From Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘House’ to bell hooks’ ‘Homeplace’: autofiction and autotheory in architectural writing

From 1936 to 1948 Simone de Beauvoir lived alone in different hotels in Marseille, Rouen and Paris, from where she conceived her fictional and philosophical writing. In 1937, after convalescing in the south of France from a collapsed lung, she took a room in the hotel Mistral in Montparnasse to write the autofictional novel She Came to Stay (1943). The English writer Jean Rhys also lived an itinerant existence in successive, shabby Parisian hotels. Her novels written between 1928 and 1939 — Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning Midnight — are autofictional renditions of the desperate existence of a stateless, impoverished, unmarried woman.

Making close readings of de Beauvoir and Rhys texts, the article theorises that the in-between, material space of the early 20th-century hotel was integral to shaping an alternative domestic life for women which resisted patriarchal imperatives. Whilst promoting feminist autofiction as a source of evidence of the material conditions of women’s lives, I draw on Audre Lorde (1984) and others to critique the limitations of de Beauvoir and Rhys’ renditions with respect to class and race. Analysing the autotheoretical approach of bell hooks’ 1990 essay ‘Homeplace’, I suggest that autotheory is an alternative mode that can decolonise writing on domesticity and, further, politically extend architectural history writing.