Hull House

Hull House is a Chicago setting in Eveline Hutchins’s early life, associated in the novel with work she values and with her contact with the artist Eric Egstrom. The evidence presents it through Eveline’s experience rather than describing the organization’s wider mission or activities.

Eveline’s Work and Encounters

During an unhappy winter in Chicago, while her sisters were away at Vassar, Eveline attended art classes and lectures and did churchwork. Of these pursuits, she liked her work at Hull House best. Eric Egstrom taught drawing classes there in the evenings, and Eveline sometimes saw him in the back passage. Their brief conversations about Manet and Claude Monet’s haystacks brought art into the everyday setting of her work, though she felt uneasy that the exchanges were neither more interesting nor cleverer and worried that someone might discover her smoking.

Narrative Significance

Hull House is presented through this limited but consequential association: it is where Eveline’s interest in art and her attraction to Eric overlap. The account does not specify what her work there involved, so its significance rests on the contrast the scene establishes between an activity she especially liked and the uncertain, self-conscious encounters that accompanied it.