Inside Out: Women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private space

Inside Out

Spatial Practices

An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature

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General Editors:

Robert Burden (University of Teesside) Stephan Kohl (Universität Würzburg) Editorial Board:

Christine Berberich Christoph Ehland Catrin Gersdorf Jan Hewitt Ralph Pordzik Chris Thurgar-Dawson Merle Tönnies

Inside Out Women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private space

Edited by Teresa Gómez Reus and Aránzazu Usandizaga

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

© Estate of Gwen John. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2008 Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1871-689X ISBN: 978-90-420-2441-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography. Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

Contents Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgements

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Foreword Janet Wolff

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Introduction Teresa Gómez Reus and Aránzazu Usandizaga

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Early Escapes into Public Spaces Falling Over the Banister: Harriet Martineau and the Uneasy Escape from the Private Lucy Bending

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Private Rituals and Public Selves: The Turkish Bath in Women’s Travel Writing Efterpi Mitsi

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Ladies on the Tramp: The Philanthropic Flâneuse and Appropriations of Victorian London’s Impoverished Domesticity Cathleen J. Hamann

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Women on Display “The Abuse of Visibility”: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction Anna Despotopoulou

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Public Space and Spectacle: Female Bodies and Consumerism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Anne-Marie Evans

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Tracing the Female Triptych of Space: Private, Public, and Power Strongholds in Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow Janet Stobbs

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Contents

Approaching the City Paving the Way for Mrs Dalloway: The Street-walking Women of Eliza Lynn Linton, Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston Valerie Fehlbaum

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Dwelling, Poaching, Dreaming: Housebreaking and Homemaking in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Melinda Harvey

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Colonial Flâneurs: the London Life-writing of Janet Frame and Doris Lessing Ma Lourdes López Ropero

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Conquering the Spaces of War In a Literary No Man’s Land: A Spatial Reading of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber

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Women and War Zones: May Sinclair’s Personal Negotiation with the First World War Laurel Forster

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Expanding the Private and Public Spaces of War: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth Aránzazu Usandizaga

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Transformations in Nature Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in Romantic Women’s Literature Stephen E. Hunt

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Public Land and Private Fears: Reclaiming Outdoor Spaces in Gretchen Legler’s Sportswoman’s Notebook Lilace Mellin Guignard

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Negotiating the City Adrienne Rich’s City Poetry: Locating a Flâneuse Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega

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Contents

Writing Inside and Outside: Eavan Boland’s Poetry of the Domestic Space Sara Sullivan

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Concluding Remarks Janet Floyd

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Lucy Bending is a Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. She is the author of The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Clarendon Press, 2000) and she is currently working on ideas of growth and development in late Victorian texts. Anna Despotopoulou is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture in the Faculty of English Studies of the University of Athens. Her current research examines the gendered treatment of the private/public spheres in Victorian fiction. Her recent publications include articles on Henry James, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Peter Shaffer, and film adaptation in journals such as The Review of English Studies, Yearbook of English Studies, Modern Language Review, The Cambridge Quarterly, Classical and Modern Literature, English Language Notes, and Papers on Language and Literature. Anne-Marie Evans is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where she specialises in twentieth century American Literature. She is currently finishing her PhD, entitled “Purchasing Power: Consumerism and Female Commodification in American Literature, 1905–1937”, which examines the changing role of consumerism in the work of various women writers including Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston. In 2005 she was guest editor for U.S Studies Online, and is the co-editor of Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel, a collection of essays on classic American novels, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press in 2008. She has published articles in MODE and The Edith Wharton Review, and is a regular book reviewer for the Journal of American Studies and American Studies Today. Valerie Fehlbaum is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Geneva where she teaches primarily nineteenth-century literature. She is the author of Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (Ashgate 2005). Her current research focuses on Victorian periodicals and women’s growing involvement in various media. Janet Floyd is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at King’s College, London. She has published on domesticity, domestic space and material culture, especially in the nineteenth century, and on the writing of household work. She also has interests in the writing of the American West. She has coedited Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (1999) and she has published

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Writing the Pioneer Woman (2002). Her current project is an exploration of the Transatlantic writing of mining. Laurel Forster is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She has written on modernism and, in particular, a number of essays on the work of May Sinclair. She has also published on food and domesticity and their representation and has co-edited The Recipe Reader (Ashgate 2003). At present she is working on a longer study of women’s magazines and also as part of a larger research project with colleagues from Portsmouth on aspects of feminism and gender in the 1970s. Teresa Gómez Reus is an Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Alicante, Spain. She has published widely on American and British women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, feminist literary theory, and art criticism in journals such as The Journal of Gender Studies, The Edith Wharton Review and The Atlantic Literary Review. She has edited and translated into Spanish a compilation of stories by Edith Wharton as well as a selection of her travel narratives. Her current research focuses on the writings of women serving at the front during the First World War and she is preparing an anthology on the subject. Lilace Mellin Guignard has an MFA in English from the University of California at Irvine and an MA in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada at Reno where she formerly taught as a lecturer. Her recent publications include ‘Husbands and Nature Lovers’ in Mark Allister’s (ed.) Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature (University of Virginia Press: 2004) and ‘At the Insistence of the Wind’ in Roberta Moore and Scott Slovic’s (eds) Wild Nevada: Testimonies of Behalf of the Desert (University of Nevada Press: 2005). Lilace is working on a book about American women’s perceptions of risk and benefit concerning their use of outdoor spaces. Cathleen J. Hamann, a PhD candidate at George Washington University, is currently completing a dissertation on the re-emergence of the social problem novel in late Victorian England as a response to popular anxieties about the role of independent upper-class women and the homes of London’s underclass. She has presented work on nineteenth and twentieth century women’s writing, including papers on the travel literature of Emily Eden and the postcolonial novels of Nadine Gordimer and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Her current research includes work on the depiction of impoverished domestic space and cross-class female friendships in British novels of the 1880s and 1890s.

Contibutors

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Melinda Harvey received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2004. Her current research focuses on the relationship between place, cosmopolitanism and modernism. She has published articles on J. M. Coetzee and May Sinclair, and reviews contemporary fiction for a number of broadsheet newspapers and literary magazines in Australia. Her principal teaching interests are in literature and film. Her most recent teaching post is at the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin. Stephen E. Hunt has a PhD in English from the University of the West of England, awarded for a thesis entitled “Persephone Unbound: The Natural Environment, Human Well-Being and Gender, 1775–1900”. Employed as an Assistant Librarian in the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England he continues research on Romantic and nineteenthcentury literature and the natural environment. Recently his work has been published in Environment and History and The Vegan. Peter Lauber is a freelance scholar and translator, holding degrees in English and Linguistics from the University of St. Andrews and in Philosophy from Durham University. His academic interests encompass philosophy, theoretical linguistics and history. María Lourdes López Ropero holds an M.A. from the University of Kansas and a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Currently, she is a Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Alicante, Spain. She has published several articles on different Caribbean writers: Fred D’Aguiar (New York Press), Austin Clarke (World Literature Written in English), Caryl Philips and Paule Marshall. She is the author of The Anglo-Caribbean Migration Novel: Writing from the Diaspora (2004). Efterpi Mitsi is an Assistant Professor in English Literature and Culture at the University of Athens. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and has published in the fields of early modern literature, travel and comparative literature. Recent publications include essays on Sidney, early modern travel, British travellers to the Orient and a collection of women’s travel writing on Greece. Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega is an Assistant Professor of American literature and poetry at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She has published an essay on June Jordan’s poetry and pedagogy and has a forthcoming essay about Gwendolyn Brook’s urban poetics.

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Janet Stobbs is a lecturer in the Humanities Department at the University of Cardenal Herrera in Elche, Spain, where she teaches English for Specific Purposes, specialising in Legal English and Business English. She holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Alicante, Spain, awarded for a thesis entitled “The Literary Trials of the Murderess: Marriage and Murder in AngloAmerican Fiction, 1850s–1930s”. She has published work on the use of criminal trials in short stories by Edith Wharton and Susan Glaspell, and has presented papers on the trial as a narrative device in 19th century and turn-of-the-century fiction. Sara Sullivan obtained her PhD from Boston University in 2007.  Her dissertation, “Coming Home to History: The Domestic Interior and the Nation in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature”,  examines the imprint of politics and history on  representations of  the intimate space of the Irish home, plotting a trajectory  that stretches from Joyce’s Ulysses to the contemporary poetry of Eavan Boland.  An independent scholar who especially enjoys attending Joyce symposia, Sullivan has devised an innovative conference experience called “Impromptu Joyce” that has met with success. She also lectures on the accessibility of Ulysses to interested groups of non-academics. Aránzazu Usandizaga is Professor of English and American Literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She has worked and published on the subject of women’s autobiography and she is currently working on women and war. Her latest research has centred on English speaking women writers of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and she has published, in Spanish, an anthology of their literary output and a study of their work (2007). She has also edited a collection of essays, Back to Peace (2007). She is now engaged, with Teresa Gómez and other scholars, in an edited book entitled Embattled Desires.

Acknowledgements

The intellectual and professional debts for this collection are many and varied. We must begin by thanking Terry Gifford, who not only believed in the original idea for the project but also provided wise and constant advice in the shaping of our volume and offered rigorous and perceptive criticism of the collection as a whole and of individual contributions. His unfailing support and encouragement have been invaluable. Peter Lauber also deserves our thanks for his intellectual generosity, his incisive critical judgement and his useful suggestions on the introduction. To Deborah Parsons we owe much gratitude for having co-organised the seminar “Women and Public Space: Practice and Representation”, presented in the 2004 ESSE Conference held in Zaragoza, which was instrumental in bringing together a number a panellists who have contributed to this book. We acknowledge the support of the directors of the Spatial Series of Rodopi, Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl, who responded eagerly to our proposed collection and who guided us skilfully through the final preparation and production of this volume. Peter Green read separate chapters and answered queries with instant attention and care. Zoraida Horrillo offered technical assistance, and Andrew Lindesay was invaluable in the final formatting and typesetting of the book. Tamzin Phoenix, from Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust, was also very kind in granting us permission to reproduce the image that illustrates the book’s cover. And we extend special thanks to all the contributors for their patience, their cooperation in rewriting to our standards, and their insights and enthusiasm, which in turned sharpened our sense of the vitality and the centrality of the issues addressed in Inside Out. The University of Barcelona and the University of Alicante granted us a much-needed sabbatical leave. We thank these Spanish institutions, and also the Generalitat Valenciana, for having provided funding and the opportunity to bring this project to fruition. Janet Floyd, who was kind enough to write the concluding remarks, hosted an invitation to King’s College, where she offered moral support in the last stages of the volume. Our warmest thanks must also go to Janet Woolf, who kindly accepted an invitation to contribute, and whose innovative and crucial work on gender and space has been a central source of inspiration for this volume.

Foreword by Janet Wolff It is fascinating to see how the language of gendered spaces has changed over the past decade or so. We are less and less preoccupied with identifying bounded areas and their exclusions, and much more interested in the blurring of boundaries, the negotiation of spaces and the contradictory and open-ended nature of urban social practices. It seems clear that the most productive work in this area is that which has begun to explore the liminal space, the ambiguous situation, the unexpected moments of access. The essays in this book speak of porosity, plasticity, thresholds, permeability, fluidity. In doing so, they remove us from what has increasingly seemed to be the cul-de-sac of complaints about women’s absence from (or invisibility in) the public sphere. The vocabulary of “public” and “private” spheres has proved both valuable and limiting for the social history of gender relations. The radical separation of home and work, which was one of the major consequences of the development of urban-industrial society in Europe, was an important and necessary focus for the early sociologists of the nineteenth century. Later, the implications of this separation (work/home, city/suburb) for men and women became clear, and feminist scholars devoted attention both to ideologies of women’s “proper” place and to the realities of the lives of women of different classes in the urban environment. It would be a mistake to dismiss this work now as naïve, or to claim that it overstated the equation of public/male: private/ female. Twenty years ago, Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff showed very clearly how complex the intersections were – how, despite official discourses and dominant practices, middle-class men also had private roles and middleclass women public ones. Others pointed out that working-class women were never restricted to the private (or domestic) sphere, and that many middleand upper-class women engaged in public activities of various kinds. Still, the basic dichotomous model has persisted; indeed, as some of the essays in this volume suggest, there may be certain dangers (both political and intellectual) in abandoning it, if this implies an equal access that is clearly not, even in the twenty-first century, the reality. One way of addressing the invisibility of women in the public sphere has been to turn the critique onto social theory itself. The conceptual framework

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mobilised to examine social life has illuminated certain areas and obscured others. This is, of course, in the nature of conceptual frameworks; the problem lies only in the assumption that they tell the truth – that they are somehow transparent. And so critics have moved from the apparent problem of women’s limited access to the public sphere to challenging the priority given to that sphere in sociological theory. The demand for new theories does not necessarily abandon the public/private dichotomy, since it might take the form of privileging the private sphere in order to make visible the lives of women. But the suggestion that it is academic discourse which hides those lives is, I think, a crucial one. The question is how else we might talk about public and private spheres, work and home, street life, and place of women in urban cultures. The essays in this volume combine to make an impressive contribution to new thinking on the subject. The authors work with the given notions of public and private, but question them, examine their limits, explore their blurred edges. They focus on a wide range of fascinating places (geographical, architectural, imaginary), which expose the gendered negotiations of “proper” place: the sick room, the Turkish bath, the suburb, the bed-sitting room, the courtroom, the window. Because the essays are primarily based in literary studies, collectively they help us to see the connections between actual lives and their imaginary formulations. In some cases, in pursuing these inquiries beyond the limits of everyday urban life (at the front in the First World War; in the wilderness and the countryside), they illuminate at an oblique angle the meanings of gender, and of femininity, in the city. It is sometimes said that our contemporary cultural theories, moving away from what seemed the inflexible, structurally determined, too-solid worlds proposed before postmodernism, produce a world of possibility and opportunity. Now the talk is of negotiation, articulation, subversion; the models are of a moveable, open environment, and the associated mood is often optimism. (For others, such postmodern approaches seem, instead, uncommitted, vague, conservative.) There is no doubt that these developments in theory have been enormously important for feminism, and for work on gender and public/private space in particular. And yet, as some of the essays here make clear, things are ­­not entirely open; public (and private) space is not absolutely negotiable; structures of inequality are still in place, and there are still limits to access, dangers in certain arenas. The flâneuse does not have endless possibilities in the city. There are real threats to women in the wilderness. Women can easily have a false sense of participation. Women may be tolerated in public only if they are also “good wives”. The great value of reading these essays together is not only that they cover such an interesting range of locations, spaces and texts, or that, as is also the case, they complement one another so well. Playing off one

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another in perhaps unexpected ways, they are able to acknowledge the limits, and at the same time celebrate the opportunities, women have historically had in navigating public and private space. April 2007

Introduction Teresa Gómez Reus and Aránzazu Usandizaga

Space, like time, is never neutral, never critically transparent, and its artistic representation is always intentional, dialectical and culturally embedded. The naïve idea of space as a pre-existing void, a fixed, inert or mute frame in which narrative events are located can no longer be considered adequate. The work carried out by a variety of thinkers and critics within a number of disciplines has shown how space is “both a production, shaped through a diverse range of social processes and human interventions, and a force that, in turn, influences, directs and delimits possibilities of action and ways of being human in the world” (Wegner 2002: 181). Against the Newtonian conception of space as a passive container in which characters develop and human activities unfold, which the critical tradition of modernity has largely taken for granted, we are growing increasingly aware of the complex purposes concealed by a particular spatial setting, which may play as important a part in shaping the reader’s response as any other element of a text. In works written by and about women the narrative location is a culturally constructed environment which contains signs that are essential for a deeper understanding of female culture. As amply shown by feminist scholars, spatial confinement is one of the more obvious ways in which the life and destiny of women have been circumscribed: the socially imposed role in the private as opposed to the public sphere, in the home rather than in the street, inside rather than in the world outside. In literature, the Bildungsroman epitomizes the way in which the personal opportunities of women distinguish themselves from those of men. Wilhelm Meister is free to enrich his knowledge about himself and about the world in unconstrained wandering. In this essentially masculine world of exploration and adventure women have always found their opportunities for movement seriously curtailed and their capacity for literary expression hampered as a result of it. But whatever the constraints in their lives may have been, women have always existed who have striven to find loopholes in the often unwritten laws which have separated the constraining private domain of women from the

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enticing public world of men. The endeavours of these women to enter areas from which they had been traditionally excluded either by visible or invisible walls, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces is the underlying theme that unites the essays collected in the present volume. Here scholars from Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Great Britain, Australia and America reveal for the first time the range of spaces in which women are represented as negotiating various degrees of empowerment, from the Victorian sickroom to the American wilderness. Where previous studies have tended to focus on one aspect of women’s engagement with space, this book uncovers remarkably subtle and tenacious strategies explored in a variety of discourses that include letters, diaries, journalism, poetry, fiction and essays. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to establish the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications. A number of these articles were originally conceived for a conference seminar, which Teresa Gómez and Deborah Parsons co-ordinated at the European Society for the Study of English, in Zaragoza, Spain, in September 2004; some derive from a round table organised by the editors of this volume for the 29th International Conference of AEDEAN, the Spanish Association of AngloAmerican Studies, that took place in Jaén, Spain, in December 2005; others are the result of invited contributions. On all occasions the guiding idea had been to explore moments of access into forbidden territories and the generally oblique ways in which women have depicted their incursions into the public domain. The 2004 conference seminar, “Women in Public Space: Practice and Representation”, provided the original impetus for the present work. Although the seminar had relied on the conceptual categories of public and private space derived from the sociology of separate spheres, this neatly drawn distinction proved inadequate for our purpose, as a number of our essays clearly revealed that the notions of “public” and “private” space are mutable terms which call for a more complex understanding than the simple dichotomous relationship could provide, on which we had originally meant to base our analysis. The discussion was continued in Jaén, in the round table seminar “Stepping Out: Women Appropriating and Subverting Space”, where some of the contributors to this volume gathered in order to rethink women’s changing relation to public and private spaces in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Topics such as the manner in which domestic design and architecture may affect the creative process of writing, the distorted perception of women in the courtroom, or the new and unfamiliar spaces produced by World War I were discussed, and in the course of our deliberations a set of ideas emerged, around which the present collection of essays would be organized.

Introduction

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The theoretical basis of Inside Out owes a great deal to Janet Wolff ’s muchquoted essay “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” (1985), which establishes a clear connection between the gendered construction of space and the dominant definitions of modernity. As explained by Wolff, the experience of freedom in the city, the fleeting and impersonal contacts of the public world which fascinated the authors of “the modern”, were beyond the reach of the respectable woman of the nineteenth century: “She could not adopt the non-existent role of a flâneuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city” (1990: 41). Another important source of inspiration has been Griselda Pollock’s “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” (1988), which illustrates how the only motifs which were available to impressionist women painters outside the purely domestic sphere were confined to respectable public sites, such as gardens and parks, at a time when their male colleagues were at liberty to move between the domestic world and any space of public life for the purpose of practicing their art. Pollock, like Wolff before her, has argued that the exclusion of women artists from the sexualised spaces of the city –the street, the bar, the café or the cabaret – which provided so many of the central themes and metaphors of modernity, not only limited women’s range of artistic representations but also had the effect of excluding them from the canon of modern art, which has taken the “free” male artist as its standard model. Since the publication of these two seminal essays, other studies have appeared which consider the treatment of space in texts written by and about women. The representation of houses and their interiors has been examined, among others, by Marilyn Chandler, Judith Fryer and Hsin Ying Chi. But what has especially attracted the attention of feminist critics and cultural theorists has been women’s presence in, or absence from, the public spaces of the city. Susan Merrill Squier’s collection of essays Women Writers and the City (1984) opened up the field by examining the responses of a range of writers and their female characters to urban life. According to Squier, the city has been an important metaphor for women because “in writing about cities, women reveal their response to culture itself ” (1984: 5), in which traditionally they have found themselves marginalized. In the wake of the 1980s social historians and cultural critics started to take notice of women’s increasingly autonomous presence in the late nineteenth century metropolis, but the modernist conception of the city as occupied, explored and interpreted by men remained largely unchallenged. Testing new ground, Janet Wolff called attention to the “subtleties of gender and space ambiguity” (1994: 115) by showing how Rodin, Rilke and the Welsh artist Gwen John negotiated in Paris “public (and private) space in ways which may have been less rigid than the social history of ‘separate spheres’ suggests” (ibid.). Nevertheless,

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Wolff insisted that the activity of flânerie was not open to respectable women, as “the lives of middle-class women were fairly circumscribed, both in terms of opportunities in the public sphere and by virtue of [prevailing] social values” (1994: 119). This view was confirmed in Walking the Victorian Streets (1995), where Deborah Nord documented how “the female urban rambler” was connected with the figure of the “fallen woman” in Victorian culture; and again in Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust, in which she claimed that up to the present “no literary detective has found and named an actual female flâneur” (2000: 200). Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000) took up the discussion of the female flâneur in order to “undercut the myth that the urban artist-observer is necessarily male and that the woman in the city is a labelled object of his gaze” (2000: 42). By taking into consideration alternative manners of experiencing the city, less detached and self-assured than the ones traditionally associated with the male flâneur, Parsons calls attention to the ways in which the modern metropolis was imagined and represented by a range of women who were writing between 1900 and World War II. The need to revise the standard ideology of separate spheres became apparent in studies in social history such as City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1986), in which Christine Stansell explores the presence of working-class women in the streets of the nineteenth century metropolis. Elaine S. Abelson’s study of urban women and the emergence of shopping (1989) has helped to dismantle the iconic image of the respectable Victorian woman hopelessly trapped in the home, by bringing to light how shopping provided middle-class women with a legitimate reason for taking to the streets unaccompanied. Through this public activity, which had its beginnings in the 1870s, women had become familiar figures in the metropolitan landscape by the end of the nineteenth century. But even this revised model of city space, peopled exclusively by men, working-class women and middle-class female shoppers, has proved too simplistic and inflexible to provide an adequate picture of the actual dynamics of urban practices. As Lynda Nead has stated in Victorian Babylon, “common sense and the evidence of texts and images from the period should tell us that this cannot be an accurate account of nineteenthcentury city space”. A more sophisticated approach is needed which, as Nead suggests, should begin “with a formulation of a more complex understanding of the public sphere than has been evident in previous studies of the metropolis. Rather than seeing public life as a monolithic entity, it is possible to conceive a variety of ways of accessing the public world and a number of different public arenas in which women could be involved” (2000: 70). Just as public space is not a simple and homogenous entity, the domestic

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interior, as Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd reveal in their edited volume Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, “is never just private; it is a sign for public and cultural interaction” (1999: 12). Private space is not a hermetically sealed container but a living space with doors and windows standing in permanent contact with the world outside. Other investigations have similarly questioned the cultural baggage that has come to be associated with the notion of domesticity. In their collection of essays Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere (2004), the social historians Joan Scott and Debra Keates have insisted on the need for scholars to test the currency of the categories “public” and “private” and to reconsider these notions in different historical and cultural contexts. One possible context has been explored by Amy G. Richter in Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (2005), a cultural study of women on trains in the Victorian period. Richter argues that trains constituted a hybrid space, which recreated domestic interiors in an undeniably public environment. Social historians such as Richter have contributed to the rethinking of a whole host of prescriptive binaries that have frequently been invoked in studies of women’s history. The originality of Inside Out lies partly in its challenge to the well-entrenched assumptions associated with “separate spheres” in the field of literary studies by calling attention to the diverse ways in which writers, especially women writers, have represented the negotiation of the boundaries that separate the domestic from the public, the inside from the outside. To achieve this, our collection of essays covers and uncovers a range of spaces that, similar to Richter’s trains, strongly suggest the intrinsic ambivalence of the relationship between gender and space and the difficulties involved in the neat distinction between the public and the private sphere, which have proved to be more intractable than previously anticipated. It seeks to call attention to the elusive nature of this cultural boundary and to the potentially misleading idea that women in the past had been systematically excluded from the public domain, without, however, falling into the opposite error of underestimating the significance which the restrictions of movement has had in the lives of women throughout history. The illustration we have selected as a cover for our book is denotative of the theme which unites the essays of this collection. Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, 1907–10, a representation of Gwen John’s Parisian studio, depicts a strongly “feminised” domestic interior. Yet any sense that this is an exclusively private and detached space is contested by the light coming from the window, revealing the blurred outlines of a building outside, as well as by the presence of an umbrella and a painting robe, suggesting a connection with the public sphere. The fact that this interior happens to be the artist’s studio, a place from which the woman painter engaged with the world of the arts, constitutes a sub-

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tle challenge to the language which insists on separating the public from the private sphere. Gwen John was an artist who had chosen Paris as her home but in which, according to Janet Wolff, she never managed to feel at ease (Wolff 1990: 59). Intimating the painter’s uncomfortable relationship with the city, the picture may also be read as a sign of liminality, of women’s restricted and troubled access to the public domain, and their tendency to represent this access in indirect ways. For the sake of greater thematic transparency we decided to organize the rich and many-sided subject of literary women in their slow but significant struggle to conquer the spaces from which, with some exceptions, they had been generally excluded, under six loosely defined headings and to order each group of essays in a broadly chronological fashion. The first three contributions in the opening part of the volume, Early Escapes into Public Spaces, provide an analysis of oblique but very original incursions made by several nineteenthcentury women writers into forbidden territories, and of their imaginative appropriation of spaces as diverse as the sick room, the Turkish Bath and the East End of London. In “Falling over the Banister: Harriet Martineau and the Uneasy Escape from the Private”, Lucy Bending provides an alternative and unexpected reading of the sick-room, traditionally a locus of solitary confinement and social invisibility for women, by exploring Martineau’s personal way of inventing new and unsuspected manners of negotiating domestic space. The chapter discusses Martineau’s rhetorical strategies, in particular in Life in the Sick-Room, to legitimise her autobiographical writing, and also the anxiety inherent in this movement beyond the boundaries of the sick-room into the public world of literary fame. The author analyses the paradoxical situation of a writer who was both “prisoner to her couch” and monarch of the sickroom, herself determining who will enter a room which gave her power in her supposed weakness. The porosity of the public/private divide is taken up again in Efterpi Mitsi’s “Private Rituals and Public Selves: The Turkish Bath in Women’s Travel Writing”, which offers a provocative reading of the hammam, interlinking women travel narratives of the nineteenth-century with the canonical sites of modernity. In Mitsi’s original reading, these Victorian travellers treated the Turkish bath in terms reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s Parisian Arcade, as a liminal space for gazing and consuming. The chapter demonstrates how the Turkish bath – a place where the division between the public and the private is suspended in a perfect mix of social classes and ethnic groups – became a tourist attraction on the oriental journey. Victorian women travellers benefited from their gender and class to gain access to a much fantasized space of the age and turn it into a

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locus of artistic possibilities. By concentrating on women travellers in Greece and Turkey, this chapter takes a step outside the standard territory of postcolonial studies to permit a richer understanding of the ways in which writers of the past experienced and narrated the foreign city – a public space in which European women travellers could enjoy considerable freedom of movement and aesthetic expression. Travel and philanthropy provided women of the upper and middle classes with the opportunity to escape from the limitations of domesticity. Similar to the Victorian travellers that Mitsi examines, who became flâneuses in a public interior, the Victorian philanthropists discussed in Cathleen J. Hamann’s chapter “Ladies on the Tramp: The Philanthropic Flâneuse and Appropriations of Victorian London’s Impoverished Domesticity” avail themselves of their gender and class to enter the murky homes of the London poor. Venturing outside their comfortable neighbourhoods, the ladies discussed in this chapter provide an interesting example of female urban mobility, one that secured them access to a space that both shocked and fascinated the Victorian establishment, and which added authority to the voice of women in contemporary social debates. By “botanizing the asphalt” in the dark heart of the empire, these ladies contributed to making the metropolis intelligible, just as Charles Dickens, Gustave Doré and Augustus Mayhew had done before them. Our second part, Women on Display, explores different ways in which writers have dramatised the sense of vulnerability experienced by women the moment they stepped outside the boundaries of the home and became exposed to public scrutiny. Addressing diverse issues, all the essays in this section illustrate the dangers women of the nineteenth and early twentieth century encountered outside the socially sanctioned boundaries, trespassing into spaces where public approval was no longer guaranteed. In “ ‘The Abuse of Visibility’: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction”, Anna Despotopoulou sees the private interior of the late Victorian drawingroom, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, as a place of public visibility for women. Inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, who has discussed the conversion of the family room into a public stage, the chapter illustrates how this transformation affected the consciousness of women and their role in the house. As the demands of publicity impinged on the private domain, the marketplace invaded the domestic sphere with its principles of display and transaction. The chapter offers a sophisticated exploration of these two major novels by combining literary criticism with recent considerations of how the public-private divide operated in the homes of the late Victorian establishment. The tenuous line separating the public from the private, and the precarious

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sense of privacy generated by domestic interiors re-emerge in “Public Space and Spectacle: Female Bodies and Consumerism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth”. The author, Anne-Marie Evans, investigates the ways in which Lily Bart consciously uses her body as a form of spectacle to satisfy the expectations of fashionable New York. Whether at the Opera House, at Grand Central Station, or on display at the sophisticated galas of the powerful and wealthy, Lily’s body appears as a form of “public space”, the unfailing centre of public interest. Focusing on the display of the female body in domestic settings that have been designed like a stage, this chapter examines Wharton’s lucid analysis of turn-of-the-century New York, when the significance of public and private underwent a marked reversal. In the warped and frivolous world of The House of Mirth, the male dealings of Wall Street become hidden and private activities, while the bodies of women are converted into glittering display windows of a business enterprise. The issue of the female body as a form of public spectacle emerges again in the closing chapter of this section, “Tracing the Female Triptych of Space: Private, Public, and Power Strongholds in Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow”, a study of women on trial. In it Janet Stobbs exposes the extent to which the protagonists of the two novels were perceived as a threat to the establishment as a result of having abandoned the role of submissive wife. This is dramatically revealed in the aftermath of the accidental deaths of their husbands, which are duely construed as cases of murder. The chapter traces the heroines’ movements from the home to the public sphere of the work place, and from their acquired ‘room of one’s own’ to the male bastion of the courtroom. It explores how, once in the dock and on public display, these heroines are reduced to objects of spectacle, and end up convicted of murder as a consequence of their unconventional lifestyle and unexpected behaviour, rather than on any real evidence. It is as true for these two women as it is for the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton that to be in the public eye may entail the loss of a woman’s reputation, or even of her life. The third part of our volume, Approaching the City, includes three chapters which record women’s tentative steps towards gaining access to urban spaces that had been commonly denied to respectable women. Notwithstanding the obstacles they would need to overcome, these women managed to experience these unfamiliar territories as an empowering environment in which they could explore their identity and develop their literary voices. In “Paving the Way for Mrs. Dalloway: The Street-walking Women of Eliza Lynn Linton, Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston”, Valerie Fehlbaum shows how the tradition which had sought to confine women to the domestic space was being

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contested before the twentieth century. Ideologically speaking, the desire to maintain clearly defined spheres that are separated according to gender may indeed have existed, keeping women within clearly established limits. Yet, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the three authors in question recognised women’s increasing presence in the modern metropolis, thus suggesting that life on the streets of the big cities was more varied in reality than social historians and feminist scholars have led us to believe. The writers document the early presence of the “angels out of the house” who managed to flout the rules that prevented women from walking alone in the streets, and pave the way for Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. In the following chapter, “Dwelling, Poaching, Dreaming: Housebreaking and Homemaking in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage”, Melinda Harvey inspects two emblematic sites of female independence, the Bloomsbury bed sitting-room and the turn-of-the-century café, both of which Richardson portrays as spaces that provide her heroine with a sense of security and a certain welcoming homeliness while exempting her from the responsibilities of domestic life. Harvey investigates these locations of public-privacy and the role they play in the protagonist’s quest for an autonomous and creative existence. The chapter traces the relationship between the heroine’s personal transformation from nostalgic girl to an accomplished artist and the spaces she inhabits. While the anonymous bed-sit grants her a certain protected autonomy, the cosmopolitan café offers her the chance to overcome her traumatic past and expand her vision of life. The capacity which women writers have displayed for asserting their presence in the city is the subject of the chapter that concludes the volume’s third part. In “Colonial Flâneurs: The London Life-writing of Janet Frame and Doris Lessing” Lourdes López Ropero focuses on Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City and Lessing’s Walking in the Shade, together with other autobiographical pieces by the same authors, to explore the ways in which their colonial background coloured their perceptions of the capital of the British empire. As rootless outsiders, they observed the city with eyes that were untarnished by tradition and they made the most of the freedom and detachment that accompanied their marginal status. The chapter documents the crucial significance their encounter with the spaces of literary London had in their writing careers, which would have been severely hampered by the provincial narrowness of their places of origin. In part four, Conquering the Spaces of War, our volume explores women’s presence in the quintessentially masculine domain of war. In the first essay, “In a Literary No Man’s Land: A Spatial Reading of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France”, Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber study Edith Wharton’s personal testimony of World War I, Fighting France (1915), a book which has puzzled

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recent readers and critics. New and unfamiliar spaces like trenches and observation posts provide an eerie image of the problem that confronted any writer who attempted to represent the unprecedented reality of this cataclysm. With the earth appearing to have swallowed up entire armies into its bowls and with towns and villages emptied of people, Wharton lets houses, hospitals, gardens, markets, and dugouts tell the human story of the war. In the author’s personal “poetics of space”, the ruins of houses reveal the tragedy suffered by the civilian population whereas the hospitals and first-aid posts she visits cast a discrete veil over the horrors of the battlefield. On the other hand, the domestic images of freshly cultivated gardens, homely dugouts and lively markets held within easy range of the enemy’s artillery are reassuring signs of French tenacity and perseverance in the face of the German onslaught. In the second essay, “Women and War Zones: May Sinclair’s Personal Negotiation with the First World War”, Laurel Forster discusses Sinclair’s little- known autobiographical text, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), which she relates to the author’s treatment of the war in her later work. Her stay near the front, where she volunteered in an ambulance corps, lasted only two weeks, but the experience would leave an indelible mark both on herself and on her writing. Like Wharton after her, Sinclair’s occupation brought her into contact with the war zone, although in many ways her experience remained that of an outsider. Her ambivalent and even conflicting sentiments – her greed for “adventure” and romance, and her sense of humiliation for having been excluded from the spaces where the “real” business of war was carried out – found expression in her “journal of impressions”, which is not so much a record of her work at the field ambulance as a highly idiosyncratic collection of her own private responses to the war and the spaces she was navigating. Her introspection and emphasis on personal emotions, Forster argues, turns Sinclair’s journal into a “non-conformist female perspective of war”, which reveals sides of life at the front which tend to receive scant attention. Vera Brittain’s autobiography Testament of Youth (1933) has been recognized as one of the first truly influential war diaries written by a woman. In “Expanding the Private and Public Spaces of War: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth”, Aránzazu Usandizaga considers the ways in which Brittain’s autobiography bridges the gulf that is held to exist between “the front and the home-front; between war-loving men and peace-loving women”. In 1914 Brittain volunteered as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment), which brought her into direct contact with the plight of the combatants. Usandizaga sees the originality of Testament of Youth in Brittain’s manner of enriching her autobiography with a range of voices and opinions about the war, which provide a broad understanding of events which had marked not only her personal life but that of an entire genera-

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tion and English culture as a whole. Brittain has no conception of the private as dissociated from the public world. In her writing it is impossible to understand the private without explictly relating it to the public. In two pioneering essays of ecocriticism, the fifth part of the collection, Transformations in Nature, uncovers gendered responses to the natural environment in the writing of women dealing with anxiety in very different circumstances and places. In “Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in Romantic Women’s Literature”, Stephen E. Hunt investigates the different ways in which four women writers of the Romantic period, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft, relied on the regenerative power of nature to overcome the trauma of prolonged physical captivity and exile. Their ability to respond sensitively and imaginatively to the natural environment in circumstances of extreme distress and peril allowed them to slip the bars and walls of “the dark galleries of [their] prison” and to develop a mental resilience which was vital to their own survival and to their literary imagination. Their writings provide an interesting counterpart to Rousseau’s and Wordsworth’s familiar evocations of nature, which are predicated on the masculine convention of the solitary wanderer. In the second essay, “Public Land and Private Fears: Reclaiming Outdoor Spaces in Gretchen Legler’s, Sportwoman’s Notebook”, Lilace Mellin Guignard deals with the difficulties women still experience today when they wish to explore wild outdoor places by themselves. Guignard interprets Legler’s book, All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportwoman’s Notebook, as a “postmodern woman’s pastoral” not just because it is written by a woman but because it calls attention to the ways in which a woman navigates the masculine space of wild America. The problem is not accessing these spaces, but of accessing them without fear and without feeling unwelcome. The essay explores Legler’s responses when engaging in outdoor activities in places where a woman’s presence is traditionally neither expected nor accepted. Guignard argues that the “spatial patriarchy” which dominates the American wilderness makes it an inhospitable place for women who are not in the company of men and that Legler’s writing offers honest insights and strategies for women who wish to enjoy open nature in solitude. The closing section of our volume, Negotiating the City, includes two contemporary versions of specific negotiations between public and private settings. “Adrienne Rich’s City Poetry: Locating a Flâneuse”, considers the impact that New York and other cities have had on Rich’s poetry, an aspect that had been neglected by earlier critics. Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega studies Rich’s preoccupation with the fact that the influence of the city has never received the attention in connection with women poets which it has regarding male poets

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like Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot or Langston Hughes. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s and Anne Friedberg’s thoughts concerning flânerie, the essay discusses the relevance of Baudelaire’s urban poetics to the understanding of the contemporary city and its impact on modern poetry. As the chapter shows, Rich is fascinated by big cities such as New York, with the violent clash of their contrasting elements. But instead of adopting Baudelaire’s masculine perspective of freedom and authoritative detachment, the flâneuses of Rich’s poems display a more troubled way of engaging with the city’s perils and opportunities. In the last chapter of the volume, “Writing Inside and Outside: Eavan Boland’s Poetry of the Domestic Space”, Sara Sullivan studies the “reappraisal and invigoration” of domestic space in Boland’s poetry and in her autobiography Object Lessons. Rejecting the iconic status that Irish nationalist poetry has traditionally awarded to women, Boland acquaints her readers with domestic spaces in which women like herself could live and act. Of special interest is her treatment of the residential suburb, which to begin with is depicted as an oppressive environment but which in her later work becomes a legitimate locus of national life and a fertile field for her poetic explorations, a space in which the private and the public are deeply intertwined. Sullivan documents Boland’s original way of defamiliarizing domestic space, which the poet represents as a realm where the strict divisions between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, cease to exist. Each of the fifteen essays seeks in its own particular way to turn inside out a number of our received ideas about women and the space they live in. Some are primarily concerned with their movement from the inside out into spaces that had previously been inaccessible to women, while others explore less obvious ways of stepping out, like the necessity many women have felt to give outward expression to their inner feelings about the spaces they inhabit. The desire to “conquer” the public world is one of the grand themes of women’s literature. But, as Virginia Woolf has persuasively argued, personal freedom and emancipation for women would need to begin with the conquest of the private room. Domesticity does not of necessity imply privacy, nor does it automatically signify a lack of agency. Inside Out is intent on breaking the chain of associations regarding the line that is supposed to separate the public from the private realm. The constraints that women have been subjected to in the course of history are undeniable. But no less significant is the imagination and courage with which women of all times and places have been turning inside out the prevailing relationship between themselves and their environment. Inside Out now provides a platform for re-reading that relationship across a new spectrum of discourses and spaces.

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Bibliography Abelson, Elaine, S. 1989. When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryden, Inga and Janet Floyd (eds). 1999. Domestic Space: Reading the NineteenthCentury Interior. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Merrill Squier, Susan. 1984. ‘Introduction’ in Merrill Squier, Susan (ed.) Women Writers and the City. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Nead, Lynda. 2000. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nord, Deborah. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Parsons, Deborah L. 2000. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollock, Griselda. 1988. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge. Richter, Amy G. 2005. Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Scott, Joan W. and Debra Keates (eds). 2004. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. Stansell, Christine. 1986. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Alfred Knopf. Wegner, Phillip. 2002. ‘Spatial Criticism’ in Wolfreys, Julian (ed.) Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 179–201. Wolff, Janet. [1985] 1991. ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press: 34–50. Wolff, Janet. 1994. ‘The Artist and the Flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’ in Tester, Keith (ed.) The Flâneur. London: Routledge: 111–37.

Early Escapes into Public Spaces

Falling Over the Banister: Harriet Martineau and the Uneasy Escape from the Private Lucy Bending abstract This chapter explores the complicated relationship between the private and the public in Harriet Martineau’s writings, and connects these to her gender identity as woman, patient, and prolific journalist and novelist. Not only was Martineau confined to her sofa through illness for five years, looking at the activities of the world through a telescope, but she deliberately and unusually made her sufferings public in a variety of forms, from the publication of Life in the Sick-Room, to her revision of the events of these years in her later autobiography. The essay considers not just Martineau’s claiming of a public existence, but also her relationship to the confines of the sick-room itself — a physicallyrealised space with firmly demarcated, yet strangely elastic walls that both imprison the patient, and yet allow a wider freedom, however mediated, through the windows, pictures, and telescope. Keywords: Harriet Martineau, Nineteenth-century journalism, Victorian women, Autobiography.

In this chapter I shall be moving between texts written at different times during Harriet Martineau’s extensive literary career, looking at the ways in which Martineau negotiated different kinds of space, both physical and mental. The starting point of my discussion is a description of a childhood mode of perception that finds a place in her Autobiography, a text written in 1855, but not published until after her death in 1870. For the young Martineau, oppressed by “a horrid lump at [her] throat” after drinking milk that disagreed with her, she found that “Sometimes the dim light of the windows in the night seemed to advance till it pressed upon [her] eyeballs, and then the windows would seem to recede to an infinite distance” (1877: 8). This strangely warping universe – one where the boundaries refuse to be held in place but come close and then recede, and physically affect the onlooker – might simply have been a response to a physical ailment, and yet her description, reiterated very exactly

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in other texts (see, for example, Martineau 1849: 63), is very typical of her written understanding of the world around her, and epitomises her representation of the world in which she moves. Not only this, but her explorations of self, and her very public exposition of her life and views, position themselves on this dangerous and shifting frontier between self and other, inside and outside, leaving her, as she puts it in her Autobiography, “remarkably open to the world” (1877: 2). The analogies she repeatedly uses throughout her works explore just such vulnerability, and concurrent resistance, to the prying outside world. Her family, as she takes up her pen to enter public debate for the first time, could not help but see, as she describes it, that she “was outgrowing [her] shell” (1877: 113) and “they had patience with me till I had rent it and cast it off ” (1877: 113). It is an odd image, and one that gets to the heart of Martineau’s uneasy relationship with the public world. Domestic life is confining and enclosing, and creates a case that must be broken if Martineau is not to be crushed by the mundane character of her domestic life, but the image also suggests the violence needed to effect this, and, concomitantly, the vulnerability of moving beyond the protective carapace of the home, as the tender shellfish is left, sensitive and unprotected, outside its wall of protective safety. Alexis Easley gathers together a collection of responses to Martineau’s works as part of her essay on the way in which Martineau was defined by her contemporaries as a “feminine transgressor” (Brake 2000: 155) at the time when she wrote. The familiar Victorian idea of separate spheres is endlessly played out, and yet these reviews find ways of suggesting that Martineau has indeed moved beyond the realm assigned to her, and yet they equivocate over the legitimacy of her freedom. The infamous review in The Quarterly Review, in which John Wilson Croker deliberately and vaingloriously set out to “tomahauk” the young writer and thus establish his own journalistic career desperately seeks to position her within what he sees to be her proper sphere. As part of her series on Political Economy, Martineau, recognising, as she wrote, the dangers to the female pen of such potentially inflammatory subject matter, took on the job of explaining Malthus and birth control to the masses in her story “Weal and Woe in Garveloch”. It is this to which John Wilson Croker objects and the – to him – questionable femininity of a woman who takes up the subject of sexual relations and procreation: But no; such a character is nothing to a female Malthusian. A woman who thinks child-bearing a crime against society! An unmarried woman who declaims against marriage!! A young woman who deprecates charity and a provision to the poor!!!  (Croker 1833: 136)

Not content with simply stating the obvious limitations of femaleness for the Victorian woman, Croker pushes Martineau beyond the bounds of the accept-

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able, and marks her off from the conventional Victorian maiden with an escalating series of exclamation marks, italics, and transgressed stereotypes as he modulates her femaleness with her unmarried state and then her youth, to provide an increasing series of enclosure and placement. As Martineau seeks to escape the confines of conventional femininity, Croker deliberately sets out to position her firmly within the confines of paternalism and its defining sentence structures, thus overtly seeking to block her passage into print. The reviews Easley collects in her article as the substantiation of her argument are fascinating responses to exactly this problem of freedom and enclosure. The Edinburgh Review bizarrely cannot decide how to position a woman who moves outside the conventional sphere of the drawing-room, claiming that “A young lady can scarcely possess the experimental knowledge of mankind, without which a confident imagination must occasionally run wild in the paradise of its own conceptions” (Easley 2000: 156). Radical uncertainty underlies this. Feminine lack of knowledge, coupled with confidence, “run[s] wild” and yet encloses itself within “the paradise of its own conceptions”. It is a duplicitous image that suggests not just the impossibility of sustaining such a position – there must inevitably be a Fall – but also the self-limitation of female thought that bangs against the walls of its own innocence, as it runs wildly but ineffectually round the prison of its own limited understanding. If Martineau used the image of the outgrown shell as a way of exploring her relationship to the public sphere and the growth of her mind, the writer here reshuffles this idea, and re-encloses her, making such enclosure a necessary part of her psychic make-up. Both share the same vision of a confining perimeter, and yet both position the writer differently in relation to it. That the idea of boundaries, and their dangerous permeability, obsessed Martineau and formed part of her mental paraphernalia becomes evident in the Autobiography’s description of her mother’s illness and the eventual necessity for keeping her within doors for her own protection. Martineau complains: “my mother would not be taken care of. She was daily getting out into the crowded streets by herself, when she could not see a yard before her. What the distress from this was to me may be judged of by the fact that for many months after my retreat to Tynemouth, I rarely slept without starting from a dream that my mother had fallen from a precipice, or over the banisters … and that it was my fault” (1877: 442). The physical debility of Martineau’s mother – her blindness and consequent inability to negotiate space without aid – cruelly embodies the type of helpless femininity that Croker so cavalierly pictured in Martineau in his attempt to confine her. This is the dangerous image of the woman who “was daily getting out” but lacked the vision to make use of, or even survive, such

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freedom. It is a strange role-reversal for the younger Martineau as her mother had, in Martineau’s own words, earlier been the gaoler, who, unwilling to let her waywardly-intentioned daughter move to London to take up a job in proofreading, deliberately chose to “remand” (1877: 113) her within the parental home: a situation arousing a massive sense of injustice at her “position of helplessness and dependence” in the daughter (1877: 113). The edges of things – the precipice and the banisters – become uncomfortable regions of danger. The dangers of the precipice are self-evident, and yet the conjunction of the precipice with the banisters that should protect and guard, makes plain Martineau’s concern with the dangers of confinement and the possibility that holding someone in against their will, will, in fact, force them over the edge and into the dangerous and precipitous outside. The question Martineau is led to ask, is how one can legitimately broach this confining wall. It is a question that is asked throughout her works, as she returns repeatedly to the same themes and ideas. Her book, Society in America, published in 1837, takes solace where it can: American women, due to the confinement of their intellect, have in her eyes become pedantic, and yet pedantry “is the result of an intellect which cannot be wholly passive, but must demonstrate some force, and does so through the medium of narrow morals. Pedantry indicates the first struggle of intellect with its restraints”(1839: 227). In a similar fashion to the image of the outgrown seashell, Martineau, here writing of American women, legitimises struggle against restraint and sees it as a sign of growth and development, however limited, and generally denied to women. Like the figure of the blind mother “daily getting into the crowded streets”, the American woman struggles and demonstrates force. Similarly, as Easley points out, Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1823–4) were seen to be “beyond the scope of a young woman, whose proper purview is the domestic sphere” (Easley 2000: 156). It is as though Martineau is in direct dialogue with her critics, responding in her dreams and on the page, to the language of limitation of vision and of enclosure. There has been a great deal written about Martineau’s dangerous entry into public, published life and my aim is to explore her representations of space in the light of such negotiations. As Alexis Easley argues in her essay on Martineau and the periodical press, publishing was a tricky business for a woman, who was supposed not to draw attention to herself. The dangers become apparent in a comment Thomas Carlyle made after reading Life in the Sick-Room, when he complains that Martineau presents herself “as if she were a female Christ, saying, look at me: see how I am suffering” (Webb, 1960: 199). Whilst there is some substance in Carlyle’s claim – a fact that Martineau herself acknowledged in her later recognition of the self-obsession and “dismal self-consciousness”

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(1877: 459) of Life in the Sick Room1 – it does make very plain the dangers, to a woman, of asking for public recognition. What interests me particularly is the way in which Martineau repeatedly represents ideas in spatial terms, persistently representing particular events in terms of a physical geography, and it is extraordinary how many times this proves to be the case throughout her work. Writing to her unnamed dedicatee at the beginning of Life in the Sick-Room, Martineau points out that whilst she herself “was as busy as anyone on the sunny plain of life, I heard of you laid aside in the shadowy recess where our sunshine of hope and joy could never penetrate to you” (2003: 39). Certainly, the sick room is a place of enclosure in which the ill person is contained, but Martineau goes further than this as she, very typically, pushes her understanding of specific places into the realms of metaphor. Here, life for those who are well is that lived on a “sunny plain”, a broad expanse on which all things are possible; all directions may be taken. When, in her Autobiography, Martineau describes the beginnings and, indeed, the later meanderings of her literary career, it is almost invariably in these spatial terms. When offered a job correcting proofs – a job that her mother prevents her from taking – she writes that she “rejoiced unspeakably in this opening” (1877: 113), and, similarly, once she has indeed moved to London to work, she writes of “the wonderful scenes which life was now opening to me” (1877: 148). Such descriptions overtly rely on the sense of an initial enclosed space from which the writer is enabled to move on to the “sunny plain”. It is no surprise, in these terms, that she turns down her brother’s offer to take on Croker after his abrasive Quarterly Review piece about Martineau, saying that such behaviour would “close her career” on which she had “entered […] independently” (1877: 155). Again, the image of entering and closing conjures up an enclosed and privileged space into which people may be allowed, and from which they may subsequently be excluded. Such an idea is, perhaps, put most bluntly when Martineau writes of the publication of her Tales of Political Economy, that “the barrier was down, and the course clear” (1877: 201). A space opens up before her, and she deliberately and determinedly moves into it. But there is an overt connection between Martineau’s sense of metaphorical space opening before her, and the necessity, forced on her, to negotiate public space in ways that did not shut down possibilities for her. The Autobiography is 1 “All the facts in the book, and some of the practical doctrine of the sick-room, I could still swear to: but the magnifying my own experience, the desperate concern as to my own ease and happiness, the moaning undertone running through what many people have called the stoicism, and the total inability to distinguish between the metaphysically apparent and the positively true, make me, to say the truth, heartily despise a considerable part of the book.” (1877: 458–59)

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full of stories of her making a run for it so that she is not forced into compromising situations, as, for example, she insists that, rather than meeting Lockhart at an evening party, she “will go out at one door of the drawing-room when he comes in at the other” (1877: 157). Again, her metaphorical imagination comes to the fore as she writes of a soirée which turns into a Whitehall farce: First, I was set down beside Lady Charlotte Bury, and made to undergo, for her satisfaction, a ludicrous examination by Lady Mary, about how I wrote my series, and what I thought of it. Escaping from this, to an opposite sofa, I was boarded by Lady Stepney, who was then, as she boasted, receiving seven hundred pounds apiece for her novels. She paraded a pair of diamond earrings, costing that sum, which she had so earned. (1877: 280)

The passiveness of the sentence structures, and Martineau’s seeming helplessness in the face of societal commitments, is manifest. She was first “set down” and later “boarded” in a hilariously piratical fashion by, as Martineau portrays her, the ostentatiously vulgar Lady Stepney, a popular writer of Silver Fork novels in the 1830s, who embodies, in the flashiness of her description, much that Martineau, at least in her written manifestations, abhorred in the public woman. There is no sense that Martineau recognises the achievements of a successful fellow female writer here: she simply derides the woman who deliberately draws attention to herself, demanding her position as cynosure. The diamonds that stand as the objective correlative of her earned wealth, yell – as Carlyle put it – “look at me” to all who see her, as public presence is made manifest in expensive jewels. Martineau’s capability for independent action is stripped from her by decorum as she cannot, or at least feels that she cannot, publicly denounce such attention-seeking behaviour. The possibility of escape comes in the form of identification with a ship with the potential for slipping its moorings and escaping out to sea. Such pain at public exposure forms a complicated analogue to Martineau’s earlier ejection into a necessarily public life. After the collapse of her father’s business – an event that forced his children to provide for themselves – Martineau delightedly took to her pen, writing essays and reviews for periodicals. Her exaltation at what others took to be a “calamity” (Martineau 1877: 108) is very apparent as she looks back on the event that freed her from the confines of the home and genteel poverty, and gave her “scope for action” (1877: 108). Her description of this liberation overtly connects her mental condition with the idea of space and movement through it. So it is that she writes: The deep-felt sense of progress and expansion was delightful; and so was the exertion of all my faculties; and, not least, that of will to overcome my obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of which I believed myself more or less worthy.  (1877: 112)

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“Progress and expansion was delightful”, and yet it leaves Martineau vulnerable and potentially open to the viewing public. She is compelled to “force [her] way to [the] power of public speech”, but her emphasis deliberately makes her someone who is heard, or better still read, rather than someone who is looked at. In stressing “progress and expansion” she deliberately sets herself apart from the stasis represented by Lady Stepney’s transmutation of earned money into ostentatious stuff that attracts attention, making plain that her presence in print is part of a process and debate rather than an end point in itself. In the second half of this essay I want to think about Martineau’s related insistence on the setting up of a refuge – a place to escape from the double demands of her position: of her femaleness and its domestic obligations, as well as from the pressures of publicity levied on the famous author. On a number of occasions in her Autobiography she refers specifically to the need for a refuge, a word that holds within it the idea of a place of shelter from pursuit or danger or trouble. What is, however, striking about her insistence on the need for just such a refuge is that she plays fast and loose with the idea of such a stronghold, using it in antithetical senses, once again marking out a profound ambivalence about the nature of interior spaces and their safety. The Autobiography, a book deeply interested in the processes and problems of writing, recognises the profound difficulty facing any woman in creating what Virginia Woolf has famously designated “a room of one’s own”. Desperate to establish a career as a writer, Martineau finds that physical space – and the possibility of creating an interior space of the mind – is almost impossible for her to claim as her own, as her plaintive cry testifies: If ever I shut myself into my own room for an hour of solitude, I knew it was at the risk of being sent for to join the sewing-circle, or to read aloud – I being the reader, on account of my growing deafness. But I won time for what my heart was set upon, nevertheless – either in the early morning, or late at night.  (1877: 78)

The refuge she seeks relies not, as one might expect, on an enclosed space away from the encroaching world, but on quite the opposite: on an escape from the defined and demarcated life put before her. The public bombardment of evening soirées is re-enacted in her own home as there is no private space permitted to her, and she is similarly “boarded” by members of her own family as well as strangers. After forging a career in the public world, Martineau’s withdrawal into the enclosed walls of the sickroom is, on first sight, perhaps surprising. However, once again, her insistence on the plasticity of the enclosed space comes to the fore, as does her insistence on the right understanding of things. She is, on the one hand, as she repeatedly states in Life in the Sick-Room, a “sick prisoner”

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(2003: 66), and yet she undoubtedly values the freedom that the sickroom gives her, from the encroachments of those who wish to “board” her, as Lady Stepney and her vulgar earrings had endeavoured. Retiring into the privacy of her own space gives her the opportunity to keep people out, and to claim her time as her own, in ways that had been impossible to her in public life. The pleasures and privileges of the sickroom, and the possibilities of a “reprieve from the daily realities of the workaday world” (Frawley 2004: 206), as well as the opportunity it offered to the sufferer have been admirably explored in Maria H. Frawley’s, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. There is no need here to rehearse those arguments, but I am interested by the ways in which Martineau negotiates and understands the enclosed space that she so carefully establishes. In the dedication of the work, Martineau speaks of the time “When I was myself withdrawn into such a recess” (2003: 39) of illness as that of the unnamed dedicatee of the book. In this she suggests both the narrowness of the place and its temporal removal from the ordinary run of affairs, but also that she has, in a parallel fashion to her passivity in the face of the encroachments of public life, been passively drawn in to the place, as it got a grip on her and held her in. Such doubleness of perception runs throughout Martineau’s writings. In this chapter I am particularly interested not just in Martineau’s overt claiming of a public existence, but also in the writer’s relationship to the confines of the sick-room itself – a physically-realised space with firmly demarcated, yet strangely elastic, walls that both imprison the patient, and yet allow a wider freedom, however mediated, through the windows, pictures, and telescope trained on the local farm labourers. Martineau’s obsession with the observation of specific objects is, perhaps, clearest in her 1838 work, How to Observe. Morals and Manners, a book that seeks to awaken the analytical and carefully descriptive spirit in travellers. The opening paragraph of the text, in a way typical of Martineau’s writing, links backwards and forwards to so many other passages that she wrote, here allowing the reader to contemplate her comments on blindness in the light of her obdurate emphasis on the difficulties and necessities of close observation: There is no department of inquiry in which it is not full as easy to miss truth as to find it, even when the materials from which truth is to be drawn are actually present to our senses. A child does not catch a goldfish in water at the first trial, however good his eyes may be, and however clear the water; knowledge and method are necessary to enable him to take what is actually before his eyes and under his hand.  (1838: 1)

Things themselves are tricky, and whilst truth lies in them, they may be something other than they appear to be to the undifferentiating eye. Objects “actually present to our senses” are only the springboard to a full apprehension of what

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they might entail, and it is this understanding that illuminates much of what Martineau writes in Life in the Sick-Room, as she explores the totemic qualities of objects; objects that, when rightly seen, like the early vision of the warping room, had the potential to be both inside a room and outside it. The blind mother stumbling over the banisters and failing to recognise or understand the hidden realities of the world not only represents the dangers of her mother’s actual condition to the dreaming Martineau, but also very closely enacts her understanding of perception and its difficulties. How to Observe makes it plain that whilst “the blind and deaf traveller” – and it is perhaps no coincidence that Martineau herself was largely deaf from an early age – “must suffer under deprivation or deficiency of certain classes of facts […] the condition of the unphilosophical traveller is much worse. It is a chance whether he puts a right interpretation on any of the facts he perceives” (1838: 16). Again, Martineau insists that things are not just objects to be stumbled upon, but are a semiotic system to be rightly understood by the skilful and practised interpreter. The sick-room is, for Martineau, both a concept – a place of meditation and of suffering – and a physically-realised space. The contents of the room – the sofa, the pictures, the bookshelves – are profoundly unreadable to those who are not ill, and who are tempted to read them in terms of the pleasure they seem to provide. And yet each one of these things can leap out of the background and into significance and prominence for Martineau, who laughs at the misinterpretations of those who enter into the space that she controls from her sickbed. In a very symptomatic fashion, a boy who visits the sick writer is seen to be “greatly admiring the luxuries around [her], and thence proceeding to reckon up a large amount of privilege and enjoyment in [Martineau’s] possession and prospect” (1877: 61). Things, for him, as for the majority of those who visit, have a meaning established by their function in the world outside the sick-room. The boy’s failure to understand becomes a way of encoding the misinterpretation of things by all who visit, and the ordinariness of objects that then take on totemic qualities. Her claim that she is “prisoner to her couch” suggests just such a way of thinking. It is as though this piece of furniture has taken hold of her so that she cannot escape, as sofas and armchairs all over the country have, in her prose, claimed their victims.2 Things are not simply what they seem to outsiders, 2 Martineau, on one occasion, draws an analogy between “the dungeons of Spielberg” and “every couch of the sick, [and …] every arm-chair of the aged and blind” (2003: 128–9). Both the prison and the furniture entrap people, keeping them in one place against their will, and this analogy encapsulates Martineau’s thought as it takes form in her work.

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but enter into new relationships of meaning with those who are ill. Her room becomes not just a physical space, but a kind of container that is “full of pain” (Martineau 2003: 45) as it transforms itself into the box where she “keeps [her] miseries under lock and key” (2003: 60). Her physical surroundings become a means of understanding her social isolation and stoicism, but also require new modes of understanding to recognise their signification. Even within the enclosing walls of the sick-room, Martineau insists on her ability to escape, and to move beyond the physical containment of the room, in ways that are epitomised by the use of her highly-prized telescope, that allowed her to spy into the houses and gardens of her neighbours. Whilst the telescope allows her “actually [to] see […] the gay crowds that throng the opposite shore after church” (2003: 62), its workings give a rationale to her own sense of the warping quality of space – a quality that allows her mentally and imaginatively to go beyond the room in which she is confined. The telescope is not simply a piece of equipment, but the analogue of her mental processes: By means of that inimitable telescope we carry about in us, (which acts as well in the pitch-dark night as at noon, and defies distance and house-walls) I see in turn a Christmas tree, with its tapers glittering in a room full of young eyes, or the games and the dance, or the cosy little party of elderly folk round the fire or the tea-table.  (2003: 62–3)

She is clearly imagining other rooms and other scenes, in ways that are recurrent throughout the text. Travel writing – a mode much valued by Martineau – allows ill readers “out of our prison for a holiday” giving to the “chamber-dwellers, the involuntary plodders within narrow bounds” (2003: 75), their freedom from the prison that is the sick-room. Such a claim is clearly not unusual. Jane Eyre, for example, escapes from the discourtesies of the Reed’s household through the intervention of Bewick’s History of British Birds, but Martineau’s vision of the shifting universe is rather more explicit and talismanic than this. Anyone entering the sick-room, she claims, will notice “how priceless are certain pictures to us, in comparison with all others” (2003: 126) in bringing consolation to the viewer. The drab surroundings, in which sufferers find themselves “weary of the aspect of a chest of drawers” (2003: 74) that confronts them at all hours, act as a foil to such talismanic objects. In the first instance, such pictures seem simply to provide comfort in their subject matter that allows the sufferer to “find something there which seems to set us right” (2003: 126), and yet the ensuing discussion makes plain that Martineau envisages a very specific mechanism of comfort, and one based on imaginative freedom and movement. Objects, specifically flags in her case, may become an “outward symbol which serves as communication between [the confined invalid] and the world”

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(2003: 137). Whilst, pragmatically, the “Union Jack on the flag-staff […] marks Sunday to me in a way I would not miss”, the “instrumentality of signals” (ibid.) hints at a more thoroughgoing process, and one that lifts her physically from the confines of the sick-room and replaces her, at large, in the outside world. The sight of the flag allows her to “see in a moment the peaks of Sulitelma or of the Andes, or the summits of the Ghauts, or tropical sands, or chilly pine forests spread before me, or palmy West Indian groves” (2003: 138). Such “mute token[s]”, flags, but also such things as the “notice of a concert, or a picture” (ibid.), “speak, unknown to anyone, a world of things to me” (2003: 137). Such things are not simply reminders of a world from which the sufferer is precluded, but, in their engagement with the imaginative powers, they are “tokens”, “signals” and “talismans” able to “implement [their own kind] of natural magic which may possibly operate at the most hopeless times” (2003: 142). The sufferer “cannot go in bodily presence” (2003: 97) on such journeys outside the sickroom, and yet “boundless thought” (2003: 128), driven by “the power of ideas” (2003: 142) makes the removal – in thought – from the sick room possible, as the prompting power of a book has “opened our prison-doors, and led us a long flight over mountain and moor” (2003: 76). It is no surprise, in the context of such imaginative freedom, that Martineau, the lionised writer,3 besieged and boarded by her appreciative public, beat a retreat into her sick-room and found in it the power of escape into “a boundless career [that] opened to me within the four walls of my room” (2003: 58). The language of description here overtly mirrors the language of freedom in the Autobiography as the young Martineau forced her way out of the family home, with its compulsory needlework and reading aloud, into a literary career. But, ironically, the walls that allow escape can still suffer a breach, as celebrity seekers force their way into her home against Martineau’s will: Sometimes it was a lady from the country, who desired to pour her sorrows into my bosom, and swear eternal friendship. This kind of visitor could never be made to understand that it takes two to make a friendship; and that there was no particular reason why I should enter into it with a perfect stranger […] Sometimes some slight acquaintance or another would enter with a companion, and engage me in conversation while the companion took pos3 Martineau flirts with her own “lionisation” by the British public, claiming that the practice is entirely abhorrent to her, and yet filling pages of her Autobiography with an article, “Literary Lionism”, that she published in the Westminster Review in 1839. Her repeated claim that she does not wish to engage in “the disgusting task of detailing old absurdities and dwelling on old flatteries” (1877: 141) is somewhat undermined by such extensive quotation.

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There is the same language here, as earlier in the Autobiography, of entering and of guarding entrances, applied to things not normally conceived of in spatial terms. A friendship is entered into, or rather, the entry into a friendship, conceived of as a shared space, is refused, whilst slight acquaintances force an entry into the sickroom to gain the paraphernalia of fame. If Martineau uses objects talismanically to escape the walls that enclose her, then such admiring interlopers endeavour to reverse the process, stealing objects directly connected to Martineau’s persona as a writer – her pen and paper – only to frame them, in an attempt to hold their idea of Martineau and to keep it within the bounds of what they know. What Martineau’s language suggests, whether in the youthful pieties of Life in the Sick-Room, or the more measured tones of the Autobiography, is the desire to escape the confines of society through the power of language and the forces of the imagination.

Bibliography Croker, John Wilson. 1833. ‘Miss Martineau’s Monthly Novels’ in Quarterly Review, April: 136–52. Deidre, David. 1987. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Easley, Alexis. 2000. ‘Authorship, Gender and Power in Victorian Culture: Harriet Martineau and the Periodical Press’ in Brake, Laurel et al. (eds) Nineteenth Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave: 154–64. Frawley, Maria H. 2004. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Martineau, Harriet. 1877. Autobiography (ed. Maria Weston Chapman). Boston: James R. Osgood.  . 1849. Household Education. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard.  . [1844] 2003. Life in the Sick-Room (ed. Maria Frawley).Toronto: Broadview.  . 1838. How to Observe: Morals and Manners. London: Charles Knight.  . [1837] 1839.Society in America, 3 vols, 2nd ed. London: Saunders and Otley.  . 1832. Weal and Woe in Garveloch: A Tale. London: Charles Fox. Webb, Robert K. 1960. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. New York: Columbia University Press.

Private Rituals and Public Selves: The Turkish Bath in Women’s Travel Writing Efterpi Mitsi abstract This chapter relates the “invisible flâneuse” of the urban space with the invisible women travellers. Facilitated by the rise of tourism, late nineteenth century women travellers could transgress certain gender restrictions and as writers interpret foreign cultures for a middle-class, mostly female, British audience. A central paradigm of the connection between space and power in women’s travelogues on the Orient is the Turkish bath, which in ways similar to Benjamin’s Passage functions as an emblem, a trope of the Orient itself, becoming at the same time a commodity, a tourist attraction of the oriental journey. Like the Parisian Arcade, a space not only for consuming but also for gazing, the hammam is a public interior, a liminal space, suspending the separations between the public and the private, between social classes and ethnicities. The visit to the hammam has an additional emblematic role for British women travellers, invoking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous letter of her visit to the baths at Sofia in 1717, which initiated a discourse informing the representation of the oriental women. A visit to the baths was a necessary stop in the tour of the Levant for travellers from the mid to the late nineteenth century, whose accounts transform Montagu’s “feminotopia”, a “natural” female naked world, to an oriental tableau, illustrating the connection between space and power. Keywords: women travellers, travel writing, orientalism, hammam, flâneuse, Victorian, Walter Benjamin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Esther Stanhope, Julia Pardoe.

The adjectives that signal urban modernity, the “transitory, the fugitive, the contingent”, introduced in Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life to suggest the rhythm of the changing city, could also apply to travel in the context of the nineteenth century rise of tourism. As a form of leisure activity, accessible to the middle-classes, tourism rests on a quick succession of impressions, experiences and sites, retained only in sketches (or later on, photographs), postcards and journal entries. Another emblem of modernity, the Passage, the Parisian Arcade, as a space not only for consuming but also gazing and

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strolling, is paradoxically connected to the new ways and forms of travel, the organized tours, which emphasize the commodification of the foreign place and turn the traveller to a consumer of natural sceneries and cultural sites. Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen Werk defines the Passage as the location of consumer fetishism, dominated by the flâneur, its detached observer and gifted interpreter, “a botanist on asphalt”, who makes the urban crowd legible to a bourgeois audience. Although Benjamin in the completed portions of his project on the Parisian arcades “dismisses the flâneur as a fairly transparent social fantasy” (Brand 1991: 6), he has created a figure offering “philosophical insight into the nature of modern subjectivity” (Buck-Morss 1989: 104), a key to the understanding of modernity, which has been well examined and theorized in contemporary critical discourse. This chapter seeks to relate the “invisible flâneuse” (Wolff 1989) of the urban space with the invisible woman traveller, who facilitated by the rise of tourism could escape from domesticity and transgress gender restrictions; similarly to the anonymity of the urban crowd, the visit to the foreign place became one of the public spheres in which women “could experience some freedom of mobility and also create a space for aesthetic expression” (Löfgren 2002: 100). Furthermore, just as “the urban observer, as both a social phenomenon and a metaphor for the modernist artist, has been regarded as an exclusively male figure” (Parsons 2000: 4), so is the nineteenth century woman traveller, despite evidence that many Victorian and Edwardian women travelled abroad, and often did so alone. Indeed, a way in which “respectable” middle-class women could stroll in cities, observing and being observed, without necessarily interacting with other people, was tourism, a new and more democratic form of travel than the Grand Tour.1 Although the traveller, like the shopper or even the window-shopper of the western metropolis, has a purposive mobility which goes against the detachment and aimless strolling of the flâneur, nineteenth century women writing their impressions of different cultures often strove to attain the aesthetic distance associated with the flâneur. The connection between flâneuse and traveller is evident in the representations of private and public spaces in the Ottoman Empire (which included Turkey and parts of Greece, the Balkans and the Middle East) by nineteenth 1 This chapter developed out of a paper that I delivered at the ESSE Zaragoza Conference 2004. I would like to thank the research-funding program “Kapodistrias” of the University of Athens, which generously financed my participation in that conference. As Janet Wolff argues, “while the solitary and independent life of the flâneur was not open to women, women were active and visible in other ways in the public arena” (1989: 153). One of these ways was travel, which became accessible as a leisure activity to middle-class British women in the mid-nineteenth century.

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century British women travellers, who interpreted the Orient for an emergent middle-class audience consisting primarily of women. One of the central paradigms of spatial configurations in these women’s travelogues is the Turkish bath, the hammam, which like Benjamin’s Passage functions as an emblem, a trope of the Orient itself, becoming at the same time a commodity, a tourist attraction of the oriental journey. Like the Parisian Arcades, which sometimes included bathhouses, the hammans of the multicultural Ottoman Empire are public interiors, where social classes, as well as ethnicities, meet and mix. The recent critical interest in women’s travel writing places their journeys and texts in the context of colonialism and imperialism, a focus that usually privileges non-European and “exotic” travels. Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking volume Orientalism in 1978 (and the many responses it generated), postcolonial theory has emphasized how orientalist and imperialist discourses are gendered and has explored the role of women in anti-colonial and postcolonial politics (see Mills 1991, Chaudhuri and Strobel 1992, Parker et al. 1992, Sharpe 1993, Lewis 1996 and 2004). Scholarship has also become increasingly aware of the complex configuration of gender, race and class in the representations of other cultures, complicating the simple sociological insight that people describe themselves by explaining how they are different from something else – the other.2 Said argued that the confrontation of Islam and Christianity, East and West, Ottoman Empire and Europe is embedded in an orientalist discourse that developed in the late seventeenth century. For Said, orientalists, and above all travel writers, instead of bridging cultures, religions, politics and art, instigated a colonialist mentality, leading to the imperialist project. Therefore, the analysis of nineteenth century women’s travel writing, a discourse designed to describe and interpret “the other” for its readers, needs to address the question of women’s relation to power, their resistance to or complicity with the imperial voice.3 In the broader discussion of the values and limits of orientalism as a discourse, the investigation of women’s sources challenges masculinist histories of orientalism, focusing on how women travellers in the Ottoman Empire perceived and represented the spaces that were inaccessible to western men. 2 It should be noted, however, that the examination of the development of Englishwomen’s travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in England and the continent has demonstrated that differences in the reconstruction of the “other place” by way of gender, class and ethnic identity are as important in European destinations (see Turner 2001, Bohls 1995, and Stabler 2002). 3 This is indeed the title of Nupur Chaudhuri’s and Margaret Strobel’s collection of essays, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. In the Introduction, the editors call for an examination of European women’s part not only in imperialism but also in “other forms of class and cultural exploitation” (1992: 3), and discuss how the imperial project shaped gender ideology.

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Since the first encounters between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, the fascination of westerners with this “exotic” place and the ensuing urge to control it, corresponded to the desire to enter the forbidden space of the women who lived in these regions. Europeans examined Muslim social institutions, such as the seclusion of space and gender, based on their own social definitions of space and invented stories about life within the harem for a European audience. The traveller fetishized the unknown, constructing himself as the male western subject, in opposition to the erotic and feminized Orient. However, the very inaccessibility of eastern women gave the opportunity to women travellers in these regions to compete against their male counterparts, as their gender allowed them to enter the harem, becoming for the first time in the context of travel a privilege rather than a hindrance. Since the publication of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, a visit to a harem – and by extension to the even more accessible hamman – became de rigueur to every Englishwoman traveller to Turkey. Although their accounts were of course orientalist in a number of ways, their representation of private spaces differs from the popular male travelogues of the period. Without suggesting that gender is a homogeneous or stable category, the examination of British women’s depictions of the hamman throughout the nineteenth century reveals the ambiguities of the orientalist discourse. The visit to the hammam had an additional emblematic role for British women travellers, invoking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s visit to the baths at Sofia in 1717, and her famous letter that initiated an entire discourse informing the view and representation of the oriental women. After a detailed and highly aesthetic description of the bathers, Montagu interpreted the hammam as the “women’s coffee house, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented etc” (1994: 59), translating the alien space in terms of her century’s popular public spaces. Her letters emphasized that the baths “were not public retreats but public institutions – civic spaces in which women from different households could come temporarily together” (Yeazell 2000: 40). Although for the author the hammam represented the Turkish women’s public life marked by an admirable decorum, for male readers or travellers to the Orient, Montagu’s description of the bathers epitomized their colonial fantasy, which concluded with Ingres’ Le Bain Turc, a famous 1862 painting based on her account and reminiscent of a keyhole voyeur. Not only did Ingres eliminate the traveller’s presence from the scene, erasing in this way the confrontation between cultures recorded in Montagu’s letter, but he also introduced insinuations of homoeroticism, alluding to the male travellers’ tales of lesbianism in the harem. Among the works on the Orient Ingres had read was the Navigations et peregrinations orientales of the sixteenth century French traveller Nicolas de Nicolay (Yeazell

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2000: 263–36), which identified the women’s baths as a place for homoerotic encounters: Amongst the women of Levant, there is very amity proceeding only through the frequentation & resort to the bathes: yea & sometimes become so fervently in love the one of the other as if were with men, in such sort that perceiving some maiden or woman of excellent beauty they wil not cease until they have found means to bath with them, & to handle & grope them every where at their pleasure, so ful they are of luxuriousness and feminine wantonness: Even as in times past were the Tribades, of the number whereof was Sapho the Lesbian.  (Nicolay 1585: 60)4

Nicolay’s assertions, intended to titillate the male western reader, illustrate how the representation of the Orient in European texts has been since the Renaissance “a fantasy built upon sexual difference” (Yegenoglu 1998: 11). Besides Ingres, many nineteenth century artists, novelists and dramatists depicted oriental women in scenes from the harem and the hammam, based on similar fantasies. Orientalism informs a genre of European art and literature from the nineteenth century, whose thematic focus on female spaces reflects a desire to interpret as well as to appropriate the Orient by identifying it with its women. For example, one of the best-known orientalist painters, Jean-Leon Gerôme, portrays in Le Bain maure (1870) a nude fair-skinned bather being washed by a half-nude black slave in a space full of Islamic architectural details and artifacts, such as a bronze engraved basin, luxurious fabrics and Iznik tiles. The meticulous realism of the painting offers (false) authenticity to a western fantasy, whose eroticism rests on the contrast of light and dark female bodies, on a sexualized merger of slavery and seclusion.5 Despite making a private scene public, orientalist representations of the baths emphasize the sense of exclusion and danger by asking the viewer to play the role of the voyeur, entering a complex architectural space, defined by columns, stairs, arches and vaults. The theme of the Turkish bath offered nineteenth-century painters like Gerôme, Théodore Chassériau, Jean-Jules Antoine Lecomte du Nouy, Edouard Debat-Ponsan, and many others, the opportunity of depicting highly eroticized female nudes without offending the propriety of their middle-class buyers. 4 The quotation is from the 1585 English translation of the French text by T. Washington the Younger. Within twenty years of its publication in 1568, there were two more editions of Nicholay’s travelogue in French, two in Italian, one in Dutch, one in German and one in English. 5 On the racial diversity of the harem and the fantasies it produced on western travellers, painters and poets see Yeazell 2000: 104–06. On Gérôme’s use of black and white bodies see also Nochlin 1989: 47. On the issue of slavery and race in the harem see Lewis 1996: 129–32.

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Following the iconographic tradition that has for centuries associated the nude with mythology, orientalist painters developed the myth of the eastern woman as a voluptuous, languid, and narcissistic creature. In such depictions of the hammam, the male western gaze intrudes upon a private female space, one that neither the painter nor his audience would have seen.6 Ironically, Montagu’s representation of the Turkish women at the baths, insisting that “there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them” (1994: 59), was assimilated both to the previous fictional, eroticized descriptions of the forbidden realm by male travellers (whom she attacked in her text) and to subsequent pictorial or literary renditions. In that context, the attempts of women travellers following Montagu to demystify the hammam, debunking the western fantasy of hundreds of beautiful nude women, shouldn’t be surprising.7 Most Englishwomen entering the baths in the nineteenth century, especially in the era of high imperialism, disputed Montagu’s vision of beautiful and graceful bodies, representing the other’s body as disgusting and grotesque. In fact, Montagu’s genuine curiosity about the lives of eastern women was not shared by the majority of her successors, for whom the hammam was a necessary stop in the tour of the Levant, as evidenced in accounts by Julia Pardoe, Harriet Martineau, Frances-Anne Vane (Marchioness of Londonderry), Georgianna Dawson-Damer, Sophia Lane Poole and Annie Harvey. Montagu’s image of a “natural” female naked world beyond the machinery of English fashion and masculinist imperatives, a “feminotopia” (to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s term) became an “Oriental tableau” (according to Dawson-Damer’s 6 Gérôme had visited and sketched the baths at Bursa but obviously not during the hours when women bathed there. 7 Influenced by Neoclassicism, Montagu appreciates (and appropriates) the Orient through an ahistorical aesthetic discourse, full of allusions to mythology, Renaissance painting and literature. Even a short excerpt from her letter suffices to indicate the difference from women travellers which will be quoted in the essay:



They walked and moved with the same majestic grace, which Milton describes our General Mother with. There were many amongst them, as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn, by the pencil of a Guido or Titian – And most of their skin shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair, divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of the graces.  (1994: 59)

Her description could be seen as an orientalizing strategy, forcing oriental women into a western frame of reference, as Meyda Yegenoglu (1998) and Jill Campbell (1994) have pointed out, countered, however, by Montagu’s representation of the bathers as aesthetic rather than erotic objects, as Elizabeth Bohls (1995) argues, thus challenging the masculinist view of the Orient.

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words), whose search, rediscovery or critique reveal not only an instance of the general historical problem of how one culture portrays another, but also the intimate connection between the Orient and the female body. Rather than a cultural interaction, a tour of the hammam became flanêrie, as the Englishwomen observed the other, freezing life into a series of picturesque scenes and tableaux, without being observed (or provoking the least attention, as many claimed). However, in the hammam, both the naked body of the bathers and the dressed (or even half-dressed) body of the travellers inevitably became objects of mutual curiosity. On the one hand, as tourists, Englishwomen reduced the human figures at the baths to “faceless ornaments” (Bohls 1995: 13); on the other hand, their own bodies, whether dressed or undressed, also provoked curiosity and scrutiny, as the bathers, the objects of the travellers’ study, desire, or even disgust, returned the gaze. Indeed, the concept of the traveller herself as a commodity, similar to Benjamin’s flâneur, already figures in Montagu’s letter: by revealing a glimpse of her underwear, as Srinivas Aravamudan argues, Montagu becomes “the fetish for the female gaze at the bath, and for the mixed gaze back in England” (1995: 83).8 It would be wrong to dismiss nineteenth-century women travellers for reproducing the orientalist stereotype of the Turkish baths as the embodiment of the sensual and indolent Orient and thus not resisting the imperial voice (as modern readers often wish). Their representation of the hammam should be read in its historical context that includes not only the British imperial aspirations in the region but also the contemporary discourse of cleanliness fraught with notions of race and gender. According to Billie Melman, nineteenthcentury women travellers not only criticized Lady Montagu for representing Ottoman women in the nude, but also avoided “exposing” the bathers through their own descriptions (1995: 89). Accounts of the hammam from the beginning to the end of the century indicate the change in the way travellers perceive “the other” and her culture. For example, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lady Hester Stanhope, the eccentric traveller to the Orient, in a letter 8 When she is invited to undress, Montagu has to refuse, showing her “stays” and thus exposing her own body to be bound not only by fashion but also by the historical machinery of patriarchy and imperialism (Campbell 1994): The Lady that seemed the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and would fain have undressed me for the bath. I excused myself with some difficulty, they being all so earnest in persuading me. I was at least forced to open my skirt and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my Husband.  (1994: 59–60)

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from Bursa, quoted in The Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope,9 presents herself bathing and becoming the object of the gaze (or even of desire) of the Turkish women: How beautiful are these Asiatic women! They go to bath from fifty to five hundred together; and when I was bathing the other day, the wife of a deposed pasha begged I would finish my bathing at a bath half a mile off, that she might have the pleasure of my society, but this I declined; they bathed with all their ornaments on – trinkets I mean – and, when they have finished, they bind up their hair with flowers, and eat and talk for hours; they fumble up their faces all but their eyes, and sit under trees till the evening. (1846: 78)

Although the letter starts with the admiration of the oriental women as aesthetic objects, recalling Montagu, Stanhope implies through the invitation by the Turkish woman that her own body is also an object to be seen and admired. The invitation, however, is promptly refused, and the spectre of lesbian eroticism repressed as quickly as in Montagu’s description. The letter then returns to the aesthetizing and orientalizing stratagems that stress Stanhope’s difference and distance from the oneiric world of the baths. However, a strange episode narrated by her physician, Dr. Meryon, in the same chapter of the travelogue, emphasizes Stanhope’s ambiguous subject position: Doubts were raised whether Lady Hester was really a woman: for as she rode about in an English riding-habit, dress […] not altogether unlike that of the pages of the Seraglio, it was whispered about that she was a boy. And so serious were the doubts, that, when she went to the public baths frequented by the women of the place, they all hid and covered themselves in a great bustle, and were not convinced of the error for some time.  (1846: 81)

Instead of a marker of Englishness, signifying the “equestrian dominatrix” (Landry 2001: 471), the riding habit of the Englishwoman is a masquerade, confusing and disguising identities and nationalities. The mistaking of the middle-aged Stanhope, dressed in the common “travelling habit” of the Englishwoman abroad, for a boy, causes excitement and titillation among the women at the baths, who need the evidence of her naked body to believe she is a woman. There is a further tease in this masquerade for the informed readers, as Stanhope caused a scandal both at home and abroad by adopting the oriental male attire from the beginning of her travels in the East. It is not only her cross-dressing, but her nudity as well, that acts out the gender subversion and the sexual provocation that had already informed Montagu’s letter a century earlier. 9 The two-volume travelogue was actually written and published by her physician, Dr. Charles Meryon, after Stanhope’s death.

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However, in the mid-nineteenth century, the focus of the visit to the hammam became the bath rather than the bathers, the emphasis being on hygiene rather than sensuality. Julia Pardoe in The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 is the first Englishwoman after Montagu to describe in detail her experience at the hammam, representing herself, however, primarily as a bather rather than as a viewer. Pardoe partakes of the pleasure of a Turkish bath, devoting an entire chapter to the detailed narration of the ritual, with the intention of correcting “the fables” of “Eastern tourists”, “which have been advanced as acts, by suffering imagination to usurp the office of vision” (1837: 1. 129). Like Montagu, Pardoe wants to challenge the masculinist and orientalist representations of the bath; unlike Montagu, who remained imprisoned in her corset and riding habit in the midst of the naked crowd, Pardoe is resolved to “not only become a spectator but an actor in the scene” (1837: 129). Her representation of “the terrestrial paradise of Eastern women” (1837: 130) combines orientalist scenery with Victorian matter-of-factness. Indeed, Pardoe’s poetic renditions of the women “reclining luxuriously upon their sofas […] in their fine white linen, embroidered with gold, with their fine hair falling about their shoulders” (1837: 132), “the heavy, dense, sulphureous vapour that filled the place”, “the reverberating domes of the bathing-halls”, “the sight of nearly three hundred women only partially dressed, and that in fine linen so perfectly saturated with vapour, that it revealed the whole outline of the figure – the busy slaves, passing and repassing, naked from the waist upwards” (1837: 133), recall the orientalist paintings of Ingres and Gerôme, a sensual dreamworld beyond time or history. But on the other hand, Pardoe seeks to control her own picture, after admitting that it seemed like “an illusory semblance or phantasmagoria, almost leaving me in doubt whether that which I looked were indeed reality, or the mere creation of a distempered brain” (1837: 134). Moving from fantasy to reality, from gazing to acting, the author describes the process of bathing, calling it “tedious, exhausting and troublesome” (1837: 134) and objects to “the great quantity of time that it consumes” (1837: 137). By constantly inserting her own presence in the scene as a somewhat reluctant participant but keen observer, the narrator records a specific episode in history, inviting the reader to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of the hammam as well as on the significance of an Englishwoman’s presence there. Moreover, Pardoe corrects Montagu by not fully exposing her bathers’ body and by insisting that her presence “did not create the slightest sensation among [them]” (1837: 137): I should be unjust did I not declare that I witnessed none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady M. W. Montague [sic]. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies

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Although a confrontation of cultures such as the juxtaposition between nudity and riding habit presented in Montagu’s letter is missing from Pardoe’s account, the reader cannot help but wonder at the absence of curiosity on the part of eastern women claimed by the author. Surely, the presence of a European woman in the baths couldn’t have been a common occurrence, unless the white linen robe succeeded as Pardoe’s masquerade. Besides, by dressing her subjects in white robes, Pardoe alludes to the nineteenth century moral concerns about bathing, such as the exposure of the naked body and the association between warm water and sexual arousal.10 Humour, like the emphasis on hygiene and propriety, was another strategy employed by women travellers of the period to censor the “improper” thoughts of their readers, regarding the nudity and sensuality associated with the hammam. Despite different attitudes toward eastern women, in all accounts of the period the hammam emerged as a fascinating yet dangerous space that Englishwomen had to control through their writing, resisting its pleasures and debating on its merits. The riding habit, a recurrent motif juxtaposed to the naked body of the other women, reappears in Georgianna Dawson-Damer’s Diary of a Tour in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land. Dawson-Damer, who informs the reader that Lady Montagu is her husband’s great-grandmother, experiences the ritual of the Turkish bath at Constantinople. In her account, the gaze is reversed since it is the Turkish women who wonder at the Europeans rather than the opposite: A sort of silken mantle was given me for a bathing, or rather steaming, dress, and I was rubbed with soft delightful soap by a white slave, the ladies amusing themselves by peeping at us through a window above. The towels were of silk and beautifully embroidered. They seemed much put out by my declining to wash my hair, and took it down, chiefly, I fancy, to see if it were my own. They were much surprised at its being so long, as their own hair, though thick and of beautiful quality, is of no great length, nor is it in the profusion of the Greeks.  (1841: 228)

Her account concludes with the humorous note that “a black slave was much amused at all the paraphernalia of my English dress” (1841: 228), suggesting the intricate corsetry of the Victorian dress as well as alluding to Montagu’s underwear, which the Turkish women thought imprisoned its wearer. By avoiding a 10 Examining the history of cleanliness in the West, Georges Vigarello (1985) cites many examples of nineteenth century prudishness regarding personal hygiene, such as wearing robes while bathing, a common practice not only in nunneries but also in upper-class homes.

