Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young

Chiara Briganti, Kathy Mezei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351943093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H. Young provides a valuable analytical model for reading a large body of modernist works by women, who have suffered not only from a lack of critical attention but from the assumption that experimental modernist techniques are the only expression of the modern. In the process of documenting the publication and reception history of E. H. Young's novels, the authors suggest a paradigm for analyzing the situation of women writers during the interwar years. Their discussion of Young in the context of both canonical and noncanonical writers challenges the generic label and literary status of the domestic novel, as well as facile assumptions about popular and middlebrow fiction, canon formation, aesthetic value, and modernity. The authors also make a significant contribution to discussions of the everyday and to the burgeoning field of 'homeculture, ' as they show that the fictional embodiment and inscription of home by writers such as Young, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lettice Cooper, E. M. Delafield, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, and E. Arnot Robertson epitomize the long-standing symbiosis between architecture and literature, or more specifically, between the house and the novel.

Chapter 1

The Interwar Domestic Novel and the Meaning of Home

Must the novel be a house?

Bhabha: 446

Take the Carlyles, for instance. One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.

Woolf, ‘Great Men’s Houses’, The London Scene (1975), p. 23

Defining the Domestic Novel

When one of Young’s heroines reflects on the ‘simple pleasure she found in the sight of familiar places and people’ and ‘did not tire of the daily round’ because ‘some little thing was always happening’ (Celia: 105), she signals certain intrinsic features of the domestic novel: the everyday, the minute and the familiar. Although some domestic novelists resented the drudgery of domesticity, ‘the unspeakable fireside, the gruesome dinnertable’, others, like Young, found amusement and pleasure in the drab and the everyday.¹ Setting the model for the genre in other literatures in English, the English domestic novel portrays the social relations and daily life of a contained community (house, village, urban parish, suburb), while foregrounding values and rituals that ‘comprise the modern notion of domesticity – separation from the workplace, privacy, comfort, focus on the family’ (Reed 1996: 7). Its origins lie in the eighteenth century as economic changes created the leisured middle-class woman; a remarkable number of women novelists rose to prominence (Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe), whose novels featured middle-class heroines caught in the throes of convoluted courtship plots. Encouraged by the increased accessibility of books through subscription (and later in the nineteenth century through circulating libraries), women writers gradually abandoned this residual link to the romance and the picaresque to devise fictional worlds that mirrored the lives of their readers. Women became the subject and avid recipients of a fictional world that paid realistic attention to detail and the everyday. However, as the domestic novel evolved through Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford), Charlotte Yonge, the sensation novels of the 1860s, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Edith Wharton, it registered an increasing sense of claustrophobia. By the early twentieth century, in domestic novelists inspired by the New Woman and the suffragette movement with its demand for equality in marriage as well as politics, the code of renunciation and submission that had characterized the genre was under attack. Marriage became the subject of rather than the solution to the plot (Ida Leverson, The Little Ottleys; E.M. Forster, Howards End).

With its focus on the lives of women (especially housewives and spinsters) and primarily written by women, about women, for women, the interwar domestic novel encompassed social realism (Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson), self-deprecatory humour and irony (E.M. Delafield, E.H. Young, Jan Struther), the monstrous (Ivy Compton-Burnett) and the rebellious (Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann). As a genre, the domestic novel runs the gamut from drawing-room comedy (Dodie Smith, Stella Gibbons),² golden age detective novel of manners (Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers),³ lyrical exposé of life in the bourgeois home (May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor, Enid Bagnold) and popular saga (Angela Thirkell) to experimental high modernism (Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Stevie Smith).⁴ The meaning of home and representations of houses are obviously central to the domestic novel genre. ⁵ When theorizing dislocation in his essay, ‘The World and the Home’, Homi Bhabha queried ‘must the novel be a house?’(446); his query surely presupposes its converse: must the house be a novel with its own narrative, characters and plot?

The following discussion tries to untangle this long-standing and intricate connection between house and novel and its implications for the domestic novel and modernism. For example, both novel and house are dwelling places and spaces whose deep structures demonstrate anatomical, psychological and descriptive equivalences and whose ‘architecture’ can be similarly read as Gothic, or modern, or postmodern. And so, just as the novel is itself a domestic space housing characters and plots in a time–space alliance,⁶ domestic spaces exist as ‘fictional constructs … stories the telling of which has the power to create the “we” who are engaged in telling them’ (Bammer: ix). Within both these spaces dwell inhabitants – the ubiquitous family or household or kinship system that sustains and is sustained by the physical and spiritual structures of the space of houses and novels.⁷ As Angelika Bammer suggests, home (and from our point of view, the novel) ‘might be thought of as an enacted space within which we try and play out roles and relationships of both belonging and foreignness’ (ix). Similar to novels, domestic spaces are texts that organize social relations (Dorothy Smith: 279), reveal and shape their inhabitants and can be ‘read’. And in terms of a hermeneutics of literature and architecture, the interplay between these two art forms brings to the fore issues concerning representation, the sign and meaning; each art resorts to the other as a reservoir of metalanguage or metaphor. For example, houses are ‘written’, that is, drafted as plans and blueprints before materializing as built forms: ‘tous les grands architectes … ont beaucoup écrit’ (Hamon: 29).

