How do Nin, Kavan, and Bowles mobilise the figure of the home to challenge paternalist literary conventions and articulate feminine subjectivity?

Within paternalistic literary traditions, the home has functioned as a material structure, housing marriage and domestic labor, but also more widely as a narrative device (enclosing moral stability, closure or the homecoming theme) or a generic expectation (connected to realist depictions, psychological coherence, or linearity). Paternalistic literary conventions often align the home with women in ways that contain female subjectivity. This study argues that Nin, Bowles, and Kavan mobilise the figure of the home across multiple registers (architectural, psychic, linguistic, erotic, literary) to challenge these conventions and articulate forms of female subjectivity that resist containment and closure. In the works House of Incest, Two Serious Ladies, and Sleep Has Its House, home is mobilised by these authors in distinct ways. Drawing on Cixous' écriture féminine as well as Kristeva's abject and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialisation, this study reads scenes of interaction with the home figure as sites of psychic disruption and self-exploration in these works. Ultimately, this study argues that these texts produce a feminist reimagining of domesticity that unsettles patriarchal narrative structures.