Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life

Victoria Rosner

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231507875
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria inglesa

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design. Elegantly synthesizing modernist literature with architectural plans, room designs, and decorative art, Victoria Rosner's work explores the collaborations among modern British writers, interior designers, and architects in redefining the form, function, and meaning of middle-class private life. Drawing on a host of previously unexamined archival sources and works by figures such as E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Virginia Woolf, Rosner highlights the participation of modernist literature in the creation of an experimental, embodied, and unstructured private life, which we continue to characterize as "modern."

“Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?”

There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse.

—Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939)

“Yes? No?” No. The opening lines of Good Morning, Midnight (1939) capture what seemed so wrong with the forms of private life in the first part of the twentieth century. Rootless and solitary, protagonist Sasha Jensen passes her time in a fruitless search for rooms. Rooms speak to her, tell her in suggestive tones what they’re about. This particular room, like so many, is all about “old times.” It keeps male and female as far apart as possible, defining them through opposition. The room recommends marriage to its occupants, dubbed “madame” and “monsieur.” Madame’s larger bed, presumably intended to accommodate monsieur should he choose to pay a nocturnal visit, announces the sexual ground rules of this space. The sanitary facilities have yet to migrate to a separate room and are cordoned off by a curtain, a divider that invokes the impropriety of the body by hiding away its ablutions even in the intimate environs of the bedroom.¹

For Sasha Jensen, the verdict on this kind of room is mutely upheld by the street outside, a narrow alley that arcs and cuts off in a dead end. Sasha warns the reader later of the latent power in the rooms she inspects: “Never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system.”² An anonymous room may wield more influence than appearances suggest. Like many texts of its time, Good Morning, Midnight reflects a deep understanding of the values and hierarchies implicit in the design of living spaces. Sasha cannot alter the rooms that present themselves; all she can do is continue the house hunt. Rhys’s talking room is as droll as Sasha is earnest. The room mocks her, attesting to the vigor of a tradition Sasha seems able to refuse but not remake. Yet she keeps up this disappointing dialogue with rooms throughout the novel. Rooms won’t give her anything but old times, so why does she keep asking for something new? Maybe because she wants it so badly, or maybe because she hopes against hope that her desire can bring its fantasized object to life.

Many British modernist writers focused their attention on the structure and function of domestic spaces and found little to praise. “My house is a decayed house,” complains the speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” charging the Victorian home of lingering past its time. In modernist texts whatever smacks of the radical—transgressive sexuality, feminism, or the spirit of the avant-garde—is either accommodated with difficulty by the domestic or simply shunted outdoors. Influenced by new trends in British design, many writers sought to undermine and even reconstruct the form of the home in order to redefine its purpose and meaning. Yet as Sasha’s example demonstrates, though old-fashioned rooms are unsatisfying, they can be hard to think beyond and hard to leave behind. The talking room she encounters offers a representative display of the powerful or magical qualities that attach to domestic spaces, qualities that can alter or derail plans for renovation or redesign.

This book proposes that the spaces of private life are a generative site for literary modernism. These spaces compose a kind of grid of social relations that shifts and slips, often upending the individuals who traverse it. Modernist spatial poetics are attuned to architectural dynamics of privacy and exposure, spatial hierarchies demarcating class, the locations and routines surrounding the care of the body, and the gendering of space. But if literary modernism is explicitly preoccupied with the structure of private life, it is also shaped by the discourse of space in more subtle ways. The modernist novel draws a conceptual vocabulary from the lexicons of domestic architecture and interior design, elaborating a notion of psychic interiority, to take one example, that rests on specific ideas about architectural interiors. Uncovering such discursive connections makes possible a kind of material genealogy of some of literary modernism’s apparently autonomous elements. It acknowledges the role of literature in the work of imagining a post-Victorian reorganization of private life to accord with changing social customs. Further, and perhaps most unsettling, it exposes the fundamental role of the built environment in creating the categories we use to organize and understand who we are. In Good Morning, Midnight, it might be said, Sasha searches for a room of her own, never fully realizing that she is already owned by the rooms she encounters.

