The woman -built house: The fiction of Eudora Welty, Shirley Ann Grau, and Carol Dawson

The goal of this study is to look at interior spaces and examine how these spaces reflect the southern women who exist within the walls. Gaston Bachelard's idea of a house built by women, and the human reaction to home, in The Poetics of Space provides the theory behind the spatial analysis of interiors. Interior spaces---the female body and the house---and exterior spaces---language and landscape---are the four points of focus. The landscape provides a comparative point with enclosed interiors. Cosmos and Hearth, by Yi-Fu Tuan, is the model for examining how people relate to the exterior world. Language reveals the self to an exterior world, and the effects of language denied are devastating. Shaped by enclosure, the voices of the characters are reflective of limited experience and limited tolerance of the surrounding culture. The body is also a text to be readjust as are the houses that shelter the women from the outside world. Enclosed within walls due to cultural ideas of gender, the body is yet another prison which encloses women.;This dissertation joins canonical writers Eudora Welty and Shirley Ann Grau with a relative newcomer to literature, Carol Dawson. Earlier writers like Mississippi's Welty, establish a precedent for the use of space in such novels as Delta Wedding (1945) and The Optimist's Daughter (1969). These novels proved time-honored comparative texts for later generations of women writers. Louisiana writer Grau's The House on Coliseum Street (1961) and The Keepers of the House (1964) and Texan Dawson's The Waking Spell (1992) and Body of Knowledge (1994) provide a second and third generational look at how Southern women writers locate their characters in the context of the contemporary South.