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description of the bathers, Dawson-Damer conceals through her disengaged humour the Victorian travellers’ discomfort at a liminal space, where the sep­ aration between the public and the private sphere is suspended. The dreamlike world of the hammam, evoking “the uterine memory of the mother” (Aravamudan 1995: 87), continuously oscillates between the binary oppositions of hot and cold, hard and soft, clean and dirty, private and public. The riding habit worn by Sophia Lane Poole in a Turkish bath in Cairo around 1842, a garment typical of and unique to the Victorian era,11 is invested in her epistolary travelogue the Englishwoman in Egypt with the imperial project and is juxtaposed with the impurity and disorder signified by the naked body of the bathers: On entering the chamber a scene presented itself which beggars description. My companions had prepared me for seeing many persons undressed; but imagine my astonishment on finding at least thirty women of all ages and many young girls and children perfectly unclothed. You will scarcely think it possible that no one but ourselves had a vestige of clothing. Persons of all colours, from the black and glossy shade of the Negro to the fairest possible hue of complexion, were formed in groups, conversing as though fully dressed, with perfect nonchalance, while others where sitting round the fountain.  (1844: 173)

The traveller, who feels exposed and threatened by the racial and social mixing at the hammam, confesses that the scene is not beautiful, “in truth, in some respects it is disgusting”. However, Poole finds the experience of having a Turkish bath “luxurious” and emphasizes in her lengthy description of the operation the pleasure felt while being “kneaded”, “latherered”, and “rubbed”. The juxtaposition between disgust and pleasure suggests a paradoxical response to the female body (her own included) and its sensations, an oscillation between frustrated voyeurism and genuine engagement. She concludes the letter on the visit to the hammam in Cairo by insisting that “the Eastern manner of bathing is highly salubrious from its powerful effect on the skin”, at the same time warning the reader that there are “drawbacks to the enjoyment of the luxury I have described” (1844: 175). The Englishwoman must close both eyes and ears as these “foreign scenes […] cannot fail to shock her feelings of propriety” (1844: 175). After inviting her readers to an orientalist tableau, full of pictorial details like the contrast between “glossy” black and “fairest” white bodies, indeed a favourite one in orientalist paintings, Poole censors the eroticism and aestheti11 In an essay analyzing the Victorian riding habit, Alison Matthews David (2002) emphasizes its paradoxical role in Victorian culture, being both masculine and feminine and satisfying the conflicting demands of Victorian femininity and emergent feminism.

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cism of the scene, in the same way as Pardoe does, by shifting the emphasis to hygiene and by finally admonishing Englishwomen (travellers and readers alike) to keep their eyes closed. The famous journalist and popular writer Harriet Martineau repeats, in her own account of a visit to the thermal baths at Tiberias, Poole’s disgust, to the extent of exclaiming: “I find it difficult to think of these creatures as human beings and certainly I never saw anything, even in the lower slave district of the United States, which so impressed me with a sense of the impassable differences of race” (1848: 544). The shock at the sight (and sound) of many foreign women bathing, performing a private act in a public place, is experienced by all Englishwomen visiting the public baths. It functions as a topos introducing the description of the women and as a link between the description of the space with its interesting architectural features and its human content – the bodies of “the other”. Often the description of the main hall of the hammam assumes metaphors of hell: the heat, vapours and reverberating noise made by the women and children recall to many travellers the Miltonic representation of hell. In fact, Annie Harvey in Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (1871) alludes to Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book 1) as well as to Dante’s Inferno (there is even a quote) in her evocation of the bath’s atmosphere, “the clouds of sulphureous vapours”, the “pandemonium”, the crowd of women (“upwards of a hundred”) appearing through the steam who “were talking and laughing, and the great height of the hall caused a reverberation that made the noise most bewildering” (1871: 76–77). However, this alien and ominous image is counterbalanced by the domestic scenes that follow the bathing, recorded by the diligent tourist, such as “the two middle-aged ladies [who] were evidently, and with much diplomacy, negotiating the preliminaries of a marriage” (1871: 78). As a detached observer, Harvey finds “the whole scene […] singularly picturesque”, concluding that, “Nothing could be more decorous than the appearance and manners of every woman there present” (1871: 79–80). Not only does the traveller avoid any reference to nakedness, but she emphasizes the ugliness of the bathers as well: “There was a remarkable want of beauty” (1871: 80). In nineteenth century Britain, the discourse of cleanliness, as Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather (1995), is charged with notions of gender, race and class. Whereas at home, personal hygiene is associated with bourgeois morality and domesticity as well as with the imperial project, at the Turkish bath cleanliness becomes morally suspect. Georges Vigarello (1985) stresses that personal hygiene becomes important in the West only at the end of the nineteenth century, when it is at the same time relegated to the realm of the private, even the secret. By transferring a private act, like washing, to the

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public sphere, cleanliness transforms to sexual self-expression, and therefore leads, according to many travellers, to physical and mental degeneration: After admitting at the end of her account that “a Turkish bath is certainly a most inviting luxury”, Harvey warns the reader against it, as “in the end [it has] a deteriorating effect upon female beauty […] The too devoted votaries of the bath speedily become enervated both in mind and body, and whilst still young in years fade into a premature old age. The indolence also which it creates does much to increase the tendency to undue corpulence, so destructive to the fair proportions of Eastern women” (1871: 80–81). The British travellers’ prejudice against the ritual of hammam echoes the controversy in the mid nineteenth century surrounding the growing popularity of the Turkish baths in Britain. The Victorian Turkish bath was really a reinvention of the Roman bath, as the dryness of the air in the bath distinguishes it from the original hammams. The Victorian “Turkish Bath Movement” began from the first experimental bath constructed at St Anne’s Hydropathic Establishment in Ireland in 1856, crossed the Irish Sea to the industrial towns in the north of England and in Scotland, and then moved southwards, through the midlands, until it arrived in London in 1860; indeed “over six hundred Turkish baths have so far been identified in the British Isles alone” (Shifrin). The furious disputes among doctors and public officials about the role and significance of the Victorian Turkish baths not only involved issues such as optimal temperatures and acceptable degrees of humidity, but also raised important social and moral concerns. Many doctors considered the Turkish bath a threat to the medical profession, while various public officials feared that it would break down class barriers. One of the “inventors” of the Victorian Turkish baths, David Urquhart, had seen people of all classes mixing freely in the baths of Constantinople, and hoped that the creation of such establishments in working-class areas in Britain would eliminate the “filth which, in these times, especially in large towns, separates the poor from the rich, as if they were not members of the same state, but, as Disraeli has phrased it, ‘the two nations’” (Urquhart qtd. in Shifrin). Besides the concern about the mixing of classes in the baths, another issue worrying middle-class Victorians was nudity. Erasmus Wilson, in his book The Eastern, or Turkish Bath, proclaims that “a costume is indispensable. Without a costume in the presence of others, the bath is not the bath –it is an evil, and as an evil it should be suppressed with the utmost severity” (qtd. in Shifrin). Wilson’s statement not only evokes the Victorian sense of propriety (perhaps to an exaggerated degree) but also recalls the racial prejudice voiced by most travellers to Turkey, who attributed the supposed “effeminacy” and “indolence” of the Ottomans to the frequent use of the hammam. Opponents of the Victorian Turkish baths claimed that its use in Britain would destroy the manliness which

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created the British Empire, as it had destroyed the Roman Empire, and as it was then destroying the Ottoman Empire (Shifrin). An editorial in the British Medical Journal of March 1861 used all the stereotypes about the Orient to attack the introduction of the baths in Britain: The [Turkish bath] may be adapted to the mental and physical constitution of those lazy Eastern voluptuaries, who have cost us so much trouble and so many lives, and the well-fed and fatted contents of their harems. The slothful pasha may work off his superfluous hydrocarbons and nitrogenous materials through the sudoriferous ducts and the pulmonary mucous membrane; but healthy men of business and of sense in this country will, we venture to prophesy, never consent to the dissipation of time and matter involved in the idea of a periodical Turkish bath.  (Qtd. in Shifrin)

This racist statement encompasses as well as surpasses all the negative comments of the women travellers about the hammam, involving the fear of excess – of time wasted, of indolence, obesity and above all of sexuality, suggested here by the references to the “Eastern voluptuaries”, to the “pasha[s]” and, of course, to “the fatted contents of their harems”. The (pseudo)scientific language of the editorial attempts to legitimate the arrogant distinction between superior and inferior races, opposing industry to sloth, health to disease, the “healthy English businessman” to the “slothful fat pasha”. The juxtaposition of the reaction against the Victorian baths in Britain with the travellers’ representations of the hammam illustrates the ambiguity of the discourse of cleanliness in nineteenth century Britain. In the West, it was only in the nineteenth century that medical science declared that the frequent washing of the body was necessary for the health of the human being. Yet even then, despite evidence that cleanliness was the best defence against diseases, people resisted washing due to old fears, to prejudice and prudery. Since the late Middle-Ages public baths were spaces of transgression and excess, associated with violence, prostitution and gambling, and thus condemned by the Church and often closed down by the state (Vigarello 1985: 43–54). On the contrary, in the Muslim East, cleanliness is a religious duty; by washing and shampooing the believers expiate their sins. The Turkish bath, therefore, becomes a mark of dramatic contrast between East and West, a symbolic space that has for a long time fascinated European travellers. The hammam illustrates the connection between space and power, space being not an area of enclosure but its representation, a starting point for “the premise of hegemonic social practices” (Smith and Katz 1993: 75), just like Walter Benjamin’s Passage. The travellers’ emphasis on the ugliness rather than the beauty of the bathers not only marks their difference from Montagu and the orientalist painters but also singles the body as an effect of power

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relations. Feminist critics, like Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, following the Foucauldian approach to the body as marked, invested and inscribed by discourse and power, challenge the assumption of the body’s natural, ahistorical and pre-cultural status. From that perspective, the bodies seen by the travellers in the hammam are neither natural nor universal, nor even aesthetic, but culturally and racially specific, as Martineau’s comment quoted above makes abundantly clear. As flâneuse in an exotic public interior, the Victorian Englishwoman in the hammam reduces the other women to countless, heavy and indolent bodies, a vision that counters the orientalist fantasy of the West without questioning its ideological premise. However, the reader perceives through the seams in their narratives that the bodies of the women travellers, whether dressed or (partly) undressed, also provoke curiosity and scrutiny. An exclusively gendered space confusing the private with the public, the hammam also represents for the traveller to the East an everyday mundane activity of that culture, thus embodying what Gillian Rose calls “time-geography” (1993). For Rose, a feminist concept of geography aims at reinserting a physical dimension into the discourse. Instead of mapping and surveying monuments and antiquities (which were the main goal of the male travellers) women travellers often trace the domestic and trivial everyday events in their sojourn in Constantinople, Cairo or Athens, including the hammam. In their accounts, British women emphasized the social role of the hammam in the lives of women in the East, who had no other opportunity to socialize outside the home. The ritual of the hammam not only fulfilled the laws of hygiene and religious regulation but accompanied all the great occasions in life as well (Encyclopaedia of Islam 145). In women’s lives it celebrated events such as marriage, pregnancy and childbirth,12 it allowed mothers to inspect prospective brides for their sons in a situation where no physical flaws could escape notice, and its importance was such that if a husband were to deny his wife her visits to the hammam, she had grounds for divorce. In 1845, in her review of twelve recently published travel books by women, the travel writer Lady Elizabeth Eastlake anticipated Rose’s concept of gendered geography by arguing that whereas “a man either starts on his travels with a particular object in view, or failing that, drives a hobby of his own the whole way before him”, a woman traveller “is less troubled with preconceived ideas as to what is most important to observe […] picking up material much more 12 Pregnant women went to hammam in order to facilitate labour, and returned forty days after labour for purification. Brides visited the hammam at least three times during the ceremonies, seven days before the wedding, during the third day of the nuptials and after the wedding night.

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indiscriminately” (Quarterly Review 76 [1845] qtd. in Leask 2002: 203). As bricoleuses, women travellers, already accustomed, as Eastlake points out, “to count canvas stitches by the fireside,” collect bits and pieces to create a fabric out of the strange life in the foreign place, a patchwork consisting of monuments, domestic scenes, and random sights and encounters.

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Ladies on the Tramp: The Philanthropic Flâneuse and Appropriations of Victorian London’s Impoverished Domesticity Cathleen J. Hamann abstract This chapter characterizes the ways in which upper- and middle-class women negotiated the sites of their philanthropic work in the poor and working class homes of London – and in the public streets surrounding those homes. As upper- and middle-class women like Octavia Hill and Beatrice Webb, as well as the heroines imagined by Walter Besant, L.T. Meade, and Mary Augusta Ward, became the front line of proto-professional social work, theirs became the subject position from which the domestic space of the urban lower class was understood. These women usurped the anonymity, curiosity, and urban mobility of the flâneur, relying upon their gender and class to access and appropriate the impoverished streets and domestic spaces of the metropolis that both enthralled and appalled Victorians. Refusing the detachment of the flâneur, the flânerie of these women is marked instead by personal engagement and the establishment of cross-class friendships fostered within impoverished domesticity. Such access afforded these independent women privileged information about spaces that fuelled late Victorian anxieties about urban life. Keywords: Victorian, flânerie, women, domesticity, London, Beatrice Webb, Octavia Hill, Walter Besant, L.T. Meade, Mary Augusta Ward.

In fact she walked down Pitfield Street into Old Street, and up Hoxton Street into Hyde Road and Whitemore Street, and so over the bridge which leads to Kingsland, and back by way of St. John’s Road to Ivy Lane – the whole with lingering step and occasional excursions into side streets which seemed to promise something strange or curious. Not this morning only, but many successive mornings, she took this walk among streets where the people live […] At first she wandered just as one wanders on a first visit to a foreign city, getting lost and then finding her way again, looking into all the shops, reading the names and the trade announcements and watching the people. And at first she was afraid; but as day after day passed and no one molested her, she grew more confident.  (Walter Besant, Children of Gibeon, 1886) A certain weird romance with neither beginning nor end; visiting amongst

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When Walter Besant’s young heroine Valentine Eldridge moves herself from a fashionable home in West London to the mean street of Ivy Lane in Hoxton, she sets about “botanizing the asphalt” of the city’s East End neighbourhood in order to get her bearings and observe the people amongst whom she has come to live. Having moved there on her own to develop a friendship with a workingclass woman who may or may not be her long-lost sister, Valentine is curious (if slightly apprehensive) about her new neighbours. She finds she is able to move freely about this urban landscape and with enjoyment, isolated from the working-class residents she observes from a position privileged by anonymity and authority. Her excursions along streets of the East End and within the rooms of a run-down tenement house in Hoxton are filtered through the consciousness of a figure that had become a stereotypical character by the 1880s – the philanthropic young woman of wealth, education, and feeling – and it was one which has certain elements in common with the flâneur, another stereotypical figure of nineteenth century urban life. In these strolls, Valentine moves in many ways that are associated with flânerie; most importantly, she serves as the subject position from which the reader of Children of Gibeon observes and comprehends modern life in the city. The figure of the flâneur, most widely known in his masculine form as defined by Walter Benjamin, is, above all, the subject “whose experience epitomizes the fragmented and anonymous nature of life in the modern city” (Wolff 2003: 69). Valentine’s excursions present the very real, if fictionally presented, possibility of a feminine flâneur, the flâneuse. And yet, the philanthropic flâneuse, as presented by Valentine and the other women under discussion here, is no carbon copy of her Parisian brother, the flâneur. This flâneuse is a curious observer of the city – especially of the lower orders of society – who moves about the modern urban landscape and is isolated from it in a way that enables and privileges vision.1 Yet these flâneuses illustrate a particular expression of flânerie. As reflected by Beatrice Webb’s diary entry on her experiences as a rent collector in East London, these flâneuses dispense with the sense of detached observation that often marks the traditional characterization of the flâneur. Even though she is a rather liminal presence in the daily lives of the tenants she visits while collecting rent and man1 I draw these rather traditional characteristics of the flâneur from Elizabeth Wilson’s survey of the earliest assessments of the flâneur (as laid out in a nineteenth century edition of Encyclopedia Larousse).

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aging the tenement, Webb still deeply feels the potential role her observation could play – is supposed to play, under some nineteenth century philanthropic schemes. Although her observation of the lives of the poor is marked by the same curiosity and anonymity as other flâneuses, and she records ephemeral encounters in the manner of a flâneur, her approach is marked by an emotional engagement unfamiliar to the flâneur. Furthermore, entering the homes of the poor regularly in order to carry out their work, they did not restrict themselves to the streets of the city for observation of the modern experience, but “botanized” beyond the threshold of the tenement house, and into the space of impoverished domesticity. My project here is to characterize the ways in which upper- and middleclass women negotiated the sites of their philanthropic work, in the streets and the homes of the poor in the East End of London and other working-class sections of the city, and the ways in which they appropriated that space for themselves, as well as their effectiveness in doing so. In order to explore this issue, a number of texts dealing with female philanthropists and social explorers in late Victorian London are discussed here: Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon (1886), L. T. Meade’s The Princess of the Gutter (1895), Mary Augusta Ward’s Marcella (1894), the essays of Octavia Hill on the management of model dwellings for the poor, and the autobiography of Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926). The ladies2 who ventured into the East End of London in the latter decades of Victoria’s reign negotiated the space of “darkest London” 3 in a manner that was much like that of the flâneur. These ladies, both real and fictional, demonstrate characteristics associated with the flâneuse, as well as 2 I refer to the upper- and middle-class women as ladies, as they were called in the Victorian age to distinguish them from working-class women, or “rough gels”. 3 Analogies that constructed similarities of “darkness” between the poorest parts of London and Africa, or other colonial spaces such as North America or India, were widespread by the 1890s. For instance, playing off of H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890) were “General” William Booth’s treatise on his Salvation Army, In Darkest London and the Way Out (1890) and Margaret Harkness’ revised title for Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army (first published in 1889) was In Darkest London. The East End was most familiar as the site of darkest London, although Charles Booth’s map shows pockets of “black streets” throughout the city, black being used on his map to denote an area that was populated by the lowest class – “vicious and semi-criminal”. The women discussed here all venture into the East End: Valentine settles in Hoxton, Joan in Shoreditch, and Marcella is described as having collected rent in the East End. The “Brown’s Buildings” she moves into while nursing are called Peabody’s Buildings in Ward’s manuscript, indicating that they were one of the many block dwellings built in the East End by the American-born philanthropist George Peabody in the 1860s. Hill’s philosophies impacted many of the model dwellings throughout the East End.

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some substantial deviations from it, in their appropriation of the impoverished streets and domestic space of the East End. All of these women usurped the scenes of a very public domesticity in the East End and other sections of London that housed the poor. They accomplished this take-over so thoroughly that they helped construct what became the subject position from which this space was viewed by upper- and middle-class readers. Their appropriations are largely achieved through a presumption of their right to enter this space that was made authoritative by their class and gender. But their entry into this space is also marked by their desire for the development of cross-class friendships/ sisterhoods that enable them to speak of their experiences out of a privileged and intimate knowledge of this space. The popularity and influence of the texts under discussion here are representative of both the late Victorian era’s preoccupation with the London poor, and its proposals for alleviating that poverty – both for the relief of the poor and for the relief of the upper classes social conscience and anxieties – through the work of personal influence. A prolific writer of girls’ books, L. T. Meade frequently took up the subject of the lower classes in both the children’s and adults’ texts among her approximately 280 published books. The Princess of the Gutter presents an heiress with a dilemma: the “up to date” Girton graduate Joan Prinsep has been left a considerable fortune, largely drawn from the proceeds of rents in working-class tenements, but she feels morally bound to use her inheritance to rectify her uncle’s neglect of his tenants. Not sure precisely how to become a more faithful steward than her benefactor, Joan visits one of these buildings, dramatically witnessing the death of a tenant, and decides to move in with a view to “experiment” with philanthropic endeavours. The novel largely deals with Joan’s search for a way to affect change and her developing friendship with the spirited “rough gel” Martha Mace, the princess of the gutter. Though not quite so prolific as Meade, Sir Walter Besant was already a best-selling author when he began producing the East End romances for which he is best known, and often maligned for, now. P.J. Keating, for instance, is rather tough on Besant, calling his plots “ludicrous” but allowing that reading his novels on the East End is still advisable, because “their popular success gives some indication of the attitudes which readers of the eighties regarded as appropriate to the subject” (Keating 1971: 98).4 Besant’s most important novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), is still in print largely because 4 Keating also argues that Besant helps shift the characterization of the East End and Eastenders as depraved to being deprived – not just economically, but culturally; Besant’s message was “that the most urgent problem of the East End is not poverty or crime but meanness. What the East Ender needs, he argues, is leadership, contact with the upper classes, and an awareness of art, books and music” (1971: 107).

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the Palace of Delight that its characters founded became a reality: in 1887, the People’s Palace, offering free facilities for cultural activities aimed at the working classes, was constructed at the end of Mile End road. However, his later novel, Children of Gibeon, takes a far more interesting look at the journey of an heiress, Valentine Eldridge, into the East End in order to form a friendship with a working-class woman who may, or may not, be her long-lost sister Melenda. Valentine is unsure when she moves into the East End whether she or her adopted sister Violet are the daughter of a washer woman. Violet and Valentine have been raised in privilege by the forward-thinking Lady Eldridge, who has kept the truth hidden from both her daughters and society until their coming of age, much to the chagrin of many gold-digging young men terrified of courting the wrong sister. In an attempt to learn about the life she might have had, and to find a way to help her “sister”, Valentine moves in to the East End tenement house where Melenda lives and works with two friends as a sweated seamstress. While Valentine also conceives of philanthropic plans on a larger scale, the main thrust of her scheme, and the focus of the plot, is the cultivation of a relationship with Melenda, who proves to be a very unwilling party in Valentine’s appropriation of her space and her friends. Mary Ward’s Marcella has a similarly complicated relationship with the working-class woman who she chooses to befriend, Minta Hurd, the widow of a poacher hung for the murder of a gamekeeper near Marcella’s home in the country. Seeking relief from a broken engagement and distraught over her inability to save Minta’s husband, Marcella leaves the estate her family has recently inherited and trains to be a district nurse in London. She sets up a home for herself in model dwellings, living among the poor that she nurses, and bringing Minta and her children along from the country. While Marcella’s time as a nurse consumes a small portion of the plot, her unimpeded movement within the city and over the thresholds of working class homes is similar in its representation to that of the other texts under discussion here. Marcella’s respected, but also rather anonymous, position as a nurse allows her to enter these homes in a position of authority, appropriating the role of the head of the household during her brief visits. In her own rather contrived “working class” home with Minta, Ward also attempts to forge an equal friendship with a working class woman, but Minta is as unsettled by Marcella’s outreach as Melenda is by Valentine’s. Beatrice Webb and Octavia Hill provide a dimension of “reality” to this discussion of women’s movement in the city’s rougher neighbourhoods and into the homes of the poor. Beatrice Webb, a prominent member of the Fabian Society, compiled her reflections and the diary entries regarding her search for a creed and a craft in My Apprenticeship. Within that autobiography, she

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details the quest that induced her to explore working-class London, first as an apprentice to her cousin-in-law, Charles Booth, during the study that would result in Life and Labour and the People of London (1891–1902), and later as a rent collector in the working-class tenement dwellings Katherine Buildings. Webb is important here because, although her autobiography is not rich in the details of personal exchanges within the homes of the poor, she does include her diary entries which provide thoughtful commentary on the intellectual and emotional discoveries made while travelling between separate lives in the West and East Ends. Similarly, Octavia Hill’s extensive writing within important Victorian periodicals provides elucidating and influential statements of the philosophy of entrée and authority that undergird the negotiations made by the characters in Besant, Meade, and Ward. Together, these five texts offer a limited but representative overview of the ways in which upper and middle-class women manoeuvred within the neighbourhoods and the homes of the poor. The housing and domestic arrangements of the poor that fell under the penetrating gaze of the flâneuse were matters of intense public scrutiny in Victorian England, so much so that what may have technically been the private space of a working-class domestic sphere became the political football of the public sphere. Throughout the nineteenth century, as business in the imperial centre boomed, residential areas throughout central and east London were cleared for railway extensions and commercial development in the form of docks, yards, warehouses, and offices. Slum clearance and demolition further contributed to a growing housing crisis for the poor. In the early years of Victoria’s reign, a “civic pride” led the London County Council to justify the demolition of the slums that housed the poor through a combination of practicality – the need for thoroughfares – and a sense that cleaning house would solve the problems of the slums. In the words of one Select Committee in 1838, “there were districts in London through which no great thoroughfares passed, and which were wholly occupied by a dense population composed of the lowest class of persons who being entirely secluded from the observation and influence of better educated neighbours, exhibited a state of moral degradation deeply to be deplored” (Edwards 1898: 10). Even though the poor and working classes were displaced from their homes through development and what Gareth Stedman Jones calls the “bland assumptions of municipal improvement,” their livelihoods remained within central London, and the lack of cheap transport necessitated that they remain, somehow, near the centres of employment (Jones 1984: 178). The resulting overcrowding did not escape the notice of the popular press, and the same sensationalized writing that had fuelled slum clearance in the first place continued to raise the daunting fear that nothing had changed – indeed, things may perhaps have become worse.

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As the nineteenth century progressed, the housing of the poor became a substantive rallying point around which politicians and philanthropists could attempt to address the larger, more fundamental question of economic disparities in the capital city of an ever-expanding empire. In an era which was increasingly interested in drawing strict lines between public and private space, and between public and private spheres, the private space of the poor was of intense public concern. The effect of endless representations of the situation by journalists, clergymen, and philanthropists was, as historian H. J. Dyos points out, “not only to begin to turn the slums into public spectacle, perhaps even a public entertainment, but to enlarge the scope both for private charity and public social policy” (1967: 16). The housing of the poor easily coalesced into concerns about the homes of the poor, and a city with the ghosts of Parisian barricades on its mind was alert to the broader ramifications of a discontented mass of the poor and hungry huddled in its centre. Reformers like Octavia Hill saw promise in not only refashioning the housing of the poor into modern, model dwellings, but also in a good dose of personal observation and influence by those “better educated neighbours” to which the London Council had alluded. Hill’s manner of yoking housing management with a philanthropic containment of the poor was highly influential in the last three decades of the century, providing the basis for countless housing projects and philanthropic organizations, and, as we shall see, for fictional solutions to the gulf between the classes. Hill, and many others, viewed the matter thus: I feel most deeply that the disciplining of our immense poor population must be effected by individual influence; and that this power can change it from a mob of paupers and semi-paupers into a body of self-independent workers. It is my opinion, further, that although such influence may be brought to bear upon them in very various ways, it may be exercised in a very remarkable manner by persons undertaking the oversight and management of such houses as the poor habitually lodge in.  (Hill 1869: 219)

Hill believed in the exertion of personal influence and the importance of knowing the poor – and the site which she preferred for that was within the home, where the heart of the matter and the hearts of the poor lay exposed to those who visited them. This assertion that the social problem of the gulf between Disraeli’s “Two Nations” could be solved through personal ties between the rich and poor, though popular, was hardly innovative. It relied upon a tradition of charity, particularly that done by women, that extended long before the trendiness of practicing it anew in the East End became so popular that it was nearly a cliché. The need for workers among the poor, however, was perfectly timed to provide

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an important avenue into public charity and the discourse over impoverished domesticity, to a growing army of upper- and middle-class ladies with an interest in meaningful work. While W.R. Greg wrote to raise the alarm regarding an astonishingly high number of “redundant” women in 1862, a good portion of those women were proving themselves to be anything but useless by taking up new roles within the public sphere as friendly visitors, rent collectors, charity officials, and nurses. Martha Vicinus explains the personal interests behind these new paths: “This passion for meaningful work [among nineteenth century single women] was the means out of the garden, out of idleness, out of ignorance, and into wisdom, service, and adventure” (Vicinus 1985: 1). It was also the means for appropriating a voice and influence for themselves within the greater universe of politics and social reform. As Martha Vicinus details in her seminal study Independent Women, the growing bureaucratization of philanthropic endeavours in the East End and elsewhere provided women with new opportunities as rent collectors, friendly visitors, proto-social workers, charitable organizers, nurses, and social researchers. These new public roles were galvanized by precisely those feminine characteristics that theoretically placed women in the private sphere as mothers, wives, and household managers. Vicinus claims that women entered this new workforce that necessitated their presence both on and off the streets of the city, through the assumption that women could “make a maternal contribution to social institutions” (1985: 15). Furthermore, Vicinus contends that in an England “severely divided by class, men had fewer and fewer contacts with people outside of their own class other than at work, while women increasingly crossed class lines through their philanthropic activities” (1985: 211). While men still held the positions of relative power – they made up the majority of board members on charitable committees, for instance – women increasingly became those on the front line of social and philanthropic work. Theirs was the figure which was associated with personal knowledge of the poor, knowledge which they were often eager to share with the rest of the upper classes and with decision makers. By the end of the nineteenth century, women such as those under discussion here had established themselves as the “largely unpaid foundation of the social service system” (Vicinus 1985: 23). Exact numbers are hard to compile, but contemporaneous estimates suggest that, in 1893, twenty thousand women were earning wages as philanthropic officials in England, and perhaps half a million more were maintaining unpaid or semi-professional positions as well. The landlady and the regular friendly visitor are two of those roles that have the most relevance for the texts under discussion here. Both of these positions, certainly for those of Hill’s philosophy, were to be valued for the manner in which they brought an individual

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of the upper classes into frequent contact on a ritualized basis with the poor families of the East End and other working class London neighbourhoods. It was during these visits, either to visit or to collect rent, that the two parties could become friends through just the sort of neighbourly intercourse that the Select Committee in 1838 thought necessary. The practice of friendly or district visiting was thought to be the basis of a “political friendship” through which the poorer classes, and their relationship to both the nation and the upper classes, could be managed. Before one may consider the movement, and appropriation, achieved by ladies within the homes of the poor, one must register their movement across the city, from their own home, up to the moment they step over the threshold of the impoverished home. While I agree with Janet Wolff and others who point out the difficulties of using the flâneur as a model, I think that this icon of modernity remains an excellent point of theoretical departure that is familiar critical ground. In her seminal essay on modernity and the flâneur/flâneuse, Wolff argues that some of the peculiar characteristics of modernity were unavailable to women given the strict demarcations between the private and the public spheres. The flâneuse “was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (Wolff 1990: 47). More recently, Wolff has written to reassert her position, but also to establish a new line of inquiry. Wolff remains adamant that we must not neglect to concede the dangers and constraints faced by women in the urban space, which is why she continues to insist that the role of the flâneuse remained impossible despite the expansion of women’s public activities, and despite the newer activities of shopping and movie-going which many scholars have since cited as likely moments of flânerie for women (Wolff 2003). Ruth E. Iskin, one among those who have reconsidered the flâneuse as a viable figure on the urban scene, asserts that If we expect all the same traits attributed to the masculine flâneur, his degree of unfettered freedom and supreme detachment, in practices and representations of feminine flânerie, we might well conclude that feminine flânerie was not possible. But if we consider representations of women in the European city along with modern women’s increasing active participation in the city, burgeoning mobility, and practices of walking, looking, and enjoying a variety of urban pleasures, then we may well conclude that feminine flânerie became integral to urban modernity by the late nineteenth century. 5  (Iskin 2003: 351)

5 Iskin (2003) argues that fin-de-siècle advertising posters displayed women of all classes as flâneuses throughout European metropolitan spaces, working to affirm and represent their presence in the urban sphere.

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Reconsidering the places in which these women were increasingly mobile, I argue that the flâneuse was not impossible or invisible: one simply had to look past the West End venues, and consider the “double condition of the city” – the slums. 6 There, as demonstrated by the ladies in these texts, they moved about the city, particularly interested in the lower orders of society, and they also had access to a certain amount of anonymity that enabled observation. Using these broad characteristics of the flâneur is a productive place to start to theorize about the characteristics of the flâneuse, before turning to the behaviours of the philanthropic flâneuse that make her distinct, such as the sense of purpose and emotion with which she approached the poorer parts of the city. As rent collectors and managers (Hill and Webb), a friendly visitor (Valentine), a nurse (Marcella), and a landlady (Joan), these women assumed the roles taken up by countless new female social actors whose presence revamped the geography of the city and recast the eyes through which it was seen.7 Like the “glorified spinster” who was at home in the city and able to “satisfy a keen appetite” for urban amusements, these ladies exhibited a consummate curiosity about the city and its inhabitants that was reminiscent of the flâneur.8 This was a curiosity that led them to leave their rather comfortable homes in the West End, or, in Marcella’s case, the countryside, and seek out scenes and encounters that could only be had where the disparities of metropolitan life were most obvious. Joan’s determination to see for herself the notorious tenements from which she will derive her income shocks all those involved, from the man who collects the rents to the old housekeeper, Mrs. Keys, who will become her chaperone. Despite rows with her aunt and the belittling comments of her advisors, Joan insists on following the rent collector “desperately from room to room” taking in the details of the terrible rooms that seem unfit for human beings (Meade, 1895: 73). Valentine’s curiosity is demonstrated by her aforementioned explorations of the streets of Hoxton, gazing day after day into its courtyards and shops, at its costermongers and street folk; like the other ladies, she also 6 The “double condition of the city” is Raymond Williams’ phrase for the modern paradox presented by the metropolis: “the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured, which is the true significance of the city” ([1973] 1975: 154). 7 Judith Walkowitz defines a number of new female social actors on the contested terrain of nineteenth century London. These included the independent working girl, shopping ladies, charity workers, and the glorified spinster: a “highly stylized cultural construction […] a partial reflection of the experience of a small number of self-supporting or financially independent single middle-class women, who began to define a new urban female style of being at home in the city” (1992: 63). 8 Upon reading “The Glorified Spinster” in Macmillan’s Magazine, Beatrice Webb and her fellow rent collector Ella Pycroft were quite amused to recognize themselves in the portrait (Walkowitz 1992: 63).

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held a keen interest in the inner life, not just the street life, desiring to “learn how work-girls live, and what they think, and what they want” (Besant, 1886: 129–30). It is this broader sense of interest that drives Webb, as well. In describing her apprenticeship to Charles Booth, she admits that her desire to enter the poor neighbourhoods of London and study their inhabitants “came neither from politics nor from philanthropy, but from scientific curiosity; from the desire to apply the method of observation, reasoning and verification to the problem of poverty in the midst of riches” (Webb, [1926] 1971: 266). What is behind this curiosity is a sense of boredom and unease with their more traditional social engagements and feminine pursuits. They hit the streets, as it were, apparently risking an identification with real streetwalkers that never actually materializes in any of these narratives, because they are seeking experiences that will continue to pique their curiosity. It is notable that all of these women have available to them more traditional locations from which they could observe “Society”, rather than resorting to seeking out the “People” in the streets; Hill, Webb, and the characters drawn here all had access, if not to wealth, at least to those who were incredibly well-connected in London society. But each of these women opted out of a more Austen-like exploration of the characters within the domestic sphere, and sought instead the glimpses of London’s very public abyss. Once they were within that abyss, these women were often recognizable as outsiders, given away by the good quality of their dress, even when they were attempting to “pass” as legitimate residents of the East End by foregoing well-styled outfits. However, they remained anonymous observers, nearly as much so as the man in the crowd who is frequently figured as the flâneur, generally being recognized more for the purpose of their presence – “woman collector” (Webb, [1926] 1971: 267) or “Nurse” (Ward, 2002: 340) – than for their individuality and their personal history. Webb describes herself and other rent collectors as simply one of the crowd: “From the outset, the tenants regarded us, not as visitors of superior social status still less as investigators, but as part of the normal machinery of their lives” (Webb, [1926] 1971: 267). Likewise, in one of her earlier essays in Macmillan’s, Hill recounts a scene from the site of much of her work: “Three ladies standing, not long ago, in a poor and dingy court in London, when a group of dirty-faced urchins exclaimed, partly [out] of impudence and partly [out] of fun: ‘What a lot o’ landladies, this morning’” (Hill, 1871: 456). Hill uses the encounter to expound on the differences between her landladies (those with “spirit” and education enough to “devise improvements” and execute them) and the more common kind (those to be avoided and replaced, for they are “bullying, violent, passionate, revengeful, and cowardly”) (Hill, 1871: 456). However, to the street Arabs, one landlady is the same

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as another landlady. There is perhaps a reversal of the social explorer’s tendency to count the individuals of the mob as indiscriminate from one another, for these women are largely able to walk the streets of poor London and maintain an element of anonymity. Rarely does a character press any of these ladies for personal information; on the contrary, it is the ladies who succeed in extracting information from those they observe. Furthermore, when the ladies cross back over to their own side of town, they vanish as thoroughly as the flâneur might from the arcade. If the home was where one class could “know” the other, it seemed unlikely that the lower classes would ever achieve such a level of intimacy with those who visited them, for even with those ladies who set up rooms in the districts they visited, there was always a trap door through which the lady could return West. All of these ladies maintained access to a home other than any that they established within the East End, even if they intended to settle there. With a certain amount of anonymity comes the isolation that privileges the flâneuse’s vision and enables her to observe with a fresh eye. The privileged class status of the flâneuse that buffered her from being known by her poorer friends also provided her with a certain position of isolation – and all of the women discussed here were isolated by the fact that they could return to a more privileged space, re-cross the borderline, should they so choose. Their disassociation from the ordinary classes allowed them an artistic and professional distance from their subject, even as they were attracted to it. This isolation is epitomized by the frequency with which all of these texts record moments of fleeting observations gained while the lady stands on the landing and gazes into the rooms of the poor. Framed by the threshold, these glimpses through halfclosed doors mark a clear delineation in the position of the flâneuse within this space, demonstrating in high relief their sense of separation from this world. These threshold moments are analogues to the fleeting scenes consumed by the flâneur on the street. Marcella’s nursing rounds take her in and out of tenements, giving her numerous opportunities to “botanize” from the landings of the stairs: “it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs […] that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district” (Ward [1894] 2002: 341). Valentine’s observations from the stairs of her own building are even more noteworthy, capturing the strangeness of her surroundings: As she climbed the steep, narrow stair, she saw, through the half-open door of the ground floor back, a strange and curious thing. The occupant, an old woman, whom she had not seen before, was solemnly engaged in dancing by herself, to an imaginary audience. She took her petticoats, pirouetted,

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executed unheard of steps, capered and postured, with all the agility and some of the grace of a youthful danseuse. Valentine was thinking of the sewing women; the thing passed before her eyes as she went up the stair; she saw it but took no heed; nor was it till afterward that she remembered it and wondered what this might mean.  (Besant 1886: 136)

The inability to find meaning in this scene marks the pivotal position of the flâneuse, poised as she is on the cusp of modern experience and, more importantly, the ways in which it is seen and re-presented. Writing of Benjamin’s formulation of the flâneur, Graeme Gilloch distinguishes the flâneur as the “figure of the intensification and disintegration of experience in the modern city” (2002: 213). This is precisely the way to characterize Valentine’s odd glimpses, particularly of the older tenants of her building, whose mannerisms imply that they are the dishevelled remnants of people who once lived far different lives among more privileged circumstances.9 The flâneuses periodically experience the threat of the disintegration of their own identity, contemplating, as they must, the presence of their own bodies within a strangely foreign space. Marcella finds that district nursing, unlike the crushing pace of her hospital training, allows her time to contemplate herself, and in one case she takes a moment to be startled by the fact that she is actually present in the scene that she is observing. While watching all night over the sick bed of a poor woman, her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances for pulling the woman through – for it was what a nurse calls “a good case,” one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty – partly on the extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman’s illness; and partly – in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought – on the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother and child!  (Ward [1894] 2002: 342)

Valentine endures a similar thought, and decides to quickly retreat from it. During her one attempt to truly endure “whatever Melenda endures”, she takes up a day’s work stitching buttonholes with Melenda and her friend Lizzie (Meade 1895: 108). Eventually failing quite miserably at it, Valentine is challenged throughout her endeavour to find some way to pacify her mind as it 9 Elizabeth Wilson suggests in The Sphinx in the City that lack of order in urban life might not be as disturbing to the female gaze as to the male. Following this, one way to read these ladies’ experiences and their general comfort level with these odd sorts of moments is to consider that for them, “that invisible city, the ‘second city,’ the underworld or secret labyrinth, instead of being sinister or diseased as in the works of Charles Dickens […] is an Aladdin’s cave of riches” (1991: 8).

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seeks some sort of intellectual outlet while sewing. Not finding much conversation from her work mates, she begins contemplating what exactly it means to live and work as these girls do. She tries to pass the time by “wondering how long life could be endured if she were doomed to spend it among button-holes”. Then she tried to imagine herself “the life-long companion of Melenda, and altogether such a one as Lizzie […] But her imagination failed her, and refused to pretend any such thing, partly because the things worn by poor Lizzie were not nice to look at” (Besant, 1886: 163). One suspects that these ruminations are made even more unpleasant by the fact that Valentine is actually taking the place of a broken down workingclass body, having taken Melenda’s dying friend Lotty to rest in her own pretty room, and setting about doing her share of work. It seems to be one thing to bring herself into contact with these girls, but yet another to truly sympathize with them in the way that lifts her out of her own consciousness. Valentine, along with her fellows who are so very curious about how the poor live, finds it difficult to fully fathom what it would be like for herself to be poor. The philanthropic flâneuse assumed certain positions vis a vis these homes and their inhabitants, and, most importantly, she turned what was an appropriation of that space into a subject position that became as inseparable from the representation of the impoverished domestic space as the flâneur has become from discussions of the representation of the experience of the modern city. In order to enter these homes, these women relied upon the authority their upper-class origins afforded them. Certainly, these visitors and workers among the poor were “protected by class privilege and emboldened by the ethic of charity” (Nord 1995: 209). The gender and class of these ladies gave them the opportunity for a “sympathetic takeover” of the homes that they entered. Relying upon the privileged position Victorian society allowed them as traditional dispensers of charity and visitors of the poor, these ladies often marched without ceremony into a space that was such a source of public interest that it is no stretch to call it the public sphere. Voicing a sense that they are the queens of all they survey, these women often speak in terms of ruling. Hill, for one, characterized the court she “settled” as “a wild, lawless, desolate little kingdom to come to rule over” and she repeatedly uses terms that invest the landlady and rent collector with a sense of near sovereign power (1869: 458). Marcella also thinks in such terms. The flashback Marcella has in the opening chapters of the novel reveals a great sense of self-confidence during her art student days in London, where she is introduced to rent collecting in the East End and socialism by her friends: she had “the chief excitement and motive-power of her new life – not in art, but in the birth of social and philanthropic ardour, the sense of a hitherto unsuspected social

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power” (Ward [1894] 2002: 46–47). Marcella is so intoxicated with the power of persuasion she can have in this sphere that she continues throughout the novel to attempt to exercise that influence, often with disastrous results. There is little feeling of any obstacles to entry, outside of those that require them to leave their own homes, for the homes of the poor are either easily gazed into, or easily entered. There is no sense of a barrier between the private space of the poor and the public space, and there seems to be little concern over the ease with which they might cross the threshold. Without any sense of misgiving, the reader sees Valentine become accustomed to striding into Melenda’s room with little ceremony, despite the fact that Melenda does not welcome her there for quite some time; we see Marcella easily take charge in the homes of the sick, swiftly ordering around husbands and nosy neighbours. Webb declares without irony, About the harmlessness of this intrusion of the relatively well-to-do into the homes of the very poor I had no misgiving; rents had to be collected, and it seemed to me, on balance, advantageous to the tenants of low-class property to have to pay their money to persons of intelligence and goodwill who were able to bring hardships and grievances to the notice of those who had power to mitigate or remedy them.  (Webb [1926] 1971: 266)

While assuredly practical, this sentiment does appear to be ominously selfsatisfied. However, it also shows the further assumption that marks this navigation of space; a presumption not just of authority, knowing best how to put a home, and a city, in order, but also that there could be goodwill, even friendships created beyond the threshold. Indeed, many of these flâneuses are portrayed as craving that friendship, and they walk straight into these people’s homes to get it. Joan Prinsep’s statement of her desire for a real companion is telling here, considering where she finds that friend: “I had an aspiration for a perfect friendship, either with a man or a woman – I did not much care which. I had a vague uneasy wish to rise to a height where I could breathe a sort of spiritual air, but I did not want goodness in the abstract. I was not a scrap religious, although I believed, after a fashion, in eternity” (Meade 1895: 27). As she explains it to the working-class women she befriends, Martha Mace and Lucy Ash, “I have come here to help you and a lot of other girls. I don’t want to preach to you a bit, but I want to show you lots of things that you have never heard of […] I want you to understand that if you are in trouble, I am here to help you – I want to be your sister, in short” (Meade 1895: 134). Valentine’s desire has a more loaded connotation, given her belief that she is indeed Melenda’s sister, but just as Martha Mace stands in the abstract as the working class to Joan’s upper class, so does Valentine’s “sister” Melenda stand to her. Valentine tells her reasons for coming in the form of a fairy tale to the

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crippled Lotty, describing a heroine that “hoped to make her sister love her”; when Lotty, puzzled, asks her why, Valentine answers, “Oh, Lotty, love makes people happy” (Besant 1886: 130). This love will not only make Valentine personally happy, but it might also make England happy, for the mending of the gulf between the classes through personal involvement was presumed to have far-reaching implications. Once they have presumed to cross the threshold, and once they have begun friendships with the working-class women, these ladies begin to make themselves at home by redecorating. Not only do these women clean house, preserving the sanitation of these homes and thereby safeguarding both their health and that of the tenants, but they also begin adding aesthetic touches to both their rooms and the rooms of others. Valentine, Joan, and Marcella are all concerned with adding their personal touch as much for the enjoyment of the recipients of their homemaking as for their own comfort. It is as if they would rather not see those whom they befriend in their “natural” surroundings, as any good “botanizing” flâneur would – they prefer to see them begin to look and live like themselves. For instance, after thoroughly refinishing a good set of rooms for herself, and causing new buildings to be built (called “Joan Mansions”), Joan sets up fashioning the perfect scene of domesticity for Lucy Ash and her rather reluctant husband within one of the apartments in her new building. After having furnished the place lovingly (but with furnishings suitable for Lucy’s class), Joan surveys the scene: “There was a little rug placed in front of the stove. An American rocking-chair, made of plain deal, stood near, and I had insisted on adding a hassock. Lucy could rock herself in that chair while she nursed her baby […]. Oh for the success of this experiment of mine!” (Meade 1895: 238)10 Marcella also makes sure to add details, convenient for her, to her home in Brown’s Buildings, having her room altered so that it connects to Minta’s room next door. Notably, we see her use this innovative reconstruction to more easily call for Minta to fetch her some tea after a long day of nursing. Most drastic is Valentine’s usurping of Melenda’s home. Having thoroughly set her own room apart by careful decoration, Valentine carries off the heart of Melenda’s trio of friends – the crippled girl Lotty to take up her deathbed in Valentine’s own room. She draws Melenda’s other mate Lizzie in through the food that she has to offer around her table, and, upon finally breaking through Melenda’s pride and convincing her to promise to be her sister, Valentine immediately makes her over: 10 The experiment does fail, miserably. Lucy waits quite in vain for her husband to return, and when he doesn’t, she goes out to seek him – murdering him in the street. Luckily for Joan, her Mansions are a success nonetheless.

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Do you think I am going to have my own sister go about in such shocking rags as these any longer? Take off your frock this minute […] Here is one of mine … Do you know, Melenda, you have got much finer hair than most girls? […] What a pity you cut it in the front! You will have to let it grow again.”  (Meade 1895: 362)

Divesting Melenda of the rags that belong to a sweat-shop needlewoman, brushing back the fringe that was the pride of every East End girl, and promptly sending her out and making over her room with curtains and new furniture, “thus was Melenda subdued, dressed, and promoted” (Meade 1895: 365). So subdued, that Melenda no longer has any interest in the amusements of the East End streets, which she has always taken part in after her long days of work. Now when she walks the streets of Hoxton, she is treated as Valentine is – no one chaffs her, no one addresses her impudently, and what is more, “the people seemed not to know her” (Meade 1895: 365). Melenda, it would appear, has become the flâneuse. It seems that Valentine could not stoop to be her real working-class sister, as it turns out Violet was the adopted daughter, so she raised Melenda up to a young lady’s sister, instead. The subtext is, of course, that if these ladies have adequate access to the homes and hearts of their workingclass sisters, they can do nothing short of closing the gulf between the two nations, raise the morality of the working class, and be loved in return. The effect of these narratives is the appropriation of this space for use and fulfilment of the lady who crosses the threshold. Judith Walkowitz locates the significance, the driving force of the considerable power of the female social investigator in the homes of the poor: it is the domestic location of the experience and the gendered sharing of stories (1992: 56). Wolff and others are certainly correct in that the streets were still a questionable location for women, even if I disagree as to the degree to which that problematic nature kept women off them so completely that they could not contribute to the representation of modernity. Indeed, the growing recognition that what was hidden in the slums within the heart of London was part of the “double condition” of the modern metropolis made the private space of the poor a vital element of public discourse: “In short, domestic life headed the national agenda, making valuable the information that women visitors and investigators had to offer and giving these women a context of national debate into which to insert themselves and their writings” (Nord 1995: 214). For that matter, the characterizations within popular novels, such as Besant’s and Meade’s, themselves participated in this public discourse as well. Both for the public and for herself, Webb found the knowledge that she had accumulated, or appropriated, from her time spent in the East End was useful: she gives evidence on her time as a sweat-shop labourer in disguise to a committee in the House of Lords in 1888, and for herself, “The

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outcome of these studies in East End life […] was an attempt […] to diagnose specific social disease, and to suggest how it could be mitigated, and probably overcome” (Webb [1926] 1971: 329). On the basis of her experiences among the London poor ,Webb is able to solidify in the years that follow her position that capitalism would destroy its workers, unless there was an assurance that everyone would be guaranteed the minimum needed to achieve a “Civilized Life” (Webb [1926] 1971: 340). Both Hill and Webb, though sometimes disagreeing over methods, negotiated this space and ended up achieving a great deal professionally through it. Hill spoke frequently about knowledge, and its role as a legitimizing force behind her professional appropriation: “Could anyone, going suddenly among even so small a number as these thirty-four families […] know so accurately as I what kind of assistance would be really helpful, and not corrupting” (1869: 224). Entrance into an important space was the ticket to an intimate and influential knowledge. For these women, as for all, knowledge was power. What was at stake for these philanthropic flâneuses, and what is at stake in registering their movement within the critical discourse of modernity, is nothing less than this: “Since flânerie necessarily involved venturing beyond the physical and psychic boundaries of private space, at stake was access to the modern city, redrawing the boundaries of feminine ‘respectability,’ and reformulating feminine subjectivity” (Iskin 2003: 350). The access these women gained to both the streets around the homes of the poor and the domestic space within those homes themselves, garnered them a privileged knowledge, a base from which they could easily usurp the homes of the poor and the discourse on them from earlier, male social explorers. That knowledge provided these ladies with a position of authority on matters of the impoverished domesticity, so much so that the figures they often assumed became stereotypical and omnipresent in any public discourse on the matter of the urban poor, their home life, their livelihoods, and their habits. In this case, the separation of spheres provided women with a place of authority that legitimated their entry into public space and the discourse of the public sphere.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1888. ‘The Glorified Spinster’ in Macmillan’s Magazine 58: 371–76. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso. Besant, Walter. 1886. Children of Gibeon. New York: A.L. Burt. Dyos, H. J. 1967. ‘The Slums of Victorian London’ in Victorian Studies 11 (1): 5–40.

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Edwards, Percy J. 1898. London County Council: History of London Street Improvements, 1855–1897. London: Truscott and Scott. Gilloch, Graeme. 2002. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Malden, MA: Polity. Greg, W[illiam] R[athbone]. 1862. ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ in National Review 15: 434–60. Hill, Octavia. 1871. ‘Blank Court; or, Landlords and Tenants’ in Macmillan’s Magazine 24: 456–65.  . 1869. ‘Organized Work Among the Poor; Suggestions Founded on Four Years’ Management of a London Court’ in Macmillan’s Magazine 20: 219–26. Hubbard, Louisa M. 1893. ‘Statistics of Women’s Work’ in Burdett-Coutts, [Angela] (ed.) Women’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women by Eminent Writers. London: Sampson Low, Marston. Iskin, Ruth E. 2003. ‘The Pan-European Flâneuse in Fin-de-Siecle Posters: Advertising Modern Women in the City’ in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25: 333–56. Jones, Gareth Stedman. [1971] 1984. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian London. New York: Pantheon. Keating, P. J. 1971. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge. Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meade, L. T. 1895. A Princess of the Gutter. London: Wells Gardner, Darton. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Palmer, Alan. 2000. The East End: Four Centuries of London Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vicinus, Martha. 1985. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ward, Mary Augusta. [1894] 2002. Marcella (ed. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Miller). Ontario, Canada: Broadview. Webb, Beatrice. 1982. The Diary of Beatrice Webb (ed. Norman and Jeane Mackenzie). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.  . My Apprenticeship. [1926] 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, Raymond. [1973] 1975. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1992. ‘The Invisible Flâneur’ in New Left Review 191: 90–110.  . 1991. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wolff, Janet. 2003. ‘Gender and the Haunting of Cities: Or, the Retirement of the Flâneur’ in AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 68–85.  . 1990. ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press: 34–50.

Women on Display

“The Abuse of Visibility”: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction Anna Despotopoulou abstract This chapter considers the domestic space of the late Victorian drawing-room as a locus of visibility and ultimately publicity for female characters in two novels by George Eliot and Henry James, Daniel Deronda and The Wings of the Dove. In his examination of the historical development and transformation of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas has shown that from the seventeenth century onwards the domestic space of the family changed into a setting with public function, as private individuals gathered for social purposes. In the late nineteenth century this transformation affected the way the female consciousness appropriated domestic settings, thus disturbing patriarchal beliefs concerning a woman’s role in the house. As publicity impinged on the private space of the family house, the marketplace inflicted its rules of transaction, production, and display on the enclosed, habitable space that it invaded, assigning to women a public role. By employing diction related to the public sphere when assessing the female characters’ inner concerns, Eliot and James exhibit their anxiety about the abuse of privacy and the redefinition of the female self in relation to commodities. Keywords: Victorian, woman, publicity, domesticity, privacy, consumerism, commodity, George Eliot, Henry James, Jürgen Habermas.

Recent studies of women and Victorian culture have frequently focused either on woman as consumer or worker in the public sphere, on her role and representation within the commercial world, or on her position within the private sphere, as she appropriates, or not, male definitions and expectations pertaining to her domestication. In accordance with recent examinations of the public-private categories, my premise, however, is that in the late nineteenth century there is no clear-cut separation between the two spheres. As Chase and Levenson have persuasively argued in Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family, private life increasingly became public in the form of a spectacular story, an evolving drama often submitted to the most brutal exposure, an exposure which, on the one hand, threatened the notion of domestic bliss that permeated

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the ideology of gendered, separate spheres and, on the other, brought about a more frantic attempt to guard the home against such publicization (Chase and Levenson 2000).1 Considering the thin line between public and private in late Victorian times and the precarious sense of privacy generated in domestic space, it seems imperative to examine the effect of this reconfiguration of boundaries on women, who have always been identified with and relegated to the domestic sphere of the home. How do women negotiate the mingling of private self and publicity within the interior space of the home? After all, the living room, the space of domestic confinement for women was, according to nineteenth century socio-historical texts, shrinking or even disappearing, giving its place to the salon or the drawing-room, the space intended for the reception of the public, a space of display, serving society rather than the family.2 In his seminal conceptualization of the public and private spheres, Habermas defines the private sphere as consisting partly of private economic enterprise and partly of what he classifies as the intimate sphere, the family circle. “In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family”, Habermas maintains, “privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private sphere of their economic activity – as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another” (1991: 48). Nevertheless, from the eighteenth century onwards, this pure humanity that was assumed to determine the nature of close relationships was an illusory concept in the sense that subjectivity could not exist independently of economic definitions, and living, even in the most private spaces of the home, was constantly, as Habermas argues, “oriented to an audience” (1991: 49). Therefore, even the intimate sphere was “profoundly caught up in the requirements of the market”, which conditioned and regulated the existence and function of the overall private sphere, as individuals were both privatized human beings but also owners of 1 This article grew out of a paper I delivered at the ESSE Zaragoza conference 2004. I would like to thank the University of Athens, which, through the funding program “Kapodistrias”, generously financed my participation in that conference. In the last few years numerous studies have examined and destabilized the dichotomy between private and public from sociological and feminist perspectives. See Scott and Keates (eds) 2004, Richter 2005, Landes 2003, Davidoff 2003, Piepmeier 2006, and Gal 2002. 2 In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas uses G. M. Trevelyan’s analysis of the changes in seventeenth century town-house architecture, in English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria, and W. H. Riehl’s 1889 examination of family life, in Die Familie, to show how the “process of privatization […] made the house more of a home for each individual, but left less room for the family as a whole […] Festivities for the whole house gave way to social evenings” (Habermas 1991: 44, 45).

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goods, “dependent on the sphere of labor and of commodity exchange” (Habermas 1991: 55, 46). In claiming that “as a privatized individual, the bourgeois was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others, i.e. bourgeois and homme” (1991: 55), Habermas literally excludes women from the experience of privatization, since women could be neither owners of goods and persons, nor hommes. Interestingly, Habermas refers to the growing role of women in the regulation of public opinion in the literary public sphere, but neglects to analyze how the diptych of bourgeois and homme is negotiated within the female psyche in private life. Indeed the literary public scene was consistently occupied by women writers, whose financial interests matched those of men. Evidence has shown that George Eliot, for example, was as interested in her financial security ensuing from multiple sales of her novels as in the quality of her work. Linking quality with quantity, she argued that “It is in the highest sense lawful for [a writer] to get as good a price as he honourably can for the best work he is capable of ” (qtd. in Lovell 1987: 80). The literary career was the only economic enterprise that enabled women to take an active role in production; however, Eliot’s comment, above, employing the masculine as a collective pronoun referring to authors in general, as well as her male pseudonym, confirm the masculinization of womanhood in the public sphere of production. In other words, there is no evidence that, despite the prominence of women writers in the nineteenth century, the literary public sphere was in any sense feminine. As Kathryn Shevelow has argued, “such authorization within writing not only does not contradict women’s political powerlessness but actually reinforces it. It is predicated upon the cultural reaffirmation of a conception of feminine values that, as the product of a patriarchal ideology, gives women a kind of literary visibility, a place in print culture, but a place defined within the terms of that ideology” (1990: 14). Apart from pronouncing that women were dependent on the male head of the family, Habermas does not analyze the particular effect of the market on the subjectivity of the female participants of the domestic sphere, an effect that seems crucial to any consideration of women’s appropriation of private space. Habermas contends that “the line between private and public sphere extended right through the home. The privatized individuals stepped out of the intimacy of their living rooms into the public sphere of the salon” (1991: 45).3 Yet this physical stepping out from one space to the other suggests a more 3 As the term “public” has been used lately to denote many and disparate kinds of social experience, in the course of this essay I will use the term “public sphere” not in the strict Habermasian sense. By “public” and “public sphere” I will refer to all relations existing outside the domestic sphere, market relations being a constituent of such public life.

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implicit change on the level of consciousness as it requires that men and women automatically step into a role exhibiting appropriate social behaviour. Women’s role-playing was bound not only by topographical binaries (the family-room/ the drawing-room, the house/the city) but also by age. The Victorian period bore witness to numerous debates among women about the appropriate age at which girls should be launched in society.4 The phrase used to indicate a woman’s formal entry in society was since the 1780s, according to the OED5, “to come out”; the preposition of place – out –however, was not a topographical marker, since “out” meant the drawing-room as much as the city. While the permeability of boundaries and the arguments about socialization never seemed to bother men who were from birth “out” – entitled to exist and function in the public sphere – the consciousness of women was affected in negative ways by the encroachment of the public on the private. In other words, while visibility on the one hand seemed to empower women by facilitating and securing their more active participation in the public sphere, it was, on the other hand, quite entrapping, as it became an unwanted side-effect of this participation. The abuse of visibility also meant the abuse of privacy.6 The gendered separation of spheres has been repeatedly argued in older and recent Victorian studies, which have examined the relegation of women to the domestic space of the home. In her survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century conduct books, Nancy Armstrong has brilliantly demonstrated how such discourses served to create an ideology of structured difference between the men who “accumulate,” i.e. work in the public sphere, produce, and provide for their families, and women who “regulate,” i.e. control and suppress their desires and appearance within the home (Armstrong 1987: 80–81). Nevertheless, while the role of women was considered fixed and controllable, the construction of domestic space itself in theoretical and literary texts was ambiguous, often presenting conflicting attitudes towards its essence and function. Ruskin’s famous description of domestic space (1865), which identified the home with a “place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, 4 In her article “The New Woman”, the English writer Ouida reacted to various articles by women who encouraged mothers to launch their daughters in public life (Ouida 1894: 610–19). See, for example, Crackanthorpe 1894: 23–31. 5 The Oxford English Dictionary Online (a compilation of the 2nd Edition and the New Edition in progress) pinpoints a passage from Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) as containing the first recorded occurrence of the phrase. 6 I have borrowed the phrase “abuse of visibility” from Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, where, writing about one of his most “public” women, Ida Farange, in 1897, the author marks that she produced on people who frequently ran into her “the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of visibility” because, apparently, “she was always out” (James [1908] 1998: 16).

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and division”, was often contradicted by art and fiction which, inspired by reallife cases, implicitly or even explicitly concerned itself with domestic threat and violence, portraying the home as the locus of insecurity. Melissa Valiska Gregory has recently argued that novels like those of Henry James “explore the failure of the Victorian domestic ideal” through the representation of “dynamics of abuse and oppression” in “the most outwardly civilized domestic relationships” (2004: 148). As Elaine Showalter says, “Ruskin makes it clear that the Home is not a concrete place, with walls and a roof, but a mystical projection of the female psyche, something a woman generates through her femaleness alone” (1977: 184). However, Ruskin’s notion of femaleness, which consists of enduring incorruptible goodness, instinctive, infallible wisdom, and self renunciation (Ruskin, 1865), was but a fiction, a projection of male desires, which hardly existed in reality. Ruskin constructs a version of feminine subjectivity which is supposed to remain untouched by socio-economic change and which is heroically resistant to the difficulties of married life – a fantasy which had eclipsed even from the writings of earlier male Victorian authors like Dickens. Therefore, since there is a substantial difference between the subjectivity of women constructed by men and that experienced or represented covertly or overtly by women themselves, one can no longer view the private, domestic space as a utopia, a safe haven which excluded, as Ruskin maintained, the outer world. Rather than being “a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods” (Ruskin 1865), the home is, as Chase and Levenson argue, “an uneasy cauldron of bliss” (2000: 14). In other words, one cannot ignore the socio-historical forces which affected women’s appropriation of private space. After all, as Chase and Levenson declare, “A house remains an object in social space, inevitably exposed to the winds of public life, and walls designed to keep inside and outside apart only sealed them in intimate antagonism” (2000: 155). Concern about the effect of the market is abundant in the Victorian novel. Gordon Bigelow has shown that Dickens’s Bleak House “tries to understand the nature of value – economic, linguistic, human –­ under the conditions of a seemingly infinite market exchange” (2000: 591). Bigelow argues that feminine domesticity, represented through the character of Esther, is offered as the stabilizing alternative to the terrors of the marketplace, while, at the same time, Dickens’s novel repeatedly employs metaphors of domesticity in relation to banking in order to familiarize the market (2000: 608, 610). Although Bigelow is primarily interested in showing the intrusion of inner on outer, private on public, rather than the other way round, in his analysis of Esther, he detects Dickens’s ambiguous treatment of domestic subjectivity by claiming that “the problem of value in the market [… is] projected back into the subject” (2000: 611). Bigelow’s study suggests that despite the separation between private and

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public spheres, the discourse used in nineteenth century economic and literary texts reveals cross-fertilization between home and market which taints the essential value of both. In this sense, if the market defines female subjectivity, determining woman’s domesticity in terms of economic value, one can no longer view woman merely as the agent of good housekeeping, and the middle-class home can no longer be regarded as an isolated utopia, nor, contrary to what Bigelow says about Dickens, as the means of limiting “the threat of wandering female desire” (Bigelow 2000: 603). As a matter of fact later Victorian novels treat the home as an insecure enclosure, where female desire very often runs loose. George Eliot and Henry James, for example, present the female consciousness as challenging established, idealized notions of a woman’s domesticity, by either having unconsciously appropriated the publicity that invaded her space, or consciously using it to her social and economic advantage. In order to trace the very thin line between private and public, between domestic space and public function, I have chosen two novels featuring women with a strong public presence, Daniel Deronda and The Wings of the Dove, which, examined in comparison, demonstrate a development in woman’s perception of private space. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot reveals most prominently her anxiety about the permeability of feminine space and its effects on subjectivity, suggesting the impossibility of identifying the home with privacy for women. In other words, in Eliot such privacy can only exist in the non-physical space of subjectivity, since the home is never secure and impenetrable. It is perhaps for this reason that from the start, Eliot plunges Gwendolen Harleth to the unstable predicament of homelessness, making her a victim of economic circumstances; Gwendolen has to abandon a home which, like her previous abodes, has been ephemeral. Rather than supporting her subjectivity with “a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection and kindly acquaintance”, Eliot makes Gwendolen a citizen of the world (Eliot [1876] 1995: 22), thus highlighting her undomestic upbringing. Contrary to the domestic ideal of female invisibility, outlined in the conduct manuals researched by Nancy Armstrong (1987: 81), Gwendolen Harleth, from a very young age thrives in self-display, being accustomed to having her beauty acknowledged and placed prominently in both private and public spaces. At school, for example, “on all occasions of display she had been put foremost” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 23), a fact which has promoted her self-confidence, her self image, and her vanity, betrayed in her frequent gazing at and admiring or even kissing her reflection in the mirror. In public spaces, like the casino or the open field where she is riding or shooting arrows, Gwendolen craves visibility. She is always aware of being looked at and attracts attention with her aloofness and disdainful behaviour, which provokes curiosity by being so conspicuously different from other women’s

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public manner which reveals more overtly their dependence on the gaze of men. Gwendolen initially appears subversive in the sense that she attempts, through self-fashioning, to control the image that she projects and the view that is received by her audience. However, in such scenes, Eliot often undermines her control by using the framing device of the picture. For instance, she will write: “[Gwendolen] was the central object of that pretty picture, and every one present must gaze at her” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 107). The image suggests that, despite Gwendolen’s prominence in the public sphere, her freedom is contained by the framework of patriarchy which requires women to perform as actresses for male spectators. Gwendolen’s standoffish behaviour and coquettish appearance constitute her “masquerade” (to use Mary Ann Doane’s sense of the term [Doane 1982: 74–87]), her effort to negotiate a distance between herself and the stereotype of woman as object. Yet this role-playing, while successfully concealing certain unrepresentable aspects of Gwendolen’s character, does not free her from objectification, which is the inevitable outcome of women’s social performance. Gwendolen’s theatrical manners are exhibited not only in public but also in domestic spaces where her audience is limited. When she arrives at Offendene she immediately strikes poses as Saint Cecilia next to an organ for the benefit of familiar spectators: family members and servants. Gwendolen’s instinctive theatricality suggests that the rise of visibility conditioned women to consider themselves primarily commodities for display. Mrs. Davilow’s exclamation after her daughter’s private performance, “A charming picture, my dear!” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 27), underlines the point that femininity is defined as something fixed and viewable, limited by ideological frames which enclose it. Female subjectivity is thus rendered confused and unable to distinguish between private feeling and public appearance. This disorientation about the bounds of self becomes most obvious during the two scenes in which Gwendolen is unpleasantly surprised by the sudden opening of the secret panel containing the macabre picture of a dead face. In both instances Gwendolen betrays genuine terror, as her acting is interrupted by an intrusion of subjectivity, resulting in her instinctive slipping out of her coquettish role. However, as soon as she recovers her self-control, in the second instance, she wishes her real terror to be taken for good acting (Eliot [1876] 1995: 62), a sample of her theatrical talent, rather than an exposure of her dark uncontrollable unconscious. Even in her most subjective moments, such as this, Gwendolen is thinking of her public projection, devising a new gothic role, that of a damsel in distress, an artful cover up for her unfortunate slip. In other words, objectification is preferable to accessibility. Gwendolen strives to keep her subjectivity unknowable; yet, at the same time, this subjectivity seems hidden even from Gwendolen herself, as visibility

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has modified the way in which women view themselves. To account for this loss or suppression of subjectivity, which occurs at the same time as the loss of privacy, I would like to refer to the early argument by Joan Riviere in “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, an article reviewed and revised by Doane. After explaining her premise that women flaunt an exaggerated form of femininity to hide elements of selfhood that they want to keep secret, Riviere feels compelled to “define womanliness” or to “draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade”. But she finds this impossible: “My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing” (Riviere 1929). With her presentation of Gwendolen, Eliot suggests this exact conflation between subject and mask, a conflation that is the result of the rise of spectacle in Victorian society and of the impingement of publicity on the private spaces which were supposed to harness subjectivity. As a matter of fact, female conduct book writers like Sarah Stickney Ellis use the metaphor of the theatre to describe not only the flaunting of womanliness in public, but also women’s domestic profile (Stickney Ellis 1842: 269) since even in the home, women would assume poses to run the household, manipulate their husbands, or simply survive in an unstable and vulnerable domestic environment. Most significantly, as Judith Rosen argues in her analysis of Geraldine Jewsbury, Stickney Ellis “and other domestic writers describe femininity as a carefully disciplined performance, one that sets ‘self ’ aside to represent in the protected realm of the home those communal values and truths endangered by the selfish competition of the marketplace” (Rosen 1996: 18). The anxiety of performance, described by Rosen as “domestic theatricality”, renders femininity precarious as her subjectivity ends up being veiled even from herself. A woman’s domestic profile is thus subject to the outcome of a constant battle between selfishness and selflessness, visibility and invisibility. In Eliot, it is only the altruistic characters like Dorothea in Middlemarch, who are able to make invisibility into a powerful weapon in their secret battle with men. Gwendolen’s confusion about the revised position of the woman in the home is betrayed by the contradictory way she appears to handle agency. Her strong sense of independence is contrasted to and deflated by her enslavement to a desire for being looked at. Focused on controlling her appearance, her agency seems non-essential. She is a subject with an only wish to become an object. Her spirit of independence operates within the borders of the sphere of feminine activity. In an astonishingly perceptive comment about the position of women, she says, We women can’t go in search of adventures – to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay

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where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers to look pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining.  (Eliot [1876] 1995: 135)

Her comment suggests that while men’s subjectivities are formed by the unknown and their experience is unpredictable, feminine development is controlled and knowable, insular and static. Gwendolen assumes the masquerade to achieve self possession and construct a version of her self that defies predictability. However, although she effectively manages her own appearance, she cannot control the effect she has on Grandcourt, who objectifies her anyway. George Eliot makes Gwendolen’s agency appear superficial but also futile. Her remark about women foreshadows the decorative role she will acquire after her marriage, as well as suggesting that all agency is attributed to men, while women exist merely to be visible in the public or private sphere, as objects of the gaze. Gwendolen’s plight illustrates the insight of her author, who as a prominent female writer had herself experienced the difficulties of women acquiring agency in the public sphere, outside the confines of domesticity. Gwendolen’s tragedy arises from her gradual understanding that as a woman she completely lacks self possession and control of her image. Lured by the publicity of the home and confirming that domestic space is not a locus of privatization for women, Gwendolen decides to marry for two notably undomestic reasons: firstly in order to secure her mother’s finances and secondly to enlarge her opportunities for social visibility. Interpreting marriage with characteristic lack of sentimentality, she calls it “social promotion” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 39). Therefore, publicity challenges and ultimately changes not only the meaning of the home as a place of domestic privacy but also the subjectivity of a woman, who having no longer such a domestic ideal to identify with becomes, similarly, permeable by the pragmatic and economic logic of the public sphere. Gwendolen’s identity is defined by market relations, even though, according to her mother, she knows nothing of business, nor could she ever understand it (Eliot [1876] 1995: 15). She lives by its rules, especially in the way she takes risks both at the roulette table and in her life decisions; her marriage, for example, is her “last great gambling loss” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 441). George Eliot emphasizes Gwendolen’s commodification in the first lines of the novel, where Deronda gazes at her trying to fit her into the superficial categories of “beautiful or not beautiful” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 7), but also throughout the period before her marriage during which she bargains and is bargained for. Gwendolen has assimilated the principles of the market society, which in the words of Agnew include “the habit of display” and “the inclination to theatricality” (Agnew 1983: 76), to such an extent that until her marriage to Grandcourt, unable to view her experience as private, she considers it “an absorbing show”: “Was not her

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hurrying life of the last three months a show, in which her consciousness was a wondering spectator? After the half-wilful excitement of the day, a numbness had come over her personality” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 357). Gwendolen’s numbness represents her mental passivity resulting from her performance-like life and her failure to view herself as a private subject. Moreover, her numbness refers to her commodified existence, which renders her incapable of expressing personal desire; instead she is an object of desire, reproducible, like other dispensable commodities. After her first kiss with Grandcourt, she throws herself into a chair and, significantly, “saw herself repeated in glass panels” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 358) (my emphasis), the repetition conveying not only, as Evelyn Ender has argued, a “specular division” (she sees herself), suggestive of hysteria, an “inner psychical division” (Ender 1995: 257), but also her lack of individuality and uniqueness. Her self image, so cherished in the past, through its involuntary repetition now loses its distinctiveness. This incident, immediately preceding Gwendolen’s receipt of Lydia Glasher’s letter, serves to imply that Gwendolen and Lydia are different versions of the same thing: women who, in Grandcourt’s mind, are reproducible and therefore common and interchangeable. Theatricality is a threat not only to women’s subjectivity but also to men’s monopoly of the public sphere. In order to stress the impossible position of a woman who, having forfeited her privacy, is forced into a role, yet not allowed to enter the public arena, Eliot has the three main male characters (Grandcourt, Klesmer, and even the kind Deronda) try to suppress women’s prominence or appearance on the stage. Detesting Gwendolen’s outspokenness, Grandcourt deems any kind of female public display madness or hysteria. He tells both Lydia and Gwendolen that public demonstration (in case they complained about their victimization) and whimsical behaviour are like playing the role of the mad woman in a drama (Eliot [1876] 1995: 350, 446); madness, of course, being the only plausible explanation for a woman’s independent action or agency. Similarly Klesmer and Deronda suppress Gwendolen’s and Mirah’s public appearances. Klesmer delineates the gruesome details of an actress’s way of life to Gwendolen, discouraging her from starting a career on the public stage, and in the case of Mirah, he deems her good enough for the publicity of the London drawing-rooms but not for the public sphere. George Eliot devises parallel plots in the case of Gwendolen, Mirah, and the Alcharisi, as regards their aspired or achieved career on the stage, in order to suggest the threat that they pose to the patriarchal structure of the public sphere. Women are consistently discouraged from appearing and making money in the market society. The Alcharisi is the only one who has made it as a public performer, but in the end admits that she had to forfeit her feminine self in order to achieve her goals.

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Mirah represents the ideal of domesticity because she is more controllable than Gwendolen. Having suffered from having been thrown against her will on the stage from an early age, Mirah detests the public sphere and considers herself unsuitable for it, a fact confirmed by Klesmer: “I would not further your singing in any larger space than a private drawing-room” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 484, 485). With underlying irony, Eliot conveys Mirah’s integration into the perfect domesticity of the Meyricks in the beginning of chapter 39, where Kate is drawing, the other girls are occupied with a “pièce de résistance” embroidery, and Mirah is reading aloud an essay by Elia which produces blank smiles, as opposed to the “loftier spheres” to which their minds are called when they hear an unusual knocking at the door. Eliot’s emphasis on the socializing effect of the knock, as it “magnif[ied] the sense of social existence in a region where the most enlivening signals are usually those of the muffin-man” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 481), suggests that the Meyrick all-woman household is cut off from the outer world of the public sphere, which, even in the form of a muffin man, is more enlivening than the domestication that these women seem to enjoy. Yet, despite her obedience, Mirah objects to the submission of the self in love or marriage. Contradicting the moral lesson of the Jewish parable narrated by Mordecai about the Jewish maiden who changed places with another woman who was sentenced to death so that the latter would find happiness with the man who loved her (and who was loved by the sacrificing woman), Mirah believes that the sacrifice was motivated by selfishness rather than “surpassing love, that loses self in the object of love”: “It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that made her die […] The Jewish girl must have had jealousy in her heart, and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king’s mind. That is what she would die for” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 735). Mirah’s interpretation of the story attributes self-serving agency to a woman’s actions and a will for victory and prominence that Mordecai, but also Deronda in his sessions with Gwendolen, have tried to suppress. The contrasting views about a woman’s disposition, which in Mordecai’s mind tends naturally towards invisibility and renunciation and in Mirah’s towards selfish fulfilment, constitute one of the main conflicts in the novel. Gwendolen’s vanities and selfish ambitions for public display, professionally and non-professionally, threaten the ideal, albeit unrealistic, image of the invisible domesticated woman, and therefore her subsequent submission is more forceful and consequently more painful. Gwendolen is obliged to submit not only by Grandcourt, who thwarts her love of herself, but also by Deronda who, without violence but with equal force, applies his philosophical and almost religious wisdom in order to make her feel her smallness and ultimately her invisibility in the context of a wider world: “she felt herself reduced to a

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mere speck” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 803). In the latter part of the novel Gwendolen denies acting in both the private and the public sphere. If before her marriage her agency was limited to striking poses which falsely promoted her self-image while in reality making her the curious object of the male gaze (Grandcourt, Deronda, and Klesmer are all depicted objectifying her with their gaze), after her marriage her enjoyment in being looked at is diminished. She avoids public display, she refuses to sing –“I shall never sing again” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 411) – and, worst of all, she loses all sense of personal worth, which is evident in her avoidance of the mirror. Grandcourt represents that kind of masculine authority, which, feeling threatened by the prominent public image of his female property, imposes on her domestic value, deeming her insignificant and not worthy of public notice. He is often depicted controlling her external appearance, dictating even the clothes and jewellery that she wears. Her “masquerade”, therefore, is no longer a means of empowerment but a tool of subjection in the hands of Grandcourt. Confused again, but this time by the privacy that the pain of revelation has inflicted on her experience, as she has to suffer on her own, Gwendolen initially seeks comfort in her previous public self, which flourished in the context of social occasions and consumerism. However, conscious of the trap that her passion for visibility threw her into, she now rejects gambling, shopping, and flirting. With insight into her plight, she acknowledges that “the admiring male […] at present seemed rather detestable”, and that the drawing-room in which she used to thrive through self-display has now become a “gilded prison” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 429, 590). Gwendolen, in other words, recognizes the objectification that she unknowingly inflicted on herself with her acting. As Mirah says, when comparing emotions acted on stage with true feeling, “Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within”, suggesting the incompatibility between outer and inner (Eliot [1876] 1995: 651). Exploring her consciousness with more consistent thinking, Gwendolen realizes that female subjectivity can exist as separate from men only via invisibility. Retreat to the non-physical space of subjectivity requires a similar retreat from the publicity of the drawing-room. By presenting the diverse but still confining effect of the intimate sphere in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot affirms that the home is a controllable space which gives women only a false idea of independent agency, since their visibility is for the benefit of men. As a modified kind of interior space, the salon or drawing-room puts woman’s subjectivity at risk, because it either imprisons her within the domestic duties imposed by men or makes her a willing item of display, an actress, who, nevertheless, does not get to experience the public sphere, but is obliged to act in drawing-rooms, appropriated and controlled by the men who dominate these private settings. In other words, although women

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inhabit those domestic spaces which represent the ideal of privacy, wholeness, and impermeability in Victorian society, an ideal that reflected the Victorian appropriation of individualism, they are deprived of the benefits of this privatized structure.7 Lacking self-possession, these women are depicted as also lacking self-consciousness. Self-knowledge and self-amelioration are shown as the outcome of male influence, in the case of both Gwendolen and Mirah, whose subjectivity is greatly affected by the Victorian conduct book ideals of domestication, regulation, and self-effacement. Eliot sees Gwendolen’s transformation as possible only through self-repression, the result of her association with Deronda, who helps her understand the error of her ways: “There was not the faintest touch of coquetry in the attitude of her mind towards [Deronda …] in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 415). Deronda affects Gwendolen’s subjectivity, imposing on her view of herself male expectations about a woman’s supposed sacrificial tendencies. Gwendolen’s “education” reflects the gradual shift in the way women were perceived, from dazzling, good-for-nothing creatures, to more interiorized women. Nevertheless, her evolving subjectivity is still the product of male expectation, consisting, in Armstrong’s words, of “the peculiar combination of invisibility and vigilance”, the “principle of domestic economy” (1987: 80, 81).8 With her presentation of Gwendolen’s development, Eliot seems to be hinting at the negative effects of women’s indiscriminate emergence in the public sphere, implying that women often want to be in the public eye for the wrong reasons. By presenting Gwendolen as misusing the power of visibility, which ultimately turns her into a victim, Eliot, in her 1876 novel, anticipates the later debates among women in the 1890s press. In 1894 the periodicals The North American Review and The Nineteenth Century ran several articles by feminist and anti-feminist British writers, which argued for and against women’s active participation in the public sphere. While Sarah Grand, author of the New Woman novel, The Heavenly Twins, encouraged women to reject the “Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere” dogma and venture out into the realm that had been forbidden to them (Grand 1894: 271), Ouida, another British writer, perceived woman’s frequent abuse of the power of publicity, attributing it to 7 Helena Michie has shown that the “bourgeois body” was modeled after classical standards, which emphasized its wholeness, impenetrability, and invulnerability, all of which were in tune with Victorian ideals of individualism, and which were mirrored in the privatized structure of the middle-class home (Michie 1999: 408–09). 8 Armstrong has shown that conduct books initiated this “cultural change from an earlier form of power based on sumptuary display [of women] to a modern form that works through the production of [female] subjectivity,” where subjectivity consists of “the peculiar combination of invisibility and vigilance”, the “principle of domestic economy” (1987: 80, 81).

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“her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge” and “her over-weening estimate of her own value” (Ouida 1894: 615). Although Ouida’s article negatively levels out all women with a prominent public presence, diminishing the significance of the suffrage movement, it nevertheless offers significant insight into the threat of publicity to the subjectivity of women which was increasingly becoming permeable. Her belief that women’s new preference for the public sphere leaves “The immense area which lies open to [a woman] in private life […] almost entirely uncultivated” (Ouida 1894: 614), requires investigation because it is possible that the private life that Ouida writes about no longer existed. Novels like Daniel Deronda depict the difficulty women had in maintaining such a private life. Ouida concludes her article vehemently by asserting that “so long as [woman] shows herself as she does at present without scruple at every brutal and debasing spectacle which is considered fashionable; so long as she understands nothing of the beauty of meditation, of solitude, of Nature; […] she has no possible title or capacity to demand the place or the privilege of man” (Ouida 1894: 619). Despite the backwardness of her argument, she successfully makes a case against those women who have forfeited feminine subjectivity for the sake of visibility, a visibility which, as we have seen in the case of Daniel Deronda, has turned Gwendolen from subject to object. In her novel Eliot seems to be predicting the effects of women’s misunderstanding of publicity and punishes her protagonist for misusing her looks, by making her an object of the male gaze right from the start and pushing her to the side. It is under Deronda’s influence that she starts taking herself seriously as a private individual rather than an actress. However, the ending is bleak for Gwendolen, whose last appearance in the penultimate chapter is marked by her piercing shrieks and a not very convincing belief, repeated several times, “I shall live” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 807). One wonders at the kind of life in store for Gwendolen, safely enclosed as she is in the domestic sphere with her mother as companion. Eliot is hard on her protagonist when she has her write in her last letter to Deronda, “I do not yet see how [I may live to be one of the best women], but you know better than I” (Eliot [1876] 1995: 810), suggesting the inability of women to comprehend and adopt male expectations of female excellence. Why should she, after all? Nevertheless, in this novel, Eliot does not make her heroine able to transcend the limitations and vanities which are the outcome of this loss of privacy. A subject only when she denounces visibility and realizes her lack of independent agency, Gwendolen, thus, could not have figured in the title of Eliot’s novel. The Wings of the Dove, first published twenty six years after Daniel Deronda, demonstrates a development in the way women perceived and adjusted to the reconfiguration of boundaries between private and public. In an earlier study

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I have shown how James’s male and female characters, in an effort to retrieve privacy, reverse the function of interiors and exteriors, treating the outdoors as private, since, paradoxically, it diminishes the possibilities of being seen, and the indoors as a penetrable space subject to display and visibility (Despotopoulou, 2002). What are the implications, however, of this problematic fluidity of privacy and publicity within domestic space for women in James’s late novels? Like Daniel Deronda, The Wings deals with women’s diverse appropriation of private space constructing two versions of womanhood: the woman predator, whose consciousness is completely taken over by the logic of the market, and the more interiorized woman, whose sensitivity makes her unable to survive the attacks from without. Mrs. Lowder is primarily the “lioness” whose predatory moves Kate Croy gradually learns to simulate. In representing the former’s “own room” as a public space, “her office, her counting-house, her battlefield, her especial scene … of action,” “a guard-house or a toll-gate” (James [1902] 1971: 23), James points at the surrender of privacy to publicity and at the invasion of the home by public sphere activities. In her personal relationships, Mrs. Lowder uses people as capital. Contrary to Ruskin’s belief in woman’s role as protector of domestic tranquility, an assignment which, as Armstrong has shown, gave her the role of “supervision”, i.e. “authority over the field of domestic objects and personnel” (Armstrong 1987: 81), Maud Lowder’s involvement with the domestic economy of her own household is depicted as threatening. In his recent study of the Victorian parlour, Thad Logan has shown that the reception areas of the home were also seen as “the cave, the den, the lair of woman”, the diction suggesting the disconcerting feeling aroused in men by women’s domestic power: “The notion of home as a frightening place, in which identity was threatened as well as nurtured, and in which the power of women was not guaranteed to be beneficently exercised, runs counter to the idealized home of Victorian popular culture” (Logan 2001: 224, 227). Maud Lowder’s mercenary temperament as well as her comfortable entanglement with the market – she is called “Britannia of the Market Place” (James [1902] 1971: 23) – are indeed a far cry from the idealized version of the Victorian angel in the house. The Wings of the Dove shows how this less than beneficent power affects the subjectivity of Milly Theale, but also of Merton Densher, who, unlike the male characters in Eliot, is incapable of diminishing the threat posed by women’s abuse of visibility. At Lancaster Gate and other salons, he feels like being “in the cage of the lioness without his whip”, and womanhood seems to him “quite the largest possibly quantity to deal with” (James [1902] 1971: 54). Unable to reconcile privacy and publicity, Milly and Densher have to bear the anguish resulting from their utopian effort to keep the two spheres separate in an age of ruthless philistinism.

