Lesley A. Hall
Wellcome Library Research Fellow
Feminists and the domestic sphere in early 1930s Britain
While the interwar period, and perhaps particularly the 1930s, have been thought of as a period ‘between the waves’ in terms of feminism, not only did this decade see a number of activist movements fired by a feminist agenda, but during the 1930s a number of interesting works applied a feminist analysis to the particular situation of that time. Besides the generally gloomy political and economic situation, there was a discernable misogynist backlash against feminism and women’s rights, even in countries which had not endured the rise to power of Fascism, with its ‘new dream of natural instinctive racial unity… which designed for women a return to their “natural” functions of housekeeping and child-bearing’. While some attention will be given to the relatively well-known works by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928) and Three Guineas (1938), the main focus will be on non-fictional works by two novelists who were part of the circle round the feminist journal Time and Tide: Winifred Holtby’s Women and a Changing Civilisation and Naomi Mitchison’s The Home and a Changing Civilisation, both published in 1934 in The Twentieth Century Library series. Both women were powerfully aware of the extent to which ideas about women, the home, domesticity, the public and the private, were historically and culturally relativistic. How they thought about women and domesticity from a specifically feminist perspective will be explored, with particular attention given to their arguments that the domestic space itself was a very problematic haven from the harshness of the world.
Biography
Lesley A. Hall, FRHistS, PhD, DipAA, was formerly Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library. Now retired, she is a Wellcome Library Research Fellow and an Honorary Senior Lecturer, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. She has published extensively on issues of gender and sexuality in Britain from the Victorian era onwards, including the textbook, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (2nd edition, 2012) and Outspoken Women: an anthology of women writing about sex, 1870-1969 (2005), as well as numerous articles and chapters. She is currently researching interwar progressives and 1930s feminisms and continues to maintain and update her website http://www.lesleyahall.net.
Olivia Majumdar
University of Birmingham
The Home and the World: Representations of Women Leaving ‘Purdah’ in early twentieth-century Indian literature
The identification of the domestic realm with the feminine has been particularly strong in a South Asian context, where upper/middle class women were historically secluded to ‘women’s quarters’ (the zenana) and segregated from men, through the practice of purdah. The home as the heart of ‘native’, spiritual culture – safeguarded by women and secluded from the ‘public’ world of Western colonisers – was a concept prized by Indian nationalists from both major religious communities (Hindu and Muslim) in the early twentieth century. This project aims to complicate that concept by exploring the first generation of women to leave the zenana and venture out into the public world of men, as represented in the writings of early twentieth century women writers, particularly Ismat Chughtai.
Writers, such as Chughtai, in texts like Terhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line), Chauthi ka Jora (The Fourth Day Outfit) and Ek Shauhar ki Khatir (For the Sake of a Husband!), illustrate the impact of a new kind of modernism – closely related to the burgeoning nationalist movement – on educated, bourgeoisie women in the early decades of the twentieth century. Chughtai also depicts the sometimes humorous, often poignant generational clashes between these ‘new’ kinds of women and their purdah-bound predecessors – the confusion, divergent attitudes and rebellions of daughters and sisters breaking away from the lives forged by their mothers. This study will explore the way that the concept of ‘home’ – particularly as a space of domesticity and traditional femininity – was challenged by this new generation of women, and how relationships within the home, both homo- and hetero-social, were reimagined as a result, and the legacy of this generation on South Asian women’s writing of the ‘home’ today, by writers like Geetanjali Shree and Mridula Garg.
Biography
I am currently an English Literature MRes student at the University of Birmingham, producing a 40,000 word thesis on the generation of value and reception of vernacular Hindi literature when translated into English. I am producing case studies as part of this project on three contemporary Hindi writers: Nirmal Verma, Uday Prakash and Geetanjali Shree. Prior to this, I graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a First Class Honours degree in South Asian Studies, where I focused on South Asian literature and languages (Urdu, Hindi and Bengali). My particular research interest is in vernacular literature from the subcontinent, which I feel is often neglected relative to the critical reception of Anglophone literature from South Asia and its diaspora. Through my research, I wish to bring vernacular literature – specifically Hindi and Urdu literature – to the forefront of literary, translation and postcolonial studies.
