The Bourgeois Interior in Edgar Allen Poe’s and Conan Doyle’s Detective Stories

• Main Author: 郭詩裴
• Other Authors: Chen, Yin I
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/51761961434519422500

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 100 === Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the bourgeois interior inspired this dissertation. As the nineteenth century witnessed capitalism and Industrial Revolution, the domestic interior served the bourgeoisie to store property, ensure comfort and security, and withstand the outdoor dangers. However, Benjamin not only questions the impregnability of this bourgeois interior but also directly points out the bourgeoisie’s unconscious anxiety over the interior despite their conscious confidence in it. Using Benjamin’s theory as my critical framework, I analyze the frequent occurrences of domestic crimes in the nineteenth-century detective genre. This formula, I argue, projects its middle-class readers’ anxiety over the domestic space as the domestic space is repeatedly invaded and disturbed by crimes. Based on Benjamin’s theory, I use Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle’s detective stories to explore how these works depict the bourgeois interior, how their authors address the issues about the bourgeois interior, and what role the detective plays, a protector or a transgressor, when involved into the invasions of the bourgeois interior. From Poe at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Doyle at the end, I also examine the changes of the bourgeois interior during the process of the middle class’ migration from the city center to suburbs. I argue that both Poe’s and Doyle’s detective stories challenges the ideology of bourgeois spatiality by showing the interior is unsafe and unstable against the bourgeoisie’s imagination.