As represented in the novel, home and house are associated with comfort, privacy, belonging and well being, whether present or absent, and most importantly with control; in Philippa Tristram’s words, the novel is ‘invincibly domestic’ and ‘functions like the house as a little world we think we can control’ (268).⁸ Authors, like homemakers, arrange and manipulate people, space and objects. Noting, along with Mary Douglas, that the home starts by bringing some space under control (289) and organizes space over time (294), we observe how, in fiction and everyday life, the house itself is material evidence of the human endeavour to control nature and the physical environment. For many women writers and their characters, the domestic sphere thus offered a site for potential control over material objects, household duties, family members and servants.

In Lettice Cooper’s The New House (1936), Evelyn, the sister-in-law of the protagonist, Rhoda, smugly reassures herself that ‘this was her house, and she was the centre; she was hostess, mistress, mother, and wife … here in the centre of her house, her child going to sleep behind her, the work that she directed going on behind the scenes, her husband depending on her, she could afford not to be afraid of anyone!’ (219).⁹ Domestic novelists were nevertheless well aware that, as Douglas contends, the home exerts tyrannous control over mind, body and speech since it is ‘a tangle of conventions and totally incommensurable rights and duties’ (302).¹⁰ In the unspoken words of one of Young’s heroines, the tie of family ‘was too close and it was knotted with the conventions that had grown round it’ (Celia: 86). So while daily rituals ensure continuity, laying down ‘a new cobweb of threads … on top of yesterday’s pattern’, Rhoda in The New House muses that everyday life had been not only her friend but her enemy, confounding life with existence: ‘because its various demands had hidden her from herself, its manifold activities had made her think that she was living’ (44, 184).

Defining Domestic Space, House and Home

Our understanding of domestic space takes into account the material, psychological, spiritual and social aspects of house and home and garden within the wider context of the everyday and of human relationships within and beyond the house. With its combination of the material, social and personal, domestic space resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (fluctuating though it is) as a system of durable, transposable dispositions that generate and organize both practices and representations (1990: 53). However, like house and home, it remains an ambiguous and polyvalent concept. For domestic spaces may criss-cross and destabilize the already uncertain borders between inside and outside and between the private and public spheres to encompass non-traditional ideas of home such as scientific laboratories, prison cells, the family car, or the heterotopic or ‘other’ spaces of gardens, boarding schools and rest homes delineated by Foucault as constituting a counter-arrangement to society’s hierarchies and institutions (Foucault 1997: 354).¹¹ As enacted in the interwar domestic novel, domestic spaces were generally secularized. And, although the Victorian angel of the house Virginia Woolf was so eager to kill off persevered in the figure of dutiful daughters and long-suffering wives trapped in the home, no longer was this ideal sanctified by writers of this period

While house and home are often used interchangeably, in order to facilitate discussion of the domestic novel, we distinguish between the house, a physical, built dwelling for people in a fixed location and the home ¹² which, whereas it may possess the material characteristics of a built dwelling, implies a space, a feeling, an idea, not necessarily located in a fixed place.¹³ However, as David Benjamin cautions – and this cuts to the heart of our own experience of the narrating and imagining of home in the domestic novel – ‘the home is a symbol, so that even though we recognize it, and “know it”, it will always defy a rational deconstruction and complete explication of its meaning content’ (3).

In her 1991 review of the literature on the meaning of home, Carole Després points to the necessity of contextualizing interpretations of the meaning of home, succinctly outlining different interpretations. Without, however, distinguishing between house and home, she discusses the conceptualization of home as a ‘symbol of how people see themselves and how they want to be seen by others’ (98) and as an indicator of status, which is ‘decoded through the characteristics of the house’, mostly its exterior, its accoutrements and its location (100). Meanings of home emerge from the process of controlling social interaction and ‘acting upon one’s environment’ (98), from a sense of permanence and continuity which connects one’s past and future (101), and from its quintessence as a ‘place for privacy and independence’ (98), a place to own, a place with both a material structure and aesthetic characteristics (99). These sociological factors are evidently played out in domestic novels.

