THE CHRONOTOPE OF THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS IN DICKENS’S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND: TWO HOUSES
THE CHRONOTOPE OF THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS IN DICKENS’S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND: TWO HOUSES

THE CHRONOTOPE OF THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS IN DICKENS’S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND: TWO HOUSES

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the significance of the house for two female city inhabitants in Dickens’s“Our Mutual Friend”. The analysis of these women’s movements in city spaces is based on their progressthrough rooms and houses in London realized in their inhabitant rhetoric. Their first house stands in atopical relationship to the successive rooms and houses that they inhabit, which can be established byanalyzing the chronotope of “the beginnings” in the city. This analysis refrains from exploring otherbeginnings in London such as immigration and concentrates, instead, on exploring the importance ofhouse space forming the two women as city consumers, which results in the topical plurality of theexamined time-space whose essence is also established by applying topoanalysis to it. The proposedapproach makes use of Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as a motif, which presupposes the existence of apattern for transcultural and (trans)historical comparative analyses of cities and/or their literaryrepresentations.

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