Ep. 25 - Panel 6B - Part 1 - Neglected interwar domestic romance - Pimpawan Chaipanit (U Aberdeen)

NPPSH Conference

Despite her being dubbed as ‘Jane Austen of the 20th century’ by JB Priestly, Dorothy Whipple’s fame for her popular interwar domestic romance, ironically, did not last like her literary precursor until the recent republication by Persephone Books. Whipple wrote not only the courtship and the romance tale, but the post-matrimony story such as extramarital affair, divorce, and domestic violence with a profound understanding of the importance of women’s education and profession. Studying her novels as the cultural products of the middle-class and from the interwar period, a topoanalytical reading of Whipple’s domestic images finds that they represent home as a contested site to the women’s heterosexual identity, desire, and economic conundrum, and reveals the history of heterosexual femininity not as a steady and voiceless conformity to the patriarchal hegemony, but a constantly reforming effort to improve and undermine the traditional heterosexual structure in the patriarchal design of suppressive spatial division, in which home is considered as a socially and economically rightful realm for women to reside and to identify their gender with. By reading her novels following the proposed method, the researcher aims to show how Whipple’s domestic romance about the quiet disquiet from the middle ground and the mid-century deserves to be reinstalled in the feminist literary canon and protected from oblivion and neglect. Pimpawan holds an MA in English Language & Literature from Thammasat University Thailand and an MA in Contemporary Literature from the University of Liverpool. She started her PhD in English in 2016 at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen. Her current research interests include spatial turn in literary theory, women’s literary history, women and romance writing, gendered space, and domesticity in women’s novel.