The house is frequently presented as a symbol of the self – a representation much influenced by C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud.¹⁴ In his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounts how his concept of the collective unconscious emerged from Freud’s attempt to interpret his house dream:

I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories. It was ‘my house’. I found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old paintings … Descending the stairs I reached the ground floo. There everything was much older … Everywhere it was rather dark … I came upon a heavy door, and opened it … I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient … [Jung descends another stairway of narrow stone steps into a cave where he discovers two human skulls]. (158–9)

While Freud obsessed about the significance of the skulls Jung had discovered in the cellar of his dream house, insisting that they represented Jung’s death wishes concerning his wife and mother-in-law, an increasingly irritated Jung decides instead that the house represents the psyche, his psyche. For example, the salon symbolizes consciousness, while the lower floors – and cellar – depict levels and layers of unconsciousness.¹⁵

Freud himself in his ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’(1916–1917) describes a ‘suite of rooms to explain the structure of the unconscious’: ‘Let us compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals’. Continuing the metaphor, he explains that consciousness resides in the drawing room; a watchman who stands on the threshold between the two rooms examines the mental impulses and refuses to admit them to the drawing room if they displease him (quoted in Rice: 277–8). It has subsequently become commonplace to interpret houses (in dreams, memories, literature and art) as settings for an emerging interior life (Rybczynski: 36) and as extensions of the psyche and body.

Not only does the house lodge, protect and shelter the human body from the outside elements and from other people, but it is often envisaged as a body. The visceral embodiment of the house prevalent in the Gothic and domestic novel reflects a tradition that perceives buildings in terms of an organic structure, its dimensions and scale modeled on the human body. This tradition originates with Vitruvius’s prescription that ‘as in the human body there is a harmonious quality of shapeliness … so it is in completing works of architecture’ (25) and that the temple should possess the same symmetry and proportion as a well-formed human body (37). In extending the idea of house and body to include the gendering and sexualizing of the house, Marjorie Garber suggests that the ‘house has been simply and directly mapped onto the female body’ (49), partly an extension of the cult of domesticity, partly a literal reading of women’s sexuality as something enclosed and interior. House, body and mind are in continuous interaction; the physical structure, furniture, social rituals and mental images of the house at once enabling, moulding, informing and constraining the activities and ideas which unfold within its bounds (Carsten and Hugh-Jones: 2). Thus, in Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume (1929), ‘the dumpy windows of the “best bedroom” floor’, the ‘dining-room windows, broad and slightly protuberant, like the paunch of a moderate over-eater’ of the houses in Kensington, are a suitable introduction to a ‘fat papa’, a ‘fat mamma’ (7, 8) and fat progeny and do much to conjure up a future of dismal self-complacency for Arnold and Harriet.¹⁶ Straining the metaphor even further, Frank Lloyd Wright complains in his 1931 essay, ‘The Cardboard House’ that:

Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body. Electric wiring for nervous system, plumbing for bowels, heating system and fireplaces for arteries and heart, and windows for eyes, nose, and lungs generally. The structure of the house, too, is a kind of cellular tissue stuck full of bones, complex now, as the confusion of bedlam and all beside. The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects … The whole life of the average house … is a sort of indigestion. (51)¹⁷

Home, as Marx argued, provides the site for reproduction and thus for the production of future labour power; the house shelters parents and children and produces and stores the food that will nurture them, if they are economically viable. The house requires labour power to function, primarily the unpaid labour of women and children; moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, the house and ‘housekeeping’ were guided by laws of efficienc, the assembly line and Taylorism, as well as by the imperative to consume the products of the assembly line – stoves, fridges, vacuum cleaners, washing machines – purportedly labour-saving devices.

In Stella Gibbons’s Bassett (1934), the business partnership between a London working-class woman who is sacked from her job in a dress factory and a decayed gentlewoman in reduced circumstances provides an imaginative solution to the economic upheaval wrought in their lives by the war. By the end of the novel, the joint efforts of Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe have turned The Tower, Miss Padsoe’s Edwardian country house, into a successful boarding house, saving Miss Baker from sharing the fate of workers, who are ‘dropping reluctantly from their precarious hold on their unnecessary little jobs’, and Miss Padsoe from being imprisoned in a relic which ‘at once reflected and embalmed, like a mirror and a crystal in one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘And What About the Home?’
• 1 The Interwar Domestic Novel and the Meaning of Home
• 2 Home Lives, Still Lifes
• 3 House Haunting
• 4 Private and Public Spheres: Publication and Reception
• 5 The Turn to Domestic Modernism
• 6 Vicarages and Lodging-houses
• 7 Modern Heroines of the Everyday
• 8 England, My England
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index