I am currently working as a Bengali cataloguer with the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project at the British Library, helping to digitise rare Bengali books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to this, I was employed as an Editorial Associate and Research Assistant at the University of Cambridge.
Cristiana Pagliarusco
University of Trento
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Room of Her Own “to Start Anew, to Strip Away”
In 1919, the American Modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe painted “59th Street Studio,” an intimate oil on canvas that portrayed the studio apartment at 114 East 59th Street, in New York, where the painter was struggling to find the right angle and light to start her career. By staring down from the windows of Alfred Stieglitz’s apartment, O’Keeffe observed the busy lives of New Yorkers, aware of what the New World was blooming into, and how Americans were reacting to this new vertical space highly praised by European artists.
This contribution aims to show how O’Keeffe’s rooms in New York opened the door to the beginning of a new way of making art, and to a new way of conceiving women’s spaces. The paper cross-examines the reading of O’Keeffe’s painting and early career life through poetry. Christopher Buckley’s poem “59th Street Studio” (Flying Backbone) casts a private gaze into O’Keeffe’s rooms; Cathy Song’s “Black Iris—New York” (Picture Bride) draws the reader into some domestic moments of the artist’s life; Alicia Ostriker’s “O’Keeffe” (The Little Space) pictures the artist ready to show her Midwestern “fist.” The poets help us visualize the minimalist space O’Keeffe was imagining in New York, in her attempt to capture patches of sky from its streets and her windows. By stripping away details, hollowing out shapes, and carving out her role as an artist—a process that Kate Braid reproduces in her book of poems Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr—O’Keeffe dismantled the walls of her patriarchal house, and profession. Space expanded in her new order. She trespassed the boundaries of stereotyped feminine realms that led her to the open, transnational houses–her adobes in New Mexico–where she boldly changed the nature of domesticity, and art.
Biography
Cristiana Pagliarusco received a PhD in Humanities from the University of Trento. Her research focuses on the intersections between the visual and the verbal media with the aim to highlight the importance of affiliative and affective relationships among artists and intellectuals in modern and contemporary age, and global contexts. She is tenured teacher of English in a Liceo focusing on humanities in Vicenza, Italy. She has presented her research in international conferences, and several articles have been published on academic and literary journals. An anthology and a monographic volume on the poetry inspired by the American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe are in press.
Suzana Zink
University of Neuchâtel
Turn-of-Century Rooms and the Pull of Modernity in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day and The Years
Women’s fraught relationship with the home constitutes an enduring thematic concern in Virginia Woolf’s work, as well as the means to explore and theorise the intersection of space, gender and patriarchy throughout her writing. Night and Day (1919) and The Years (1937) both prominently explore turn-of-century women’s renegotiation of space and the ensuing paradigmatic shifts in the notion of home and domestic living in the age of modernity. The 1919 novel makes the Hilberys’ late Victorian household the locus of its critique of memorialisation practices, shown to reinforce patriarchal gender roles by showcasing the home as the container of great men’s lives. The novel juxtaposes the house in Cheyne Walk with the great poet’s biography in ways which highlight the conjunction of material and textual space, suggestive of a reading of rooms as texts of memorialisation. The book thus uncovers the archival function of built space, here designed to perpetuate the Victorian ideal of greatness, at odds with the younger generation’s aspirations. Woolf’s 1937 novel further deconstructs the home by charting the move away from the highly gendered divisions of the late-Victorian house to new modes of living across the city, a spatial history which is not completely devoid of ambivalence towards the blurring of spatial divisions. The spatial shifts thus configured map out new ways of envisioning the relationship between home and modernity, inviting closer attention to the changing nature of home at the turn of the century.
Biography
Based at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Suzana Zink holds a PhD in English from King’s College London (2013). Her teaching experience includes literature and language courses and her research interests focus on spatial issues in modernism, especially Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. Her monograph entitled Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity was published by Palgrave Macmillan USA in spring 2018.
