Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Victoria Rosner)

Theses

• “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…
• “Uncovering such discursive connections makes possible a kind of material genealogy of some of literary modernism’s apparently autonomous elements…
• “imagining a post-Victorian reorganization of private life to accord with changing social customs…
  • Woolf on moving into Gordon Square: “We were full of experiments and reforms….Everything was on trial.” (130) And it resulting in: “domesticity was inseparable from the loftier guiding principles” of philosophy and art
  • Changing private life requires changing interior decoration
• “exposes the fundamental role of the build environment in creating the categories we use to organize and understand who we are.” (2)
  • ie, rooms determine us, not vice versa
  • “expose the material basis of the putatively autonomous aesthetics of the modernist novel” (16)
• Home as “a laboratory for social experimentation” (5), a “workshop for interior design and social change” (13), bringing the avant-garde into the private space of home to create “proposals for a new domesticity” (13)
  • Changes in home thus link modernism and feminism
• Talking about “interiority” is a “tension between abstraction and materiality, between metaphor and literality.” (11)
  • Whereas most critics just talk about modernism as Just Abstract, she’s going for concrete life, she says
    • Modernism usually seen as public sphere movement (streets, cafes, galleries)
• Spaces are “overdetermined in their meanings and painful to experience….Like hysteria, they sometimes substitute for inarticulable narratives.” (15)
  • Thus, they connect authors and characters to their past, despite modernism’s wish to cast off that past
• Space determines identity, but the good news is, you can change your space to take control of that process.
• Goal: “set the objects free to express their natures,” not “drain the life from aesthetic objects” (20)
• Can’t totally escape the Victorian household
  • Woolf, “Sketch,” “While we looked into the future, we were completely under the power of the past.”
  • “The inescapable irony of these household memoirs is that their chief achievement lies in their vivid recreation of a way of life they were created to discredit.” (84)
  • Brilliant evocation of Victorian life can’t cancel it out completely
    • The “dirt” of modernism = the hint of the past that persists out of place
• The Study
  • Books ‘n’ Guns
  • Secrecy
  • Authorship
  • Women increasingly claim the male space of the study for themselves
    • They seem to do it by seeing themselves as men in there
  • Study is a strange place in the house b/c it “perfects privacy” despite the house being communal; and the fact that you can do professional work inside the private sphere
  • Late 19th century, decorators lamenting that studies aren’t used for real reading and writing uses anymore, but just for lounging
  • Hotbed for tensions over private possession and privacy, as well as secret keeping

Historical Details

• By end of nineteenth century, birth rate drastically declined, having fewer and fewer servants
  • You manage your house by yourself more and more
• Electricity and modern plumbing coming into homes
  • Creation of the bathroom: 1880s in London (bodily functions “sequestered” and marked off now, instead of inside each room in form of washstands, chamber pots, etc)
• Ruskin and Arts & Crafts critique about heavy, overstuffed, eclectic Victorian homes into simpler, cleaner, better made handicraft
  • Not in England: Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright
• Omega Workshops: translating post-impressionism for the home, even the middle-class home, they said
  • abstraction, geometrical design, nude bent/dancing/etc figures, lots of color, vibrancy, surface decoration
  • integrate fine art into the household (ie, fine art and applied art same now)
  • Fry: “allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life.”
  • Just one example of the many links between modernists and avant-garde interior design
• Decorative arts gaining more prestige in early 20th century
• The Study
  • In 19th century, becomes the private space of the master
  • “sanctioned professional work within the domestic sphere”
• Morris v Whistler
  • Both want home to be pure beauty, surround yourself in beauty
  • Morris sees beauty in the native and natural
  • Whistler more cosmo, abstract
    • About color and form
    • Japanese influence

Themes About Space

• Privacy and Exposure
• Hygiene
• Social hierarchy
• Interiority: psychological
• Protection
  • Protects people
  • Is itself a sacred, protected space: “hallowed”
• Separation and Specialization
  • By gender, function/use
    • Even some staircases marked for Bachelors or Ladies
  • Discrete or mixed?
  • Separate = moral, old guard, Victorian
    • Each room has its function, gender, class
    • Victorian home is compartmentalized to maintain discretion and distinction
    • Privacy is king
    • Against commotion, distraction, contamination
    • Supports hierarchy: convenience, privacy, amount of space, level of decoration, etc
    • Robert Kerr is the old expert (see his 1871 The Gentleman’s House)
    • Creates another set of public/private distinctions inside home
  • Mixing = challenging, new
• Threshold as Transition
• Covering/Concealment
• Dirt