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Despite her abhorrence of visibility, Milly has to participate as an actress in the stage-like performances taking place continuously within the houses that she frequents. In other words, both female protagonists adopt theatrical techniques in order to benefit from the possibilities of socialization offered by the no longer domestic function of the home. In the Venetian part of the novel, James employs metaphors from the theatre to emphasize this performativity that becomes an essential element of, not only social, but also intimate interaction. The relationship between Milly and Kate is played out as if in a “dim scene of a Maeterlinck play” (James [1902] 1971: 287), and their acting is aided by figurative masks which they put on and take off during conversation: They flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been suspected the greatest reality in the business […] It was when they called each other’s attention to their ceasing to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in the air.  (James [1902] 1971: 286)

Both women have appropriated the masquerade as a means of protection as well as attack. But while for Kate the mask has become one with her character, as acting determines her consciousness of self and is not just a means of social interaction, Milly strives hard to avoid the conflation between exterior and interior. For Kate, as Densher acknowledges, even the most intimate erotic moments are a show, as every moment in her life is evaluated according to its measure of visibility. Her inability to view enclosed settings as unaffected by public function, is revealed in the first chapter, where, contemplating her father’s squalid home she notes that houses “constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies” (James [1902] 1971: 5). Even when alone, her thoughts are on the social projection of her solitude. Her private grief for the loss of her mother, for example, becomes, in her mind, a public spectacle, an opportunity for appropriate social behaviour (James [1902] 1971: 23). On the other hand, Milly feels restricted by the masquerade in which she reluctantly takes part, as, for example, in the scene at the National Gallery where she assumes her longforgotten and unused role of the spontaneous and even comic American girl in order to overcome her embarrassment and conceal the depth of her knowledge of the relationship between Kate and Densher (James [1902] 1971: 192). Milly tries to physically separate privacy from publicity creating a space for her subjectivity. In London and Matcham, initially, she is affronted by the publicity to which she is subjected, firstly as a spectacle in the London salons and secondly as a Bronzino lookalike, a face up for public scrutiny, for examination and definition. Milly is forced to acknowledge that subjectivity is a social

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construction, permeable by the determining force of public visibility and social worth. Even flânerie, engaging in city life through spectatorship, to which she resorts to avoid the stifling theatrical enclosures, is doomed as it is quickly checked and turned into an opportunity for men to gaze at women. In Venice, however, although she cannot avoid the social identity projected on her by the world – after all, “the girl couldn’t get away from her wealth” (James [1902] 1971: 82) – she constructs a private space in the upper part of her two-storey palazzo from which she reluctantly descends. Her conversation with Lord Mark in Venice points at the contrasting values between those whose consciousness is consumed by public concerns and those who still cling to a sensitive and more subjective experience of life. “Ah, not to go down – never, never to go down!” she strangely sighed to her friend. “But why shouldn’t you, “he asked, “with that tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it.” She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not understanding. “Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that the positive beauty is that one needn’t go down. I don’t move in fact.”  (James [1902] 1971: 292)

Milly’s rejection of visibility as a means of feminine exposure and progress and her relish of solitude and immobility marks the development of woman’s perception of herself from the figure of Gwendolen Harleth, who, at the end of Daniel Deronda, did not quite know what to do with her new-found subjectivity. James describes Milly’s private experience, perched in her Venetian loft, as an adventure, “the adventure of not stirring” (James [1902] 1971: 293), which is different from the kind of manly adventures envied by Gwendolen in Eliot’s novel. Milly’s final adventure is one of introspection and self-discovery, which cannot be shared by Kate Croy and Maud Lowder, who are all outer and no inner. Thus, the physical separation of spheres within Milly’s home, the upper storey vs. the lower, alludes to the two kinds of femininity constructed in the novel and rendered as a series of dichotomies: the heart vs. the body, the face vs. the mask, the natural vs. the artificial, and depth vs. superficiality. In The Wings it is not only women who are depicted as suffering from the mingling of inner and outer. Men too are compared according to the way they experience this fluidity. While Lord Mark represents the man whom the loss of privacy does not seem to have touched and whose type, it may be assumed, is partly responsible for this intrusion of publicity in every corner of private life, Densher may be identified with Milly in their common rejection of visibility. Like Milly, Densher constructs private spaces, both indoors and

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outdoors, which shelter a rich inner life. Initially, Densher admires Kate for her difference, marvelling at her unpredictability: “The women one meets – what are they but books one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut” (James [1902] 1971: 236). What Densher deems unknowable is the consciousness of womanhood that defies reading as it strays from ideologies of domestication. But while, in the beginning, Densher relishes the mystery in Kate, he gradually finds her unconventional and perhaps male logic threatening. In a radical revision of the notion of gendered spheres, James has Kate invade Densher’s domestic privacy, his rooms, bringing to it elements of the marketplace, which the occupant has tried to expel with his romanticism. Densher’s space is like Milly’s, an interiorized, subjectively perceived setting, representing depth and sentiment. While Densher views Kate’s sexual surrender in his Venetian rooms in terms of a private treasure of inestimable value, Kate sees it as a business transaction, a fulfilment of her part of the bargain, an act of specific value and consequence: a means to a mercenary end. Similarly, his London rooms represent the development of his feelings, the waning of his love for Kate and his realization of Milly’s impact on him, which is likened to a secret, a pearl, and a sound audible only to a “spiritual ear”, a “faint, far wail”, which is smothered or even deadened by the “sounds of life” like those that Kate brings along with her presence (James [1902] 1971: 450–51). In both cases of Milly’s and Densher’s abodes, private space is construed as a metaphorical as much as a literal setting which harnesses a secret, the secret representing the characters’ evolving consciousness. In both novels, we see that in the course of the nineteenth century the previously domestic space of the home becomes a locus of publicity for women of social stature or physical beauty. However, the drawing-room and other interior spaces of social interaction give women a false sense of participation in the public sphere and an illusory freedom from domestication. Such women who try to appropriate the power of visibility and evade the private sphere of activities are, in the end, thwarted in their personal ambitions, their theatricality turning against them. Kate Croy, who is represented not only as an object of consumerism but also as a competent consumer herself, applying the rules of the marketplace to her relationships, in the end gains status as a figure of public admiration, but fails in her private ambitions. Kate takes advantage of her power as a public commodity, and in this sense she is more aggressive than Gwendolen, but by having revised the self according to commodities, she completely sacrifices the private for the sake of the public. Like the Alcharisi, in order to acquire the desired visibility, she has had to renounce sensibility, which nineteenth century sociological and cultural discourses had constructed as “naturally” feminine. Kate dares to assault the carefully guarded boundaries

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of the masculine public sphere, but her power is precarious because it simulates male codes of conduct and thus it is constantly prone to the unveiling and neutralizing agency of man. In other words, Eliot’s and James’s writing suggests that women with aspirations to enter the public sphere through prominent exposure or an assimilation of marketplace rules were regarded as a threat to the patriarchal ideal of a fixed separation between domestic and public spheres, female and male roles. As Rita Felski has argued, being “victims of modernity” these women are threatening because they stand for “the feminization of society through a burgeoning materialism and hedonistic excess” (Felski 1995: 66); their conduct, breaching the line between private and public, puts to question the role of men and the definition of masculinity in an increasingly consumerist society, and therefore, it has to be suppressed. Hence, the two alternative ways explored by the authors by which women can acquire publicity, as spectacle, in the case of Gwendolen, or as ruthless materialist, in the case of Kate, are both doomed to failure, leading to the personal misery of the female subject. After all, this passage into the public sphere does not really represent a female conquest but merely perpetuates patriarchal systems of beliefs in which women can be either objects of the gaze or else imitators of male conduct.

Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1983. ‘The Consuming Vision of Henry James’ in WightmanFox, Richard and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds) The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon: 67–100. Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Bigelow, Gordon. 2000. ‘Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens’s Bleak House’ in English Literary History 67(2): 589–615. Chase, Karen and Michael Levenson. 2000. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crackanthorpe, B. A. 1894. ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ in The Nineteenth Century 35: 23–31. Davidoff, Leonore. 2003. ‘Gender and the “Great Divide”: Public and Private in British Gender History’ in Journal of Women’s History 15: 11–27. Despotopoulou, Anna. 2002. ‘The Price of “Mere Spectatorship”: Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove’ in The Review of English Studies 53: 228–44. Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. ‘Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’ in Screen 23 (3–4): 74–87. Eliot, George. [1876] 1995. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin Classics. Ender, Evelyne. 1995. Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Felski, Rita. 1995. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Gal, Susan. 2002. ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’ in differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13: 77–95. Grand, Sarah. 1894. ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ in The North American Review, 158(448): 270–76. Gregory, Melissa Valiska. 2004. ‘From Melodrama to Monologue: Henry James and Domestic Terror’ in The Henry James Review 25: 146–67. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James, Henry. [1902] 1971. The Wings of the Dove. Harmondsworth: Penguin.  . What Maisie Knew. [1908] 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics. Landes, Joan B. 2003. ‘Further Thoughts on the Public/Private Distinction’ in Journal of Women’s History 15: 28–39. Logan, Thad. 2001. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovell, Terry. 1987. Consuming Fiction. London: Verso. Michie, Helena. 1999. ‘Under Victorian Skins: The Bodies Beneath’ in Tucker, Herbert F. (ed.) A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell: 407–24. Ouida. 1894. ‘The New Woman’ in The North American Review 158: 610–19. Piepmeier, Alison. 2006. ‘Stepping Out: Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres’ in Journal of Women’s History 18: 128–37. Riviere, Joan. 1929. ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10. On line at: http://www.ncf.edu/hassold/WomenArtists/riviere_ womanliness_as_masquerade.htm (consulted 2.01.2005). Richter, Amy G. 2005. Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rosen, Judith. 1996. ‘At Home Upon a Stage: Domesticity and Genius in Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters (1848)’ in Harman, Barbara Leah and Susan Meyer (eds) The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction. New York: Garland: 17–32. Ruskin, John. ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ in Sesame and Lilies. On line at: http://www.underthe sun.cc/Classics/Ruskin/SesameAndLilies/SesameAndLilies5.html (consulted 5.01.2005). Scott, Joan W. and Debra Keates (eds). 2004. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1990. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of their Own. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stickney Ellis, Sarah. 1842. Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character, and Responsibilities. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

Public Space and Spectacle: Female Bodies and Consumerism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Anne-Marie Evans abstract Edith Wharton was eager to follow Henry James’s advice when he famously suggested she “Do New York” in 1902, and the result of her subsequent endeavours was The House of Mirth (1905). This chapter considers the function of forms of space in Wharton’s text, and draws on the work of economist Thorstein Veblen, author of the seminal The Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899). By re-reading The House of Mirth in terms of the consumer politics of the Gilded Age, and analysing how the central protagonist Lily Bart is able to manipulate areas of public space, it is possible to explore how women are consistently relegated to the status of products for male consumption. Wharton’s scathing critique of the leisure class, exemplified through Lily’s hazardous journey from attractive product to impoverished producer, illustrates the narrow options available to the single woman of the time. By exploring the utilisation of consumerism and the use of different forms of space in Wharton’s bestseller, this analysis intends to understand better the changing role of women within a materialistcentred culture. Keywords: America, space, public, private, consumerism, commodity, body, decoration, fashion, marriage, art, autonomy, Edith Wharton, Thorstein Veblen.

“As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 4). So admits Lawrence Selden in the famous Grand Central Station opening scene of Edith Wharton’s bestseller The House of Mirth (1905). Wharton places her notoriously “negative hero” in the role of detached observer, a position he will occupy for much of the novel.1 The relationship between Lily and Selden, performer and spectator, resonates here in their early encounter. The novel became a huge success, achieving sales of over 30,000 copies within the first three weeks of its publication after a hugely successful serialisation in Scribner’s. Despite the wealth of critical attention the text has since attracted, Wharton herself made no great claims for a work she described as “a simple and fairly moving domes1 From Wharton’s letter to Sara Norton, October 26th, 1906, from the Wharton Archives, Beineche Library See, for more information, Wolff 1977: 111.

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tic tragedy” (Wegener 1996: 267). Published when she was forty-three, the novel numbered eighth in the top ten bestsellers of 1905, its bitterly ironic title taken from Ecclesiastes 7:4. The House of Mirth chronicles the downfall of beautiful, charming, and wilful Lily Bart, once a socially promising if impoverished debutante. At twenty-nine, her chances of an advantageous marriage are swiftly decreasing, and the text documents her thwarted aspirations and eventual death after eleven years in society. Lily changes the space around her, transmuting each area into a platform for sexualised public performance. By interrogating the way in which Lily is effectively conditioned by both the city landscape and existing social hierarchies, and appraising a range of public spaces, the female body functions as an extension of public space in the consumer society of what has come to be known as the Gilded Age. In the aggressive marital mart of The House of Mirth, women are forced to translate themselves into attractive products for an increasingly lascivious male audience in their determined efforts to secure a husband, social status and the financial security that only marriage seemed to provide. A “good” marriage ensured social success and financial security in a culture where the gently-bred female was not permitted to work for a living and subsequently support herself. Marriage remains Lily’s only option to save herself from humiliating penury and her behaviour in private spaces is a result of this necessity. As such, communal spaces and the interpretation of the female body as a form of both public space and public interest, become integral to a contemplation of Lily’s journey in The House of Mirth. Through examining the notion of private space, and how Lily’s clothes and appearance have the power to transform public spaces, this analysis will demonstrate how the female body was increasingly perceived as an extension of public space. The contemporary love of surfaces, appearances and social position (exemplified by Lily’s love of designer Jacques Doucet dresses) were notoriously attacked by social economist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. The text elucidates his conclusions concerning the behaviour of the American social elite, and remains a meticulously constructed argument savaging the excesses and ostentatious consumerism of what Veblen designated the “leisure class”, the members of the unofficial American aristocracy not obliged to work for a living. Veblen specifically attacked the position of women in this society, claiming they functioned primarily as ornaments for their husbands’ wealth and displayers of the growing trend towards, as Veblen famously defined it, “conspicuous consumerism”, the wearing of riches normally associated only with the nouveau riche. The female body is thus translated into a form of public space, as a visual display of her

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husband’s healthy finances. In simplified Veblen-esque terms: men acquire, and women display. The active male provides essential resources while the female remains relegated to the role of a passive decoration.2 Rather than applying spatial theories of public space, such as Habermas’s well-documented work on discursive and political public space, I read The House of Mirth as a cultural historian, using Veblen’s work to re-evaluate the text. Wharton’s Manhattan and the deeply congested space of New York function to highlight the destructive impact of consumerism upon civic life and the individual female psyche. “We have passed from the golden age of architecture to the gilded age of decoration”, Wharton declared in The Decoration of Houses, her rigorous approach to minimalist décor written with Ogden Codman, Jr. (Wharton & Codman [1897] 1997: 191). This idea of decoration and surfaces permeates her approach in The House of Mirth, where an enthusiastic public endorsement of one’s home, person or marriage partner constitutes the most sought after social commodity. The panorama of “Old New York” provides the novel with myriad public spaces to explore. Lily walks along Madison and Fifth Avenue, attends the opera, walks in Central Park (a man-made rural space in the midst of the urban panorama) and travels upstate through the Hudson Valley to visit Gus and Judy Trenor at Bellomont, their country estate. As Lori Merish observes, “Most of the novel’s action takes place in semipublic spaces of consumption and commercial amusement” (2003: 237). In Central Park, Lily goes for a walk with Gus Trenor as she believes that this inherently public space will shield her from any accusations of misconduct, playfully suggesting they go and “feed the squirrels” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 114). Unfortunately, Lily fails to realise that this too can be equally ruinous. She is observed in the Park by a nameless friend of Grace Stepney “quite late, after the lamps were lit” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 120). The lateness of the hour changes the relatively safe space of the public park to an illicit, secretive, half-lit venue which could be associated with scandalous behaviour. Lily’s actions are again misconstrued and misunderstood as her visibility on this occasion contributes to her reputation for being inappropriately “conspicuous”. After the imposed order of the grid system on the public space of the city in 1811 (an act of intended urban improvement but unpopular for a considerable period), the late nineteenth century oversaw the development of the New York department store, for the first time utilising specially designed window displays 2 For example, Veblen argued persuasively that the contemporary preference for the restricting female corset aligned with his theories of vicarious wealth, as the corset’s physical rigidity prevented women from any physical work, and so ensured that they remained attractive illustrations of their husband’s ample wealth. Veblen believed the very function of the corset was to advertise affluent indolence.

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to entice the female shopper. Maureen E. Montgomery explains: In the late nineteenth century, the leisure that women displayed was no longer restricted to the home and came to involve large outlays on leisure goods and services. The increasingly public nature of leisure enjoyed in heterosocial settings, such as restaurants, cabarets, or skating clubs, gave women greater access to public space, and this was combined with a greater mobility due to the availability of mechanised transport. Women had to work hard at displaying leisure and making sure that the display was noticed, particularly as newspaper scrutiny raised the ante.  (1998: 11)

Montgomery’s argument that women had to work to provide a spectacular show challenges Veblen’s theory of the passive female. This move towards display and surveillance can be detected in the relationship between Lily and Selden. A member of Lily’s social group because he is amusing company rather than rich, Selden cannot compete with other more affluent potential suitors for Lily. Merish interprets the situation as, like the developing role of the New York window shopper, one of perpetually “just looking”. Selden utilises the same non-buyer’s principles in his scenes with Lily: “it is precisely because he can’t afford (but appreciates) Lily that Selden best enacts the dynamics of visual desire in consumer culture” (2003: 259). In addition to Selden’s ever-watchful eye, Lily undergoes observation from the ubiquitous Mr. Dabham of Town Topics during her time in the Mediterranean and aboard the Dorset’s yacht, the Sabrina. The rise of the tabloid press in the US made public space an amplified showground for performance and in The House of Mirth, the press survey and report on “elite society by making it visible to the classes beneath them” (Kaplan 2003: 88). Lily’s sojourn abroad is made considerably more traumatic as her actions are reported in the society magazine and scandal sheet Town Talk, which Wharton based on the real life publication Town Topics, in existence from 1885 and boasting a popular section entitled “Saunterings”, a gossip column written anonymously by “The Saunterer”. Montgomery posits the Saunterer’s role as one of social consumer-parasite: “he was a panoptical figure surveying social life in the metropolis. He was also a merchant dealing in information, gossip, rumor, and innuendo, and in his hands the currency of gossip was transformed into profit and power” (1998: 1). Like the shadowy figure of “The Saunterer”, Dabham’s continuing scrutiny contributes to an awareness of narrative claustrophobia, “the beautiful Miss Bart” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 190) will never fail to guarantee elevated sales of Town Topics, again reinforcing Lily’s role as a performer in public spaces. From the very beginning of the novel, as Selden appreciates the handsome figure of Miss Bart emerging from the throbbing hub of Grand Central Station, her role as a social spectacle is confirmed. Amy Kaplan has noted how Lily is

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paradoxically defined as both apart from the crowd which “forms a background that outlines her brilliance” and simultaneously surrounded by “the passers-by [who] constitute an audience of spectators” (2003: 85). Throughout the text, Wharton crucially distinguishes that the power of seeing and being seen lies with Lily. Selden realises “that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 3). Following her disastrous expulsion from the Sabrina, Lily’s strategy is simple: “to keep herself visibly identified” with the right kind of people (Wharton [1905] 2000: 260). In other words, Lily realises she must be publicly associated with the higher echelons of society if she has any hope of rehabilitating herself. The House of Mirth begins and ends with Lily Bart as the subject of the male gaze, a frequent and willing object of admiration. At her fateful meeting with Selden in the first chapter, she is immediately construed as a site of male interest; Selden’s “eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart”, reports Wharton ([1905] 2000: 5) and Lily is swiftly placed within the mode of production as she strolls along: Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness […] Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisified, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?  (Wharton [1905] 2000: 5)

Written entirely from his masculine perspective, Selden’s deductions about Lily are based primarily on her physical appearance. Her real character appears to be “vulgar clay” which is enhanced and accessorised for public display. Described in semi-erotic terms, Selden notes minute details such as Lily’s ear, hair and eyelashes as surveillance becomes a form of consumer voyeurism. Selden is aware of his position as a visual consumer of Lily, “conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness”. Selden’s notion that the cost of producing Lily as a finished commodity is high implicitly denies her autonomy and forms a parallel with Lily’s vague understandings of Wall Street finances. She remains as ignorant of the capital and labour relationship as Selden is from the mysteries of female presentation. He hypocritically notes Lily’s external polish, distinguishing her from the “herd” of femininity but proceeds to criticise her love for the material without admitting that this

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external beauty forms the cornerstone of her attraction.3 Selden simultaneously and implicitly approves of her attentions to personal adornment, hugely admiring of her physical appearance, deeming the “sacrifices” he describes as worthwhile. To return to Veblen’s theory that “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlman of leisure” (Veblen [1899] 1994: 47), we can see it exemplified in The House of Mirth, as Lily enacts the role of Selden’s “valuable goods”; her beauty makes him conspicuous by association. Ever financialy astute Sim Rosedale quickly learns that being seen in a public space in the company of Lily Bart socially equates “money in his pocket” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 15), a realisation he repeatedly uses to his advantage. The gazing prior to Lily and Selden’s famous stroll down Madison Avenue is not limited to Selden. Wharton notes that at Grand Central, “One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train” (Wharton[1905] 2000: 3). Lily provides an entertaining distraction for Selden, while he follows her to Bellomont only to exclaim, “you’re such a wonderful spectacle. I always like to see what you are doing” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 64). By claiming Lily as a “spectacle”, Selden seeks to conceal his personal interest in her company, implying that she functions as a spectacular site of public interest. Lily remains aware of the power of the male gaze and Selden openly appreciates her artistry in arranging herself to cultivated advantage. Walking slowly to church whilst at Bellomont, the Trenors’ country seat, Lily pauses to wait at a bend in the path: “The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 59). Lily reveals an astute understanding of the aesthetic potential of an area of public space, and how she might utilise it to her immediate benefit. As the object of her machinations, Selden enjoys an advantaged viewpoint (she smokes in front of him but not the millionaire, and potential husband, Percy Gryce) seeing through Lily’s consciously assumed coquetry, wryly noticing that “even her weeping was an art” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 70). Ever susceptible to the fineries of female adornment, as his previous affair with Bertha Dorset bears witness, Selden enthusiastically consumes 3 This is consistent with Selden’s continuing attempts to translate Lily into an appealing work of art. In the final scene, as he rushes to her boarding house he glances up and spies a pot of pansies on one of the window sills, automatically assuming the room must be Lily’s: “it was inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the dingy scene” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 314). Selden’s actions reveal his wish to aestheticise Lily and highlight again his appreciation of the pleasingly attractive, despite his verbal protestations to the contrary.

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female attractions, yet he interprets this inclination as an aesthetic appreciation rather than a sexualised consumerism. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes, “The Lily unadorned, would, after all, fail to sustain his interest” (Wolff 1977: 121). Selden, attracted to Lily’s ability to turn heads, exists as a slave to the spectacular: “At key junctures in the novel, Selden is seduced by the immediacy of the spectacle and cannot understand the countervailing evidence” (Kaplan 2003: 97). His condemnation of Lily after witnessing her exit from the Trenor house fully reinforces Kaplan’s argument as Selden lacks the ability to distinguish between reality and the spectacular, and the setting of this particular spectacle (in the public street) serves to cement his belief and (mis) perceptions. Earlier in the novel, on the train to Bellomont, Lily’s attempts to manoeuvre a beneficial encounter with the tedious millionaire Percy Gryce demonstrates her acute understanding of the integral role female clothing, and the attention it can draw to the female body, plays on the social carousel: “The train swayed again, almost flinging Miss Bart into his arms. She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was enveloped in the scent of her dress and his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 18). Clothes, often wrapped in scented tissues and linen, are used to sway the outcome of Lily’s war between boredom and economic necessity, where she must overcome her disdain for Percy Gryce “on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 25). This brief example illustrates how Lily is capable of charging a public space with sexual energy: her presence completely overwhelms the shyly tedious Gryce, who timidly feels “secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 18). During Lily’s stay with the Trenors, the rest of the weekend party understands the game she has engaged in to secure Gryce’s interest and “A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded existence of Bellomont” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 45). Again, perceptions of public space are manipulated to provide a venue for what should constitute the intimately private but instead provides entertaining gossip for bored houseguests. “What would you like to be when you grow up?” asked Aunt Mary Newbold to a young Edith Wharton, “The best dressed woman in New York” was the prompt reply (Wolff 1997: 33). As this anecdote reveals, Wharton recognised from an early age the importance of the meticulously composed female appearance and its intrinsic power – an awareness which is evident in the episode that narrates Lily’s encounter with Percy Gryce, where Lily’s dress functions as an integral part of her attempt to captivate the millionaire’s interest. Wharton sexualises the passage in the train with this emphasis on physical sensation and illicit touching: “his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch”, as Lily embraces the

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role of innocent ingénue.4 Clothing and costume, frequently symbolic of urban consumerism, are employed on other figurative levels. Gerty Farish, who works for a living and is Selden’s cousin, is characterised by her lack of care for current fashion, with “the ‘useful’ colour” of her gown and “the subdued lines of her hat” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 70–1). The more ostentatious the outfit, the more prolific the consumerism, the less worthwhile the person, as Bertha Dorset’s extravagant gowns would testify, paralleling Gus Trenor’s clothes which are significantly tight and uncomfortable (Wharton [1905] 2000: 72). In an effort to explain her protagonist’s lust for the material, and setting the scene of a predominantly consumer-obsessed culture, Wharton paints a chaotic picture of her heroine’s childhood: “A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was ‘company’; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a halltable showered with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a bronze jar” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 28). The imagery of the invitations, eagerly seized upon in the Bart household and the “oblong envelopes”, which contemporary readers would have recognised as tradesman bills, kept literally out of sight, neatly illustrate the values with which Lily has been indoctrinated. In the Bart household, pleasure rules supreme and financial pragmatism remains an unknown concept. Lily is born into this hedonist existence, uninfluenced by a positive parental example: “Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her ball dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks” ([1905] 2000: 25). Wharton subtly indicates Lily’s importance as the child of this household, ignored by both parents and left alone, the image of her “vigorous and determined” mother distinctly lacking any maternal tenderness. Trained since childhood to view her marriage as the salvation of the Bart fortune, an immense social and economic pressure is frequently impressed upon her: “It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 33). Unsurprising, this emphasis on the physical encourages a narcissistic self-consciousness in Lily, who spends much of the novel contemplating her own attractiveness and examining her reflection in an array of mirrors. Lily’s gradual awakening to a world other than the one surrounding her effectively coincides with her change in status as a consumer. In happier days, she exists as a guest of the rich and a customer of the exclusive 4 Revealingly, Wharton herself was not above utilising clothing as a means of attraction. Martha Banta recounts a young Wharton’s attempts to attract the attention of Henry James with her plan to “put on my newest Doucet dress and to try to look my prettiest!” (Banta 2003: 65).

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and expensive, but as her fortune declines, she moves subject positions to that of a producer. In Madame Regina’s, where she eventually finds work as seamstress to a milliner, she spends her time trimming the hats she would once have inspected, tried on and purchased. In The House of Mirth, the usually private space of the drawing-room becomes a public stage on various occasions, including Lily’s interviews with her Aunt Peniston. In a famous moment from her autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton recounts an incident from when she was about eleven and showed her mother a story she had written which began, “ ‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown”, said Mrs Tomkins. ‘If I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.’ ” The only response from socialite Mrs. Jones to her daughter’s creativeness was the comment that, “drawing-rooms are always tidy” (Wharton 1934: 73). Whilst illustrating the atmosphere from which Wharton escaped through her writing, this anecdote also reveals how the space of the drawing-room was perceived. Supposedly a private familial space, it in fact occupied a dual role as an arena for competitive social discourse. For Wharton’s mother, the drawing-room would always be tidy in case of visitors, and as such would reflect the rest of the house. In this context, nominally “private” space functions as an indicator of social consequence and status. An untidy room would hint at disordered lives, a reputation no lady of a certain social standing would be prepared to risk. The drawing-room operates as a show-room, a space for theatrical spectacle masking the real daily life of a family, its use value completely diminished in the wake of its performative value. This practice allowed women to undermine Veblen’s passive model of their roles and utilise their influential power as society hostesses, as Kaplan demonstrates: For the lady of leisure, domesticity was subordinated to publicity as the home became a stage setting for the gala social events orchestrated and acted out by women. The upper-class home functioned less as a private haven from the competition of the marketplace than as the public stage for that competition.  (2003: 91)

Wharton’s increasing awareness of this social conundrum revolves around the realisation that the space of the drawing-room grows ever more perilous, as the interior grows as potentially dangerous as the public street. The library at Bellomont, for instance, is never used for reading but instead has been appropriated as a “quiet retreat for flirtation” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 57). The public space of the ballroom or tableau vivant stage can paradoxically invite moments of private intimacy within the sphere of the text. Indeed, public spaces are seemingly designed here to invite the intimate, with a growing awareness that the private can only be accessed through the public.

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Wharton’s detailed knowledge of interior decoration ensures that each description of a character’s dwelling place remains symbolically precise. In contrast to Selden’s spacious yet comfortable quarters and his blatant attempt to evoke an atmosphere of bohemian intellectualism, Lily’s room at her Aunt Peniston’s, with its dark and heavy furniture inherited from the late Mr. Peniston, presents another example of her habituating the most insignificant of spaces. Lily equates a form of spatial freedom with the drawing-room, recounting to Selden an old flirtation that failed to prosper on account of her potential future mother-in-law: “she wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t do over the drawingroom” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 9). Lily’s protests, only half in jest, reveal that if allowed the freedom to redecorate she believes she “should be a better woman” ([1905] 2000: 7). Lily’s wish is simple: she longs to make her own individual space, have the agency to “do over” a room exactly as she pleases. In short, she wants to embrace the power of the mistress of the house rather than the guest role she has spent the last eleven years occupying. She consistently occupies areas of subsidiary space; as a guest living in a borrowed room, on the dangerous and ephemeral space of the Sabrina, on the train, in the tableau vivant or finally in the marginalised space of a seedy hotel room. Accompanied to the opera by scheming social opportunists Gus Trenor and Sim Rosedale, a Jewish financier on the peripheries of high society because of his racial background, Lily rejoices in being the centre of male-dominated attention, “always inspired by the prospect of showing her beauty in public, and conscious tonight of all the added enhancements of dress, the insistency of Trenor’s gaze [which] merged itself in the general stream of admiring looks of which she felt herself the centre” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 112). Lily interprets this public space as the locus for her sexual power but her vanity proves naïve, unable to interpret (as the reader does) the inherent sexual threat implied by Trenor’s “insistent” gaze. Crowds of theatregoers are not enough to deter Trenor’s possessive stance, exposing a presumptuous intimacy inappropriate for a public gathering. In this example, the partnership of space and spectacle operates as a three-fold model: Lily herself as an enticingly beautiful spectacle, and the spectacle of New York’s affluent society arriving and being seen at the opera, in addition to the actual performance on stage. Through Lily, public spaces are translated into public stadiums for acting out the rituals of courtship. During a socio-religious ritual of courtship, at the Stepney-Van Osburgh wedding, Lily finds herself displaced by the bride as the centre of attention. Tired of her continuing role of bridesmaid at the altar, Lily decides that “when next seen there she wanted to be the chief figure in the ceremony” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 84). Lily longs to be the highly conspicuous star of the show and she has no further interest or use for her supporting role. Always aware of the danger

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of being “too long before the public” ([1905] 2000: 84), Lily fears that the public may want a change of cast: she has been “Miss Bart” for far too long to continue to provoke the necessary public interest. When witnessed emerging from the Trenor home after dining with Carrie Fisher, it is not simply the fact that Lily is seen late at night unescorted on the street but the realisation that she has been alone with Trenor in the private space of his home which damages her already precarious reputation. The risky passage between the Trenor house and the comparative safety of the carriage provides a space of danger and misunderstanding. Only too eager to interpret appearance as truth, Selden’s observation of Lily leaving Trenor’s home highlights the dangers of visibility, a hazardous trap in Wharton’s depiction of the Gilded Age. Fleeing to Havana the following day and ignoring his previous appointment with Lily, Selden positions himself in the role of disillusioned lover in the second half of the narrative. Discovering that Lily, like himself, may currently be found in Monte Carlo he muses that “he could trust himself to return gradually to a reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 184). The emphasis on visibility reveals Selden’s weakness: he can only contemplate Lily in abstract terms and would not be able to survive a face-to-face encounter. He displays a fear of the spectacular, that Lily’s beauty and physicality would somehow crumble his resolve and loosen his place on the moral pedestal where he has installed himself. When they do meet on a train to Nice, Selden approaches the experience with cathartic vigour, promising himself that “now he would really get well – would eject the last drop of poison from his blood” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 185). Lily’s physical presence remains dangerously intoxicating, and Selden perceives her presence as a form of contamination, a “drop of poison”, feeling she possesses the power to invade his very physiognomy. This parallels Lily’s earlier, highly romanticised sense of self: “She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 97). Lily’s ability to exist as a social spectacle, it seems, is matched by her ability to permeate the very air surrounding her, as Wharton again utilises the imagery of contamination (this time as an airy fragrance) to explicate Lily’s actions. In a compromising of social space, Wharton skilfully utilises the popular contemporary pastime of the tableaux vivant as a metaphor for the urban, sophisticated woman as spectacle, masquerading Lily as a figure from the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The text has myriad moments where Lily is subjected to the intrusive male gaze and her appearance as Mrs. Lloyd systematically positions the female as an object for visual consumption. Art is everywhere in Wharton’s work, from Mrs. Peniston’s reproduction of the popular dying gladiator statuette which importantly can be seen and recognised by pedestrians

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on Fifth Avenue ([1905] 2000: 95), to Rosedale’s determined integration into high society by buying a house belonging to a victim of the Wall Street crash who had “filled a picture gallery with old masters” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 96). Removed from any aesthetic value or appreciation, art instead must be transformed into a socio-financial commodity. The tableau vivant was a popular component of turn of the century culture, as women engaged in the imitation and dramatization of famous paintings. These interpretations appeared in magazines such as New York’s The Cosmopolitan, where Wharton had some early short story fiction published (Barker 2000: 144–5). Wolff argues a convincing case for Art Nouveau presenting the prevailing influence upon the text as it permeated American culture so effectively, integral to both architecture and home furnishings, in which Wharton was both interested and highly knowledgeable. The pervasive image of the Art Nouveau woman, whose affinity with nature was a symptom shared with neoclassical images of the female, reinforced the popular notion of woman as a decorative possession or “ultimate acquisition” (Wolff 1977: 115). Accordingly, Lily’s choice of appearing as Sir Joshua Reynold’s Mrs. Lloyd signifies on several levels.5 Mr. Lloyd commissioned the original picture to commemorate his fiancé, and this painting, as Deborah Barker argues, both authenticates her impending bridal status and commodifies her as belonging to her husband. Lily, in her turn, is also translated into a bona fide ornament to be hung upon the wall (Barker 2000: 149). Eerily reminiscent of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, the choice of painting conveys a fatal error on Lily’s part: The painting of Mrs. Lloyd demonstrates the traditional way a woman acquires a name in art. It is Reynolds’s signature on his portrait of her that brings her fame, and it is her husband’s name that saves her reputation. She is doubly inscribed in a system of patriarchal representation. Lily, however, has in effect placed her own signature over that of Reynolds. She assumes the role of both artist and married woman.  (Barker 2000: 149)

The original Mrs Lloyd, who is even denied the inscription of her first name, is placed protectively within the sphere of her future husband’s identity. Just as Mrs. Lloyd can be eternally consumed as a work of art, Lily, wishing to present an idealised version of her artistic self, is instead consumed by the unforgiving gaze of Veblen’s “vicarious” consumers. Lily’s social standing distorts the literal perceptions of her. Ned Van Alstyne complains it was a “Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get up” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 130), whilst frankly 5 Judith Fryer discusses the fact that this scene reveals a “frank presentation of Lily’s body, an acknowledgement of an erotic nature that is never mentioned in her society” (Fryer 1986: 77).

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appreciating her revealing costume. Lily in effect becomes her own artist, personalising the original image: “It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 130). Ironically, this provides a moment for Lily to seize masculine power through her “artistic intelligence” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 130) and employ the gaze herself as she surveys her audience, yet her assumption of sexual power is problematised by Wharton, as Lily’s diaphanous robes are deliberately seductive as in the original painting. This attempt to be flâneur rather than mere model proves unsuccessful and Lily’s fate as a casualty of a consumer-orientated society is swiftly confirmed. In the Terence Davis film adaptation of the novel in 2000, the tableau vivant sequence is critically altered. Instead of appearing as Mrs. Lloyd, Gillian Anderson as Lily appears as J. A. Watteau’s representation of Ceres (Summer). Although the suggestive drapery of Lily’s costume and the affiliation to nature remain the same, the male presence has been exiled. In the original portrait of Mrs. Lloyd, she appears carving her future husband’s name on a tree, his identity physically inscribed into the scene. As Ceres, Lily is free of the male spectre which haunts the original. Davies uses the viewer’s gaze of Lily to great effect during several times in the film; in the opening scene, Lily appears only in hazy silhouette emerging from the smoke of Grand Central Station. The viewer observes Selden watch Lily, her face withheld from the audience by smoke and whirling parasols until the last second, heightening the expectations of both Selden and the audience, and implicitly placing emphasis on Lily’s physical appearance. Davies utilises artistic images in his framing of several scenes, reinforcing the iterative art references in the text, encapsulating a moment in time and turning the film itself into a work of art, used to great effect in the final scene with freeze framing and the caption “New York 1907” appearing on screen. Ironically, Wolff has argued that Selden appreciates Lily only at her death: “the only Lily he can tolerate […] is the beautiful idealised memory he carries of her, the most superb piece in his collection” (Wolff 1977: 131–32). An accomplished and experienced artist, Lily excels at displaying herself to best advantage. Like her misunderstanding of the laws of socio-economic exchange, Lily misjudges her negotiation of the social space of the tableau vivant. Her attempt at being a female producer of art rather than merely a product of it fails in its execution. Lily makes the fatal error of misjudging her audience and her willingness to participate unmarried in the tableau serves only to glorify the rumours already surrounding her. Considering her fate and her habit of always positioning herself as an aesthetically pleasing object, JeanChristophe Agnew comments about Lily that “it is no surprise that her ultimate downfall should come by being quite literally framed” (Agnew 1989: 149).

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Throughout the text, the female body functions as a form of currency in a socio-sexual climate where Wharton continuously constructs the female body as commodity and possession. Startling in the novel is the amount of attention paid to Lily’s hands, with Selden’s noting in the first chapter that her hand is “polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 7). This sensory description evokes an image of sexuality and luxury that contrasts with Percy Gryce’s observance of Lily arranging tea on the train to Bellomont: “he watched her in silent fascination while her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 18). Lily’s fine hands and ornamental potential determine her price on the marriage mart. Although unacknowledged by Veblen, the maintenance of appearances and manufacturing of elaborate spectacles, on both personal and public levels, represents a form of work. As Lillian S. Robinson proposes, “Lily’s sexual attractiveness is undeniably a material asset in her struggle to improve her social and financial position through marriage. But ironically it is also a liability as long as it is not yet backed up by money and status” (Robinson 1994: 347). If Lily was less beautiful, less spectacular, like Gerty Farrish, her morality and behaviour would never be questioned, but her greatest asset (her physical appearance and poise) prove to be the source of her Achilles’ heel within the social marketplace. Lily’s alleged affair with Trenor publicly questions the status of her virginity, consequently affecting her market value, as the actions of Jewish banker Sim Rosedale reflect.6 A potential “buyer” of Lily, he decides to utilise his consumer right to return “faulty goods” and so recedes his proposal of marriage. Robinson notes that the unwritten social laws that condemn Lily naturally apply only to the female section of society, for men are not expected to have their sexual affairs held up to social scrutiny and judgement. Unlike her male counterparts, whose private affairs are seldom used to discredit them socially, the unspoken accusation that Lily has indulged in an affair serves as enough evidence to publicly condemn her. Her body thus becomes a part of the public domain; enduring speculation, comment and vicious rumour. From a spatial perspective, Veblen’s dismantling of female autonomy (in his insistence that she operates at the level of a decoration) and his later attention to the persuasive curves of the corset, specifically defines the female body as a commodity-spectacle. If women’s fashions are designed to render them 6 In Elizabeth Ammons’s discussion concerning Wharton and race, she argues that Lily’s body is consistently racially codified as white, from the choice of her name to her appearance in the Reynolds tableau vivant, to her reluctance to marry Rosedale, a Jew. As Ammons argues, “All of these identify Lily Bart not simply as white, but very white” (Ammons 1995: 77).

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“conspicuous”, Veblen’s schematic simultaneously places them at the level of a performance, a demonstration of unrestrained affluence, as femme fatale Bertha Dorset’s elaborate gowns testify. This devotion to drawing attention to one’s body through ostentatious costume (and in Lily’s case, the implied promise of sex men believe her beauty implies), serves to reinforce the perception that the female body itself may be construed as a site of public space, in the same way that elaborate fashions render the female body a site of performance. Kathy Peiss argues that the decorative female body symbolised a space where separate spheres were united, “places in which ‘private’ and ‘public’ met – the clothed body, the well-furnished parlour – were accepted, indeed celebrated, as sites of commodity culture” (Peiss 1996: 314). As the novel progresses, these notions of public and private not only meet but are continuously reversed. Lily’s body and virgin status become issues of public interest when rumours of affairs with both wealthy socialite Gus Trenor and Bertha’s husband, George Dorset abound. Despite her innocence, her reputation is irrevocably damaged, highlighting the dangers surrounding women challenging the separate spheres and participating in elements of public life. Not until she is apprenticed at Madam Regina’s millinery establishment does Lily fully appreciate and understand the realities of the workforce who have kept her exquisitely attired for so long. Lily finds herself in the unusual position of a producer, her career as a member of the working class represents the one time in her life she has ever had to truly account for herself. It is the one social space where her beauty cannot help or save her; in fact, she is placed rather lower on the social scale than her fellow labourers, who are unimpressed by her, “awed only by success – by the gross tangible image of material achievement” ([1905] 2000: 275). As an unmarried woman who has produced no offspring, Lily’s “tangible” success remains non-existent and she can find no role for herself as a manufacturer. However, for Lily in particular, the failure to find a communal and welcoming female space hastens her fate. Lacking female support, Lily sits alone at the small restaurant on Fifty-ninth Street, filled with women where “A hum of shrill voices reverberated against the low ceiling, leaving Lily shut out in a little circle of silence” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 292). Under the scrutiny of this unforgiving female workforce, Lily’s misreading of Mrs Haffen, the charwoman, is echoed. Not realising she is being assessed for her susceptibility to blackmail as she leaves Selden’s apartment, Lily disastrously misconceives Mrs Haffen’s speculation for her appreciation of the spectacular: “The poor thing was probably dazzled by such an unwonted apparition” ([1905] 2000: 13). Unused to interrogatory stares (until she is forced to spend time with Rosedale at the Van Osburgh wedding), Lily’s narcissism at this point in the text ensures she can only equate observation with admiration. In contrast,

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Lily’s realisation of (and rebellion against) the consuming male gaze does not occur until the very end of the text when Lily refuses to model hats for Madame Regina, who slyly realises that “as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset” (Wharton [1905] 2000: 275). Lily finally removes herself from the marketplace, realising she has nothing left to barter with. This reflects a maturity of change in her understanding of the world, finally realising the limitations of her ornamental role and refusing her position as a product. In conclusion, whereas at the start of the text Lily is a vision of beauty to behold at Grand Central Station, admired by myriad commuters and passers by, at the end of the novel she dies alone in an anonymous and dilapidated boarding house. When Lily does finally attain a room of her own, the room is both empowering and imprisoning, eventually metamorphosising into her tomb, with Selden acting as her only mourner-surveyor. Significantly, the one woman who does have a room of her own (albeit “dingy” in Lily’s opinion) is Gerty Farrish. Yet the prospect of a mere room is simply not enough to tempt Lily. Her diminishing social space, from her dazzling entrance into Grand Central Station at the start of the novel where she is the centre of attention, to her period of dislocation aboard the Sabrina and then with Mrs Hatch, to her final resting place of the compact boarding house room, mirrors her dwindling social standing. As Lily’s reputation is increasingly compromised, and her downward trajectory confirmed, so is her access to any form of personal space in the ruthless consumer market of the Gilded Age.

Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1989. ‘“A House of Fiction”: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic’ in Broner, Simon J (ed.) Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920. New York: Norton: 133–56. Ammons, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘Wharton and Race’ in Bell, Millicent (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 68–86. Ammons, Elizabeth. 1980. Edith Wharton’s Argument With America. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Banta, Martha. 2003. ‘Wharton’s Women’ in Singley, Carol J (ed.) A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 51–87. Barker, Deborah. 2000. Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Bronfen, Elizabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Erlich, Gloria C. 1992. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Fryer, Judith. 1986. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina Press. Goodwyn, Janet Beer. 1990. Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Kaplan, Amy. 2003. ‘Crowded Spaces in The House of Mirth’ in Singley, Carol J (ed.) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 85–105. Lewis, R.W.B. [1975] 1993. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Vintage. Merish, Lori. 2003. ‘Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction’ in Singley, Carol J (ed.) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 229–70. Michaels, Walter Benn. 1987. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montgomery, Maureen E. 1998. Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York. London: Routledge. Peiss, Kathy. 1996. ‘Making Up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture, and Women’s Identity’ in de Grazia, Victoria and Ellen Furlough (eds) The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press: 311–36. Preston, Claire. 2000. Edith Wharton’s Social Register. London: MacMillan. Robinson, Lillian S. 1994. ‘The Traffic in Women: A Cultural Critique of The House of Mirth’ in Benstock, Shari (ed.) Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth. New York: Bedford Books: 340–58. Veblen, Thorstein. [1899] 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Dover. Wegener, Frederick (ed). 1996. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. [1897] 1997. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton. Wharton, Edith. 1934. A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton-Century.  . [1905] 2000. The House of Mirth. London: MacMillan. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1977. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tracing the Female Triptych of Space: Private, Public, and Power Strongholds in Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897), and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934) Janet Stobbs abstract This chapter explores parallelisms in the use of private and public space in Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897) and F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), two novels that coincide in describing how the publicly visible rejection of the role of submissive wife was considered a social threat, and in symbolising this threat in the death of the husband. In this way, Atherton and Jesse link their protagonists’ escape from domestic spaces into work spaces to their appearance in the courtroom, a journey from dependence to independence, which ends in the glass-ceiling destination of a male stronghold of power. The chapter argues that the home, the work place and the courtroom depicted in these novels form a triptych of women’s experience of privacy and publicity in traditionally private and public spaces. Lack of privacy in the home provokes a need to escape into the public work space, a step toward a “room of one’s own”. At the same time, the personal, intimate space required by the heroines ironically prefigures the prison cells allotted by the symbolic space of male power, the courtroom. Keywords: women, home, marriage, privacy, work, independence, public spectacle, courtroom, trial, murder, jury, power stronghold, Gertrude Atherton, F. Tennyson Jesse.

1. Women on trial Never were women more emphatically public figures than when they were in the dock and accused of murder. Courtrooms were crowded with a curious public, avid, not necessarily for the truth, but for details of the private lives and secrets that lay behind the dreadful act. Secrets became scandals in the newspaper reports of the trial read by a general public from all walks of life, and the accused was tried twice over, as woman and as culprit.1A guilty verdict for the 1 The murderess as a public and literary figure has been analysed in several fascinating studies such as: Richard D. Altick’s Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1970); Mary S

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former increased the likelihood of a conviction for the crime, and, while innocence could be enhanced if the defendant reinforced the stereotype of morality and feminine passivity, it was seriously endangered if she failed in its depiction. If a defendant was accused of murdering her husband, the prosecution could present her to the court as a bad or unfaithful wife in order to persuade the jury of her guilt. In this chapter I consider the political and social implications of women on trial for murdering their husbands in two novels: Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, written in 1897 by the Californian novelist Gertrude Atherton, and A Pin to See the Peepshow, written in 1934 by the British novelist, playwright and criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse. These novels offer striking portrayals of spirited, independent women who aspire to greater experience of life than marriage can offer them. The female protagonists are budding career women whose priorities lie outside the home, but whose progress towards success is brought to an abrupt halt by the death of their husbands, an ensuing murder charge against them, and a trial at which they are found guilty, although they are really innocent. They are difficult women, rebellious and wilful, selfish, and far from likable characters, who the reader feels distant from, and rather judgemental of, at times. Even so, the treatment they receive in court as the accused is blatantly biased, and it becomes apparent during the trial that they are punished for their “bad” behaviour as wives, rather than on solid evidence. As the defence counsel in Patience Sparhawk and Her Times warns Patience: “‘[the jury] will be surely prejudiced against you because you did not love your husband and because you left him’” (Atherton 1897: 413). As anticipated, the prosecution case against Patience focuses on painting a portrait of her as a heartless wife: “With masterly ingenuity he made each juror feel what an awful being a bad women was, an unloving undutiful wife; […] that no unloved husband’s life would be safe were not such women exploited and punished” (Atherton 1897: 447). What makes these two works interesting, from the perspective of analysis of literary portrayals of women on trial in literature, is that the trial is narrated from the point of view of the accused women, expressing their traumatic experience of public exposure, and the injustice of the proceedings. Literary representations of women in the dock previous to, and contemporary with, these two novels have mainly focused on women’s aspect and behaviour, or narrated the scene from an external narrative viewpoint.2 Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (1977); Anthea Trodd’s Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989); Virginia Morris’s Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction (1990), and Judith Knelman’s Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (1998). 2 See, for example: the trial of Mary Monson for the murder of her landlord in The

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Atherton’s story has many autobiographical echoes in its description of a young, independent-minded woman’s failed marriage, and successful newspaper career in the United States of the end of the nineteenth century. It was first published in England, where it was taken to be a New Woman novel (Leider 1991: 150). Gertrude Atherton had certainly given some thought to the subject of wives murdering husbands, as she published “recipes” for eliminating tiresome husbands in the San Francisco Examiner (Leider 1991: 273). Even so, the main inspiration for the murder plot of Patience Sparhawk and Her Times was the sensational press coverage of real contemporary murder trials (Leider 1991: 148). F. Tennyson Jesse, who was editor of several volumes of the famous series of Notable British Trials, based her novel A Pin to See the Peepshow on the Old Bailey trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, jointly tried, convicted and executed for the murder of Edith’s husband in London in 1922. The trial scenes are very close to the real event, but Jesse changed several of Edith Thompson’s personal circumstances, and she imaginatively elaborated and fictionalised her youth and married life, in order to create her heroine Julia Starling, née Almond.3 The build-up to the trial focuses on the impact of the First World War on women’s lives, and how it was instrumental in helping women out of the house and into the world of work as substitutes for the men away fighting. But Jesse also illustrates how tradition and stereotyped notions of love trap the heroine in a fantasy romance which ends in tragedy. In these novels, Atherton and Jesse focus on the impossibility of reconciling the traditional, domestic role of wife with a more personally fulfilling, professional activity outside the home. They envisage the evolution of women Ways of the Hour by James Fenimore Cooper (1850); the trial of Catherine Gaunt in Griffith Gaunt by Charles Reade (1865–6); the trial of Lydia Gwilt for the murder of her husband in Armadale by Wilkie Collins (1864); the trial of Beryl Booth for the murder of her husband in Murder or Manslaughter by Helen B. Mathers (1885); the trial of Bess Haywood for stabbing an admirer in A Writer of Books by George Paston (1899); the trial of Hetty Sorrel for infanticide in Adam Bede by George Eliot (1859); the trial of Anne de Barrigan for the murder of her husband in “Kerfol” by Edith Wharton (1916), and the trial of Harriet Vane for the murder of her ex-lover in Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (1930). 3 F. Tennyson Jesse did not write the account of the Thompson and Bywaters trial for the Notable British Trials series, although she took a keen interest in the proceedings and collected information on the case (Colenbrander, 1984: 134 & 190). For details of the Thompson and Bywaters trial and the life story of Edith Thompson, see Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson by René Weiss (1988). For a legal analysis of the trial and discussion of whether the outcome was a miscarriage of justice see R v. Bywaters and Thompson by Jean Graham Hall and Gordon D. Smith.

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towards independence as a very physical movement out of the home and into the world of work. Their heroines use the freedom and self-confidence that this professional activity affords to challenge the established status quo of power in the home, thereby giving rise to matrimonial friction, and patriarchal anger on the husband’s part. This contravening of the male-dominated power structure is symbolised in the novels by the death of the husband, construed as murder, for which the wives are indicted, thus converting the courtroom into the inevitable destiny of these heroines. In the courtroom, the wife’s independent lifestyle is used to forge a picture of her guilt; her refusal to submit makes her untrustworthy, and her attempts at self-realisation are viewed as selfish and anti-social. The trials that take place in these novels are emblematic of the debate on women’s position in society, mirroring deeply-entrenched fears that women’s independence was conducive to criminal behaviour. In Women and Crime, Frances Heidensohn analyses the theories of female criminality since the nineteenth century, and observes that: Growths in female crime rates have been linked to the emancipation of women for more than a century. Pike (1876) argued that as women grew more independent they would also grow more criminal. Bishop (1931) argued that there were already signs of increases in female criminality which he attributed to increasing emancipation. […] Pollak claimed that “the total volume of female crime has increased as a result of the progressing emancipation of women in our society.”  (Heidensohn 1996: 154–5)4

She also explains that, in studies in the 1970s and 1980s, the apparent increase in numbers of women committing “unfeminine” crimes, such as robbery and violence, was also interpreted as a side-effect of “the movement for women’s liberation which, it was suggested, was leading to the emancipation of women into taking a bigger share of crime” (Heidensohn 1996: 6). Also describing Pike’s preoccupations with women’s independence leading to crime, Clive Emsley suggests that the criminal woman in the nineteenth century was considered a threat to the established power relations between men and women, which were based on woman’s confinement to the domestic sphere (Emsley 1996: 152, 163). In particular, Emsley stipulates that women charged with murdering their husbands were considered extreme, albeit rare, examples of this challenge: “The offence was the ultimate negation of the behaviour expected of the dutiful wife or servant, and it also reached into the ranks of the respectable middle classes” (Emsley 1996: 152). 4 References are to the following works: L.O. Pike: History of Crime in England (1876); C. Bishop: Women and Crime (1931), and O. Pollack: The Criminality of Women (1961).

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From a historical point of view, murdering a husband was once a form of insurrection or rebellion and, until 1828, the killing of a superior by an inferior (as, for example, the case of a servant killing a master, or a wife murdering a husband) belonged to a special category of murder classified as “petty treason”. Frances Dolan has written about this crime as depicted in seventeenth century texts and she explores how it was clearly identified in both legal and literary texts of the time with resistance and rebellion: The murderous wife calls into question the legal conception of a wife as subsumed by her husband and largely incapable of legal or moral agency. She also violates the vigorous and persistent, if not necessarily descriptive, cultural constructions of women as incapable of initiative or autonomous action […] through violent action, the contradictions of wives’ social and legal status erupt as uncontainable.  (Dolan 1992: 3)

Margaret Anne Doody maintains that literary portrayals of women who murder husbands have political connotations, as “petty treason is in some sense a ‘political offence’” (1984: 61). Furthermore, Virginia Morris claims in Double Jeopardy that Victorian writers were aware of the political reverberations of murders committed by women: “they implied, if they did not always explicitly state that the individual cases were part of a larger, legitimate gender battle – a power struggle between men and women – rather than a simply individual example of depravity or immorality” (Morris, 1990: 3). As can be seen from the above, the association between women’s criminality and their independence has a long history, and the specific act of murdering a husband has been interpreted as a struggle for power between the genders. In Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, and A Pin to See the Peepshow, Atherton and Jesse clearly represent this power struggle in a triptych of spaces where men were the established authority. The first triptych “panel” portrays women negotiating an inviolate space of their own within the four-walled privacy of the home. The second “panel” deals with the hierarchical world of work, which women were beginning to enter on terms of limited equality with men, although mainly in a supplementary role. Thirdly, the most imposing “panel” of this triptych of private and public space is the courtroom, representing a highly significant public space where, despite the tentative moves towards equality between the sexes evident in the public world of work, and even after women won the vote, men maintained an enduring monopoly on decision-making, authority, and speech. Women have mainly appeared in courtrooms as either witnesses or the accused and only more recently as members of the jury, lawyers, and ultimately judges. In Britain, women were allowed to serve on juries after the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919, although only women who were householders were eligible. In the United States women did not automatically become eligible for jury

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service when they won the vote in 1920, and voluntary exclusion for women was only ended in 1975. According to Marina Angel, there is an important parallel between voting and serving on juries, as they are both political rights that enable women to take part in making and applying the law. More importantly, she argues that only when women started working outside the home as wage earners did their role become sufficiently visible and relevant in the community to make a gender-based exemption from jury service obsolete (Angel 1996). In the case of the two novels studied here, the developments outlined above mean that the trials the heroines undergo (because written in different contexts) register certain differences. Gertrude Atherton’s heroine faces a jury composed of twelve men, as the story takes place prior to women gaining the vote. Patience is very aware that the men who will decide her future are not her peers, although their gender does not seem to be her main preoccupation; she finds being “at the mercy” of a jury composed of men from an inferior social class and of inferior intellect “humiliating” and terrifying (Atherton 1897: 422). In A Pin to See the Peepshow, set in 1922, there are two women on the jury at Julia’s trial, although in the real-life trial on which Jesse’s novel is based there was, in fact, only one woman on the jury. However, women on the jury make little difference to the verdict in Jesse’s novel, for Julia’s adultery becomes the basis of the prosecution case, and, as Julia realises, not even the two women on the jury would be able to understand why she got involved in an affair: “those two women looked as though they had never had a lover in their lives. Those ten men looked as though they had never been lovers” (Jesse 1979: 359). However, despite differences, the experience of public exposure and sexual prejudice is similar in both novels, and I shall be considering the trials in parallel, as complementary portrayals of the same type of “miscarriage” of justice. The similarities between the trials, notwithstanding the time difference, are perhaps symptomatic of the lack of real progress in the treatment that women received at the hands of justice, regardless of their gaining position and status in the world of work, and even after winning the right to vote and sit on juries. These two novels show how the heroines find themselves converted in public spectacle in the courtroom, where, as happened to real-life murderesses, details of their private lives and marriages are dragged out into the public view “while the whole world was watching”, as Mary Hartman describes in Victorian Murderesses (Hartman 1985: 256).5 Hartman argues that the law “opened the 5 Prior to Mary Hartman’s observations on the narrative potential of the sensation caused by criminal acts being discovered in court, Mikhail Bakhtin drew attention to the importance of the criminal trial in the history and development of the novel as a prime narrative structure for exposing private life and making it public in ‘Forms of Time and Chronotype in the Novel’ (1981: 123).

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closed doors of these women’s lives”, revealing a whole range of taboo issues centring on women’s sexuality. What is more, the normally “hidden history of domestic power relationships” was also exposed when women were on trial for murder (Hartman 1985:4), as happens in Jesse and Atherton’s fictional trials, when letters read out in court and witness testimony reveal the husbands’ attempts to master their wives, and the women’s endeavour to resist. In her capacity as criminologist, F. Tennyson Jesse was well aware of the potential scandal and spectacle of a murder trial and upheld the truth behind the observation “everyone loves a good murder” (Jesse 1958: 7). The Thompson and Bywaters trial, on which she based her A Pin to See the Peepshow, provoked tremendous public interest in 1922, and a million people signed a petition for their reprieve, which never came. Apparently, Gertrude Atherton also took the death plot for her novel Patience Sparhawk from a real murder case. Her biographer, Emily Wortis Leider, claims that she adapted the sensational 1892 trial of Carlyle Harris, accused of murdering his secret bride, Helen Potts, with an overdose of morphine drops, and also that Patience Sparhawk owed a lot to the popular interest in the much-publicised and talked-about British trial of the American citizen Florence Maybrick for poisoning her husband in 1889 (Leider 1991: 147). The novel reflects the fervent public interest in murder trials. When Patience’s arrest hits the newspaper headlines she becomes the “heroine of the most sensational drama of the day” (Atherton 1897: 414). Atherton even attended a murder trial in order to document her courtroom scenes.6 The three representations, or panels, of space (home, work and courtroom) are physically “hinged” together. Movement between home and work is facilitated by public transport, and journeys are adventures offering women the chance to visually penetrate the city; to be on-lookers and observers from a vantage point that makes them the subject rather than the object. However, between the public space of work and the courtroom, the journeys become nightmarish transportations in which the women’s outward vision is impeded or confused. Taken between prison cell and courtroom, these women lose their capacity to be subjects, and experience the nightmare of public spectacle. The novels narrate the heroines’ evolution from one space to the next, creating the sensation 6 Atherton also documented the prison scenes by visiting Sing Sing, the prison where Patience is confined to await execution, and she was allowed to sit in the electric chair (Leider, 1991: 147). F. Tennyson Jesse was also interested in prisons and visited several in the States (including Sing Sing), and many British prisons, including Holloway, where her heroine is imprisoned and executed, as happened in real life to Edith Thompson. Jesse became friends with the woman who had been Deputy Governor of the prison while Mrs Thompson was awaiting execution, and she provided Jesse with information and advice during the writing of the last chapters of A Pin to See the Peepshow (Colenbrander, 1984: 189–90).

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that the courtroom is their inevitable destination. The home, supposedly the truly private space, and theoretically the domain of the woman, in reality does not provide the privacy they need, because the husbands veto this right. Paradoxically, going out to work, out into public, provides them with independence, which in turn bolsters their authority at home and helps towards achieving an individual private space in the home. However, neither heroine is properly aware of the importance of their move outside the home because they are victims of a romantic heritage that moulds and deforms their aspirations and ambitions; they partly collude in their own downfall, by rejecting professional fulfilment in favour of romance, love and self-sacrifice. By rejecting the traditional role of wife, the heroines incite social censure. They have stepped over the line of permitted independence – taken things too far – and they wake up to the warped reality of a crowded courtroom, and the prosecution’s version of their story. Their journey to self-realisation ends abruptly the day of the husband’s death. 2. Behind Closed Doors Both novelists begin their novels with the formative years of their heroines, describing the situations and experiences that determine their future, and consequent appearances in the courtroom charged with murdering their husbands. Despite the very different settings and social contexts, Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Jesse’s Julia Almond share similar vital experiences of their family and home environment. Primarily, there is an almost aggressive lack of privacy within the domestic space of the home, and Patience and Julia struggle to secure or improvise spaces where they can be introspective, think and dream. Patience’s bedroom, for instance, becomes eloquently out of bounds when she bolts the door, shutting herself in and others out of her protecting prison. She appropriates the parlour as private living space and uses the library of her father’s friend as a comforting womb-like retreat. In A Pin to See the Peepshow Julia’s sanctuary, her “city of refuge” (Jesse 1979: 134), is also her bedroom, prized as the only space that she can call her own: “it stood for something very special in her life, for decency and freedom, above all for possession” (Jesse 1979: 32). “Up in her room, Julia drew a deep breath of pleasure. Here she was alone at last, this place was hers” (Jesse 1979: 40). “This wasn’t a mere room, it was her own soul” (Jesse 1979: 124). In Atherton’s novel, Patience’s childhood is a constant evasion of her damaging home life; reading is a form of retreat into a safe world, literally represented by the womb-like library where she is introduced to the classics, which in turn furnish her lonely imagination with a composite romantic hero to desire and dream about. The dreams that she indulges in are wanderings “of her ego through the books she has read” (Atherton 1897: 23), girlish adaptations

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of the classics to the world of popular romance, with Patience as heroine. As indicated by the exaggerated gothic style of the ruined church tower, where Patience goes to dream, these childhood venues of privacy disclose the inadequacy of Patience’s preparation for the wider world. As real escape from her home seems to be impossible, she naturally falls into a romantic escapism, filling her head with standard helpings of fairy tale endings.7 Julia Almond in A Pin to See the Peepshow also falls prey to misguided romantic notions, reading for romantic sustenance, and to counteract the stultifying normality of her home: “Julia lived only in escape from the dull and somewhat sordid facts of life as it had to be lived within its confines” (Jesse 1979: 31). The narrator is critical of this undiscriminating consumption of cultural and literary sources, as it reduces “the pattern of life to a romantic assumption that is translated into truth for very few, and those few either exceptionally lucky or – not so exceptionally – undiscerning” (Jesse 1979: 46–47). These intimate dreaming spaces provide a taste of freedom and independence, which fuels the heroines’ need to escape from the family home; however, they both choose the erroneous path of marriage to move out. For Julia, it is loss of exclusive possession of her bedroom that precipitates her into a marriage destined to fail. She deludes herself that, as Mrs Starling, she will have control over the bedroom, with her husband knocking at the door to gain admittance. Inevitably, at the end of the war her husband is back at home, indignantly claiming authority in the house, and the battle over Julia’s exclusive rights to the bedroom as her own private space begins. Patience, on the other hand, marries for the respectability and social status that she was deprived of as a child. When Patience marries Beverly Peele, she marries into “society” and a family that has occupied Peele Manor for over three hundred years. As Mrs Beverly Peele she is required to play her part as decorative wife and to hide her intelligence. In private, the same struggle over personal space within traditional marriage occurs in Patience Sparhawk and Her Times as happens in A Pin to See the Peepshow, and Patience’s husband invades all those spaces she guards as intimate, from bedroom to library. Both husbands are possessive and jealous of their wives’ time and space, staking claims and brooding when outmanoeuvred. The wives employ survival tactics to ensure some freedom of movement and respite from suffocating domestic intimacy. This usually involves placation with wifely attentions, pampering of husband’s ego, compromise, and, ultimately, submission. Whenever 7 In her study of Gertrude Atherton’s life and works, Charlotte S. McClure aptly points out that Patience finds no guidance or practical help in literature, and suggests that Gertrude Atherton was fully aware that “promiscuous reading of novels is a form of killing time and escaping dull existences” (McClure 1979: 44).

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the husbands feel their position is challenged by their wife’s independence they threaten them with confinement: Julia’s husband threatens to cause a scene at work, so that she will lose her job; or he secretly hopes she becomes pregnant, so that she has to stay at home with the baby. (In fact, Julia has a back-street abortion to prevent this from happening.) In Patience Sparhawk Patience’s husband throws tantrums if she does not pay him her undivided attention when required. Even her retirement to the library to read provokes him: “‘The idea of forgetting your husband for a book – a book! You are a lovely wife! You are a disgrace to the name! You would rather read than kiss your husband! I’ll lock this room up, damned if I don’t’” (Atherton 1897: 220). Ironically, the significant connection between privacy, intimacy and freedom presages the privation of all three in the final chapters of the novels, when the heroines must share cells with other inmates, with loss of all privacy because of constant surveillance in prison, rather like, as Julia describes, animals in a zoo (Jesse 1979: 338). 3. Crossing the threshold and traversing the city In marked contrast to the forced intimacy of the couple, and feared confinement of the house, the street and the city offer an escape route from the control of the family or husband. Various means of transport bring the public spaces of the street, city and workplace within reach; public transport in the shape of trams, trolley buses and trains whisk Patience and Julia through and across the city, offering a window to look out at the urban landscape. In Patience Sparhawk and Her Times mobility and transport signify independence and the author associates travel with Patience Sparhawk’s career and future. The means of transport mirrors the importance of each step of her journey: a frustratingly slow horse and trap in her home town, the gliding steamer that transports her to a fairytale New York, or the street cars that provide the enraptured Patience with a window and a view of an immense and densely thronging metropolis. During marriage to Beverly, however, her mobility is arrested. Forced to stay at Peele Manor, the family home, when the rest of the family move to New York for the winter months, incarceration with her husband becomes unbearable, and she shows the first signs of rebellion when she travels into town to visit friends, despite her husband’s disapproval. The importance of movement and mobility is apparent in the ultimatum Patience presents to her husband: as an alternative to the divorce that Beverly will not concede, she asks to be able to travel. In reply, he threatens to lock her up, and this makes escape the only remaining option (Atherton 1897: 304). The tram in A Pin to See the Peepshow represents the progress and modernity of George V’s reign, and it contrasts with the Victorian backwater where

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Julia lives, which represents “an age when folk were content to stay in that class of life in which they had been born” (Jesse 1979: 32). The tram journey to school is Julia’s “daily great adventure” (Jesse 1979: 5), providing her with moments of rhythmic unison with the city. She becomes part of “the orchestra of Greater London” (Jesse 1979: 3), and her mind is free to move outside, greedily absorbing the passing street scenes and imaginatively penetrating “behind lighted windows at night” (Jesse 1979 13).The narrator explains that this capacity is one of Julia’s greatest virtues – her “zest for life” (Jesse 1979: 13). Julia likes the “height and authority” (Jesse 1979: 3) of the front seat upstairs because it makes her feel in control, autonomous and adventurous. On the other hand, downstairs, inside and without a view, she dreams rather than looks, and lives out a fantasy life, one that is based on a “‘romantic assumption that there was something wonderful and golden, something complete and round; that was what she wanted’” (Jesse 1979: 387). When she is deprived of a view she falls back on this damaging romantic assumption, becoming a romantic heroine of a double, even triple, life: “her life at the shop; her mere existence at Saint Clement’s Square, and her life of the imagination” (Jesse 1979: 225). This romantic assumption is symbolised in the novel by Julia’s short-sightedness, a condition which prevents her from perceiving reality. Julia considers herself pretty, which (the narrator assures us) she is not: “She was very shortsighted, and she saw the pallor of her skin, the narrow brightness of her eyes and the gleam of her hair through a haze that lay like a bloom over everything at which she looked” (Jesse 1979: 7). This haze is self-imposed because Julia does not want to wear her glasses in public, preferring a role as object: “It was tiresome being a woman if there were anything wrong with your sight; you had to choose between seeing and being seen. Julia chose to be seen” (Jesse 1979: 187). Julia particularly enjoys being the object of admiration: “this contact of eyes, that swift flicker of knowledge between her and men with whom she did not exchange a word – she even veiled her glance with a sort of glassy impassivity – yet excited Julia” (Jesse 1979: 34). Only when Julia wears her glasses (usually in places like the top deck or the theatre, where she is not likely to be observed) does she really participate in life around her, “and the world would leap into sharp reality for her” (Jesse 1979: 210). Her refusal to wear glasses is a rejection of seeing in favour of being seen, of preferring her fantasy world to her real one. This fatal confusion between fantasy and reality leads to the murder of her husband by her lover, as the quotation below, taken from the scene of her husband’s murder (“the deed”), illustrates: “The dream was over. It had fallen away like a great wave and, sharp and hard, one deed remained; a deed that seemed to have nothing to do with the dream, and that yet in some fantastic fashion was the outcome of it. No one would understand the dream, but they would see the deed” (Jesse 1979: 311).

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4. Opening Doors The world of work is the antithesis of the dream or fantasy world that Patience and Julia indulge in to stem the inadequacies of their dependent situations. It is a world where the practical comes to the fore and the fanciful recedes. Both authors emphasise the importance of the world of work for women, without playing down the physical demands it makes on them, and the adverse side effects on health (such as, tiredness, nervous exhaustion, listlessness, and loss of weight). Both heroines find the world of work exhausting but challenging, and each is very successful in her line of business, steadily gaining responsibility, autonomy and money. However, Patience and Julia go out to work for different reasons: for Patience, it is an act of rebellion, while work for Julia is an inevitable fact of lower-middle class life: “The life of everyone born in Julia’s class is of necessity intermingled with the idea of a job. It is at once escape and fulfilment” (Jesse 1979: 49). The work contexts are also quite different: Atherton describes the male territory of a newspaper, where women are admitted in a secondary role. The newspaper is a restricted world for women, with limited professional prospects, at most a Sunday editorship or the setting up of a woman’s newspaper or magazine. Patience reports on “society” news while her male colleagues deal with more serious news, and she is expected to provide a woman’s perspective while writing in a style aimed at the male reader. Nevertheless, this discrimination does not affect interpersonal relations between the men and women of the press office and Patience learns to take her editor’s advice, criticism and judgement of her work without expecting concessions for her position as a woman.8 F. Tennyson Jesse, on the other hand, portrays the predominantly female space of an up-market dress-maker’s shop; a prototype woman’s work space, transforming women’s work inside the home into women’s work outside the home. L’Etrangère, the smart West End dress-maker’s where Julia works, is a converted Georgian house whose family rooms have become fitting-rooms and work rooms. Although it has a public presence on the street, it is a domestic space redesigned as work space, a “queer topsy-turvy world” (Jesse 1979: 77), unpredictably combining professional, amateur, and family atmospheres. It is a marked feminine space, and operates as an exclusive club for women, where they can exchange information, like a second-hand public sphere. Julia’s contact 8 Charlotte S. McClure describes how Gertrude Atherton considered work as a newspaper reporter a good introduction to real life and an apprenticeship in writing, because women “would lose their nonsensical sentimental notions and learn the principles of composition. Drawing on her own experience, she imagined a newspaper job for Patience Sparhawk as a part of her initiation into knowledge of the world” (McClure 1979: 36).

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with women from the upper classes allows her to overhear snippets of privileged information about the impending war, not available in the press. In this way, Julia enters as a silent spectator into the public sphere. In other respects, the shop is a microcosmic working world, with strict hierarchy, and where, as a general rule, the professional has precedence over the personal. Even though these differences between work spaces are important ones, the role of a paid job outside the home is fundamentally the same in each novel. Their jobs, and the money they earn, provide Patience and Julia with a sense of freedom, self-confidence and authority, which they can exploit to achieve more personal space and privacy in the home. In Patience’s case, her job is a happier alternative to her marriage, and she manages to support herself on her earnings, ensuring financial independence from her estranged husband. Her job literally allows her a “room of her own”, and, even though the small room she rents in a boarding house represents struggle, it is also a symbol of her freedom (Atherton 1897: 307, 319), and a private space in which to develop and mature. Even though Patience is physically and psychologically exhausted after a year, she is morally stronger; she feels happier in the “cubby-hole” room of her own, than she ever was at her husband’s family home, Peele Manor. Unlike Patience, Julia does not earn enough to afford a comfortable room, and a life of her own; it does endow her, nonetheless, with “a certain authority in the household, which would not otherwise have been hers” (Jesse 1979: 182), and she is acutely aware that total financial dependence on her husband would reduce her to “a general servant” (Jesse 1979: 235). The war gives Julia a break from marital monotony and it also means increased business in the shop because many customers take men’s places at work while these are away fighting, and, ironically, there is more money to spend on clothes and going out. As Julia becomes more interested and involved in the business, and earns more responsibility, the shop displaces her fantasy world: “More and more she was becoming aware that life wasn’t like the storybooks after all […] the practical Julia was over-laying the dreamer” (Jesse 1979: 121). Her real life becomes a more fulfilling balance between a satisfying domestic independence and the world outside, encountered at work. When her husband comes back from the war, work becomes a form of refuge, an alternative to Julia’s fantasy world, resuscitated by the patent lack of love and romance in her marriage: “She wanted what she had read about in all the storybooks ever since she could read at all. If she could not have that, she had, as solid fact, L’Etrangère [the shop]” (Jesse 1979: 204). Even during her adulterous affair with a younger man, when the shop loses some of its “objective reality” (Jesse 1979: 230), it is still preserved as a “sacred” place (Jesse 1979: 246), and is set against romance.

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One senses that the working world should be women’s destiny rather than marriage, but this destiny is circumvented in both stories. Patience is unable to resist the authority of tradition, and lets herself be persuaded by her husband’s family to return to the husband she is separated (although not divorced) from, to attend him on his (alleged) death bed. Although Patience insists on being paid, and treated as a professional nurse, as opposed to wife, she knows that her emancipation has been effectively curtailed (Atherton 1897: 344) along with access to the public world of work. Return to her husband’s house is a regression that curtails her freedom, and her concession to patriarchal authority ultimately traps her in a murder investigation. Resistance to her husband and his family’s authority is used in court to make her appear guilty. Her father-inlaw, a distinguished lawyer, plainly seeks retribution for the treachery of leaving her husband: “‘you have dishonoured an ancient house […] and left it without an heir. Its name, after nearly three hundred years in this country alone, must die with me. If you had borne a son I should move heaven and earth to get you out of the country, but now I hope to heaven you’ll go to the chair’” (Atherton 1897: 386). In A Pin to See the Peepshow Julia is unable to relinquish her dream of romance, and she sacrifices a promising career as a business woman for an adulterous affair, which she deludes herself is “the real thing”. In this way, both heroines participate in their own downfall, and their husbands’ deaths lead them directly to the courtroom. However, Patience and Julia follow different routes to the courtroom: Patience’s husband mistakenly takes an overdose of morphine, and Patience is framed by Honora, a relative who lives with the Peeles and who is secretly in love with Patience’s estranged husband. This fanatical woman represents innocence incarnate, and in court she gets away with committing perjury, confessing to perjury, and then committing perjury a second time. The jury and the public are totally taken in by her carefully-studied angelic appearance and behaviour: As Honora ascended the stand there was a deep murmur of admiration. She looked like an angel, nothing less […] Honora bowed her head with an expression of deep humility, as a child might that had been justly rebuked […] As Patience passed out of the room with Tarbox she heard the word “angel” more than once, and knew that it did not refer to her.  (Atherton 1897: 439, 440 & 442)

While Patience is stabbed in the back by the stereotype of the ideal woman, Julia falls into a romantic trap of her own making, and one that converts her into an adulterer. During the affair she weaves a web of fanciful lies written in love letters that are subsequently read out in court to frame her as a murderous

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wife. Guilty of adultery, Julia has little chance of proving her innocence to the charge of murder because, even though the hand that killed her husband was her lover’s, her presence at the scene implicates her, and her letters read out in court incriminate her. By putting the reader in Julia’s place in court, F. Tennyson Jesse leads us to doubt the validity of the jury’s verdict of guilt. 5. Doors Closing Atherton and Jesse coincide in describing the extreme sense of public exposure that the women on trial experience; the courtroom becomes a stage on which their private life is held up to public scrutiny. Atherton’s experience as member of the public in the murder trial that she attended taught her the dramatic potential of the witness and defendant on the stand – far greater, she thought, than that of a “‘paltry theater’” (Leider 1991: 149). Patience is conscious of playing a part as if in a play, “and assuredly there has been no such theatre as the court room since the world began” (Atherton 1897: 420). Likewise, she is very aware of being centre stage, and experiences “being shot upon by a battery of eyes” (Atherton 1897: 421) from the public; men stare in eager curiosity, and the district attorney fixes her with narrowed eyes that look at her with “cold speculation” (Atherton 1897: 422). In A Pin to See the Peepshow the concept of the courtroom as a theatre and the trial as a play originates from the real trial of Edith Thompson, where the judge warned the jury not to think that they were at a play or reading a novel (Graham Hall and Smith, 1997: 42; and Jesse, 1979: 360). Even the title of the novel itself is a reference to the idea of theatre, in the form of a peepshow. Julia’s nightmare trial is an inversion of the “little private world” (Colenbrander, 1984: 190) of the peepshows that the sixteen-year-old Julia looked into at school: “at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly […] a complete and self-contained world” (Jesse 1979: 19)9. Julia is enraptured by the “strange glamour” of the peepshow, and it affects her in an unsettling way: “And suddenly Julia became muddled between this world that she knew so well and which she knew was the real world, and the peepshow she had just been living in for a fraction of time” (Jesse 1979: 21). This is a metaphor for Julia’s future in which she confuses illusion and reality, becoming trapped in the courtroom peepshow, dazzled by the bright, drowning light of the courtroom. “Everywhere there were eyes” (Jesse 1979: 339), people looking at her from every possible angle of the courtroom, and converted in a monstrous collective public eye a “strange many-headed beast that surged and muttered and stared at her” (Jesse 1979: 327). 9 In her biography of F. Tennyson Jesse, Joanna Colenbrander describes how Jesse heard a friend describe these peepshows made by children at school, and immediately decided on this for the title of her novel, which, until that moment, she had referred to as “Julia” (Colenbrander 1984: 190–91).

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To face her public ordeal, Julia makes up her face to combat the bright light and dresses carefully, but, prey to vanity, she decides against wearing glasses, just as she did when questioned by the police. With glasses “she wouldn’t look pretty, and helpless, and young any longer. She would look cautious, clever. She mustn’t look that whatever she did” (Jesse 1979: 322). In consequence, her blurred vision magnifies the nightmarish quality of the trial, with the judge appearing as a “blot of scarlet” with a “grey fuzz” of a wig (Jesse 1979: 339). Impaired vision is accompanied by a “mist in her mind” (Jesse 1979: 340), making it difficult for her to follow the proceedings and understand the legal terminology. She tries to keep her head high, but at the same time she no longer has her body under control: her hands shake, she cannot swallow, a sense of numbness takes over, tiredness overwhelms her, and she even falls momentarily asleep. Patience Sparhawk manages her demeanour and performance better, although nervousness makes her rigid and proud. She also takes extreme care over her dress for her appearance in court, even though she knows that her becoming appearance will not win her any points with the jury. She is aware of what is happening during the trial, comprehending her vulnerability. She takes her bearings from the graphic layout of the courtroom and the position of the audience, jury and legal protagonists, and she senses the latent hostility of the judge, revealed in the description of “his silver chin-tuft […] shaped like the queen of hearts” (Atherton 1897: 421), an allusion to the farcical trial scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), where the queen bypasses the verdict to directly pass sentence (Carroll, 1970: 161). The open antagonism of the district attorney (prosecuting counsel) chills Patience’s blood, driving home the possible fate of “an open grave” (Atherton 1897: 422). The inferior male jurors haunt her at night, “she awoke in the morning with a violent start, seeing them for a moment in a row on the foot board of her bed. She speculated, at times, upon the lives of those men, those pinched grubbing lives, and felt for them a sort of terrified pity”(Atherton 1897: 423).10 Patience is mainly lucid and has moments of insight during the trial, but she dreads having to testify after her father-in-law has testified to her failure as dutiful wife: “Patience’s blood congealed. The woman he depicted was enough to inspire any jury with horror. It was herself and not herself, a Galatea manufactured by a clever lawyer” (Atherton 1897: 428–29). Margaret Anne Doody has pointed out that women on trial in the eighteenth century were faced with one of the few real-life opportunities for women 10 Charlotte McClure considers Atherton’s description of “the tense drama of the courtroom” to be “a highly realistic picture of the judicial system” (McClure 1979: 61), in as far as the stark contrast between the upper class lawyer and the lower class jurors is concerned. I would add that the emphasis on class barely hides a latent criticism of male dominance in the courtroom.

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to speak out in public and to be heard: “Defending her life in a public court was […] one of the few occasions in the eighteenth century in which woman was urged to take command of the public forum – or at least to have a voice in it” (Doody, 1994:291). Anthea Trodd, writing about the Victorian era, also maintains that the courtroom scene was one of the few “fictional excuses” for gentlewomen to appear in public in fiction: “The heroine in court could become a woman in public without resorting to the streets or the boards – the main public arenas for women” (Trodd 1989: 131). In the novels discussed here, both heroines have the opportunity to speak in public when they take the stand at their trials, but they do so with very different feelings. Patience is reluctant to testify, but is told that not to do so would set the jury against her. Numerous rehearsals prepare her for her cross-examination by the district attorney, so she is aware of performing a part she has been primed for, using men’s words to defend herself, and so, recognising the weakness of her defence case, she realises that only her barrister’s eloquence will save her. Renouncing her own version, she follows her lawyer’s script. During her imprisonment and trial Patience looses all vestige of her hard-won independence, and becomes romantically and literally dependent on her lawyer–lover, finally converted in her saviour and the hero at the novel’s close. Julia, on the contrary, is desperate to go into “the box” (Jesse 1979: 333) and tell her own story. She insists on testifying, despite all attempts by her lawyer and barrister to stop her. She is warned that it is not like a business deal, and that she will not be able to convince the jury, but Julia is oblivious to the danger: “She had always been able to make men believe what she said. Why should this be different, especially when she knew she was telling the truth?” (Jesse 1979: 333). Although Julia relishes the opportunity to tell her story in public, she is (literally) blind to the dangers involved and the possible trap she walks into. She confuses the tolerance of the business world toward women with the intolerance of the legal world, and of the public at large, represented by the jury. She mistakes the jurors for equals: the men may look like business contacts, buyers and sales representatives, or the two women might remind her of the milliner at the shop, but this deceptively familiar jury judges Julia on her deficiencies and failure as a dutiful wife.11 The prosecution counsel skilfully corners Julia into a narrative of contradictions and guilty-sounding admissions, while the judge’s “acid” incursions on Julia’s story stun her (Jesse 1979: 353): “Why did I say that, thought Julia desperately. I never even tried that; but looking back carefully as she could upon the cross-examination, she could not see the point at which she 11 Edith Thompson’s counsel in the real life trial considered that he could have got an acquittal for her if she had not given evidence herself (Graham Hall and Smith 1997: 77), and that she ruined her chances by obstinately going into “the box”.

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had taken the wrong turning, at which it had become possible for the man to trap her into such an admission” (Jesse 1979: 356). Even more damaging is the judge’s prejudice against Julia for her adultery: “but there again he kept on using the words ‘adultery’ and ‘adulterer’” (Jesse 1979: 364); “adultery apparently was quite as bad as murder!” (Jesse 1979: 355).12 Gertrude Atherton and F. Tennyson Jesse make it very clear that their protagonists do not receive a fair trial, but, above all, the most striking impression is of the hostility of the court room and the dominance of the male protagonists who wield the power. The heroines feel prey to these men who have the power of taking their lives, and the authors explicitly show how the testimony of the accused is twisted, manipulated and used against them. F. Tennyson Jesse, in particular, aimed to write about a miscarriage of justice, but her novel takes a political stance from which Jesse exposes the terrible sexual prejudice that influenced the jury more than the evidence presented by the prosecution. According to her biographer, F. Tennyson Jesse was greatly affected by the Edith Thompson trial and was especially shocked by the “harsh verdict”. At the time of the trial she had collected exhaustive material and documentation on the case from all sources: “the story and the woman haunted her mind, and only by re-creating them in fiction form could she rid herself of the uncanny knowledge of the affair that seemed to possess her […] Fryn immersed herself so deeply in their lives she almost suffocated” (Colenbrander, 1984: 134 & 190).13 Although Elaine Morgan considers that Julia is more than just a symbol of 12 Graham Hall and Smith discuss the judge’s biased summing up of the Thompson and Bywaters trial, and it is clear that Jesse was not exaggerating in her fictional version: “He held very strong opinions on moral issues, and did not hesitate to make them known throughout this trial […] Extra marital relationships were anathema to him” (Graham Hall and Smith 1997: 42–3). One barrister was in no doubt about the judge’s role and responsibility in this trial: “‘the disgust of the trial Judge, Mr Justice Shearman, for marital infidelity and his unimaginative, literal mind hanged this unhappy creature’” (C. G. L. Du Cann 1960: 206, qtd. in Graham Hall and Smith 1997: 44). 13 F. Tennyson Jesse probably read Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel The Documents in the Case published in 1930, and partly based on the Thompson and Bywaters case. Sayers reportedly wanted the adulterous wife in her novel to resemble Edith Thompson, and in her novel Sayers made the wife guilty for “egging on” her lover to kill her husband (Reynolds 2002: 250). In her biography of Sayers, Barbara Reynolds attributes F. Tennyson Jesse with succeeding where Sayers’ novel failed: “This is the powerful love-story Dorothy was groping for but never grasped, possibly because she had not the courage to do so” (Reynolds 2002: 254). More importantly, Dorothy Sayers was obviously not convinced by Edith Thompson’s defence, and she made her into “ ‘a dreadful person’ ” (Sayers qtd. in Reynolds 2002: 250), whereas Jesse considered the trial amounted to a miscarriage of justice, and perhaps represented Edith Thompson in a truer light, as Elaine Morgan explains in her introduction to Jesse’s novel.

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woman, “she is the symbol of any human being caught up in a judicial machine where the pretence of administering justice is irrevocably skewed by the prejudices of the people appointed to dispense with it” (introduction to A Pin to See the Peepshow, Jesse 1979), I feel that the emphasis is, in fact, on Julia as a woman (rather than just “any human being”) on trial for murdering her husband. The lead up to the court scene is important in itself as a portrait of a young woman trapped by her class and gender, and by a hypocritical double morality, showing that the prejudice and bias that Julia is subjected to in the courtroom is precisely because she is a woman who has committed adultery. Despite the presence of two women on the jury at Julia’s trial, Julia’s unsuitability as a wife and her social transgression weigh heavily against her. Patience Sparhawk and Her Times reflects the limitations and frustrations of women’s emergence into the public world of work, showing how tradition and romance become the enemies of women’s independence. The courtroom scene is a revelation scene and, despite Patience’s independence and spirit, in the hostile male stronghold of the courtroom she relinquishes her authority and her story, handing it over to be scripted and judged by men, thus admitting a defeat which is later forced home by the bathetic romance of the final scene. This finale proffers small sense of resolution to the question of Patience’s quest to find a goal in life, the “psychological drama of a woman’s quest for identity and for a life purpose within and beyond her procreative function” (McClure 1979: 41),which Charlotte McClure claims is Atherton’s antidote to middle-class women’s belief in romantic love. This type of abrupt ending was a contemporary fashion used “to suggest a problem of life or character” (McClure 1975: 68), and perhaps here, the problem is that happiness for Patience requires selling out to romance, because she is forced to place her life in the hands of the one man with whom she could live in equality. Patience and Julia’s stories show how women’s emergence into the public working world was tolerated, and even encouraged, but that if they neglected or rejected their traditional role of wife, they would be ostracized. Access to the public world of work, necessary during the war, and success in the public world of business did not signify access to, or success in, strongholds of male power such as the court of law which, instead, become a glass ceiling to curb women’s growing independence. Speaking out in the public courtroom does neither accused woman any good, because their rejection of the conventional role of wife, and their unwomanly behaviour make them culpable in the eyes of the jury, the judge, the courtroom audience and the general public. Gertrude Atherton and F. Tennyson Jesse were aware that men were still very much in control of women’s independence and that they were prepared to punish those who over-stepped the mark and challenged the basis of men’s authority in the

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home. At the end of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries Gertrude Atherton and F. Tennyson Jesse emphasise the impotence of women in courts dominated by male power structures. In these two novels the stigma of public appearance follows the women into the courtroom, thrusting them into the hostile public eye. Atherton and Jesse exploit the situation to cast a critical eye upon the representative public space of the courtroom, exposing it as a reserve of power wielded by men and which, on these occasions, is used to punish women for their independence.

Bibliography Atherton, Gertrude. 1897. Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. London: John Lane The Bodley Head. Altick, D. 1970. Victorian Studies in Scarlet. New York: Norton. Angel, Marina. 1996. ‘Criminal Law and Women: Giving the Abused Woman Who Kills a Jury of Her Peers Who Appreciate Justice’ in American Criminal Law Review 33: 230–348. Bakhtin, M. 1981. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotype in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press. Bishop, C. 1931. Women and Crime. London: Chatto and Windus. Carroll, Lewis. [1865] 1970. The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (ed. M. Gardner). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Colenbrander, Joanna. 1984. A Portrait of Fryn: A Biography of F. Tennyson Jesse. London: André Deutsch. Collins, Wilkie. [1864] 1996. Armadale (ed. Catherine Peters) (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, James Fenimore. [1850] 1996. The Ways of the Hour. Stroud: Alan Sutton. Dolan, Frances E. 1992. ‘Home-Rebels and House-Traitors: Murderous Wives in Early Modern England’ in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 4: 1. Doody, Margaret Anne. 1984. ‘“Those Eyes Are Made So Killing”: Eighteenth-Century Murderesses and the Law’ in Princeton University Library Chronicle 46 (1): 49–80.  . 1994. ‘Voices of Record: Women as Witnesses and Defendants in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers’ in Heinzelman, Susan Sage and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (eds) Representing Women: Law Literature, and Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press. Du Cann, C. G. L. 1960. Miscarriage of Justice. London: Frederick Muller. Eliot, George. [1859] 1960. Adam Bede. London: J. M. Dent. Emsley, Clive. 1996. Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (second edition). London: Longman. Graham Hall, Jean and Gordon D. Smith. 1997. R. v. Bywaters and Thompson (The Then and Now Series 1). Chichester: Barry Rose Law Publishers.