Clare Taylor
The Open University
Contesting modernism: Regency Revival interiors in town and country
The period from c.1930-c.1950 was one of expansion in the nascent profession of interior designer on both sides of the Atlantic, but also one where the role remained marginalised in terms of both gender and amateur practice. However, this paper argues that over this period interior design was crucial to the birth of a new kind of domestic modernism, one used to define new kinds of spaces from the London flat to the weekend cottage. The paper focuses on the Regency Revival, showing how it was manifested in the ‘solemn Regency’ interiors created by the playwright and collector Edward Knoblock, comparing these to what Christopher Hussey termed ‘modern Regency’ interiors including those designed by the architects Harry Goodhart-Rendel and Basil Ionides. However, it challenges the trope of the Regency decorator style, discussing the contributions of the decorators Roland Fleming and Norris Wakefield, including the latter’s schemes in town and country for the collector Edward James. The paper also challenges gendered models of practice and clients, including examining the contributions of the interior decorators Sybil Colefax and Nancy McClelland, both through Colefax’s work for Diana Cooper and McClelland’s illustrations of the modernist interiors created for clients including Claire Marion-Cox in the pictorial supplement to her 1939 study, Duncan Phyfe and the English Regency. I argue that modernist design for the domestic interior was not only manifested through the better known work of leading artists, architects and retailers, but could also be realised by those who sought to align 1930s taste with that of the 1830s. This is seen particularly in small-scale domestic spaces, which needed to accommodate new forms of sociability and which provided a version of modernism rooted not only in new forms of lighting and materials, but in the re-use of Regency ‘antiques’ and decorating models.
Biography
Dr Clare Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University, works on the decoration of the interior and on issues around gender, taste and material culture. Much of her research focuses on the contested category of the decorative, complicating the narrative of the interior by examining the contributions of collectors, decorators (including the ‘advisor’ and ‘society decorator’), scholars and dealers, and by the foregrounding the role of seemingly ephemeral decorations such as wallpapers. Her contributions to edited collections includes studies of the country house and London flat in ‘Modern Swedish Rococo: the Neo-Georgian Interior in Britain, c.1920-c.1945’ (ed. Holder & McKellar, Neo-Georgian Architecture 1880-1970: A Reappraisal, Historic England, 2016) and of how the Georgian was presented in commercial, museum and domestic interiors in ‘The Georgian period room, c.1900-c.1945: Scholars, Dealers and Decorators’ (ed. Coutts, Westgarth and Whittaker, The Period Room: Museum, Material, Experience, in press). Clare’s monograph, The Design, Production and Reception of Eighteenth-Century Wallpaper in Britain (Histories of Material Culture and Collecting series, Taylor & Francis, 2018) includes an Epilogue examining how eighteenth-century wallpapers have been rediscovered for the twentieth century interior.
Juliet Dunmur
Independent
Prudence Maufe: “A Servant of Heal’s”
Prudence Maufe (1883-1976), was the designer wife of the prolific architect Sir Edward Maufe (1882-1974). She was originally employed at Heal & Son in 1915 by Sir Ambrose Heal as Adviser on Interior Decoration, but soon became much more than that. Prudence Maufe was in charge of the Mansard Gallery and the adjoining Mansard Flat, a showcase for modern design, from its inception in 1917. She undertook the furnishing and decoration work for many of Heal’s customers, and she was considered particularly skilful in the use of colour. As an interior designer Prudence was a pioneer, becoming active well before Syrie Maugham and Sybil Colefax, society ladies who moved in rather different circles. She became a Director of Heal & Son in 1939, an unheard of position for a woman at the time.
Prudence Maufe was responsible for introducing the latest trends at Heal’s, frequently making trips to Europe to visit factories, craftsmen and artists. After 1945 ideas changed, and a new company, Heal’s Wholesale & Export, began to concentrate of furnishing fabrics. The company later changed its name to Heals Fabrics, and became the major pattern design success story of the 1950s. Prudence Maufe frequently collaborated with her architect husband on decoration schemes, such as a modern flat for the art patron Sydney Schiff, for which Edward Maufe designed the luxurious furniture. Prudence Maufe wrote articles on the theme of modern interior decoration in magazines such as The Spectator, The Queen and the Pall Mall Gazette during the 1920s and 1930s.