“On or about December 1910 human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Surely not. Yet something inward, something personal, something significant did seem to be altering in the early years of the twentieth century. “All human relations have shifted,” Woolf continued. She laid her emphasis on relations specific to private life: those “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.”³ Woolf felt that the organization and customs of daily life were changing, if not in a fashion readily ascribed to any given individual then certainly in one measurable in its impact on the home. The peace and stability of the Victorian household deteriorated, deformed by the pressure of changing social, sexual, and cultural mores. What took its place was a far more provisional, more embodied, more unstructured kind of private life—the kind of life we still call “modern.” The story of this metamorphosis is my subject. It is a story that can only be told through a dual focus on human relations and the intimate spaces that contain them.

Woolf might have based her claim for the signal importance of 1910 on numerous public artistic, social, and political events: the publication of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, unrest in Ireland, the controversial second Post-Impressionist exhibition, the renewed clamor for women’s suffrage, and more.⁴ But rather than ground her claim in any of these events, she pointed to the kitchen table:

In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?⁵

Woolf’s class-bound assumption—that her readers would all have cooks and that none of her readers might be cooks—is irritating. Less retrograde and more surprising is her decision to locate the origins of modernism in the kitchen’s homely environs. Many critics do seem to ask for “more solemn instances,” and when tracing the impact of modernity they bypass the kitchen table in favor of other locations more traditionally sanctified by the avant-garde: the street, the café, and the gallery, among others. Yet Woolf hews to her choice, for the next piece of evidence she provides remains on the same homely terrain: “Consider the married life of the Carlyles, and bewail the waste, the futility, for him and for her, of the horrible domestic tradition which made it seemly for a woman of genius to spend her time chasing beetles, scouring saucepans, instead of writing books.”⁶

If Victorian society dictated that Jane Carlyle commit herself to kitchen duties, by about 1910 she might have respectably abandoned that sphere in favor of a writer’s study. After 1910 human beings were different, says Woolf, and modernist literature both responds to and produces that difference. But what has that to do with kitchen tables?

Take another Woolfian kitchen table, this one imaginary and found in her novel To the Lighthouse. The novel concerns the Ramsays, a British family vacationing in the Hebrides and their guests, one of whom is Lily Briscoe, an unmarried woman artist. Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher and Lily seeks an explanation of his work, which one of the sons provides: “Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there.”⁷ Lily is indeed not there; she is not at the kitchen table because she has neither a husband nor children. The novel stresses that her decision to pursue her creative work entails abandoning domestic responsibilities. If Mr. Ramsay’s phenomenological credo stands for the solidity and independence of things apart from persons, Lily’s aesthetic program is somewhat different.⁸ Her technique is abstract, though she works from life; in her painting, the reality of objects dissolves into the vision the artist imposes on the model. As she puts it, “A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence.”⁹ The sacred center of the Victorian household can be dislodged by the modernist artist, converted into a formalist statement. Lily’s painting stands in for Woolf’s novel, itself a modernist work that tells the story of the displacement of traditional family structures like the Ramsays’. For Woolf, the kitchen table represents not what the modernist artist must discard but what she must transform into the basis of her work. Christopher Reed writes that the “standard of modern art [has been] a heroic odyssey on the high seas of consciousness, with no time to spare for the mundane details of home life and housekeeping.”¹⁰ If modernism and the domestic have often seemed like antithetical categories, Woolf weaves them together as she locates modernism’s origins squarely in the spaces of private life.

Private life is an amorphous category that changes over time. Antoine Prost notes: “The boundaries of private life are not laid down for once and for all; the division of human activity between public and private spheres is subject to change.”¹¹ I use the term “private life” broadly and flexibly in this book, as I think it must be used, encompassing issues such as the physical setting of the home, the social network of family relations, the routines of the household, and the habits of the body. My focus will be on the domestic sphere, the physical location that Hannah Arendt describes as central to private life: “the four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard.”¹² The walls of the home proffer an umbrella of privacy, an apparent ability to retreat from the general gaze, but as we shall see, the home does not proffer its protection equally to all household members, nor does its protection invariably extend autonomy to those who dwell within its doors. The home is not often conceived as a progressive site. Yet for Woolf, as for many others, the home was seen as a kind of laboratory for social experimentation. Woolf was also joined by many of her contemporaries in her view of how literary modernism could participate in key changes in the conduct and organization of British private life. The anecdotal history of modernism is strewn with evidence of this involvement, from Lytton Strachey uttering the word “semen” aloud in the drawing room, seemingly for the first time in English history; to James Joyce’s representation of Bloom on the toilet; to Natalie Barney’s lesbian expatriate salon in her own home on Paris’s Left Bank; to Woolf’s famous claim to a room of her own on behalf of all women writers. All these moments are flavored with bravura. They are flourishes designed to call attention, provoke controversy, and signal an unwillingness to carry on with things as usual. They are rebellions located in that most sacred and custom-bound site, the home.

Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter Virginia Nicholson has recently described the writers and artists of pre–World War II England as “Bohemians,” a “tiny, avant-garde minority … set … apart from the vast mass of conventional British people.”¹³ Such a characterization overlooks the broader influence sought by British writers and artists who proselytized directly and indirectly to the general public on the need to reform the home. In his widely publicized 1882 lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde addressed remarks on the reform of home decoration to a variety of audiences, including Colorado coal miners. Wyndham Lewis’s short-lived Rebel Art Centre produced fiercely avant-garde applied arts to sell to the public, and Lewis himself undertook commissions in interior design. Roger Fry published widely on the need for British design reform.

Though much of the British public had neither the desire nor the resources to make dramatic alterations in their domestic arrangements, by the end of the nineteenth century the Victorian home was being subjected to a critical examination. The drive for domestic reform had an origin in the design agendas of William Morris and John Ruskin, but it is also possible to trace a literary genealogy of domestic reform with roots in the early feminism of the New Woman novel. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, novelists asserted the New Woman’s incompatibility with Victorian domesticity and often refused the form of the marriage plot.¹⁴ The heroines of these novels sought to create unconventional households, and they disdained traditional marriages. For example, in Thomas Hardy’s novel A Laodicean (1881), the aptly named Paula Power is the orphaned daughter of an industrialist, “a personification of the modern spirit, who had been dropped, like a seed from the bill of a bird, into a chink of mediaevalism.”¹⁵ When the story opens, she has inherited an ancient and crumbling castle where she installs telegraph wires and a gymnasium to accommodate her modern needs.¹⁶ The impoverished aristocrat whose family sold the castle seeks an alliance with Paula, but she ends up with the architect who renovates the castle, a task he accomplishes by annexing the old ruins “as a curiousity” and building a modern house by their side. If a conventional happy ending would have used a marriage to ally the new industrial wealth with the old landed aristocracy, Paula’s interest in an architect who is neither her social nor her financial equal turns her away from convention and toward modernity. Paula does marry, but she marries a man whose only qualification is his ability to build, as Paula puts it on the last page, “a new house … [to] show the modern spirit for evermore!”¹⁷

A Laodicean was not the only novel to represent the home as a problem the New Woman had to resolve. Paula Power marries an architect who will help her build a future, but others lacked either her pluck or her resources. In George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), Monica Widdowson flees the home of her doltish husband and attempts unsuccessfully to gain the scandalous protection of her lover’s flat: “She knocked at her lover’s door, and stood longing, praying, that it might open. But it did not.”¹⁸ Unable to gain admission, she returns to her husband, becomes pregnant, and dies shortly after giving birth. Similarly, in Hardy’s later Jude the Obscure (1895), Sue Bridehead wanders from one rooming house to another, unable to find accommodation because of the unconventional nature of her family. And in Grant Allen’s 1895 best-seller The Woman Who Did, Herminia Barton is finally driven to suicide by her inability to provide an acceptable home from which to marry off her illegitimate daughter. Like New Woman writers, female aesthetes sought to reshape the home to better accord with women’s changing sense of self. Rosamund Marriott Watson’s work on interior design, The Art of the House (1897), writes Talia Schaffer, represents the home as a place that “must be redefined as women’s identity changes.”¹⁹

These stories intimate the kind of pressures on conventional British domesticity during the late nineteenth century.²⁰ The basic constitution of the household community was revised: over the course of a few decades the birth rate among married couples was cut almost in half; at the same time the servant class declined rapidly. A middle-class family employed one or two servants, not more.²¹ Household guides and etiquette books proliferated and advised women about how to cope with these changes. Design reformers, inspired by Ruskin, criticized—though not always with popular agreement—the heaviness and excessive eclecticism of the Victorian interior and promoted more unified designs with less ornament and more emphasis on craftsmanship. The gradual introduction of indoor plumbing wrought important changes in housekeeping and personal hygiene; eventually electricity started to find its way into ...