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Hartman, Mary S. [1977] 1985. Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Resp­ectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes. London: Robson. Heidensohn, Frances. [1985] 1996. Women and Crime (second edition). London: Macmillan. Jesse, F. Tennyson. [1934] 1979. A Pin to See the Peepshow. London: Virago.  . [1924] 1958. Murder and Its Motives. London: Pan. Knelman, Judith. 1998. Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Leider, Emily Wortis. 1991. California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and her Times. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Mathers, Helen B. 1885. Murder or Manslaughter. New York: George Munro. McClure, Charlotte S. 1979. Gertrude Atherton. Boston: Twayne. Morgan, Elaine (ed.). 1979. Introduction in A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse. London: Virago. Morris, Virginia B. 1990. Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Paston, George (Emily Morse Symonds). [1898] 1999. A Writer of Books. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. Pike, L. O. 1876. History of Crime in England. London: Smith and Elder. Pollack, O. 1961. The Criminality of Women. New York: A. S. Barnes. Reade, Charles. 1865–66. Griffith Gaunt serialised in The Atlantic Monthly. Reynolds, Barbara. [1993] 2002. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Sayers, Dorothy L. [1930] 1968. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Sayers, Dorothy L. and Eustace Robert. 1930. The Documents in the Case. London: Ernest Benn. Trodd, Anthea. 1989. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. London: Macmillan. Weiss, René. 1988. Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wharton, Edith. [1916] 1971. ‘Kerfol’ in The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (ed. R. W. B. Lewis). Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 283–300.

Approaching the City

Paving the Way for Mrs Dalloway: The Street-walking Women of Eliza Lynn Linton, Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston Valerie Fehlbaum abstract In Victorian Britain gender governed space, or so we have been led to believe. In this essay Fehlbaum draws attention to divergent representations of public and private space in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the writings of Eliza Lynn Linton, Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston. She shows notably how they were challenging and re-negotiating the stereotypical spheres assigned to women, thereby paving the way for the likes of Mrs Dalloway in the twentieth century. Keywords: Ella Hepworth Dixon, Eliza Lynn Linton, George Paston (Emily Morse Symonds), John Strange Winter (Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard), Virginia Woolf, urban space, Victorian periodicals, lady journalists, flânerie, representations of London.

When the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London.  (Woolf [1930] 1967: 155)

Space, whether private or public, is undoubtedly a prominent concern in Virginia Woolf ’s writing. Most closely associated with the metaphysical inner recesses of consciousness or with physical interiors, rooms to call one’s own, Woolf also had plenty to say about women’s relation to urban space. From Mrs Dalloway’s delight in leaving her domestic interior, to the aptly-titled essay, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”, one senses an exhilaration in Woolf, a liberating impulse which only the streets of the city can satisfy. Clearly throughout the eponymous novel Mrs Dalloway is not the only character who enjoys the metropolis.1 Peter Walsh, in particular, relishes the opportunities 1 The obvious exceptions are Lucrezia and Septimus Smith, but it is not the city per se which is the cause of their malaise.

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that the streets and parks of London offer, but his is primarily a traditional stance – the male flâneur observing and fantasising about the women he sees. Elizabeth Dalloway, perhaps less at ease than her mother, found “London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with father and the dogs” (Woolf [1925] 1972: 149), and yet she, too, prefers to “dally a little longer” (Woolf [1930] 1967: 157). “It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus” (Woolf [1925] 1972: 149). Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, openly declares, “I love walking in London […] Really, it’s better than walking in the country” (ibid: 8). A few decades earlier, however, such apparently simple pleasures, aimlessly experiencing the life of the city, would have been rather more limited for women. In Victorian Britain gender governed space, or so we have been led to believe. At a pinch a woman of a certain class might become “an angel out of the house”, doing good works amongst the poor, but as a rule the private and domestic were considered her domain, leaving the public forum for the male of the species, or for women of a lower class. In this chapter I would like to examine some of the conflicting ways in which this simple binary divide, perpetuated not only by the Victorians themselves, but also by some twentieth and twenty-first century critics and historians, a few feminists included, was already being contested, particularly by women writers, forerunners of Virginia Woolf, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ideologically, there may indeed have been a desire to maintain clearly defined separate spheres according to gender, thereby keeping women within restricted limits, and unchaperoned women on the streets could well have been assimilated with street-walking women of dubious morals. Nevertheless, the gendering of space is somewhat more complicated than this stereotypical view would suggest, and I would like to draw attention to various divergent representations not only of urban, but also of domestic space provided by women themselves in their fiction and non-fiction. It is also important to bear in mind that the conception of social space was, and still is, in itself a contentious issue. Some spaces, such as art galleries, museums, restaurants, shops and theatres, are on the one hand public places and on the other confined interior spaces. At the same time access to them can be somewhat restricted according to gender and class. One has only to think of old-fashioned public houses which generally after the 1880s had both a public and a lounge bar, the former reserved for men, whilst the latter, usually with a separate entrance, had a more refined atmosphere and was designed for mixed company or even for women to drink alone. Likewise public parks and gardens, as their names indicate, may be officially open to all, but who frequents them

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and when may vary considerably depending on time of day, season of the year and so on. During the last decades of the nineteenth century London expanded phenomenally. Department stores such as John Lewis (1864), Liberty’s (1876), D. H. Evans (1879) opened, as did cafes and teashops such as ABC Teashops and Lyons Corner Houses, theatres and clubs flourished, whilst public transport – buses and the underground – facilitated faster, easier transit for the capital’s inhabitants and its visitors. With the growth of a more consumer-oriented society, the metropolis increasingly offered people of different classes and genders the opportunity to come into contact. In The Story of a Modern Woman Ella Hepworth Dixon describes a typical morning in London thus: Sunshine brightened the huge gilt letters over the newspaper offices; the crowded, brightly coloured omnibuses, the hansoms laden with portmanteaux on their way to Waterloo Station, the flaxen hair and beflowered hats of the little actresses hurrying along to rehearsal. An ever-moving procession of people poured like a torrent up and down the street; journalists, country folk, office boys, actors, betting men, loafers – all the curious shifting world of the Strand was jogging elbows on the pavement.  (Dixon [1894] 2005: 106)

At one point in the story when the upper middle-class female protagonist, “the angel out of the house”, undertakes to visit Kentish Town, a socially-acceptable reason to leave the home, she announces, “I’m going on top of one of those charming trams. I told Worth when I was in Paris that I always went on the tops of omnibuses, and he designed me this little frock on purpose” (Dixon [1894] 2005: 76). At the same time there was also much concern about the whole notion of what constituted the public domain. In “Pictures from the Magazines” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities Michael Wolff and Celina Fox observe a close link between the growth of the city and the expansion of the periodical press. Elizabeth Wilson likewise in “The Invisible Flâneur” draws attention to the unprecedented changes taking place in the literary world. As she says, Urban industrial life generated a demand for new forms of writing – the feuilleton, the magazine article. It gave birth to a new kind of literature of the myriad sights, sounds and spectacles to be found on every corner, in every cranny of urban life.  (Wilson 1992: 96)

There was indeed a remarkable increase in the number of journals of various sorts and an overall tendency to assume authorship of articles, stories, reviews. By signing their periodical contributions in their own names, rather than using pen-names, or simply resorting to anonymity as had been the case in the past, many writers were thus going public This was exactly the sort of journalism,

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“new journalism” to use Matthew Arnold’s disparaging phrase, embodied by the likes of W.T. Stead, which offered many opportunities to aspiring women writers. Not surprisingly, therefore, especially in the fin de siècle period some women writers, particularly those also dubbed with the derogatory adjective “New”, otherwise often accused of being too inward-looking, were visibly entering the public arena, encroaching upon urban space, and appropriating for themselves areas traditionally considered the preserve of men. They were thus literally stepping outside the limits of conventional behaviour. I would argue, however, that even earlier some literary discourses contrasted glaringly with the apparently fixed ideologies of gender-specific spaces. In the 1860s already there had been much discussion about women’s use of the streets. One polemic in particular was sparked off by a letter to The Times on 7 January 1862, from a certain “Paterfamilias from the Provinces”, complaining that a female relative and female friend had been seriously incommoded on a visit to London. There ensued a seemingly endless public debate culminating in July in a long article in Temple Bar entitled “Out Walking” signed simply with the intials “E.L.L.”. This was in fact Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98), probably most familiar to present-day readers as the coiner of the phrase “Girl of the Period”, an epithet she applied to the deviant (deviant in her eyes), young woman, a precursor of the New Woman, who through her questioning of the womanly ideal, demanding, for example, easier access to higher education and meaningful employment, was obviously seen as a threat to the established order and severely castigated for it. Eliza Lynn Linton was not, therefore, renowned for her liberal views and her comments are hence all the more revelatory. She begins logically enough by asking: Is it a fact that modest women are continually being spoken to if they walk alone? And that even two well-bred, well-dressed, and well-conducted girls together are not safe, however quiet their demeanour and unalluring their attire?  (Linton 1862: 132)

Somewhat surprisingly, she continues: What becomes of all the modest single women of the middle ranks, who, if they walk at all, are obliged to walk alone, yet who never dream that they are thereby reduced to the standard of social evils? What becomes of the daily teachers, art-students, “assistants” of every kind, readers at the British Museum, and the many other instances of unprotected womanhood abounding? (My italics)

This suggests that, contrary to popular belief, as early as the 1860s there were plenty of respectable, unchaperoned women on the streets. Eliza Lynn Linton

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then offers advice to such women on how to avoid becoming “the object of attentions not altogether to [their] mind”, and provides to all intents and purposes a practical guide, another sort of conduct manual, for women on how to behave in the street. Nowhere, however, does she suggest that they should stay at home. Moreover, in spite of castigating young women for indulging in curiosity when out walking in London, elsewhere in personal writings and in her fiction Eliza Lynn Linton appears to foreshadow Virginia Woolf ’s exhilarating relationship to the city. For example describing the excitement of receiving a favourable review in The Times for her first novel, Azeth the Egyptian, she writes: I seemed to tread on air, to walk in a cloud of light […]. I felt as if I must have stopped the passers-by to shake hands with them […]. I remember the sunset as I went up Oxford Street, to what was not yet Marble Arch. For I could not rest in the house. I could not even go home to dinner. I felt compelled to walk as if for ever […]  (Qtd. in Layard 1901: 54)

Several years later Ella Hepworth Dixon echoed similar sentiments in her descriptions of “Things which THRILL” in one of her “Pensées de Femme”, where she suggests “[p]erhaps the best means of experiencing it is to write a book […] and wake up one morning to find it reviewed at length in The Times” (Lady’s Pictorial (23 May 1896): 774). Elsewhere Eliza Lynn Linton also claimed, “London is my Home, and there are all my best friends, my work, my Ambition, my surrounding”.2 Critics such as Walter Benjamin have noted that as the century drew to a close urban space in cities like Paris or London became prime sites for spectacle, where the flâneur, gendered male, apparently ruled supreme. More recently some feminist critics such as Elizabeth Wilson and Sally Ledger3 have challenged this notion of the masculine flâneur suggesting that to different ends women also strolled through the streets in search of sensation: shopping, window-shopping, going to parks, tea-rooms, and so on. It is clearly important to ask not only who occupied the streets, but also which ones, when and why? For example, Regent Street, an elegant shopping area during the day, became the empire of prostitutes in the evening. Women of differing classes, therefore, were generally participating more openly in the life of the city. Not all, however, were pleasure-seeking. On the contrary, I would argue that some women such as Ella Hepworth Dixon (1857–1932) in their lives and in their writing were seriously engaged in advo2 Letter to Mrs Cooper, 15 September 1869. Qtd. in Nead 2000: 77. 3 See in particular Ledger 1997, chapter 6 “The New Woman in the Modern City” in which she discusses the flâneuse or the woman of the streets.

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cating greater overall independence for their sex and were actively challenging the distribution of power, thereby contributing to far-reaching changes in the real and in the literary world. By the example of her own professional life and through her fiction Ella Hepworth Dixon demonstrated that it was possible for a woman “to make her way in the world and compete with men” (Dixon [1894] 2005: 98). Her journalistic career may have begun, as does that of one of her protagonists in The Story of a Modern Woman, by writing a few “interviews at home” of some personal friends, but very quickly she preferred a less restrictive type of journalism. For instance, she contributed several travel articles to various periodicals, including such unlikely topics as a visit to a leper colony in Norway.4 Likewise, her fictional heroines often preferred the streets of London to the cosy interiors so fraught with unexpected dangers. In The Story of a Modern Woman Mary Erle, arguably the “modern woman” of the title, deliberately rejects the two options traditionally offered to unmarried, fatherless young women of her class —becoming a companion to a High-Church spinster aunt in Bournemouth or marrying a wealthy man she does not love. Like Jane Eyre, she also refuses to become the kept mistress abroad of the man she once loved. At one point her wealthier friend, Alison Ives, comments “in her world, one had to marry some day or other” ([1894] 2005: 92) adding “the later the better”. She claims, “One couldn’t permit one’s self the luxury of being an old maid, unless one had an income of over five thousand pounds a year” (ibid: 149) (my italics). Marriage, however, is rarely presented as an enviable or preferable state. When, for example, Mary Erle’s fiancé proposes, “[h]is hands, which held her two wrists […], felt like links of iron”, and she “tasted for the first time, in all its intensity, the helplessness of woman, the inborn feeling of subjection to a stronger will” (ibid: 82). As it turns out neither woman marries, but they both lead busy lives outside the domestic sphere. Alison remains the angel out of the house and “devote[s] herself to the task of helping young girls”, but avoids drawing attention to it: “I couldn’t bear any one to say that I had ‘taken up slumming’.5 You know how I detest the whole attitude of the upper and middle classes toward the poor” (ibid: 48). “It would look like a pose”, she adds. Mary Erle, on the 4 “A Leper’s Paradise” in The World (4 July 1894): 31–32. Ella Hepworth Dixon therein recounts how in the role of an English nurse she visited the leper colony with a ship’s doctor, no outsiders being permitted. Having toyed with the idea of calling herself “Dr Janet, of Harley Street”, the title of a famous New Woman novel by Arabella Kenealy, she was finally admitted as “Sister Diavolina”, surely a passing reference to Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins another New Woman novel. 5 See Eagleton 1995.

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other hand, financially much less secure than her friend, ultimately chooses “to walk alone, to fight the battle of life unaided” (ibid: 192). In order to keep herself and her younger brother, she finds various writing jobs. Like her creator, she actually begins by attempting to make a career in art, but quickly abandons her paint brush for a pen. The inherent difficulties facing women artists during the Victorian period have been amply discussed elsewhere in recent years by eminent critics such as Deborah Cherry and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Suffice to say at this point that it was simply easier and more acceptable for a woman to earn a living wage through writing. Nevertheless, Ella Hepworth Dixon rarely lost an occasion in her fiction and non-fiction to comment, usually ironically, on her contemporary Art world. From the mid-Victorian period onwards, there had in fact been increasing concern about the growing numbers of women seeking employment and the inadequate possibilities available. In the late 1850s the Langham Place Circle became particularly active in drawing attention to the plight of such women, and over the next few decades numerous publications and articles in the periodical press contributed to the discussion.6 It should be remarked that most, if not all, of the activities proposed could still be carried out within the confines of the home and remain hobbies rather than jobs. This fundamental distinction between mere pastime and paid employment was a subject to which Ella Hepworth Dixon often returned, as in the Lady’s Pictorial when she comments on the “amazing revolution” of Woman demanding “to be paid proper wages for work performed” (Dixon 1907: 834). Nor was she alone in raising further questions about equal pay for equal work. John Strange Winter (Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Palmer Stannard) in Winter’s Weekly regularly advocated that a woman should “by all means do all the work she can get to do, but let her insist on being paid at the same rate as a man would receive” (Winter 1894: 5). Journalism, significantly, was rarely included in such surveys of possible employments for women, or merited separate treatment altogether. In February 1890 writing on “Journalism for Women” in Woman, Mabel Collins cites the example of a naval officer “of the old school of thought and feeling” who, having fallen in love with a lady journalist, asks her to give up her newspaper 6 See for example English Woman’s Journal edited by Bessie Rayner Parkes. Another publication, The Year-Book of Women’s Work, which, as its name implies, concentrated entirely on this subject, first appeared in 1875, and was edited by Louisa M.Hubbard who in the same year also started the monthly Woman’s Gazette – or news about work, which changed its name to Work and Leisure in 1880 and remained in circulation until 1893. The Lady’s Pictorial, from its début in 1881, ran a series called “Woman’s Work”, but this was generally restricted to the home, especially the kitchen, school, or occasionally the medical domain, and then only in the lower echelons.

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work. “I can understand a lady taking up her pen when she has some fancy she wants to express prettily – but newspaper work!” (Collins 1890: 2) (My italics). A similar opinion is echoed by Mary Erle in The Story of a Modern Woman when she declares, “Aunt Julia […] thinks I am given over to the Evil One since I’ve become a journalist” (Dixon [1894] 2005: 144). It should be mentioned that even for men the world of journals was regularly looked down upon. In J.M. Barrie’s When a Man’s Single, a short exchange between the hero’s beloved and her mother is revelatory: “He is evidently to be a newspaper man all his life.” “I wish you would say journalist, mamma, […] or a literary man. The profession of letters is a noble one.” “Perhaps it is, […] but I can’t think it is very respectable.”  (Barrie [1888] 1923: 188)

Even when it was accepted that women could write for the press, there was often a desire to maintain a gender divide within the world of journals. An earlier unsigned article in Woman had indicated as much: There can be no doubt as to the increasing opportunities which journalism as a profession offers to a bright, clever woman, but I am not among those who are disposed to believe that the newspaper of the future is to be altogether the work of the ladies, and I may perhaps be permitted to point out where, according to my experience, their true sphere in journalism lies, and how they may best fit themselves for it.7 (My italics)

The writer overtly maintains, “A woman’s sphere in journalism generally lies far away from the office or composing-room”. This article also prefigures many of the issues raised in Journalism for Women, a Guide published in 1898 by Arnold Bennett, one time editor of Woman. The very title of Bennett’s guide surely suggests that society’s prescribed gender-based distinctions were to be upheld within the press world as well. As late as 1925, the year Mrs Dalloway was published, Ella Hepworth Dixon comments on the situation with a telling choice of metaphors. These modern days are certainly the opportunity of the Women. For the first time they can, and do, compete with men. […] One of the last citadels to fall was the newspaper office. Here prejudice reigned supreme. […] But today the Bastille of Journalism has fallen.  (Dixon 1925: 6)

For my present purposes, it is interesting to note that Ella Hepworth Dixon’s fictional budding journalist is rather more at ease in the streets than she is indoors, whether in newspaper offices, her new lodgings or even “kettledrums” amongst 7 “Women as Journalists by a Man Editor”, Woman (3 July 1890): 3–4.

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the wealthy. Some critics, including Steve Farmer in his Introduction to the new 2005 edition of The Story of a Modern Woman, have commented on the overall claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel, but, whilst I would agree that this is indeed “clearly symbolic of the plight of the nineteenth-century Englishwoman […] cornered by the cant of tradition” (Farmer 2005: 23), I would suggest that urban space offered some relief from the constraints of domestic domains and semi-restricted public interiors. As Mary Erle traipses alone through the city in the course of her work visiting editors, going to interviews and so on, neither a street-walker nor a flâneuse, she is both observed and observer. In no way does she idealize the city. Acutely aware of a multiplicity of images and possibilities that urban space offers, she negotiates her way around public places, and notes, for example, the prostitutes outside Charing Cross station, the sordid little eating-houses and the “battered leavings of the vice of a great city” (Dixon [1894] 2005: 152) as well as chic districts like Portman Square, Regent’s Park and South Kensington. More importantly, and perhaps contrary to what one might expect, even as a fairly young woman she feels less threatened under the gaze of the men in the streets than she does under that of the men of her own class in so-called safe surroundings: With her chin in the air, looking straight before her, she stepped along, in the half-dark, with a royal scorn for the well-dressed loafers who find their pleasure in accosting ladies in the street. She was twenty-two, and a young woman now; it behooved her to be able to take care of herself. And, after all, they were perhaps more easily disposed of than some of the men who took her in to dinner, men who had tired eyes and a dubious smile, and who were fond of starting doubtful topics with a side-long, tentative glance.  (Dixon [1894] 2005: 67)

Furthermore, both female protagonists in the novel experience moments of crisis, moments when they learn the truth about their respective suitors, not in the privacy of their respective homes but in public places which are nonetheless enclosed spaces, one in a fashionable theatre, the other in a hospital for the poor, thus obliging them to exert admirable self-control, as their public image has to hide their personal sufferings. Throughout her long writing career Ella Hepworth Dixon frequently commented on women’s obligation to keep up appearances behind “an acquiescent smile”. For example in 1898 in the Lady’s Pictorial she writes: Not the least tiresome of the conventions of Society is the one which ordains that we should always be smiling when we appear in public. It is a rule, to be sure, which is applied with special rigour to feminine persons […]. A woman, however tired or worried or preoccupied she may be, is expected to be for ever “wreathed in smiles”.  (Dixon 1898: 732)

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“Public” here must surely mean not the general crowd, but the restricted company of select society, as in the last meeting between Alison Ives and her suitor Dr Strange which takes place at one of her mother’s famous dinner parties. A little earlier, whilst visiting a hospital for destitute women, Alison had learnt of the eminent doctor’s hypocritical double life and his callous casting off of one of his mistresses. As she now awaits his arrival with dread, she too contemplates the “foolish, fixed smiles of the women” (Dixon [1894] 2005: 156). In contrast, she greets the doctor with a “hard look on her face” and “a royal scorn in her glance”, making her also perhaps a modern woman, defying the constraints of social propriety within the domestic sphere. Towards the end of the novel, after various trials and tribulations Alison, the supposedly traditional woman, the angel, whether in or out of the house, dies from a disease caught during the course of her charity work in slum areas, whilst Mary, the modern woman, survives. Much has been written about the final scene, and even Ella Hepworth Dixon offered revised versions for different editions of her novel, revealing perhaps some difficulty in attaining the exact mood she wished to imprint on a reader’s imagination. I would suggest that part of the problem arises from a resistance to end the novel with marriage or death, as custom would have it. This rejection of these simple binary options and the open-endedness of some New Woman fiction might thereby indicate further opportunities elsewhere, and was surely a deliberate attempt on the part of some writers to challenge the fixed codes society imposed on women in life and in literature, a theme to which Virginia Woolf would turn her attention a few decades later to greater effect. In the last scene Mary Erle returns to Highgate cemetery to the site of her father’s grave where she had earlier stood with her brother. On that occasion Out yonder, at their feet, the dun-colour of the buildings lost in the murkiness of the horizon line, London was spread out. Here and there a dome, a spire loomed out of the dim bluish-grey panorama. A warm haze hung over the great city; here and there a faint fringe of tree-tops told of a placid park; now and again the shrill whistle of an engine, blown northward by the wind, spoke of the bustle of journeys, of the turmoil of railway-stations, of partings, of arrivals, of the change and travail of human life, of the strangers who come, of the failures who must go. “Jim,” said the girl suddenly, taking the boy by the arm, “There’s London! We’re going to make it listen to us, you and I. We’re not going to be afraid of it - just because it’s big, and brutal and strong.”  (Dixon [1894] 2005: 48)

Now as she once again surveys London, this time unaccompanied, ostensibly much more alone, with both her brother and her lover married and her best friend dead, “she made a feint as if to grasp the city spread before her, but the

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movement ended in a vain gesture, and the radiance of her face was blotted out as she began to plod homeward in the twilight of the suburban road”. This may be interpreted as “gloomy” to use Ella Hepworth Dixon’s own phrase, but Mary Erle ultimately turns her back on the grave-yard, not on the city, surely emphasizing the triumph of life over death. In Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity Deborah Parsons draws attention to the city as both exhilarating and isolating, and comments on the number of women who choose to remain alone, with the city as a sort of surrogate lover. Mary Erle’s preference for the city, disregarding the suburbs, the epitome of domesticity, could certainly be read in this light.8 At the same time Ella Hepworth Dixon would seem to be drawing on the well-read reader’s familiarity with earlier works. T.P. O’Connor in his contemporary review of the novel notes the resemblance, for example, between this scene and That awful passage at the close of Père Goriot in which Lucien de Rubempré9 looks down from Père la Chaise on Paris. […] Doubtless, too, the resemblance is intentional, for the two passages mark the everlasting difference between man and woman. Lucien de Rubempré shakes his clenched hand in fierce and brave defiance; but the woman’s hand “ended in a vain gesture”. Defiance and conflict and victory are the hopes, and often the portion of the man; but tranquil endurance and blind obedience is the highest to which woman can reach.  (O’Connor 1894: 2)10

I would argue, however, that Mary Erle also has her portion of “defiance and conflict and victory” and hopes. There may be disillusion, but there is little lamentation and even less of a sense of defeat. Mary Erle may not have achieved all she set out to do, but she is no Ruth, “sick for home”. She has survived and can “plod homewards”. The final note, therefore, however tenuous, remains positive. It is also possible to see similarities with the opening of Wordsworth’s Prelude, “from yon City’s walls set free […]. The earth is all before me” (The Prelude Book First: 7–15), itself a reflection of the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “The world was all before them” (Paradise Lost Book XII: 646). If, unlike Adam and Eve, “hand in hand”, Mary Erle was to stand alone, unlike Wordsworth she 8 See Parsons 2000, in particular chapter 3, “The New Woman and the Wandering Jew”: 82–122. 9 Eugène de Rastignac in the original. 10 In fact, at the end of the original French version Rastignac merely surveys Paris and says, “A nous deux maintenant!” (The Penguin Modern Classics edition translates this as “It’s war between us now”.) His first “act of defiance” is then to go and dine with Mme de Nucingen, Père Goriot’s daughter.

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has no desire to flee the city. Moreover, as she proceeds homewards towards the metropolis she describes it not in typically hostile Victorian terms, but as “majestic, awe-inspiring, inexorable, triumphant London”. In so doing she surely has some of the makings of a Paul Morel or a Mrs. Dalloway, and Ella Hepworth Dixon, I would maintain, had added a paving stone to the road towards Modernism. I would also suggest that The Story of a Modern Woman led to a spate of fictions, novels and serials, based on the experiences of lady journalists. In June 1894 the Sunday Times reviewer of The Story of a Modern Woman commented, “So far as we know the career of the heroine is new to fiction”,11 but two years later in July 1896 in her overview of “Leading Lady Journalists”, which somewhat surprisingly makes no mention of Ella Hepworth Dixon, M.F. Billington declared, “Fiction has made heroines of us, and the ‘lady journalist’ has figured in more than one recent play or burlesque” (1896: 101). In fact, even earlier, in 1888, Eliza Lynn Linton herself had already included a subplot about a newspaper woman in her novel Sowing the Wind. After the death of her father, Jane Osborn finds herself, rather like Mary Erle later, having to work to cater for her own needs and those of her family, and elects to write rather than become a governess. Although the story touches on various issues concerning women’s quest for both respect and equality with men in work, it remains in many ways a curiously unflattering portrait. Jane Osborn claims to be proud of being able to do the work of a man among men, and does her work “manfully”, but at the same time describes herself as “ungainly” and as an “unlovely boy-woman”. Her editor even calls her “Mr. Jane” and “old Johnny Osborn”, suggesting that only unwomanly women could thus succeed in a man’s world. Fortunately, rather more flattering images were propagated in the 1890s. After The Story of a Modern Woman, the most notable series about lady writers were Cottrel Hoe’s “Jennie Baxter, Journalist” which appeared in The Windsor Magazine from December 1897 to November 1898, and was later published in book form and signed by the author’s own name, Robert Barr, and Annie S. Swan’s “Journal of a Literary Woman in London” in Woman at Home from April 1901 to September 1902. As the title suggests, the latter consists of a series of stories told by Miriam Carter, and includes several descriptions of literary women, but here, too, a woman author is not as generous to her sex as one might expect. For example Kitty Ford, a “journalist for the latest ladies’ paper”, is described as an “odd little figure in a very limp and soiled white nun’s veiling frock peering through her shabby lorgnette at the smart guests. Jennie Baxter, on the other hand, perhaps due to the male gaze of her creator, is “always most 11 Sunday Times (3 June 1894): 2.

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beautifully attired, and her whole affect was so charming that men have been known to turn in the streets and say ‘By Jove!’”. She also has a strong sense of her profession, but is tired of relying on a “fitful income”, and, as the story unfolds, reveals admirable enterprise. She rarely walks the streets of London, however, and usually “stepped lightly into a hansom cab” (The Windsor Magazine 7 (December 1897): 205). More pertinent for my present purposes is George Paston (Emily Morse Symonds)’s full-length novel, A Writer of Books,12 which appeared in 1899. Four years earlier she had published a short story entitled “A Lady Journalist” in which the lady journalist of the title, Evelyn Lambert, is in fact rather dubious, since she persuades her fiancé to write for her and passes his work off as her own, ultimately doing him out of a job until she marries the editor and persuades him to reinstate her former lover. Interestingly, however, it is her editor who engages in the more stereotypical traditional behaviour of women – window-shopping and thinking about his appearance: “He was seen by a member of his staff standing in front of a hairdresser’s window, gazing wistfully at the bottles of hair-restorer therein displayed” (Paston 1895: 72). In A Writer of Books the female protagonist, Cosima Chudleigh, is a more complex character altogether, and bears many resemblances to Mary Erle as she experiences the city, including, of course, Grub Street. More of a sensationseeker than Ella Hepworth Dixon’s woman writer, Cosima is nevertheless by no means a mere flâneuse; she deliberately explores urban space in search of material for her fiction. Often, as she passed through the crowded streets, she felt tempted to slip between two lovers and listen to their whispered words, to follow the tiredlooking shop girls and chattering factory hands as they hurried home from their work, to eavesdrop at the doors of sinister-looking houses in narrow back streets, or to strike up an acquaintance with the sandwich-men and flowers-sellers who lined the Strand. (Paston [1898] 1999: 37)

Interestingly, Rachel Bowlby in Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis comments on the close links between walking the city and writing for women such as Virginia Woolf, and Woolf ’s pretext for venturing out, a pencil, would certainly endorse this argument. In A Writer of Books, however, the woman writer is seen initially rather as a reader of the city: “Every day […] she explored the sights of London, but still she felt impatiently that the great city lay like a clasped book before her, a book every page of which she wished to turn, while as yet she could only gaze upon the cover” (Paston [1898] 1999: 37). 12 I am indebted to Margaret Stetz for drawing my attention to this text and its rich source of comparisons and contrasts with The Story of a Modern Woman.

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Unlike Mary Erle, Cosima had grown up in the provinces, but she demonstrates none of the typical provincial anxiety about the metropolis. On her first day she immediately sets about her self-assigned task with gusto. Once more she glanced at the well-studied map of London. Yes, she felt sure she could find her way unaided to her destination […] Across Holborn she directed her course, and presently through a narrow alley emerged upon the wide-stretching fields of Lincoln’s Inn. Resisting the temptation to stop and examine the picturesquely gloomy buildings that lined her route, she pressed forward till at length she stood at the junction of the Strand with the highway of letters, and saw the long wings of the griffin which, like the dragon in a fairy tale, seemed to be guarding the approach to the gold-paved streets of the city. With beating heart and dilated eyes, she took her first walk down Fleet Street, stopping from time to time to gaze upon the temples dedicated to the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Chronicle, or Punch. Ludgate Circus had but little interest for her beyond the fact that from thence she obtained her first view of St Paul’s […]  (Paston [1898] 1999: 18–19)

Cosima displays a positive enjoyment of the freedom of the city and partakes of its various pleasures, even more intrepid than Elizabeth Dalloway twenty-five years later. She [Elizabeth Dalloway] looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St Paul’s, shyly, like someone penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the larder. For no Dalloway came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting. […] She penetrated a little farther in the direction of St Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good.  (Woolf [1925] 1972: 152)

Again, as in the case of Mary Erle, for Cosima the streets of London are more enticing than her boarding-house, and regularly she “would wander out and indulge herself with a cheap seat at a concert or theatre” (Paston 1999 [1899]: 39). Her enthusiasm and desire to experience everything the city has to offer sometimes lead her into a few awkward situations, reminiscent of the abovementioned 1860’s Times’ debate. It was on the occasion of one of these outings […] that she met with her first adventure worthy of the name […] When the concert was over she passed slowly out into Regent Street […]

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She had not proceeded more than a few paces, however, when she became aware that a young man was walking alongside her, and glancing with a sort of furtive eagerness into her face. She quickened her pace a little, and he quickened his; she slackened, and he fell back on a level with her. It was not the first time that she had thus been “shadowed” by tentative admirers; but hitherto, thanks perhaps to her studiously unconscious air, not one of them had summoned up courage to speak to her.  (Paston [1898] 1999: 39) (My italics)

She would appear to have followed Eliza Lynn Linton’s advice in “Out Walking”, and acquired “that enviable street-talent, and pass men without looking at them, yet all the while seeing them” (Linton 1862: 133). None-the-less, she still comments on the “oddity of such a situation (which) had always impressed her”, again noting the unspoken distinction between the open public arena of the street and restricted public spheres: The man hovering at the woman’s elbow, the woman conscious of his proximity in every nerve, yet maintaining an expression set and impassive as that of a waxen mask. And both of them human beings, who would be free to enjoy each other’s society and conversation were but a few unintelligible words muttered by a common acquaintance. After all, it was only conventionality that forbade a respectable woman to enter into conversation with a stranger in the street, since in a railway carriage or on board ship the proceeding would not be regarded as a social crime.  (Paston [1898] 1999: 39)

As it happens, “her literary curiosity” gets the better of her and she does strike up a conversation with the young man, which in turn leads to her making the acquaintance of Bess Heywood, a would-be actress, working as a barmaid who not surprisingly is a far more knowledgeable woman of the world. Like Mary Erle, Cosima runs greater risks from so-called respectable quarters. Mr Carlton, a fellow lodger, whom she considers a “harmless, elderly coquette”, first invites her to his room for tea, slightly compromising in itself, and afterwards offers to take her, chaperoned, to a restaurant and then the theatre. Here, not only is the chaperon useless, and the performance not up to Cosima’s expectations, but the behaviour of her escort is even worse. Half an hour of almost intolerable boredom had well-nigh reduced her to tears, when her attention was distracted from the imbecilities on the stage to the peculiar behaviour of her host. Mr Carlton’s arm was stretched along the back of her seat, and he was leaning towards her, his eyes gazing with maudlin tenderness into hers, his wine-scented breath almost scorching her cheek. As she turned away her head, she felt a hand close tightly over hers. An immense disgust seized her, an overpowering repulsion. She snatched away her fingers, and sitting forward, tried to forget her discomfort in an endeavour to catch the words of a thrice-encored patter-song.  (Paston [1898] 1999: 66)

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On the way home in the cab, a restricted yet still public space, he again importunes her. Sometimes, however, public places offered greater security, for example from her over-zealous fiancé. She could no longer blind herself to the fact that in his capacity of lover, Tom was growing day by day less timid, less submissive, in a word, less bearable. He now assumed the privileges of affianced husband with a confidence that silenced while it appalled her. She had no right to shrink from his caresses, and her one consolation lay in the fact that it was easy to avoid opportunities of being alone with him. Their meeting-places were of necessity restaurants, theatres, and railway carriages, and Cosima grew to love the great open-eyed, open-eared public that acted as a continual check upon the terrible demonstrativeness of her lover.  (Paston [1898] 1999: 133)

Also, like Mary Erle, and before Virginia Woolf ’s more advanced women, in moments of crisis she found relief in taking to the streets on her own even at night to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere indoors. Similarly, at the end of the novel, she finds herself alone. This time, however, the female writer goes even further than Ella Hepworth Dixon’s protagonist – she has left her unfaithful husband and offered herself to a much older man whom she has grown to love and who persuades her against acting rashly. She then accepts that there is more to life than love and marriage. “Her old-fashioned prototype” gave way to a modern woman for whom “all was not lost, […] life was not over”, and she sets about writing “the book, the flawless masterpiece that every author is always going to write” (ibid: 258) (her italics). Like Mary Erle, she finds solace in activity, and one is reminded here of the plight of the nameless narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) who is driven mad by confinement and enforced inactivity. Some spaces such as the home, ostensibly safe havens for women, could prove to be even more dangerous than public places. Earlier novelists, both male and female such as Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) and Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860) had raised the question of the dangers of domestic interiors, but I would argue that writers such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Paston went a step further, and showed that a life outside the home was not only possible, but also at times preferable. By the end of the century, to return to Cosima Chudleigh’s figurative language, not only did such women writers start to turn the pages of “the great city [that] lay like a clasped book”, they even began to add some pages of their own. It would take another generation to argue for a room of their own, after which, the next step would be to “become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreable after the solitude of one’s own room” (Woolf [1930] 1967: 155).

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secondary sources Bowlby, Rachel. 1985. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York and London: Methuen. . 1992. Still Crazy After All These Years. London: Routledge. . 1997. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dyos, H.J. and Michael Wolff (eds). 1973. The Victorian City: Images and Realities. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 1995. ‘The Flight to the Real’ in Ledger and McCracken (1995): 11–21. Farmer, Steve. 2005. Introduction to The Story of a Modern Woman. Peterborough: Broadview. Layard, George Somes. 1901. Mrs Lynn Linton: Her Life, Letters, and Opinions. London: Methuen. Ledger, Sally and Scott McCracken (eds). 1995. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1997. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marcus, Jane. (ed.). 1982. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan. Nead, Lynda. 2000. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London. New Haven: Yale University Press. Parsons, Deborah L. 2000. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snaith, Anna. 2000. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Walker, Lynne. 1993. ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West end of London 1850–1900’ in Cracks in the Pavement. London: Sorella Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1992. ‘The Invisible Flâneur’ in The New Left Review 191 (Jan/Feb 1992): 90–110. Wolff, Janet. 1985 ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’ in Theory, Culture and Society special issue ‘The Fate of Modernity’, Volume 2, Number 3. Wolff, Michael and Celina Fox. 1973. ‘Pictures for the Magazines’ in Dyos and Wolff Volume II: 559–82. Unsigned review of The Story of a Modern Woman, ‘What to Read and What to Avoid’ in Sunday Times (3 June 1894): 2. Unsigned, but perhaps Arnold Bennett, ‘Women as Journalists by a Man Editor’ in Woman (3 July 1890): 3–4. Unsigned, but probably John Strange Winter, Winter’s Weekly (10 November 1894): 5.

Dwelling, Poaching, Dreaming: Housebreaking and Homemaking in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Melinda Harvey abstract This essay dispenses with feminism’s easy platitudes regarding the liberating effects of a “room of one’s own” to offer an in-depth inspection of two key sites of female inhabitation – one private, one public – in Pilgrimage: the bedsitting-room and the café. Its central task is to demonstrate how the specific nature and conditions of Miriam Henderson’s use of her Bloomsbury rooming-house determine her New Woman-style spatial practices in the public sphere. The bedsit’s paradoxical qualities of inviolability and porosity, it argues, establishes Miriam’s predilection for the café scene. Both are defined as places of public-privacy —as interstitial spaces, which allow Richardson’s heroine to experience more heterogeneous freedoms. Her use of the bedsit and the café registers the novel’s twin preoccupations with solitude and solicitude, turning Pilgrimage into a portrait and a product of the alternately reposeful and stimulated female consciousness at creative work. Keywords: Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage, spatial practices, bedsit, café, publicprivacy.

One walks about the streets with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. T. S. Eliot, Letter to Conrad Aitken, 31 December 1914

The hunt for the “invisible” flâneuse of modernity has prompted many critics to turn their attention to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, a thirteen part novel-series published over a period of 52 years, from 1915 to 1967. Pilgrimage is remarkable for a number of reasons. Its early critics singled out its excessive length, formlessness, lack of plot, obscurity, monotony and narcissism. Its recent apologists have argued that it is an invaluable document of the public world of the streets as experienced by a woman in the turn of the century London. The novel-series is replete with scenes of its protagonist, Miriam Henderson,

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playing flâneuse. Walking has long served as a metaphor for the act of writing itself. Both entail seeing and judging and imagining. I have argued elsewhere that Miriam’s frequent night-time rambles are crucial to her development as a writer (Harvey 2001: 746–64). This essay, however, is interested in exploring the locations at either end of the peregrinative trail that make walking-writing possible – the flâneuse-friendly dwelling and dallying places of Pilgrimage’s London. Miriam’s estrangement from the enclosed home will be considered in terms of its spatial consequences. The status, character and function of two specific locations Miriam frequents will provide the focus – the bedsit and the café. I will be arguing here that the bedsit’s inviolable but inexhaustible porosity – its provision for, paradoxically, precious solitude as well as an enduring attachment to the transient world outside – sets the standard for Miriam’s choice of secondary sites of inhabitation in Pilgrimage, the most notable of which is the café. The bedsit and the café – exempt from the responsibilities and restrictions of domestic life, but characterised by an inexorable homeyness – are examples of spaces of public-privacy. These are places that are “permeated by streams of communal life” (to use a phrase of Walter Benjamin’s) but house a range of activities commonly thought of as occurring in the domestic sphere (Benjamin 1924: 74). They offer a more attenuated kind of the promiscuous sociability the flâneuse experiences when walking in the city. Like the stranger encounter of the streets, public-privacy denotes contact that is covert, arbitrary, fleeting and, as such, evocatory. At the interstices of the realms commonly understood as exterior (external, civic, public) and interior (internal, intimate, private), spaces of public-privacy are porous. The urban historian and critic Richard Sennett calls these heterotopic and inspiriting areas of engagement “live space” – zones in which people are drawn to “live the complexities of the society directly and physically” in a way that goes above and beyond any quantitative use-value (Sennett 1992: 3). The room of one’s own, for all its limitations of size, scope and function (or, more accurately, precisely because of them), both models and gives Miriam license to discover, enter and use live space. But Pilgrimage is a novel that holds to the view that there’s “more space within than without” (Iv, 168),1 and as such it is as much interested in interiority as it is in concrete spaces. This essay will, therefore, also consider the role that remembered places play in Miriam’s selection of actual comfort zones in the city. A deep nostalgia for her rambling childhood home will be shown to determine Miriam’s choice of lodging and eating locations. This love of spaciousness matures over time to become less 1 All quotations from Pilgrimage are taken from Gill Hanscombe’s four-volume edition of the novel-sequence published by London’s Virago Press in 1979.

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parochial and exclusionary and more synonymous with the kind of speculative openness we associate with the exiled modernist writer. 1. The Bedsit Since the late-nineteenth century, the bedsit’s modest dimensions have been seen to be spinster spaces, fit and proper for the woman who is neither an Angel of the House nor a mistress of the streets. Feminist critics, deceived by Woolf ’s class-blind rubric of the “room of one’s own”, have been prone to over-eulogise the bedsit as a utopian site of female creativity and freedom. It has often been confused with the kind of rooms that money – and five hundred pounds a year is real money – could supply.2 Thus, in general, we have failed to see it for what it usually is: a locus of economic hardship and social deprivation as well as a site of intellectual and sexual freedom. Small, shabby and expediently furnished, the bedsit is the family home slashed to meanness. It is a sleeping cubicle divested of its separate supplementary spaces for eating, drinking, cooking, cleaning, bathing, dressing, reading, talking and entertaining. Miriam, seeing a bedsit for the first time, recognises this: “This is the furnished room; one room […] The awful feeling, no tennis, no dancing, no house to move in, no society” (Iii, 17). The possession and use of a Bloomsbury bedsit does on the rare occasion actualise for Richardson’s Miriam some feeling of horror. Despite its limitations, however, Pilgrimage celebrates the “little shabby enclosure” (Iii, 321) as a “dream world” offering “evening and week-end freedom” (Ii, 163). Readers of Pilgrimage pay their first visit to the bedsit in The Tunnel, the first chapter-novel of the novel-sequence set in central London.3 John Mepham has identified The Tunnel’s opening thirteen-and-a-half pages as Pilgrimage’s most “notorious” and “unreadable” constituent section – a weighty charge given the novel-cycle’s infamy for impenetrability (Mepham 2000: 449–64). This section has come to stand for the novel-sequence as a whole in the minds of readers. It also has befuddled the critics more than any other, and can be seen to have contributed directly to the fading appeal of the Miriam books generally. Even Richardson herself conceded it was problematic: “I agree, with groans, as to the opening of The Tunnel. I attempted a compressed retrospect & achieved almost nothing at all” (Richardson 1921: 48–49). 2 I think Ann Heilmann and Pilar Hidalgo, for example, are a little guilty on this count: see Heilmann (1995) and Hidalgo (1993). I hazard that this impulse to glorify the bedsit is as much due to the lack of historical or sociological studies of spinster spaces as it is to literary feminism’s habit of utopian retrieval of female-centered texts, particularly in vogue during the late 1970s and early 1980s. 3 Each of the thirteen separate books that comprise Pilgrimage will be referred to as “chapter-novels”, following Richardson’s own lead.

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According to Virginia Woolf, a fascination for the first chapter of The Tunnel tends, more often than not, to “provide an amusing spectacle of hasty critics seeking in vain”: The Tunnel’s method, she adjudged rather backhandedly “is a method that demands attention, as a door whose handle we wrench ineffectively calls our attention to the fact that it is locked” (Woolf [1919] 1992: 15). I intend to show that Richardson’s protracted account of Miriam’s arrival at Tansley Street is not, to continue Woolf ’s conceit, a closed door at whose knob we, as readers, vainly struggle. Rather, The Tunnel’s beginning chapter is, like the empty room at the top of the Tansley Street stairs, a “door ajar; tapping in the breeze” (Ii, 12). These notorious pages are Richardson’s open invitation to inspect and understand the topological and textual geography of the novel-sequence as a whole. The tour around Miriam’s room is our first live and exclusive look at Pilgrimage’s London. 2. Open for Inspection The first chapter of The Tunnel delineates Miriam’s impressions of the room and its contents for the first time as its occupant. Motionless just inside the door – which she alternately closes, opens, then closes again – Miriam registers every physical aspect of the attic: the barred lattice window, the bevel roof, the discoloured mantlepiece, the yellow wallpaper and wardrobe, the ragged carpet, the globeless gas bracket, and the deal table covered with a cotton-print table-cloth. Jean Radford, Howard Finn and John Mepham have recently seen in the first chapter’s “very long, indigestible solid blocks” of detail much more than a vivid surface signifying nothing (Radford 1991: 50–52; Finn 2002: 115–22; Mepham 2000: 453–56). I, too, see import and design and not just a kind of reality effect here. Radford’s suggested explanations are closest to the mark. Detail, she says, exists as an enjoinment to reader participation, as a way of insisting upon “the room’s material existence, that things or objects exist independently of human appetites and desires”, and as a way of demonstrating the bedsit’s imbrication with the greater public sphere: Another effect achieved by the technique here [in Chapter I] is to make the point that Miriam is in the room, the room is in the house, and the house is in London – and indeed that London is a city in the wider world […] Richardson extends the figure of the house, traditionally used to represent a woman’s social and psychic existence, to the city; her use of the larger figure (the city) in conjunction with the smaller figures of rooms and houses makes possible a more mobile and extensive set of figures: streets, intersections and city zones as well as walls, doors and windows. In this way, the public and private realms are brought into a new textual relation […]  (Radford 1991: 51–52)

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The Tunnel’s notorious opening chapter is intended to be neither infuriating nor abstruse. After chronicling Miriam’s unsuccessful search for a home over the course of three chapter-novels, Richardson, finding her protagonist ready and willing to settle in a Bloomsbury bedsit, obliges her reader with an unhurried conducted tour. Thus, it is in the context of Miriam’s loss of the maison natale, as well as the succession of false stops in schools, shared rooms and other people’s houses, that Chapter I must be read. A space for long-term inhabitation for Miriam has been found, so Richardson takes the time to enumerate its walls, window, floor, furniture and fittings for us. This is the place upon which everything else will depend. That said, the attention paid to exterior phenomena – first, the stairwell, the landing and the skylight; later on, the neighbouring house-fronts, the easterly breeze, the traffic noise, the outlying squares and their bare trees, the cheeping birds, the paper-boy’s cry, the violin and the bells of St Pancras – is peculiar. I agree with Radford that what we are being alerted to here is that Miriam has come into possession of is not one room, but a whole house, and that this house includes both the transit spaces of the lodging-house and the streets, parks and buildings nearby. 3. The Street Inside These far-off “rooms” – the café, especially – will be explored more closely in due course. First, though, I want to make some general comments about Miriam’s bedsit – in particular its ability to connect itself so intimately with city spaces. Unquestionably, Richardson is keen to establish the bedsit as safehouse and storehouse. This is intimated, for example, by the careful catalogue in Chapter I of all cupboards and drawers – they are, Gaston Bachelard tells us, “veritable organs of the secret psychological life […] intimate space[s], space[s] that [are] not open to just anybody” (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 78). But it is the bedsit’s capacity for propitious porosity that stands out as its defining characteristic. This porosity is given greater emphasis by Miriam herself who, static for most of the first chapter of The Tunnel, carries out two very noteworthy actions pertaining to the room’s primary thresholds, its door and window. First, the door: when Miriam enters the attic she closes it immediately. This, of course, is natural enough and one need not take account of it. But a short time later, after attending to the play of the light “pouring through the barred lattice window” against the wallpaper and roof, Miriam reopens the door, without any apparent intention to pass though it. Why? Part of the reason lies simply in the fact that Miriam is always alive to a passionate interest in the sacred concreteness of objects, of the “universal marvel of existence” (Richardson 1921: 91). Later in the novel-sequence she reflects:

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Melinda Harvey The astonishingness of doors opening when you push them. But what is much more astonishing than things behaving after their manner, is that there should be anything anywhere to behave. Why does this pass unnoticed?  (Iv, 455)

It was an attitude shared by Miriam with Richardson herself: “For what astonished, and still astonishes me more than anything else,” she confessed once, “was the existence, anywhere, of anything at all”.4 But there is more going on here than simply this. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space points us toward the truth behind the alternately closed and opened door. Discussing “images of secrecy”, Bachelard says of the casket: When a casket is closed, it is returned to the general community of objects; it takes place in exterior space. But it opens! […] From the moment the casket is opened, [the] dialectics [of inside and outside] no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning.  (Bachelard 1958: 78)

A like rationale holds for Miriam’s manipulation of the door. By closing, opening and then closing it again, Miriam dissolves the traditional limits of the room. If a room has its doorway open wide, the dialectics of inside and outside no longer exists – the interior is effaced with one stroke. No longer are the attic’s carpet, window grate, bed and scattering of furniture swallowed by the abject gloom. Courtesy of the exterior – namely the skylight out on the landing (which, itself, is a threshold) – Miriam comes to a fuller awareness of the most private parts of her new living sphere. The unbolting of the door allows Bachelard’s “atmosphere of novelty and surprise” to reign in the room. The movement of “silence” from outside to inside also reminds us that Miriam’s attic is related to the passageways directly contiguous with it – the landing, the staircase, the vestibule, and ultimately, the street. Miriam cannot help but play with her door – push it closed and pull it open, note the jiggle of its knob in her hand as well as its flapping in the breeze and the happy squeal of its hinges. This is a door that, above all things, covets openness – it is her portal to publicity and privacy, each enriching rather than compromising the other, a porte de passage to the porous life. 4 Rose Odle, Dorothy’s sister-in-law and literary executrix, substantiates this with a relevant anecdote: “They both [Richardson and her husband, Alan] treated inanimate objects as if they had some life of their own […] And when I left Trevone to go home, Dorothy would write that my used Burgundy glass and squashed cushion on the chair had been left overnight to hold some of my presence the next day”. See Odle, ‘Some Memories of Dorothy M. Richardson and Alan Odle,’ Talk to the Friday Club, London, 18 November, 1957, 17, in The Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, II.9.211.

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Miriam’s dormer window is the garret’s other key permeable limit, a point of both entry and egress, a source of light and warmth for the room and a frame through which Miriam can encounter the external world. Windows, more obviously than doors, transgress the binary of inside and outside. Doors are entrances and exits, protective barriers and terminating impasses. Framed panes of glass act as conduits and barriers too, but they enlarge the scope of rooms by informing them with an external prospect without meddling with their actual size and scale. They afford the visual presentness of people, places or things without demanding intimacy or recognition. In a room that otherwise cries freedom for women, Miriam’s window is, however, a convolution of constrictive iron bars, immovable panes and double lattice. Since Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, attics have been dangerous places for women who refuse to submit to the restrictions of the patriarchal order. Latterly a governess and an orphan too (Mrs Henderson dies at the end of the previous chapter-novel, Honeycomb), Miriam recognises that she must take affirmative action against the habiliments of imprisonment. What follows is an almost ritualistic avulsion of the window’s various trappings, described by Richardson for a whole page (Ii, 14–15). Miriam’s hard-fought liberation of the window and grate means that her view from the attic is no longer delimited to a sealed glimpse of outside walls, roofs and sky. Her act, in fact, returns the room to an equivalence relation with the exterior world. I say returns because the furnished garret betrays a look of the exterior, as if it had at one time been exposed to the elements. Throughout the novel-series Bloomsbury’s roads and house-fronts are characterised as “dingy” and “shabby” (Iii, 194; Iii, 177). The room’s dust, its fadedness and shabbiness, is evidence of its porosity, of its happy correspondence with the life of the streets. Miriam’s bedsit contravenes the classification of matter as interior or exterior and the systematic ordering of space as private or public. Dirt is the mark of porosity, and as such, a guarantee of public-privacy. This is indeed the promise of Tansley Street’s “large brown dinginess” for Miriam, tired out by the horrors of previous lodgings – by the “ugly clean little room[s]” and the censure of “awful” women (Ii, 20; I, 284). Mrs Bailey’s “shabby and worn” appearance, the stairwell’s faded umbers, buffs and madders, the landing linoleum’s dust-encrusted cracks and fissures, and “the clear brown shock” of the attic-room itself foretell untrammelled freedom. Upon arrival, Miriam follows the room’s lead and leaves her things “half unpacked about the floor”. Ignoring the housekeeping obligations of ideal femininity, she settles in, instead, for a spot of reading. Bachelard notes in The Poetics of Space that, “generally, beauty exteriorises and disturbs intimate meditation” ([1958] 1994: 107). By this way of thinking, then, messiness is homeliness for the independent woman with artistic intent.

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By the end of The Tunnel’s first chapter, the room is thoroughly awash with outside sights and sounds. A violinist is described as if immediately present; the bells of St Pancras’ church clamour and jangle “in” – not “into” – the garret (Ii, 15; Ii, 23). Time, too, joins the room’s irresistible porous vortex: “The night was like a moment added to the day; like years going backwards to the beginning; and in the brilliant sunshine the unchanging things began again, perfectly new” (Ii, 22). The bedsit’s happy admittance to the life of the streets is not compromised by a lack of privacy. Watching an unscreened dormer window opposite, Miriam makes out only “a dim figure amongst motionless shapes”. Reassured that her movements inside her own room would, likewise, appear indistinct, Miriam gives up the thought of a shrouding window-blind: “London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes: […] London, just outside all the time, coming in with the light, coming in with the darkness […]” (Ii, 16). 4. La Maison de Passe The Tunnel’s first chapter is not merely a tour of a single attic-room in Bloomsbury but a revealing glimpse at a sprawling, if decidedly unorthodox, house. This house is not, however, synonymous with the four outer walls of No. 7, Tansley Street. Instead, it is an imagined structure constituted by “a pattern of regular doings” in real space, to use Mary Douglas’ helpful formulation (Douglas 1991: 287). Miriam’s home consists of the bedsit as well as a number of publicly accessible indoor and outdoor spaces she habitually visits. Architects and phenomenologists have pointed out for some years now that architecture is an event, be it actual (physical) or mental (imaginary). Homes are no different, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains: It is evident that home is not merely an object or building, but a diffuse and complex condition, which integrates memories and images, desires and fears, the past and the present. A home is also a set of rituals, personal rhythms and routines of everyday life. And a home cannot be produced at once; it has its time dimension and continuum, and it is a gradual product of the dweller’s adaptation to the world. (Pallasmaa 1995: 133)

Exiles, as Michael Seidel notes, are wanderers by nature, but homebodies by habit (Seidel 1986: 10). Miriam, displaced and disenfranchised, fashions for herself a domicile that interpenetrates London’s zones of public-privacy – its streets, shops, theatres, restaurants, lecture halls, buses and trains. By extending the boundaries of her home to include live spaces, Miriam makes the city fit and proper for flânerie. Loitering, that most illicit of acts for the respectable woman, is normalised by the manufacture of an imaginary enclosure. A primary intention of the London chapter-novels of Pilgrimage is to elaborate (and

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when Miriam’s living conditions change, complicate) the configuration of this extraordinary house that is at the heart of her New Woman freedom. With the ever-porous bedsit setting the standard, Miriam scours the city’s public sphere seeking its atmosphere of simultaneous isolation and community. Need also determines Miriam’s choice of satellite sites of inhabitation around town. The bedsit has its limitations: food, for one thing, needs to be sought outside. The café manages both to satisfy the high demands and make up for the more practical shortcomings of the bedsit. 5. “The Magic Circle” Any building, given a change in its user’s needs, circumstances or desires, can be remodelled – extended up or out, partitioned off, or utterly overhauled. Miriam’s house demonstrates a like elasticity. From Chapter I of The Tunnel we gleaned an enduring connection between the room’s freed window and fluttering door and what Miriam comes repeatedly to call “the magic circle” (Iii, 86; Iv, 196; Iv, 336–37). This is the geographical area known as Bloomsbury and the West End, the preferred quarters “for writers, poets, painters, musicians, actors, historians, statesmen, philosophers, scientists – leaders of thought and action in every sphere of activity” (Gordon and Deeson 1950: 11). Over the entire course of her time in London, Miriam never fails to find easefulness, safety and a profound sense of happiness within these primary limits. This is a fact presaged early in The Tunnel when Miriam returns home for the first time to Tansley Street after a lazy Sunday spent with her sister, Harriett, her husband, Gerald, and their friends: Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of Endsleigh Gardens, Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road, she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying impression and had become part of her home. It was the borderland of the part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. It was all she wanted.  (Ii, 30)

But there are some very basic needs neither the bedsit nor the transit zones of a house can provide, and Miriam must seek these further afield. For food and companionship – hallmark beneficences of the traditional household – Miriam annexes numerous places external to the Tansley Street house and yokes them to her own rented room. In this way the stairs leading from the fourth-floor garret to the green front door of Mrs Bailey’s house become a passageway to the vestibule of Bloomsbury’s streets and squares. An “oasis”, Bloomsbury itself is also a tributary to a variety of vital places – “islands” Richardson called them (1939: 61) – of which eating-places make up a not insubstantial part.

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But Miriam’s choice of additional living space changes as Miriam’s circumstances change. While the interior rooms remain secure and intact, the outer limits of Miriam’s house are under constant construction. Pilgrimage is, as Scott McCracken has noted, “extraordinarily detailed about social relations that produce space, for example, the complicated codes of access and disbarment that define the difference between a boarder and a lodger” (McCracken 2000: 56). It is to these arrangements, agreements and allegiances (spatial, social and psychical) that I shall now turn. 6. The Artful Lodger Miriam starts her life at Mrs Bailey’s as a lodger, not a boarder. This is a very important distinction, so it is worth explaining. Leonore Davidoff, in her pioneering work on women and housing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, defines a lodger as a tenant who pays a specified weekly sum of money to live in segregated quarters in another family’s household. Lodging ensures shelter, furnishings and basic services such as “cleaning, carrying water and coal, emptying slops such as waste water and chamber pots, making fires, [and] running errands”; boarding, on the other hand, authorises a more integrated and wholesale use of the house – for example, the right to laundry facilities and/or the inclusion at family meals. A boarder, in short, is a nominal “part of the family of the occupier”. A lodger, however, lives separate and apart, a family unto him or herself (Davidoff 1979: 64–97). In Miriam’s case – that is, at least to start – a half-crown (that is, an eighth of her weekly wage) procures her a week’s accommodation in a furnished room with rudimental attendance, but no food, drink, heating nor use of any additional living areas. It is immediately apparent that this is, for Miriam, a far from loathsome or incommodious arrangement. Why? To answer this question we must return to The Tunnel’s now familiar first chapter. In between removing the window grate and retiring for the night under her dusty counterpane, Miriam, propped up on her mattress, book banished to her knee, falls into thoughtful retrospection. We learn that nine months have passed since the fatal visit to Brighton that brings the previous chapter-novel, Honeycomb to its abrupt conclusion, and that in this intervening time Miriam has been living in London as a boarder.5 Having done her time in houses outside the “magic circle” of Bloomsbury and the West End,6 Miriam has learned that ancillary services 5 See George H. Thomson (1998: 64), who dates Mrs Henderson’s suicide to have occurred in July or August 1895 and Miriam’s arrival at Tansley Street at Saturday 4 April 1896. 6 Richardson does not specifically locate the first of Miriam’s boarding houses, but we can safely assume it, also, is not inside the “magic circle”, since it is described as being situated among “maddening endless roads of little houses in the east wind” (Ii, 17).

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like cooking and cleaning come at the cost of privacy. Ferns and spotlessness and trays of food amount to prying eyes and rash admonitions – the horror of women’s scornful looks, “heavy with disapproval”, making it “impossible to read or think or play”, and making her “nearly mad with sorrow” (Ii, 20; Ii, 17). The move to Tansley Street and the concomitant shift in status from boarder to lodger, then, can be understood as a concerted attempt on Miriam’s part to avoid interruption, observation and speculation. In the opening moments of The Tunnel, we find Miriam unwilling to make conversation with Mrs Bailey. Intimacy would enfeeble the borderlands of her newly-acquired terrain of liberty, and her fear of this is palpable: “She held herself in. It was better to begin as she meant to go on. Behind Mrs Bailey the staircase was beckoning. There was something waiting upstairs that would be gone if she stayed talking to Mrs Bailey” (Ii, 11). If Miriam’s London life is a pilgrimage as the book’s title suggested, then by definition, it must be a life lived among strangers. The lodging-house, as Miriam herself notes with pleasure a little later on, “h[o]ld[s] all the lodgers secure and apart, fixed in richly enclosed rooms in the heart of London”. It also, by virtue of its multitude of deprivations, ratifies Miriam’s preference for public-privacy over over-familiarity, for spaciousness over confinement: “No one knew her here … no past and no future … coming in and out unknown, in the present secret wonder” (Ii, 77). Miriam’s exalted lodger status is premised on the virtual absence of the other lodgers: she knows they are there but they keep their doors closed, so Miriam can safely have hers open without feeling invaded. This life of communal apartness simulates the exhilarating publicprivacy of the flâneur in modernity. 7. The Doleful Boarder It is little wonder, then, that Miriam is genuinely horrified by the news of Tansley Street’s impending conversion from lodging-house to boarding-house at the end of The Tunnel. Significantly, she learns of Mrs Bailey’s entrepreneurial ambitions as a result of an unprecedented encroachment – into the downstairs diningroom. Excepting her everyday use of the house’s transit spaces – its vestibule, staircase, corridors and landings – this is Miriam’s very first inter-room traversal at Tansley Street, and it is met with instantaneous regret: “The hall and the stairs and her own room would be changed now she knew what this room was like” (Ii, 285). By the time Mrs Bailey has spelled out for her the reasons behind her decision to transform Tansley Street into a boarding-house, Miriam’s remorse has turned to calamitous fear. The Tunnel comes to an end with a dire prognostication of Mrs Bailey’s ultimate humiliation. The reader is left with an image of the house’s wrongful usurpation by boarders, its celebrated thresholds choked by a haemorrhage of bodies staking their illegitimate claims (Ii, 287).

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Interim, The Tunnel’s follow-up, shows Miriam proceeding to minister to this spectre of sinister porosity. The chapter-novel begins with a tired-out Miriam plonking her Gladstone bag down on Grace and Florrie Broom’s doorstep. It is here, “smack-bang” in the middle of “barren” North London that Miriam sits out an entire one-fifth of Interim. Though it is Christmas time, her appearance at the Brooms’ bears the unmistakable marks of a forced flight. North London is, to Miriam’s mind, dead space, the “perfect stage for the last completion of a misery as wide at the world”, a place she declared just months before that “[i]t was torture even to be in it, going through it” (Iii, 208; Ii, 144) on a bicycle. Miriam does not return to her garret until a week or so later. Richardson presents us with an incongruous tableau of a “tidy room with everything mended [… and] put away in tidy drawers” (Ii, 320) and a darning and fussing Miriam, sworn off books and men, at its spotless centre. It is as if the room – and, indeed, Miriam herself – has been made exposed by the new boarding-house status and, as such, must be made to look respectable. Returning to Tansley Street from Wimpole Street late the following Saturday, Miriam finds there to be “no warmth anywhere in the world” (Ii, 323). Miriam’s passage towards home is as difficult as if she were, each step, dealing with bars, locks and ramparts: The icy wind drove against her all the way. When she crossed a wide thoroughfare it was reinforced from the north […] At every crossing in the many little streets, there was some big vehicle just upon her keeping her shrinking in the cold while it rumbled over the cobbles, overwhelming her with a harsh grating roar that filled the streets and the sky.  (Ii, 324)

The description of Miriam’s walk home here is consistent with all the classic symptoms of the anxiety dream. The situation as it stands back at the house is, likewise, “perfectly and awfully dreadful”: The whole house and even her room had been changed in a twinkling. Coming in, it had had warmth, even in the cold twilight. Now it lay open and bleak, all its rooms naked and visible, a house “foreign young gentlemen” heard of and came to live in […] The house had been her own; waiting for her when she found it; the quiet road of large high grey mysterious houses, the two rows of calm balconied façades, the green squares at either end, the green door she waited for as she turned unseeing into the road from the quiet thoroughfare of Endsleigh Gardens, her triumphant faithful latchkey, the sheltered dimness of the hall, the great staircase, the many large closed doors, the lonely obscurity of her empty top floor. What had come now was the fulfilment of the apprehension she had had when Mrs Bailey had spoken the word boarders. Here they were.  (Ii, 324–25)

As a lodging-house, Tansley Street was the guarantor and criterion of public-

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privacy at home and away. Alive with the absent presence of strangers and the attendant prospects for enlivening indirect encountering, the house, at the same time, vouchsafed a serene and comfortable aloneness. But, as boarding-house, Tansley Street’s porosity is worn away to comfortless overexposure. Previously, the house was able to hold the house’s occupants and their variety of doings separate, secure and private. According to Miriam, the house, by opening wide its doors to all and sundry – “young Norwegian gentlemen”, “cosmopolitan” Jewish refugees, as well as England’s own home-grown riff-raff “in mysterious disgraceful difficulties” (Iii, 30) – has invalidated its invigorating correspondence with the outside world and lies, instead, “open and bleak, all its rooms naked and visible” (ibid.). 8. The Amphibian Difference A longer inspection of Miriam’s Tansley Street life reveals that boarding-house inhabitation, contrary to Miriam’s expectations, ultimately extends rather than delimits the boundaries of her imagined home – that is to say, once a crucial adjustment has been made with her landlady. Mrs Bailey breaches the threshold of Miriam’s attic-room later on in Interim. As it turns out, the incursion is not designed to cause “dismay”. Mrs Bailey’s intention is to strike a deal with Miriam – to ratify in a business-like fashion Miriam’s rightful admittance to “the life that was beginning to flow downstairs” (Ii, 329). It is arranged that quarter-hour French lessons for Sissie Bailey will entitle Miriam to a cooked breakfast every day, around-the-clock access to the large heated drawing-room, and a place at the Bailey dining-table at any time, should she choose it. With this agreement in place, Miriam finds she is able to now enjoy using the downstairs rooms. By pledging to dispense, now and again, a smattering of French phrases from a Havet, Miriam sidesteps the shameful indebtedness to the Baileys she feared last night might dog her forever (Ii, 328). No longer the boarding-house’s sole lodger, timorously scuttling from front-door to garret and vice versa behind the backs and under the noses of Mrs Bailey’s boarders, Miriam becomes, as she describes it later to fellow Tansley Street resident, Michael Shatov, “amphibious” – “neither a lodger nor a boarder” (Iii, 81) but with all the advantages of both. Under the amended compact with Mrs Bailey, Miriam enjoys the right to a double manner of existence at Tansley Street. She is free to avoid or avail herself completely of the communal rooms downstairs. Solitude and sociability have become equally viable modes of conduct. By dwelling from time to time in Mrs Bailey’s downstairs rooms Miriam appends these dingy and dusty rooms inside the house to her own upstairs. She is also invited to inhabit numerous

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new and different zones of encountering beyond her own reach and experience in the city thanks to the people she meets there. As a lodging-house, Tansley Street was very literally a tunnel providing safe and reliable passage for Miriam from garret-sanctuary to a scattering of familial and familiar locales in wider London. But it is by virtue of Tansley Street’s conversion to a boarding-house that Miriam’s imaginary home is expanded and diversified to include wholly unknown – indeed, foreign – avenues or arenas of potential engagement. There is no better evidence for the widening of Miriam’s sphere of home-like emplacement than in her rejection of the A.B.C. teashop for the cosmopolitan café. 9. Eating Out It is clear that living at Tansley Street, irrespective of Miriam’s status as a lodger or an “amphibious” boarder, forces her to eat out. Neither Mrs Bailey’s offer of “single meals at any time for a very small sum” (Ii, 330) nor the “wonderful and astonishing” bedsit cooking-class conducted by Eleanor Dear in The Tunnel – “savoury” haddock with a “lovely little loaf ” of bread, using only a shallow steaming pan and a single gas-ring, all at a “cost less than a small egg and roll and butter at an A.B.C.” (Ii, 257–59) – entirely convince Miriam of the advantages of home-dining. Eating-house habituation, after all, tenders cheap replenishment in “live” space, without the headache of making convivial conversation or shopping for supplies. I asserted earlier in this chapter that the bedsit, protective but porous, is Miriam’s spatial beau ideal – the benchmark against which all other places are judged. The café is one of the metropolis’s best outlets for a like public-privacy. A part of the street but, all the same, safeguarded from it, the café is a site of rest and refuge, which privileges spectacle and stimulation as well as freeform and fleeting solidarity. For the cost of a drink, a café habitué can tarry in a state of detached involvement, enjoying a succession of small encounters (with people, things, thoughts) that need never be registered, acknowledged or remembered, in a space that does not compromise on homely comforts. For Scott McCracken, chain eating-houses (such as the teashops/coffeehouses of the Aerated Bread Company (A.B.C.s) and J. Lyons & Co., as well as the Slater’s restaurants) were as much responsible for the emergence and performance of New Woman identities in London as the department store (McCracken 2000: 63). In Pilgrimage as a whole, the café never ceases being a site in which Miriam can reliably enact her anonymity and autonomy. 10. From English Chain to Cosmopolitan Café (1) Around about the time of Mrs Bailey’s visit to the attic room, that is, concurrent with Miriam’s first forays into the warm downstairs common-rooms, Miriam’s

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taste in eating venues undergoes a dramatic modification. Apart from meals at the houses of family members or friends, Miriam eats exclusively at chain coffee-houses throughout The Tunnel. From Interim through to Clear Horizon, however, she increasingly chooses to frequent the continental-style cafés of Bloomsbury and the West End. How can we account for this changing of allegiance? I contended earlier in this chapter that it was possible to explain Miriam’s predilection for particular eating-houses by referring directly to her concurrent housing arrangements. Simply put, then: as lodging-house, Tansley Street facilitates chain restaurant usage; as a home for boarders it, by contrast, encourages Miriam to explore and embrace the much less familiar, more cosmopolitan café. I want to suggest that Miriam’s use of chain coffee-houses and teashops is linked more strongly to a nostalgia for a lost familial past than any emancipatory present or future for women, and, inversely, that regular attendance at Donizetti’s and Ruscino’s is suggestive of a less parochial and more self-reliant pilgrim. 11. The Chain Restaurant and the Maison Natale The A.B.C. depot’s inexpensive, home-style meals, as well as its enlivening anonymity, appeal to Miriam, but as Scott McCracken notes, “[t]racing the genealogy of the A.B.C. in Pilgrimage reveals a legacy of childhood pleasures” (McCracken 2000: 63). We see Miriam pay her first actual visit to an A.B.C. in The Tunnel – that is, once her autonomous London life has begun. However, the teashop chain has been mentioned twice before in previous chapter-novels, in ways that declare their incontrovertible tie to her carefree days in the maison natale. In Backwater, we see Miriam escorting her mother to “our ABC [sic]… . [t]he one we go to after the Saturday pops” (i, 199) in an attempt to lift her spirits. Prior to this, Miriam punctuates an eleventh-hour lamentation about leaving home for Hanover with the following elegiac lament: Miriam stared into the fire and began to murmur shamefacedly. “No more all day bezique … No more days in the West End … No more matinees … no more exhibitions … no more A.B.C. teas … no more insane times … no more anything.”  (i, 18)

Miriam’s prophesy of her future days could not be more mistaken: West-Central London, the theatre and especially A.B.C. teas all become staples of her Tansley Street existence. I would like to go as far as to assert here that this correspondence between the leisure activities of family life and lodging-house life is not the workings of pure chance, but the result of an unconscious strategy on Miriam’s behalf. In short, Miriam chooses to live in a Bloomsbury lodging-

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house because its porosity gives her the freedom to imagine herself back in the family home. To better explain this idea I want to turn to a conversation that takes place between Miriam and Michael Shatov in the Tansley Street drawing-room halfway through Deadlock (Iii, 123–24). After listening to Miriam reminisce about the childhood antics of her sister, Harriett, Shatov solemnly states, “A happy childhood is perhaps the most-fortunate gift in life […] This early surrounding lingers and affects all the life” (ibid.). The remark prompts Miriam to confess to him the deep nostalgia she still feels for the Babington house and garden, the first home she ever knew. Yes, she says, when you are young you know how happy you are by “how desperately you love a place”. She goes on to relate the story of her last day at Babington – a memory recalled by Miriam frequently throughout Pilgrimage (i, 316–17; i, 425; Ii, 213; Iii, 124; Iv, 243), and now commonly referred to as the “bee-memory”(Iii, 124) among Richardson’s critics (Raitt 1993: 132). To console Miriam, Michael suggests that the “free life of garden and woods” she enjoyed there still resides within her. Miriam’s response to Michael’s kind assuagement reveals the way that the maison natale continues to play an active part in her experience of place: I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the porches and French windows and the way the lawns went off into the mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after the years in the small house by the sea, I don’t remember the house, only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down it. I used to run up and down it to make it more.  (Iii, 124)

Miriam’s behaviour as a child at the house in Barnes is an accurate rendition of the way she continues to see, use and manipulate space as an adult. Still not cured of the expectation of domestic spaciousness, Miriam “run[s] up and down” the transit zones of the Tansley Street house (the faded ruins of a once-glorious Georgian home – that is, in the same grand architectural vein as the family house at Barnes) and its surrounding streets of “gentle charm and grace” in order to make the bedsit “more” (Gordon and Deeson 1950: 139). Though she vows she will never give up the “New Woman” life for anything (Ii, 150), the maison natale has, nonetheless, engraved within Miriam an absolute set of spatial expectations specific to the English country house. Her partiality for places is nostalgic in the original sense of the word: in its deep longing for that safe and unchanged home, from which she was prematurely exiled by her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s suicide. As a consequence, “homeliness” for her means the kind of

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extensiveness that can accommodate the full range of social and private, indoor and outdoor leisure activities consistent with English middle-class life. This is a realisation Miriam comes to, herself, in Revolving Lights: But here, in this separate existence, was a shape […] Was this bright shape that drew her, the secret of her nature … the clue she had carried in her hand through the maze? It would explain my love of kingly old Hanover, the stately ancient house in Waldstrasse; the way the charm of the old-fashioned well-born Pernes held me so long in the misery of north London; the relief of getting away to Newlands, my determination to remain from that time forth, at any cost, amidst beautiful surroundings. Though life has drawn me away these things have stayed with me […] My drifting to the large old house in grey wide Bloomsbury was a movement of return.  (Iii, 244)

Excepting perhaps the Corrie family’s private home at Newlands, of all the places in which we see Miriam reside only Mrs Bailey’s lodging-house makes it possible for her to imaginatively gentrify her dwelling place, without sacrificing any of her precious independence. The Tansley Street house offers Miriam a foothold from which she can fancy herself back at home. From the remote, topmost corner of the Tansley Street house, Miriam, unsupervised, builds her dream-house out of a select number of pre-existing sites outside in the world, to which she achieves free and easeful access through the “tunnel” of the building’s hall and stairwell. Back to the chain restaurant, then, and A.B.C. restaurants are the most significant of these poached exterior locations. As I mentioned earlier, A.B.C. outings were a much beloved feature of Henderson family life – something Miriam expects to miss when in Germany; something that might return a mother’s tormented mind to sanity in remembering. Miriam’s repeated patronage of A.B.C.s in the early London chapter-novels of Pilgrimage (for example, Ii, 329; Ii, 382–84), thus, consolidates the link between the New Woman present and the bourgeois past established, as we have already seen, by bedsit inhabitation. This is a continuum further signalled by the A.B.C.’s endemic “dowdiness” (Ii, 150). We have already seen that this is the way Richardson symbolically denotes live space in Pilgrimage. The uniform sheet of dust that spreads from bedsit to coffee-house affirms that both locations are part of Miriam’s spacious imagined domicile. But the presence of this dirt throughout Miriam’s self-constituted home also serves as a stern reminder to the reader that she is, despite her salaried penury, to the manor born. Unlike Rosamond Lehmann’s Olivia Curtis, whose bedsit ignominy is signalled by her “everlasting war on grubbiness” (Lehmann 1936: 77), Miriam refuses to lift a finger against the dirt that surrounds her. Miriam’s fondness for the “dowdy”

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A.B.C. is, like her embrace of dirt and disorder in the bedsit, a clear example of nostalgie de la boue – literally, Martin Amis tells us, “a homesickness for the mud, for the stickiness and ooziness of childhood” (Amis 2002: 267) – but it is also another defiant defence of her middle-class status and her ties to the rambling house of her youth. 12. From English Chain to Cosmopolitan Café (2) There are two secret truths about nostalgia: one is that it arises when a return home is no longer a real option, the other is that it reveals a resistance to change. The conversion of the Tansley Street lodging-house into a boarding-house, though much dreaded by Miriam, offers her the opportunity to overcome the trauma and shame of her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s suicide. As a lodging-house, Tansley Street allowed Miriam to imaginatively recreate the spatial conditions of her insulated country house past. The benign porosity of the bedsit conferred upon Miriam the privilege to pick and choose the terms of her interaction with foreignness. Since for the uncured nostalgic, all places aspire to the condition of home, the Miriam of The Tunnel does not stray far from locations already familiar to her due to prior frequentation as a child, or somehow reminiscent of the originary home’s easeful spaciousness. Participation in boarding-house life, however, tenders Miriam the chance to invent for herself a much more independent metropolitan existence. This opportunity, however, is tantamount to accepting that a return to the English country house is impossible. But the more Miriam involves herself in the life of the Tansley Street house and the wider Miriam’s “magic circle” grows in Pilgrimage, the more ready she is for writing. The last section of this essay will explain how Miriam’s embracement of the continental café is instrumental in this transformation. To begin with, it must be noted that there is in Miriam’s frequentation of the continental café some small strain of homesickness. Her initial participation in the life of the boarding-house is reluctant, even resentful. It is palatable to her only because of the opportunities it presents to revel in public displays of the middle-class ways of the past and, consequently, distance and differentiate herself from the Baileys. By reviving her bourgeois set of accomplishments – flaunting her fluent French in front of Sissie, whom she is supposed to be teaching (Ii, 343–44) or playing a Chopin nocturne on the piano – Miriam forgets she is “the fag-end of the Baileys’ stock-in-trade” (Ii, 336) and can envision herself again, as she did in the lodging-house days, in the oneiric house. A fellow boarder, the Spanish Jew Bernard Mendizabal, is Miriam’s unwitting accomplice in her plot to steal back her lost home. Despite first feeling a “stiff middle-class resentment of his vulgar appearance”, she very quickly senses that

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a zone of “equal companionship” can exist between them due to her good breeding and “his polyglot experience” (Ii, 340–41; Ii, 392). To deliberately make the Baileys feel like “strangers in their own dining-room” she urges him to talk of Amsterdam, flamboyantly argues with him in a foreign language and delights in the alienating effects of his friend, Antoine Bowdoin’s piano-playing on the family (ii, 346). Though I do not wish to make light of the fact that the affinity Miriam feels for Mendizabal is shot through with significant ambivalences, it is their “equal knowledge” that first lures her out of the boarding-house and away from the A.B.C. restaurant (Ii, 392). True, Miriam’s decision to fraternise with him is heavily influenced by the fact that being in relation with the “foreignness” of the Jew provides her with a potent reminder of “her inexorable Englishness” – an Englishness inseparable, to her mind, with the country house family life of her past (Ii, 392). As Bryan Cheyette and others have demonstrated, Jews were with “frequency […] positioned as ‘other’ to the ‘English nation’” (Cheyette 1993: 53) from the 1870s as a means of shoring up the racial boundaries of Englishness in the wake of its imperialist successes and the ever-increasing tides of immigration to the country. By pairing herself off with Mendizabal in Interim, Miriam does feel a sense of having her birthright returned to her, but in the last assessment of it, Mendizabal is less Miriam’s obliging attaché than her guide to an unknown, more urbane London. It is in this – admittedly stereotypical – Jewish role of “cosmopolitan” that Mendizabal introduces Miriam to the continental café. He is instrumental in refashioning her London home to include strangeness as well as familiar sameness, the effect of which is the expansion of Miriam’s “magic circle” (Ii, 344; Ii, 393). From the start, Mendizabal is soldered intractably to the notion of the continental café: meeting him for the first time Miriam immediately thinks him “a man from a café. A foreign waiter in his best clothes”(Ii, 337–38). This is confirmed by Mendizabal himself when, talking of his life in Amsterdam, he tells her he “conduct[ed] a café” there. A few weeks later, he is whisking Miriam away to the hedonistic Ruscino’s. It is, for Miriam, like a first visit to a foreign country: Continental London ahead of her, streaming towards her in mingled odours of continental food and wine, rich intoxicating odours in an air heavy and parched with the flavour of cigars, throbbing with the solid, filmy, thrilling swing of music. It was a café! Mr Mendizabal was evidently a habitué. She could be, by right of her happiness abroad […] In a vast open space of light, set in a circle of balconied gloom, innumerable little tables held groups of people wreathed in a brilliancy of screened light, veiled in mist […] The confines of the room were invisible. All about them were worldly wicked happy people.  (Ii, 394)

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The boarding-house conversion and the inaugural trip to the continental café mark the start of Miriam’s appreciation for the spaciousness of strangeness rather than sameness. In the same way as “the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him” will later make the walls of her room “transparent” and “force them into companionship with all the walls in the world”, Mendizabal, “at the height of his happy foreign expansiveness” (Iii, 87) at Ruscino’s, unravels to her a world of alternative vastness and charm to the country house life. Miriam ultimately rejects a Jewish identity for herself by refusing to marry Michael Shatov in Deadlock, but Mendizabal, nonetheless, plays a crucial role in her transformation. His happy exile offers her a model for a freedom that is not haunted by family traumas and the loss of the originary home. Concurrent with her frequentation of the continental café, Miriam becomes less parochial and worldlier, her rovings no longer over-determined by a yearning for the lost home. By Deadlock – the beginning of her relationship with Michael Shatov – she is railing against the derogatory image of the boarding-house in the public consciousness and pitying “all English people who had not intelligent foreign friends” (Iii, 14; Iii, 151). Edward Said has told us that the truly worldly individual endeavours to inhabit the large, manywindowed house of culture, as opposed to the separatist, who is content to be confined to some tiny corner of the world. While Miriam will continue to cling to the solitude of the bedsit, by embracing the café at the same time she enjoys an increased liminality. Miriam is, for the rest of the novel-sequence, “neither English nor civilised”, genuinely “poised between the competing interests of many worlds” (Iii, 108; Ii, 71). There is in Miriam’s embracement of unfamiliar London still the same love of live space that has always been apparent, but this, Miriam discovers, can be found much further afield than in both the house at Tansley Street and the chain coffee-houses of her youth. In the subsequent chapter-novels of Pilgrimage we find Miriam much more willing to seriously encounter foreignness and difference (Iv, 134). This is evident in her relationships with Shatov and Amabel, as well as her fortnight’s trip to the Bernese Alps in Oberland, her more extended stay at the Roscorla’s Quaker farm in Dimple Hill, and, ultimately, the act of writing itself.

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Bibliography Amis, Martin. 2002. ‘Against Dryness’ in Leader, Zachary (ed.) On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.). Boston MA: Beacon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1979. One-Way Street and Other Writings, Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (trans.). London: New Left Review Editions. Castle, Terry. 1993. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheyette, Bryan. 1993. Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidoff, Leonore. 1979. ‘The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century England’ in Burman, Sandra (ed.) Fit Work for Women. London: Croom Helm: 64–97. Douglas, Mary. 1991. ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’ in Social Research 58 (1): 287–307. Gordon, Edward and Deeson, A. F. L. 1950. The Book of Bloomsbury. London: Edward Gordon. Finn, Howard. 2002. ‘Objects of Modernist Description: Dorothy Richardson and the Nouveau Roman’ in Paragraph 25: 107–24. Harvey, Melinda. 2001. ‘From Passante to Flâneuse: Women, Walking and Writing in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’ in The Journal of Urban History. Special Issue ‘Imagining the City’ 27 (6): 746–64. Heilmann, Ann. 1995. ‘Feminist Resistance, the Artist and “A Room of One’s Own” in New Woman Fiction’ in Women’s Writing 2 (3): 37–49. Hidalgo, Pilar. 1993. ‘Female Flânerie in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’ in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 6: 93–98. Lehmann, Rosamond. [1936] 1981. The Weather in the Streets. London: Virago. Mepham, John. 2000. ‘Dorothy Richardson’s “Unreadability”: Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel’ in English Literature in Transition, 43 (4): 449–64. McCracken, Scott. 2000. ‘Embodying the New Woman: Dorothy Richardson, Work and the London Café’ in Horner, Avril and Angela Keane (eds). Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 58–71. Pallasmaa, Juhani. 1995. ‘Identity, Intimacy and Domicile: Notes on the Phenomenology of Home’ in Benjamin, David N. (ed.). The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments. Aldershot, Brookfield VT: Avebury: 131–47. Radford, Jean. 1991. Dorothy Richardson. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Raitt, Suzanne. 1993. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Richardson, Dorothy. [1915–67] 1979. Pilgrimage. London: Virago.  . 1939. ‘Years of Bloomsbury’ in Life and Letters To-day 21: 60–66.  . 1921. ‘The Future of the Novel’ in Starr, Meredith (ed.) The Future of the Novel: Famous Authors on their Methods – a Series of Interviews with Renowned Authors. London: Heath Cranton: 91.

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Seidel, Michael. 1986. Exiles and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Sennett, Richard. 1992. ‘The Body and the City: Looking for “Live Space” in the Modern Townscape’ in The Times Literary Supplement (19 September): 3–5. Thomson, George. 1998. A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. University of North Carolina at Greensboro: ELT Press. Woolf, Virginia. [1919] 1992. ‘The Tunnel’ in Bowlby, Rachel (eds). A Woman’s Essays: Selected Essays Volume One. London: Penguin: 15–17.

Colonial Flâneurs: the London Life-writing of Janet Frame and Doris Lessing Mª Lourdes López Ropero abstract This chapter traces the motif of the female flâneur in a selection of autobiographical works by Janet Frame and Doris Lessing set in the 1950s, the 1960s and contemporary London. It argues that flânery has not only allowed Frame and Lessing to assert their visibility in the modern city as women and as authors, but has provided them with rich materials for their writing. My analysis emphasises the impact of their colonial background on their urban visions, an issue which has been overlooked or inadequately emphasised in recent flâneur scholarship. Keywords: flâneur, gender, visibility, publishing, colonialism, empire, city, space, palimpsest, spectacle, London, life-writing, Janet Frame, Doris Lessing.

In her path-breaking Streetwalking the Metropolis, Deborah Parsons persuasively argues for a “post-Benjaminian” notion of the flâneur figure (2000: 41). While retaining the methodological framework of the flâneur artist as the observer and walker of the city, Parsons expands the subject by breaking its gender, class, and time constraints. Certainly, the activity of flânery is susceptible of being carried out by women who may be working class and outsiders. The gallery of women writers that Parsons draws on in her study ranges from figures like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson to Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys or Doris Lessing. Besides, flânery is not necessarily confined to the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century, but may even encroach into the postmodern city. This has also been argued by Keith Tester who considers the flâneur a “recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of […] the metropolitan existence” (1994: 1, 16). Furthermore, Parsons qualifies the urban vision of the female flâneur, whose gaze is more tolerant than authoritative, and more connective than detached. As a consequence of the latter, the observed city functions both as a setting and as “constituent of identity” (2000: 7), both a voyage in and a voyage out.

