The House of Pages: Longing, Confinement, and Women’s Imaginative Architecture

Authors

• Ashtyn E. Hedlund, University of Nebraska-KearneyFollow

Abstract

This article examines how women’s longing and imaginative agency are shaped, constrained, and reconstituted within domestic and psychological interiors in women’s literature. Drawing on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ann Petry’s The Street, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons, the essay employs bibliomancy as both method and metaphor, allowing chance, intuition, and textual resonance to guide critical inquiry. Through a symbolic “house” composed of five rooms, the article traces how each narrative transforms confinement into imaginative depth. These spaces reveal longing not as frivolous desire but as an architectural force that constructs interior worlds when external freedom is denied. By blending literary analysis with embodied, ritualized reading practices, this article argues that women’s imagination persists even under restriction, fracturing, adapting, and ultimately expanding beyond the limits imposed upon it. In doing so, it positions longing as a generative, inheritable force that enables survival, self-authorship, and radical transformation across literary traditions.

Recommended Citation

Hedlund, Ashtyn E. (2026) "The House of Pages: Longing, Confinement, and Women’s Imaginative Architecture," Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 27, Article 2.
Available at: https://openspaces.unk.edu/undergraduate-research-journal/vol27/iss1/2