It is an irony surprisingly true that a single woman in want of a home must possess the power to disenchant the suitor seeking entry to her abode. If she is to survive happily, the woman must transform what her beloved perceives as possessing his domestic comfort into preserving her domestic law. Her transformation is not a tease, but rather the sacrifice of her own desire in order to live in the company of others. This study identifies the home, traditionally perceived as feminine space, dangerously under siege by an intrusive masculine will that intriguingly precipitates a feminine spiritedness to protect the hearth.

In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's 1835, “The Fairy of the Fountains,” Melusine's fairy bower, explicitly forbidden to her lover on the seventh day of every week, is permeated by the pilgrim Raymond, exposing the fairy's deepest secret revealed on her day of bathing: she is a mermaid, a beguiling enchantress, but as reptilian monster, a disturbance to social decorum. A similar unsettling intrusion occurs in Emily Brontë's 1847 Wuthering Heights when the traveler Lockwood enters the deceased Catherine's childhood bed. His brazen disturbance awakens the beautiful, but demonic ghost of Catherine. Home invasion becomes further provocatively visible in Ghost, a 1990 sculpture in which Rachel Whiteread inverts an emptied home's interior, literally casting outward a room's anatomy, if you will, for public scrutiny. From Romantic to contemporary times, the home, the site of preserving the female's governance, is also an elegiac space of feminine displacement.

Four ideas cohere this study: 1) the home belongs to feminine law; 2) a happy reign within the home depends on masculine allegiance to this law; 3) breaking this law first disrupts feminine domestic order and second, this breakage weakens masculine power dependent on the home as his own enduring fortress; 4) feminine law is complex not because it is driven by a woman's autonomous choice, but because it is dictated by a societal construct which demands female leadership according to strict expectations imposed on her from without.