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In this light, Parsons admits, the flâneur becomes a capacious trope, a “conceptual metaphor for urban observation and walking” (2000: 41). This new inclusiveness, she warns, may lead to arbitrarily blending diverse subject positions into the figure of the flâneur, overlooking “the particular influences of their race and class” (2000: 227). In fact, in her analysis of the flâneur in Doris Lessing’s semi-autobiographical novel The Four-Gated City, Parsons does not take issue with the bearing that Lessing’s Commonwealth background may have on her depictions of the London cityscape. Parsons approaches the flâneur as a gendered concept that draws attention to women’s encroachment on urban space. Even though she refers to Martha, the protagonist, as a “native from Africa” who enjoyed “the freedom and anonymity of being an outsider in London”(2000: 215), she does not follow this line of argument in her chapter. More recent studies of flânery in the work of Lessing do not take a postcolonial outlook (Arias 2005) and the same applies to analyses of the works of other Commonwealth expatriates such as Caribbean-born Jean Rhys (Bowlby 1992). It is important to note, however, that the concept of the colonial urban observer has been put forward by Angela Woollacott in her article ‘The Colonial Flaneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turn-of-the-Century London’, which explores the “less familiar” (2000: 762)1 connection between urban space, gender and colonialism. Wollacott’s approach is multidisciplinary rather than literary, drawing on social workers and reformers, as well as writers and artists. What I attempt to do in this chapter is to explore the interaction between the metaphoric quality of the flâneur figure and the actualities of a given flâneur, paying special attention to cultural and national affiliations.2 The urban vision of Commonwealth writers like Doris Lessing or Janet Frame – my case studies – in the British metropolis is, though not over-determined, at least inevitably influenced by their un-Englishness, as well as by their gender. Their encroachment on the metropolis results in a two-way exchange. On the one hand, their encounter with the metropolitan literary establishment is instrumental in their writing careers, otherwise jeopardised by the stifling atmosphere of their peripheral and provincial homelands. On the other, as outsiders, they contribute a contrapuntal reading of the London urban text. Raised in “New World”, settler countries, these writers are irresistibly drawn to the historical metropolis and especially alert to its palimpsestic nature3. Besides, their background 1 See also Woollacott 2002. 2 An earlier version of the Janet Frame’s section of this chapter appeared in “Walking the Imperial Metropolis: Janet Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City”, Feminismo/s 5 (2005): 85–95. I gratefully acknowledge the editor’s permission to use this material. 3 In her chapter in Susan Merril’s Women Writers and the City, Christine Sizemore argues that women writers are particularly responsive to the multilayered nature of

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in racially-troubled societies makes them aware of cultural differences and social injustice, a knowledge that permeates their observations of the urban landscape. While blending Lessing and Frame into the flâneur trope, I wish to highlight their specific subject positions, which distinguish them from other female flâneur artists. I will focus on a selection of London autobiographical pieces by these writers. This selection includes the third volume of Frame’s autobiographical series, The Envoy from Mirror City, and the first volume of Lessing’s, Walking in the Shade, as well as some sketches from her collection London Observed – ‘In Defence of the Underground’, ‘Storms’, ‘The New Café’ – and her documentary In Pursuit of the English. Frame spent her early life in New Zealand small towns, where her father worked for the railways. Her upbringing was blighted by her family’s poverty, a sense of inadequacy, and the deaths by drowning of two of her sisters. While she was working as a trainee teacher in Dunedin in 1945, a more fitting activity for a woman than writing, her alienation and her family bereavements triggered an emotional breakdown, which doctors mistook for schizophrenia, a misdiagnosis which kept her in mental hospitals for almost a decade. Her autobiographical trilogy, To the Island (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984), has drawn the attention of feminist critics. In her volume Gendered Resistance, Valérie Baisnée analyses the autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras and the first instalment of Janet Frame’s trilogy to illustrate how “autobiography has become a place in which the female subject not only records personal growth but also tackles certain political issues linked to the position of women in society” (1997: 12). The third volume of Frame’s trilogy, The Envoy from Mirror City, evokes the process by which Frame, a determined young woman, left her New Zealand home behind to seek a career as a writer in mid-1950s London. Janet Frame’s autobiographical London invites a comparison with that of Doris Lessing, for both were white colonial women pursuing writing careers in the metropolis, and both of them documented their urban experiences in their life-writing. Lessing is not included in Baisnée’s book, but her two-volume autobiography, Under my Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade, 1949–1962 (1997) fits in with her argument. Born in Persia (Iran) to British parents, Lessing grew up in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), where her father became a maize farmer. Whereas the first volume of her autobiography covers her difficult childhood and youth in colonial Africa, the latter records the city, which includes a strong sense of historical time (1984: 176–77, 180). I argue that this is even more so in the case of colonial women writers. Sizemore explores the image of the palimpsest in Lessing’s novel The Four-Gated City, although she does not consider the writer’s outsider status.

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her move to London in 1949 as a single mother, twice married and divorced, longing to become “self-created, self-sufficient” (1998: 3).Walking in the Shade is an account of Lessing’s development into a prolific writer of international renown, away from the stifling atmosphere of provincial and racially-troubled Southern Rhodesia, “where, if there was a serious conversation, then it was always about the Colour Bar and the inadequacies of the blacks”(1998: 3). The volume charts her career since the publication of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, whose manuscript she had brought with her to London, up to the writing of The Golden Notebook, her longest and most ambitious novel and a feminist classic. Lessing is still a London-based writer. Her London life-writing is not confined to the second volume of her autobiography, but also includes In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary (1960), which describes her stay in a boarding house after her arrival in London in 1949, and some contemporary sketches gathered in the short story collection London Observed (1992). 1. Urban observers The Envoy from Mirror City recounts Frame’s seven-year stay in London, where she travelled in 1956 on a literary grant awarded by her country to broaden her experience as a writer. In London, Frame managed to stretch her grant money by doing part-time jobs which did not divert her from her main task, writing and elbowing her way through London’s literary world. A crucial part of Frame’s daily agenda in London are her daily strolls and bus rides though the city, which she admits to be “absorbing in its seasons” (1987: 112). Indeed, Frame displays a modern sensibility towards the city, which spurs her creativity and provides her with materials for her fiction: […] during my time at Grove Hill Road I had been aware of a subtle shifting of my life into a world of fiction where I spread before me everything I saw and heard, people I met in buses, streets, railway stations, and where I lived, choosing from the displayed treasure fragments and moments that combined to make a shape of a novel or poem or story. Nothing was without its use.  (1987: 154)

On arriving in London after a one-month sea voyage from New Zealand, Frame realizes that the letter she had sent booking a room at the Society of Friends’ Hostel at Euston Road had never reached its destination and there was no room available for her there. She eventually got a room for two nights at the YMCA Hostel, which reminded her of “a mental hospital without the noise” (1987: 19). Despite the nuisance, Frame experiences this mundane incident as a moment of intense feeling where some truth is revealed: “For a moment the loss of the letter I had written seemed to me unimportant beside the fictional gift of the

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loss as if within every event lay a reflection reached only through the imagination and its various servant languages” (1987: 19). From early in the volume Frame reveals herself as “a secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city”, to borrow Keith Tester’s words drawing on Baudelaire (1994: 7), a walker endowed with an active imagination for whom experienced reality has the meaning she attributes to it, thus displaying the motifs associated with the figure of the flâneur. In her restless search for the best place to live in London, Frame stays in a cottage in the Suffolk countryside, where she is allowed to live in exchange for her caretaking services. However, she soon realizes that, in spite of the peaceful and pastoral atmosphere, the bustle of London is more congenial to her writing, bearing out Tester’s statement that “The poet is the man for whom metropolitan spaces are the landscape of art and existence” (1994: 2). The city, with its impersonal crowd, speaks a more meaningful language to Frame than nature does: In Suffolk I […] was […] eager to go walking in the dew-wet lanes, watching the hares in the corn, seeing the wildflowers, primroses, cowslips, bluebells, blackthorn; but my heart was in London, I wanted to return there where I was happy to be alone in the crowd, surrounded and sustained by the immensity of people, of the human race, who, although it – we – had destroyed or crippled much of the natural world, including my northern hemisphere sky, could still send representatives to explore the Mirror City, and […] struggle home to create their works of art.  (1987: 158)

While in Suffolk, Frame misses her place in the metropolitan crowd and feels the need to escape from the seclusion of the Suffolk countryside and its domestic tasks, “garden, clean, walk the dog, shop” (1987: 157). While performing her gardening duties, she is seized by the fever of digging out stones, “English, Roman, Saxon, Danish relics from another city” (1987: 159), which point at her longing for a metropolitan existence. Frame observes the spectacle of the city, paying attention to its most fleeting moments as well as to its rituals of public spaces. In a dark winter evening, the flux of metropolitan life unfolds before her eyes: I watched the leaves turning and falling and drifting against the black iron railing of the parks. I saw the sun change to blood-red and stand on end upon the winter-beaten grass of the Common; I watched the people with a new urgency in their gait, hurrying to their homes, if they had homes to escape the dark and the cold; and those with no homes depending for warmth and shelter on the doorways of peopleless places like banks and insurance buildings and […] on the seats of the railway stations and bus terminals and down from the Strand, by the river, underneath the arches. Then after dark, the new life of London, the glitter, the people in taxis and dark polished cars […] the wandering misfits shouting at the sky […]  (1987: 170)

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In this passage, Frame is attentive to the transient moments of nature, the drifting of the leaves, or the red sunset against the green of the Common. She records her impressions with the eyes of a poet, aestheticising the colours of the city: the greenness of leaves and parks, the redness of the sun, the blackness of iron railings and cars, the polish and the glitter of the metropolitan night. She notices the effect the encroaching darkness and cold has on the city-dwellers, the commuters returning home at the rush hour, the haves and the have-nots, and the simultaneity and frenetic rhythm of contemporary city life as it renews itself after sunset. The title of the second volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, Walking in the Shade, and of her late collection of short stories and autobiographical sketches, London Observed, suffice to show the centrality of the city in her work. Actually, the four-section structure of her autobiographical volume is dictated by the four different addresses Lessing had in the 1949–62 period. In one of the epigraphs to the volume, Lessing defines herself as a “rover” on the streets. Yet the perceptions of London that Frame and Lessing record in their autobiographies differ, mostly due to the fact that Lessing’s arrival in the city took place six years before Frame’s. Walking in the Shade does not abound in happy scenes of female flânery. Even though Lessing’s mobility and visibility in the public spaces of the city – including its literary and communist political circles – is obvious from her account, the London that she encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s was still a war-torn city whose citizens she describes as a “tired people” (1998: 11) drained by the war effort. In fact, some of the houses she inhabited were “war-damaged and surrounded by areas of bombed buildings” (1998: 19). The rituals of public spaces that she witnesses are those of a country trying to get over the war. It is not surprising, therefore, that the walks described in this volume should be night walks. The ‘Warwick Road SW’ section features an extended description of night time London as a threatening wasteland. Lessing feels intimidated by the “incipient violence” of the buildings in Earl Court, the dismaying “enormousness” of the city and, significantly, its lack of “convivial” places – coffee bars, pubs, restaurants – where people can connect. This gloomy atmosphere poses a bigger threat to the walker than the kerb-crawlers that inevitably address her, misunderstanding the purpose of her walk (1998: 164–5). Despite the bleakness of post-war London, Lessing at times displays an aesthetisicing gaze. The following passage, from In Pursuit of the English, illustrates this point: It was a wet evening, with a soft glistening light falling through a low golden sky. Dusk was gathering along walls, behind pillars and balustrades. The starlings squealed overhead. The buildings along Pall Mall seemed to float, reflecting soft blues and greens on to a wet and shining pavement. The fat

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buses, their scarlet softened, their hardness dissolved in mist, came rolling gently along beneath us, disembarking a race of creatures clad in light, with burnished hair and glittering clothes. It was a city of light I stood in, a city of bright phantoms.  (1996: 40)

As Frame in the passage discussed above, Lessing captures the colours and rhythm of the metropolitan evening with the sensibility of a painter. The blurriness of the picture is probably induced by her earlier exposure to a print of Monet’s ‘Charing Cross Bridge’, which Miss Privet, a French prostitute and fellow boarder, had shown to her. Miss Privet is another flâneur herself, who revels in revisiting the London walks that Samuel Pepys describes in his Diary (1996: 40). In the last section of Walking in the Shade, Lessing lightens up her London descriptions. In the late 1950s a new age is dawning, for hunger and ruins have given way to affluence. This has affected the public rituals of the city. A more convivial culture is fuelled by the new restaurants and coffee shops. The shopping along Oxford Street is enlivened by jazz musicians, and a new generation is untouched by the war (1998: 276). Lessing, who now lives in a flat within walking distance of Soho and Oxford Street, relishes daytime London, its noises and “street companionship”, which she acknowledges as sources of inspiration for her stories (1998: 277). Lessing’s autobiographical volume ends on a happy note which concludes with the epigraph mentioned above, taken from the Louis Armstrong song ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’: “I used to walk in the shade / My blues on parade / Now this rover / Crossed over / To the sunny side of the street.” Lessing uses city metaphors to describe her personal and professional achievements in London, which parallel the city’s and Europe’s recovery after the war. The autobiographical sketches featured in London Observed, all set in contemporary London, are also in this vein. In ‘Storms’, Lessing tries to convey to her provincial taxi driver her love for the city, showing herself to be an observer of its spectacles: “It was like a great theatre, I said; you could watch what went on all day … you could sit for hours in a cafe or on a bench and just watch. Always something remarkable or amusing […]” (1993: 129).4 ‘The New Café’ features Lessing at her most voyeuristic, observing “real-life soap operas” (1993: 97) like the flirting activities of a young man with German tourists, and his brief and dramatic encounter with his alleged true love and their child. With a few brushstrokes, Lessing, the sharp-eyed psychologist, captures the fear of commitment that often ruins human relations, displaying a tolerance and empathy that counters the traditional male flâneur’s gaze. This sketch testifies to the importance of observation in furnishing Lessing with materials for her fiction. 4 For an extended discussion of theatricality in Lessing’s works, including the sketches ‘The New Café’ and ‘Storms’, see Arias 2005.

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2. Colonial Flâneurs Having established the degree to which Frame and Lessing display a modern sensibility to the metropolis, for a long time solely attributed to the male artist, I shall go on to qualify their subject positions as colonial strollers in the Mother Country. Janet Frame, the New Zealand writer going about mid-1950s London on a grant, fits the pattern of the lone, uprooted traveller that traditional scholarship on the flâneur has conventionally considered male (Wolff 1991: 39). As Woollacott has pointed out in the context of turn of the century Australian women (2000: 766), Frame’s outsider status gains her a high degree of freedom and anonymity in London. It is thanks to her outsider status that she is able to wander the streets confidently and unacknowledged. Frame is outspoken about her marginality as a New Zealander in London: she knows that speaking the English language and having received an English education does not guarantee acceptance in the Mother Country, although it is not acceptance as British that she is after. Significantly, all the people she interacts with and with whom she identifies herself in the metropolis tend to be from countries like Ireland, Australia, or West Africa. Soon after her arrival in London she develops a brief friendship with Nigel, a Nigerian: We shared much. We were both colonials with “similar” education – heavy doses of British Empire, English history, produces, rivers, cities, kings, and literature. He too had been given lists of the good, the strong, the brave, with friends and enemies clearly, permanently identified. He too had read of other places, other worlds with a mantel of invisibility cast upon his own world. I was more favoured, however, in having my ancestors placed among the good, the strong, the brave, the friendly, in the position of the patronizing disposers, the blessed givers.  (1987: 34)

Both Frame and Nigel come from cultures in which Britishness is the norm. Frame is more “favoured”, however, because she is a Pakeha, or white New Zealander, the descendant of the British settlers and not a Maori native; Nigel, in turn, comes from an overwhelmingly black society, where the British ruled as a small elite. That is the reason why Nigel addresses Frame as “you English” (1987: 35). The ambivalence of Frame’s identity is clear when we notice that whereas she is perceived as English by a Nigerian, she sees herself as a colonial in awe of the imperial metropolis of the Old World. A similar bond develops between Frame and her neighbour Patrick Reilly, an Irish immigrant whom she considers her first friend in London. Patrick expects Janet to understand “what the English had done to Ireland” (1987: 23). Yet Frame resents Patrick’s bigotry since, despite being an immigrant himself, he warns her about the blacks in London, who “are stealing all the work” (1987: 25); in post-war Britain the Irish suffer as much housing discrimination as other immigrants, as

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the signs “‘no children, pets, coloured or Irish’” (1987: 130) that Frame encounters suggest. In her interactions with other foreigners in London, Frame shows a strong awareness of the cultural construction of difference. Her biases are first put to the test during the sea-voyage towards Britain. When the ship stops at Curaçao, a Dutch colony, she walks about the streets of its capital, Willenstad, feeling tempted to survey the poverty surrounding her with a civilizing gaze characteristic of nineteenth century British explorers.5 The “dusky black” inhabitants of the colony make her recall the Maories of her native New Zealand. But as soon as she becomes aware of her resorting to “the old clothes of prejudice”(1987: 12), she makes an effort to overcome them. This gesture implies that, when she is the subject of the look, Frame refuses to be complicit with prevailing stereotypes, in this case those associated with a colonizing masculinist gaze, “viewing space as more fluid than fixed” (Pollock 1994: 121). Frame is doing here what Pollock describes when analysing the paintings of Mary Cassatt. Whereas male impressionist painters portray women as the passive subjects of their gaze, Cassatt carries out a “rearticulation of traditional space so that it ceases to function primarily as the space of sight for a mastering gaze” (1994: 87). Thus, the women depicted by her, specially the widow in ‘At the Opera’ (1879), appear as agents of their own looking or any other activity. The space of Willenstad, its exoticism and backwardness, is susceptible to being the object of a mastering gaze, which Frame will not hold. As I pointed out above, her mind is a receptacle of new experiences, alert to the “displayed treasures” that her stay abroad unravels. Raised in a dominion, Lessing shares Frame’s sense of strangeness and understanding of racial politics. Early in Walking in the Shade, Lessing acknowledges her difficulties in defining herself (1998: 15). Her move to Britain was partly due to her unbelonging in Southern Rhodesia, where she admits to have been “hated and ostracised” for being a “Kaffir-lover”, or for sympathising with the plight of the native population (Lessing 1997: online). Once in London, she joins people on the margins of British society – Italians, French, West Indians, South Africans, Communists, McCarthy exiles. Lessing’s arrival in London in 1949 coincides with the first arrivals of colonial immigrants to the metropolis. Under her gaze, Britain takes a racial attitude similar to that of segregated Southern Rhodesia: In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks.  (1998: 12–13) 5 See Pratt 1992, chapter 9.

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Yet this Britain, described as a “Sleeping Beauty” “fenced all around with sharp repelling thorns” (1998: 87) will inevitably yield to the pressure of multiculturalism in the course of time. The underground trip described in the contemporary sketch ‘In Defence of the Underground’ allows Lessing to comment on the changes that have taken place in the racial makeup and racial attitudes of the British in the last few decades. Lessing observes with amusement the women dressed in “saris and cardigans” in her carriage (1993: 84), which symbolise their adjustment to the new place. She reflects on an incident she saw in a London hospital, where a representative of the more reluctant older generation had to “come to terms with the impossible”, that is, being looked after by a black nurse (1993: 90). It is precisely the variety of London, its modern transitory character, exemplified by the people she sees getting on and off her train, which turns the city into a great theatre for the writer to observe. The urban landscape of London, the heart of the empire, becomes a place of search full of “spaces of mystery” (Tester 1994: 13) for the colonial flâneur to observe. In her London strolls, Frame becomes a “reader of the urban text”, to quote Parkhurst’s words: And the words of London fascinated me – the stacks of newspapers and magazines, sheets of advertisements in the windows of the tobacconists and newspapers shops, the names on the buses, the street signs, the menus chalked on blackboards outside the humble Transport Cafes […] the numerous bookshops and libraries. I had never had so much opportunity for public reading.  (1987: 26)

Besides common names on advertisements and shops, Frame is haunted by proper names such as “Mortlake, Shepherd’s Bush, Swiss Cottage” (1987: 26), or “Crystal Palace, Ponders End, Piccadilly Circus, High Wycombe” (1987: 27). The poetry and historical reverberations in these names stimulate Frame’s sense of wonder in a way that New Zealand’s names do not. New Zealand is a New World where place names “still echo with their first voice” (1987: 28). London, in turn, is the source, a site to be excavated by Frame in her search for origins and meanings, a palimpsestic city accumulating fragments of history. Michel de Certeau states that “people are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by the […] remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be proper” (2001: 133). The motivation of names, the value engraved on them by urban planners and managers, is slowly lost in the course of time and replaced, Certeau explains, by the meaning that these names have in walkers’ lives. Set in motion by London’s proper names, Frame ponders on such contradictions. The spell cast on her

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by the reverberations of British history and literature that these names bring is broken once she observes the spectacle of urban decay they have come down to. Very often, the topographical features reflected in names have not survived centuries of history and change. Indeed, the pastoral connotations of “Shepherd’s Bush” are at odds with the street “dreary-looking buildings set in a waste of concrete and brick and full of people who appeared to be pale and worried” (1987: 26) that Frame notices in her strolling. Likewise, Frame learns “the truth of Piccadilly Circus”, that it was not a real circus (1987: 20). In fact, even the circular shape evoked by the word circus has changed through years of urban planning. London’s names and buildings are in fact relics of earlier, more pastoral times, and of the city’s former glory as the heart of a vast empire.6 Lessing also responds to London’s historical palimpsest, where layers of pastoral names combine with decades of urban development. Her colonial sensibility is amused by the history names encapsulate and the inconsistencies it engenders at the present time. As she stands outside the underground station in Hampstead, the West End, where she lives at present, she ponders on the fact that this area used to mark the end of London (1993: 80). In fact, well into the nineteenth century, the West End, which started as a woodland clearing in the Middle Ages, was a peripheral hamlet of agricultural workers, gardeners and craftsmen with very few gentry. The rural past of the West End lingers in street 6 London’s architecture and urban planning bears, indeed, the imprint of past ambitions. As Jane Jacobs states, “the cultural politics of place and identity in contemporary First World cities is enmeshed in the legacies of imperialist ideologies and practices” (2002: 4), which were the work of men. Piccadilly Street was named after a house belonging to a wealthy tailor famous for selling “piccadillies”, a kind of collar, in the 18th century; this came to replace the street’s former name, Portugal Street, in honour of Catherine de Braganza, the queen consort of King Charles II of England. In the nineteenth century, John Nash, George IV’s favourite designer, undertook a massive renovation of central London, designing the big avenues of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, among others. Nash saw the construction of Regent Street as an opportunity to separate the good from the bad streets, leaving the latter to the East (Tucker 1999: 434). At the turn of the century, the London City Council realised the city lacked the broad avenues of continental cities like Paris (Schneer 2001: 24). The face of London did not match the city’s splendour as the heart of a global empire. They thus undertook the broadening of the Strand and the construction of a big artery running north from it which would eventually be called Kingsway. In the crescent built to link the Strand and Kinsway, the Aldwych, several emblematic representations of the British Empire were located – the Australia House, the India House, and the Africa House (2001: 27), creating the kind of atmosphere the Council had intended. At present, the city is pervaded with symbols of the country’s wealth and power – Trafalgar Square, Cleopatra’s Needle and Sphinxes, the Bank of England, and the like.

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names such as Mill Lane, though the mill has long gone. These thoughts crowd Lessing’s mind as she travels from West London to the City on the Jubilee line, although she realises that the ordinary London dweller is unencumbered by such realisation, for “the weight of those buildings, pavements, roads, forbids thoughts” of this kind (1993: 86). Lessing’s musings on the inconsistencies of place names in present times should not be mistaken for nostalgia for a more pastoral England. Paradoxically, Lessing links such pastoral nostalgia with the attitude of the older generation, who long for a “Lost Eden of decently uniform pinko-grey people”, a “Paradise Isle” without foreigners, which also includes her, despite having lived in the country for forty years (1993: 89, 83). The taxi driver depicted in ‘Storms’ hates the city “violently” on these same grounds (1993: 128). As the title of the sketch ‘In Defence of the Underground’ indicates, Lessing prefers urban London, which also offers moments of pastoral bliss, when the natural and the urban world are reconciled. She relishes nature as she waits for her train: “At the station you stand to wait for trains on a platform high above roofs and the tree tops are level with you. You feel thrust up into the sky. The sun, the wind, the rain, arrive unmediated by buildings. Exhilarating” (1993: 82). Standing in front of a florist shop whose shelves encroach into the pavement, she feels as in a “pavement garden” where a blooming lily “scents the air stronger than the stinks of the traffic” (1993: 80). It is worth comparing these impressions with the description of the West End recalled by an old Londoner Lessing encountered: “It was all fields and little streams, and we took off our shoes and stockings and sat with our feet in the water and looked at the cows. They used to come and look at us. And the birds, there were plenty of those” (1993: 81).The exhilaration that London offers Lessing makes the images of pastoral London summoned by her elderly informants seem trite and exclusive. 3. Conquering the Metropolis The routes that Frame and Lessing take through the metropolis describe a shift away from peripheral marginality as colonials into the heart of the city and its literary establishment. In one of the concluding chapters of The Envoy from Mirror City Frame carefully describes the bus ride and walk that took her from Camberwell, a district in South East London where she lived at that time, up to the Strand area, where she was to meet her publisher, W. H. Allen: I set out to the Strand and the publisher W.H. Allen in Essex Street. I sat in the bus enjoying the familiar route […] Now down past the Institute of Psychiatry, the Maudley Hospital, King’s College hospital […] past the new council flats, the dilapidated shops, the surge of East Street market and cluttered pavements, past the Elephant, the Eye Hospital, the Old Vic, Waterloo Station, Waterloo Bridge to the Strand […] I had my photo taken in a PolyFoto studio

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at Charing Cross. Then I walked back towards Essex Street, loitering as I was too early, by looking at shop windows. And then I had turned the corner from the Strand and was in Essex Street, standing in front of W. H. Allen.  (1987: 148–9)

The route described in this passage, which culminates in a publishing house of central London where Frame would sign the contract of her lifetime, encapsulates Frame’s appropriation of the public spaces of the city, those of decision-making and visibility. Similarly, towards the end of Walking in the Shade, Lessing has stepped out of darkness onto “the sunny side of the street”, light being here a metaphor for visibility. As I anticipated earlier, the four sections of the volume, headed by Lessing’s London addresses (‘Denbigh Road W11’, ‘Church Street, Kesington W8’, ‘Warwick Road SW5’, ‘Langham Street W1’), chart her encroachment on the city, as well as her achievement of “a place of her own” (1998: 131) thanks to the success of her writing. In Denbigh Road W11, Lessing rented a garret which was too small to “unpack a typewriter” (1998: 6) in a war-damaged house. In contrast, the flat that Lessing inhabits in Langham Street W1 at the end of the volume is within walking distance of Central London, where she roams at ease in search of street companionship (1998: 277). Lessing’s, like Frame’s, London narrative is one of conquest. If in In Pursuit of the English she had stated that England was a “grail” for her (1996: 9), in the course of the ten-year pilgrimage depicted in Walking in the Shade she has become a successful writer and a self-supporting woman. My concern in this chapter has been to show how Janet Frame and Doris Lessing have resorted to flânery to assert their presence in the modern city as women and writers. Rather than the traditional space of female invisibility, the public spaces of the metropolis have become the setting of these writers’ strolling and a rich source of materials for their writing. Furthermore, they have achieved visibility in the London publishing world, located at the heart of the city, and earned the international success that their home countries did not grant them. An important part of my argument has been to explore the connections between urban space, gender and colonialism. Thus, I have highlighted the impact of these writers colonial background on their perception of the city, which has granted them a contrapuntal angle of vision. As Deborah Parsons warns, the inclusiveness of the flâneur trope in recent criticism should not obscure the diversity of female subject positions that it may encompass. Far from being transparent, urban visions are mediated by gender, but also by race, culture and national affiliations. The latter tend to be ignored or not duly emphasised by recent flâneur scholarship. As women, Frame’s and Lessing’s gazes are more tolerant and connective. As white colonials, they have a deeper awareness of difference and history than the average city stroller.

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primary sources Frame, Janet. 1987. The Envoy from Mirror City. London: Paladin. Lessing, Doris. 1998. Walking in the Shade. London: Flamingo.  . 1993. London Observed. London: Flamingo.  . 1996. In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary. New York: Harper Perennial. secondary sources Arias, Rosario. 2005. ‘‘All the World’s a Stage’: Theatricality, Spectacle and the Flâneuse in Doris Lessing’s Vision of London’ in Journal of Gender Studies 14(1): 3–11. Baisneé, Valérie. 1997. Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Blunt, Alison and Gillian Rose (eds). 1994. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: The Guilford Press. Bowlby, Rachel. 1992. Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing, and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. De Certeau, Michel. 2001. ‘Walking the City’ in During, Simon (ed.) Cultural Studies: A Reader. London: Routledge: 126–33. Jacobs, Jane. 2002. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Lessing, Doris.1997: ‘A Notorious Life. The Salon Interview: Doris Lessing’. Online at: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1997/11/cov_si_11lessing.html (consulted 15.02. 2006). Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla. 1994. ‘The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris’ in Tester, Keith (ed.) The Flâneur. London: Routledge: 22–44. Parsons, Deborah. 2000. Streetwalking in the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Pollock, Griselda. 1994. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. London: Routledge. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes. London: Routledge. Schneer, Jonathan. 2001. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis.Yale: Nota Bene. Sizemore, Christine.1984. ‘Reading the City as Palimpsest: The Experiential Perception of the City in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City’ in Merrill Squier, Susan (ed.) Women Writers and the City. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press: 176–90. Tester, Keith. 1994. ‘Introduction’ in Tester, Keith (ed.) The Flâneur. London: Routledge. Tucker, Herbert. 1999. Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Blackwell. Wolff, Janet. 1991. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Woollacott, Angela. 2000. ‘The Colonial Flâneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turn-of-the-Century London’ in Signs: Journal of Women Culture and Society 25(3): 761–87.  . 2002. ‘The Metropole as Antipodes: Australian Women in London and Constructing National Identity’ in Gilbert, Pamela (ed.) Imagined Londons. New York: State University of New York Press.

Conquering the Spaces of War

In a Literary No Man’s Land: A Spatial Reading of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber abstract This essay examines Edith Wharton’s Fighting France through a range of disparate spaces, from bombarded buildings to replanted fields and gardens, from hospitals, markets and blacked out towns to the labyrinth of the first-line trenches. This spatial interpretation seeks to demonstrate that Wharton’s critically neglected compilation of war essays is an integral part of her writing project as well as a daring and original attempt to penetrate the darkness that had descended over Europe with the outbreak of World War I. Fighting France, the authors argue, reveals the radical implications of Wharton’s personal aesthetic in the pathos with which she invests the ruins of private houses and expressly denies to the war-damaged monuments. Houses become the veiled sounding board for all the sensitive material which personal reservations or wartime censorship prevented her from expressing openly. Gardens, hospitals and markets freely manifest her faith in France. The essay finally follows Wharton into the trenches where, as early as 1915, she managed to capture and transmit a note of that same absurdity and relativism that has been the key note of the literature which later would emerge at the front. Keywords: First World War, Edith Wharton, Fighting France, domestic space, treatment of houses and monuments, garden imagery, trench experience.

The world since 1914 has been like a house on fire. All the lodgers are on the stairs, in dishabille. Their doors are swinging wide, and one gets glimpses of their furniture, revelations of their habits, and whiffs of their cooking, that a life-time of ordinary intercourse would not offer.  (Wharton [1919] 1997: xvii)

Ten days after the General Mobilization, Edith Wharton wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson: “It is all thrillingly interesting, but very sad to see” (Lewis & Lewis 1988: 333). Even though she felt that the war had “shaken all the foundations of reality” (ibid.), it is impossible to ignore the note of anxious expectation in her words. The plunge out of normality into the torrents of uncontrollable events, the sweeping away of ordinary concerns and the celebration of a sense

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of community inconceivable in times of peace profoundly marked Wharton’s experience of the First World War. “People”, she writes in Fighting France, “who only two days ago had been leading a thousand different lives in indifference or antagonism to each other […] were bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion” (1915: 16–17). The declaration of war established a sense of common purpose that seemed to eradicate individual distinctions and rendered personal occupations insignificant. It was generally accepted that “the war effaced the boundaries of individuality and privacy and thus made possible a more intense and immediate sociability” (Leed 1979: 45). Living in Paris since 1907, Wharton, too, felt carried away by this intense sensation of being part of an amalgamated community. The “house” had been set “on fire”, which in turn would open up “the doors” of the nation and funnel the multitude of unrelated lives into one single direction, towards the all-encompassing task of fighting for France. Edith Wharton was deeply committed to the allied cause and her response to the war was dedicated and immediate. Without any previous experience in either charity work or business, she set up and managed a complex relief network that provided assistance for thousands of French and Belgian refugees, an achievement which earned her the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur in 1916. As with many other women during the Great War, the anxiety to help was accompanied by an irrepressible urge to write, to capture in words the exceptional events she was witnessing. In the six articles gathered into Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915) she conveys her impressions of a nation at war, ranging from images of Paris during and after the general mobilization, to her vivid accounts of the five extensive trips she undertook between February and August of 1915 to every section of the Western Front. She entered “the forbidden zone” on the request of the French Red Cross who asked her to report on the special requirements of the front-line hospitals, a philanthropic mission that opened the doors for her to a physical and literary space that was largely denied to women. Travelling by car, in carts and on mule, on occasions utterly appalled by what she saw, on others full of the excitement that Sandra Gilbert recognizes in so many women who managed to get to the front (1982), she toured hospitals and field ambulances, and even entered the first-line trenches –which in itself was no mean achievement, given the French government’s reservations about issuing passes to women. Wharton was very proud of her role as an eyewitness reporter and she made good use of the “I was there” strategy to lend authority to her voice. She impressed on her reluctant editor that she had been offered “unexpected opportunities for seeing things at the front”, nobody else had been granted before her, and that she had visited towns, such as Ypres and Verdun, “no one has been allowed to visit as yet” (Lewis & Lewis

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1988: 356–7). The resulting articles, which were written with the intention of mobilizing her compatriots’ moral and financial support, are among the first to have come from an American woman, and they remain even today a vividly interesting account of the war in its opening stages. It proved uncommonly difficult to put into words the trauma the First World War was producing. The scale and ferocity of the fighting had left many writers without words or ideas in their attempt to comprehend the unfolding disaster. Henry James confessed in an interview to the New York Times six months into the conflict, “One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words: they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before” (qtd. in Price 1998: xii-xiii). Edith Wharton herself felt similarly hamstrung at the outbreak of hostilities, as she wrote to her friend Gaillard Lapsley, “I am so shattered by this war […] that I am inarticulate even when I want to be most affectionately expressive” (Beinecke Library. MSS 42. Series VII). However, as she later noted in her autobiography, she “could not sit still and brood over” the losses the war was resulting in. She “wanted to put them into words” (1934: 368), and in Fighting France she came to develop her own strategies to deal with Henry James’ artistic conundrum. Wharton’s solutions do not conform to the open brutality and bitterness we have come to associate with the literature of World War I. Her presentation of the conflict bears only a distant resemblance to the eyewitness accounts of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928) or Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), which have since been endowed with something approaching canonical status. She shows little awareness of the way the war is progressing, and accounts of actual combat are rare. Wharton has direct contact with soldiers in the trenches, the garrison towns and the hospitals. But she neither mentions the horrific injuries she is bound to have witnessed, nor does she ever lend her voice to the soldiers who have returned from battle. The nearest she comes to touching the realities of the trench war is in her description of “a long line of ‘éclopés’ – the unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the awful struggle” (1915: 49). It is hard to know whether it is her respect for the severe French censorship regulations or whether she finds herself “inarticulate” where she might have wished “to be most affectionately expressive”, that makes her refrain from anything other than the most oblique reference to the horrors of modern war: “It is a grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of eyes that have seen what one dare not picture” (1915:

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50). Instead of making wounded combatants relate their harrowing stories, she lets the empty expression in the eyes of the battle-weary soldiers intimate an unutterable reality on the other side of silence. All her restraints in describing the plight of the combatants disappear in the pitiful portraits of shattered houses. It is on their behalf that she feels at liberty to express her anxiety and grief. At the same time, it is the people’s unflagging energy in remaking their lives within the ruins of recaptured towns which maintains her faith in the survival of France. Wharton’s tendency to displace the focus of interest from the reality of combat to other, apparently more peripheral, aspects of the conflict connects her work with that of a host of other women writers whose accounts display a similar “reliance on elusiveness [and] on indirection” that Dorothy Goldman (1995: 88) has identified as a distinctive feature in women’s narratives about the Great War. Yet, as Julie OlinAmmentorp has noted, “Wharton’s work is something of an anomaly” (2004: 15), for it does not conform to present expectations of either men’s or women’s literature of war. What makes the text so resistant to critical commentary is that, rather than adhere to the conventions of a recognizable genre, it navigates between disparate narrative forms. Cast in a manner suggesting a journal, it includes few personal and contextual details. It shares with travel writing the theme of discovery and an air of adventure and suspense. But the volume is too emotionally charged and ideologically committed to fit the description of a travelogue. The acuteness of Wharton’s eyewitness accounts should easily qualify her, as Kate McLoughlin believes, “for inclusion in the category of war reporter” (2005: 1), and yet her observations are too elusive, too sophisticated and idiosyncratic, to be of significant journalistic value. Although they are clearly denotative of the enormous havoc resulting from the war, these articles do not dwell on its crudest realities but centre instead on the undaunted spirit of resistance which she read into every facet of wartime France. These considerations may help to explain the scarce attention Fighting France has received from contemporary critics, in spite of the excellent reception its first publication was granted both in America and in France. The volume has been excluded from women’s anthologies on World War I1 and it has elicited little analysis and scant appreciation.2 Julie Olin-Ammentorp (2004) has been one of the few critics to 1 Fighting France features neither in Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (1997), Joyce Marlow, ed. (1998), Agnes Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman, Judith Hattaway, eds. (1999) nor in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. See Sherry (2005). It is all the more noteworthy to find it published in full in the French anthology of important reports written during World War I. See: Alain Quella-Villéger and Timour Muhidine (2005). 2 In Women and War (1987) Jean Bethke Elshtain has dismissed Wharton’s war

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discuss the work at any length, but rather than treating it in its own right, her underlying purpose was the discovery of thematic and stylistic patterns within Wharton’s war-related literature. More pertinent to our argument is Annette Larson Benert (1996), who has focused on the vital importance that “civilised space” assumes in Wharton’s writings related to the Great War. Yet her discussion of Fighting France rarely ventures beyond the listing of spatial images that help to convey Wharton’s reverence for French civilization and its resilience in the face of “troubled times”. In the present essay we propose to read Edith Wharton’s wartime reports through the full range of their disparate spaces, from bombarded buildings to replanted fields and gardens, from hospitals, markets and blacked-out towns to the labyrinth of trenches and subterranean passages. The object of this spatial interpretation is to vindicate Fighting France not only as a piece of writing whose marked preoccupation with living space creates a vital link with the remainder of Wharton’s literary production, but as a daring and original attempt to penetrate the darkness that descended over Europe with the outbreak of World War I. In this twilight of civilization she invests the private home with a pathos she persistently denies to the grand historic monument. Whether a victim of human violence or simply a prey to natural decay, a cathedral survives aesthetically in its transmogrified state, whereas the moment a house has ceased to be a living space, nothing remains but a squalid absurdity. Thus it is that Wharton makes the countless ravished homes at the front attest to the irrationality of a wasteful and unnecessary war. Their bombed and burnt out ruins act as an effective metaphor of the “horrors unnameable” (Wharton 1915: 164) on the score of which the text maintains a stubborn silence. Her apparent neglect of human beings in favour of their inanimate surroundings has been touched upon by Sharon L. Dean, who claims that “Wharton’s sensations do not come from empathy with the people and their suffering but from the aesthetics of the scene” (2002: 77). In our reading of Fighting France, its houses and gardens are as indissolubly linked to the fate of their residents as houses and gardens are impossible to separate from Wharton’s own life and work; accounts, claiming that she had no concrete experiences on which to base her writings. See the critique of Elshtain’s work on Wharton in Goldman, Gledhill and Hattaway, (1995: 27). Alan Price, in his otherwise excellent analysis of Wharton and World War I, claims that, in Fighting France, she relies exclusively on the language of natural disasters, which “indicates that Wharton had no other field of imagery to draw on to project the magnitude of the disaster” (1998: 12). Other interpretations include Jean Gallagher’s study of the iconography of war propaganda in Wharton’s essays (1998) and Mary Suzanne Schriber’s reading of the text as “travel writing in the grotesque” (1999), both of which offer a rather limited account of the book’s scope and interest.

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and it is on this account that the image of “the house on fire” assumes the role of a leading metaphor for the agony of an entire nation. Wharton’s “fighting France” is not a nation divided into armed combatants and helpless civilians. It is a place where the customary distinctions of gender and social rank have been surrendered to the common cause and where the difference between the soldiers defending their positions and the “army” of ordinary citizens who keep the nation alive has lost its practical significance. The war itself had vanished underground and entering the outlandish world of the trenches she strains her eyes and her imagination in order to grasp the nature of a conflict which was defying traditional logic. It is Wharton’s ability to give a literary form to this great European tragedy, at a time when rumours and propaganda were paralysing the judgement of an entire continent that must earn for her an enduring place among the women who have written on a war they dared to go and see with their own eyes. 1. Murdered Houses It is one of the salient features of Fighting France that it is a story told by towns and houses rather than by people. But it is also a story of a people told through its bombed and deserted houses, which are cast as the leading actors in an unfolding drama. We are to read the grief and affliction of its lodgers into every shattered and abandoned building, as the mauled and flattened dwellings speak out on behalf of their missing residents, whose voices the war had silenced. The village of Auve, on the river Aisne, discloses the rhetorical role that ruined houses are made to play as indices of human suffering. The narrator was to pass through many other flattened villages, but being the first, Auve came to represent “all separate terrors, anguishes, uprooting and rending apart involved in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities” (1915: 58). In her walks through war-time Paris, she had been haunted by the “look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins” (1915: 33) that she saw written in the faces of French and Belgian refugees. In Auve, now, the rubble and cinders of its former homes give voice to a people who are lost in “dumb bewilderment” (ibid.). Of all that had connected them securely with their past and given “meaning and continuity to the present”, “the photographs on the walls, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered – of all that accumulated warmth nothing was left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!” (1915: 58). Wharton’s wariness in exposing human suffering completely disappears in her detailed descriptions of broken towns and shattered homes. It is for more than merely stylistic reasons that she reverts to the same anthropomorphic language she had used in connection with churches and houses in her peace-

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time travelogues, and whose range she now imaginatively expands to fit the novel theme of war. It is a subtle way of making houses reveal what censorship and personal reserve prevent her from treating openly. The language of death and injury, which she uses sparingly in reference to human victims, is present throughout her eloquent accounts of ravished homes and martyred churches. “Murdered houses spread out in their last writhings” and “beheaded villages” (1915: 93, 82) are the outward expression of German violence against the civilian population. The same houses that were “breathing” with significance and that spoke of “intelligent enjoyment of living” in A Motor-Flight through France ([1908] 1991: 29) agonize in Fighting France. In the village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt, the church itself had been left “so stripped and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like a human victim” (1915: 82). In Flanders, an abandoned convent recalls “a mind from which memory has gone” (1915: 156), and Ypres, itself, had been “bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse” (1915: 152–53). It is no accident that houses in ruins should become one of the leitmotifs in Wharton’s portrait of wartime France. As R.W.B. Lewis notes, Wharton had “a profound addiction, sometimes amounting to an obsession” (1975: 121) with living space, with the arrangement of rooms, the lay-out of carefully designed gardens, all of which, according to Judith Fryer, appeared like “extensions of her physical and spiritual self ” (1986: 174). Anticipating Gaston Bachelard, Wharton’s own “poetics of space” attributes to an inhabited place a significance that far transcends its purely geometrical reality. In her fiction, the relationship between her characters and their homes is emphatically reciprocal, with the houses moulding the inner being of its residents as surely as the residents give shape to the houses they inhabit. As Marilyn Chandler contends, in Wharton “living space is always significant space, never free of moral resonance” (1991: 157). Having grown up in Victorian New York, with its overloaded architecture and stifling interior designs, Wharton developed an awareness and sensibility in the creation of harmonious homes, which found its place in the co-authored volume The Decoration of Houses (1897). To be able to live in perfect communion with the space she occupied was, for her, of vital significance, and in the hills of Massachusetts she would construct “a truly literary house” (Luria 1999: 188) that reflected her own existential needs. Throughout her life, the creation of living space remains one of her most deeply cherished themes, and in her portrayal of “fighting France” this preoccupation would assume a new and tragic dimension. Nowhere in Fighting France is the immolation of living space presented in a more engagingly dramatic language than in the haunting impressions of

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Ypres. Wharton had passed through many evacuated towns, but nowhere had she witnessed an “emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets. Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows” (1915: 151–2). The only “people” remaining in the city are the lifelike buildings which meet her eyes with a hollow stare: “Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce” (1915: 153). Wharton makes use of the same operatic imagery as the German veteran Ernst Jünger in his representation of another “theatre of war”, where a peaceable French town had been transformed into a picture of unmitigated desolation: “Whole houses had been flattened or ripped apart by shells, so that the rooms and their furnishings were left hanging over the chaos like theatre flats” (Jünger [1920] 2004: 94). But beyond the tediously familiar stage-instructions, this absurd drama repeated ad infinitum before an empty house has been left without a script, and the only “actors” in this silent mise en scène are “the poor little household gods [who] shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree” (Wharton, 1915: 153). Wharton’s injured sense of privacy makes her sympathize with the Penates of these ruthlessly uncovered homes, in which “a hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls”, in which “whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wallpapers” and “yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls” (ibid.). Her tender solidarity goes hand in hand with the curiosity and fascination that any novelist might feel before these unexpected insights into other peoples’ living-rooms which normal times could never have furnished. It is as though she found herself before the cited “house on fire” whose “doors are swinging wide”, revealing aspects of people’s existence “that a life-time of ordinary intercourse would not offer”. Fascination gives way to indignation in her picture of “a poor bourgeois house” in the adjacent city of Dunkerque, which had its entire front torn away. “The squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling bedsteads, heaped-up blankets [and] topsy-turvy chairs” (1915: 174) had no associations left with a stage-set. The author of Fighting France seems personally quite untouched, on the other hand, by the damage done to important public monuments. To her eyes, the spectacle of a ravished dwelling is “far more painful” (ibid.) than the sight of a shattered Gothic church in the immediate vicinity of the broken home: “St.Eloi was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the poor little house reminded one of some shy humdrum person suddenly exposed in the glare of a great misfortune” (ibid.). With its shattered walls incapable of shielding the private calamity of its residents against the prying eyes of the public, the house itself appears to be in agony. The people

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are gone and all that is left is the “personal” affliction of a little house, which is never made to look more human than after it has ceased to be a home. The “wounded church” (ibid.) is treated in the same anthropomorphic language as the “poor bourgeois house”. But being a public edifice whose “martyrdom” confers an added dignity to its lofty Christian mission, it is neither calling out for pity, nor does it claim the kind of privacy that a “shy humdrum person” might desire. A more weighty reason exists, however, for the undisputed priority which is granted to the disgrace of a humble dwelling over the “martyrdom” of “a graceful Gothic church” (ibid.). In Wharton’s “poetics of space”, the grand artistic monuments constitute no more than the stylish “ornamental façade” (Wharton [1901] 1989: 178), whereas the private home makes up its all-important foundation. The celebration of ordinary houses as the mainspring of civilized life is a perennial feature in her written work. In French Ways and their Meaning she explicitly locates the core of French culture, not in the creation and preservation of artistic masterpieces, but in “real living” – “a deep and slowly-developed thing, the outcome of an old and rich social experience” ([1919] 1997: 102). As Cynthia Griffin Wolff has noted, the notion of culture that interested her was never limited to “the narrow sense of a country’s accumulated artistic and intellectual production”, but extended to all those features of daily living that give “continuity [to] countless insignificant human lives” (1978: 262). Wharton’s concept of an “underlying relation between art and life” Maureen E. St. Laurent takes to mean that “all art is inextricably rooted in the material conditions that produce it” (1993: 167). In the hierarchy of life, houses and gardens which have no recognized position in our cultural inventory are destined to take precedence over the canonized forms of art and architecture, an inversion of the commonly accepted priorities that challenges the critical opinions which have dismissed Wharton’s aesthetics as narrow and elitist. However, not even such a radical reappraisal of cultural values is sufficient to account for the serene detachment with which she reports on the famously bomb-damaged basilica of Rheims: “The Cathedral square was deserted; all the houses around it were closed. And there, before us, rose the Cathedral – a cathedral, rather, for it was not the one we had always known” (1915: 184–85). The German bombardment had set on fire the scaffolding that covered its front and enveloped the whole church in flames. The result was “a structure so strange and beautiful, that one must search the Inferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision” (1915: 185). Not only does the fascination with which she contemplates the velvety black of the scorched façade contrast with the scant interest she had shown for this emblem of Gallic culture in A Motor-flight through France (1991: 176–77); her lack of moral

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outrage is also singularly at odds with the scandal its shelling had provoked in intellectual circles all around Europe. Henry James had denounced it as “the most unspeakable and immeasurable terror and infamy” (qtd. in Benstock 1994: 304) and Albert Londres, who visited Rheims shortly after the event, prophesied that “the cathedral [would] for ever shout this crime from its emaciated towers” (Quella-Villéger and Muhidine, 2005: 17. Our trans.). Wharton candidly admits that the heightened aesthetic appeal of its calcined statues was a “beauty of disease and death” and that the Cathedral of Rheims was “glowing and dying before us like a sunset…” (1915: 186). “By grace of time”, however, the continued exposure to the elements converts an ancient monument into a “work of nature” (Wharton [1908] 1991: 9), and Wharton does not seem anxious to differentiate between the preventable ravages that are caused by war and the natural fate of any work of stone. If the damage in Rheims was limited, Ypres had been left without a single landmark standing:3 “every monument that marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is a town without a profile” (1915: 151). And yet, what might be mistaken for a lament is in reality no more than a pensive observation. In Ypres, it is not the disappearance of its medieval towers, but rather the endless rows of houses without roofs, without fronts and without inhabitants, that cause her any anguish. Just as in Rheims, the monumental façades that are “so proud in death” (1915: 154) serve as fuel for her poetic imagination. Schooled in the aesthetic tradition of Ruskin, these medieval edifices seem to make a deeper impression on her in their state of ruin than when she saw them intact in 1908. Wharton followed Ruskin in his deep distrust of restoration and she shared with him his passionate appreciation of art and architecture in their unreconstructed state, as enduring testaments to past ages. In Fighting France, however, Wharton dares to carry Ruskin’s celebration of medieval ruins to its logical conclusion. Whether ancient or of recent date, the scars of battle are an integral part of an historic building, and the modern German siege guns only did with more efficiency what catapults and battering rams had perpetrated centuries ago. The war had not robbed the Flemish monuments of any of their former glory. It appears, if anything, to have added to their splendour: “The walls of the Cathedral, the long bulk of the Cloth Market, still lift themselves above the market place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion” (ibid.). Rather than victims of German violence, “the glorious ruins of Ypres” are inextinguishable symbols of Belgian endurance: it is “the singular distinction of the city”, she concludes, “that it is destroyed but not abased” (ibid.). 3 Referring to Ypres, Leon Wolff writes, “the town was shelled day and night and since 1914 had been bombed more than any other target on the Western Front” (1979: 115).

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2. Freshly Raked Gardens Fighting France is, above anything else, a portrait of a nation at war. If Wharton has cast the houses, instead of their inhabitants, in the role of defenceless victims, it is because it would have been as inconceivable to her as it was for the country’s wartime press to portray the French as a helpless people, at a moment when their very survival as a nation was hanging in the balance. The German armies had broken into the “house” of France and set it “on fire”. In no other place that Wharton passed through on her expeditions into the war zone was this as literally the case as in “the martyr town” of Gerbéviller, where every single house had been burnt to the ground in the three days of German occupation. With stoic composure, a former mayor takes Wharton on a tour round the ruins of his home, recalling the wooden panelling in what was left of his dining-room and the beautiful view from what had once been his sitting-room, with that dignified air of resignation which constitutes the hallmark of what she calls “the tone of France” (1915: 219). The only “house” that really counted now was the one he shared with all his French compatriots. In reporting on the war, Hermione Lee notes, Wharton was writing “from life [and] from the heart, and, also, for strategic effect ” (2007: 484). Being an “incorrigible life-lover”, as Wharton once called herself, it is perhaps not surprising that in Fighting France she did not choose to focus upon the death and suffering she witnessed; “she was more interested in those things that provided unexpected coherence and continuity” (Wolff: 1978: 266). Rediscovering signs of ordinary domestic life in the environment of the front, in the very places from which all militarily redundant features were supposed to have disappeared, helped her feel more at home in that bizarre and unsettling arena. In this inauspicious world of mud and filth, her artistic eye was quick to capture any detail that might produce a sense of cosiness and intimacy or add a touch of beauty to the drabness of life at the front (Benert 1996: 331). In Lorraine, she was delighted to see soldiers carve out colonies of dugouts in the second-line trenches that created an atmosphere of genuine domesticity: “they are real houses, with real doors and windows under their grass-eave, real furniture inside, and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors” (1915: 120). In the colonel’s dugout “a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same amused pride in the look of things” (ibid.), and “in other cheery catacombs [she] found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and household decoration” (1915: 126). Wharton never presents the French soldiers as aggressive fighters or conquerors, but rather as guards protecting their imperilled country. Their defensive assignment helps to align them with the doctors and nurses in the field hospitals,

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whose dedication and resourcefulness in treating the wounded earn them a special place in Fighting France. Like the poilus responsible for the dugouts, the médecin-chef of Blercourt is a true master of improvisation: “With admirable ingenuity he had managed to create out of next to nothing the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance: Sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy, a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which ‘tisanes’ were brewing over a cheerful fire” (1915: 67). The dressing station was “little more than a hovel in a mere hamlet of scattered cottages and cowstables” (1915: 66–7). But with his inventiveness and attention to detail he had not only succeeded in creating a fully functioning surgical unit, but had given it that element of homely comfort which the war was supposed to have rooted out as an unnecessary luxury. Wharton’s portrait of hospitals and first-aid posts, which celebrates the role of medicine as a form of resistance to the physical and spiritual destruction the war was causing, does not contain any of the acrimony and sarcasm which permeate some of the memoirs written by nurses who had served at the front. Unlike Mary Borden who in The Forbidden Zone exposes the irony of military expediency that would send those it heals back to the front “to be torn again and mangled” (Borden 1929: 121), Wharton does not enter the moral debate about the meaning of the conflict and the manner in which it was waged. Assuming “the stance of a patriot” (Wright 1997: 90) she is principally concerned with establishing connections between the physical and spiritual landscapes of a vulnerable and wounded but heroically resisting nation. Heating and the general lack of hygiene were among the most pressing problems Wharton encountered in the desperately overcrowded hospitals she had been sent to inspect. The hot showers fitted on a moored canal-boat which belonged to a dressing post outside Verdun was, therefore, bound to attract her attention: “The boat was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain of red-flowered chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as the hot water to make over the morale of the men: they were the most comforting sight of the day” (1915: 78). Her preoccupation with red-flowered shower curtains may appear gratuitously eccentric and her insistence on their importance for the morale of convalescing soldiers out of tune with the harsh realities of war. But if we recall the dreariness of the winter landscape, the desolation of the battlefield and the drabness and dirtiness of life in the trenches, those unwonted touches of comfort and beauty may have had a significance for the poilus that is easy to overlook. Mary Borden, who had run a hospital unit at the front, was herself in no doubt about the restorative effect that clean linens and gay coverlets could have on wounded combatants: “They even […] made the difference sometimes between a man’s slipping away or back into the world when he awoke” (1929: 161).

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It is easy to detect a semantic link between those flowers on the curtains of chintz that had impressed Wharton near Verdun and a vase full of “jolly roundfaced pink peonies” (1915: 93) which decorated her writing desk in Nancy. They too have a significance that reaches far beyond their purely aesthetic appeal. The former mayor of Gerbéviller had picked them in the garden of his ruined home and they make their entry in her article from Lorraine, not for the sake of adding force to that “stale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man’s havoc”; they feature in her pages “as a symbol of conscious human energy coming back to replant and rebuild the wilderness …” (1915: 94). Fighting France is not about conquest and military victories. If anything, it is a homage to the creative force of human life, with its capacity to endure the worst calamities and recover from its deepest wounds. Wharton had the highest regard for the French success in forcing back the German army “during those burning autumn days” (1915: 97) of 1914. Her greatest admiration, however, she reserves for the energy and speed with which the inhabitants of the recovered territories manage to “replant and rebuild the wilderness”. Rather than lamenting over the “streets and streets of […] murdered houses” (1915: 93), on her second visit to Lorraine in May 1915 she was delighted to discover that “new life was budding everywhere” (1915: 94). Brick-layers and masons were at work in every village and “even in the most mortally stricken there were signs of returning life: children playing among the stone heaps, and now and then a cautious older face peering out of a shed propped against the ruins” (1915: 94–5). But more significantly still, “before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens” (1915: 93). If the peonies of Gerbéviller stand for the “conscious human energy” that turns barren soil into budding gardens, the “indomitable” (1915: 103) Soeur Julie4 represents the very embodiment of this creative energy. No soldier expresses the spirit of Fighting France as poignantly as this Sister of Charity with her tenacity, her courage and her life-affirming optimism. A nun in farmer’s boots, she combines religious faith with leadership and domestic common sense. Like the former mayor, she too had “held her own” during the three days Gerbéviller had been occupied, “interposing her short stout figure” 4 Amelia Rigard, whose religious name was Sister Julie, was a peasant woman, sixtytwo years old, belonging to the Order of Saint Charles of Nancy, who was head of the poor-house and hospital of Gerbéviller when the Germans entered the village. For her fortitude in the face of the German invasion, she was awarded the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur in 1916. It is a curious coincidence that Wharton should meet this nun, who, the same year as herself, was to be awarded a decoration that was rarely granted to women.

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between her Hospice and the “fury of the Germans” (ibid.). She has little time to dwell on the woes of the recent past. The local population had returned to “this desert” and wanted feeding and clothing. “There are the crops to sow, the gardens to tend. They had to come back”, Soeur Julie explains (ibid.). Her call was for field-labourers’ boots, and turning up “a hob-nailed sole” (1915: 104) she declared with a smile that all the women had taken the place of men and were working in the fields. In musing admiration Wharton adds: “I seemed to see my pink peonies flowering in the very prints of her sturdy boots!” (ibid.). It is neither a coincidence that Wharton should make the broken houses represent the death and destruction the war was wreaking, nor is it at all surprising that she should come to revere “the carefully combed gardens align[ing] their radishes and lettuce-tops” (1915: 95) as perfect emblems of life and regeneration. Her life-long enthusiasm for house design went hand in hand with a passion for gardens. “From her attempts to impose upon the stubborn soil of New England a classical house and garden to her reestablishment of continuity after the War, we can trace her conscious attempt always to arrest the chaos around her by conquering, dominating, planting, cultivating space” (Fryer 1986: 170). Wharton was deeply sensitive to the seasonal rhythms of outdoor nature. She suffered with her gardens in times of drought, and when they bloomed she too was in a state of well-being. The alluring sight of the land of Lorraine recovering from the ravages it had suffered the autumn before is enough, for a moment, to spirit away the sombre reality of a war which was turning ever larger stretches of her beloved France into a life-denying desert: “The landscape, in its first sweet leafiness, is so alive with ploughing and sowing and all the natural tasks of spring, that the war scars seem like traces of a long past woe” (1915: 97). In the city of Dunkerque, in the meantime, war and peace were treading on the heels of each other within the same densely crowded space. “The marketpeople, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up their wooden stalls” (1915: 175) around the craters and debris left over from the shelling of the previous evening, and hiding “the signs of German havoc” (ibid.) behind their booths and merchandize. Mary Borden had remarked about just such a market held on the very edge of the war: “The business of killing and the business of living go on together in the square beneath the many windows, jostling each other” (1929: 15). In her vignette, the war and the market are barely taking notice of one another; the wounded in the ambulances do not know about the women in the square and the market women have no time to wonder what was in those cars with the bright red crosses. The American journalist and writer Mary Robert Rinehart, who had passed through Dunkerque a few months before Wharton, saw the market reappropriating a space the war had wrested away from it: “All

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week long it had been crowded with motor ambulances, lorries, passing guns. […] Now all has changed. The square had become a village filled with canvas houses, the striped red-and-white booths of the market people. War had given way to peace” (Rinehart, 1915: 174). For Wharton, these French civilians holding their own within easy range of the German siege-guns become impossible to distinguish from the poilus in the trenches who are doggedly holding “their bit of France” (Wharton, 1915: 126). The France the soldiers are defending is the France that is kept alive by the market-people of Dunkerque. It is not in monuments like the ruined church of St. Eloi that the foundations of French culture must be sought, but in the shell-cratered Place Jean Bart where the local population is keeping up those ordinary everyday activities which, in Wharton’s eyes, lie at the root of all civilization. Rinehart contemplates the trading and bargaining with the uneasy distance of “an intruder, gazing at the grief of a nation” (Rinehart, 1915: 174). Wharton, however, could not refrain from making the errands of this indomitable city her own personal affair: “I should have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market of Dunkerque …” (1915: 175). The most enigmatic illustration of this life-affirming spirit Wharton encounters in a “villa in the dunes” (1915: 178) in an unnamed place near the border between Belgium and France, where “for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world” (1915: 177). Dorothy Goldman surmises that these “two hearts” refer to the Baroness de T’Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm (1995: xiv), two British women who had gained notoriety with their first-aid post in the annihilated village of Pervyse, only yards away from the firing-line. But Wharton’s rhetoric is too opulent and grandiose to fit convincingly with the “Heroines of Pervyse”, in spite of the decorations these nurses had been awarded: “Because of the light that comes from [that house], dead faiths have come to life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse” (1915: 177).5 In all probability, this strangely hyperbolic language and the air of mystery with which she surrounds those “two hearts” are pointing to King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who had retreated to a little summer house in La Panne, a Belgian fishing village surrounded by sea grass and sand. Wharton had visited their secret residence in June 1915 (Lee, 2007: 487), the same month she composed this remarkable panegyric. The significance which the continued presence of the Belgian sovereigns will have had for their hard tried subjects is very likely to have prompted her unforeseen homage to liberty, which she deftly turns against her American compatriots to 5 Moreover, their dressing-station was not located in a “villa in the dunes” but inland in the cellar of a village house, and no biographical evidence suggests that Wharton ever met the “Women of Pervyse”.

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try to goad them out of their complacent neutrality: “In the harbour of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddess with a torch, designated as “Liberty enlightening the World”. It seems as though the title on her pedestal might well, for the time, be transferred to the lintel of that villa in the dunes” (1915: 177–8). Reading Fighting France is a perpetual quest for the unspoken text concealed behind a sometimes disconcerting rhetoric, with its persistent recourse to houses for the purpose of shielding the “unnameable” from the eyes of the censor. Rinehart had no reservations about disclosing the location of the Belgian sovereigns and it is reasonable to believe that this indiscretion was responsible for the prohibition of her Kings, Queens and Pawns in war-time Britain. Wharton’s cryptic and portentous style should be appreciated as her own sophisticated way of concealing this sensitive piece of information from all who had not learnt the art of reading between the lines. In Fighting France, these “two hearts” who are holding their position on the beaches of Belgium link hands with the Sister of Charity in Gerbéviller, the médecin-chef of Blercourt, the people of Dunkerque and the soldiers in the trenches to form together one “long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vosges” (1915: 179). The entire body politic is represented in this venerable frieze, from the king and the queen all the way to the farmer and the soldier, leaving aside neither the professional, the officer, the merchant, nor the representatives of the church. In the ranks of this procession, however, there exist neither social orders, nor conventional roles. In a world turned inside out, women take the place of men, nuns parade in farmers’ boots, doctors convert hovels into hospitals and soldiers make domestic spaces out of dank holes in the ground; a royal sovereign occupies in secrecy a bourgeois summer residence while market-women face enemy shells as if they were soldiers at the front. Keeping alive a town under fire, attending wounds in a clean and well-run ambulance, claiming back the devastated land, and guarding a trench against a hidden enemy on the other side of no-man’s land are morally indistinguishable parts in that unfolding drama which Wharton has condensed into Fighting France. 3. A Black Labyrinth Houses, gardens, hospitals and markets are spaces whose traditional meaning is never put into question. Whatever defamiliarizing effect the war might have, their significance and purpose remains entirely self-explanatory. In the world of trenches and observation posts, however, Wharton touches a phenomenon which Eric Leed has called “the liminality of war” (1979: 12). “War experience”, as he observes, “is nothing if not a transgression of categories. In providing bridges across the boundaries between the visible and the invisible,

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the known and the unknown, war offered numerous occasions for the shattering of distinctions that were central to orderly thought” (1979: 21). Wharton’s constructed transparency of a nation marching in single file does not preclude a variety of instances where the atmosphere of war dissipates clarity, where vision is impaired, and where confusing, contradictory and uncanny sensations take the place of organizing thought. Wharton’s feeling of thrill and exhilaration as she catches her first glance of one of the endless lines of military vehicles rumbling up to the front is impossible to overlook: “This is war!” (1915: 47). Yet her physical proximity to the battlefield was no warrant for any genuine understanding of a conflict which seemed to have lost its way in an inscrutable maze of trenches and caves. On her first trip to the front, her disorientation becomes a literal reality in the “chartless wilderness” she is obliged to traverse, some sixty miles to the east of Paris, where all the sign-posts had been demolished and the mile-stones plastered over. Rumours were circulating that it had been a German attempt to create confusion, although it seemed more plausible to believe that it was a precautionary measure of the local population, whose villages were now in ruins or had simply been abandoned. The soldiers replacing the vanished inhabitants rarely even knew the name of the village they were guarding and when questioned, “their answer [was] almost invariably: ‘We don’t know – we don’t belong here’” (1915: 83). The nightmare which resulted from the absence of familiar reference points serves as a perfect reflection of the disorientation which civilians, soldiers, generals and politicians were all suffering in this struggle. It was a war in which signs had ceased to signify, confusedness replaced transparency and certainty was being substituted by the wildest form of rumours. Walking through a blacked-out city was as eerie an experience as driving through a landscape stripped of sign-posts, and the lack of visual stimulus was prone to magnify the portentous presence or absence of auditory impressions. In Nancy, Wharton found herself enveloped “in such complete night” that, barely able to distinguish the silhouettes of its buildings, she had the sensation of standing in an enchanted city: “Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the sound of the cannon began” (1915: 106). She recalls a variety of nocturnal episodes in which the experience of hearing battle is given life by means of an impressive range of literary devices, as though the female writer-journalist wished to compensate her expectant readers for the scarce visual representations of genuine combat. The pounding noise of the artillery seems “to grow nearer and more incessant” (1915: 72) as night falls over the silent, blacked-out city of Verdun. And then, “just as the strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A moment later […] a pigeon began to coo; and all night

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long the two sounds strangely alternated …” (1915: 73). The juxtaposition of the emblem of peace which is straining to answer the implacable voice of destruction rolling down from the shrouded hills beyond remains one of Wharton’s most arresting images of a world turned inside out. On both of her expeditions to the actual firing-line Wharton makes every effort to construct her narrative around the suspense and excitement created by the opportunity of “being there” and seeing the war with her own eyes. “Here we were, then, actually and literally in the first lines!” (1915: 132). But, contrary to her expectations, she finds that “except for another shot or two [from an enemy sniper], and the motionless intentness of a soldier’s back at the peephole, there was nothing to show that we were not a dozen miles away” (1915: 132). The anti-climatic effect of this observation is not the result of any failure on her part to represent a scenario that is totally unfamiliar to her, but stems rather from the dubious reliability the sense of vision had acquired in a subterranean war. The phantasmagoric nature of trench warfare has been masterfully captured by Leon Wolff: As for men, they were seldom to be seen. For this was the peculiarity of the Western Front: the uproar seldom ceased and the number of men involved was countless, but the terrain seemed deserted. Nothing moved in the lethal zone where the great armies brushed against each other. Nobody appeared to be fighting. Here and there somebody stared through a loop-hole. Occasionally a man actually fired a gun of some size, seemingly at random. It seemed impossible that anyone could be hit by it. Yet the casualties went on – about seven thousand each day, except when serious fighting occurred.  (1979: 34)

In No Man’s Land, Eric Leed takes up the bewildering ambivalence which the enemy’s retirement into the soil would produce in the minds of many combatants: “The battlefield was ‘empty of men’ and yet it was saturated with men” (1979: 20). The sense of danger, combined with the impossibility of giving the enemy any recognizable human face, “seemed to make the war experience peculiarly subjective and intangible” (1979: 19). Wharton’s reports from the trenches convey the same feeling of incomprehension, the intolerable uneasiness of sensing the presence of danger and yet seeing “nothing out there” that was possible to contend with. This perceptual conundrum becomes even more acute after scrambling down a winding passage to a hollow within yards of the enemy positions. On taking “a cautious peep” at the German lines in front, she remarks: “I looked out and saw a strip of intensely green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on its other side. That was all. The wooded cliff swarmed with ‘them’ […] yet all about us was silence and the peace of the forest” (1915: 133). In another passage, the lurking “presence” of the enemy, concealed in the vernal landscape, further increases her sense of the unheimlich.

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Nothing but the wreck of the bridge showed that we were on the edge of war […]. But there the Germans were […] The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing the invisibility of the foe became. “There they are –and there – and there.” We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades […]. Suddenly an officer said: “Do you see that farm?” […] but the whole place seemed to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. “They are there,” the officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate.  (1915: 109–10)

The sudden sighting of what seems to be a soldier from the opposite side engaging in a spying activity identical to her own strikes Wharton with the force of a revelation: “the loudest cannonade had not made ‘them’ seem as real as that!” (1915: 111). Auditory impressions may enrich our imagination, but in a war whose fighting armies have vanished from sight, the opportunity to see the enemy while remaining invisible to his prying eyes assumes a literally vital significance. Jean Gallagher has seized upon “the intensification of specularity” (1998: 27) in Wharton’s frontline reports; but in her suggestion that “the final fixed object of the soldierly gaze is the Other-as-mirror” (ibid.), she seems oddly insensible of the fact that the difference between seeing and being seen is the difference between killing and being killed, and that this “unbroken mirroring” (ibid.) was daily resulting in thousands of casualties all along the Western Front. Wharton’s reports from the war-zone are saturated with ocular motifs and metaphors: the narrator’s “straining eyes”, the silent snipers at their peep-holes, the glaring “eye of the cannon” (1915: 109), the look-outs on the “unsleeping hill” (1915: 119) and the “iron-rimmed eye of the mitrailleuse” (1915: 131), are all facing in the same direction, watching at the highest level of alertness for those “human masks of hate” which are lying in wait with their weapons primed for action. Wharton never closed her eyes to the fact that in a world replete with lethal technology the explicit purpose of this unrelenting “game” of hide-and-seek was not just the killing of time. “The fixed object” of Wharton’s own “intensification of specularity” is not to kill the Boche but to turn him into a living entity which can be seen in the light of day and not only heard in the darkness of night, to grasp him in his physical reality and not only hear about him in rumours and propaganda. A further veil of unreality drops away at the moment of beholding a fallen soldier from the other side. Peering through a concealed hole “one saw at last … saw, at the bottom of the harmless glen […] a grey uniform huddled in a dead heap” (1915: 134). What she sees is neither a body nor a face but only a shapeless uniform whose colour betrays its German origin. Yet, in this spectral world

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of spying eyes this meagre evidence was sufficient proof that “it was after all a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow …” (ibid.). However, it is only on descending into the bowels of the earth “on the extreme verge of the defences” (1915: 214) and following “a black labyrinth” (1915: 215) of narrow shafts and tunnels to their furthest point that Wharton, for a short inspired moment, contrives to see the Great War with eyes that are no longer blinkered by the immediate and the anecdotic. Plunging underground and “creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings” (1915: 212), she descends through another, even “darker and narrower tunnel” (1915: 213), finally to emerge inside a gutted house that had been transformed into an observation post. In this avant-garde position, the metaphorical “house on fire” has been reduced to an empty shell, capable only of providing the most rudimentary shelter against the unsleeping eye of the enemy next door. The building had only kept its outer walls, with most partitions between the rooms and the floor of the second story missing, with no doors to the outside and no windows, except for a small number of peep-holes. There was nothing to suggest that only a few yards separated the French from the nearest German position, nor was it immediately apparent why the “lodgers” of the house should whisper “as they do about a death-bed” (1915: 215). It was only on peering through a crack in the wall that Wharton notices another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard: it was an enemy outpost, and silent watchers in helmets of another shape sat there watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitely less real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputed village […] I could not understand where we were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemy outpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little, there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching from trenches to trench: the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs of eyes, stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless line from Dunkerque to Belfort.  (1915: 215–16)

In her wartime novel The Marne, Troy Belknap imagines France as “a great traceried window opening on the universe” (1918: 9). Censorship and propaganda may have reduced this open window to a little loop-hole in a wall. But peering through this tiny chink, Wharton grasps a reality that, one year into the conflict, still remained beyond the reach of ordinary observers. Her lofty image of a “long wall of armies guarding the civilized world” against “the fury of the German invader” gives way inside this ghostly carcass of a farm to a vision of the struggle that no longer recognizes either just defenders or iniquitous invaders, but only symmetry and stultifying uniformity: the same trenches, the same outposts, the same guns, the same binoculars, the same deadlock; on both sides the same sniping, the same fear of being sniped at and the same waiting,

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watching and weariness. This is the conclusion Wharton reaches at the end of her pilgrimage “from the North Sea to the Vosges”. Perplexed, disorientated and with her visual field reduced to the width of a chink in the wall, for an instance she loses sight of all the higher objectives the war was supposed to have had. Wharton never abandoned her patriotic vision of a wall of allied armies “guarding the civilized world”. But in this summer of 1915, she found a personal way of exposing the absurd and futile nature of a war which no-one at that moment knew either how to fight or how to end. Although she had inspected many hospitals, Wharton was not in daily contact with the horrific price the war was exacting. She did not understand the generals’ thinking nor could she possibly imagine what it meant for soldiers to “go over the top”. Her personal experience of war never went beyond “that mute reciprocal watching” in which she had taken a tiny part. But in her concluding remarks it is possible to detect the first tentative signs of that same disillusionment and irony which became the key note of the literature which in due course would emerge out of the trenches and field hospitals. Many of Wharton’s phrases and comments may sound ill-attuned to the acknowledged “Myth of the War” (Hynes, 1990: 436), which has unceremoniously stripped the language of patriotic idealism of all its former legitimacy. But in this vignette which unveils the nightmare of a petrified front, it is possible to recognize what has since become the accepted and expected way of reading the First World War. Conclusion Fighting France is a book that was written in a literary no man’s land. With the outbreak of the Great War, the unquestioning confidence that words could adequately represent reality disappeared along with so many other assumptions that had previously been accepted on faith; and when Wharton sat down to write about this European calamity, no new language lay ready for her use. She had to grapple with the unprecedented phenomenon of a war that had retreated underground, out of sight and out of reach for anybody who wished to capture its significance and render it intelligible to a bewildered public; and she did so in that same controlled and self-assured idiom which Henry James had deemed exhausted and irrelevant. Wharton did not experience the war the way a soldier would have done, but neither was she one of those civilians who voiced their opinions from the safety of their desks without ever having heard the detonation of a shell. She was neither directly involved in the conflict, nor was she merely a detached spectator. She wrote in English, for an American readership, but she did so from a French perspective, expressing her commitment to the cause of the Entente at a time when America showed no desire to become involved in a European war. Her articles were written for a neutral audience overseas, but

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her rhetoric and her style reflect the severe restrictions a nation at war imposes on its writers. However conscious she was of facing a phenomenon which transcended anything she had ever heard or read about, Wharton had no way of anticipating the cataclysmic proportions the First World War was destined to reach. The multitude of “horrors unnameable” make up the hidden subtext of Fighting France; but this does not prevent its author, on occasions, from drawing on the same language that Homer, Milton and Tolstoy employ without any fear of appearing either callous or frivolous as a result of it. “‘It was gay and terrible’, is the phrase forever recurring in ‘War and Peace’” (1915: 146), and even as late as 1915, Wharton could still make mention of “the gaiety of war” (ibid.), without the risk of causing scandal among her readers. The futile offensives of that year resulted in appalling carnage along the Western Front. But not before the unprecedented calamities of Verdun and the Somme in the following year did a new perception begin to emerge that would change the way we think about war forever. When Wharton wrote her articles it was possible for civilians to follow the course of battles that were delivered before their very eyes. From a garden in the Argonne, she was able to capture “a little corner of the battle of Vauquois” (1915: 64), just across the valley from where she was standing, in the same old way in which people, since times immemorial, had been the spectators of combat, just out of range of its arrows or bullets. In the titanic battles that were waged in 1916 and 1917 any civilian close enough to witness the fighting would inevitably be swallowed up by the juggernaut of war. For all these reasons Fighting France is liable to trouble any modern reader for whom Graves, Sassoon and Blunden provide the only pattern for a legitimate representation of World War I. It is pertinent to recall, however, that the books of these veterans were published several years after the armistice was signed, uninhibited by censorship rules, and with the shift away from a heroic patriotism that was well on its way to becoming a post-war dogma. Wharton’s articles, on the other hand, were written during the opening phases of the conflict, without an available model or a ready-made standard of composition. The resulting book is a bold and original compilation of an important writer’s personal impressions that was published at the point of an historic watershed, when the old ways of representing war were no longer valid and a new style had not yet emerged.

Bibliography primary references Borden, Mary. 1929. The Forbidden Zone. London: William Heinemann. Jünger, Ernst. [1920] 2004. Storm of Steel. London: Penguin.

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Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis (eds). 1988. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s. Londres, Albert. [1914] 2005. ‘L’Agonie de la Basilique de Reims’ in Quella-Villéger, Alain and Timour Muhidine (eds), 14–18 Grands Reportages. Paris: Omnibus: 15–17. Rinehart, Mary Roberts. 1915. Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front. New York: George H. Doran. Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman. [1897] 1978. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton.  . [1901] 1989. Italian Backgrounds. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press.  .[1908] 1991. A Motor-Flight through France. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.  . Letter to Gaillard Lapsley, 18 September 1914. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale Collection of American Literature. Edith Wharton Collection. MSS 42. Series VII.  . 1915. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. New York: Scribner’s.  . 1918. The Marne. New York: Scribner’s.  . 1934. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner’s.  . [1919] 1997. French Ways and their Meaning. Lenox, Mass.: Berkshire House. secondary references Benert, Annette Larson. 1996. ‘Edith Wharton at War: Civilized Space in Troubled Times’ in Twentieth Century Literature 42 (3): 322–43. Benstock, Shari. 1994. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. London: Penguin. Cardinal, Agnes, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway (eds). 1999. Women’s Writing on the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, Marilyn R. 1991. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dean, Sharon L. 2002. Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Fryer, Judith. 1986. Felicitous Space. The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press. Gallagher, Jean. 1998. World Wars through the Female Gaze. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gilbert, Sandra, M. 1982. ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’ in Signs 8 (3): 282–309. Goldman, Dorothy, Jane Gledhill and Judith Hattaway (eds). 1995. Women Writers and the Great War. New York: Twayne. Hynes, Samuel. 1990. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: The Bodley Head. Leed, Eric C. 1979. No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Hermione. 2007. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto & Windus. Lewis, R.W.B. 1975. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Constable Luria, Sarah. 1999. ‘The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton and the Mount’ in Bryden, Inga and Janet Floyd (eds). Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 186–209.

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Marlow, Joyce (ed.). 1998. The Virago Book of Women and the Great War. London: Virago. McLoughlin, Kate. 2005. ‘Edith Wharton, War Correspondent’ in The Edith Wharton Review XXI (2): 1–10. Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. 2004. Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. Grainesville: University Press of Florida. Quella-Villéger, Alain and Timour Muhidine. (eds). 2005. 14–18 Grands Reportages. Paris: Omnibus. Price, Alan. 1998. The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. New York: St. Martin’ Press. Raitt, Suzanne and Trudi Tate (eds). 1997. Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sherry, Vincent. (ed.). 2005. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schriber, Mary Suzanne. 1999. ‘Fighting France: Travel Writing in the Grotesque’ in Colquitt, Clare et al. (eds). A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Newark: University of Delaware Press: 139–48. St. Laurent, Maureen. E. 1993. ‘Pathways to a Personal Aesthetic: Edith Wharton’s Travels in Italy and France’ in Joslin, Katherine and Alan Price (eds). Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang: 165–79. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1978. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, Leon. [1959] 1979. In Flanders Fields. London: Penguin. Wright, Sarah Bird. 1997. Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Women and War Zones: May Sinclair’s Personal Negotiation with the First World War Laurel Forster abstract May Sinclair’s emotionally-charged journal recording her short time near the Belgian front lines offers a highly personalised account of a female presence in war. This essay explores the roles performed and the spaces encountered by Sinclair and the other women she met. Women’s complex relationship with war zones, spaces and places is revealed through personal experience, masculine attitudes in evidence and Sinclair’s own modernist writerly techniques. Keywords: May Sinclair, World War I, Women’s work at the front line, access to the front for women, women writers of WW1, interior and exterior war zones, psychological responses to WW1, shell shock, war reporting, Sinclair’s war novels and poetry, critics’ views of Sinclair’s writing.

I make no apology for my many errors – where they were discoverable I have corrected them in a foot-note; to this day I do not know how wildly wrong I may have been about kilometres and the points of the compass, and the position of batteries and the movements of armies; but there were other things of which I was dead sure; and this record has at least the value of a “human document”.  (Sinclair, 1915a: x–xi)

Women were active participants in the various spaces of the First World War, at home and at the front; this is now well understood through writings and other documents (Ouditt 2000). However, much less readily understood are issues such as the conditions of their placement; the difficulties they experienced; the level of acceptance of women in the war zones; and the relationship of these women to the places they encountered. Women’s experience of and participation in the First World War is made complex by a number of factors. Firstly, on the broader scale, as thousands of men were lost to the war or killed in action, women’s lives changed drastically; the war period became a

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time of domestic upheaval, disruption to social class structures, and cultural change. Part of such changes was a re-emergence of the questions concerning gender roles and contested spheres of work and domesticity, now made necessary and urgent by practical circumstances. Secondly, on the personal scale, women contributed to the war effort in ways too numerous to mention, from the sole management of home and family to the communal rolling of bandages or knitting of socks for soldiers in local village halls, and from the retraining in first aid, or as a military chauffeuse, to the joining of a women’s corps such as the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) or the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), and many more roles in between. This raised a number of personal issues for women who were very used to having their behaviour dictated by class expectations; there were now no clear guidelines as to how they should behave in their war effort. Should they be ladylike or business-like, and how should they dress, in uniform (which they could purchase) or practical work clothes? Women’s literature of the First World War often reveals a tension between what was expected of women before the war and what became newly acceptable or redefined under the new circumstances of wartime conditions. Yet there is also a larger irreconcilable difficulty here: ideologically and in terms of propaganda for the men in the trenches, it was essential to maintain the image of women remaining passively at home, waiting patiently, maintaining the much-loved status quo as a significant part of the idealised “home and country” at stake in war. Inconceivable within this idealised image was the prospect of women, possibly in uniform, contributing to the war effort and also working hard to save their country. Simultaneously then, women were expected to be contributing to the war effort in some way whilst also accepting a more passive role embodying the image of those remaining stolidly at home, being fought for and thus giving the sacrifice at the front a purpose. This sense of conflicting roles for women was, of course, increased manifold for those women who were close to the front line, where their physical presence in the dangerous spaces of war was perhaps essential – say in the running of military hospitals – but ideologically disastrous. How could the soldier hero believe he was protecting his women folk if they refused to stay put at home and insisted on entering the war zones and encountering similar levels of danger to himself? At the very least this must have caused confusion and gender conflict regarding the ways women experienced the spaces of war. Nicola Beauman expresses the depth of this problem when she questions whether there was “any ‘right’ (that is acceptable) behaviour for the women who lived through the years of the Great War and for the heroines whom the writers among them recreated in their fiction”. She goes on to make a list recording that it was wrong to be “smugly patriotic and pro-War. It was wrong to be too detached from it […]

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wrong to indulge in complacent martyrdom. It was wrong to enjoy the war […] wrong merely to devote oneself to one’s children […] It was right for men to go to war to fight for ‘freedom’, wrong for women to nurse or drive an ambulance to help to fight for the same freedom” (1993: 145–6). Participation in war for men can be largely seen as ideologically focussed on the single concept of the soldier hero. But for women it is more complex and much less well defined. Thirdly, related to these conflicting roles and expectations for women in wartime, was the difficulty of finding a suitable mode of recording their experiences and encounters. This can be detected in the way women writers of the time struggled to reconcile ideological femininity with female participation in the war effort. Finding a mode of expression or appropriate tone which could encompass a sense of being protected by the masculine war effort as well as describing the authority of female war work, which also adhered to conventions of propaganda, masculine gallantry and the new feminism proved a challenge to many a fine female writer. But as Beauman claims, women’s lives were “irrevocably changed” by the war, and so they had a right to respond (128, 146). Dorothy Goldman also argues that “women suffered differently” in war but because they were not part of the physical agony, their voices on the subject of war remained unheard. She warns of the potential danger of marginalising women because they remained true to their own experiences, thus denying a larger truth about the war (1993: 1–2). May Sinclair was a writer who encountered the First World War from within the war zones, but experienced it in many ways as an outsider too. This divided engagement enabled an unusual approach in her particular mode of war writing, often taking the internalised (even psychologised) inner response to war and projecting this onto the exterior spaces of war situations. For Sinclair, with little else to offer the war effort besides her powers of observation, her writing prioritises her impressions of people and places over more factual commentary on military command or war action. In this way Sinclair’s war writings, because of their unusual approach, start to investigate whether war zones could also be understood and imagined as female spaces. A close reading of Sinclair’s war writing will help to dismantle a one-dimensional, masculinised domination of the story of the First World War. The intensity of feeling expressed not only in her diarised account but also in later novels is what sets Sinclair’s war writing apart from other similar works. By concentrating on feelings, emotional responses and strong belief in female capabilities, she both participates in the war and yet remains outside the usual mode of discourse. The women who did “talk of mud” had to find a means of expressing themselves. They had to determine their own tone and balance; make choices about what to include and what to omit, and constantly respond to the truth

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of their own war (Goldman 1993: 8). Any first hand discussion about the front by a woman writer was normally dependent upon the access arrangements she could make involving suitable transport and military permissions. War zones were variously open or closed to a female presence and participation depending on a range of variable and inconsistent factors. Sinclair’s desperation to get to the front and her repeated accounts of favouritism and “luck” of other women getting to the front before her are testament to this. This link between Sinclair’s eventual access to the front and the emotional honesty of her writing is a crucial one. Unlike other writers who never visited the war zones at the front, Sinclair’s direct contact with the spaces of war gave her the confidence to write about the war as she experienced it and not as convention demanded. On September 25th 1914 May Sinclair, a modernist writer aged about fifty, set off with Dr Hector Munro’s ambulance corps, mostly made up of women, in order to provide assistance for the Belgian refugees. Although Sinclair had travelled abroad before, this trip to the front line offered her the opportunity to enter spheres not normally open to middle-age middle-class women, with no practical skills to offer. She certainly anticipated danger and excitement within the war zone. Suzanne Raitt has commented that Sinclair was one of those who were thrilled at the prospect of having her chance at the war (Raitt 1997: 78). Certainly the war had a marked impact on Sinclair’s work: out of her day book, which recorded her experiences at the front, emerged her Journal of Impressions (1915a), and then a number of novels which refer to WW1 in various ways. Tasker Jevons (1916), The Romantic (1920) and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) are the three which most closely echo her own experiences at the front, whereas Tree of Heaven (1917), Far End (1926) and History of Anthony Waring (1927) use the war more conceptually or as a backdrop for the narrative progression. Some details of this expedition are clear, others remain curiously hazy. For instance, Sinclair recorded in her Journal the difficulties involved in even getting permission to travel to Belgium and the necessary badgering of embassies and the War Office. However, the funding for the venture is still open to speculation: Sinclair may have funded it all or just made a contribution, thus effectively buying her place. Even more intriguingly, we know from the Journal that Sinclair’s time at the front only lasted fourteen days; yet the background to her return or dismissal remains a mystery. Sinclair’s first biographer, Theophilus Boll, knew that Dr Munro “had requested the War Office not to allow her to rejoin the corps” and tried to get Munro to explain, but without success (1973: 107). Boll suggests that Sinclair “did not subordinate her strongly critical mind to the disciplinary phase of the military machine” (ibid.) and that Munro was not unreasonable in his request. Although Sinclair was witness to the way

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women worked in war zones, obeying orders and complying with military structures and bureaucracy, she personally seems to have found such a level of compliance almost impossible. Nonetheless, the intensity of Sinclair’s responses to war is clear from the level of emotional expression in her Journal and the way she reiterated the same material in subsequent novels. Other war diaries adopt a different tone: Louise Mack’s account of being in Belgium at a similar time to Sinclair, but remaining in Antwerp during the German occupation, has a much more practical, daily survival feel to it; and the well-known A Hilltop on the Marne, also 1915, by Mildred Aldrich has the authority of a visual panorama of the battlefields. Sinclair’s account differs from other accounts by being much more personal. She limits herself to her own particular boundaries of comprehension and interpretation; she focuses on women’s stories, and almost never attempts to extend her discourse to a more expansive war commentary. In doing this she remained almost painfully true to her own experiences and responses; her honesty at times is uncomfortable. Although her Journal is self-indulgent, it is also unusually revealing and insightful, giving confident prominence to personal feelings, reactions and observations, and bringing to light the human aspects of war some would prefer to remain hidden. Sinclair’s diary is unusual in making the connection between psychical and physical landscapes. She offers neither practicalities nor overview, but she does make detailed links between the war zones she encountered and her emotional responses. As the diary progresses through its three hundred and thirty two pages, it becomes far removed from the sensible, de-sensitised, understated and sometimes ironic tone which became the standard (highly masculinised) mode of discussing the First World War (Fussell 1977: 29–35). Yet, from the outset, Sinclair does try to adhere to overarching propagandist conventions of foregrounding heroic behaviour, commenting positively on the war, and maintaining discretion about actual place names and people; she had after all signed Masterman’s “Author’s Manifeso”, a propagandist agreement (Smith 2000a: 5). Her subversion lies in her unconventional subject matter and in her mode of expression, which borders on the experimental. Alongside a mapping of emotions onto war landscapes is the employment of modernist experimental literary techniques, particularly unusual in war writing. Sinclair uses the modernist techniques of fragmentation of consciousness, exploration of dreams and hallucinations, and surprising juxtapositions between matters large and small. She further disrupts her own text by presenting herself as an unreliable narrator and achieves this by digressing and contradicting herself, by playing with time and sequence, and by making clear links between inner and outer worlds. All this sets her journal apart from other writers who, in writing about war,

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reverted to a realist mode. In literary terms then, Sinclair was both within the modernist fold, but outside the normative style of war writing. Critics have varied in opinion on this war diary. Sinclair’s contemporary Rebecca West saw it as a work of sincerity, “one of the few books of permanent value produced by the war” (Marcus 1982: 305). Later, Claire Tylee has described Sinclair’s war journal as self-indulgent and self-absorbed, even “narcissistic and myopic” but nonetheless genuine (1990: 30). Sharon Ouditt has described Sinclair as “rapidly seduced by the alterative glories of warfare” and as one who “articulates her excitement in hedonistic terms” (1994: 34). Suzanne Raitt argues that Sinclair’s writing embodied the shame of being a woman in the war zone, and goes on to describe Sinclair’s many humiliations: her sexual jealousy of other women finding favour with officers; her lack of medical training; her lack of understanding of war; her excitement at danger; and “the shame of a middle-aged woman who sees in middle-age her last chance at life” (1997: 65). Sinclair’s war journal has variously been found to be both within the canon of war literature and outside acceptable discourse about the Great War. Whilst Tylee has argued that Sinclair indulged a Victorian penchant for ecstatic expression concerning war, I suggest that while there are moments of heightened emotion, the Journal is best understood overall as a modernist text –one which exhibits modernist literary techniques and uses the devices associated with this mode to explore the internal response to war. Sinclair’s role as secretary to the commandant, publicity officer and fundraiser (which she claims she was partly goaded into taking), combined with her excitement at the prospect of war, and her personal determination to “help out” during her war adventure, without a proper role or any medical skills to offer, all in all made her position a precarious one (1915a: 16–17). It also made her acutely sensitive regarding the entry of women into the various arenas of war, their treatment and their behaviour, their participation and exclusion from the obvious and less palpable spaces of war. Some issues and incidents, recorded initially in her Journal, were reworked at length into her later novels. Within this context, Sinclair brought her interests in feminism and emerging psychological discussions to bear on her attempts to rationalise and understand the chaos of war and the different aspects of life it affected. As Sinclair entered each new war zone she did so in the spirit of adventure, anxiously awaiting opportunities to come her way. With each new zone, her writing reveals attempts to accept and understand her often complicated relationship to that space. She negotiates between the external space and her internal emotional response, often using one to explore the other. At times her intense excitement is at odds with the brutal realities of war. Always her negotiation with war spaces is filtered through the strangeness of being a woman at war, amongst an ambulance crew unusually

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made up of a large number of women. Thus Sinclair’s is a highly individualised representation of war expressed through a gendered, internalised and often analytical response, and situated in a surprising range of war zones. The Journal may be read as a woman’s negotiation with the internal and external spaces of war. Moreover, Sinclair is also at war with her conscience over her presence in the war zone, and her sense of being somewhere she has no right to be is a dominant preoccupation. On arriving at Ostend after five weeks of what Sinclair describes as “black funk” (a terrible fear of what she might encounter), and when a moment of spare time presents itself, Sinclair uses the opportunity to “sneak into the Cathedral” and then again she “wanders forth” to look at the “motor ambulances on Cockerill’s Wharf ” (1915a: 8–10). Later she enjoys the beauty of the Flemish landscape, with its low vividly-painted houses, straight roads and tall trees (1915a: 11–12). Sinclair experiences this space as a tourist and is even accused of sight-seeing by one of the nurses in the ambulance corps (9, 10). She is not without a guilty conscience about this, but finds it difficult to conceive of this beautiful place as a war zone. The discrepancy between her previously imagined “limbs entangled in intestines, corpses by every roadside” and her actual experience of the beautiful peace of the open countryside is vast (1915a: 8). Her imagined war zone and her first experience of Belgium are diametrically opposed, and Sinclair has to temper her obvious excitement, “Is it possible that I am enjoying myself?” with her awareness of the disapproval of others (1915a: 12). Her honesty in including this in her Journal, in discussing the thrill which turns into ecstasy, her enjoyment of the sights and the drive to Ghent enable us to understand one of the incongruities of this war. At this moment in the Journal the war-torn Belgium is described as a tourist venue, and the spatial images of war-zone and Flemish landscape are awkwardly juxtaposed. The idea that a country at war might at once encompass touristic landscapes and war-torn villages and battlefields is an arresting juxtaposition and raises questions about privilege and non-combatants. At the very least, Sinclair’s first-hand observations of her surroundings refute a totalising image of a country at war. Once at Ghent, Sinclair is struck by the effectiveness of the conversion of a rather grand hotel, the Flandria Palace Hotel, into a military hospital: “the billiard-room is an operating theatre; the great dining-hall and the receptionrooms and the bedrooms are wards” (1915a: 23). It is where they are to set up their quarters and whilst Sinclair had expected “two bare dormitories”, they are given “a fine suite of rooms” (1915a: 21). She describes their mess-room in detail with French windows and a balcony and a “pale blonde light” that fills the room. However, this interior space, with its marble-topped tables set out for conference in a U shape, becomes an oppressive place for Sinclair. As they wait for

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orders Sinclair understands that they are to confine themselves patiently to the mess-room, and she resentfully reflects that it is a space “to contain us” (1915a: 28). When some of the corps do have the “luck” to go out in the ambulance to the rescue of some injured soldiers, Sinclair becomes increasingly aware of the divisions of space in the hospital and the qualifications and permissions needed to enter into the different sections. After the chosen crew has left, Sinclair does seem to spend some time sitting in the deserted mess-room, possibly sulking, until she strikes up a conversation with one of the hospital orderlies and asks if she could hand round some cigarettes to the patients. Sinclair thus leaves the confines of their quarters and enters the designated spaces of the hospital, sheltered and somewhat protected by the orderly, who, “with his instinct of protection […] glides before me, smoothing the way between my shyness and this dreaded majesty of suffering”( 1915a: 46). Sinclair compartmentalises her emotions spatially within this hospital: in the mess-room she rails against her inactivity and uselessness, and in the wards she has to deal with her fear and the imagined horrors of physical mutilation and pain she may witness. But as she follows the orderly through the wards she feels she is “in another world”, feeling not horror as she expected, but a humbled “adoration” (1915a: 47). Back in the mess-room again, she becomes miserable once more and watches with longing the movement of vehicles rushing towards the “fighting lines” (1915a: 49). Within the building of the hospital and nearby to the front lines, Sinclair is tantalisingly close to significant war zones, and yet kept apart by the mandates of required skill-sets and military appropriation of different spaces in wartime. Frustrated at the confines of the mess-room, Sinclair negotiates a role for herself, helping out with the thousands of refugees at the Palais des Fêtes serving at the evening meals for three hours. She describes the vast building as “rather like Olympia” (1915a: 61), and whilst this might in the past have been a venue for horticultural shows, now “It is the peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields and their children that are being shown here” (ibid.). Sinclair’s shock at the sight of so many displaced families and individuals is clear from her unusually controlled and detached way of commenting on the refugees: “four thousand of them lying on straw”; “laid out in rows”; “litter of prostrate forms” (ibid.). Sinclair explains how she feels “stunned and stupefied” by the sight of so much human sorrow and destitution and seems so overwhelmed that her usual emotional responses have not yet come to the surface.1 The most she can do is to repeat a phrase as a sine qua non, which only inadequately accounts for what she has seen, “‘C’est triste, n’est-ce pas?’” whilst she tries to account for this numbness: “And you who look at them cannot speak or think or feel” (1915a: 63–9). 1 Claire Tylee has argued that this moment evades Sinclair’s powers of description.

