You can’t keep the woman in the wallpaper: The agency of the woman and the house from Homer to modern feminist literature

This article uses new-materialist approaches to explore the dynamic and two-way interaction between the woman and the house under patriarchal constraints. It draws on case studies from Homeric epic to the works of Ismail Kadare, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sue Townsend and Daisy Johnson to show the cross-cultural and cross-temporal persistence of this nexus. It shows the ethical import of the New Materialisms in terms of inclusivity, shifting our focus to underrepresented agents and questioning hierarchical approaches to both materiality and the female. Women are not only objectified, but also negotiate their agency through objects. If women are confined to the domestic domain, their agency will interact with that of the house: whether in collaboration, or antithesis.