Hill Street Architecture (The Pretext)

Hill Street, the street in Wentworth where the home of the Ransoms is located, is a street which looks like it is “part of an American college town.” (Lewis, 1968, p. 637). First, there are the “white porches” (Lewis, 1968, p. 637) between which Mr. Robert Ransom moves almost alone after leaving his house (Lewis, 1968, p. 637). A porch is “a small area at the entrance to a building, such as a house or a church, that is covered by a roof and often has walls” (Hornby, 2015, p. 1193).

The reader can probably imagine Hill Street well because of the white porches being part of the American college town Wentworth. White porches like the one in the first picture above seem to be typical American. Moreover, the houses are equipped with “shingled gables” (Lewis, 1968, p. 637).

A shingle is “a small flat piece of wood that is used to cover a wall or roof of a building” (Hornby, 2015, p. 1429). The shingled gables in Wentworth are described as “irrelevant” (Lewis, 1968, p. 637) which could mean that they were just built to create a better look like the two gables on the right in the second picture above. Like the white porches the shingled gables create an atmosphere of an American college town and project a certain picture in the reader’s mind.

Sources:

Hornby, A. S. (2015). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, R. W. B. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.