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When it comes to the evening meal service, the spatial organisation and manipulation of so many pitiful refugees enables Sinclair’s emotional state to come to the fore. She describes the layout of the makeshift mass dining arrangements in some detail, with the “enormous oblong space” of the Inner Hall and its “immense auditorium, tier above tier of seats” at either end (1915a: 84). She describes how the refugees “come in relays to be fed” down a gangway of ropes in an ordered, measured fashion. For Sinclair it is these temporary barriers, and the way they control the crowd, that make these thousands of people less threatening for her. “The barriers make it a steady procession, a credible spectacle. You can take it in” (1915a: 85). As she assists with the serving of the coffee and slice of plain white bread, she works herself into a frenzy, bypassing the established system of serving the coffee, and turning the washing up into a competition: “You contend with brawny Flemish women for the first dip into the tub and the driest towel. Then you race round the tables with your pile of crockery, and then with your jug, and so on over and over again” (1915a: 87). At night she has a nightmare in which people are plucking at her sleeve and pleading for more food. The order and structure given by the physical barriers help Sinclair deal with the chaos of so many displaced people, but when in close proximity to them she is barely able to control her pity or herself, perhaps imagining that through some superhuman effort of racing round the tables manically she would be able to alleviate the unbearable misery. Thus, although the refugees are controlled by the spatial arrangements, Sinclair is not. During an evening’s visit to the local Hôtel de la Poste, Sinclair decides that she must move from the Hospital Quarters and take a room in this War Correspondents’ hotel for a week. It is the energy of this alternative place close to the action, as opposed to the apathy of the corps’s quarters at the hospital, which attracts Sinclair and gives her renewed enthusiasm for one of her objectives as war reporter. Her aim with this shift of venue is to “write some articles” and she anticipates at least having her ear closer to the action here, “The War Correspondents will tell me what is being done”, even if she actually gets physically no closer to the battlefields (1915a: 111). She is attracted to the seeming liveliness of the hotel, which is full of correspondents and Belgian officers, “It is full of live, exultant fighters, and of men who have their business not with the wounded and the dying but with live men and live things, and they have live words to tell about them” (1915a: 107). The Flandria seems to have made her feel inactive and imprisoned, “a prisoner in a Hotel-Hospital”, whilst she anticipates more productivity and energy at the Poste (1915a: 109). Even though her new room “is more like a prison than any view from the ‘Flandria’” Sinclair still makes the move (1915a: 112). She has already met a sculptor she knew before the war, someone who also came from “the world where people make busts and

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pictures and books” (1915a: 106) and so associates the new location with a different mindset, a more active outlook, and more direct contact with the war. In some ways this move works out well for Sinclair, but it also highlights personal difficulties. She enjoys her new freedom to wander around the town and particularly enjoys the old quarter and the cathedral, with no-one to accuse her of sight-seeing this time. With this newly acquired freedom, Sinclair does indeed find inspiration enough to write a few articles. There is a stark contrast for Sinclair between the sense of inhibiting imprisonment she felt at the hospital-hotel and the freedom and buzz she absorbs at the journalists’ hotel. In the Flandria, she was restricted as part of the corps, trapped in the mess-room of their designated quarters and forced to wait for permission to do anything worthwhile. For not only did Munro and his corps become part of the bureaucratic system, and necessarily have to wait for their orders to leave for the front; when those orders did come in Munro very much presided over the decision over who would go and who would stay. His recklessness in taking the young and attractive Ursula Dearmer (Lady Dorothie Fielding in real life) with him to the front line seems to have infuriated Sinclair. The now broken promise made to Ursula’s mother to keep her daughter out of danger is part of Sinclair’s annoyance, but Sinclair’s envy and even sexual jealousy is what leads her to argue so ferociously with Munro (Raitt 1997: 79). Sinclair does not shy from revealing heightened emotions and fraught human relationships in her impressions of the effects of war. Quite purposefully Sinclair offers the reader few general overarching signposts for the progress of war; it is hard to gauge a sense of the progress of military operations from her text. She frequently operates the convention of using only the first letter of a proper noun to conceal a significant place name. Moreover, she disrupts her own text, and footnotes her confusion about the sequence of days, using malaria fever as a reason for the discrepancy and also as a way of excusing her aggressive and accusatory behaviour towards Munro. The reader is able to understand the German invasion of Belgium from vague snippets only. Furthermore, quite surprisingly for a day book of such a limited period, she has to reconstruct its linearity and does so deliberately within the text and footnotes. In this way her modernist non-realist technique and her concentration on linking her inner world to the outer one succeed very well in conveying the chaos of war. The story of Sinclair’s time at the front in terms of places, dates and specific battles has an unreliable feel. In part this is due to temporal confusion and in part due to an unevenness of tone and the excessive attention to seemingly insignificant domestic or personal issues such as her fuss over a writing table. In stark contrast to this her portrayal of her own experiences rings true. She is conscious of her inappropriate placement in this

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space of war, and yet desperate to make the most of her time there. This can be read through her mixed-up behaviour. For instance, when installed in the Hôtel de la Poste, even though she is desperate for information, she initially tries to conceal herself beyond a glass screen from the one journalist she knows, “Mr L”, and she does this to avoid making an “infernal nuisance” of herself (1915a: 121–2). Nonetheless, when they meet at breakfast the next day, Sinclair evidently pumps him for all the information he can give her about the war. Although Sinclair produced a few war-time articles such as “The Woman at the Front” (1915b), her output was limited. Her lack of writing productivity may be initially linked to the inertia and imprisonment she felt at the Flandria, but is also more complex: there are many instances where she is reluctant to make copy out of her experiences and numerous times when she prioritises her emotional response over the facts of an event. In addition, she knows there are things which shouldn’t be passed on as they are either confidential or would subvert British propaganda on the home front. Given this, it is easy to see why her impressions of the war did not easily translate into newspaper copy. Although her Journal indicates that she is excited by the prospect of a great journalistic scoop (1915a: 104), it seems to be those most directly involved in the war that she admires the most, and this idea of charging round the front lines rather than using contemplative writing skills is explored much more in Tasker Jevons, her war novel. Sinclair was also sensitive to the restrictions placed upon her as a woman. She was impressed by the work of many women she met at the front and comments accordingly. For example, the two women originally with Sinclair’s corps who went on to manage a vital triage and dressing station and became known as “the two Heroines of Pervyse” (Mitton 1916); and the hospital totally staffed by women and run by Mrs St. Clair Stobart; and although the details are hazy – was it a converted concert hall or a convent? – Sinclair manages to convey a good deal about the conditions for the patients and the dedication of the allfemale staff, concluding that “this Hospital is a Feminist Show” (1915a: 147–51). Sinclair’s use of the idea of feminism and what she terms “the New Chivalry” become fused into a mode of understanding women’s entry and acceptance into various war zones.2 Sinclair uses the term feminist about Hector Munro, describing him as a “curious psychic monster” taking women with him to the “siege-guns” at the front line. She questions, “Is it uncanniness? Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance that gives them their share of danger?” (1915a: 111–2). Whilst The Romantic became the title of one of her war novels, it is this term the “New 2 For another discussion of Sinclair and chivalry see Wilson (2003: 179–88).

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Chivalry” which Sinclair uses, sometimes quite ironically, to discuss the opportunities given by whichever masculine authority (Munro or other) to women to travel within the war zone. For instance, “The General—he cannot have a spark of the New Chivalry in his brutal breast— has ordered Mrs. Torrence off her chauffeur’s job” and of one of the ambulance corps, “the chauffeur Tom has none of the New Chivalry about him. He is the mean and brutal male, the crass obstructionist, who grudges women their laurels in the equal field” (1915a: 113–4). Sinclair is particularly conscious of Tom, the chauffeur, and Munro, the corps leader, as gatekeepers of her freedom to enter the war zones. Those who determine her ability to venture to the front line are measured against the New Chivalry. Once she assumes what she believes to be the newly-authoritative role of war correspondent she feels a newly-found impetus to travel and her show of independence is followed by a few permissions from Munro to go out in the car and then the ambulance. Tom, the chauffeur, is a frequent barrier to Sinclair’s entry into war zones. He is of the old school, takes no orders from a woman and shows his disapproval either by defying Sinclair directly and refusing to transport her, or by questioning how he is “to steer his car and protect his women at the same time?” (1915a: 237). Other men adopt more equivocal positions on the question of women at the front, “ ‘Mr. L.’ may have disapproved of ‘taking a lady into danger’”, but did not restrict Sinclair’s movements in any way in the war zone (1915a: 178). This contact, Mr. L., and the comings and goings of the Hotel lead Sinclair closer to the war zones. She has a number of excursions both with the ambulance corps and with others and each time records her different impressions, albeit haphazardly. Because it was impossible for Sinclair (and perhaps anyone in truth) to grasp a broader sense of the war, she relates what she witnesses in terms of the people and the places she encounters. On one errand to transport two doctors, the passengers see for themselves the mass exodus from Antwerp, and Sinclair describes this in terms of the landscape: “endless processions of refugees; endless, for the straight, flat Flemish roads are endless, and as far as you can see the stream of people is unbroken”( 1915a: 138). Another time on the road out of Baerlaere with “Mr L”, Sinclair finds herself in a “joyous adventure” where the road is blocked by the ruins of a small hamlet. Her description of the ruined houses gives us an immediate sense of the devastation caused by the bombardment, and the wall of the barn was “the only thing that stood between us and the German batteries” (1915a: 176–7). This playful tone continues when Sinclair has to stop a fellow passenger from leaping out of cover “to find some pieces of nice hot shell for me” (1915a: 177). She stops him, not because souvenir hunting is distasteful, but in order to keep him out of danger.

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Sinclair, who largely led her life alone, enjoyed the prospect of comradeship in the ambulance corps; whether she functioned at all well as part of this group, or even recorded it accurately, has been hotly contested (Raitt 2000: 162–3). Nonetheless, it was important to Sinclair that she not only witnessed the war but that she did so with other people. And although some of those people restricted her access to the front, others made it possible not just to get there, but also to try and make sense of the incomprehensibility of it all. The various moments in this Journal in which Sinclair does feel connected and involved with the war are also times when others help her or share the experience. In this way Sinclair relies on what Patricia Yaeger describes as a “communal intimacy”, which Yaeger goes on to explain, quoting Arendt, as “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear”. This “reassures us about ‘the reality of the world and ourselves’” (1996: 1–38). Her connections with places and people at the front helped her to make at least some sense of the chaos of her war. The reality of spaces in the war zone was significant for Sinclair. She discusses the concept of philosophical reality in a number of contexts in her writing, including this Journal. On one mission to bring back the wounded from a small village near Lokeren, accompanied by two stretcher bearers, to her great joy she finds a badly wounded soldier in one of the houses. She becomes obsessively possessive about him, “to me he was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen […] He was my first wounded man” (1915a: 196). The whole episode turns into something of a mystical experience for Sinclair, “There was something odd about that short stretch of grey road and the tall trees at the end of it and the turn. These things appeared in a queer, vivid stillness, as if they were not there on their own account, but stood in witness to some superior reality. Through them you were somehow assured of Reality with a most singular and overpowering certainty” (1915a: 193–4). The sense of finally doing the task she had secretly hoped for all this time, recovering the wounded from the front line and virtually under fire, is given epiphanic status. She bestows her belief in philosophical Reality upon the physical manifestation of the surrounding landscape. Through her various trips and her earnest but largely inconsequential efforts to offer “help”, she locates her time in Belgium within the detail and reality of her immediate surroundings. She attaches emotional significance to various places, often displacing her emotional reaction onto those places. Her regret at the whole war is expressed when they pick up wounded from a convent in Ecloo, where time has stood still for centuries and Sinclair is charmed by the life there. It is as though in this place alone there was opportunity for psychic rest. Something in the calmness and order of the convent allows her a momentary pause to contemplate the larger destructive force of the war in

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general, seeing the threatened invasion as “a horror of the Middle Ages” (1915a: 306). Similarly, at the end of her trip, when Sinclair is manipulated into returning to England, she associated her very great disappointment with the white cliffs of Dover, “And I hate the white cliffs. I hate them with a sudden and mysterious hatred”(1915a: 331). Even afterwards Sinclair continued to project her emotions and responses to war onto the places she encountered in her travels. In her poem “After the Retreat”, written in the style of the Imagists, she mournfully displaces and anthropomorphises the sadness of Belgium onto a house: “It looked / Through windows blurred like women’s eyes that have cried too long” (1915c). Yet because this house is the destination of her night-time flights of fancy, there is a sense that Sinclair also maps her deep regret at being forced out of the war onto the topography of the same house, making it represent both the fall of Belgium and the hurtful curtailment of her own war. The house, standing for this longing of Sinclair’s, speaks the disappointment she can hardly name. Of all the ways in which Sinclair could have presented an account of her short time in Belgium in the First World War, she positions it meticulously and determinedly as a journal of “impressions”, stating that she has no intention of producing a factual diary or social commentary, or general record of field ambulance work (1915a: ix).3 She doesn’t want her account to be “second-hand” (1915a: xi) and announces her intention of including her “temperament” – her emotional experience and internal response as an untrained but intelligent female observer. In this way the text does not function as a conventional, factual war narrative, but as a series of fragmented impressionistic sketches. Moreover, there seem to be deliberate strategies to make the text unreliable. The overtly-stated sincerity and authenticity of tone with which the Journal is written masks a number of factors: the Journal itself was not written at the front and Sinclair comes close to admitting that it was not even written directly from daily notes; it underwent several full revisions before the final version was sent for publication (Raitt 2000: 160–61). And for an acclaimed and highly professional writer, there are a large number of amateurish oversights, such as the unevenness of pace, the periods of sketchy detail, the “lost” days of Sinclair’s illness, the confusion over place names and the unconsciousness of time, with much footnoting and questioning of accuracy. Sinclair uses her authorial control, either consciously or unwittingly, to construct a wartime self of an unreliable narrator. Two selves are present: the self that witnesses the front (the narrator); and the self that writes and edits these impressions later with a meta-narrative of self-judgement (the author). Her extensive explanation of her method seems to be an excuse for her infelicities and an apologia for 3 Although she did try to offer some more factual accounts in her few newspaper articles later.

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her self-indulgence, but also an attempt to find a tone of voice that might help explain the effects of war on the emotions of a sensitive woman. For Sinclair, the problem of writing about her experience of the places of war will not be moulded into a conventional form and structure. The question arises why such a competent and professional writer would produce such a haphazard account. Why has authenticity and reliability been subsumed into another project? If her only desire was to reproduce the frantic, disorganised and chaotic nature of war, then Sinclair could have used her novelist’s powers of description. By producing such a disrupted narrative, Sinclair can be seen to be, on the one hand, conforming to agreed standards of propaganda, and on the other, producing a non-conformist female perspective of war. Rebecca Hogan has argued for the diary form as a subversive, écriture féminine style of writing (Hogan 1991 99–100). Seen this way, the Journal’s fragmentation and unreliability, its focus on the inner life and emotional responses, and its constant reference to the women workers at the front, all combine to disrupt masculinist conventions of fact, linearity, rational explanation and purpose.4 Sinclair has thus found a way to be both within the war, but outside its conventions. It is her engagement with the places and spaces of the different war zones which enables her to write a war narrative at such odds with convention. Place becomes a catalyst for stating the truth of her experience. By rooting her war continually in a sense of place, albeit a mess-room, an hotel, a hospital or a battlefield, she can explore the underside of war experience, the greed for adventure, the petty bureaucracy, the limitations put on women, the achievements and the arguments among those women, the incongruous beauty of the war zone, the Reality at the front, and so on. All the while she manages not to be bound by the conventions of “positions of batteries and the movements of armies” (1915a: x) in her writing and to focus on the bravery and heroism of women, resisting the masculine totalising one-dimensional image of the First World War. In her war novels Sinclair continues her themes of being both involved with the war and yet set apart from its normal constructs and modes of conveying meaning. The focus on the inner life in a time of physical brutality gives Sinclair the critical space and distance to explore the adjunctive aspects of war. Unusual, even distasteful, aspects of war such as the pursuit of personal glory; cowardice and psychosis; hostility and competition between women at the front; and war neurosis all feature in her war fictions. Tasker Jevons, the eponymous hero of Sinclair’s first novel after A Journal of Impressions, is a gifted writer who, without the security of class and position, 4 See Sharon Ouditt’s discussion of Woolf ’s war writing, which I have found helpful here (Ouditt 1994: 169–71). See also Angela K. Smith’s discussion of a “different kind of female language for the literary representation of war” (Smith 2000b: 3).

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becomes very successful. Attracted to him is an intelligent and spirited upperclass girl with a disregard for social propriety, and through Viola and her family the novel explores the cruelty and hilarity of English pre-war snobbery. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Jevons takes himself, his chauffeur and his much loved and now khaki-painted car to the front line in Belgium (1916: 266–71). The reason for the writer’s being at the front is a poignant theme for Sinclair, and perhaps her thoughts about her own position had crystallised when she wrote of Jevons in the novel, “‘I don’t want to go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things’”(1916: 262). Jevons, then, in his self-purchased khaki, eschews the idea of merely reporting the war and opts for a more directly involved participation as a rescue worker, with himself and his chauffeur picking up injured soldiers from the front line in Belgium. This rejection of the writing career and the driving around the battlefields reflects Sinclair’s ambition to do something useful in the practical sense. There is a desire to engage more directly with the war zone, to engage with it physically as a bodily presence rather than intellectualising the war and engaging only with the mind (and the pen). In this novel Sinclair directly recycles much material from the Journal, from the hotel name and layout to the restrictions imposed by being under orders, from speculations and conversations about the war to actual events and places such as battlefields, besieged villages and a convent. Jevons’s bravery earns him the respect and admiration of those other elite men of action: the “officers of the General Staff ” (1916: 293). Viola, who through her persistence catches up with Jevons, witnesses “through the glass screen” the scene of “public homage” to him by the officers for entering the most dangerous zones in his scouting car, under fire, to rescue the wounded (1916: 293–94). Viola herself, through persistence and negotiation works her way into front line danger for some of the time too, and echoing the Journal there is a discussion about women entering the war zone. Viola responds to a comment made about chivalry in a way “that drove her back in sheer defence on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too” (1916: 317). The war zones, as Sinclair observed them in life and in fiction, were open or closed to rescue workers not just in the most obvious way, according to their gender, but in a more complex way, which depended on female chivalry, bravery and determination as well as on the powers of persuasion of the women involved. Her next war novel, The Romantic (1920), very much focusses on bravery and cowardice, and follows two characters, John and Charlotte, in an uneasy relationship, out to the front in Belgium amongst a voluntary ambulance corps. In this work of fiction the places and spaces of war which Sinclair encountered in real life become a direct means of expressing an interior psychological landscape of psychosis, misogyny and cowardice. Using her interest in the new

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psychoanalysis, and her connections with the Medico-Psychological Clinic of which Hector Munro was a founding doctor (Boll 1962: 310–26), Sinclair explores the link between the physical circumstances of war and the more abstract science of psychology. The story of John’s cowardice is exposed against a detailed backdrop of different war zones. Once at the front, the novel focusses on the spaces of war as Sinclair previously experienced them and on how these spaces provide an opportunity for airing aspects of human emotions not normally associated with more conformist accounts of war-time behaviour. Competitiveness, for instance, comes to the fore over the allocation of quarters to volunteer groups. At the Flandria military hospital (taken directly out of the Journal, even with the same foolish statue above the staircase), the group learn that their field ambulance crew will have to share quarters with another corps. Once in the quarters (with the same glass door and blonde light) the corps already in situ is possessive about the space, making no room for the new arrivals. As the groups get their turn on the battlefield, John’s cowardice comes to notice as he drives away in the ambulance without the wounded, or refuses to carry the stretcher and runs away round the turn of the road with its “curving screen of trees” (1920: 101, 123). Whilst the landscapes of the battlefield help to mask John’s acts of cowardice, the different interior spaces of the quarters function as places for disclosure and reflection on his behaviour. The psychotherapist, Dr. McClane, quite likely a portrait of Hector Munro, discusses John’s illness with Charlotte in her bedroom, away from the public area of the mess-room. And when Charlotte needs time on her own to come to terms with his cowardice, she tries to hide from general view on the balcony, but is brought back into the group, back into the mess-room. They all now know how John has behaved, and by making room for her to sit down, they offer her their support. The different spaces of the mess signify private and public understanding and acknowledgement. And as John’s behaviour becomes public knowledge, so it is increasing talked about in the joint public space of the mess, and then in open spaces: John and Charlotte’s final conversation is in Convent Garden as he is trying to bolt from the war; and McClane’s final resume of John’s condition (voicing Sinclair’s psychoanalytical explanation) takes place on the deck of the boat taking them back to England. This final space of the novel is a transitional space moving between war and real life back home, a space in which to try and make sense of the events of war. Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) is the last novel of Sinclair’s which has the First World War as a central focus. In some ways Anne Severn is perhaps Sinclair’s most sophisticated attempt to account for the war in terms of the interior mental and psychological experience, intricately mapped out against places and spaces.

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Through the character of Anne, yet again a member of an ambulance corps in Belgium, Sinclair revisits her never-forgotten rancour at her dismissal from the front. When Colin, one of the Fielding brothers, develops a bad case of war neurosis, it is Anne his cousin and not Queenie his wife (also a member of the same corps), who is sent home to look after him. In the fictionalised version of Sinclair’s own tale, Queenie manipulates the situation so that Anne is fired “out of the Corps” (1922: 114–7). In the character of Queenie we see the unpleasant pursuit of female glory again with this woman bossily dominating the ambulance corps and greedily seeking all the action in the war zone. Yet Sinclair wreaks her revenge, and Queenie is portrayed as over-bearing and domineering, reviled by Colin and objectified as part cause of his nervous terror. Anne, on the other hand, matures in personality and looks, takes over the running of the cousins’ family estate and devises a multi-faceted, holistic approach to bringing Colin back to full mental health. Just as in other novels Sinclair used the war zones to explore heightened emotions and psychological issues, so in Anne Severn she uses the domestic interior and peace-time exteriors to portray the topography for a return to mental health. Anne’s home-made strategies for curing Colin depend upon the layout and spaces of the house and farm for their success. It is as if the interior battle against war neurosis can only be fought back in the familiar territory of the domestic space, using the actual rooms of the house and fields of the farm as a map for mental recovery. Inter-connecting bedrooms with doors left open, the terrace and the library, become places where Colin spends his time, shivering, screaming and remembering the horrors of war (1922: 120–1). Anne resists her father’s instruction to send Colin to a nursing home and instead she effects a programme of revisiting the places of their childhood. Slowly, through a combination of memory and place, he starts to recover. His final recovery has to take place outside the confines of the farm, in Sicily in fact, where the “beauty of the place” gives him the sense of inner peace he so craves (229–30). Perhaps following Sigmund Freud’s metaphor of the mind as a house, Sinclair explores the effects of the newly-prominent shell shock in terms of the interior of the house and his recovery in terms of exterior places. Whereas Freud really used the house only abstractly as a metaphor for the mind, Sinclair’s approach is perhaps more easily understood as a technique after the Symbolists, or even the Imagists where the thing stands for the idea, as in this case the house stands for Colin’s mental landscape. There is something of a displacement of the effects of shell shock onto the layout of the house. In this novel the war is on the inside, in the mind, in the home; the cure lies in being able to face the exterior. Sinclair’s negotiations with the places and spaces of her short time with a field ambulance corps are to be understood in terms of her personal encounter

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physically and psychologically in those zones. Her Journal of Impressions remains an intriguing document because of its first hand emotional response (from someone who was never in any real danger) together with its depth of insight and commentary. An apparatus of modernist techniques is employed to bypass convention and expose the aspects which concern Sinclair most of all. By locating her experiences so directly – in hospital, hotel or refugee centre – and by “placing” her self in the context of war, Sinclair’s journal reveals much concerning the experience of a non-combatant in the First World War. By the very use of places and spaces to signify her responses, by melding the external location with an internal psyche, Sinclair, neither truly inside or outside the war, negotiates an alternative voice to enrich our understanding of women, consciousness and war.

Bibliography Aldrich, Mildred. 1915. A Hilltop on the Marne: Being Letters Written June 3-September 8, 1914. London: Constable. Beauman, Nicola. 1993. ‘“It is not the place of women to talk of mud”: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War I’ in Goldman, Dorothy (ed.) Women and World War I: The Written Response. London: Macmillan: 128–49. Boll, Theophilus. E. M. 1962. ‘May Sinclair and the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London’ in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (Aug): 310–26.  . 1973. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses. Fussell, Paul. 1977. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hogan, Rebecca. 1991. ‘Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form’ in Prose Studies: Special Issue on Autobiography and Questions of Gender 14 (2, Sept): 95–107. Mack, Louise. 1915. A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War. London: Fisher Unwin. Mitton, G. E. (ed.). 1916. The Cellar-House of Pervyse: A Tale of Uncommon Things from the Journals of The Baroness T’Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm. London: A & C Black. Ouditt, Sharon. 1994. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. London: Routledge.  . 2000. Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography. London: Routledge. Raitt, Suzanne. 1997. ‘“Contagious Ecstacy”: May Sinclair’s War Journals’ in Raitt, Suzanne and Trudi Tate, (eds) Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 65–84.  . 2000. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sinclair, May. 1915a. A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. London: Hutchinson.  . 1915b. ‘The Woman at the Front: A Wild Spirit of Adventure Awakened’ in Daily Chronicle (2 February 1915).  . 1915c. ‘After the Retreat’ in The Egoist 2 (1 May): 77.  . 1916. Tasker Jevons: The Real Story. London: Hutchinson.  . 1920. The Romantic. London: Collins.  . 1922. Anne Severn and the Fieldings. London: Hutchinson.  . 1919. The Tree of Heaven. London: Cassell.  . 1926. Far End. London: Hutchinson.  . 1927. History of Anthony Waring. London: Hutchinson. Smith, Angela. K. 2000a. Women’s Writing of the First World War: An Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  . 2000b. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tylee, Claire. 1990. The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. West, Rebecca. 1982. ‘Miss Sinclair’s Genius’ in Jane Marcus (ed.) The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–17. London: Macmillan: 304–07. Wilson, Leigh. 2003. ‘“She in her ‘Armour’ and He in his Coat of Nerves”’ in Heilmann, Ann (ed.) Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Pandora: 179–88. Yaeger, Patricia. 1996. ‘Introduction: Narrating Space’ in Yaeger, Patricia (ed.) The Geography of Identity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan: 1–38.

Expanding the Private and Public Spaces of War: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth Aránzazu Usandizaga abstract Since 1990 critics have proved that women considerably enlarged their territory during WWI. Their intrusions were physical as well as moral, imaginative and literary. Modernism encouraged and taught women to steadily invade forbidden territories. This chapter analyses Vera Brittain’s appropriation of war space in her 1933 text Testament of Youth. In the context of her critics and biographer, we suggest that in spite of Brittain’s limitations, particularly in terms of comprehending the conditions imposed by class and gender, her text is groundbreaking. It dares to trespass the most dangerous spaces of war writing: the contradictions of patriotism; the risks and humiliations of being a VAD; the need to assimilate the enemy; the suffering of losing a lover, a brother and most friends in the war; the difficulties of adapting to the dramatic changes undergone by women during and after the war; the acceptance of women’s responsibilities towards the home front as well as the war front; of suffering men’s anxiety and fear of women during and after the war; the desolation of having to adapt to a post-war scenario intent on forgetting the war; the futility of the post-war peace efforts. The chapter focuses on her discourses, passionate and convincing, as well as detached and objective; a testament of herself and her generation. It traces the connections between her text and the new genres of the thirties, such as reportage, and her influence over the important war reports provided by British and American women of the period. Keywords: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, modernism, space.

1. Introduction Focusing on female war experience leads to an awareness of war as less firmly bounded in both space and time than conventional historiography would have it.  (Debra Rae Cohen 2001: 37)

Access to unknown spaces began to have profound effects on women’s lives since the late-nineteenth century, both in public and private terms; in terms of self-knowledge as well as of public and political projection because, as Virginia Woolf suggests in A Room of One’s (1929), private and public spaces are

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intricately connected. At the same time, the complex tensions women writers faced in their changing negotiations with the redefinition of spaces traditionally excluded to them inspired an intense exploration of metaphorical and symbolic spaces in literary representation. These changes became particularly visible after 1914 when women’s penetration of new territories acquired an unprecedented scale. Their dramatic advance was indeed mostly due to the tragic events of World War I. As Sandra Gilbert famously discussed in her 1982 article, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War”, the Great War intensely and very suddenly subverted the accepted culture of women because for the first time in western history women were actively and urgently needed in the war effort. The surprisingly prolific inspiration these changes inspired to women writers during the war and the two decades of the post-war is the best testimony of their need to come to terms with the private and public relocation which was to unexpectedly and profoundly affect their culture and their understanding of themselves. Indeed the most important consequence of this new sudden awareness is their wish for expression and self-expression not only in trying to understand the war but also in grasping the meaning of their own involvement in the conflict and in the events of the decades after the war. Yet the rediscovery and canonical recognition of women’s war writing has been remarkably slow and gradual. Though women were dramatically committed to the war effort, the full responsibility in what was understood to be the truthful interpretation of the war was initially and for many decades attributed to the war soldier-poets and authors. Critic Margaret Higonnet indicates the emergence of this new group of combatant writers: “Canonical interpretation has held that mass conscription created a new kind of artist: a soldier-poet who recorded his direct experience” (1994: 144). Direct experience and ironic detachment from events initially became the acceptable approaches in the narrative of a conflict considered too tragic and unintelligible to be comprehended and explained. The impossibility of coming to terms with the magnitude and the sheer irrationality of the war inevitably led soldier-poets to give up interpretation in favour of minute description and irony, and to silence the overall rationalization of unbearable experience. Such is the case of many of the best known soldier-writers of the war: Robert Graves, Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, etc. These processes inevitably reinforced old beliefs and prejudices as to the authority in the description of war because direct access to actual fighting was, of course, practically restricted to soldiers. In one of the most widely read war novels, All Quiet in the Western Front (1930) by Erich Maria Remarque, its soldier-hero, Paul Baumer, stands for a clear example of such attitudes. When at home for

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a few weeks on leave from the front, Paul decides not to talk to his family and home-front friends about the war because he feels his experiences at the front cannot possibly be comprehended except by actual soldiers. Though history proves that “war is a national activity that destroys behind the lines as well as at the front” (Higonnet 1993: 154), Baumer’s reaction continued to radicalise the theoretical distance between front and home-front; between war-loving men and peace-loving women. Since the 1980s, critics and scholars have convincingly argued and proved that texts by non-combatants are essential in order to complete our understanding of the political and military events of World War I. They have shown that the imaginative effort invested in its narration and interpretation by women and non combatants, that is to say, the writing from spaces other than the actual fronts, such as the home fronts and the areas outside the fronts, is truly relevant. Intense research has been going on since the early nineties, and critics Claire Tylee, Dorothy Goldman, Sharon Ouditt, Trudi Tate, Margaret Higonnet, and others have undertaken serious revisions of a great number of documents by non-combatants; biographies, diaries, letters, novels, short stories, poems, dramas and autobiographies on the war period and its aftermath. Given the lack of a tradition in the writing of war, women authors were forced to find their own imaginative voices in accounting for their understanding and interpretation of the spaces newly occupied by them during the Great War. Though they used many different genres in their war writing, they often chose revised versions of the autobiographical for their interpretations of the war. The tradition of women’s autobiography was well established by 1918 and the profound social and psychological changes for women triggered by the war stimulated women writers to imaginatively invade physical and mental spaces so far unknown. It further lent itself to the handling of women’s urgent need to experiment in the projection of their own problems and limitations. Unlike soldier-poets, women’s need to make their dramatic experience believable seemed to justify a literature closely committed to the narrative of facts. Higonnet recognises these tensions in women’s war texts and defines the strategies they used in their writing: “In order to confront the censorship of critiques of war, many women appear to have turned to another genre, the semifictional, semitestimonial, sketch” (Higonnet 1993: 155). 2. Narrating the Great War One of the most ambitious autobiographical war texts published by a woman is Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933). Critics Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout emphasize its originality at the time of its publication. According to them it was recognised to be:

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Several issues must be looked into in order to approach both Brittain’s purposes in her choice of the genre of autobiography as well as of the kind of autobiographical text she produced. Also the date and publisher of her text should be considered as relevant to its understanding since Testament of Youth can be seen as influenced by the genre defined by George Lukács as reportage: a genre capable of providing the adequate connection between the general and the particular [...] True reportage was not limited to simply narrating events; its descriptions present connections, show their causes, and foresee their consequences.  (Coiner 1995: 28)

Brittain’s text was published in London in 1933, by Victor Gollancz, a famous intellectual of the left at the time. In the early nineteen thirties literature and culture were undergoing an intense revision. The cultural policies recently initiated by the extremely influential communist Popular Front both in England and the United States during the Great Depression focussed on imposing the communist revolution by dominating culture and literature as opposed to the previous policies of international communism mainly targeted towards influencing and controlling the working classes. Though theoretically respectful of the intense modernist literary experimentation taking place at the time, as stated by Leon Trotsky in his influential study, Literature and Revolution (1924), international communism deeply affected the literature and culture of the period. Given the urgency to respond to the dramatic social consequences of economic depression in the west, the autobiographical report, the genre of reportage, became extremely influential. In the case of women writers it further allowed them to move openly away from the conventions of confessional autobiography and to penetrate public spaces so far inaccessible to them. Testament of Youth is very probably influenced by reportage in its attempt at finding the rhetoric capable of reworking the balance between the personal and the political. The author openly confesses her literary intentions when writing her war autobiography by insisting that “the poetry of this age lies in its prose” (1933: 125). Though not committed to any specific political ideology but to an intellectual objectivity and emotional detachment, her text can be seen as importantly contributing to the expansion of the genre of women’s war autobiography, and of becoming very influential in the writing of later autobiographical texts and war texts by women. Testament of Youth may have been particularly relevant to the important number of autobiographical war texts

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written by English and American women on the Spanish Civil War a few years later, as well as to similar attempts by women during and after World War II. Brittain’s writing and also the kind of life she chooses, both personal and professional, reflects the urgent need prevalent since the war and particularly in the nineteen thirties to locate the private in the context of the public. The author openly admits her literary and political convictions and purposes in her novel Honourable Estate (1936): “If large areas of human experience – political, economic, social, religious – are to be labelled inadmissible as subjects for fiction, then fiction is doomed as organic art” (qtd. by Mellown 1983: 216). Muriel Mellown confirms Brittain’s beliefs in the tight connections between one’s private and public selves: “Brittain contended that a principal function of the novel is to reveal the impingement of public affairs on private lives” (Mellown 1983: 216). After the unexpected suffering caused by World War I, and given the dramatic economic and political situation in the west since the last years of the nineteen twenties and early thirties, like many other writers and intellectuals, Brittain believes it is no longer possible to dissociate the personal from the political. Private choices and literary initiatives must assume and meet public responsibilities. Though ambivalently received by critics, Testament of Youth became an immediate bestseller because of its significant difference from the autobiographical texts written by war poets. Brittain’s biographer, Deborah Gorham partly explains the aspects that distinguish Brittain’s text from other war autobiographies and provides some of the reasons for its immediate popularity: While the work of Blunden, Sassoon, Graves and similar writers is important because it replaced the language of traditional heroism with an ironic vision, it does not offer a coherent explanation for, or moral protest against, the war […] In contrast to the literature of the trenches, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth lacks the deft, understated irony that has become the hallmark of the best Great War literature. But it has something to offer that understated irony does not: namely a reasoned analysis of why the war happened and of how to prevent a future war.  (Gorham 1996: 233)

Though challenging within the genre of war autobiography as well as openly experimental within the conventions of the genre, Testament of Youth does not attempt the more radically modernist literary experiment in the writing of autobiography of the period. Though certainly concerned with the literary, Brittain is too affected by events to submit them to the unexplored paths of literary experimentation. As suggested by Gorham, Brittain’s autobiography wishes to understand “why the war happened”, and its effects on herself and

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others. In tracing her persona from her earliest memories all the way to 1933, Testament of Youth inaugurates an independent approach to the narrative of war. The war is the central event in her text, both in terms of space and of emotion, and the very interesting post war period she records derives directly from the war experience. Though not radically modernist in its literary experimentation, nevertheless Brittain does experiment with original ways of integrating the personal and the historical: of introducing and giving expression to the private spaces of her feelings and ideas, and imaginatively connecting them to the wider publicized and interpreted spaces of the political and military scenario. In spite of its limits, it is accurate to recognise that her text manages to achieve what Claire Tylee defines as “[the] enlarging [of] the landscape of the mind” (qtd. by Cohen 2001: 37), as well as “the deconstruction of a particular way of remembering and representing war by deploying a new arsenal of war imagery” (Cooke 1993: 200). Brittain was twenty one when the war broke out, and the description of her experience during the war and her response to it occupies the long, central part of her narrative. The early pages of the text devoted to the narrative of her happy, privileged childhood and early youth are presented as the background to the terrible events of 1914 as well as the point of departure to the dramatic personal, social and cultural changes imposed by the war. Also the last third part of her text, the pages covering the period between 1918 and 1933, pivots around the war and its consequences both in personal, professional and social terms. As we read in Testament of Youth, Brittain had always been deeply tied to her only brother Edward. In the summer of 1914 her brother, her brother’s intimate friend and Brittain’s lover, Roland Leighton, as well as all of their intimate friends, were students at Oxford with a promising future ahead of them. Brittain describes how they were all immediately to volunteer and eventually to die at different times and fronts during the war. Also the author had been accepted at Somerville College at Oxford in 1914, and also she decided to give up her education and join the war as a voluntary nurse, a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment). Brittain’s autobiographical persona narrates her wish to closely follow the British soldiers in their changing fighting scenarios. Her first training as a voluntary nurse takes place in Buxton and London hospitals where the war wounded are sent in from the French and Belgian fronts. Next she chooses to follow the troops abroad: initially for a year to Malta and immediately to the deadly western fronts of northern France. Profoundly attached to her lover Roland, her brother Edward and their close group of friends, she refuses to abandon them and decides to share their dangerous destiny by joining soldiers all the way to their deaths. As the war proceeds, hospitals move closer to the threatening fronts, and the author is forced to experience invasion (Brittain

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1988: 385–90), bombardments (Brittain 1988: 417–20) and is ultimately submitted to all kinds of war suffering. 2.1. The literary persona Within the limits of straightforward, realistic autobiography, one of the most interesting experiments Brittain introduces in her text is her decision to expand her literary persona. Far from limiting her text to the exclusive expression of her own personal experiences and intimate responses and ideas to events, the narrator manages to include a broad spectrum of opinions and points of view by always contrasting her persona’s own intense impressions and reactions to the increasingly dramatic events to those of others; those of her friends and family as well as to opinions and information stated by public figures and sometimes published in the media. In order to achieve her goal of providing voices other than her own and creating a richer and more complex narrative texture, the author also incorporates other people’s versions of events and situations by introducing quotations from texts, poems and occasionally even music fragments. As a result her testament of youth encompasses, besides her own, her whole generation’s reactions to war as well as that of many members of other generations involved in the tragedy and affected by it. She further completes her own ideas and perceptions with those of many others by quoting from letters sent and received in the present and the past; from conversations she accurately remembers, and often even from conversations she imagines. She also critically revises her own memories by rereading and quoting from the diary she kept until the end of the war as well as from the notes she wrote at the time. Testament of Youth is thus an autobiography written in permanent dialogue initially with the living as well as with the dead, and eventually also with her persona’s past self. All these voices provide complementary as well as contradictory information, and allow for a constant critical contrast to her present individual memories and feelings. In terms of her literary persona, her narrator becomes a tentative self composed of many fragments; an aspiring narrator sharing the difficult responsibility of describing the many aspects of the conflict, simultaneously caught in the complex process of trying to articulate a consistent autobiographical whole. The extended persona capable of incorporating many dissonant voices, positions and responses to the war also allows the author to experiment with original ways of integrating the personal and the historical: the wider publicized and interpreted spaces of the political and military scenario and her intimate, personal responses to the event as well as those of her closest family and friends. It enables the narrator to locate the hidden spaces of intimacy in the well-known context of public spaces, so that though events are presented in

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relation to the narrator’s experiences and personal interpretation, they remain interesting historical testimonies. These precarious balances can be seen to be adequately controlled by the author in the distance she manages to establish between herself and the intense emotion of some of the most dramatic events she is forced to experience. Her efficiency is proved, for example, when the persona faces one of the most difficult narrative moments in the text, that of having to narrate her character’s reaction to intimate loss at the news of her lover Roland Leighton’s death at the front. Though devastated by the event, the narrator is prevented from invading the narrative moment with her own excess of feeling. In following what could be described as the language of film, the narrator is made to completely deconstruct her intense emotional response to the tragedy by projecting it from the writer’s present. Her reactions to her lover’s death are reported by introducing a series of disconnected images irrelevant to the tragic fact of Roland’s death, a series of scenes which evoke and contemplate from the distance of time and space a number of isolated memories of a character belonging to the past, located in a devastated scenario. The event is thus efficiently referred to from the perspective of a detached observer: Whenever I think of the weeks that followed the news of Roland’s death, a series of pictures, disconnected but crystal clear, unroll themselves, like a kaleidoscope through my mind. A solitary cup of coffee stands before me on a hotel breakfast table; I try to drink it but fail ignominiously. Outside, in front of the promenade, dismal grey waves tumble angrily over one another […] In an omnibus going to Keymer, I look fixedly at the sky […] At Keymer a fierce gale is blowing and I am out alone […] It is late afternoon; at the organ of the small village church, Edward is improvising a haunting memorial hymn for Roland […] I am back on night duty at Camberwell after my leave […]  (Brittain 1988: 239–41)

2.2. Forbidden territories Perhaps Brittain’s most interesting accomplishment in her war text is her daring invasion of narrative space both physical and metaphorical. Her account of the war years is truly absorbing in that it includes her narrator’s description of both the front and the home front. This ubiquity enables her to transcend accepted notions of war space both for combatants and non-combatants and provides her with a new authority. Not only is Brittain very near the fronts most of the time, but indeed her narrator dares to enter forbidden metaphorical territory in dealing with the deepest and mostly unanswered questions both men and

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women faced in their need to come to terms with the conflict. She looks into the most intricately dangerous mental and physical spaces of war, and tackles the most upsetting personal and public matters. She discusses patriotism, heroism, the enemy, and the possible meanings of life and death. She further dares to give expression to some of the most disturbing questions raised by the war: Freely quoting from one of the letters she had sent to her lover Roland Leighton shortly before his tragic death at the Belgian front in 1915, the narrator asks: Is it really all for nothing – for an empty name – an ideal? […] Will the issue not be worth one of the lives that have been sacrificed for it? Or did we need this gigantic catastrophe to wake up all that was dead within us? [...] In the light of all you have seen, tell me what you think […] Surely, surely it is a worthy idea - to fight that you may save your country’s freedom from falling into the hands of this terrible and ruthless foe. It is awful to think that the very progress of civilization has made this war what it is […] Just to think that we have got to the stage of motors, aeroplanes, telephones […] and yet have not passed the stage of killing one another […]  (Brittain 1988: 116)

Such reflections are later passionately and intensely contradicted, and though harshly denouncing the perverse reasons that triggered the conflict, and critically claiming her generation’s excessive innocence, the narrator recognises the greatness involved in the tragic sacrifice: Between 1914 and 1918 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually rededicating themselves – as I did […] – to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. When patriotism wore threadbare, when suspicion and doubt began to creep in, the more ardent and frequent was the periodic re-dedication, the more deliberate the self-induced conviction that our efforts were disinterested and our cause was just. Undoubtedly this state of mind was what anti-war propagandists call it – hysterical exaltation, quasimystical, idealistic hysteria – but it had concrete results in stupendous patience, in superhuman endurance, in the constant re-affirmation of incredible courage. To refuse to acknowledge this is to underrate the power of those white angels which fight so naïvely on the side of destruction.  (Brittain 1988: 370)

The feeling of total desolation takes hold of her very early in time and she cannot avoid referring to her perplexity when writing from the first hospital in which she trains as a nurse: “This war means such a waste of life even when people don’t die” (Brittain 1988: 220). Yet, from the perspective of the present in which she writes, she needs to evoke the intrinsic contradictions raised by the war. Though war is far more deathly and tragic than one can imagine, the narrator recognises it also as a source of extraordinary vitality: “France was the scene of titanic, illimitable

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death, and for this very reason it had become the heart of the fiercest living ever known to any generation” (Brittain 1988: 372). Brittain has her persona profoundly reject war but she also forces her to assume the enormous energy it raises: Looking back upon the psychological processes of us who were very young sixteen years ago, it seems to me that […] our task is infinitely complicated by the fact that war, while it lasts, does produce heroism to a far greater extent than it brutalises.  (Brittain 1988: 370)

Another ambiguous and slippery edge of war Brittain forces her persona to penetrate can be seen in her response to the sympathy felt by many soldiers towards the enemy. Paul Fussell reveals this profound ambivalence as reflected by many soldier-poets, perhaps expressed most famously by Wilfried Owen in his well known poem “Strange Meeting” (1918), where the poet imagines a haunted unexpected meeting between the ghosts of dead soldiers of both fighting sides. The poem’s last line, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”, becomes the ultimate recognition of the essentially tragic destiny common to soldiers on both sides in being forced to take part in an increasingly irrational fight and in having to destroy an unknown enemy. Owen summarizes the feeling which was to have devastating psychological effects on soldiers. As the war dragged on for months and years, the anxiety that the real enemy was not the soldier at the other side of the trenches, but the war itself and those who supported it, can be increasingly recognised in much front war writing. As a nurse working in field hospitals located close to the western fronts, Brittain’s narrator also goes through the terrible struggle of having to nurse wounded German soldiers-prisoners; of perhaps having to look after the very men responsible for the deaths of her lover and friends. As did many soldierpoets, she also wrote about the intimate conflicts produced by the experience. When a very badly wounded Prussian soldier thanks the narrator for her help, she is faced with the complexity of the situation: [He] held out an emaciated hand to me […] After barely a second’s hesitation I took the pale fingers in mine, thinking how ridiculous it was that I should be holding this man’s hand in friendship when, perhaps a week or two earlier, Edward, up at Ypres had been doing his best to kill him. The world was mad and we were all victims […] These shattered, dying boys and I were paying alike for a situation that none of us had desired or done anything to bring about.  (Brittain 1988: 376)

The narrator identifies with the problems and ambivalences of Allied soldiers at this stage of the war, and the similarity of her feelings and responses to the

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matter are confirmed in her quotation from the letter her brother writes to her at the time: “‘It is very strange that you should be nursing Hun prisoners,’ wrote Edward from the uproar in the Salient, ‘and it does show how absurd the whole thing is’” (Brittain 1988: 377). Brittain’s persona has all the details about a war simultaneously fought in geographies widely distant from one another. She provides information about war in the Mediterranean while working as a V.A.D. in a war hospital at Malta, and in the last stages of the war she knows exactly what is going on in the Italian front because her brother writes to her uninterruptedly from his position in Italy until his death in 1918. As is the case with soldier-poets and writers Brittain’s narrator is very capable of communicating the anguish of their bombarded field hospital on March 22, 1918, when she confesses: I shall never forget the crushing tension of those extreme days. Nothing had quite equalled them before – not the Somme, not Arras, not Passchendaele – for into our minds had crept for the first time the secret, incredible fear that we might lose the War.  (Brittain 1988: 411)

She also has significant personal impressions to communicate about people’s reactions to events at home. Not only does the narrator receive and quote their letters constantly but she also visits them from time to time and knows exactly how they live, what they do, what they eat and don’t eat; what they think and feel. Her uncle, working in the war administration, becomes the source of inside administrative and political information otherwise inaccessible, and his letters, abundantly quoted in the text allow the persona to be aware of the many government tensions and crises taking place in England during the war. Her uncle also writes to her in 1916 about Lloyd George’s abilities and the amount of hope his new Government raises (Brittain 1988: 315), and has interesting remarks to make about controversial politicians and military commanders, in particular of Commander Douglas Haig (Brittain 1988: 420). The text provides opinions significantly in agreement with those proposed in some of the latest contemporary studies on his performance as war commander: “Although […] the publication of official revelations has stripped from the Haig myth much of its glory, I have never been able to visualise Lord Haig as the colossal blunderer […] of the Somme massacre of 1916” (Brittain 1988: 420). Though often critical of militarism and ambivalent about patriotism, as the first glimpses of hope begin to be recognised her attitude towards patriotism and the war seems to also change. In November of 1917, in the devastated spaces of what was by then an endless and aimless conflict, she contemplates for the first time with new hope the newly arrived American troops. Brave and

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capable American soldiers and “triumphant battle” are visualised in all their military glory: They looked larger that ordinary men […] so god-like, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army […] the old armies reinforced by the exultant, inexhaustible Americans […] [in] the growing crescendo of triumphant battle […]  (Brittain 1988: 421, 459)

Brittain has her persona remember the tensions, moods and emotions of the dangerous last months of war. She evokes the enormous impact upon “All ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders”, to whom it was addressed, of Haig’s Special Order of April 11, 1918, when the German offensive seemed to be at its worst. She reproduces in her text the dramatic order sent to them by Commander Haig to hold out and if necessary, to die: There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end […]  (Brittain 1988: 419)

Her patriotism, questioned in the previous pages of the text, prevails at this hugely dramatic moment, and is reinforced in the last stages of the war with the perspective of victory. In a key scene in the text, the narrator is finally made to come to terms with her country and tradition when the royal family visits the hospital she is working in. 2.3. Personal Loss In one of its most interesting aspects, Brittain’s text offers an unusual and very precise analysis of the gradual destruction of her own pre-war self as well as of that of her lover’s, her brother’s and her friends during the war. Though they had shared their lives in the past, at this stage the narrator records the gradual distances emerging from the differing experiences that drive them inevitably apart. If she and her peers have ceased to share the most determining experiences of the present, she also realises that the values commonly held in the past are no longer sustainable in the context of the extraordinary subversions and contradictions of war and of the unexpected feelings, thoughts and emotions it brought about. The new tentative persona she works out in her text is profoundly affected by what she experiences as well as by her long and difficult argument with trying to come to terms with it, with her effort at trying to understand how war has changed not only herself, but her family and friends, her lover as well as the world. She dares to look into the darkest corners of war culture

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in dealing with the threatening distance the war establishes between men and women, with the increasing tensions it creates between them and between their different ways of understanding and interpreting the experience of war. The widening gap she acknowledges between herself, her family and her friends – between herself and her lover, her brother and her intimate friends – leads to her tragic awareness of the increasing misunderstanding between those at the front and those left behind. Having ceased to share the dramatic events of war and not being able to easily communicate their reactions and responses to them, their psychological distance gradually widens. Again in a letter to Rowland she gives expression to such uncertainties: The War, I began to feel, was dividing us as I had so long feared that it would, making real values seem unreal, and causing the qualities which mattered most to appear unimportant […] I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again […]  (Brittain 1988: 215)

There is but scarce consolation for such feelings of tragic distance and isolation, of experiences bound to have determining personal consequences which cannot be shared with those with whom one has always been in permanent dialogue. The narrator’s brother, Edward, also recognises the unbridgeable distance between them and in one of his many letters suggests that the only possible consolation to it lies in clinging to the memory of the past: “[…] you find me changed, I expect, more than I find you; that is perhaps the way of Life. But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world and the sun of that memory never sets” (Brittain 1988: 361). 3. Back to Peace Brittain’s long text of 668 tight pages in its 1988 Virago edition covers not only the war years and the years of her childhood and early youth previous to the outbreak of war, but also those after Armistice until 1933. Testament of Youth is thus not exclusively a war text but a post-war memoir as well, and this second part also shows some of its limitations. This third part is initially triggered by the narrator’s wish to describe the difficulties the generation of war survivors were forced to face in their realisation of how profoundly war had determined their future: I resembled many other contemporaries who were at last recovering from the numbing shocks of the wartime years; our hopefulness was due to a belief that the War was really over, and to a failure as yet to understand completely how deep-rooted and far-reaching its ultimate consequences must be.  (Brittain 1988: 537)

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If the war had hugely broadened Brittain’s spatial scenario, the author encounters important difficulties in her wish to expand and psychologically grow both personally and artistically in times of peace. Her exploration of new spaces in the years immediately after the war is presented as full of contradictions, and the much expected new and rewarding spaces of peace seem increasingly difficult to find. At this stage her search for possible spaces of survival is dominated by her personal conflicts and sorrows. Though the narrator returns to the life she had left in 1914, the spaces she reencounters are now radically transformed. Indeed her next immediate move after demobilisation in 1920 is to return to Oxford, but the changing world imposes new trials as well as further rites of passage upon her and her generation. The best choices seem unclear to her. Brittain has her narrator invade three post-war spaces in the pages of her testament: her first steps take her back to the spaces of the past and to the necessary effort in the recovery of its memory so as to be able to understand and accept the tragedy of war, of personal loss as well as the extraordinary social change imposed after the war. Secondly, the author moves in the direction of choosing to accomplish a radical change of class, and finally, she decides to penetrate the realm of feminism as well as of pacifism, and devotes her whole energy to such attempts. 3.1. Spaces of the past As an Oxford student suddenly submerged in a world populated by the post-war generation, the narrator very soon needs to tread the most difficult territory for the war generation: the need to merge in an environment no longer interested in their suffering. This state of affairs has a profound effect on the narrator who very soon collapses with depression. It takes some time before she can come to terms with the apparent and generalised lack of concern with the war as soon as it was over. Her generation’s eventual reaction to the new lack of response and respect for the past is to be “ashamed of war” (Brittain 1988: 510) and it takes some time for them to get over the feeling. The narrator projects her own depression and neurosis (Brittain 1988: 511) in the face of the general decision to forget and move on to a profoundly changed post-war scenario. Her reaction at the overwhelming refusal on the part of survivors and of the younger generations to glance backward becomes increasingly painful and particularly unacceptable in view of the silent official agreement that the war generation must accept and survive the terrible suffering on its own. It takes the narrator a long time to learn to live in a changed world no longer inhabited by her beloved peers and in which the culture she shared with them has all but disappeared. They must face the loss of a solid post war community.

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In view of this the narrator gradually realises that the first and most important space to be recovered by her and her generation of war survivors, their greatest responsibility, is the recovery of the past by means of memory. The disappeared spaces of the past must be brought back to memory, assumed and given new sense, and she must make sure its hopes, its extraordinary effort and its overwhelming suffering are not obliterated in a new world adamant about forgetting. In personal terms, the initial stages of this recovery take her to Italy and France to find the tombs of her brother, of her lover and of her other dead friends. It also stimulates her to get in touch with as many of their surviving comrades as can be found, and to gather as much information as possible about their deaths. This approach to the physical context of their individual tragedies aims at establishing the first necessary mental structures of sense and understanding capable of articulating and explaining their heroism as well as of leaving a true record of their individual tragic destinies (Brittain 1988: 524–34). The awareness of this need to remember, to never forget the past, no matter how painful, mistaken and incomprehensible it may have been, becomes one of the reasons and sources of her autobiographical narrative, Testament of Youth. 3.2. From Literature to History The war radically determines the narrator’s return to peace and the importance of remembering is provided also as the source for her decision to reorient her studies. Back in Oxford in 1920, the narrator gives up her previous choice of studying for a degree in Literature, very successfully initiated by her just before the war, and chooses to take History instead. The change is extremely significant given her lack of preparation in historical studies and her awareness of the many difficulties that lie ahead. Yet it responds to her priority in devoting her life to the understanding of the true reasons that led to World War I, as well as to her priority in the urgent need to work in the prevention of a new conflict: It’s my job, now, to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening to other people in the days to come. Perhaps the careful study of man’s past will explain to me much that seems inexplicable in this disconcerting present. Perhaps the means of salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.  (Brittain 1988: 471)

In “Oh, What a Literary War”, one of the most inspired chapters in Paul Fussell’s famous book, The Great War and Modern Memory, the author argues that the First World War was so intensely written about because in 1914 literature was still very much the dominant art and entertainment for a broad section of the British population. Indeed, Brittain’s persona, as well as her brother, her lover

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and friends, are all already great readers and aspirant writers before the war. According to Brittain’s text, the narrator’s early decision to study Literature in Oxford before the war had been inspired by the passion her generation had felt towards the great tradition of literature in English, and had responded to her own strong literary inclination shared by her brother, her lover and her friends. After the war, though Brittain’s persona chooses to become a writer, she renounces literary creation as her main target at a time in which literature had become radically experimental. Like much of the writing of the nineteen thirties, her work, even her fiction, profoundly concerned with the historical and political, does not abandon the tradition of realism. In such terms Brittain chooses a form of writing indebted to the past over the more challenging modernist writing. 3.3. The intellectual class In the case of Brittain the choice of a literary career was at the same time profoundly related with issues of class. Her early acknowledged passion for the life of the intellect and for literature in particular had originated already in her childhood and had become the source of her early rejection of the industrial and merchant upper-middle class she was born into and of her choice of a new class, that of the intellectual and the writer. Intellectual life was already prestigious for its inclination to favour liberal change, and after the war, at a time of great social and political uncertainty it was widely supported and promoted. The narrator is consistent throughout her war testament in showing her awareness of the limitations attached to the class into which she had been born, and in emphasizing her early unquestionable wish to become a member of a broader intellectual class. Yet the argument she provides to justify her desire to change class and her attitudes towards the class she aims to join is often questionable, if not at times openly uncritical. The first time she attends a lecture in Oxford on a visit previous to her enrolment, she refers to the city as an “Earthly Paradise […]. I had some excuse for thinking that I had strayed by accident into the most exclusive circle of a celestial hierarchy” (Brittain 1988: 64). Later in her story, when working as a nurse at the western front in 1916, the narrator receives a letter from her previous English tutor and feels excessively comforted by it: For it represented a link with the world once so rapturously chosen and now incredibly remote – the world of intellectual experiment, of youthful hope, of all the profound and lovely things that belong to the kingdom of the mind.  (Brittain 1988: 246)

The description provided in the text of the heroine’s romance with Roland

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before the war also seems to respond to her passion for the literary and to originate almost exclusively in their shared interest for certain authors and texts. One of them is Olive Schreiner, for example. Literature is not only an inclination and an interest they share but it is turned into the basis of their mutual understanding and love. As the narrator candidly admits, rather than in their intimate attraction their love seems to emerge from their common readings and find reason and support in their mutual purpose to become writers: “Months of intimate correspondence had bound us together, and yet between us was this physical barrier of the too conscious, too sensitive flesh” (Brittain 1988: 114). One of the aspects of Roland’s life the narrator most values is significantly the fact that both his father and mother are writers. The first time she sees his mother, the persona is allowed to be carried away by a process of indiscriminate idealization in describing her appearance to the narrator’s “rapturous eyes as the individual embodiment of that distant Eldorado, the world of letters” (Brittain 1988: 115). The processes leading to the narrator’s change of class and the systematic steps she takes towards becoming an intellectual and a writer are indeed accomplished by 1933. According to her biographer, before the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933, the author “had built herself a solid career […] as a journalist, as a lecturer, as a writer of non-fiction and even as a novelist” (Gorham 1996: 187). Yet Brittain’s chosen change of class is seen to have been more difficult and contradictory than it is made to seem in her autobiography. In her study Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War, Sharon Ouditt offers critical remarks on the subject of Brittain’s attitudes to class as expressed by her heroine in Testament of Youth. Ouditt traces the presence of some of the less attractive forms of upper-class snobbery in Brittain’s text and denounces a sense of privileged distance on the part of the narrator on several occasions. For example, her unquestioned dismissal of the idea of working as a professional nurse after the war, something less affluent women were forced to do if they wished to pursue professional independence, as well the reasons she provides for her decision to become an intellectual and a writer, somehow question the validity of her choice. 3.4. Old versus new ethics According to Ouditt, these uncertainties become very relevant in evaluating Brittain’s discussion of the moral responsibilities assumed in the writing of Testament of Youth, an issue of the greatest relevance given the serious moral complexities raised by the war. Again Ouditt critically comments on the author’s

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notions of morality as expressed by her narrator in the text, and defines them as old-fashioned: “There is a puritan reserve that seems to belong […] to the generation of a Dorothea Brooke” (Ouditt 1994: 33). Brittain does indeed seem to leave important new ethical realms unexplored in her text. Indeed throughout the text the narrator herself openly proposes her moral notions of responsibility as directly connected to the nineteenth century, and specifically to George Eliot. In fact, Eliot’s moral imagination, in particularly as dramatised in Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt, the Radical, becomes the ethical reference of Brittain’s autobiography of 1933. Yet Eliot’s vision inevitably corresponds to a world of the past, a world in which the Great War was still unimaginable, and Eliot’s attitudes cannot possibly be made to wholly account for the moral tensions and contradictions raised by the conflict. The intellectual and, as a consequence, the moral revolution at the turn of the century is perhaps too radical to be understood in terms of the past. In that sense, though Brittain chooses and undertakes an apparent change of class in rejecting the ways of the English upper-middle class at the turn of the century, the many issues her autobiography leaves unquestioned and unanswered point towards her moral uncertainties. The ethical dimension of some key cultural questions at the time, ambivalent to her and particularly difficult to handle because of the profound revisions they were being submitted to, she omits from her text. This she does, for example, in the presentation of the narrator’s mother as denounced by Ouditt. The text does not face the narrator’s need to assume her necessarily contradictory feelings towards her mother whose kind of life she obviously rejects but whom she simultaneously dearly loves. Also the narrator’s representation of sexuality remains uncertain: sometimes suggested but always treated from a distance. Also patriotism, though questioned in specific moments in the text, remains in the end unambiguously accepted and supported. These issues that other contemporary writers dared to question to their final consequences remain ultimately unexplored and undefined in Brittain’s testament. Though her autobiographical text is in many ways very daring, I believe it is not unfair to say that Brittain does not propose the profound revision both in understanding and in the reinterpretation of moral spaces which had began to take place at the turn of the century and most dramatically after the Great War. Only a few writers of fiction started to imaginatively experiment in the dramatisation of such radical changes. Virginia Woolf for instance, dared to assume the greater intellectual and literary risks in penetrating all the way into the dangerous psychological spaces of patriotism, motherhood or women’s cultural revisions. Woolf was not only devastated and outraged by the war but was further to take to its most dramatic consequences the investigation of the war’s deathly effects upon the old self: in the case of Septimus Smith, for example,

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but also in defining the creative dimensions which emerge from the destruction of old spaces and their values. Thus she proposes a rediscovery of unknown female realms in Mrs. Dalloway’s discourse, or of a newly born Persephone-like heroine in Lily Briscoe’s search of a truly feminine cultural, moral and artistic scenario. Perhaps these differences respond to those between history and imagination, between reportage and fiction, between realism and modernism. 3.5. Feminism and pacifism This is certainly not to negate the value of Brittain’s defence of feminist spaces in Testament of Youth, the third realm she aims at recovering, but to establish its limits. The narrator projects herself in her testament as working very hard and very efficiently in favour of peace and of women’s rights since the war. Indeed the author belonged, for example, to the first generation of women students to be granted an Oxford degree, and it was, according to her text, the result of a long and hard battle in which she also played a considerable role (Brittain 1933: 504). Brittain’s political efforts in favour of women and peace were acknowledged in 1982 by Carolyn Heilbrun: It is too concise but not inaccurate to say that she devoted her life to a redefinition of women and peace. Looking about us today, we cannot claim that she was successful in either struggle. But struggles interest us less for their success than for their purpose and meaning.” (Heilbrun 1992: 40)

Again Ouditt suggests the author’s ambivalences also in the realm of feminism, and she denounces a prevailing rhetoric of “glamorous submission”, a “sense of devaluation” in her vision of herself in relation to men. Brittain’s interiorised attitudes of “submission” and “self-devaluation” may perhaps be related to the devotion and idealisation the author felt for her brother, perhaps exaggerated by his tragic death in 1918. Brothers played a relevant role in determining their sister’s lives until the war. Angela Woollacott summarises the codes dominating social relations between brothers and sisters before the Great War and their sudden subversion after the conflict: When a brother (in the middle class) went off to school, to university, to the City, or to India, the sister’s life was enhanced through vicarious access to and knowledge of the public world. But waving them to war was entirely different […] War threatened not only the loss of a brother but the loss of mediated access to public events and, therefore, a reduced world.  (Woollacott 1993: 137)

The crisis in the social codes dominating brother/sister relations begins to be questioned with the war and some writers provide remarkable revisions of this issue: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s war short story, “A Love Match”, for example,

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suggests a subversive alternative to the traditional relations between brothers and sisters. In Warner’s story, a brother and sister devastated by the war find peace and survival in mutual incestuous love. But again Woolf ’s work, as discussed by Marion Shaw in her 1997 article, “‘Alien Experiences’: Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain in the Thirties”, is placed at the centre of the literary revision of brother/sister relationship as a consequence of the Great War. The issue is of course of great significance in the understanding of Woolf ’s feminism. In relation to Brittain, Shaw suggests that the author’s representation of her heroine’s position as a sister is also meaningful of the author’s often contradictory notions of feminism: [Brittain’s] emphasis on the difference between women and men […] is at the heart of conflicting emotions in Testament of Youth where […] though war is lamented, the virility and romance of men going to war is acknowledged as a proper masculinity.  (Shaw 1997: 48)

Brittain’s testament confirms Sandra Gilbert’s theory in her definition of the effects of war and of post-war upon women (Gilbert 1982). In fact, though Brittain’s experience of war managed to penetrate new and very important cultural spaces for women, her spatial expansion was indeed interrupted in the post-war scenario. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the novels she wrote immediately after the war proves her anxieties. Yet there are two important initiatives deserving attention introduced in the last part of Brittain’s Testament of Youth which nevertheless confirm her post-war expansive intentions. The first was her daring, unusual and open friendship with another woman, author Winifred Holtby, and the second was her also unprecedented and agreed upon experimental marriage arrangement. Again in Heilbrun’s terms: She has not only offered us one of the rare accounts of women’s friendship; she has also here described her refusal to live by any of the accepted scripts for women’s lives.  (Heilbrun 1982: 41)

Having met at Oxford in 1920, their interest in literature and their common wish to become writers drew them initially together, and eventually they both continued to write and work in the newly created League of Nations. Though the complexities of their relationship have been amply discussed, it is important to remember that their close friendship lasted until Holtby’s relatively early death in 1935. Even after Brittain married G.E.G. Caitlin in 1925, Holtby shared their life and their home most of the time. As she had done with her war experience in Testament of Youth and though Holtby is also permanently present in the last third of her first autobiography, Brittain devoted a new autobiographical text, Testament of Friendship (1940), to the memory of their extraordinary friendship.

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Brittain’s concern with the expansion of women’s experience can also be recognised in her attempt at trying to work out a married relationship very different from traditional ones. As opposed to most modernist experimental heroines, Lily Briscoe for example, and many later feminist heroines, who were made by their authors to refuse marriage and remain alone, Brittain proposes a persona who, like herself, does marry and decides to have children but who tries to find a way of avoiding the traditional limitations imposed upon women in marriage. Again Heilbrun points to the importance of her decisions: Frank about desire, they (Brittain and Holtby) were analytic about marriage. Between marriage and desire women have doomed themselves, as Brittain knew, to domesticity and marginality […] [Brittain] married, but without forgetting or denying that she knew marriage to be death for women as individuals.  (Heilbrun 1992: 42–43)

4. Conclusion Beyond its limitations, Brittain’s text, Testament of Youth, should be read as an important literary effort in trying to penetrate and articulate in coherent terms, from the perspective of the author’s own time and social space, what can perhaps be defined as one of the most unexpected and tragic events in western history. Her testimony manages to achieve a great deal in bravely describing and interpreting some of the more complex realms of war, and after war. The greatest challenge she meets in writing her text is that of finding the adequate language in which to narrate her experiences of the war as well as of its dramatic effects to her generation, and in many ways her achievements were truly groundbreaking. The huge difficulties she faces in transforming and reinventing the genre of autobiography in order to meet her purposes can be recognised in her constant references to other writers from the present and the past. One example might best illustrate her anxieties. In one of the many difficult and painful moments of her narrative, Brittain’s persona remembers the poet Rupert Brooke’s powerful early war sonnets and defines the poems as “unhackneyed, courageous, and almost shattering in their passionate, relevant idealism” (Brittain 1933: 155). With Brooke’s early death at the front, and with the disappearance of so many promising poets and writers, she is left without models in the writing of the late war and post-war, and she confesses her literary uncertainties in the question she immediately raises: “How would Rupert Brooke have written, I wonder, had he lived until 1933? Had he lived to the ‘grey and tragic present?’ ” (Brittain 1933: 155). Brittain’s testament aims precisely at answering this question. Testament of Youth is her attempt at refusing to forget the “shatteringly passionate and relevant idealism” of the past and of coming to terms with “the grey and tragic present”.

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Brittan, Vera. [1933] 1988. Testament of Youth. London: Virago.  . [1940] 1981. Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtby. London: Fontana. Bishop, Alan (ed.). 1981. Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary, 1913–1917. London: Victor Gollancz. Cohen, Debra Rae. 2001. ‘Encoded Enclosures: the Wartime Novels of Stella Benson’ in Quinn, Patrick J. and Steven Trout (eds) The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. London: Palgrave: 159–72. Coiner, Constance. 1995. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Seuer. New York: Oxford University Press. Cooke, Miriam. 1993. ‘Wo-Man, Retelling the War Myth’ in Cooke, Miriam and Angela Woollacott (eds) Gendering War Talk. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 177–205. Cooper, Helen, Adrienne Munich and Susan Squier. 1989. ‘Arms and the Woman. The Con[tra]caption of the War Text’ in Cooper, Helen, Adrienne Munich and Susan Squier (eds) Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 9–25. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, Sandra M. 1983. ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’ in Signs 8 (3): 282–309. Gorham, Deborah. Vera. 1996. Brittain: A Feminist Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1992. ‘Vera Brittain’s Testament of Experience’ in Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women: Feminist Essays in Literature. London: The Women’s Press: 38–50. Higonnet, Margaret. 1993. ‘Women in the Forbidden Zone’ in Goodwin, Sarah and Elisabeth Bronfen (eds) Death and Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.  . 1994. ‘Cassandra’s Question: Do Women Write War Novels?’ in Higonnet, Margaret (ed.) Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 144–62. Mellown, Muriel. 1983. ‘Reflections on Feminism and Pacifism in the Novels of Vera Brittain’ in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2 (2): 215–28. Ouditt, Sharon. 1994. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. London: Routledge. Owen, Wilfred. [1918] 1986. ‘Strange Meeting’ in Hibberd, Dominic and John Onions (eds) Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology. London: MacMillan: 165. Quinn, Patrick J. and Steven Trout (eds). 2001. The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. London: Palgrave. Shaw, Marion. 1997. ‘ “Alien Experiences”: Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain in the Thirties’ in Williams, Keith and Steven Matthews (eds) Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After. London: Longman: 37–53. Woollacott, Angela. 1993. ‘Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gendering in World War I Britain’ in Cooke (1993): 128–48.

Transformations in Nature

Friends of our Captivity: Nature, Terror and Refugia in Romantic Women’s Literature Stephen E. Hunt abstract This essay explores the way that four Romantic women writers confronted perilous situations involving physical captivity, personal trauma and depression through engagement with the natural world. Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith accompanied their husbands in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison. Helen Maria Williams was held captive in the Luxembourg Prison in Robespierre’s France. Mary Wollstonecraft also experienced and survived the Paris of the Terror but suffered protracted depression that culminated in two suicide attempts in the years that followed. Resilience, derived from engagement with the natural world and transformed by the literary imagination, helped these writers to cope with intensely threatening and disempowering spaces. Robinson, Smith and Williams in particular reiterate their desire for shared experience of the natural world. Such writings provide a counterpoint to more familiar Rousseauan and Wordsworthian evocations of the natural world, often predicated on the masculine convention of the solitary wanderer. For example, a letter by Charlotte Smith fondly embraces the reassuring familiarity of the countryside and reunion with her family in a single conceit. While such a gendered distinction between the mutual and the solitary appreciation of nature is complicated by Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical essays, these also strive to open up imaginative space for recuperation by negotiating the border between the natural and cultural. Keywords: Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Romanticism, French Revolution, natural environment, resilience, prison, well-being.

This chapter explores the depiction of “natural” spaces in adverse situations in selected late-eighteenth century writings. In the excerpts that follow, by Mary Robinson (1758–1800), Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), contemplation of the natural environment and attention to non-human species become intimately connected with ideas concerning human well-being, improvement and consolation. To

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step out into the English countryside or the woods surrounding Paris during the Terror was to distance themselves from the intense personal and political turmoil of their lives and times, yet also to inspire writings that step into central debates about sensibility and rationalism. In canonical masculine texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, solitary encounters with the natural world have come to define a central theme in the Romantic tradition. At the same time less attention has been paid to appreciation of scenery and feeling for other species in Romantic women’s literature. Here, however, the argument is developed that Romantic women’s writing also offers glimpses of ways in which nature sympathy opens up mental and physical space for resilience and recuperation in circumstances of extreme distress and peril. Robinson, Smith and Williams all endured physical imprisonment and found that natural imagery provided a regenerative power, sustaining the literary imagination. A development from sensibility to a more complex and uneasy engagement with the natural environment can be traced in Wollstonecraft’s later writings such as A Short Residence, written following a suicide attempt. The eighteenth century’s close is characterised by internecine European war, embittered class conflict accompanying the process of industrialisation and countless narratives of individual hardship. In such circumstances the sentimentalised bucolic idyll represented a popular imaginative space, a cherished image of settled tranquillity, contrary to personal and political upheaval. Marie Antoinette’s retreat at the “petit hameau”, Trianon, epitomised such an idyll. Here she would dress up as a faux shepherdess, away from court gossip and the recriminations of an increasingly hostile population. For her detractors Marie Antoinette’s behaviour became synonymous with frivolity and scandal. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, however, Edmund Burke defended her fortitude of character: “she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of all her friends [...] with a serene patience” and “the dignity of a Roman matron” (Burke [1790] 1968: 169). This sharply contrasted with the violation of rural space when the “horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell [...] of the vilest of women” occurred during the march from Paris to the Royal estate in the countryside at Versailles (Burke [1790] 1968: 165). Despite its proximity beyond the city’s central quartiers, the gardens of courtly Versailles are geographically distinct from metropolitan Paris; to tread upon them was to violently break decorum. Among the many ripostes to the Reflections, Mary Wollstonecraft deftly reversed the polarity of Burke’s rhetoric urging him, “after reviewing this gust of passion, learn to respect the sovereignty of reason” in the Vindication of the Rights of Men and

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defended urban working women deprived of the “advantages of education” in the ancien régime (Wollstonecraft [1790] 1994: 26, 29). Instances such as Marie Antoinette’s escape to the rigorously sanitised “petit hameau” while the real rural poor suffered longstanding deprivation make it easy to caricature pastoral idealisation as sentimental detachment from harsh social and political realities. However, in what follows a more complex relationship between romantic sensibility and the countryside is apparent in the writings of other incarcerated women. The confines of a prison cell may seem an unexpected and unpromising point of departure for a discussion about engagement with the natural world. However, while the home and its warm flickering heart the hearth, were frequently sanctified as harmonious feminine space, in reality the domestic sphere was often an insecure retreat from social upheaval. Among prominent Romantic women writers, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith both spent several months accompanying their husbands in the debtors’ prison, while Helen Maria Williams was taken from her home and detained in captivity in France. Mary Robinson (and young daughter, Maria) accompanied her husband Thomas Robinson to the King’s Bench prison in 1775 where the family remained for more than nine months (Robinson [1801] 1930: 90). In “Captivity” (1777) Mary Robinson addressed lines to the personified “Tranquillity”: Permit me, gentle maid, with thee to rove O’er the wide heath, or in the woodbine grove, Or to the hospitable cottage, free To ample Virtue’s pure society, Where innate Goodness, unadorn’d by Art, At once expands, and dignifies the heart; Where rural Mirth, and Health go hand in hand, And joys extatic cheer the rustic band. (lines 211–18)

By writing such poetry Robinson was able to imaginatively reach out to a space where she was not only liberated from confinement in prison but could escape the demands of social recognition. Such a conceit of rustic liberty is familiar in neo-pastoral verse, a commonplace instance of what Raymond Williams termed the “appeal to simplicity” (Williams 1973: 74). These lines, however, are not a landowning gentleman’s privileged tribute to an idealised rural acreage but an imprisoned woman’s attempt to preserve her mental well-being in a struggle for life and dignity. The King’s Bench prison was known for its filth and squalor, overcrowding and typhus. Poet and playwright Maria Barrell (fl. 1788–90) who

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spent five years there, refers to witnessing “scenes of sorrow almost incredible” in The Captive (1790) (Todd 1987: 40). Such conditions would have doubled the sense of felicity in imagining the possibilities of roving “far from the town”: Grant me, indulgent Heaven, a small retreat, Not idly gay, but elegantly neat; Free of access for ever be the door, To the benevolent, and friendless poor; Far from the town, in some secluded shade, For blooming Health, and Meditation made; There would I rove amid the sweets of spring, And hear the feather’d choir exulting sing, To view each varied scene, and sweets exhale Which breathe in every flow’r, in every gale, Where Nature opes the vegetable scene, And plenteous fields display a vivid green ..................................................................... Thus let me live, bless’d with a social friend, In whom good humour and affection blend: For joys like these, from giddy scenes I’d fly, To live unenvied, and unknown to die. (Robinson 1777: lines 227–44)

Ironically the demands of fame were shortly to become particularly exacting given Robinson’s public affair with the young Prince of Wales (later George IV). This was prompted by her stage appearance as Perdita, rural maid and heroine of the Winter’s Tale, which subsequently rendered her one of England’s most famous, indeed infamous, women. By 1780 Robinson had thus became situated at the epicentre of metropolitan “giddy scenes”, intimate with the body politic that cartoonists such as James Gillray later caricatured in satirical representations of the Prince of Wales’s own overblown body. However, while “Captivity” is a dream of rural seclusion, it celebrates companionship not isolation, and longs for mutual enjoyment of the natural environment. What is imagined is not an individual engagement between the unitary self and the natural world epitomised in the poetry of William Wordsworth and other male Romantic poets. In her verse Robinson desires shared moments and experiences that strengthen intimate relations and affective bonds, rather than unaccompanied confrontations with the sublime. A fertile and cultivated landscape is evoked: one to be enjoyed with “a social friend/In whom good humour and affection blend”. Subject position is also critical in interpreting the writing of Charlotte Smith. In common with Robinson, Smith’s optimistic representations of nature

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are a consistent antidote to the unhappiness of her life experience. Her work stresses the positive value and gratification to be enjoyed through contact with the natural world. Charlotte Smith endured a desperate domestic situation. After her wedding she was transplanted from the cherished Sussex countryside of her childhood to live an emotionally isolated existence in Cheapside in “one of the narrowest and most dirty lanes in the city” (Dorset [1826] 1929: 307). One consequence of Smith’s disastrous marriage was that (like Robinson less than a decade earlier) she was confined in the King’s Bench prison, to accompany her equally feckless and disloyal husband, Benjamin. Rarely has the sense of imprisonment in a patriarchal relationship appeared so literal. Eventually, Smith made a pragmatic decision that her moral duty to her nine children outweighed any loyalty to the profligate Benjamin. In such circumstances, she was an author who wrote not in spite of, but under compulsion of, destitution. In addition to a substantial output of multi-volume novels and poetry, Smith produced several works on botany, ornithology and other branches of natural history, thus enabling her to keep a step ahead of creditors. The following letter extract describes the thrilling spatial transition Smith experienced on her release from prison in 1784. Her account of “misery”, “vice” and “terror” are corroborated by Joanna Innes’s fascinating study of the life and organisation of the King’s Bench prison which recorded that of the 570 prisoners held in 1791, 340 had wives and children living with them at least occasionally. Innes further notes that prison reformer John Howard estimated male-to-female ratios to be 19:1 (in 1779) and 25:1 (in 1782), thus indicating the extent to which this was a predominantly male environment (Innes 1980: 263). The occasion of her departure signified not only Smith’s reunion with her children but also joy in returning to her beloved Sussex downlands. There can be no clearer documentation of the natural environment’s capacity to replenish and bring about a sense of reintegration in contrast to the worst urban dislocation. As she wrote in 1784: For more than a month I had shared the restraint of my husband in a prison, amidst scenes of misery, of vice, and even of terror.[…] After such scenes and such apprehensions, how deliciously soothing to my wearied spirits was the soft pure air of the summer’s morning, breathing over the dewy grass, as (having slept one night on the road) we passed over the heaths of Surrey. My native hills at length burst upon my view. I beheld once more the fields where I had passed my happiest days, and, amidst the perfumed turf with which one of those fields was strewn, perceived with delight the beloved group, from whom I had been so long divided.  (Ch. Smith 2003: 5–6)

Smith’s beloved “native hills” are remembered not for solitary rambles but for the associations they have with her happy upbringing and present family. As such

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they represent a desirable continuity in her life, after the radical disjunction of the prison regime which substituted “terror” for kinship and friendship. This is not genteel rural retirement but a euphoric expression of liberation experienced visually and through synaesthesia. Love of place is intimately linked here to love of family; both types of affective bonding become mutually reinforcing. In such instances there is a companionate engagement with the countryside. Women writers such as Robinson and Smith present a relational self in contrast to the individualised unitary self, familiar in Wordsworthian poems such as “Daffodils”, in which William famously wandering “lonely as a cloud”, removes the presence of Dorothy upon whose diary entry the verse is based. Charlotte Smith’s exhilaration upon reaching the Sussex countryside following captivity was matched by Helen Maria Williams’s pleasurable refuge in the rural environs of Paris after being released from the Luxembourg Prison during the Terror. Smith described the beauty of the natural world, as a “soft, pure” and “soothing” space away from the “terror” suffered in gaol. For Williams too, the natural world existed as a place of familiarity and sanctuary in sharp contrast to the oppressive realities of city life. Poet Richard Polwhele (1760–1838) singled out both Smith and Williams and also Mary Wollstonecraft for their “gallic licentiousness” and subversion of the natural order due to their interest in botany in his popular anti-Jacobin verse diatribe The Unsex’d Females (1798: 19). As Alan Bewell argues in “Jacobin Plants”, commendations by radical authors made botany seem dangerously Jacobin during the reactionary aftermath of the French Revolution (1989: 132). The study was morally suspect because its chief exponent, Rousseau, was held to be an inspiration for revolution, complicit in a way of looking at the world that culminated in sexual wantonness and regicide. Such an image was substantiated by the promotion of Rousseau’s close friend and disciple, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as director of the Jardin des Plantes and the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle during the Terror.1 In her autobiographical Letters from France, Williams records that she had been in a “fairy land” evoked by a conversation with Bernardin, when she was interrupted by news that foreign nationals were to be arrested by state decree (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.i.6). This self-representation as someone inhabiting a fable illustrates Angela Keane’s observation that, throughout, the Letters from France are factual yet dramatized and even set within a “romance frame” (Keane 1992: 280). The rhetorical devices of sensibility are brought to bear on an extreme situation in which Williams’s personal accounts of contemporary events appear to merge with Gothic fiction. After a sleepless night a sense of 1 See Roy McMullen’s introduction to Botany, A Study of Pure Curiosity: by JeanJacques Rousseau, 1979: 19.

