The Metaphor of the 'House as Text' in Victorian Novels

After the poetic metaphor (of the Aristotelic and classical rhetoric schools), and the linguistic metaphor (belonging to the historical linguistics and the philosophy of language), the metaphor has turned into a central topos in epistemology (M. Black, 1962; P. Ricoeur, 1975; T. van Dijk, 1975; J. Molino, 1979a, 1979b; A. Ortony, 1979 apud Rovenţa-Frumuşani, 2000); the metaphor has ceased, on the one hand, to be a poetic myth, becoming an explanatory principle in science (also in Johansen and Larsen, 2002) and, on the other hand, to restrict itself only to the lexical level, in order to enter the field of discourse theory (in argumentation through Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca’s neo-rhetoric, in the speech acts theory with T. van Dijk, in implicit and indirect speech acts theory with J. Searle and Kerbrat-Orecchioni). Our intention is to shape the metaphorical references of such a statement as “the house is a text” and find out the effects that such an association of terms has when applied to 19th-century English novels and characters.