Soggettività femminile e spazio domestico nell’era del lavoro agile. Un confronto tra The Last Samurai di Helen De Witt e Negative Space di Gillian Linden

Abstract

The article analyzes the relationship between remote work, domestic space, and female identity in twenty-first-century fiction, comparing Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000) and Gillian Linden’s Negative Space (2022). In both novels, albeit from different perspectives, the intellectual labor of mothers intersects with the domestic sphere, exposing deep tensions between production and social reproduction. In DeWitt, labor precarity paradoxically becomes the condition for a utopian educational project, whereas in Linden, work in the post-lockdown phase translates into claustrophobia, anxiety, and alienation.