Biography
Juliet Dunmur is the author of a forthcoming biography of Sir Edward Maufe, architect of Guildford Cathedral, and his designer wife Prudence. Juliet is the grand-daughter of the architect and interior designer, and as a child frequently stayed at their home at Shepherds Hill in Sussex, a perfect example of 1930s chic, with few pieces of furniture but with every piece of the best and placed with intent. Juliet’s exploration of the couple’s work was initially sparked through family papers, and expanded as other material and contacts became available. Juliet has given several talks at Guildford Cathedral about the building and the couple that created it.
Juliet previously worked as an editor and designer for local magazines in Sheffield, particularly in the fields of community care and mental health. She has held public appointments as a Lay Member of a Research Ethics Committee and an independent assessor for the NHS Appointments Commission. Juliet presented a workshop on patients’ rights and participation at an International Federation of University Women’s in Toronto. She has worked as a Lay Member of the Mental Health Tribunal.
Thomas McGrath
Manchester Metropolitan University
“A fitted carpet was the symbol of luxury and class!”: Embracing modernity in the mid-twentieth century working-class living room
In terms of space, material objects and cultural use, the interiors of many working-class homes witnessed a significant transformation during the mid-twentieth century. Modification was apparent throughout these homes during the period under discussion, but change became most evident in relation to the aesthetics and use of the living room space. Terminology for this communal area varied in relation to region and types of housing. The parlour, kitchen, front or back room were some of the alternative terms used when referring to the living room.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the ways in which conversions in material and architectural culture, influenced the use of the room and compromised long standing domestic traditions and behaviours of the family and for a new generation of home-occupiers.
My paper draws upon a comprehensive range of archival sources and oral testimonies which trace the ways in which this part of the home evolved from a practical space to become a comfortable, leisurely family room. A sample of oral testimonies, from working-class communities in the North West, have proven crucial in creating a personal and tangible link between the domestic sphere and wider local community networks.
Furthermore, the testimonies reveal how the living room acted as an agent for change within the home. From this, arguments have been formulated to highlight the various ways in which modernity can be identified in the working-class living room. The oral recordings also show how modernity was viewed by some as a gateway towards social mobility through the purchasing of positional goods. Moreover, they simultaneously reveal that modification of the living room acted as a barrier between different generations, among those who actively embraced it or those who rejected it within their homes.
Biography
I am a funded history PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. My PhD research is a mixture of social, architectural and urban histories. It focuses on the domestic lives of the mercantile communities of Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The house itself serves as a microcosm for wider historical themes to help us understand changing patterns in routine, architecture, material culture and urbanisation.
The focus of my research both for the thesis and my other areas of interest is upon the domestic habits of different social classes and the impact of status upon the home. My research spans from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and offers new insights into social and cultural life within the urban and suburban geographies of the North West in this period. I enjoy using archival sources and a wide-range of methodologies to identify cultural practices, daily routines, consumption habits and details of family life. I believe these show that a house can be seen as a physical extension of the inhabitant’s personality.
My website traces the hidden histories and untold stories of buildings in the Manchester/Greater Manchester region: http://www.ifthosewallscouldtalk.wordpress.com
Michael Clegg
University of Birmingham
‘Intended for every home’: the Everyman Prints and the intermodern
In late 1930s Britain a growing movement advocated for the artists’ lithograph as a way to make modern art affordable to ‘every purse’ and available in ‘every home’ (to quote contemporary phrases). The domestic encounter with original, contemporary art was seen to have a value which the museum object could not match. A concrete manifestation of this movement came with the Everyman Prints, published by the Artists’ International Association in 1940. The series included works by artists such as Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Carel Weight and impressions were available for a few pence from travelling exhibitions, as well as over the counter at Marks and Spencer. Some contemporaries interpreted the Everyman Prints as catering to a working-class audience with a stress on social (or socialist) realism, and this understanding has been adopted by subsequent scholars. However, In this paper I suggest that the primary audience was less ‘every’ householder than the young and aspirational, those who saw themselves creating a ‘modern home’, in the words of the series brochure, despite restricted means, through access to new technologies of reproduction for books, music and art. I argue that the initiative can be understood as an example in visual art of the ‘intermodern’, that is the pre-war cultural position identified by literary scholars such as Kristin Bluemel and Nick Hubble as a coalescence of progressive sections of the (lower) middle-class – and their political values – and aesthetic interests derived from modernism. In summary, attention to the Everyman Prints – and the wider movement they represented – shows how the apparently private space of the pre-war home could also be, for some, a place where an individual’s combined commitments to modernism and to a progressive politics were affirmed.