Some Quotes

• “For Woolf, the kitchen table represents not what the modernist artist must discard but what she must transform into the basis of her work.” (4)

Literary References

• T S Eliot, “Gerontion”
• Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
• Lawrence, Women in Love (Breadalby)
• Huxley, Crome Yellow
• Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and To the Lighthouse
  • “A lock on the door means the power to think for oneself”
  • Six chapters: 1st at Oxbridge; 2nd at Brit Reading Room and London; remaining at narr’s home
  • Written like a novel
• Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness
  • Whose heroine must reproduce the spatial habits of her father to embrace her inverted life fully
• James, The Spoils of Poynton
• Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
  • Whose femme fatale uses a study to foil Sherlock
• Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray
  • Frame: link between fine and applied arts, art and real life, aesthetics and ethics, where art becomes a part of the house, just as it divides them
  • Aestheticism is where life becomes art
• Forster, Howards End
  • Margaret’s redecoration of Howards End rechristens it completely: it goes back to the original function of the house (to shelter unostentatiously), sweeping off the superficial layer of ambitious gentility that the Wilcoxes had put on it
    • “It all turns on affection now,” says Margaret, not conventions (ie, Helen’s pregnancy) (143) despite Mr. Wilcox saying that it’s a “question connected with something far greater, the rights of property itself” (144)

What I Should Read

• Criticism
  • Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism
    • Victorian and modernism as continuous
  • Thomas Foster, Transformations of Domesticity
    • modernist women’s lit “should be read as a transitional moment between nineteenth-century domestic ideologies and postmodern conceptions of space” (thank you!)
  • Bill Brown in Modernism/Modernity: “The Secret Life of Things”
  • Anthony Vindler, Warped Space
    • In Rosner’s words, “space warps and twists to body forth the subject’s interior life.” (15)
  • Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception
  • Christopher Reed in Not at Home
    • “being undomestic came to serve as a guarantee of being art”
    • Bloomsbury relied upon “imaginative recombinations of available conventions” (132)
    • Omega believed that “the objects of daily life reveal and perpetuate the social and moral conditions of their creation” (134)
  • Ellen Eve Frank, Literary Architecture
  • Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat
  • Warren Hunting Smith, Architecture in English Fiction (1934!)
  • Philippa Tristram, Living Space in Fact and Fiction
  • Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories
  • Chase and Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy
  • Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House
    • libraries as “essential adjunct” to house parties
  • Roger Chartier in A History of Private Life
    • Figure of reader turns from solitary man to “gregarious” woman (women encouraged to read aloud)
• Contemporary works on the decoration of houses
  • Lytton Strachey’s essay on childhood home, “Lancaster Gate”
    • Former generation only cared about mental and moral aspects of houses, but now we are “agitated by staircases, inspired by doors, disgusted by cornices, depressed by chairs…” etc
    • “what subtle and pervasive effects upon the whole substance of our existence may not be theirs?” (the power of houses)
    • This essay is “anthemic,” showing how their homes shaped who they are (Rosner says this is true for Woolf too in her memoirs), not just critique and rejection
    • And like Woolf, revolt against Victorian Great Men (cf Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography), which is all about public life and mental development (no body or private life) (cf autobio of Darwin, Carlyle, and Arnold), and turn to private life (consciousness and private spatial life and body)
      • Saw Victorians as too preoccupied with the mental and moral: they ignore the physical and the substance; so their life-writing reveals the unrevealed
      • “Significance in the incidental” (87)
    • He must define himself against it to propel himself into the future, even though he isn’t uncontaminated by it
  • Woolf, “22 Hyde Park Gate” and “Old Bloomsbury
    • the house “seemed tangled and matted with emotion” (73)
  • Oscar Wilde’s American lecture tour, 1882
    • “The Decorative Arts,” “democratic art made by the hands of the people and for the benefit of the people” (Rosner 26)
    • But typically Wilde doesn’t really care: art shouldn’t worry about morals
    • “The English Renaissance of Art:” “there will be nothing in any man’s house which has not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its user” and compares it to Plato’s ideal city
    • Cf Charlotte Gere, The House Beautiful on Wilde and design
  • Rosamund Marriott Watson, The Art of the House (1897)
  • Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1871)
  • Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism
    • “The tendency to project the iamge of our functions into concrete forms is the basis, for architecture, or creative design” (69)
    • Body as metaphor for house (ie, study as brain of house)
  • J. J. Stevenson, House Architecture (1880)
    • the woman’s boudoir: “the very commendable purpose of allowing ill-humour to be got rid of in private” (74)
• Literature
  • Hardy, A Laodicean (1881)