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bathos set in as Williams assumed that, together with her mother and sisters, Persis and Cecilia, they were to be spared as female citoyennes. The call from the commissaries of the revolutionary committee therefore dealt a second shock of the unexpected the following night. Williams recollected the terror and panic of the moment of her arrest as partially connected details which, in retrospect, she curiously visualized as a picturesque landscape in spots of time: Sometimes, under the pressure of a great calamity, the most acute sensations are excited by little circumstances which form a part of the whole, and serve in the retrospect of memory, like certain points in a landscape, to call up the surrounding scenery: such is the feeling with which I recall the moments when, having got out of our apartments, we stood upon the stair-case surrounded with guards […]  (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.i.9)

Williams was further disappointed to discover that the apartment used as their makeshift cell had blocked lower windowpanes. The next morning she managed to mount a table and “saw through our grated windows the beautiful gardens of the Luxembourg”. Gazing upon the “majestic trees” she remarks: “it is scarcely possible to contemplate the beauties of nature without the enthusiastic pleasure which swells into devotion” (H. M.Williams 1795: I.8). Elizabeth A. Bohls draws attention to the strong reminiscence here of the way in which imprisoned Emily St. Aubin seeks consolation in scenery when gazing from a Gothic prison in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, published the previous year (Bohls 1995: 132). In artfully constructed representations inspired by the picturesque landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine, Emily looks out upon sparkling mountain streams rushing through sunlit woods. Such shimmering movement, light and colour contrasts dramatically with her present predicament, as she is held in a gloomy casement against her will. This disjunction represents Emily’s inner conflict; as her mind recovers its strength she is spiritually revived by the sublimity of the natural world that eases her sense of apprehension and psychic anguish. It seems that Williams recognised all too literal parallels between Emily’s fictional situation and her own vulnerability and loss of freedom. Williams subsequently used the figure of a beautiful landscape to come to terms with her embittered experiences of prison life. A striking passage recounts how a picturesque tapestry inspired her to contemplate the beauties of nature, thereby using imaginative power to gain some respite from captivity: To be seated at the foot of those sheltering hills which embosomed some mimic habitations, or beneath a mighty elm which rose majestically in the fore-ground of the piece, and spread its thick foliage over a green slope, appeared to me to the summit of earthly felicity.  (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.i.37)

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Unfortunately, the process of association and the consolation prompted by this “pleasing illusion” became inversely mirrored long after Williams had attained her freedom. The pleasures of imagining the verdant outside when inside also unhappily made her recall being inside when outside. So persistent was the effect of this tapestry of the elm that Williams found, because her imagination had become “disordered”, that she later responded to scenes of natural beauty by remembering her incarceration. While subsequently travelling in Switzerland the discovery of a “towering elm”, immediately called to mind the tapestry and the familiar trees of the Luxembourg gardens because it “resembled the friend of my captivity” (H. M. Williams 1795: III.20). Williams attributes the idea of such a process of recall and association to Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). Another friend in captivity was the dog that accompanied a fellow Englishwoman in a neighbouring cell, appearing to share her melancholy (H. M. Williams 1795: III.14). Kindness to dogs and other animals was also a feature of the sensibility demonstrated in Williams’s novel, Julia ([1790] 1995). Both Williams and Charlotte Smith made progressive arguments for attention to the welfare of non-humans for their own sakes and as a vital stage in the creation of a more humane society. Williams and writers such as Catharine Macaulay went so far as to extend legal protection and rights to other species (Macaulay 1996: 277; Kennedy 2002: 169). In Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, instilling the virtues of kindness to animals is a key aspect in bringing children up to be “rational creatures” (Wollstonecraft [1788] 1989: IV. 370). Paul Davies suggests that “compassion is the link between the mystical and political wings” of Romanticism (Davies 1998: 91). A further imaginative device that helped Williams to transcend the compressed space of her existence within walls was to count passing days of captivity by using Philippe Fabre d’Églantine’s new revolutionary calendar – with its allusion to vegetative fertility rites in the changing weather, flowers and harvesting – because its “appellations [...] bring to the mind images of nature, which in every aspect has some power of giving pleasure” (H. M. Williams 1795: III.103). While she was confined she also began to translate Bernardin’s novel Paul et Virginie, to which she contributed new poems on sensibility and natural history.2 When describing her release following two months of imprisonment, Williams sets up a polarized contrast between the pastoral space to which she retreats outside the city, and zones which still held danger because of their proximity to the ongoing violence of political persecution. Williams undertakes a 2 See introduction to H. M. Williams ([1790] 2001: 25) and Kennedy (2002: 122–25).

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sustained engagement with Burke in which she explores the implications of the revolutionary events themselves through figurative representations of the sublime and the beautiful (Blakemore 1997: Chapter 11). Two highly charged spaces are opposed in a series of substantial distinctions; never has the contrast between city and country been so extreme. The defilement of humanity and sense of horror in the city woods is sharply counterpointed to the open pastoral terrain to which Williams escapes. Enclosed woodland environments are often threatening spaces for women, and again in this instance there is a familiar gendered distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. These woods are associated not only with the terror of the dangerous characters that inhabit them but directly with the Terror as an historical and political moment: We no longer dared, as we had done the preceding year, to forget awhile the horrors of our situation by wandering occasionally amidst the noble parks of St. Cloud, the wild woods of Meudon, or the elegant gardens of Bellevue, all within an hour’s ride of Paris. Those seats, once the residency of fallen royalty, were now haunted by vulgar despots, by revolutionary commissaries, by spies of the police, and sometimes by the sanguinary decemvirs themselves. Often they held their festive orgies in those scenes of beauty, where they dared to cast their polluting glance on nature, and tread with profane steps her hallowed recesses. Even the revolutionary jury used sometimes on a decadi, the only suspension from their work of death, to go to Marly or Versailles; and, steeped as they were to the very lips in blood, without being haunted by the mangled spectres of those whom they had murdered the preceding day, they saw nature in her most benign aspect, pleading the cause of humanity and mercy, and returned to feast upon the groans of those whom they were to murder on the morrow. (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.ii.2–3)

The former Royal estates are emphatically personified as female nature. Once “noble”, “wild”, and “elegant”, they have now been subjected to the violation expressed by the syntactic antagonism between “profane” and “hallowed”. The physical presence of the “despots” is impressed upon the degradation and disenchantment of a now fallen countryside, itself a victim toppled by the sweep of history as surely as any political dynasty.3 Steven Blakemore suggests that Williams might be inferring a “repetitive link between the Jacobins and the Old Regime” (Blakemore 1997: 189). In Williams’s terrorized woods enchantment is 3 Simon Schama records that many French woodlands were decimated during the Revolutionary Wars. The relaxation of the old customs and codes of the ancien régime left the woods vulnerable to the uncontrolled grazing of livestock and caused the boles of the trees to meet the blades of a rural populace desperate for fuel (1995: 180).

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destroyed by sacrilege: “the fairy scenes have been polluted, the wizard bowers profaned” (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.iii.85). She repeatedly sets up an opposition in which the contours of pleasure and pain are traced through natural imagery. It is clear that, however beautiful nature may be, in such an extreme political situation it is human presence that defines nature; nature does not have the transformative power to change sensibility or lead to the love of humankind. Although the regime’s functionaries might still enjoy the opportunity for repose in the parks, they have become so desensitized that their response is limited and they are closed to the moral and humanitarian benefits of nature that is the Romantic standard of the civilized being. Ironically, it is Williams’s personified nature that pleads the cause of humanity because such inhumane humans are no longer unable to do so. By contrast, the open country to which Williams retreats with her family is safer, although they continue to endure rigorous surveillance. This more open terrain is bucolic, “unfrequented”, though not unpopulated because of the presence of a single shepherd. Williams’s delight at reaching such countryside is not the abandoned experience of the solitary wanderer but pleasure in finding a space subject to less official control in which she can enjoy stolen and shared moments with her mother and sisters. Williams’s contradictory feelings and anxieties about the course of revolutionary events are displaced onto the natural environment in sharply defined dystopian and utopian spaces. The space of refugia is constructed in terms of the beautiful and is described in terms such as: “charming variety”, “soothing”, “graces”, “congenial”, “delicious fragrance”, “stillness”, “soft rustling”. The environs of Paris, safer than the city centre, are constructed as a place where the self, suffering a psychic pain that would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress syndrome, can grieve, recuperate and begin to heal: The hills were fringed with clouds, which still reflected the fading colours of the day; the woods were in deep shadow; a soft veil was thrown over nature, and objects indistinctly seen were decorated by imagination with those graces which were most congenial to the feelings of the moment. The air was full of delicious fragrance, and the stillness of the scene was only disturbed by sounds the most soothing in nature, the soft rustling of the leaves, or the plaintive notes of the wood-pigeon. The tears with which the spectacle of the guillotine had petrified with horror now flowed again with melancholy luxury.  (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.ii.9)

This description of being lulled and immersed or enfolded in nature is suggestive of a foetal cocooning, an effect enhanced by the sibilance of words such as “soothing”, and the repetition of “soft”. In an exploration of female metaphors of

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landscape in American literature, Annette Kolodny, while conscious of the limitations of such representations of women as nature, argues that “the mother’s body, as the first ambience experienced by the infant, becomes a kind of archetypal primary landscape to which subsequent perceptual configurations of space are related” (Kolodny 1975: 156). Williams’s sense of a comfortable, though temporary and provisional dwelling in the land recalls, again in Kolodny’s words, “the parameters of the original home, the maternal embrace (or even, perhaps, the womb)” (ibid: 152). This primal sense of physical security and well-being is given great emphasis in Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of human hiding-places and homely dwellings that echo nests and burrows in which “physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed” (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 91). Williams’s demonstration of her own continued ability to respond sensitively and imaginatively to the natural environment implicitly enables her to distinguish herself from the bloodthirsty excesses of the Terror and the state apparatus in a society riven by class conflict. Able to weep once more, her humane response elevates her as a moderate in touch with the sights, scents and sounds of the hills and woods, and thus morally distanced from the violence and corruption of Robespierre’s regime. The space enables Williams to become human again, not frozen with terror as she had earlier been as an eyewitness of political executions. Williams’s reluctance to leave France and to lapse into reaction and Francophobia, despite her profound disillusionment with this regime, leads to the doubling of a sense of exile. She had betrayed her origins according to nationalist discourse, because she was situated on the opposite side of an embattled geographical and political boundary. Williams adapted the conventionally private genre of the letter into a public form, and so faced accusations by critics at home, such as Laetitia Hawkins that, as a woman, she was transgressing propriety by speaking out as a political commentator on public events (Keane 1992: 287). She also went into internal exile in the French countryside due to her critical and hence vulnerable position outside the power structure of the new body politic. Williams’s political discourse about nature, which makes use of a language that opposes defilement to purity, became an emblematic displacement of the torments of social division and conflict. Jack Fruchtman notes that the oftengendered pairs of oppositions in Williams’s prose, which rhetorically divide nature and anti-nature, reflect the author’s commitment to the Girondins rather than the Jacobin faction of the Convention (Fruchtman 1995: 228–29). However, such oppositions can be fluid and, just as the reason and passion of revolutionary vertu may overspill into atrocity, Williams’s new-found rural idyll remains dangerously adjacent to the barriers of the city. Even while she,

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and her close female relatives, experience intense pleasure in spending time in the countryside, they are aware that their movements are monitored by the state and that they are fugitives who could only risk a return to Paris “on forfeiture of [their] heads”. Furthermore, the pre-lapsarian reaches of the pastoral countryside themselves geographically eclipse the perilous liminal space of the despot-haunted woods. In 1794 it became expedient to leave France altogether and Williams crossed the border to undertake the writing and botanizing and to experience the sublime that is commemorated in her travelogue A Tour in Switzerland. It was not until the overthrow of Robespierre, and the temporary political relaxation of the Directory, that both Williams and the French population were able to emerge from the frozen and barren underworld of the Terror. Regeneration became possible in the blighted land, as if Demeter were allowing the resurgence of seasonal change as Ventôse finally gave way to Germinal: Upon the fall of Robespierre, the terrible spell which bound the land of France was broken; the shrieking whirlwinds, the black precipices, the bottomless gulphs, suddenly vanished; and reviving nature covered the wastes with flowers, and the rocks with verdure.  (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: II.ii.190)

Acquaintances in revolutionary France, both Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft found themselves in precarious situations as exiles. In Britain they were regarded as politically suspect and morally scandalous due to their extramarital relationships. Within France they became perilously placed due to “counter-revolutionary” Girondist affiliations that caused the execution of several of their associates during the Terror. Both particularly identified with Madame Roland and keenly felt her loss to the guillotine. Their political writings are among many responses to the attack upon the French Revolution in Edmund Burke’s infamous Reflections. In the highly charged debates of the 1790s all sides recruited “Nature” as a powerful rhetorical ally, at turns democratic, revolutionary or despotic. Wollstonecraft was a visitor at Williams’s salon on the Rue Helvétius in 1792. Their participation in the intellectual milieu of the salon created a space for women to debate current affairs beyond the separate spheres imposed by their formal exclusion from political office. Wollstonecraft wrote back to her sister Everina, that Miss Williams has behaved very civilly to me and I shall visit her frequently, because I rather like her, and I meet french company at her house. Her manners are affected, yet the simple goodness of her heart continually breaks

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through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined, at least I should, to love than admire her.4

A complex combination of factors including the traumatic loss of associates during the Terror and personal depression exacerbated by her relationship with Gilbert Imlay culminated in Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt in May 1795. It was in such circumstances that she left for Scandinavia in June, ostensibly as a representative for Imlay’s business interests. Imlay is the recipient of the letters in Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical travelogue, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987). Rousseau had provided an immediate model for the trope of wandering and botanizing along in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782).5 However, both her daughter Fanny, and French maid Marguerite, accompanied Wollstonecraft throughout the travels described in A Short Residence. Furthermore, while Rousseau, and the fashion for sensibility and the pastoral, had inspired Mary, a Fiction, Wollstonecraft later moved towards a more critical engagement with these former influences (Wollstonecraft [1788] 1976). By 1796 her attitudes towards rural communities were deeply ambivalent: Talk not of bastilles! To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature – shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart [...] I felt my breath oppressed, though nothing could be clearer than the atmosphere. Wandering here alone, I found the solitude desirable; my mind was stored with ideas, which this new scene associated with astonishing rapidity. But I shuddered at the thought of receiving existence, and remaining here, in the solitude of ignorance, till forced to leave a world of which I had seen so little; for the character of the inhabitants is as uncultivated, if not as picturesquely wild, as their abode.  (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 131)

Wollstonecraft is stimulated with “astonishing rapidity” by the experience of a 4 Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 24 December 1792. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2004), 215. The most recent editor of Wollstonecraft’s letters, Janet Todd, challenges as unfounded speculations by Roger Ingpen and Ralph Wardle that later comments made to Gilbert Imlay about his former lover as a “cunning woman” refer to an affair with Helen Maria Williams that immediately preceded Wollstonecraft’s own relationship with him. See letter to Gilbert Imlay, 20 August 1794, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd, 260. Todd is responding to notes in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 260 and 280. 5 In the Penguin edition of Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, Richard Holmes notes that Reveries of the Solitary Walker was one of Wollstonecraft’s favourite books and that the epistolary Short Residence was in part modelled on its confessional tone (1987: 282).

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solitary stroll in the natural world, and by the images that would impress themselves upon the inner mind. At the same time however, this passage explicitly modifies, and rejects, the idealization of rural life. While occasional solitude may have a beneficial effect upon the human mind, it is coupled with “ignorance” in this passage and associated with the limitation rather than the expansion of individual vision. In an approach antagonistic to that of Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft suggests that rural life cannot be intrinsically efficacious, because the true value of wild nature is most fully appreciated and cherished by the mind cultivated with sensibility, which is most likely to be developed and refined in the social milieu of larger towns. Paradoxically, those that are “bastilled” within wild nature take care to shut out its harshness most determinedly. The rural environment affects character in a negative way that directly contradicts pastoral conventions. The local inhabitants seem compelled to anaesthetize themselves against the outside world, preferring rather to escape into a claustrophobic, hermetically sealed existence: “What, indeed, is to humanise these beings, who rest shut up, for they seldom even open their windows, smoking, drinking brandy, and driving bargains? I have been almost stifled by these smokers”(Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 132). Such comments are redolent of puritan disdain for “unimproving” pleasures and the luxuries of alcohol and nicotine, and tinged with a characteristic distaste for trade. Wollstonecraft’s contemplation of the prospect of living among unenlightened provincialism in such districts inspires in her something approaching horror. Her abhorrence for the behaviour of the rural poor is accentuated when her sensibility is offended by the “infernal appearance” of a country fair, a place leading inevitably she fears to “gross debauch” (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 156). Wollstonecraft’s response anticipates Harriet Martineau, who in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett mocked Wordsworth as oblivious to the way that “sensual vice abounds in rural districts” in the 1840s: […] while every Justice of the peace is filled with disgust, & every clergyman with (almost) despair at the drunkenness, quarrelling & extreme licentiousness with women, – here is good old Wordsworth for ever talking of rural innocence, & deprecating any intercourse with towns, lest the purity of his neighbours shd be corrupted.  (Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1969: I. 462)

Wollstonecraft was an acute observer, quick to offer a critique of the effects of capitalism upon human sensibility and to recognize the potential conflict between the drive for economic return and the conservation of the natural environment. For centuries mining, forestry and other economic activities had inevitably altered such scenery but now it appeared that the new dynamism in

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European commerce was accelerating the destructive impact: The views of the Elbe, in the vicinity of the town, are pleasant, particularly as the prospects here afford so little variety. I attempted to descend, and walk close to the water edge; but there was no path; and the smell of glue, hanging to dry, an extensive manufactory of which is carried on close to the beach, I found extremely disagreeable. But to commerce every thing must give way; profit and profit are the only speculations – “double – double, toil and trouble.”  (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 194)

William Hazlitt later provocatively satirized parochial attitudes in an essay entitled “Character of the Country People” (1819). In particular he despised the lack of cultural feeling for natural beauty he experienced in the Lake District, offering anecdotally, “An artist who was making a sketch of a fine old yew tree in a romantic situation, was asked by a knowing hand, if he could tell how many foot of timber it contained?”(Hazlitt [1819] 1930–34: XVII. 68). Critics such as Gary Kelly and Mary Jacobus argue that in Wollstonecraft’s case distaste for commercialism was strongly connected to her disaffection with her relationship to Imlay, whom she felt had been “embruted by trade” (Kelly 1996: 172, 177–79; Jacobus 1995: 76–77). However, it seems that Wollstonecraft was also profoundly disturbed by an incipient awareness of a dilemma that was to constitute a singularly modern conflict. She found herself at once eager to embrace industrial and technological progress as an emancipatory force with the capacity to ameliorate the human condition, yet filled with fascinated horror when confronted with the material reality of the industrial landscape. Wollstonecraft is no proto-deep ecologist, believing anthropocentrically that “the world requires, I see, the hand of man to perfect it” and rejecting a primitivist return to nature in the form of “Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity” (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 121–22). Yet, despite some Promethean enthusiasm, she is candid enough to voice dismay at the physical despoliation entailed in such enterprises. Although it appears to be out-proportioned by its surroundings, the construction of the new canal at Trollhattan in Sweden represented an insolent intrusion upon the landscape for Wollstonecraft, leaving her to regret that “such a noble scene had not been left in all its solitary sublimity” (Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 160). Wollstonecraft’s discursive negotiation of rural districts and “natural” spaces is a sophisticated and complex one. She acknowledged a marked revival of spirits and return of well-being during her sojourn in rural Scandinavia.6 In Letter One Wollstonecraft’s mood was uplifted by stark and unpromising landscape: 6 This was short-lived and was followed by a further suicide attempt on her return to London (Kelly 1996:176).

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Helen Maria Williams portrayed an assault upon a feminized nature, yet found refuge and serenity in the countryside after the violence of the Parisian streets and parks. Here too, the natural environment offers solace in the precise historical moment of the aftermath of the Terror’s most oppressive and bloody phase. Her scepticism about the improving qualities of time spent in the countryside coexists with an underlying belief that a cultivated mind, with understanding and compassion, can enjoy benefits foreclosed to those motivated by considerations of status and commercial self-interest. In her writings about nature, Wollstonecraft attempts to construct an elevated form of sensibility that unites the mind and the heart, forging an alliance between rationality, feeling and the imagination – a belief in a radical transition akin to the one she continued to hope for in a revolutionary transformation of the social sphere. Such ideas are developed further in “On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature” (1797). What was to be Wollstonecraft’s final essay illustrates a late-eighteenth century writer’s awareness of the importance of subject position in the experience and representation of the natural world. Again adopting the pose of the solitary walker, she both anticipated Wordsworth’s programme for “natural” diction and pointed to a number of different forms and qualities of engagement and “relish” for nature. Wollstonecraft’s meditation begins with an acerbic observation that casts some doubt upon those that flaunt their propensity for rural delights. She notes with heavy irony that while wandering alone in the countryside she invariably met no one but the occasional labourer, yet on her return found that “when I joined the social circle, every tongue rang changes on the pleasures of the country” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 7). This point underlines her scepticism towards the drawing-room dilettantes who might earnestly eulogize the picturesque but in reality avoid the stinging nettles, dishevelled and twigged hair, and muddy boots that inevitably accompany country rambles. Wollstonecraft’s sharpness clearly indicates that by this period there is some social capital to be gained from publicly displaying an affection (or rather affectation) for nature, ironically often in the absence of any actual engagement with it. The objects of

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Wollstonecraft’s disdain have an urban perspective, as “those, who leave, for a season, the crowded cities in which they were bred” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 7). Such sensibility towards the natural world, as a luxury object of choice, is made possible because there is no longer any necessity to directly work the land which exists as a source of revenue and retreat; a sensibility that therefore reflects rather a degree of disassociation from the natural world. The critique of this perspective, characterized as “artificial”, rather than a “real perception”, and contrasted to the “trudging” of the “labouring man” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 7), is continuous, therefore, with the strictures against the luxurious, indolent and inauthentic, characteristic of Vindication of the Rights of Women and other writings in Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre. Notwithstanding such scepticism, Wollstonecraft places real value upon the beneficial experiences to be gained in natural surroundings and goes on to outline a tripartite schema for possible depths of response to the countryside, thus elucidating a number of different subject positions that might be engaging with the natural world. There are some that merely learn fashionably sublime phrases to impress in society, others that can enjoy the countryside if it is mediated through an artist’s eye and, finally, those that respond authentically and directly to nature. In the first category are those, dismissed as “witlings”, whose primary aim in learning about nature is “to enable them to talk” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 11). Such characters recall the would-be wits of William Congreve’s dramas who merely attempt to cultivate the appearance of refinement by learning a selection of bon mots. Men, in particular, who learn about natural history to impress were indeed occasionally satirized in women’s novels at this time. In Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, Bellozane, a Swiss suitor who initially found his aunt’s plants the “most boring subjects in the world”, quickly begins to study botany when he discovers Emmeline’s interest (Smith [1788] 1971: 359–60). Jane Austen captured the type precisely in her unfinished final novel, Sanditon (1817), in which Charlotte Heywood, though temporarily amused, quickly becomes bored by Sir Edward Denham’s enthusiasms: He began in a tone of great taste and feeling to talk of the sea and the sea shore – and ran with energy through all the phrases employed in praise of their sublimity, and descriptive of the undescribable emotions they excite in the mind of sensibility. – The terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm, its glassy surface in a calm, its gulls and its samphire, and the deep fathoms of its abysses, its quick vicissitudes, its direful deceptions, its mariners tempting it in sunshine and overwhelmed by the sudden tempest, all were eagerly and fluently touched; – rather commonplace perhaps – but doing very well from the lips of a handsome Sir Edward.  (Austen [1817] 1974: 184)

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The second category of nature appreciation Wollstonecraft identifies is made up of those whose appreciation for nature is unfeigned, but who lack the capacity for direct spontaneous response. These, “from the want of a lively imagination”, require a poet or painter to mediate and concentrate pleasing views into picturesque prospects to enjoy the countryside (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 10). Wollstonecraft laments the dearth of direct nature observation and in doing so echoes John Aikin’s earlier complaint that “the grand and beautiful objects” of nature which “are the most obvious store of new materials to the poet”, are, in practice, “the store which of all others he has most sparingly touched” (Aikin 1777: 4). Wollstonecraft more vigorously objects that images from nature are consequently all too often rendered “disgusting, because they have been servileely copied by poets” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 8–9). “Servile” is a politically charged word and there are echoes of the Platonic condemnation of imitation in this denunciation. The balance between outer nature and inner expression is a delicate one in Wollstonecraft’s argument. While, she suggests, it is permissible, indeed unavoidable and natural, if human concerns should arise in the mind during the course of the contemplation of nature, natural description that is primarily informed by the stock diction and recycled representations often associated with later mimetic Augustan literature is rendered sterile, uninteresting and lacking the spontaneity that Wollstonecraft commends. Finally, there are those rare individuals able to respond to nature forcefully and spontaneously. Wollstonecraft, by identifying herself as someone who takes part in “solitary rambles”, asserts her own individualist subjectivity and implicitly numbers herself among them. Powerful nature poetry, it is suggested, should be the product of a more direct encounter with natural sublimity. Written in 1797 and thus contemporaneous with the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wollstonecraft’s essay foreshadows the Wordsworthian conception of poetry as powerful feeling, able to express emotions that are not reducible to analytical reason. This is in keeping with later Romantic criticism and further grounds the currency of the ideas of fancy and imagination later to be made the centrepiece of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “The silken wings of fancy are shrivelled by rules; and a desire of attaining elegance of diction, occasions an attention to words, incompatible with sublime, impassioned thoughts” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 9). Such lines reveal a commitment to the expression of a visionary feeling for nature, one at odds with the supposedly puritanical tone of cool intellectualism that urges the repression of passion in Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wordsworth’s reminder, that the task of the poet to record the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” should be “recollected in tranquillity”,

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closely glosses Wollstonecraft’s advice that “effusions” ought to be “softened or expunged during the cooler moments of reflection” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 8). A tension is apparent here which must be resolved if Wollstonecraft’s explanation of the “relish for the beauties of nature” is to be logically coherent. Given that evidently “a poet is rather the creature of art, than of nature”, the idea of nature as a human textual construct is a paradoxical and troubling one if the positive aspects of Wollstonecraft’s argument are to be sustained (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 9).7 The latter are threefold: First, that the relish of the natural environment is both a manifestation of, and the occasion to further exercise a lively and discriminating mind; second, the idea that the love of nature leads to devotion to the creator (an argument drawn from natural theology with its Protestant emphasis upon individual accommodation with God); finally, the possibility that nature can address ennui and alienation because it has the capacity to whet the understanding in a civilization in which popular taste has been impaired by sensual overindulgence. Aikin had suggested that there were strong parallels between accuracy of representation and a philosophical truth on the part of the poet and further associated elevated taste with the integrity of empirical experience: “Taste may perhaps be fixed and explained by philosophical investigation; but it can only be formed by frequent contemplation of the objects with which it is conversant” (Aikin 1777: 154). Conceding, in a parenthetic aside, that “natural is a very indefinite expression” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 7), Wollstonecraft indicates that she was conscious that the word was a slippery signifier. It is suggested that the true appreciation of nature is best enjoyed by the poet for whom “the understanding has been enlarged by thought and stored with knowledge” (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 7), a criterion that she realizes may lead to a paradox because it is dependent upon what the human mind can bring with it to nature from culture. The greatest depth of feeling and felicity of expression exists in those that have educated and cultivated themselves, factors that militate against the broader emphasis upon direct experience and spontaneity, and inconveniently imply that the love of nature is not natural, at least in the sense of a straightforwardly innate and universally experienced process. There is an optimistic claim that the individual self can be enlarged by an act of will through the accumulation of knowledge, of which the direct experience of the natural environment is but one dimension. In her suggestion that “the poetry written in the infancy of society, is most natural”, Wollstonecraft hypothesizes a purity of encounter with the natural environment, an idea which, again, is problematized by her own acknowledgement of the semantic instability of “natural” as a “very indefinite expression”. 7 The title indicates Wollstonecraft’s direct debt to Aikin who spoke of the “relish for the beauties of poetry” (Aikin 1777: 2).

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Such a potential contradiction in the love of nature, however, is addressed by analogy to the nature of love. Wollstonecraft consistently employs metaphors of sexual heat and coolness to create a curiously libidinized effect in “On Poetry”, contrasting the fickle feeling of the landscape libertine or voluptuary with the quieter yet more enduring “ardour” of the true aesthete and faithful lover of nature. In human relationships the promiscuous and relentless search for extraordinary stimulation leads to an unsatisfactory and frivolous absorption in surface forms: Gross minds are only to be moved by forcible representations. To rouse the thoughtless, objects must be presented, calculated to produce tumultuous emotions; the unsubstantial, picturesque forms which a contemplative man gazes on, and often follows with ardour till he is mocked by a glimpse of unattainable excellence, appear to them the light vapours of a dreaming enthusiast, who gives up the substance for the shadow.  (Wollstonecraft [1797] 1989: VII. 10)

It is the true poet, who profits from inner growth and a deeper understanding, that is best able to relish the subtleties and nuances of experience and emotion when enjoying the countryside. Such an argument extends the purlieus of Wollstonecraft’s early morning stroll in the countryside out to the parameters of her more expansive personal cosmology. True education is a faculty that exists to sharpen critical discrimination and bring about self-improvement. The quality of the enlarged potentiality of the human imagination is preferred to the quantity of knowledge; this is the ability to ground the universal in the particular or to extrapolate the eternal from the immediate, to be attentive to the broader context of knowledge, and to prefer longer term purpose and content to ephemeral desire. True nature poetry is produced by a dynamic interchange between the poet of discrimination and the directly experienced countryside and not by the encyclopaedic learning of stock phrases, correct diction and mechanical rhyming schemes. This idea that too much artificial green verse may jade the senses recalls familiar strictures upon the excesses of sexual appetite as a consistent theme in Wollstonecraft’s prose. In a letter from Sweden about the manners of country girls she writes “as the mind is cultivated, and taste gains ground, the passions become stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual sympathies of the moment”(Wollstonecraft [1796] 1987: 83). Wollstonecraft’s passion for the countryside may likewise be more accurately interpreted as emphasizing the concentration rather than the dissipation of human energies rather than the alleged repression of the sensory. It is apparent then that Wollstonecraft’s ideas about the “beauties of nature” are interwoven with social concerns. She makes use of metaphors of sexuality

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and intimates significant variation in the responses of different socio-economic groups to the natural world, reflecting the specific habitus that she attributes to these categories. The celebration of the civilizing consequences of an individual accommodation with the natural environment is articulated through a meritocratic sentiment which critiques both the preoccupations of a leisured urban class that devalues the countryside as a site of retreat and relaxation, and the imitative sycophancy of mass taste. Written for the largely non-conformist readership of the Monthly Magazine, Wollstonecraft’s commendation of the natural world in “On Poetry” is one of an active engagement that demands effort. There is an identity of form and content in the essay which, setting out from a regret that the taste for nature popular with her contemporaries is not grounded in “real perception”, takes a discursive explanation of different tastes before circuitously returning to its point of departure and to closure with an insistence that “the understanding must bring back feelings to nature”. It is fitting then that, as Wollstonecraft’s last published essay, “On Poetry” itself perhaps amounts to an unintended coda to the rest of her work. The foregoing examples demonstrate Romantic women writers’ use of personal literature to negotiate natural spaces in extremely adverse circumstances. Wollstonecraft’s writings invoke the author’s desire to assert a rationalist feminist perspective, a sense that partly counterpoints the sensibility of Williams’s chronicles of life in revolutionary France. Yet while Wollstonecraft avoids Williams’s romance frame, the main prototypes for a Short Residence are Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, both associated with sensibility. As Vivien Jones comments, the epistolary form enabled a narrative voice that combined the personal and the political (Jones 1993: 302). In such prose, extraordinary first hand experiences of imprisonment and depression are mediated through and further develop prevailing fictional tastes for sensibility, the gothic and the picturesque. They are also derived from and some cases anticipate masculine texts, frequently contesting discursive categories of nature and culture. In the literature of Helen Maria Williams and Charlotte Smith in particular, the presence of natural history was to signify more than mere background colour. Botany and natural history were key to the project for enlightened education that Williams admired in the Parisian Lycée in Letters from France (H. W. Williams [1795–96] 1975: I.ii.30). Deborah Kennedy notes that later Williams’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (1814–29) was to inspire Charles Darwin to take up science and travel (Kennedy 2002: 186). Charlotte Smith undertook extensive work in popularising natural history and was a talented botanical illustrator. Wollstonecraft privileged the importance of the countryside by developing a theory of the literary use of natural

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imagery in “On Poetry”. The sensibility demonstrated in earlier works such as Mary gives way to a more sceptical attitude, but there remains a belief in the value of authentic engagement with nature and doubts about the direction of progress in purely quantitative terms that marks the Romantic disquiet with the civilising project in “On Poetry” and A Short Residence. The critical engagement with the rural ideal in Wollstonecraft’s final works retains a belief in the natural environment’s value for human well-being. For the four women under discussion the “vivid green” of the countryside symbolically allows the imagination to slip the bars and walls of what Mary Robinson calls “the dark galleries of a prison” (Robinson [1801] 1930: 99), an actual captivity she suffered in common with Williams and Smith and the figurative restriction of extreme depression suffered by Wollstonecraft. For all of them attention to the natural environment not only supported physical health but buttressed mental resilience and was vital to the literary imagination.

Bibliography primary sources Aikin, John. 1777. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. London: J. Johnson. Austen, Jane. [1817] 1974. Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon (ed. Margaret Drabble). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. 1969. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, (ed. Elvan Kintner), 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Burke, Edmund. [1790] 1968. Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (ed. with an introduction by Conor Cruise O’Brien) London: Penguin. Dorset, [Catherine Ann Turner]. [1826] 1929.‘Charlotte Smith’ in Sir Walter Scott, The Lives of the Novelists. London: Dent. Hazlitt, William. 1930–34. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (ed. P. P. Howe), 21 vols. London: Dent. Macaulay, Catharine. [1790] 1996. Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects. London: William Pickering. Polwhele, Richard. 1798. The Unsex’d Females. London: Cadell and Davies. Robinson, Mary. [1801] 1930. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself (a new ed. with an introduction). London: Cobden-Sanderson. Robinson, Mary. 1777. ‘Captivity’ [from ‘Captivity’, a poem, and ‘Celadon and Lydia’, a tale (1777)]. On line at: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk (consulted 11 November 2006). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1821] 1979. Botany, A Study of Pure Curiosity: The Botanical Letters and Notes Towards a Dictionary of Botanical Terms (3rd ed., trans. by Kate Ottevanger, with an introduction by Roy McMullen). London: Michael Joseph.

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Smith, Charlotte. 2003. The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (ed. Judith Phillips Stanton). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  . [1788] 1971. Emmeline. The Orphan of the Castle (ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis). London: Oxford University Press. Williams, Helen Maria. [1790] 1995. Julia, A Novel (with an introduction by Peter Garside), 2 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes.  . 1795. Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, from the Thirty-First of May 1793, till the Twenty-Eight of July 1794, and of the Scenes which have Passed in the Prisons of Paris, 3 vols. Dublin: printed by J. Chambers.  . 1975. Letters from France (eight volumes in two, facsimile reproductions with an introduction by Janet M. Todd. Photoreprint of the 5th ed. of Letters written in France 1796, published by T. Cadell, London: and of the 1795–96 ed. of Letters containing a sketch of the politics of France, published by G. G. and J. Robinson, London). Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints.  . 2001. Letters Written in France, In the Summer 1790, To a Friend in England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution (ed. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser). Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Literary Texts. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1979. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (ed. Ralph M. Wardle). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.  . 2004. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (ed. Janet Todd). London: Penguin.  . 1976. Mary, a Fiction [1788] and The Wrongs of Woman [1798] (ed. Gary Kelly). Oxford: Oxford University Press.  . [1790] 1994. Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (ed. with an introduction by Janet Todd). Oxford: Oxford University Press.  . [1796] 1987. A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (ed. with introd. by Richard Holmes). Harmondsworth: Penguin.  . 1989. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler), 7 vols. London: Pickering. secondary sources Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bewell, Alan. 1989. ‘Jacobin Plants: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s’ in The Wordsworth Circle, 20 (3): 132–39. Blakemore, Steven. 1997. Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Associated University Presses. Bohls, Elizabeth A. 1995. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics: 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Paul. 1998. Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition: Studies in Imagination. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books. Fruchtman, jr,, Jack. 1995. ‘Public Loathing, Private Thoughts: Historical Representation in Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France’ in Prose Studies, 18.3: 223–43.

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Innes, Joanna. 1980. ‘The King’s Bench prison in the later eighteenth century: law, authority and order in a London debtors’ prison’ in Brewer, John and John Styles (eds) An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Hutchinson: 250–98. Jacobus, Mary. 1995. First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Jones, Vivien. 1993. ‘Femininity, Nationalism and Romanticism: The Politics of Gender in the Revolution Controversy’ in History of European Ideas, 16 (1–3): 299–305. Keane, Angela. 1992. ‘Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France: A National Romance’ in Prose Studies, 15 (3): 271–94. Kelly, Gary. 1992; rpt with minor alterations 1996. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of MaryWollstonecraft. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kennedy, Deborah. 2002. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins. Todd, Janet (ed.). 1987. A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660–1800. London: Methuen. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus.

Public Land and Private Fears: Reclaiming Outdoor Spaces in Gretchen Legler’s Sportswoman’s Notebook Lilace Mellin Guignard abstract This chapter examines the struggles women often face negotiating wild outdoor spaces. Similar to the constraints a modern woman felt who wanted to wander the city anonymously, a contemporary woman alone far from settled areas is immediately suspect unless she has a socially sanctioned purpose, or is with a man (and often then is an unwelcome reminder of civilized manners and domesticity). Gretchen Legler’s book, All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, provides a nonfiction account of one contemporary American woman who is successful at hunting, fishing, paddling, and camping, yet is unable to achieve the same public privacy as men because she is always accompanied by gender specific fears (primarily rape). Feminist geographers have shown that cultural conditioning of women to feel most unsafe in public spaces (against all statistical evidence), and the internalization of the male gaze that censors her actions even when men are not present, are forms of spatial patriarchy still operating today. By using personal essays to explore these issues, Legler enlists the pastoral mode of nature writing in nontraditional ways that Terry Gifford terms “post-pastoral”. Ultimately Legler’s essays reveal not only the cultural impediments to American women accessing outdoor spaces on their own terms, but also the masculine and heterosexual bias within the traditional pastoral mode privileged in American nature writing. Keywords: women and nature, flâneur, public privacy, pastoral, post-pastoral, spatial patriarchy, male gaze, wilderness, lesbian, rape, Gretchen Legler, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Terry Gifford, Annie Proulx.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  (John Muir [1938] 1979: 439) Not to have known—as most men have not—either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one’s self.  (Joseph Wood Krutch, qtd. in Zwinger 2002: 577–8) I’m always afraid alone in the woods, but I push on.  (Gretchen Legler 1995: 34)

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Until recently, feminist discourse has concerned itself largely with recasting indoor spaces and reclaiming public spaces outside the home which are associated with political and economic power. A discussion of more natural or wild outdoor spaces has long been outside mainstream feminist attention. Literary critic Stacy Alaimo (2000) traces the ways most feminist theory distances woman from nature, due in large part to Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of how Cartesian rationalism set woman up as nature incarnate, passive and silent, thus without access to the benefits of power and voice that identification with the cultural side of the dualism affords white men. There is an important distinction to make between feminine spaces and “land-as-woman”, a concept that Annette Kolodny argues is “the central metaphor of American pastoral experience” (1975: 158). Nature was not perceived as feminine space, that is, a space for women and their activities; nature was seen as female itself. This perception, which is still embedded in American culture, poses a problem for women if they wish to retreat to nature in the tradition of the literary pastoral, alone and unrestricted by city manners and customs, and leads Alaimo to refer to woman “as that which is mired in nature [and] outside the domain of human subjectivity” (2000: 2). Such conflation with nature is a more intense version of the hurdles a woman faced to becoming a flâneur, a term originating in early nineteenth century Paris for a city stroller, a purposeless and anonymous crowd watcher. Though the term “has never been satisfactorily defined”, according to Rebecca Solnit (2000: 198–9), “it can be concluded that the flâneur was male […] with little or no domestic life”. In much the same way women were mired in nature, Solnit states: “One of the arguments about why women could not be flâneurs was that they were, as either commodities or consumers, incapable of being sufficiently detached from the commerce of city life” (2000: 237). The acceptability of woman’s presence, whether in the city or outdoors, has traditionally been linked with her task, and that task has been linked to domesticity. For instance, in frontier America it was appropriate for women to engage nature as gardeners or homesteaders­ ­– even without men (Domosh and Seager 2001: 147). In the early twentieth century, shopping allowed women greater mobility but, again, it was a “purposive mobility which [had] nothing to do with the detached and aimless strolling of the flâneur” (Wolff 1995: 102). Unless she cross-dressed like George Sand (Wolff 1990: 41), she could not lose herself in the crowd and enjoy the luxury of unaccountability because “any deviation from the evidence of such purpose immediately renders her suspect – a loiterer, an unrespectable woman” (Wolff 1995: 102). Thus, what has been called the “right to escape to public privacy” was not afforded to women (Wolff 1990: 40). This essay will extend the conversation of women’s mobility in the modern city to women’s mobility in

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outdoor spaces removed from the garden or permanent settlement to show not only how one twentieth-century woman navigates the public aspects of being outdoors, but how she begins to access the public privacy which, as with city wandering, rests on her ability to move around without always feeling watched, threatened, or accountable to someone. Gretchen Legler’s (1995) book All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook is described as “part nature guide, part family history and part feminist tract” in which Legler, “who has spent the better part of her life hunting and fishing, considers herself an outsider in the male world of the outdoors” (Hughes 1996: 25). It is a postmodern woman’s pastoral that frames each essay with an excursion outdoors designed to let the writer reflect on her relationships with family, husband, lesbian lovers, and self. As such, Legler’s book falls under the classification of contemporary nature writing, which according to ecocritic Don Scheese “has become […] the most popular form of pastoralism” (2002: 6). Characterized by a non-fiction account of a writer’s outward and inward journey in a “predominantly nonhuman environment”, Scheese says, “nature writing is a descendant of ‘natural history’ and ‘spiritual autobiography”’ (2002: 6). While two essays received Pushcart Prizes,1 the book has not received critical attention from scholars of American nature writing. Perhaps this is because the essays offer little in the way of natural history, and, though her eye is keen and her description vivid, the nonhuman environment at times seems more a framing device or mere setting than understood as having its own legitimate interest. And though she demonstrates a mature biocentrism, environmental responsibility receives little emphasis. Here the otherness the writer is most concerned with is her own. But Legler’s work may also get passed over because a book full of woman’s issues is not what we expect in nature writing. Critic Lawrence Buell reminds us that, though women’s presence in the nature writing tradition may not receive much attention,2 “pastoral modes have functioned as a means of empowerment for women writers” (1995: 44). Perhaps because anthologies of women’s nature writing are appearing with greater frequency,3 the editors of a collection of critical articles on U.S. women nature writers explain that critics have begun “re-examining genre and genre expectations” (Edwards 2001: 4). They claim that “much nature writing in America has 1 Awarded annually by inclusion in a collection of poetry and prose from “the Best of the Small Presses” in America published by Norton. 2 Indeed, Susan Fenimore Cooper’s book Rural Hours (1850) was hugely popular – even Thoreau read at least some of it before writing Walden – yet only Walden is read in American classrooms. See Johnson 2000. 3 For examples see Anderson 1991, 2002, and 2003; Hogan 1998 and 2001; and Rogers 1994.

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followed a pattern of separation, whether through travel, or isolation, or both”, a pattern that also separates nature and culture; such “philosophical assumptions” have often meant overlooking the “women authors [who] experience nature as intimately connected to culture” (Edwards 2001: 2). Terry Gifford, a proponent of the continuing importance of pastoral modes in this age of environmental degradation, agrees that this is the way it has been, but that “post-pastoral literature”4 conveys “an awareness of both nature as culture and of culture as nature” (1999: 162). Likewise, Gifford posits that further elements to look for in a post-pastoral work include: “recognition that the inner is also the workings of the outer” and “that the exploitation of the planet is of the same mindset as the exploitation of women and minorities” (1999: 156, 165). He continues, “for many post-pastoral ecofeminist writers, Arcadia might be located within the body, were ‘the body’s world’ less damaged, environmentally and socially” (1999: 166). This perspective allows, it seems to me, for more than just spiritual autobiographies in nature writing, but actual bodies and desires. It calls for more self-conscious reflection on how the body we are given – woman or man – is an extension of the earth, and how the expectations society attaches to our bodies travel with us into the woods and beyond. While through a traditional pastoral lens Legler’s essays might appear sentimental, from Gifford’s perspective her retreat to nature to understand her body, and the fears, desires, and expectations it carries, at times achieves post-pastoral status. When I call A Sportswoman’s Notebook a woman’s pastoral, it is not because it is written by a woman, but because her content stems from the body she was given, calling attention to how one woman’s body navigates the masculine space of wild America. Legler’s problem is not so much accessing such spaces, but accessing them on her own terms. One of the main obstacles to her feeling like she belongs is how the spaces she occupies while hunting, fishing, and camping are culturally constructed as public, especially in the sense that they are separate from the private world of home, family, emotions, and responsibilities. My analysis charts the ways in which Legler is made to feel that her presence in such spaces is unwelcome and unnatural, and then shows her struggles to be outdoors without being controlled by fear, instead slipping from self-consciousness into a public privacy that can be shared with others and the earth. Legler guides us through her exploration of the “spatial expression of patriarchy” out-of-doors (Domosh and Seager 2001: 100), that is, behavioural responses shared by many women when engaging in activities that occur in 4 Gifford defines the post-pastoral as an “alternative […] vision” that goes “beyond traditional conventions” and limitations “of the pastoral and anti-pastoral” which encompasses “the best new writing about nature” (1999: 4–5). He identifies six main qualities, discussed in detail in Chapter Six, of which I only refer to a few.

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outdoor spaces where a woman’s presence is not traditionally expected or accepted. In addition to literary critics, historians, and philosophers, I will rely on the work of feminist cultural geographers who can help us better understand how “the decisions that are made about our everyday lives, based in outmoded ideas of gender, are fixed in our everyday places and spaces” (Domosh and Seager 2001: xxiii). 1. No Girls Allowed One of the ironies of outdoor spaces in the United States is that much of the land we recreate in and on is public, supported by federal or state taxes paid by men and women. Yet since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, the more rugged and removed the natural spaces, the more they were considered as a resource for American men so they did not lose their “virility” by becoming “overcivilized” as the frontier diminished (Nash [1967] 1982: 149, 150). So in many ways they were a private public space, preserved as a “wilderness cure” (Nash [1967] 1982: 151) that women did not need, presumably because it was considered impossible for a woman to be overcivilized. Her job was to stay home and instill strong moral values in the children until the boys were at the pivotal age when a mother’s influence became detrimental; then men whisked them off to learn to hunt and gain additional education consisting of the “savage virtues” (Nash [1967] 1982: 152). Obviously this general cultural attitude based in outmoded ideas of gender has not kept women from recreating in public land. In fact many women are introduced to wilderness activities by men. Legler was taught to fish by her father and goes hunting with her husband, Craig. Craig is an important figure because he portrays an alternative male way to be outdoors, a contrast to the men who threaten, judge, or dismiss Legler. The first essay, “Border Water”, is a narrative about a yearly spring fishing trip to the Rainy River that introduces Legler, Craig, and the conflict at the heart of the collection. “I used to hate being a woman”, Legler states, recalling how she had always liked being one of the guys (1995: 8). “All my friends were men. I am thirty years old now, and I feel alone. I am not a man. Knowing this is like an earthquake. Just now all the lies are starting to unfold” (Legler 1995: 8). While the reader does not yet know what lies she refers to, her reconnecting to herself as a woman explains why Legler says, “Until recently it never occurred to me to wonder why I was the only woman I knew who walked in the woods with a shotgun looking for grouse, or sat in a duck blind or a goose blind, or crouched up in a tree with a rifle waiting for deer, or went fishing on the Rainy River” (1995: 8). Rather than her three years of taking this trip and her many more years of general fishing experience increasing her comfort level, this new awareness

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of herself as a woman makes Legler “uneasy” about the fishing weekend (1995: 5). Consequently, she portrays the three main physical spaces she inhabits during the weekend in ways that illustrate three aspects of her fear. Her depiction of the campsite demonstrates why she fears a physical threat to her body; her depiction of the boat/river space shows why she fears being judged and publicly ridiculed; and her difficulty in gaining entrance to the fish house attests to her feeling she is unwelcome and her fear of what she might become if she tries to belong on their terms. The couple stays, as they have past years, at Franz Jevne State Park in Minnesota, which is only “a few dirt pullouts and two outhouses” without paved roads or street lights (Legler 1995: 6). Their small site “is in the middle of tall evergreens,” but that is not the reason she feels “surrounded” and “vaguely gloomy” (Legler 1995: 6). Legler is aware of the men in the other campsites “lighting lanterns, starting campfires, firing up cooking stoves” (1995: 6). Even though the tasks she lists are domestic, they are accompanied by “muffled, rough voices” that remind her she is “the only woman here” (Legler 1995: 6). The fact that they have a “women’s outhouse” suggests that women do camp there, and even in the absence of other women it might be one place Legler feels like she is on her own turf (1995: 6). But this too has been claimed by at least one male with a “thick black marker” whose grotesque picture of a woman’s vulva is accompanied by the message: “ ‘I want to fill your pussy with a load of hot come’ ” (Legler 1995: 6). This and the accompanying graffiti leave Legler so “terrified and sickened” that she “can’t pee anymore” (1995: 6). She rushes to pull up her many layers, and though Legler is “happy to be outside” she looks over her shoulder and into the woods, feeling watched and unsafe (1995: 6). The threat Legler hears is “I want to rape you” (1995: 6). She has literally seen the writing on the wall, but even without the evidence of such a threat, the fear of rape is so pervasive and insidious it leads “most women” to live under “self-imposed” restrictions (Domosh and Seager 2001: 100). According to geographers Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, women “avoid walking in certain places, at particular times, and often will not go out alone” (ibid.). This reaction to a gender-specific fear is the dominant “spatial expression of patriarchy” according to geographer Gill Valentine, “since it reflects and reinforces the traditional notion that women belong at home, not on the streets” (Domosh and Seager 2001: 100) – or, by extension, in the woods, rivers, or mountains. Yet psychologists and geographers agree that this “female fear feeds on misinformation about rape” (Gordon and Riger 1989: 6). One of the great misconceptions that continues to propagate the separation of the private-female sphere from the public-male sphere is the notion that women are safer in the home, under the protection of a father or husband, or

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at least with walls and locks between them and what is wild. The irony is that our protectors, those whom we allow into our private space, statistically are our greatest threat of physical assault. Fearing the stranger crouching behind the bushes is all out of proportion to the occurrence of stranger rape, a risk that has been “exaggerate[d]” to keep women “in their ‘place’”; the result is that “although most violence against women is actually perpetuated in the private spaces of home, it is those spaces defined as “public” that the majority of women fear most” (Domosh and Seager 2001: 100). Through the scene in the campsite and outhouse Legler gives the reader her experience of how such cultural conditioning is perpetuated. The trees, tent, and darkness afford the campsite a modicum of privacy compared to being in the jig on the river. They have found a good spot for fish so it is “crowded” with “boats push[ing] together” where again there are no other women, and many of the men are “swigging beer” and smoking cigars (Legler 1995: 7). The common references to “drunken” men Legler encounters add further credence to her perception of them as “dangerous” and illustrate how the expectations of civilized conduct do not exist here (1995: 5). This is where Legler most feels the male gaze, as does Craig: “We watch ourselves being watched. He says, ‘All these guys are out here to get away from their wives’” (1995: 7). Legler’s unexpected presence has interrupted the men’s pastoral idyll much the way the sudden “shriek of the locomotive” (Marx [1964] 2000: 16) brings Nathaniel Hawthorne’s musings away from a “simple pleasure fantasy” of nature and back to the industrial world and society (Marx [1964] 2000: 15); instead of a “machine in the garden” (the boats, after all, have motors), Legler’s body disrupts the wilderness fantasy, simply by being female and representing the world of family, civility, and responsibilities the men wished to escape. As literary critic and Americanist Leo Marx, who coined the expression, states, such an interruption brings “tension, conflict, and anxiety” ([1964] 2000: 16). A man’s presence outdoors represents conquering while a woman’s presence represents civilizing (Domosh and Seager 2001: 147), so in this way the men’s public privacy is shattered. To the men, Legler represents the gaze of polite society, of wives, but through sheer numbers and a sense of entitlement that culture has conditioned into them, the men have no trouble turning the gaze back on the couple. In this situation Legler would rather not be noticed. Probably from a mix of choice and necessity, her clothes disguise her gender: Craig asks her if, dressed as she is, she thinks anyone knows she is a woman. She ponders what would tip them off: “[M]aybe when you lean over in the boat and kiss me. Then maybe they would think I was a woman. But I wouldn’t necessarily have to be” (Legler 1995: 7). The fact that Legler is not alone, that she is with a man, is what

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removes any possibility of her moving about anonymously. Yet being with a man is also what allows her easier access along with some protection – his presence is a sign that she is claimed, not loose. A loose or wild woman would carry the connotation of sexually immoral, uncivilized and therefore not deserving of society’s protection. It is interesting to note that Legler’s account lacks any preoccupation with her physical appearance and femininity, a topic to which women’s backpacking guides often devote whole chapters.5 The male gaze she feels is not voyeristic but mocking.6 Although she claims that they are being watched, it is important to note that at no time in the essay does Legler show any evidence that men are judging her, nor does she argue that they are. What she does is recount the situation so that we can see that she has internalized the gaze so pervasive in western culture. Spatial patriarchy perpetuates itself much like Foucault’s Panopticon. In order to gain a “social presence” in the “limited space” to which they have been allowed access (Berger 1972: 46), women have had to learn to anticipate the male gaze and act so as to earn or keep its favour. Art and cultural critic John Berger claims that “this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split in two” (1972: 46). The last scene on the river demonstrates this phenomenon. When Legler takes the boat by water to the landing while Craig brings the van around, she is anxious to do it well. She expects Craig not to trust her with it and he does not understand her misgivings. When all is going well, the water and wind blowing in her face and hair, she feels at peace: “My image of myself and my self come together here” (Legler 1995: 11). But then the propeller scrapes loudly against rocks. Legler makes it to shore “where men line the banks” and immediately starts to lecture herself: “I have fucked up. I never should have been trusted with this […] It is not my place to drive a boat. It is too big a thing for me. Too dangerous, too demanding” (1995: 12). This response continues, though Craig’s reaction is not the angry one she has been taught to expect. He even takes some of the blame for her not feeling confident in the task, realizing he must step back and let her practice (away from strangers) driving the boat and trailer, as well as lighting the lantern and stove. “Many women”, Legler muses, “grow up believing they can’t do anything” 5 See Farmer 1976, Nichols 1978, and Thomas 1980. A good rhetorical analysis of such guides is Glotfelty 1996. Even one book written by and for outdoor lesbians has a section on appearance that suggests dressing to suit your sweetie’s taste (see Thacker 2002). 6 I have experienced similar feelings of inadequacy when camping on my own. Once I arrived at a campsite after dark and, while struggling to set up my tent, heard some men in the next site whispering and laughing. I felt sure they were making fun of my incompetence. I found out they were impressed that I could do it at all, and were laughing at how they would not have been able to.

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(1995: 11). She does not want to be like that. “I know that I can learn to do this physical, mechanical task. What I regret is that I do not simply assume I can do it. I wish I could charge into it without reserve […] free of doubt. Like a man might” (Legler 1995: 11). The pressure of being (or seeming) competent is the cultural albatross around male necks, and in outdoor spaces this means being able to protect and provide against more-than-human forces. The man in the woods, declared Stewart Edward White in 1903, “matches himself against the forces of nature” (qtd. in Nash [1967] 1982: 154). Confronting wilderness “is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of his essential pluck and resourcefulness and manhood, the ability to endure and to take care of himself ” (ibid.). This view of the male role when “in the woods” can be enacted unwittingly, as Craig reveals. Unlike patriarchal society in general, he is not threatened by his wife gaining equal competence or becoming able to take care of herself, yet he and Legler automatically fall into the routine of him handling the mechanical tasks with technical gadgets. It takes a conscious effort to break the pattern. This is the same conditioning that prompted Miriam O’Brien Underhill, a renowned early twentieth-century American climber, to decide she must climb without the company of a man in order to reach her potential as a mountaineer. She explained that “in any emergency, particularly in an outdoor sport […], what man wouldn’t spring to the front to take over?” (Loomis 2005: 4). But since women are generally discouraged from being responsible for their own survival, there is often an element of spectacle when one, by necessity or choice, goes about such tasks in public. So much of what men do is physical and happens in public spaces – by adulthood they are accustomed to it (even those who may not like it). However, most girls grow up under the assumption that much of their social role is passive or occurs in private, except for – now – in sports where public, physical success and failure are practiced. Molly Loomis points out how, when climbing with her girlfriends, “we still encounter comments ranging from complimentary and kind to condescending and rude, their message being that we are women and we are climbing, a combination unusual enough to warrant commentary” (2005: 3).7 This scene on the river exposes the ways in which one woman feels herself performing male tasks in front of a group of strange men, and how there is no need for them to say anything aloud or openly heckle her because she is judging herself already, possibly in ways more harsh and cruel. 7 My experiences backpacking alone, climbing, and paddling have been similar. It was especially apparent when I worked as a raft guide. Large, strong men – often military types – resisted being assigned to my boat. Once on the river, they did not initially listen to my commands, having more faith in their brawn than my knowledge and skill.

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When Legler goes to the fish house we find the most overt example of her not belonging due to gender conditioning – in this case to always be polite. A group of men are already inside talking and filleting, and she asks if there is room for someone else. Legler is told it is “kind of cozy” and chooses to wait at the door, but another man arrives and “barrels” past her, and, of course, the men make room at the table (1995: 13). When Craig asks if they would not let her in, the answer is not a simple yes or no. She is furious at herself for not doing the same thing the man did, and furious at him for not showing basic manners when he saw her standing there. Legler tells Craig, “there’s no room for a goddamned girl in that fish house” (1995: 13) and describes setting up a make-shift station on the ground and angrily, rather than reverently, cleaning and slicing her catch. I am saying to myself, “I can do this better than any of those bastards. Better than any of them.” I feel defiant and confident, proud and suddenly cruel. When I do this, I realize, I am leaping across a line between the fish’s life and mine […] And I can do it as well as any. I can move as easily as anyone across this space.  (Legler 1995: 13)

She has achieved access and competence in the task, but still does not belong. In the van Legler tells Craig “I should give up and stay home […], the worse it gets the more I see I don’t have a place out here” (1995: 14). Craig quietly responds that if she does not take her place then she will lose it. And the necessity of taking her place is the crux of the matter. Rather than the birthright that wilderness is for American men, women must forcefully, or at least aggressively, claim their right to be outdoors away from homes and malls, civilized domesticity and commerce. Legler makes clear that she can do so, but crossing the line and assuming the power side of the dualism (this time between humans and other animals) does not make her happy, and the possibility that this is the only way to have access to these spaces scares her. Legler wants co-existence, not dominance and ends by saying, “there has to be a space for me; space for me as a woman out here” (1995: 14). Many of the essays that follow detail her struggle to discover what accessing such spaces on her own terms entails. 2. Going Out to Go In Susan Gal (2004) rightly claims that public and private are not fixed distinctions but ideological ones. I use the terms here in order to argue that American men can access public outdoor spaces without gender-based fears, thus allowing them a greater sense of privacy or escape. In the same way scholars break down the interiors of the Victorian home to analyze which rooms are more public or private, such “multiple nestings” occur within the broader context of

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outdoor spaces (Gal 2004: 265). Instead of “embedding ‘public’ activities in private spaces” (Gal 2004: 272), I want to examine what happens when a woman performs many private activities outdoors.8 This nesting of the inner/outer or public/private dichotomy is highlighted by American explorer and author John Muir’s well-known observation that going out is really going in. He encapsulates the way the Romantic pastoral impulse of retreat has been a means of inner reflection, not just observation of the outer landscape. But spatial oppression has limited women’s outdoor roaming, and therefore one must assume that their self-knowledge, as nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch would say (at least about men), has been limited as well. Domosh and Seager note that Victorian lady travellers who did escape the constraints of tight corsets, high heels and the “ideologies that encourage women to be physically frail” (2001: 117) were not as interested as their male counterparts in “naming and claiming new geographical discoveries”; rather their purpose lay in “self-discovery” (2001: 144–5). Legler’s experience suggests that though physically accessing outdoor spaces gains women the public aspect of such spaces, it does not provide reliable access to the private aspects. The American definition of “wilderness” found in the Wilderness Act (1964) states the tract of land must be big enough to have “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation” (online at wilderness.net), but for women this may be another instance where the importance of size is overstated. It is not possible to feel solitude if one always feels watched or on-guard. Like women in the modern city, Legler struggles to feel she can move freely, unselfconsciously, and safely when alone in nature. Under culture’s terms she has limited ways to claim a place outdoors: as a sexual resource (a wife or girlfriend), as not-a-woman (renouncing her sex), as camp aid (domestic partner), or at least as dependent upon a male as guide or provider. But Legler shows us what her terms would be: as a sexual being not there for men, as someone who does not have to censor or watch herself, as a woman who has agency, as a body separate yet linked with the body of the earth. The fact that she feels she must deny parts of herself when hunting, fishing, or camping – hide her body or not act in stereotypically feminine ways of being emotional or polite – adds to Legler’s sense of herself as an “imposter” (1995: 106), as playing a role. There is an important distinction to be made between feeling conscious of having an audience, whether actual or internalized, and feeling so comfortable in what one does and where one is that the self-monitor recedes. In order to be able to 8 The necessity of going to the bathroom outside deters many women from venturing outdoors on longer excursions. One of the most private acts, it generally demands we be alone and, when urinating, more exposed than men.

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slip from self-consciousness into an inner privacy, Legler must find a way to lose the sense that she is always performing outdoors. In “Gabimichigami”, an early essay a scant two pages long, Legler re-creates a fleeting moment when she felt absorbed in a public privacy where her awareness was filled with only her body and the earth. It is not a seamless transition, as her shifting point of view conveys, but it represents a brief escape from selfconsciousness. She and Craig are camping on a cliff in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness while on a paddling trip. This morning, three days into the excursion, Legler wakes in the tent with Craig already outside preparing breakfast. As she begins to dress a new desire takes hold, so new it does not seem like her own. “I start to button [the shirt], then stop”, Legler says before changing to third person (1995: 35): She doesn’t want clothes. She undresses, lets the shirt fall. Her boots are set outside the tent door [. . .] She ignores them. .... She does not pretend that she is dressed […] But she walks outside without any shyness, with the same confidence of movement she would have if she were covered.  (Legler 1995: 35)

Craig sees Legler as “she walks into the woods, away from him” (1995: 35). “She has never done this before” and “wonders if he will follow her, and is glad when he does not” (Legler 1995: 35–6). Her response to the only male gaze around is significant because she is not embarrassed or preoccupied with what Craig may think. Her only concern is that he should not interfere, and, when he does not follow, Legler lets go of his gaze. What she never lets go of is her own gaze, which is not the internalized gaze of the patriarchy such as we saw in “Border Water”, but the self gaze that is aware of moving into a new relation to nature. Legler’s descriptions of the woods merge her body with the earth: “In this light, the trees radiate greenness. In this light, blue veins glow through her skin” (1995: 36). She rubs against a spruce, chews on pine needles, and leans against a birch, comparing the textures of these to her shoulders, hips, and thighs. Water falls on her back but she is not cold, her feet land on rocks and twigs but are not hurt. This losing of herself in nature might be alarming to feminists, given how women have been conflated with nature against their will, especially how even Legler’s language objectifies herself. However, I read this as an indication of Legler’s struggle to shed binary logic that decrees one can be a subject or an object, but never both. She is experiencing what phenomenologists would call “intersubjective phenomena”, where there is “a multiplicity of sensing subjects” (Abram 1996: 38). Legler does not explain the phenomenon but gives us

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an example of feeling a sense of merging without denying agency to herself or nature. “Gabimichigami” is a nested pastoral. Legler begins already in a remote place with only one other person, a man with whom she is intimate. Yet there is a further retreat to a privacy that is both of the body and of the earth, enacting the longing for an Arcadian ideal within the body that Gifford has identified in other ecofeminist writers (1999: 166). Her unexpected disinterest in clothes could be read as a symbolic casting off of cultural oppression, but that seems more an analysis aimed at a piece of fiction than nonfiction. Foremost here is her experience of being in direct sensory contact with natural surroundings. Later essays make clear Legler’s ideological position that nature and culture can not be separate; clothed or not we still carry gender expectations. Yet she gives us early in the book (too early to function as a climax or epiphany) an example of achieving the public privacy which she spends subsequent essays trying to reclaim on her own after ending her marriage, and with new female lovers. In “Gabimichigami” Legler reaches a level of public privacy deeper than that she shares with Craig outdoors, yet it is likely that it is only possible because he is there. Having a trusted male in the vicinity, Legler can relax her guard, and he does not break her reverie until, at last, he calls to her (and Legler once again shifts to first person). This reverie helps illuminate a comment in the essay immediately preceding “Gabimichigami” in which Legler says: “I am always afraid alone in the woods, but I push on” (1995: 34). Now we see that she pushes on for moments that take her briefly beyond her preoccupation with self and identity and the constraints culture places upon her. Despite all her fears, she knows the benefits. Acclaimed nature writer Alison Hawthorne Deming (1994) is one of the few who has directly addressed this issue in her essays. Deming states: “Women in our culture understand and respond to fear differently than men do. For one thing, we face it more often, since we inherit a historical legacy of men’s social and physical power over us” (1994: 172). Fear is a “radar” that women carry everywhere, and Deming suggests women go to the forest to “escape” it; but “no matter how sweet and pastoral her longing for the wild, once there, she finds her old companion fear has come along” (1994: 172). Both Legler and Deming implicitly raise the question: What could women achieve if they had access to the self-knowledge acquired through wandering that is associated with great male thinkers and artists? In this collection Legler does not give an answer, and focuses overmuch on her own situation without using that insight as a lens to view outward. But perhaps this is where each wanderer begins. By escaping, even briefly, into a solitary public privacy, Legler does discover a less judgmental body image, a sense that “her body is fine, out

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here” (1995: 36). It should not seem odd that her body image and her comfort level outdoors are so tightly joined because “in all societies there is an intertwined reciprocity between space, bodies, and the social construction of both” (Domosh and Seager 2001: 112). Legler’s work suggests that a woman’s increased comfort level outdoors is accompanied by letting go of some cultural inhibitions and gender conditioning. It is important to recognize that Legler does not present herself as freed from all her previous fears and anxieties outdoors. In “Lake One, Lake Two, Lake Three, Lake Four”, Legler recounts her “first-ever solo canoe trip”, which takes place after she has left Craig (1995: 155). Legler is going out to go in, to “prepare for [her] future” which involves burying her sister’s ashes (1995: 155). What follows is the description of an imperfect trip where, nevertheless, significant gains – inner and outer, physical and mental – have been made. She is not totally confident or competent; she gets lost at first, has trouble hanging her food bag to keep the bears out, and often struggles carrying her canoe when portaging. However, the descriptions of packing provisions, of paddling straight, of setting the tent up “quickly, with wet, cold hands”, of starting a fire, of keeping “the cream cold by weighing it down in the water with rocks” attest to the skills, knowledge, and comfort she does have outdoors (Legler 1995: 158, 162). Legler is also still afraid and finds she must really work to concentrate on the tasks of setting up camp in an attempt to “evaporate [her] fear, the fear that behind [her] was something terrible, something watching” (1995: 159). Yet there are also peaceful moments on the lake and at camp. Legler still internalizes the judgmental male gaze when she drags her canoe due to exhaustion, and especially when she decides to alter her plans, not going as far or as fast as she and Craig had previously done. “There was that voice, rattling on . . . ‘If you were half the outdoorswoman you claim to be you’d do it. Do it. Do it’” (Legler 1995: 163). However, success lies in Legler’s response: “Wisely, for once, I chose not to push myself ” (1995: 163). While she recognizes this as being wise rather than copping out, she still seems a long way from comfortable with choosing to shorten her route. Most of all, Legler’s solo excursion was a going in as well as a going out, a time to reflect both on what grieving is, and what she does and does not go outdoors for. Though she did not get a sign or message about what to do when burying her sister’s ashes, Legler did realize something about herself: “I enjoy solitude, but I do not enjoy being alone […] I yearn for contact” (1995: 167). Perhaps with the awareness that she is competent enough to go solo, Legler no longer has to prove anything and can choose to enjoy her solitude outdoors with others. Fear remains, but it does not rule her.

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3. The Brokeback Pastoral While fear (whether of men or bears or getting lost) is a major barrier to many women’s sense of comfort outdoors, Legler demonstrates how solitude may just not be seen as fun. Carol Gilligan (1982) has noted that women tend to be more relational than solitary, and this dislike of strict isolation may be another reason pastoral modes are not as readily available to women. In Legler’s case one might wish she did enjoy it more, or give it another chance. Likewise, the public privacy women can find in small groups, going “manless” as Underhill termed it, is underexplored though she does write of all-woman camping and ski trips. Instead, several essays focus on outdoor excursions with women who are, or she hopes will soon be, her lovers. While annoying in how unworldly her tone becomes compared to previous essays that contain critiques of how our cultural approach to the natural world parallels our approach to women and sexuality, these later essays present pastoral escape as retreat from city manners and norms that are laden with heterosexual bias and precede the publication of Annie Proulx’s (1999) short story “Brokeback Mountain” by several years. “Brokeback Mountain” – the basis for Ang Lee’s controversial and awardwinning movie by the same name in 2005 – is fiction and would not be considered by some ecocritics to be nature writing. Yet historically the pastoral is a form which came to include fiction (Gifford 1999: 1), and comparing some of Legler’s essays with Proulx’s story reveals an interesting trend of post-pastoral retreat to a safe place for unsanctioned companionship rather than for isolation. In the story, two cowboys come to love each other one summer while herding sheep. Since the cowboys are, in fact, shepherds for a time, this story is actually a pastoral of the “historical form” (Gifford 1999: 1). It is a blissful time for young men who had not expected such companionship. “There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on […] the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs” (Proulx 1999: 260). They can never recapture this time, the feeling of invisibility (though in truth they were seen), and, though they escape to the wilds for brief trysts as years go by, they never escape as completely as they did that summer. The tension in the story centers around one of the men wanting to leave his wife and child to ranch together and the other’s commitment to his children and knowledge that they would never get away with it in homophobic twentieth-century America; in other words, one’s desire to make Arcadia permanent and the other’s awareness that Arcadia is more a notion than reality. Similarly, some of Legler’s essays such as “Cold” and “All the Powerful Invisible Things” set up a pattern in which the natural world is “a secret safe place away from everything that could ever hurt [Legler or her lover]”, a place where “it feels like everything is possible” (1995: 189). Yet there is often still fear

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when she and her female lover are out alone. They sense a presence watching from the woods and lock their cabin door. This fear is more pervasive than for the gay cowboys who, because they are men, feel they belong in the wild and experience no fear that first summer, but only once they descend the mountain. Interestingly, the one thing that makes Legler feel safest, at least in these essays, is severe cold. Camping in remote cabins heated by wood they must chop, Legler and her lover find themselves in weather at least forty below zero, “too cold to make love” (1995: 103). Cold enough to kill, yet they extend their stay longer than planned. If nothing else can reassure one that there are not killers who target women or lesbians9 lurking nearby, it appears extreme weather can. A strange idyll, but convincing: “I ask you if you like this – to be isolated in this way, to be warm and to be the happiest you might ever be, in a lonely, faraway place like this in the bitter cold. ‘I could live like this,’ you say” (Legler 1995: 103). This gives the impression that living is equated with not having to keep one’s fear radar always on, that the constant vigilance women, as well as gays, must exercise daily is merely existing.10 “Brokeback Mountain” takes the Romantic image of the loner cowboy and suggests that, gay or not, some men might have relational inclinations. It challenges pastoral assumptions from the inside by showing men using the public privacy of the wilds for love and companionship – activities perceived as feminine. Legler’s brokeback pastorals, to label the mode, challenge pastoral assumptions from the outside, even more so than if she had limited her focus to her struggles as a woman and left out the added difficulties of being a lesbian. They add another layer of fear she has to deal with and another challenge for a writer trying to make space for her voice within a genre defined by masculine qualities and freedoms. Legler’s accounts resist the pastoral pattern of a solitary escape from “the entrammeling society” to “the promising landscape”, both of which “are [traditionally] depicted in unmistakably feminine terms” (Baym 1981: 133), where the outer is prioritized over the inner, and nature is separate from culture. Ultimately, she prefers to retreat briefly with women for a companionship unrestricted by societal heterosexual norms. These retreats are imperfect but 9 The 1996 double murder of two lesbians on the Appalachian Trail put such fears in the spotlight. Even though the FBI has never found evidence to indicate it was a hate crime (they do not say whether there was sexual assault). Karla Mantilla makes a strong argument that, in the absence of other motives, all random attacks on women and lesbians are more political than targeted attacks and serve to gain control over more than the victim by causing many women to restrict their activities. See Mantilla 1996. 10 Obviously the same is true of marginalized heterosexual male populations. A good example of an African-American post-pastoral is Harris 1988.

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still seem to be desired as a means of making everyday life back in the city more easily endured. As the main character in “Brokeback Mountain” reminds us, “if you can’t fix it you got a stand it” [sic] (Proulx 1999: 269). Just as Janet Wolff has argued that “insofar as the experience of ‘the modern’ occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men’s experience” (1990: 35), Nina Baym has shown that in American literary criticism, the “American experience is inherently male”, in large part because “the essential quality of America comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual” (1981: 130, 132). The fact that these opportunities were rarely available to women affected more than just women’s experience on the ground, but also their vicarious experience of outdoor spaces through literature. The “sense of agency offered to white boys through imperialist fiction” is an example of how “imaginative space”, as cultural geographers call it, can “position and enable” a “spatial self ” (Crang and Thrift 2000: 10). By not being able to read much about themselves in such wild spaces, women’s cultural exile from wilderness has been reinforced. Many women who pioneered various outdoor activities, such as climbing and bicycling, wrote about them, not because they were writers, but because they felt women would be encouraged to try such sports if they were given female examples. “The first openly feminist mountaineers of genuine renown were Americans”, claims David Mazel (1994: 8–9). “Bloomer girl”, Julia Archibald Holmes, published an account of her 1858 summitting of Pikes Peak in The Sibyl, a journal run by women devoted to feminist social reforms (Mazel 1994: 7). Later that century climbers Annie Peck Smith and Fanny Bullock Workman openly competed for the women’s altitude record, using their fame to “further the cause of women’s rights” and authoring numerous accounts (Mazel 1994: 9). About the same time there was Frances E. Willard ([1895] 1991), influential leader in women’s social reform movement, who wrote a small volume about learning to ride a bike at age fifty-three. Willard felt that “there was a special value to women in the conquest of the bicycle by a woman […] who had so many comrades in the […] army of temperance workers that the action would be widely influential” ([1895] 1991: 74). Though not necessarily pastorals, these demonstrate how written examples of a woman’s efforts to gain skill and comfort in outdoor spaces can act as aids to other women by sharing frustrations, accomplishments, tips, and realizations. Thus, accounts such as when Legler details her struggles and pleasures hunting, camping, paddling, and fishing enable women to more easily access male terrain in the United States both on the ground and on the page. There is an interesting caveat in John Ruskin’s description of the female character. Stereotypically, the man is “active [. . .] the creator, the discoverer

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[whose] energy [is] for adventure” while the woman’s energy is for arranging, ordering, and praising (qtd. in Wolff 1990: 16). “She is protected from all danger” that “man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter”, Ruskin declares, “unless she herself has sought it” [emphasis added] (Wolff 1990: 16). Even though many women now work as raft guides, wilderness rangers, wildlife biologists, and do other “rough work in the open world”, it is still often assumed that women do not seek such opportunities; that, except for a few Amazon types, women have no interest in wild outdoor spaces; that women do not enjoy getting dirty. Unfortunately, many women are inhibited from seeking such opportunities because of gender-specific fears and lack of examples. Legler’s book is one of many demonstrating that women do choose to experience physical activity, risk, and open spaces, though not always the same way as men – or as each other.

Bibliography Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage. Alaimo, Stacy. 2000. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Lorraine (ed.). 1991. Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry about Nature. New York: Vintage. Anderson, Lorraine and Thomas S. Edwards (eds). 2002. At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s Nature Writing. Hanover: University Press of New England. Anderson, Lorraine (ed.). 2003. Second Edition of Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry about Nature. New York: Vintage. Baym, Nina. 1981. ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’ in American Quarterly 33: 123–39. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crang, Mike and Nigel Thrift (eds). 2000. Introduction. Thinking Space. London: Routledge: 1–30. Deming, Alison Hawthorne. 1994. Temporary Homelands: Essays on Nature, Spirit and Place. New York: Picador. Domosh, Mona and Joni Seager. 2001. Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: Guilford Press. Edwards, Thomas S. and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe (eds). 2001. Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers. Hanover: University Press of New England. Farmer, Kathleen. 1976. Woman in the Woods. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books.

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Gal, Susan. 2004. ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’ in Scott, Joan and Debra Keates (eds) Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 261–77. Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. London: Routledge. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Glotfelty, Cheryll. 1996. ‘Femininity in the Wilderness: Reading Gender in Women’s Guides to Backpacking’ in Women’s Studies 25(5): 439–56. Gordon, Margaret T. and Stephanie Riger. 1989. The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Harris, Eddy L. 1988. Mississippi Solo: A River Quest. New York: Harper & Row. Hogan, Linda, Brenda Peterson and Deena Metzger (eds). 1998. Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Hogan, Linda and Brenda Peterson (eds). 2001. The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World. New York: North Point Press. Hughes, Carolyn T. 1996. Review of Legler (1995) in New York Times 19 May 1996, late ed., sec. 7:25. Johnson, Rochelle. 2000. ‘Placing Rural Hours’ in Tallmadge, John and Henry Harrington (eds) Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kolodny, Annette. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Legler, Gretchen. 1995. All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook. Seattle: Seal Press. Loomis, Molly. 2005. ‘Going Manless: Looking Back, Forward, and Inward 75 Years After Miriam O’Brien Underhill’s Milestone All-Female Ascent of the Grépon in the French Alps’ in The American Alpine Journal: 3–20. Mantilla, Karla. 1996. ‘Murder on the Appalachian Trail’ in Off Our Backs (July 1996). On line at: http://www.findarticles.com (consulted 10.03.06). Marx, Leo. [1964] 2000. The Machine in the Garden. Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazel, David (ed.). 1994. Introduction. Mountaineering Women: Stories by Early Climbers. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Muir, John. [1938] 1979. John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nash, Roderick. [1967] 1982. Wilderness and the American Mind. Third Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nichols, Maggie. 1978. Wild, Wild Woman. Berkley: Windhover. Proulx, Annie. 1999. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner: 253–83. Rawlins, C. L. 1996. ‘A Light Green Baroque: Nature Writing at the End of Nature’ in The Bloomsbury Review (March/April): 12. Rogers, Susan Fox (ed.). 1994. Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women. Seattle: Seal Press. Scheese, Don. 2002. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Routledge. Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking.

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Thacker, Beck. 2002. Amazon Girls Handbook. Chicago: Warwick Park Press. Thomas, Lynn. 1980. The Backpacking Woman. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books. Wilderness Act. [1964] 2006. ‘Definition of Wilderness’ sec. 2c. On line at: http://www. wilderness.net/index.cfm?fuse=NWPS&sec=legisAct (consulted 07.01.2006). Willard, Frances E. [1895] 1991. How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential 19th Century Woman (ed. Carol O’Hare) Sunnyvale, California: Fair Oaks Publishing. Wolff, Janet. 1990. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.  . 1995. Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zwinger, Ann. 2002. ‘Of Red-Tailed Hawks and Black-Tailed Gnatcatchers’ in Elder, John and Robert Finch (eds) The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: Norton.

Negotiating the City

Adrienne Rich’s City Poetry: Locating a Flâneuse Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega abstract As Adrienne Rich indicates in the essay “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” urban spaces such as New York City had a profound impact on her work for many years. At a time when the American ideal placed women in the domestic sphere of private, suburban homes, Rich was exploring her private identity in relation to her location in public city spaces. Yet the role of urban space is rarely examined in critical studies of Rich’s work. This essay analyzes ways in which Rich simultaneously builds on a history of poetry in and of the city and exposes those roots as unstable, requiring revision and reconstruction. American literary history has often noted the presence and influence of the city on male poets such as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes, but it is rarely explored in the work of women poets. I argue that, like these male poets, Rich inserts herself into an urban poetics characterized by the influence of Charles Baudelaire and his flâneur. Rich transforms Baudelaire’s nineteenth century, Parisian flâneur into a twentieth century flâneuse in the modern American city that requires the perspective created by flânerie to consider gender, sexuality, race, and class issues in an activist poetic gaze. Drawing on the theories of Walter Benjamin and Anne Friedberg about the flânerie, this essay not only reveals the impact of public urban life on Rich’s poetry, contributing to the challenge of addressing her incomparable range, it also contributes to critical discussions about the value of Baudelaire’s flâneur to contemporary urban studies and brings it back to poetry studies. Keywords: Adrienne Rich, flânerie, flâneuse, flâneur, city, urbanity, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” “Frame,” “The Blue Ghazals,” “End of an Era,” labyrinth, Ariadne, crowd, Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire.

Although Adrienne Rich is rarely considered a “city poet” the way some poets are (Gwendolyn Brooks as a Chicago poet, Frank O’Hara as a New York poet), the prevalence of urban spaces in her poetry indicates the impact of the city on her work. Rich’s poetry focuses directly on the city as early as 1961 in the poem “End of an Era” when the speaker addresses the city through apostrophe and invokes Charles Baudelaire, whose Paris poems in Les Fleurs du Mal set the

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standard for city poetry that still influences poets today. “End of an Era” suggests the presence of a flâneuse in Rich’s poetry, a gendered form of Baudelaire’s flâneur, who attempts to redefine traditionally male-centered spaces, specifically, the city and city poetry. In poems such as “End of an Era”, “Frame”, “The Blue Ghazals”, and “Twenty-One Love Poems”, Rich engages the city’s limitations, demonstrating her double entrapment in and between the architecture of urban spaces and patriarchal literary tradition. Rich’s desire to understand and capture the “real” city in poetry allows her to address issues of gender, race, and class through flânerie, but also traps her in the conflicted identity of a flâneuse who is caught between public and private space, between male- and femaledefined space, and between a poetic style that adheres to tradition and one that rejects it. In attempting to appropriate flânerie for women, Rich’s city poems articulate her struggle to transition from what Paula Bennett calls a “dutiful daughter” poet to a specifically “woman poet” (1986: 9). The city is a vexed place for a feminist poet trying to construct an identity outside the confines of patriarchal expectations. Rich confronts city spaces that have traditionally been designed, constructed, and controlled by men to implicitly exclude women, or at least to control their movement with surveillance. Lucy Collins explains that in Twenty-One Love Poems, “the city exemplifies civilization – growing from man’s achievements in industry and commerce, it is a dynamic space within which relations of power and identity are contested. Urban space is marked, even defined, by the masculine” (2004: 146).1 Furthermore, by virtually eliminating private space, the city imposes on the lives of its inhabitants, who engage in all the activities of relationships, careers, and families while rarely being out of sight or ear-shot of other people. Therefore, while city spaces offer the possibility of public recognition that the private spaces of suburbia are designed to deny, women’s ability to access that recognition is still defined by men. At a time when Rich was rejecting the American ideal that placed women in the private, suburban, domestic sphere, the city offered an enticingly public alternative. She lived primarily in three major east-coast cities until the mid-1970s: Baltimore, where she was born and raised; Boston, specifically Cambridge, where she attended Radcliffe College and later lived with her husband and children; and New York City, to which she and her family moved in 1966. In New York, Rich explored the liberating possibilities of stepping into the human and cultural congestion of the city crowd. She describes her motivation for taking a job in City College’s SEEK program as coming partly from “a need to involve myself with the real life of the city, which had arrested me 1 Adrian Oktenberg supports Collins’s interpretation by referring to the city as the apex of the “civilization” because it is the center of industry, commerce, law, and culture that men have created.

