Modern British and American Drama(1900-1939) The Dialectic of Theatrical Space and Domestic Space.

I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air. And, three paragraphs later: Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me, — a story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day. From this point, the tale is related of the Welsh-born industrial workers who are the focus of Harding's story. But these opening lines are crucial, for they posit the grim reality of the mill workers' lives as an irruption into the narrator's apparently comfortable middle-class existence. After all, we do learn, at the end of the narrative, that the storyteller is ensconced in her domestic library, which is scattered with a number of objects of distinction: "A half-moulded child's head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty." It is striking then that, as she meditates in her insulation, the narrator should remark about the air of the mill town, "It stifles me." The personal effect that the stifling atmosphere of the mills has on the narrator indicates the degree to which the private, middle-class domestic space is penetrated by the machinery of industrial capital ...»