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Abstract
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This research is essential because it addresses the central economic invisibility of the Victorian domestic economy. By prioritizing the analysis of unpaid labor as it is dictated by domestic architecture (a “spatial politics”), the study illuminates the true cost of industrial prosperity. The invisibility of this labor is key to understanding the Condition-of-England novel’s incomplete critique. While Brontë and Gaskell critique industrial exploitation of paid workers, this study argues that the spatial containment of middle-class women represents an equally insidious form of exploitation: the appropriation of reproductive labor without recognition. The topic is a priority area for study as it integrates three critical fields: Victorian literary studies, feminist economics, and architectural theory. It moves the scholarly focus away from purely psychological readings of female discontent and toward a materialist understanding of the home as a workplace. For instance, analyzing the lack of a proper "study" or "office" for educated women in these novels, it can be demonstrated that the domestic architecture structurally denied them the space needed for intellectual or paid professional labor, locking them into the repetitive, reproductive work of the house. This specificity is crucial and moves beyond vague notions of “patriarchal oppression” to concrete, textual evidence of spatial repression.
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