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from the first weeks I began living here” (1979: 53). She identifies this “real” city in the City College students, whose comfort in the public spaces of the city must have seemed foreign to Rich. The students provide a connection to city life that enables Rich to move her poetic and personal voice out of the private, suburban sphere of marriage and motherhood and into the public sphere of the city streets as a flâneuse. In order to insert women’s perspectives and contribution into the city space, its map must be rewritten to include their lives. In “The Blue Ghazal” dated “5/4/69,” Rich writes: “City of accidents, your true map / is the tangling of all our lifelines” (1984: 123). Rich’s “true map” of the city incorporates the “lifelines” of all its inhabitants, including women. The assonance of the short “a” vowel sound in these lines, all of which fall on stressed syllables, indicates the beginning of a new map of the city. The short “a” sound – as opposed to the strong, long “a” vowel sound as it is pronounced in the naming of the letter – is secondary, like women’s contributions to the city space have been secondary. By naming the map of the city with an emphasis on the short “a” sounds, these lines recognize the omission or neglect of women’s perspectives in the city. They suggest Rich’s desire to revise the city’s cultural construction by writing a new map of the city in her poetry. Like Ariadne helping Theseus navigate Daedalus’s labyrinth, Rich seeks to provide a thread for women to follow through the urban labyrinth as it is literally constructed by architects and figuratively constructed by poets. In Skyline: The Narcissistic City, Hubert Damisch connects cities to the ancient labyrinths of Greece and Egypt: city streets create maze-like spaces (2001). By considering the city a labyrinth, Ariadne, as the provider of the “map” in the thread, becomes a precursor to the flâneuse. Because she fails to navigate the labyrinth herself, Ariadne represents the prevention of women’s movement through literal and figurative labyrinths: the literal city (public space) and the figurative maze of social standards and expectations (private space). Ariadne’s legacy clouds Rich’s ability to articulate a flâneuse in her poetry. Like Ariadne, left stranded on an island by Theseus, Rich finds that depending on men to rescue her from patriarchal control backfires. Rich is abandoned by her poetic forefathers, whose tools she thinks she needs to escape the labyrinths. Rich’s poetry suggests, hints at, and almost articulates women’s flânerie, always on the brink of realizing a twentieth century flâneuse, and yet it is repeatedly obstructed by poetic history. The legacy of city poetry in American literature mimics the male-centered construction of the city. The male poets who established forms of city poetry based in flânerie constructed reflections of patriarchal city space. In “N.Y.” Ezra Pound claims that New York City is “My city, my beloved”, “a maid with no breasts” into whom he will “breathe” a soul through his poetic apostrophe

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([1926] 1990: 58). City poetry excludes women’s perspectives not only by objectifying and controlling them as Pound does, but also by preventing women from participating in flânerie. The influence of Baudelaire’s flâneur can be traced through the work of such male American poets as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes. All of the hope and possibility that Rich sees in the city are defined by her inheritance of urban response from such male poets: The city as object of love, a love not unmixed with horror and anger, the city as Baudelaire and Rilke had provisioned it, or William Blake for that matter, death in life, but a death emblematic of the death that is epidemic in modern society, and a life more edged, more costly, more charged with knowledge, than life elsewhere […] Here was this damaged, self-destructive organism, preying and preyed upon. The streets were rich with human possibility and vicious with human denial […]  (1979: 54)

The city paradoxically nurtures creativity and production and destroys it at the same time. Grappling with the contradictions of a city whose streets teem with “possibility” but also with “denial”, Rich looks to her poetic forefathers to provide methods for translating the complexities of city life into poetry. Echoes of their city poetry reverberate through her city poetry, enabling her flânerie, but also undermining her attempts to create a specifically woman flâneuse. Flânerie is a problematic motif for Rich to adopt because it often contributes to the exclusion of women from the cultural construction of the city. According to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s urban poetry, flânerie was the exclusive domain of men in the nineteenth century. The flâneur was an upper-class gentleman who had the leisure to wander the city streets, observing the crowd and interpreting it in his poetry. In Benjamin’s description, flânerie is defined by a variety of factors including the flâneur’s alienation in the crowd, his emotionally distanced gaze, his ability to be directed by the movement of the crowd, his role as an “unwilling detective” who stumbles upon crime in the crowd, and his intoxication in the city and crowd. The flâneur is a distinctly private person who observes and records public spaces precisely because he is able to retain anonymity and invisibility in public spaces. For women to participate in flânerie, they have to be able to blend into the crowd and go unnoticed as well. Rich flirts with the traditional mode of flânerie for writing city poetry, but, like the use of her roots in formal poetic style in order to resist its very limitations, she resists the flâneur’s exclusive rights over how flânerie functions. Although critics such as Janet Wolff and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson claim that anonymity and emotional detachment in the crowd are impossible for women, critics such as Anne Friedberg, Anke Gleber, and Deborah Parsons provide analyses that establish the prevalence and importance of women’s participation in forms of flânerie. Friedberg identifies shopping as a means of

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women’s flânerie in the early twentieth century: “The female flâneur was not possible until a woman could wander the city on her own, a freedom linked to the privilege of shopping alone” (1991: 421). The shopping mall offers the ideal setting for women to participate in flânerie because “[i]t defers urban realities, blocks urban blights – the homeless, beggars, crime, traffic, even weather […] The mall creates a nostalgic image of a clean, safe, legible town center” (Friedberg 1991: 424). Although Friedberg’s analysis establishes the possibility of women’s flânerie, shopping relegates women to consumer address in an artificial environ­ment. Friedberg also locates women’s flânerie in film, removing it from its original artistic form in poetry. Rich insists that the actual city recognize women’s perspectives, setting her city poetry in spaces such as the public street rather than consumer-driven malls. By writing the city, Rich is producing a version of it that provides a map to make the city space familiar for readers. Repetition of the words “map” and “atlas” throughout Rich’s oeuvre2 indicates her desire to make the material spaces around her more legible. According to Deborah Parsons, the role of the writer in the city is more complex than as a simple recorder of experiences: The urban writer is not only a figure within a city; he/she is also the producer of a city, one that is related to but distinct from the city of asphalt, brick, and stone, one that results from the interconnection of body, mind, and space, one that reveals the interplay of self/city identity. The writer adds other maps to the city atlas; those of social interaction but also of myth, memory, fantasy, and desire.  (2000: 1)

Traditionally, women are portrayed as consumers of products in the city rather than as producers of the city, a fact on which Friedberg’s analysis of the flâneuse in the mall is predicated. By acknowledging women’s participation in writing the city, Parsons includes their perspectives in the production of the city, implying that they can construct their own, metaphorical city space. Rich’s poetry acknowledges that her gender restricted her contribution to the city’s cultural production in a way that her prose does not. The poem “End of an Era” implies that Rich struggled early in her career to locate her identity in the city.3 She engages the patriarchal legacy of city poetry by asking Baudelaire, through apostrophe, to redeem the city after she becomes disillusioned by her discovery of women’s exclusion. Rich inadvertently creates an unsustainable position for her flâneuse by attempting to appropriate the poetic 2 These terms are most prominent in the title and poems of An Atlas of a Difficult World, where Rich attempts to create a map of her identity and of America. 3 This poem is probably set in Boston as it was written in 1961, when Rich was living in Cambridge.

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power of Baudelaire’s flâneur despite her latent awareness of the politics of the position that prohibit her gendered voice. The speaker of “End of an Era” first addresses the city directly, alluding to Eliot’s “Unreal City” of The Wasteland in the capitalization of the word “city,” itself a nod to Baudelaire: […] City, dumb as a pack of thumbed cards, you once had snap and glare and secret life; now, trembling under my five grey senses’ weight, you flatten onto the table. (1993: 174)

The city once had “snap and glare” for the speaker, but now it is “dumb” to her: incapable of speech. Despite her persistence (the metaphoric cards are “thumbed”), the city turns out to be “flat”, nothing more than an illusion. The lines are rhythmically choppy, disrupting the flow both of her understanding of the city and of her communication with the reader. The emphasis on the word “you” at the end of the second quoted line, separated out between a comma and the end of the line, leaves it hanging and accusatory. Similarly, the line “you flatten” suggests a double meaning: the city is flattened, but it also flattens. The speaker realizes that she cannot see herself in the city map, nor can she contribute to that map. Rich’s self-conscious second reference to The Wasteland in the metaphoric cards, which allude to the Tarot cards that Eliot uses to demonstrate his foreboding response to the modern city, disables her physical and poetic response to the city. The paradoxical city causes the speaker of “End of an Era” to achieve her goal of connecting to Baudelaire’s city for the very reasons that she feels excluded from it. When her apostrophe to the city, and possibly to Eliot, fails, the speaker of “End of an Era” then calls directly to Baudelaire, trying to renew what made the city seem special before: “Baudelaire, I think of you […] Nothing changes” (1993: 174). Baudelaire has no impact on the city that she is in: “rude and selfabsorbed the current / dashes past, reflecting nothing” (1993: 174). The double meaning of “current” as the flow of the crowd on the city streets and as the marker of present time demonstrates the dual aspects of the speaker’s alienation in the city space. This alienation provides her, like Baudelaire’s flâneur, with the tools to observe the city as a flâneuse, but the speaker finds this position to be disillusioning rather than empowering. The city is constantly changing, keeping up an illusion of progress that only further distances the speaker of “End of an Era” from identifying with the

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space in which she lives. “The neighborhood is changing / even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar” (1993: 174). The speaker is an outsider because of her knowledge of the city’s patriarchal construction. Even the people she knows, her neighbors, are changed by this knowledge and appear “peculiar.” This sense of alienation is essential to flânerie, according to Benjamin, making the speaker of “End of an Era” closer to the forefathers of city poetry than she thinks. Despite this connection, she does not move out into the city spaces. She allows the alienation to prohibit her movement rather than using it as a moment of intoxication, preventing “End of an Era” from pursuing an example of women’s flânerie. The poem indicates that Rich feels that turning off one’s senses (they are grey) in order to observe prohibits women’s ability to respond. The poem “Frame,” written in 1980, exemplifies Rich’s struggle to connect her emotional response to the urban setting to flânerie (1984: 303). “Frame” connects to the literary roots of flânerie in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories by employing the perspective of a flâneuse who has stumbled upon crime in the city space (Benjamin 1973: 42). Like the narrator of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” who watches the flâneur pass his window in the crowd, the speaker of “Frame” watches a crime occur from a protected distance. She observes an incident between a woman and the police that exemplifies, for her, the nature of the city’s effect on women. The poem is located in a specific time and place – “This is Boston 1979” – defining the city in a specific time. The speaker watches a woman emerge from a university building and wait for a bus in the shelter of a doorway. The setting is further established by the class implications of the woman’s use of public transportation. The speaker of “Frame” writes from a specifically gendered perspective, challenging the assumption that women are in danger primarily from random attacks on the city streets since the crime she witnesses is committed by the academic elite and the police. The woman whom the speaker of “Frame” watches is trapped between the spaces on the city streets that present dangers from weather and the academic space of the science laboratory that presents dangers from intellectual rejection, mimicking the ongoing struggle in Rich’s city poems between her identity in the city and poetic spaces. The speaker notices the woman coming “out of the lab- / oratory” at the beginning of the poem. The word “laboratory” is broken by enjambment so that it makes the two words “lab” and “oratory”’ an overt comment on the implied connotation of the word in contrast with the denotation of its parts. “Lab” is probably how the students refer to the space casually, an identification of comfort with the space, but also the common term that most people know for a space of scientific research. By separating “lab” from “oratory”, Rich gives the space a more complex definition since “oratory” might refer to this poem’s speaking out about the following events, but more

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importantly, suggests the word’s meaning as a place of prayer. The contradiction between scientific reason and faith is highlighted by the elevation of a “lab” to a site of implied holiness in an “oratory”. As a public facility, the “lab” is also made private in this connection. By entering this male-defined space and exposing its contradictions, the female student disrupts the male power structure of the laboratory. As a flâneuse watching from a distance, the speaker takes the liberty of projecting an identity onto the woman in “Frame” that may or may not be based in fact: the woman is thinking about organic chemistry, how to pay her rent, and how she can convince professors to write recommendations for her. Being a woman in the sciences makes her invisible to professors who assume that scientists are, and should be, men. The implication that the woman may be black (all of the other characters in the poem are identified specifically as “white”) further isolates her in the academic setting. Finally, the violence that occurs to her in this poem is caused by the assumption that she has no right to be in this place of science and knowledge. Her success would undermine the professors’ faith in man’s superiority in the academy. The speaker of the poem specifically identifies her location when the poem switches to first person, visually demonstrated by italics: “I don’t know her. I am / standing though somewhere just outside the frame / of all this, trying to see” (1984: 304). As a flâneuse, she stands outside the frame of events, safe from the danger that will occur, but she observes the events that happen to the woman. In the narrative of the poem, a white man approaches the woman, accosts her, and then brings a police officer to aid in the removal of the woman from the doorway of the building. The policeman arrests the woman (presumably for trespassing) and violently shoves her into the police car (her head “bangs” on the car, “he twists the flesh of her thigh / with his nails”) (1984: 304–05). The speaker identifies her role in witnessing the events several times: she is standing at the edge of the frame; she cannot hear what is said but sees it all. The city space between the two women silences the victim’s protests. Recognizing the woman’s innocence, the speaker resists the silent, observer role that she has assumed as the flâneuse by saying: “What I am telling you / is told by a white woman who they will say / was never there. I say I am there” (1984: 305). The declaration of her presence resists the limitations of the role of flânerie as pure observation without emotional implication. She bridges class, race, and spatial divisions to demand recognition of women’s voices. Although a flâneuse should be silent in her observations, the speaker of this poem resolves that she must become a recognized witness to crime against women in the city. The events of “Frame” force the speaker, as flâneuse, to recognize the emotional implications of witnessing violence and the bonds between women in the

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crowd, but also to recognize that she has been forced to become a flâneuse in this situation – removed, detached, recording rather than interacting, remaining an observer rather than trying to help the woman – because no one will believe her anyway. The flâneuse witnesses the violence as through a “frame”, ‘around which she cannot see or move. The flânerie is limited by this frame which may be literal, but certainly has more than one figurative level: the doorway that frames the woman as she waits for the bus, the frame that captures this moment, like a picture, or even the boundaries that define how far the speaker is willing to interact with the events she witnesses. Most importantly, the speaker of the poem recognizes that the woman she watched was framed in the criminal sense as well. She was set up by academia, the police, and society in general. In fact, the speaker implies that the city has framed all women this way. The poem does not achieve flânerie because the speaker gets stuck between the role of detective (like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” who watches from his window) and a flâneuse who can remain emotionally detached. Although the poem suggests elements of flânerie, its socio-political conscience resists allowing the speaker to become a flâneuse. Rich’s flâneuse cannot help but recognize the effect that race, gender, and class had on the woman in “Frame.” As a (possibly) black woman who had to take the bus to school, she did not fit the model of “scientist” for similar reasons that Rich’s speaker does not neatly fit into the definition of “flâneuse”. Both women are appropriating roles that have been defined to exclude them in spaces that are designed to limit their access. Rich’s flâneuse has returned to the city streets only to discover that her privilege of sight empowers her to witness the “urban reality” but that it does not provide her with a means of changing that reality. All she can do is state her presence, even if it is denied. Rich wants more from the city. She wants not only the ability to walk and witness the city streets as the speaker of “Frame” does (she is entirely unnoticed, to the point that any knowledge of her presence will be denied by men), but the ability to actively change that scene as well. While the poems “End of an Era” and “Frame” expose Rich’s struggle to locate a woman poet’s position in the city, considered together with “The Blue Ghazals” and “Twenty-One Love Poems”, they create a poetic map that narrates Rich’s conflicted relationship with flânerie. Creating a poetic map of the city is crucial to Rich’s interpretation of women’s flânerie. Her flâneuse should be able to show women how to navigate the physical and figurative city spaces to avoid the kind of restriction, neglect, or violence that she describes in “End of an Era” and “Frame”. Such a position would allow Rich to use her sense of alienation to prevent other women’s alienation in the city. Rich attempts to provide threads for others to follow while navigating literal and figurative city labyrinths, but

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she expresses Ariadne-like frustration at her own inability to navigate them. By acknowledging her limited power in the city, she recognizes that she may never be able to fully navigate or produce the city space. Therefore, she must appropriate the flâneur’s mode of navigating the city to then resist the very limitations that it provides and make her vision of the city recognized. Turning to the staple theme of lyric poetry, love, Rich demonstrates the emotional relationship between people and spaces in the city that challenges the perception of flânerie as necessarily removed from emotional entanglements with the crowd. Like Ariadne, Rich looks to love to lead her out of the patriarchal city that represses her and discovers that using love as a map still leads to silencing or abandonment. “The Blue Ghazal” from 9/28/68 addresses the city as an “object of love”4 (1984: 121). The triangular relationship between a man, a woman, and the city provides a motif for the series of couplets. While the speaker of the ghazal achieves the distance and scope of flânerie, the fate of the woman in the poem undermines the poem’s success. A man, a woman, a city. The city as object of love. Anger and filth in the basement. The furnace stoked and blazing. A sexual heat on the pavements. Trees erected like statues. Eyes at the ends of avenues. Yellow for hesitation. I’m tired of walking your streets he says, unable to leave her. Air of dust and rising sparks, the city burning her letters. (1984: 121)

The lovers are conflated with the city, unable to separate their love for each other from their love of the city. Although the city is identified as the “object of love” in the first couplet, it is followed immediately by “anger and filth in the basement”, suggesting not affection, but rage and destruction brewing under the surface of the city streets. Moreover, the city is described as distinctly 4 Interestingly, this line of the poem also appears in the “Teaching in Open Admissions” essay that I already discussed, and which was written after this poem chronologically.

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masculine: the “sexual heat” of the pavements is emphasized by “erected” trees like “statues”, suggesting the kinds of phallic monuments to patriarchal construction that herald city spaces. Although skyscrapers make a more obvious symbol of patriarchy in the city, suggesting that the trees have been “erected” the way buildings are conveys Rich’s sense that they are artificial replacements for nature, which she often identifies with womanhood. The traffic lights – “eyes at the ends of avenues” – provide surveillance of the city streets by controlling the speed and timing of crowd’s movement through the city. By the end of the poem, the woman has been erased by the city. The male character in “The Blue Ghazal” first erases her by conflating her with the city. He becomes tired of walking the city streets – which could also be the woman’s streets, like a part of her body, in the couplet’s phrasing – but he is unable to leave “her”, which could either be the female lover or the city. The city completes the erasure by destroying the evidence of the woman’s love, evidence of her voice and evidence of her ability to produce anything that would contribute to the city scene or the relationship by burning her letters. The love that is portrayed in this ghazal is not of love for the city, but of how love in the city can destroy the woman. Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz explains that the poem “records the relationship between a man, a woman, and a city: the city is filth and chaos, all caused by man […] The city will continue to be more and more a space of violation, anger, corruption” (1984: 12). Ironically, and despite the anger that Diaz-Diocaretz identifies in Rich’s poetry, observing the dangers of the city is part of the intrigue of flânerie. The images are reminiscent of Baudelaire’s “O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!” (Baudelaire [1857] 1993: 55) The risk that women take in attempting to connect to the city is that they will become similarly sullied by the environment. But Rich has no way of articulating a woman’s independent identity in such a role. Because the woman’s body (and her implied sexuality through the love relationship with the man) is either erased or contaminated in the city, the poem fails to allow her to move freely through the city space or to define herself within that space. Transitioning to lesbian love does not alter the impact of the patriarchal city on women or improve their chances at embodying a flâneuse in Rich’s poetry. “Twenty-One Love Poems” demonstrates the conflict between Rich’s desire to employ poetic traditions such as flânerie and her need to establish a voice and form that breaks out of the traditional mode so that it can prioritize individual experience that includes recognition of the effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the city. The speaker’s relationship with her lover is obstructed by the city’s literal and figurative labyrinths. The city imposes on their love as the limits of public acceptability obstruct their happiness. Yet, as Audre Lorde describes in Zami, the city space housed (maybe without sheltering) a lesbian community in

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New York as early as the 1950s, so it would appear that Rich’s implication of the lovers being alone in a city that denies their existence is an observation about the separation of public and private space through issues of social acceptability. In “Twenty-One Love Poems”, Rich demands recognition beyond that of the lesbian community in the city. Her flâneuse moves between public spaces where she is simply woman and private spaces where she is lesbian uneasily. Evidence of flânerie appears at the very beginning of “Twenty-One Love Poems”. The first poem opens as the speaker is walking through the city, noticing urban “blight”: “pornography”, “science-fiction vampires”, and “victimized hirelings” (1984: 236). The speaker interprets these images as manifestations of patriarchal power that warps women’s sexuality. The act of walking and observing alone suggest flânerie, but what this flâneuse observes proves that the only spaces in which women can exist in the city are pornographic. She sees a “red begonia perilously flashing / from a tenement sill six stories high”, evoking traditional femininity – the flower – conflated with the prostitute’s red light. The speaker is trying to imagine a city where she and her lover can exist, where women have not been defined solely as sexual commodities. “No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, / … our animal passion rooted in the city” (1984: 236). Their love is rooted in the city, but they want to be connected with nature like trees, which the city has made phallic in “The Blue Ghazals”. Because no one has “imagined” the women, they should be free to leave, but the word “rooted” implies that they are incapable of moving or of removing their love from the city streets. This speaker’s movement through the city replicates flânerie but it only reinforces her sense that the city does not belong to her, and worse, that it will destroy her. The first poem’s despair foreshadows the fate of the lovers, but the speaker valiantly tries to define a nurturing space for her love in the city, exploring the tension between public and private space in the city. In the second poem, the speaker wakes in her lover’s apartment, exploring the emotional developments of their love and her discoveries about herself from that emotional state. This poem conflates the lover with poetry, and the third poem builds on the connection by conflating the speaker’s love of the city with her love for her lover. She compares the feeling of joy one experiences as a youth in the city to her feelings for her lover: Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty, my limbs streaming with a purer joy? did I lean from any window over the city listening for the future as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring? (1984: 237)

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The speaker’s excitement in anticipation of her lover’s arrival surpasses the excitement that she felt the city held when she was younger. The lines imply that, prior to this relationship, the experience of being young in the city was the strongest feeling of love that the speaker had experienced. Between the second and third poems, the speaker has conflated her feelings of love for poetry, the city, and her lover so that they overlap, lost in a private emotional state. As the relationship progresses through the poems, the speaker’s awareness of the public city space returns. Moving back onto the streets of the city in Poem IV, the speaker walks home from being with her lover. Although she has a destination, there is no urgency about getting home. The leisure allows her to return her attention to the city and to flânerie. She notes images of the city along her way: “I come home from you through the early light of spring / flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado, / the Discount Wares, the shoe-store” (1984: 238). Once at her building, she calls for a man to hold the elevator and he calls her “hysterical” – instantly returning her to the stereotyped public image of women. Although she is carrying grocery bags, giving the appearance of domesticity, in her walk down the street the speaker had become an anonymous member of the crowd, neither significant nor insignificant for participating in a domestic act. The speaker does not dwell on the man’s comment, but it weighs on the poem, triggering the reader’s awareness of the speaker’s struggle to be acknowledged in the city space. At home, the speaker opens a letter from a man in jail who has been physically and sexually tortured which causes her to break down. The distance of the lover is crucial as the speaker is confronted with patriarchal oppressions in the city scene. Her lover is removed from her literally, but also symbolically by the city: the city which represents the horrors of patriarchal control (“men who “love wars” “still control the world”). The city further imposes on the women’s relationship in Poem XVI, but the speaker does not yet recognize its insidious influence. “Across a city from you, I’m with you”: the lovers are divided by the city, but the speaker believes that they are still connected (1984: 244). She says, “This island of Manhattan is wide enough / for both of us, and narrow”, imaging that the city is both wide enough to give them their own space and narrow enough to keep them emotionally attached, but the phrasing of the lines separates out “narrow” from “wide enough”, creating a space between the terms that emphasizes their contradiction (1984: 244). For instance, the city’s crowd is “narrow”-minded even if there is enough space for them all to live. The women’s love has to be separate because it cannot be open and known to the city crowd. This flâneuse’s intoxication in the city – a characteristic aspect of flânerie according to Benjamin – is driven by love, not by the city. Rich’s sequence of poems dismantles the euphoric illusion, rendering flânerie a critical rather than an inspirational position for women.

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The optimism of poem “XVI” is immediately tempered by the acknowledgement that lesbian love has no public place in the city. Sure that their love will survive public recognition, the speaker abandons her observant flânerie and examines the meaning of love in poem XVII, only to be jolted out of her reverie by the realization that there are “forces” that are “within us and against us, against us and within us” (1984: 244). The inability of the lovers’ relationship to function in public spaces prevents them from being able to function in private spaces. The city reflects the speaker’s disillusionment with love and her thwarted return to flânerie in Poem XVIII: Rain on the West Side Highway, red light at Riverside: the more I live the more I think two people together is a miracle. (1984: 245)

Unlike the colon which connects these four lines, once again conflating the city and love, the speaker discovers that she cannot connect the public spaces of the city with the private spaces of her love. In this moment, the highway represents the speed of traffic moving through the city. Instead of seeing a connected crowd, the speaker realizes that the city is made up of individuals whose movement is stopped at the light, but no connection can be made between them. Like the traffic on the highway, the speaker no longer moves through the city because she is not motivated to be moving between her home and her lover’s home any longer. Although the speaker of the “Twenty-One Love Poems” struggles between private anonymity in flânerie and public recognition of her lesbian love, her retaliation against the city’s silencing positions her as a new kind of flâneuse. She recognizes and claims her role as part of the city despite her inability to demand recognition from the crowd. In the end, the speaker claims a space within the city, defining her new role as woman articulating the city: I choose to be a figure in that light, half-blotted by darkness, something moving across that space, the color of stone greeting the moon, yet more than stone: a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle. (1984: 246)

Here at the end, the woman realizes that she is the city: she is the color of stone, but because she is also woman, she is something more. She “chooses” to “walk” in the city – she chooses to traverse the city map, to make it her own, and to become the city by writing the city. This is a woman who can move as a flâneuse

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through the city, but she appears only at the very end of the sequence and is never successfully articulated in a poem. Ultimately, “End of an Era”, “Frame”, “The Blue Ghazals”, and “Twenty-One Love Poems” fail to articulate a flâneuse or to emblemize the city the way other city poets have because Rich is unwilling to meddle with poetic tradition. Although Rich’s poetry clearly explores the effect of urban space on her identity, she talks about the issue of space in a different way in her critical work. In “Notes toward a Politics of Location”, Rich identifies specific “locations” from which she works. She challenges the notion of “location” as a physical landscape and suggests that the first “location” she must work from is her own body. As a feminist woman, her body is the first location that identifies her and constructs her understanding of the world. Other “locations” that she identifies include race locations – she locates herself as a white, Jewish woman – and sexual locations – she identifies her location as lesbian. Therefore, in the physical city, she locates herself in relation to socio-political problems to articulate the figurative labyrinths that she must navigate just to enter the physical labyrinth of streets. Wendy Martin notes that, “Rich uses the details of daily urban life to state her political message” about disenfranchised and exploited people and to “convey a sense of the cultural fragmentation and urban dislocation and destruction” (1984: 186–87). Furthermore, Margaret Dickie explains that, “As she describes them, the political positions of her life have been tied to the many locations in which she has lived or, rather, they have been tied to coming out of particular locations. She has had to come out of the South, out of Cambridge, out of New York, in order to see the differences within herself ” (1997: 183 [italics Dickie’s]). The city spaces of Cambridge and New York became symbols of patriarchal containment and limitation that Rich resisted as a feminist, lesbian woman. By deeming the city devoid of possibility for women, Rich fails to write a map of the city that makes women’s perspectives a priority. Instead she turns inward, writing a map of herself that can extend out to the natural world in An Atlas of the Difficult World. Although “End of an Era”, “Frame”, “The Blue Ghazals”, and “Twenty-One Love Poems” do not realize a “woman poet” voice with which Rich is comfortable, they outline the possibility of women’s flânerie in twentieth century American poetry. The problem of appropriating a malecentered form and attempting to make it incorporate the perspectives of women eventually suppresses Rich’s potential revision of both the city and city poetry, but it anticipates voices of other poets who refuse to give up on the city. Rich retaliates, resists, and struggles against the confines of flânerie, trying to make it her own, but the restrictions of the form consistently disappoint the poems’ speakers. They try to make public statements, to motivate the crowd to action, but flânerie is an intentionally anonymous position that prevents interaction

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with the crowd. Adherence to poetic tradition betrays Rich by restricting her ability to construct a vision of a city that empowers women.

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles, 1993. The Flowers of Evil (tr. James McGowan). New York: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter, 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (tr. Harry Zohn). London: NLB. Bennett, Paula, 1986. My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon Press. Collins, Lucy, 2004. ‘ ‘‘Our Lives Inseparable”: The Contingent World of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems’ in Hinds, Michael and Stephen Matterson (eds) Rebound: The American Poetry Book. Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi. Damisch, Hubert, 2001. Skyline: The Narcissistic City (tr. John Goodman). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam, 1984. The Transforming Power of Language: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Utrecht, Netherlands: HES Publishers. Dickie, Margaret, 1997. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 1994. ‘The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris’ in Tester, Keith (ed.) The Flâneur. New York: Routledge. Friedberg, Anne, 1991. ‘‘Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition’ in PMLA 106(3): 419–31. Gleber, Anke, 1999. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lorde, Audre, 1982. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. Martin, Wendy, 1984. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Oktenberg, Adrian, 2002. ‘ ‘‘Disloyal to Civilization”: The Twenty-One Love Poems of Adrienne Rich’ in Cooper, Jane Roberta (ed.) Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, 1951–81. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Parsons, Deborah L., 2000. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Pound, Ezra, 1990. Personae: The Shorter Poems (revised and ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz). New York: New Directions Books. Rich, Adrienne, 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton.  . 1984. Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950–1984. New York: Norton.  . 1991. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991. New York: Norton.  . 1993. Collected Early Poems, 1950–1970. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Wolff, Janet, 1995. Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Writing Inside and Outside: Eavan Boland’s Poetry of the Domestic Space Sara Sullivan abstract This chapter considers the reappraisal and invigoration of domestic space that occurs in the poetry of Eavan Boland. In her poetry collections and prose, Boland presents complex domestic interiors that resist boundary definition and offer artistic nourishment to the women within them. In particular, Boland’s work champions the often-overlooked suburb as a place of relevance to the public concerns of the nation as she expands the borders of the domestic sphere. In both her poetry and her artistic autobiography, Object Lessons, Boland undermines the nationalist tradition of the Irish lyric that would turn living women into silenced and static icons. Instead, Boland shows how real, varied, and aging women and the domestic interiors they inhabit are connected to the life of the nation and the writing of the political poem. Keywords: Irish, woman, home, nation, domestic space, interior, suburb, political poem, private sphere, liminal, Eavan Boland, Object Lessons. My house is diaphanous, but it is not of glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract and expand as I desire. At times, I draw them close about me like protective armor […] But at others, I let the walls of my house blossom out in their own space, which is infinitely extensible. (Georges Spyridaki, Mort Lucide (qtd. in Bachelard 1964: 51)

Eavan Boland’s poetics is one of transformation and re-appraisal; her work encourages its readers to see familiar objects and spaces in a different light. The common and seemingly prosaic spaces of the domestic sphere serve as the most frequent subject of her transforming vision. Boland’s poetry reveals the political and historical factors unavoidably present in the private Irish dwelling, as she presents the suburban home space as a full and complex world, well-suited to the staging of issues related to the public realm. The women in Boland’s mature poetry transform the domestic interior by discovering elements of the exotic, the external, and the mythological within it, re-making the rituals of daily life and dissolving the borders between public and private spheres.

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“Nocturne”, from Boland’s poem collection The Journey (1987), showcases the transformative impulse that lies at the heart of her work (1995a: 115). The speaker secures her house for the night, sealing its borders and clearing the detritus of the day before she retires to bed. As the poem makes clear, however, the familiar borders of the home are not easily defined. “Nocturne” is set in a quiet domestic setting that Boland will turn into an unexpected, foreign place. The poem’s first lines suggest the intimacies of the home: “After a friend has gone I like the feel of it: / The house at night. Everyone asleep. / The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening” (1–3). In these early lines Boland reappraises the interior spaces of the home by comparing them to powerful elements of the outdoors. The poem then returns to the indoor scene, presenting two familiar objects from the kitchen in a deliberately truncated sentence that contains no motion or action. Only the objects themselves appear, suggesting that these emblems of domestic normalcy are significant enough to warrant mention alone: “A floral teapot and a raisin scone” (4). Boland’s concentration on domestic objects and their details is a significant feature of her poetry and her artistic autobiography, Object Lessons (1995). As she does here in “Nocturne”, Boland often uses domestic objects to evoke the familiarity of the home space even as she destabilizes that space through surprising metaphors and images. Once “[t]he clock strikes”, the poem’s center shifts again, introducing a note of the uncertain and the otherworldly in the figure of the resident black cat who shares equal space with more prosaic objects from the domestic sphere: The cat comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs, a black ambivalence around the legs of the button-back chairs, an insinuation to be set beside the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup, the saucer with the thick spill of tea which scalds off easily under the tap. Time is a tick, a purr, a drop. (lines 6–13)

Instead of becoming a more subdued and stable environment as it is shut down for the night, the home in “Nocturne” becomes an increasingly mysterious and shifting place. At the poem’s beginning, the hour of the night is clearly delineated by the speaker and the striking clock (“One-o-clock”), but by the poem’s midpoint, time is told in multiple ways, all of which represent different, animated elements of the household reduced to their aural incarnations: “a tick, a purr, a drop”. The poem emphasizes the creature-like qualities of an inanimate

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domestic object (the button-back chair around whose legs the cat weaves itself), while the animal in the poem is transformed into an intangible “insinuation”. Even while defamiliarizing the home’s interior spaces as they become nocturnal territory, the poem retains an interest in the natural rhythms of domestic activity, including the rinsing of tea from a saucer in the kitchen sink. This combination of mystery and normalcy is an important element of Boland’s treatment of the home space. Elements of the outdoors and the otherworldly are not introduced to provide escape from the domestic interior, but to reframe its familiar corners, to offer new juxtapositions for the spaces and objects most commonly seen. For this reason, the “insinuation” into which the cat has turned is “to be set beside / the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup”, the transformed and the unknown put right up against the everyday, both aspects drawing equal attention from Boland’s poetic gaze. The poem continues to frustrate binary divisions as the prosaic and the mysterious, inside and outside, become intermingled. Even upstairs and down become indeterminable as the in-between space of the landing becomes the focus of action in the second stanza. Boland next ushers a spider into the scene, a creature who, like the black cat, has exotic and other-worldly associations. In another blurring of boundary definition, the poem does not specify whether the spider on the window is actually inside or outside the home. Regardless of the spider’s location, the speaker identifies her actions with that of the silent visitor as she initiates a final act of transformation: The spider on the dining room window has fallen asleep among complexities as I will once the doors are bolted and the keys tested and the switch turned up of the kitchen light which made outside in the back garden an electric room – a domestication of closed daisies, an architecture instant and improbable. (lines 13–21)

Despite the speaker’s deliberate actions of closing and shutting down, the domestic interior – turned over to the foreign reign of the nocturnal realm – is shown in the last stanza of “Nocturne” to be a place of open borders. The woman may bolt the doors, but the borders of the home space itself are not fixed. This realization is made most clear by the striking image of the poem’s last lines. In engaging in the process of securing her home for the night, the speaker

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instigates an alternate world that turns the space of her home inside out. The simple “switch turned up of the kitchen light” – the speaker’s last act before turning in – transforms the space of the outdoors, a back garden, into the interior space of a well-lit room. This sudden outdoor room functions as an instant parallel universe, creating a destabilizing refraction of the domestic space through which both spaces accumulate a transforming hint of strangeness. The reversal is presented in deliberately spatial terms: the poem emphasizes the alternative “architecture” that is created as a result of a simple domestic act. The home’s occupant discovers that, despite closing her family in for the night, she is no longer properly “inside”. Instead, an alternate space has been created which calls the simple boundaries of the home into question. This instability is not dangerous; instead, the poem’s tone towards the instantly created “electric room” is that of wonder and appreciation. This interest in both the physical and ephemeral space of the home persists throughout Boland’s poetry as she explores the shifting dynamics within the seemingly fixed borders of the home space. These dynamics often occur in the suburb. Instead of looking for ways to escape the Dublin suburb in which she produces the majority of her work, Boland ultimately embraces the environment for its artistic and political potential and imbues the objects of domestic life with multiple layers of meaning that transport the reader beyond the closed borders of a strictly defined architectural space. Through her volumes of work, Boland challenges the deepest assumptions about what constitutes appropriate subject matter for the Irish poem and reinterprets the Irish home space, revealing a shifting and spiraling environment whose fluctuating borders make it part of the public world. Boland’s nuanced treatment of the domestic space reflects her growing understanding of the suburb as a hybrid zone well-suited to the complexities of her poetry. Rather than consider the suburb as removed from myth, history, and art, Boland demonstrates how those elements conspire in a new way in the suburb to create poetic subject matter and to illuminate the public sphere as well as the private. The suburban neighborhood for Boland is not an accidental, functional world or simply the desultory result of urban sprawl, nor is it an insular and insignificant location sheltered from the concerns of the nation. Straddling the extremes of city and country, the suburb is in-between territory, an aspect that emerges vividly in the poem “Suburban Woman” (1995a: 50) from Boland’s earliest widely-published collection, The War Horse (1975). Here the suburb is a violent battlefield “caught in cross-fire” between town and country, the suburban woman its “sole survivor”(13). The hybrid quality of the suburb that is a liability in this early poem will become one of the suburb’s most valuable features in Boland’s later work. As in all of her poems, here the suburb is a shifting place where liminality is always on display. Boland’s poetry

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constantly confronts the reader with these liminal states, whether between two countries, two levels of a house, two eras in an individual’s life, or at that half-lit time of day that recurs most frequently in Boland’s work: dusk.1 She is highly attuned to the hybrid quality of the suburban environment, and, ultimately, Boland’s poetry recognizes that this liminal zone offers metamorphic and artistic potential for the woman who finds herself within its borders. Like domestic space as Boland represents it, the suburb is a shifting, evanescent place. Boland contrasts the suburb favourably to the city in Object Lessons as a place of openness and aura, drawing attention to details that confirm the environment’s worthiness as a setting for her poetic attention: A suburb is altogether more fragile and transitory. To start with, it is composed of lives in a state of process. The public calendar defines a city; banks are shut and shops are opened. But the private one shapes a suburb. It waxes and wanes on christenings, weddings, birthdays. In one year it can seem a whole road is full of bicycles, roller skates, jumble sales. Garages will be wide open, with children selling comics and stale raisin buns. There will be shouting and calling into the summer night. Almost as soon, it seems, the same road will be quiet. The bicycles will be gone. The shouting and laughing will be replaced by one or two dogs barking in the back gardens. Curtains will be drawn till late morning, and doors will stay closed. (1995b: 160)

The “state of process” that defines the suburb stands in stark contrast to the well-defined grooves of the public city, a place whose doors open and shut on a schedule. The suburb opens and closes as well, but the portals of the domestic space are more fluid, responsive to the movements of individuals and their private lives. Boland draws our attention to seemingly commonplace objects and events – the bicycles and jumble sales of her suburban street – in the same way that her poetry encourages us to take a deeper look at these elements of everyday life in order to perceive their sublime qualities. The suburb also has a particular relation to the space of the domestic interior in which Boland’s poetry is so heavily invested. The primary purpose of the suburb is not industrial, agricultural, or commercial. Its instigation is residential 1 Boland’s attraction to the twilight hour is evident in numerous places, including the first lines of “The Women” – “This is the hour I love: the in-between, / neither here-nor-there hour of evening” (1995a: 114) – and the first lines of “Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening”: “Jean-Baptiste Chardin / is painting a woman in the last summer light” (1995a: 92). “Energies” (1995a: 92) likewise begins, “This is my time: / The twilight closing in …” In “The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave me” (1995a: 137), the reader is not surprised to find the past described as “An airless dusk before thunder” (22). Numerous other examples abound throughout Boland’s poems. The second most frequent time of day in Boland’s poetry is dawn, the natural counterpart to dusk and a moment that is equally transitional, between darkness and light.

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– to create and multiply the domestic space. In this way the suburb can be seen as the unfolding of domestic space across the landscape, a conglomeration of domestic interiors that create an exterior community. The suburb is neither urban nor rural, but instead is the domestic sphere writ large, providing an ideal setting for Boland’s exploration of the nuances of the home space. Boland’s earliest poems about the suburb from her first widely published collection, The War Horse (1975), apply broad allegories to turn the suburb into a place of foreboding, entrapment, and violence. In this volume, the suburb is a lost, fractured environment on the outskirts of meaningful existence. Boland wrote The War Horse after marrying and moving from the city of her youth to the suburbs of Dublin, a move she credits as a fundamental influence on her life and her art: “Nothing has ever been a greater influence on me than to move from the world of urbane learning, speculative possibility, the cherishing of literature, to the quiet barbarities of the suburbs […] where everything is surreally domestic, oppressive, noticeable” (Kennelly 1979: 114). In Object Lessons, Boland states that the city of her youth “with its twilights and meeting places, its conversations and memories seemed made for poetry. There was even an enchantment about it” (1995b: 94). In contrast to this magical place, “Ode to Suburbia” and “Suburban Woman” from The War Horse characterize the suburban environment as a destructive place with brutal consequences for the creation of art and for the women who resided there. In “Ode to Suburbia” (1995a: 44), Boland uses the Cinderella story as an informing metaphor to present the suburb as an endlessly repeating tableau of ugliness and limitation, suggestive of her own early experiences trying to locate her poetic vocation far from the city in which it had been nurtured: No creature of the streets will feel the touch Of a wand turning the wet sinews Of fruit suddenly to a coach, While this rat without leather reins Or a whip or britches continues Sliming your drains. No magic here […] (lines 19–25)

In a similarly dark vein, “Suburban Woman” (1995a: 50) uses the terminology of battle to describe the suburb as the soiled, violent consequence of a clash between two opposites. In both poems, the suburb is a wholly negative location that has a detrimental effect on the woman within it. Boland’s assessment of the suburb changes significantly after The War

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Horse, as she re-evaluates her suburban environment and recognizes that its hybridity can be a boon to the woman living within it. In subsequent volumes such as Night Feed (1982), The Journey (1987), and Outside History (1990), Boland’s presentation of the suburb undergoes a significant evolution from the one revealed in “Ode to Suburbia” and “Suburban Woman”. In these later collections and throughout Boland’s poetry to date, the suburb is no longer a place that traps its female inhabitants in a state of limbo or shuts down the creating artist. Instead, the suburb is represented as the fertile ground from which Boland’s poetry springs. “Envoi”, from The Journey, explicitly lays out Boland’s desire to turn the elements of suburban life into art (1995a: 123). In the poem, the speaker invokes a new muse to guide and bless her endeavour: Under the street-lamps the dustbins brighten. The winter flowering jasmine casts a shadow outside my window in my neighbour’s garden. These are the things my muse must know. … If she will not bless the ordinary, if she will not sanctify the common, then here I am and here I stay and then am I the most miserable of women. (lines 9–12; 21–28)

In this manifesto-like poem, Boland’s relates her commitment to turning the “ordinary” and “common” elements of everyday life into poetry, using the religious terms “bless” and “sanctify” to demonstrate the level of devotion she has to this ideal. Instead of being lost in the suburb’s liminality or feeling constrained by the domestic realm, Boland recognizes in the suburb an expansive environment that will nurture her art and broaden its scope. In Object Lessons, Boland describes how the constant change and flux of the suburb has a positive effect on her poetry: At one level, I could have said that there were summer dusks and clear, vacant winter mornings when I was certain the suburb nurtured my poetry. I might have found it hard to say how or why. In every season the neighbourhood gathered around me and filled my immediate distance. At times it could be a shelter; it was never a cloister. Everywhere you looked there were reminders – a child’s bicycle thrown sideways on the grass, a single roller skate, a tree in its first April of blossom – that lives were not lived here in any sort of static pageant; they thrived, waned, changed, began, and ended here.  (1995b: 166)

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As the scope of her poetic vision expands, the fluid nature of the suburb and its enormous capacity for change and transformation provide an opportunity for the creating female artist. After revealing the borders of the domestic interior to be porous and shifting, Boland shows how that fluidity is a boon to the woman in the household, a figure who draws upon the permeability and liminality of the home space to create art that interacts with the wider world. Women, Home and Nation This wider world becomes the defining feature of Boland’s exploration of the domestic space as her poetry matures. Instead of turning inward, examining only private interiors in her effort to create works of poetic value, Boland applies her transforming vision to the omissions and tragedies of Irish history as well, showing how private and public worlds are interlinked. Boland powerfully engages with political and national history by bringing it into the personal realm, connecting items in the public consciousness to her own history and making the private details of real women relevant to the national political poem. As she states in Object Lessons, “I wanted to see the effect of an unrecorded life – a woman in a suburban twilight under a hissing streetlight – on the prescribed themes of public importance” (1995b: 187). Having rejected fixed and static boundaries for the dwelling place and expanded the borders of the domestic sphere, Boland is able to compel the world of politics, national identity, and history into that space, demonstrating how seemingly separates spheres are entangled. The most visibly political act of Boland’s poetry is her removal of women from their historical position as silenced object and icon of the Irish lyric. Her work instead recognizes women as varied, complex, and active subjects for poetry. She became aware of the division between art and womanhood even as a young poet: “However much my powers of expression made my mind as a human being the subject of the poem, my life as a woman remained obdurately the object of it” (1995b: 28). Object Lessons chronicles Boland’s efforts to find a poetic identity, both public and political, that draws upon the private and personal experiences of her life as an Irish woman instead of essentializing womanhood as an expression of Irish nationalism. In enacting this goal, she is up against the formidable foe of tradition. In her artistic autobiography, Boland chronicles the dangerous conflation of woman and nation that has been common to Irish cultural history and literature, in which “women were often double-exposed, like a flawed photograph, over the image and identity of the nation” (1995c: 486). The Irish lyric that taught and influenced Boland contains a deadly element for the woman writer: The heroine, as such, was utterly passive. She was Ireland or Hibernia […] She was invoked, addressed, remembered, loved, regretted. And, most important,

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died for. She was a mother or a virgin. Her hair was swept or tied back, like the prow of a ship. Her flesh was wood or ink or marble. And she had no speaking part. If her harvests were spoiled, her mother tongue wiped out, her children killed, then it was for someone else to mark the reality. Her identity was an image.2 (1995b: 66)

Boland’s poetry attempts to reverse this tradition, giving her women subjects voice and context, creating individuals instead of images. To do this, she takes her reader to the spaces where actual women like herself live and act. Boland’s artistic exploration of the domestic space is a crucial part of her project to remove women from their perch on the pedestal of the Irish lyric. Through poems that subvert and expand the borders of the domestic interior, Boland implies that a form of liberation from the binding tradition of nationalist objectification can be discovered where real women exist. Concentrating on the realm where many Irish women dwell, Boland affirms the layers and nuances of this space and, by extension, the women that inhabit it. Her decision to focus her poetic eye so intensely on the domestic interior reveals Boland’s belief that Irish women need not be elevated to the status of untouchable myth nor subsumed into an icon of nation in order to be worthy subjects for poetry. Not all of Boland’s poems are set in the domestic space, but each of them works to pry the Irish woman from the trap of lyric objectification. Boland undermines the iconic status of women in the Irish lyric by ignoring sweeping panoramas and bringing the reader’s attention down to the smallest footnotes of history. In “Mise Eire”, from The Journey (1995a: 102), Boland imagines two Irish women whose actual experiences are long lost to remembrance or the fine stylizations of an art form. The poem echoes the title of Padraid Pearse’s poem “I am Ireland” 3 and W.B. Yeats’s drama Cathleen ni Houlihan, two works that are based on the conception of Ireland as a female figure of nationhood. “Mise Eire” rejects this identification, as well as the false heroics of suffering and 2 Boland acknowledges a significant exception to this tradition in the figure of James Joyce. In including the image of the old milkwoman in “Telemachus” and then subverting its iconic power, Joyce “did not beg any favours from that image of Ireland”; this move was “enormously liberating” to the young Boland when she encountered Ulysses (1998: 18). Instead, “by reference and inference, [Joyce] shows himself to be intent on breaking the traditional association of Ireland with ideas of womanhood and tragic motherhood […] By cunning inflations, by disproportions of language, he takes his revenge. He holds at a glittering, manageable distance a whole tendency in national thought and expression; and dismisses it” (1995b: 144–5). 3 Pearse (1879–1916), the militant Irish nationalist who led the Easter Rising and died for it, wrote “Mise Eire” in 1912 (1991: 559). The poem, written in the voice of Mother Ireland, who “bore Cuchulainn the valiant” and who is “older than the Old Woman of Beare”, is based on the image of a suffering woman in search of heroes.

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martyrdom that accompany it. Through its concentration on the precise details of two actual women affected by their country’s fate, the poem does not force the women to stand as noble icons of a defeated nation; the defeats suffered by these women are actual, personal, and unrecorded by history. Boland uses the first person to bring these silenced women alive, speaking through them in a voice they were not given in life: I am the woman in the gansy-coat on board the Mary Belle, in the huddling cold, holding her half-dead baby to her as the wind shifts east and north over the dirty waters of the wharf mingling the immigrant guttural with the vowels of homesickness […] (lines 28–38)

Even though it fundamentally revises the trope of woman-as-Ireland, the poem does not reject Ireland itself. Instead, the poem retains a sense of national identity through the grief felt at the loss of a country and a language. This sense is conveyed in the possessive insistence of its Gaelic title, which states “I am Ireland”, even while the poem rejects the static idealizing of woman as nation. This layered claim demonstrates the fine distinction Boland makes in the poem between a forced substitution that represents a lie, and the truth of the individual women who actually compose Ireland. The poem also suggests that the easy feminization of the national that turns Ireland into a suffering, noble martyr is unjust to the nation as well as to its individual women:4 I won’t go back to it – my nation displaced into old dactyls, oaths made 4 In an essay about Boland’s progress in the face of challenges presented by Irish literary history, Jeannette Riley makes the connection between art and politics clear: “The images of Ireland as a woman and of a woman as Ireland greatly reduce both Ireland’s and Irish women’s potential for meaningful, active, independence, if either are to maintain any independence at all” (1997: 25).

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by the animal tallows of the candle – land of the Gulf Stream, the small farm, the scalded memory, the songs that bandage up the history, the words that make a rhythm of the crime where time is time past. (lines 1–14)

The speaker’s nation has been “displaced / into old dactyls”, its experiences and history abstracted into poetic form until Irish reality is absent, a country of “scalded memory” composed only of songs and verses. Boland signals the Irish poet’s potential complicity in this act with the self-consciously poetic word “dactyls”. With this word, Boland hints at the ever-present danger that exists for the poet – the impulse to lyricize and to objectify, to make images out of human experience. Boland reminds herself of that hazard and tries to avoid it; the imagined experiences of the dissimilar Irish women in “Mise Eire” are told without sublimation or universal claims made on behalf of Ireland or all women. Boland claims that her desire to put individuals marginalized and forgotten by history at the center of her poems emerges from her own experience as a woman writing in and about an Irish suburb. Her persistent attention to the domestic realm might seem to the uninformed reader like a deliberate withdrawing from the public arena, a focus on the personal and the private to the exclusion of the political and the national. In fact, she sees it in exactly the opposite way. Boland believes her political and historical engagement with Ireland is absolutely connected with her attempts to create poetry about a suburban woman’s life: By now I have come to terms with the fact that a suburb is an awkward and unlikely theater for a poem. It is certainly true that this ordinary street, of young trees and younger children, has provided me with one of the most challenging components in a poetic theme: a devalued subject matter. It has given me insight into the flawed permissions which surround the inherited Irish poem, in which you could have a political murder, but not a baby, and a line of hills, but not the suburbs under them.  (1995b: 204)

Boland claims that her struggle to turn a marginalized artistic perspective into a valued poetics makes her not only capable of writing a political poem, but

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best-suited for the task. As a poet attempting to put real women, not images, at the centre of the Irish poem and to make the details of her suburban life worthy of artistic attention and respect, Boland does not write from a secure position within the male Irish bardic tradition, with the inherited authority and comfortable power relations that position might entail. This marginalized position ironically offers her an advantaged capacity for the creation of political poetry: “I do not believe the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self who writes that poem – a self in which sexuality must be a factor – is seen to be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessness with which the political poem is so concerned” (1995b: 185). Boland considers her decision to write poetry that reflects her lived experiences – especially her experience as a woman in the seemingly unpoetic and apolitical suburbs – as nothing short of a political act that recasts the traditional Irish poem. With this assertion, Boland boldly aligns herself with the Modernist revolutionaries of Ireland’s literary history who refused to accept that their own artistic visions of the nation were “devalued subject matter”, and instead turned them into art – iconoclasts such as James Joyce, who made the events of an ordinary day in Dublin into a powerful force of twentieth century literature. Like those Modernists who insisted that their peculiar styles or unlikely subject matter be considered art, Boland claims that her own position – and the position of other Irish women poets like her – on the margins of traditional Irish poetry grants to them an important significance: she has “come to believe that the woman poet is an emblematic figure in poetry now in the same way the modernist and romantic poets once were” (1995b: 235). From this indispensable vantage point, Boland powerfully combines private experience, the language of myth, and Irish tragedy, as she does in “The Making of an Irish Goddess” from the Outside History collection (1995a: 150). Here the ability of the suburban environment to shift, transform, and contain multiple levels of meaning allows it to encompass yet another element: a history of Irish suffering. The poem begins in the world of the ancient Greek myth, after which the narrative moves to the suburb to explore the most intimate details of the speaker’s body. Only then does Boland introduce the reality of the Irish famine, having preceded her introduction of the tragedy with the weight of myth and relatable details of a contemporary woman’s life. The poem begins by introducing a figure that will serve as both parallel and contrast to the Irish goddess of its title. In the myth of Ceres and Persephone, one of the poet’s favorites,5 Ceres descends to the underworld to rescue 5 Boland fruitfully returns to this myth in “The Pomegranate” from the In a Time of Violence collection (1994), another poem about the mother-daughter relationship that both laments and celebrates change and loss.

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her daughter who was captured by Hades. In Boland’s poem, upon her descent to hell, Ceres looks back and sees the diligence of rivers always at one level, wheat at one height, leaves of a single color, the same distance in the usual light; a seasonless, unscarred earth. (lines 6–10)

Ceres’s recovery of her daughter from the underworld will result in the end of her unchanged world, as her bargain with Hades to keep her daughter for half the year will instigate the arrival of seasons to a previously static landscape. In the meantime, however, her gaze falls upon a plentiful and unravaged scene. The contemporary speaker of “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, on the other hand, already resides in the mutable suburb, a place attuned to the cycles of change and loss. After introducing Ceres, the speaker connects the myth to her own life, making the story personal: “But I need time – / my flesh and that history – / to make the same descent” (11–13). The suburban mother will, like Ceres, also retrieve her daughter by the poem’s end, but unlike Ceres, she has always lived in a world of seasons upon which an entire population can be dependent. Moving through myth and personal history, the poem then introduces the national history of the Irish famine, evoking the decimating crop failures of the 1840s that resulted in a barren and desperate landscape. An Irish goddess must carry an awareness of time and the seasons in which her people suffered: In my body, […] in my gestures – […] must be an accurate inscription of that agony: the failed harvests, the fields rotting to the horizon, the children devoured by their mothers whose souls, they would have said, went straight to hell, followed by their own. (lines 14, 18, 21–29)

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In a poem about the retrieval of daughters by their mothers, Boland centers the work around a short but devastating stanza that reverses this dynamic completely, showing the extent of the barbarity caused by this moment in Irish history. The unchristened young victims of the famine descend to the underworld, followed by mothers who in this story are not the rescuers, but the destroyers. After the poem telescopes out to encompass Greek myth and one of the darkest periods in Irish history, its focus narrows to an ordinary moment in suburban life to end the poem. As a result of the poem’s earlier inflections, this moment is infused with the drama of loss and redemption that is enacted by Ceres and Persephone and subverted by the horrors of the Irish famine. As she searches for her daughter, the speaker offers her own definition of myth, one tempered both by the classical story and by Irish reality. Her definition incorporates her awareness of time’s passage (her body “neither young now nor fertile”) and the personal dynamic so vital to Boland’s poetics. In her constantly changing world, the speaker is given the opportunity for connection despite the ever-present possibility of loss: Myth is the wound we leave in the time we have – which in my case is this March evening at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, across which the lights have changed all day, holding up my hand sickle-shaped, to my eyes to pick out my own daughter from all the other children in the distance; her back turned to me. (lines 31–42)

Boland uses the word “sickle-shaped” near the poem’s end, suggesting at once a tool for gathering crops and a chilling symbol of death (as borne by the Grim Reaper). This compacted adjective deftly combines overtones of the goddess of agriculture Ceres with the perverse substitution of children for harvests during a desperate time in Ireland’s history. The harvest reaped by this modern-day Irish mother is figurative and hopeful, taking the form of her own progeny, her seed grown into flesh. Like a scarred earth, this woman bears the “marks of

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childbirth” on her body, but those scars have been life-giving. The sickled shape of her hand which gathers in her daughter contrasts both to the uncut wheat of Ceres’s world and to the catastrophic lack of harvests to be reaped by the Irish of the nineteenth century. For this Irish goddess, her location in the liminal suburb does not exclude her from Irish history or a legend of antiquity – it allows her to bring both to bear upon her present existence. By recasting the myth of Ceres in an Irish context and setting its final action in the suburbs, Boland makes the ancient world of myth and the past tragedy of the famine relevant to ordinary contemporary life, infusing the domestic environment with the weight of Irish history and suffering. The famine was the result of agricultural calamity and policy conducted in the realm of the public, but Boland makes the Irish famine about the private tragedies that resulted – the unfathomable lengths to which the event drove Irish mothers. The poem is exemplary of Boland’s belief that an engagement with history, politics, and the wider world is not only possible in the suburb, but, because of the overlap between public events and private experiences, inevitable and necessary. The subject of the famine is central to “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, but it is not introduced to be held up as lofty poetic material, to galvanize nation­alist feeling, or to objectify its participants. Instead, Boland demonstrates the surprising proximity of these mother figures separated by time, distance, and mythology; the poem stresses their connection, even though they ostensibly exist in separate worlds. Millennia away from the myth of Ceres and more than a century removed from the famine, the speaker’s body must nonetheless carry Ireland’s scars, since she has chosen to be a mouthpiece for Ireland’s pain. In “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, Boland creates a figure that is shifting and multi-representational; the woman who holds up her hand, “sickle-shaped”, at poem’s end represents not only a suburban mother but also a re-interpreted Ceres and a newly molded Irish goddess. The poem is grounded in the suburb, but the narrative transports the reader to the public places of myth and history, while the voice of a real woman with private concerns remains at its center. The re-evaluation and expansion of domestic space characteristic of Boland’s work is made possible by the boundary-resistant and transformative nature of her poems themselves. Boland discusses the power of the written word to effect this kind of expansion in an essay about the poetry of Adrienne Rich, an artist who greatly influenced Boland’s poetic development. Boland first encountered Rich’s poetry as a woman in her thirties living in the suburbs of Dublin. She relates the powerful affect Rich’s poems had on her at this time, an era in which Boland, a mother of small children, was thoroughly immersed in the domestic space; the poems “came to the very edge of the rooms I worked in, dreamed in, listened for a child’s cry in” (1997: 17). As described in the essay,

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the poems become vivid, animated entities that use their power of motion to infiltrate Boland’s half-lit suburban environment and reveal its expansive possibilities – they “passed through the frost of the suburban dark [and] the early light of a neighbourhood summer”. As Boland explores her predecessor’s work, the physical presence of Rich’s poetry books becomes a part of Boland’s home life. The books intermingle with the house’s effects until they become reinterpreted domestic objects themselves, items that open up not only the home space but Boland’s awakening artistic and political consciousness: I took whichever book [the poems] were happening in from place to place, propping it against jars and leaving it after me on chairs and beside coffee cups […] And as they permeated the small barriers of place and distraction, these poems also began to open my mind to new ideas of who writes a poem and why.  (1997: 17)

Significantly, Boland presents the poems not as static words on a page, but as ongoing events; she is able to select “whichever book they were happening in” (emphasis added). The books become emblems that contain active movement and the power to change – they are shown as capable of crossing boundaries and “the barriers of place and distraction”. The poems, and the books that contain them, are comfortably integrated into the domestic detritus of Boland’s home, yet they open up that space to a larger universe. This is an apt approximation of Boland’s lifetime poetic project, one in which the domestic space of the Irish suburb is revealed as a location that nourishes artistic inspiration and enables meaningful political engagement.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. (trans. Maria Jolas0). New York: Orion Press. Boland, Eavan. 1995a. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet.  . 1995b. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: Norton.  . 1995c. ‘Writing the Political Poem in Ireland’ in Southern Review 31: 485–98.  . 1997. ‘Reading Adrienne Rich’ in PN Review 28 (4) 114: 17–18.  . 1998. ‘James Joyce: the Mystery of Influence’ in Lawrence, Karen (ed.) Transcultural Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 11–20. Kennelly, Brendan. 1979. ‘Eavan Boland’ in Hogan, Robert, et al (eds) Dictionary of Irish Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press. Pearse, Padraid. [1912] 1991. ‘Mise Eire’ in Deane, Seamus (ed.) The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. II. Derry: Field Day Publications: 559. Riley, Jeannette E. 1997. ‘Becoming an Agent of Change: Eavan Boland’s “Outside History” and “In a Time of Violence” ’ in Irish Studies Review 20: 23–29.

Concluding remarks Janet Floyd The plotting of inside and outside, interior and exterior, private and public have been and remain matters of profound cultural importance. These distinctions structure the imagination and experience of the world. We can scarcely think about subjectivity, a social existence, or the disposition of power without inside and outside. But such terms are protean. We, as scholars, struggle to describe their range and contain their significances, and we generalise about experience of them at our peril. Nonetheless, with our attentiveness to the particular spaces and experiences invoked and invented in writing – and to the spaces from which texts are written – we begin to sketch tentative maps of the insides and outsides of a changing, post-industrial world and raise questions about the relationship between the particular and the general. In these concluding remarks, I want to consider “inside”, “outside” and the idea of “inside-out” in the light of the essays in this volume and to reflect on the ground covered. When we turn to “inside”, we tend first to turn to the domestic space, the focus of much of our thinking about inside and interiority. In the face of homelands, home fronts, colonial “interiors” and “domestic” politics, the domestic space retains its primacy as the essential interior. The comparison with other insides and interiors may be telling. “Inside” is, after all, the word used to describe incarceration in penal institutions. The most sacred zones of sanctuaries, spaces of intense interior experience, are inner sanctums. Still, the idea of home drives these other individual experiences of inside and interior to the margins. Nor is this a merely rhetoric or convention. However hollowed out the spaces of the home become at the hands of the modern state, however great the publicity beaming down on “private” life, Daniel Miller is surely right to insist that “in industrialised societies, most of what matters to people is happening behind the closed doors of the domestic sphere”: The home itself has become the site of their relationships and their loneliness: the site of their broadest encounters with the world through television and the internet but also the place where they reflect upon and face up to themselves away from others.  (2001: 1)

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The home’s profound national importance is never in doubt but the ideological work that the privatised domestic space performs for the state seems not to compromise its availability as a repository of ideas of modernity and progress, healing power and tradition, memory and repose, intimacy and longing. Outside has, perhaps, a different intensity because of its possibility of unstructured openness. Mary P. Ryan writes evocatively of people being “strewn across the seemingly boundless space of the public” (1997: 172). Traditionally the public is, of course, the arena of courageous action, power and fame, though Diana Fuss’s gloss on “out”, in a discussion that reflects on the significance of “coming out” for the gay community, is instructive in suggesting the fertility of the term: “Out” can also signify an end or resolution (outcome; school’s out); an excuse, alibi, means of escape (an easy out); a beyond or surpassing (outdoing); an expiration or exhaustion (outmoded, outdated), a fullness or excessiveness (to deck out or rig out); or an utterance or cry (to call out). The term cannot escape certain contradictory class connotations as well. The phrase “coming out” can refer to a debutante’s ceremonious and ostentatious introduction to high society, while the phrase “ins and outs” was coined in the nineteenth century to label the nomadic poor who regularly sought admission to the workhouse.  (1991: 9)

Since the Greeks, the private sphere has been understood as the place to leave in order to enter a public world of infinite possibility. We still tend to find the greatest vitality in the changing spaces of the city that we do not attribute to the “over-familiar space of the home”, to use Sara Sullivan’s term in this volume. Café houses, department stores, fairs, malls: all are recovered as métiers of discussion and improvisation, revolution and carnival. When Efterpi Mitsi describes the Turkish baths of the Ottoman Empire, she evokes the richness and complexity of the institution for Eastern users and their Western observers. New “outsides” proliferate: Sullivan evokes the “fragile and transitory” suburb in which it is possible to develop new ways of disposing of time and space. In the modern West, where no single public sphere, in the sense that Habermas uses that term, can be imagined as having a coherent social or political force, nowhere evokes outside’s potential more than the street. Baudelaire’s strolling spectator of nineteenth-century Paris, Virginia Woolf ’s flâneuse in 1920s London, the figures picked out in this volume (Valerie Fehlbaum’s “modern women” in fin de siècle London, Cathleen J. Hamann’s “philanthropic flâneuses” in Victorian London and Melinda Harvey’s “flâneuse-friendly dwelling and dallying places” of London in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage): all such characters seem to venture towards an infinitely variable experience. The “natural” landscape outside the city has traditionally seemed to offer another

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circle of “outside” freedom: freedom from political corruption, from dutiful public service, from consumption and the churning excitements of the city, freedom to think, write, enjoy Nature and revel in solitude; and Stephen Hunt’s essay suggests how such a retreat might encompass rather more pointed purposes. If the complexities of “inside” must be negotiated, then the “outside” seems a space of improvisation and creativity. Recently, though, critical attention has focused more and more insistently on the ideological and imaginative (rather than the actual) status of such conventions of difference between inside and outside. The boundaries of the domestic space have been subjected to critical enquiry: the openness of the bourgeois drawing-room to visitors, of the working-class home to middleclass philanthropic surveillance, of the aristocratic reception rooms to clients, of the salon to the fashionable few. As we move our gaze from the domestic spaces of the bourgeoisie and the working-class family, we find other domestic spaces that seem to suggest different relationships between inside and outside: the hotel, the boarding house, Harvey’s vividly evoked bedsit. We have become used to thinking about how the experience of the outside suggests ways of inhabiting the inside, for example, in the domestic adoption of the bright lighting or large windows of public spaces. Conversely, the domestic inside suggests modes of being in public spaces: in the soft velvety interiors of theatres, the nooks and resting places of the department store, the restaurant, the waiting room. The blurring of boundaries, playfully or in the service of the state, begs an important question, of course. To whom, exactly, are any of these spaces penetrable and on what terms? The boundaries of the middle-class home have never been blurred for most of those attempting to cross them. The relegation of children, servants, less privileged family members, less privileged visitors within the home’s complex geography encourage us to think of axes of up and down as well as inside and outside. This is not peculiar to the conditions of “inside”, of course. Exclusion and separation on grounds of race and class as well as gender characterise experiences of outside spaces too. It is, in part, this well-developed predilection for exclusion that has inspired scholarship that emphasizes an affect of compression in every space, finding widening circles of determined exclusion beginning in the private and mushrooming into the public. Anna Despotopoulou evokes a late nineteenth century social arena in which “exposure” is absolute. Lilace Mellin Guignard’s essay suggests a world in which there is, for women, scarcely any “outside” and where the consciousness of patriarchal constraint distorts even the supposed experience of freedom in the wilderness. Lucy Bending brings our attention to a different construction of internalised constraint in Harriet Martineau’s sense of existing at the spatial

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extreme – on an edge – in a domestic space in which boundaries, sometimes secure, sometimes permeable, advance and recede. For some scholars conceptual strategies that foreground human experience and movement in space rather than thinking of space in terms of constraint or ritual have proved fruitful. The work of Michel De Certeau on the production of meaning by individuals through consumption has been influential, as has Bruno Latour’s writing on networks of transient, contingent activity in constant change and variation. Such analyses privilege movement, journeying and, of course, walking, and bring them to the heart of quotidian experience. Sara Sullivan finds the poet Eavan Boland approaching the home as a live space in which objects and humans interact. Equally, though, situations and arenas that unravel and defy the structures of routine, allow us to approach the convergence of conventional and improvisational negotiations of space. War structures space according to the most traditional constructions of gender. It also produces extraordinary experiences of space. Laurel Forster describes the paradoxical experiences of “new” spaces and conventions of behaviour faced by May Sinclair. Still foregrounding movement, Lourdes López Ropero explores the peculiar movements generated by empire, in which those from the colonised “margins” of the homeland travel to the “home” that is and is not their own. These are not exceptional experiences of space and they are surely as germane to our understanding of inside and out as the intricate movements and routines of leisure time. Battlegrounds and war zones, empires and colonies, each with their complex dispositions of inside and outside, are spatial worlds that suffuse experience. This volume’s title encourages us to adopt another tactic still: to turn the terms inside and outside “inside-out”, thus giving ourselves the opportunity to expose and know thoroughly the invisible workings of both terms. In their different ways both Janet Stobbs and Anna Despotopoulou do just this. Stubbs’s murderesses on trial remind us of the forensic attention given to a space conventionally characterised as a sanctuary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also force us to recall the violence that has always been available to enforce the conventional relations of the domestic space and perhaps more fundamental to its life than we (or the writers whom we study) have chosen to acknowledge. Despotopoulou evokes the “brutal exposure” visited on the inhabitants of the home, not only by or with outsiders, but also within the family itself. The home is exposed as a “cauldron” indeed in which the passions of the private life boil dangerously. In a different vein, “inside-out” reminds us of Freud’s idea of the unhomely (unheimlich), in which it is not intrusions into the domestic space from outside that generate fear, but the very familiarity of the home. The public space may seem less sinister and less intense by comparison: a

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space of freedom in intimacy and an escape from the relentless judgements and receding spaces of the domestic. It is this sense of what can be experienced in the city that has made the subject-position of the flâneur the object of fascination and desire. If this is a capacious figure of infinite possibility and un-plotted movement, unincorporated ideologically and yet sophisticated in analysis, small wonder that feminist scholars have looked to recover a woman’s flânerie and have adapted the term to draw in the urban experiences characteristic of women. When, however, Rob Shields suggests that the figure of the flâneur is “as much mythic as it was actual”, and that it “has something of the quality of oral tradition and bizarre urban myth” (1994: 62), he gives us pause for thought and pulls us back to what we, individually and collectively, know of the city. How far has the fascination of Baudelaire’s model city dweller distracted us from exploring the movements of the multiplicity of women on the street: streetwalkers, yes, shoppers and investigators of one kind or another, poets and writers; but also women going about their daily routines of paid and unpaid work? Recent work on the urban experiences of women may have turned our sense of women’s participation in the world outside the home inside-out. Pulling our attention away from the individual middle-class subject stepping out, this work attends instead to the women in various class positions who were “at home” in the street and in the many other public spaces of work and leisure that have characterised modern industrial societies. Anne-Marie Evans’s discussion of Lily Bart is suggestive of the ways that a well-connected woman might seek to manipulate her public appearances. This reminds us of what different and conflicting issues were at stake in some women’s visibility and indeed of the dangers of public space for women. The distance between Baudelaire’s urban stroller and many women’s experience of the city is measured in Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega’s essay. Here the impersonal, reflective stance of the flâneur is turned inside-out in Adrienne Rich’s petrified stance in the face of the “restriction, neglect and violence” visited on a woman whom she feels herself powerless to assist. Where in all this are the women writers whose work is examined so carefully here? Where do they situate themselves? Stephen Hunt’s description of Mary Robinson’s and Charlotte Smith’s lives provides an invigorating vision of what such a life could be, while Laurel Forster, using the case of May Sinclair, envisages the ways in which experiences of “outside” might prove confusing, even excruciating, as well as liberating and productive. How often are the writers on whom we focus writing safely at home and why is it often with some surprise that we discover them wrangling with publishers or throwing themselves into activity, long after we have exhaustively explored their domestic politics? The case of Edith Wharton is an interesting one: while the dynamics of entrapment and exposure are the subject of many studies of Wharton and her

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work, her activities during the First World War have only very recently been accorded sustained attention and significance. Teresa Gómez Reus and Peter Lauber explore the sheer range of spatial experience experienced by Wharton as she travelled around the front and the ways in which Wharton’s interest in the house, far from being left behind, is mobilized within her writing of that outside experience. What would happen if we shaped our vision of women writers’ analysis of inside and outside around such experiences as these, rather than by imagining them in rooms of their own? Perhaps we would become more sharply analytical about novelists’ insistent focus on a fraught division between inside and outside, whilst relegating industry, politics, empire, war to the margins of their texts. Surely we would be more attentive to genres other than the novel where very different spatial politics are explored. Implicit in a number of the essays in this volume is the relationship between space and writing, lighting out and literary experimentation. Virginia Woolf ’s association between creativity and “a room of one’s own” remains a powerful idea, but the relation of that founding feminist statement to the post-Romantic association between, for example, walking and writing or, more specifically, getting away from domestic routine and writing, is an interesting one. Aránzazu Usandizaga describes how Vera Brittan expands the range of what could be written about war, while other contributors suggest how different, unconventional experiences of space generate or demand new or particular forms of writing and conceptions of creativity. What, finally, should we be saying about our own role in the work of turning inside and outside inside-out in our search for understanding of the relationship between women, writing and space? As Janet Wolff began this collection by remarking, we should not forget how unresolved issues of access (to insides or outsides) remain in Western culture and beyond. In our scholarly tendency to privilege openness, change and lack of closure we easily forget the relative privacy, seclusion and security of attachment that produces much scholarly writing as well as that of many of our subjects. Perhaps, too, Dana Heller is justified in suggesting that scholars of women’s writing have “overinvested” in the question of private and public as a focus for our thinking about women’s oppression (1995: 220). Nonetheless, the question of women’s place “outside” and the nature of her interventions in the public sphere condense vital questions about what has constituted power and agency, experiment and freedom. And as the scholarly distaste for the home as a space and as a subject begins to recede, we can read the unhomely work of canonical writers with different questions and ever more intricate spatial relations in mind. This volume is a witness to the continuing vitality of the debate about inside and outside and the space that it offers for zestful scholarship.

Concluding Remarks

357

Bibliography Fuss, Diana. 1991. Inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories. London: Routledge. Heller, Dana. 2001. ‘Housebreaking History: Feminism’s Troubled Romance with the Domestic Sphere’ in Elam, Diane and Robyn Wiegman (eds) Feminism Beside Itself. New York: Routledge: 217–33. Miller, Daniel. 2001. ‘Behind Closed Doors’ in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg: 1–19. Ryan, Mary P. 1997. Civic Wars: Democracy ad Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shields, Rob. 1994. ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie’ in Tester, Keith (ed.) The Flâneur. London: Routledge, 1994: 61–80.

Index Abelson, Elaine S. 22 AEDEAN 20 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 95, 119 Aikin, John 290, 291n Akenside, Mark 280 Alaimo, Stacy 298 Albert, King of Belgium 219 Aldington, Richard 250 Aldrich, Mildred 233 Allen, W.H. 200–01 Amis, Martin 184 Ammons, Elizabeth 120n Anderson, Gillian 119 Angel, Marina 130 Angelou, Maya 191 Antoinette, Marie 274–75 Aravamudan, Srinivas 53, 57 Ariadne 319, 321, 328 Armstrong, Louis 195 Armstrong, Nancy 90, 92, 99n, 101 Arnold, Matthew 152 Atherton, Gertrude 26, 125–44 Austen, Jane 289 Bachelard, Gaston 171–73, 211, 283 Bakhtin, Mikhail 130n Banta, Martha 114n Barnes, Djuna 189 Barr, Robert (alias Cottrel Hoe) 160 Barrell, Maria 275–76 Barrett, Elizabeth 286 Barrie, J.M. 156 Bart, Lily 26, 355 Baudelaire, Charles 30, 47 poetry of 319, 322–23, 329 flâneur/urban stroller 193, 320, 322, 324, 352, 355 Baym, Nina 312–13

Beauman, Nicola 230–31 Beauvoir, Simone de 191, 298 Belknap, Troy 224 Benert, Annette Larson 209, 215 Benjamin, Walter 168, 319 flânerie 30, 322, 325, 331 flâneur 53, 66, 77, 153 post-Benjamin notion of 189 Parisian Arcade 24, 47 Passage 47–49, 60 Bennett, Paula 320 Bending, Lucy 24, 353 Bennett, Arnold 156 Berenson, Bernard 205 Berger, John 304 Besant, Walter 66–68, 70, 81 Bewell, Alan 278 Bewick, Thomas 44 Bigelow, Gordon 91–92 Billington, M.F. 160 Blake, William 322 Blakemore, Steven 281 Blunden, Edmund 207, 226, 250, 253 Bohls, Elizabeth 49n, 52n, 53, 279 Boland, Eavan 30, 335–50, 354 Boll, Theophilus 232 Booth, Charles 67n, 70, 75 Booth, William 67n Borden, Mary 216, 218 “botanising the asphalt” 25, 48, 66 Bowlby, Rachel 161 Braidotti, Rosi 61 Brake, Laurel 36 Brittain, Edward 254, 258–59, 261 Brittain, Vera 28–9, 249–69 Brontë, Charlotte 164, 173 Brooke, Rupert 269 Brooks, Gwendolyn 319

360

Index

Browning, Robert 118 Bryden, Inga 23 Buell, Lawrence 299 Burke, Edmund 274, 281, 284 Burney, Frances 90n Butler, Judith 61 Bywaters, Frederick 127, 131, 142n Caitlin, G.E.G. 268 Campbell, Jill 52 Cardinal, Agnes 208n Carlyle, Thomas 38, 40 Carroll, Lewis 140 Certeau, Michel de 198, 354 Cassatt, Mary 197 Chandler, Marilyn 21, 211 Chase, Karen 87–88, 91 Chassériau, Théodore 51 Chaudhuri, Nupur 49n Cherry, Deborah 155 Cheyette, Bryan 185 Chi, Hsin Ying 21 Chisholm, Mairi 219 Codman, Ogden 109 Cohen, Debra Roe 249, 254 Colenbrander, Joanna 127n, 131n, 139, 142 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 290 Collins, Lucy 320 Collins, Mabel 155–56 Collins, Wilkie 164 Congreve, William 289 Cooper, Susan Fenimore 299n Croker, John Wilson 36 Damisch, Hubert 321 Dante [Alighieri] 58 David, Alison Matthews 57n Davidoff, Leonore 15, 176 Davies, Paul 280 Davis, Terence 119 Darwin, Charles 293 Dawson-Damer, Georgianna 52, 56–57 D’Églantine, Philippe Fabre 280 Dean, Sharon L. 209 Dearmer, Ursula (Lady Dorothy Fielding) 238

Debat-Ponsan, Edouard 51 Deming, Alison Hawthorne 309 Despotopoulou, Anna 25, 101, 353–54 Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam 329 Dickens, Charles 25, 77n, 91–92 Dickie, Margaret 333 Disraeli, Benjamin 59, 71 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 26, 149, 151, 153–61, 164 Doane, Mary Ann 93–94 Dolan, Frances 129 Domosh, Mona 298, 300, 301–03, 307, 310 Doody, Margaret Anne 129, 140–41 Doré, Gustave 25 Douglas, Mary 174 Duras, Marguerite 191 Dyos, H.J. 71 Easley, Alexis 36–38 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth 61–62 écriture feminine 243 Edwards, Thomas S. and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe 299, 300 Eliot, George 25, 87, 89, 92–101, 103, 105, 127n, 266 Eliot, T.S. 25, 167, 322, 324 Elizabeth, Queen of Belgium 219 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 94 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 208n Emsley, Clive 128 Ender, Evelyn 96 ESSE 44n, 88n Evans, Ann-Marie 26, 355 Eyre, Jane 44, 154 Farmer, Steve 157 Fehlbaum, Valerie 26, 352 Felski, Rita 105 feminism 16, 167, 169n, 231, 234, 239, 262, 267–68 Feminismo/s 190n feminist 99, 150, 239, 293 feminist critics 15, 19, 21, 27, 153, 169, 191 feminist founding statement 356 feminist mountaineers 313 feminist poet 320

Index feminists, alarming to 303 “feminotopia” 52 Fielding, Lady Dorothy (alias Ursula Dearmer) 238 Finn, Howard 170 Floyd, Janet 23 Forster, Laurel 28, 354–55 Foucauldian approach to body 61 Foucault’s Panopticon 304 Fox, Celina 151 Frame, Janet 27, 190–201 Frawley, Maria H. 42 Freud, Sigmund 246, 354 Friedberg, Anne 30, 222–223 Fryer, Judith 21, 118n, 211, 218 Fuss, Diana 352 Fussell, Paul 233, 258, 263 Gal, Susan 88n, 306–07 Gallagher, Jean 209n, 223 geography of the sick-room 39 George, Lloyd 259 Gerôme, Jean-Leon 51, 52n, 55 Gifford, Terry 13, 297, 300, 309, 311 Gilbert, Sandra 206, 250, 268 Gilligan, Carol 311 Gilloch, Graeme 77 Gillray, James 276 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 164 Gleber, Anke 322 Gledhill, Jane 209n Glotfelty, Cheryl 304n Goldman, Dorothy 208, 209n, 219, 231–32, 251 Gollancz, Victor 252 Gómez Reus, Teresa 20, 27, 356 “good wives” 16 Gorham, Deborah 253, 265 Grand, Sarah 99, 154n Graves, Robert 207, 226, 250, 253 Greg, W.R. 72 Gregory, Melissa Valiska 91 Grosz, Elizabeth 61 Guignard, Lilace Mellin 29, 353 Habermas, Jürgen 25, 87, 88, 89, 352

361

Haig, Douglas 259, 260 Hall, Catherine 15 Hall, Graham 127n, 139, 141n, 142n Hamann, Cathleen J. 25, 352 Harkness, Margaret 67n Harris, Carlyle 131 Hartman, Mary 126, 130 Harvey, Annie 52, 48, 59 Harvey, Melinda 27 Hattaway, Judith 208n, 209n Hawkins, Laetitia 283 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 303, 309 Hazlitt, William 287 Heidensohn, Frances 128 Heilbrun, Carolyn 267, 268, 269 Heilmann, Ann 169n Heller, Dana 356 Hidalgo, Pilar 169n Higonnet, Margaret 250, 251 Hill, Octavia 65, 67, 69–71, 73–75, 78, 82 Hoe, Cottrel (Robert Barr) 160 Hogan, Rebecca 243 Holmes, Julia Archibald 313 Holmes, Richard 285n Holtby, Winifred 268, 269 Homer 226 Howard, John 277 Hubbard, Louisa M. 155n Hughes, Langston 30, 319, 322 Humboldt, Alexander von 293 Hunt, Stephen E. 19, 353, 355 Imagists 242, 246 Imlay, Gilbert 285, 285n Ingres 50–51, 55 Ingpen, Roger 285n Innes, Joanna 277 Iskin, Ruth 73, 82 Jacobs, Jane 287 Jacobus, Mary 270 James, Henry 25, 90n, 91–92, 100–05 and Edith Wharton 26, 107, 114n, 225 on bombed cathedral of Rheims 214 on World War I 207 Jesse, F. Tennyson 26, 125–44

362

Index

Jewsbury, Geraldine 94 John, Gwen 21, 23, 24 Jones, Vivien 293 Jünger, Ernst 207, 212 Kaplan, Amy 110, 113, 115 Keane, Angela 278 Keates, Debra 23 Keating, P.J. 68 Kelly, Gary 287 Kennedy, Deborah 293 Kolodny, Annette 283, 298 Krutch, Joseph Wood 297, 307 Lapsley, Gaillard 207 Latour, Bruno 354 Lauber, Peter 13, 27, 356 Ledger, Sally 153, 219 Lee, Ang 311 Lee, Hermione 215 Leed, Eric 206, 220, 222 Legler, Gretchen 29, 297, 299 Lehmann, Rosamond 183 Leider, Emily Wortis 127, 131, 139 Leighton, Roland 254, 256–57 Lessing, Doris 27, 189–92, 194–201 Levenson, Michael 87, 88, 91 Lewis, R.W.B. 211 Linton, Eliza Lynn 26,149, 152–53, 160,163 Logan, Thad 101 Londres, Albert 214 Loomis, Molly 305 López Ropero, Lourdes 15, 354 Lorde, Audre 329 Lorraine, Claude 279 Lukács, George 252 Macaulay, Catherine 280 Malthus, Thomas 36 Mantilla, Karla 312 Marlow, Joyce 208n Martin, Wendy 333 Martineau, Harriet 24, 35–46, 52, 58, 61, 286, 353 Marx, Leo 303 Masterman’s “Author’s Manifesto” 233

Maybrick, Florence 131 Mayhew, Augustus 25 Mazel, David 313 McClintock Anne 58 McClure, Charlotte S. 133n, 136n, 140n, 143 McCracken, Scott 176, 180, 181 McLoughlin, Kate 208 McMullen, Roy 278n Meade, L.T. 65, 67–68, 70, 74, 77, 79–81 Meister, Wilhelm 19 Mepham, John 169, 170 Merish, Lori 109, 110 Michie, Helena 99n Miller, Daniel 351 Milton, John 52n, 58, 159, 226 Mitsi, Efterpi 24, 25, 352 Modernism 160, 249, 267 Modernist 21, 48, 169, 229, 232–34, 238, 247, 252–54, 269, 346 Monet, Claude 195 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 47, 50–55, 60 Montgomery, Maureen E. 110 Morgan, Elaine 142 Morris, Virginia 126n, 129 Muhidine, Timour 208n Muir, John 297, 307 Munro, Hector 232, 238–40, 245 Nash, John 199n nature writing 297, 299, 300, 311 Newtonian space 19 Nead, Lynda 22, 153n Nicolay, Nicolas de 50–51 Nord, Deborah 22, 78, 81 Norton, Sarah 197n Novy, Jean Jules Antoine Leconte de 47 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish 155 O’Connor, T.P. 159 Odle, Rose 172n O’Hara, Frank 319 Oktenberg, Adrian 320n Olin-Ammentorp, Julie 208

Index Ortega, Kirsten Bartholomew 29, 355 Ouditt, Sharon 229, 234, 243n, 251, 265–67 Ouida 90n, 99, 100 Owen, Wilfred 258 Pallasmaa, Juhani 174 Pardoe, Julia 47, 52, 55, 56, 58 Parkes, Bessie Rane 155n Parsons, Deborah 13, 20, 22, 48, 159, 189–90, 201, 322–23 Paston, George (Emily Morse Symonds) 26, 127n, 161–64 pastoral 29, 193, 199, 200, 275, 280–81, 284–86, 297–300, 303, 309, 311–13 pastoral, neo- 275 “Paterfamilias from the Provinces” 152 Peabody, George 67n Pearse, Padraid 343 Peiss, Kathy 121 Pepys, Samuel 195 People’s Palace 69 Poe, Edgar Allan 325 Pollock, Griselda 21, 197 Polwhele, Richard 278 Poole, Sophia Lane 52, 57–58 postcolonial 25, 49, 190 postmodern 16, 29, 198, 299 post-pastoral 297, 300, 311, 312n post-traumatic stress syndrome 282 Potts, Helen 131 Pound, Ezra 321–22 Pratt, Mary Louise 52, 197n Proulx, Annie 311, 313 Pycroft, Ella 74n Quella-Villéger, Alain 208n, 214 Quinn, Patrick J. 251–52 Radcliffe, Ann 279 Radford, Jean 170–71 Raitt, Suzanne 182, 208n, 232, 234, 241–42 rape 297, 302–04 Remarque, Erich Maria 250 reportage 249, 252, 267 Reynolds, Barbara 142n Reynolds, Sir Joshua 117–19, 120n

363

Rhys, Jean 189–90 Rich, Adrienne 29, 30, 319–25, 327–31, 333–34, 349–50, 355 Richardson, Dorothy 27, 167, 169–73, 175–76, 178, 182–83, 189, 352 Richter, Amy G. 23, 88n Riehl, W.H. 88n Rigard, Amelia 217n Riley, Jeannette 344n Rilke, Rainer, Maria 21, 322 Rinehart, Mary Robert 218–20 Riviere, Joan 94 Robinson, Lillian S. 120 Robinson, Mary 29, 273–78, 294, 355 Robinson, Thomas 275 Rodin, Auguste 21 Roland, Madame 284 Roosevelt, Teddy 301 Rosa, Salvator 279 Rose, Gillian 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29, 273–74, 278, 285, 287, 293 Rosen, Judith 94 Ruskin, John 90–91, 313–14 Ryan, Mary P. 352 Said, Edward 49, 186 Saint-Pierre, Bernardine de 278 Sand, George 298 Sapho 51 Sassoon, Siegfried 226, 250, 253 Sayers, Dorothy L. 142n Scott, Joan 23 Schama, Simon 281n Scheese, Don 299 Schreiner, Olive 261 Seager, Joni 297–98, 300–03, 307, 310 Seidel, Michael 174 Sennett, Richard 168 Shaw, Marion 268 Sherry, Vincent 208n Shevelow, Kathryn 89 Shields, Rob 355 Showalter, Elaine 91 Silver Fork novels 40 Sinclair, May 28, 229, 231–46, 354–55

364 Sizemore, Susan 190n, 191n Smith, Angela K. 243n Smith, Annie Peck 313 Smith, Charlotte 29, 273278, 280, 293–294, 355 Smith, Jean and Gordon D. 127n, 139, 141n, 142n Smith, Septimus 149n, 266 Solnit, Rebecca 22, 298 Spanish Civil War 253 Spyridaki, Georges 335 Squier, Susan Merrill 21 St. Clair, Stobart 239 St. Laurent, Maureen E. 213 Stanhope, Lady Hestor 53–54 Stanley, H.M. 67n Stannard, Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Palmer (alias John Strange Winter) 149, 155 Stansell, Christine 22 Stead, W.T. 152 Stepney, Lady 40–42 Sterne, Laurence 293 Stetz, Margaret 161n Stobbs, Janet 26, 354 Strobel, Margaret 49 Sullivan, Sara 30, 352, 354 Symbolists 246 Symonds, Emily Morse (alias George Paston) 26, 127n, 149, 161–64 Tate, Trudi 208n, 251 Tester, Keith 189, 193, 198 Thompson, Edith 127, 131, 139, 141n, 142 Thomson, George H. 176n Thoreau, Henry David 299n “time geography” 61 Todd, Janet 276, 285n tourism 47–48 travel writing 47, 49, 208, 209n Trevelyan, G.M. 88n Trodd, Anthea 126n, 141 Trotsky, Leon 252 Trout, Steven 251–52 T’Serclaes, Baroness de 219 “Turkish Bath Movement” 59

Index Tylee, Claire 234, 236n, 251, 254 Underhill, Miriam O’Brien 305, 311 Urquhart, David 59 Usandizaga, Aránzazu 28, 356 Valentine, Gill 302 Vane, Frances-Anne 52, Vane, Harriet 127n Veblen, Thorstein 107–10, 112, 115, 118, 120–21 Vicinus, Martha 72 Vigarello, Georges 56n, 58, 60 Walkowitz, Judith 74n, 81 Ward, Mary Augusta 65, 67, 69, 70, 75–77, 79 Wardle, Ralph 285n Warner, Sylvia Townsend 267–68 Watteau, J.A. 119 Webb, Beatrice 65–67, 69–70, 74–75, 79, 81–82 Wegner, Phillip 19 West, Rebecca 234 Wharton, Edith 26–28, 107, 109–22, 127n, 205–26, 355–56 White, Stuart Edward 305 Whitman, Walt 30, 319, 322 Willard, Frances E. 313 Williams, Helen Maria 29, 273–75, 278–84, 285n, 288, 293–94 Williams, Raymond 74n, 275 Wilson, Elizabeth 66n, 77n, 151, 153 Wilson, Erasmus 59 Wilson, Leigh 239n Winter, John Strange (Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Palmer Stannard) 149, 155 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin 107n, 113, 118–19, 213, 215 Wolff, Janet 21–22, 24, 48, 66, 73, 196, 313–14, 322, 356 disagreement with 81, 322 on Gwen John 22, 24 on shopping 73, 298 Wolff, Leon 214n, 222 Wolff, Michael 151