and the elements of plot, character, situation and theme to which it is linked. The study reveals that the window serves to frame those visions that stimulate or express the observer's desires for possession, for freedom, and/or for an understanding of the self in relation to the world. Furthermore, the nature and direction of these desires are related to gender--to that of the writer and, more immediately and demonstrably, to that of the literary character. The second chapter is concerned with fiction written by men that represents various forms of man's desire to possess a woman. Such fiction describes a sequence running from voyeurism to sexual violation and, in some instances, beyond, to the redemption of the violator. The writers examined are Samuel Richardson, Henry James, William Faulkner, John Barth and Bernard Malamud. The third chapter treats fiction written by women that explores the woman's desire to elude such possession. Whereas the voyeur is typically an outsider looking in the window, the woman who seeks her freedom is typically on the inside, looking out, but ultimately escaping confinement through love, through death, or through both. The writers examined are Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf. The fourth chapter, devoted exclusively to American fiction written by men, examines works that contrast the territorial imperative, a preeminently American form of the desire to possess, to the transcendental capacity for seeing through the phenomenal world as though it were itself a window. Beginning with references to Melville's Ahab and to the essays of Emerson, I examine in detail the use of windows, literal and figurative, in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James. The fifth chapter investigates further the theme of visual penetration, as it appears in the work of modern women writers. I propose that the experience of being enclosed, converted to a literary subject, fosters experiments with style and structure that afford ways of overcoming both situational and formal constraints. I begin by examining works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf in which the window is used as an occasion for overcoming boundedness, and end by discussing Woolf's and Doris Lessing's representations of seemingly solid surfaces as penetrable screens. In the sixth chapter I redirect attention from the situations depicted in the work of fiction to the very conditions of fiction, examining the window and the mirror as complementary images of literary activity. After reviewing the use of these images in literary theory and criticism, I focus attention on works of fiction by Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth that describe the mirroring and windowing functions of literature itself.