Biography
I am in the second year of a PhD in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. My thesis has the working title ‘Artists’ Prints in Post-War Britain’, and my research interests include British art, twentieth century art, printmaking, visual responses to the post-war moment and the concepts of art democratisation, art in the home and a national art tradition. I previously completed an MA (with Distinction) in the History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London and have published two peer reviewed articles based on my MA work: one on early arts television programming, in British Art Studies, and one on the 1957 rehang of Tate’s modern British collection, in Tate Papers. I am a mature student, having previously worked for the UK government.
Hannah Halliwell
University of Birmingham
Absent Presences: The Morphinomane at Home in French Visual Culture (1880-c.1916)
This paper analyses visual representations of the morphinomane (morphine addict) in turn-of-the-twentieth-century French art. Artists’ use of female figures significantly contributed towards the feminisation of morphine – alongside the drug’s associations with fashion, consumerism and modernity – despite contemporaneous statistics showing that the majority of morphine addicts were (male) doctors. Almost always pictured in the domestic sphere, artists’ representations of the morphinomane seemingly perpetuate the mythologisation of the (bourgeois) home as a private space characterised by femininity. However, this paper rethinks ideas about medical presences – and thus medical spaces – in turn-of-the-century French art by analysing the manifest feminisation of morphine in conjunction with its latent medicalisation. The latter, I will argue, signals a disruption to the allegedly feminine domestic space and infers that the home was temporarily yet recurrently disturbed by (male) doctors’ visits. Crucially, morphine likely only entered the home via this route, yet the figural presence of a doctor is absent from these works. I contend that the recently modernised hypodermic syringe, which appears in almost every depiction of morphine use, was inherently medicalised and had become metonymic with morphine addiction. The paper shows that the medicalised hypodermic syringe acts as a medical absent presence. Artists’ removal of the respected fin-de-siècle family doctor protected his societal position and simultaneously reinforced the drug’s feminisation. I argue that the presence of a doctor in morphinomane artworks would not only draw attention to the hypocrisy of morphine use within the medical community, but it would overtly unsettle the feminisation of both the drug and the home. Ultimately, the paper argues that the repeated inclusion of the hypodermic syringe in morphinomane visual culture serves to disrupt the myth of the turn-of-the-century home as inviolable and exclusively feminine.
Biography
Hannah Halliwell is a Midlands3Cities doctoral researcher in the History of Art department at the University of Birmingham (2016-2019). Last year (2017-2018), Hannah was awarded the department’s Haywood Fellowship award for teaching and organising departmental research seminars. Hannah completed her MA and BA in the same department. During the MA, Hannah was assistant editor for the Journal of Art Historiography. Her MA dissertation examined depictions of female figures in bicycle posters. With a continuing interest in the interdisciplinarity of art and the representations of women, Hannah’s PhD focus is the (almost exclusively) female morphine addict in fin-de-siècle French visual culture.
William Carroll
University of Birmingham
‘Wooden Gothic and Sordid Squalor:’ The haunted small-town domestic in American Photography
One of the most significant aspects of American modernity was the increased commercialisation of photography, a form that became popularised through photojournalism and cultural publications such as Life magazine. The most iconic photographic project in American history, however, is exemplified by the Farm Security Administration (1937), a New Deal initiative that aimed to document and historicize the Great Depression in America’s rural, small-town locales. A closer inspection of this historical catalogue reveals photographs not of an exclusively functional, historic nature but instead works of significant artistic, and modernist, merit.
In the images captured by Walker Evans, one of the FSA’s most prominent photographers, the modernist sensibilities inherent to American interwar photography can be seen most clearly. Evans’ attention to domestic spaces and vernacular architecture of the period, as well as the intersection between people and place in provincial communities, renders the aesthetic qualities of his oeuvre equally as important as its historical value. From the empty chairs that feature in many of Evans’ depopulated domestic spaces, to his artistic fixation on Victorian-style architecture and its degradation, Evans’ much-imitated style was the source of both awe and ire during his time; he was celebrated by many for his ‘lyric documentary style’ and shunned by others for his cold, disconnected approach.
This modernist legacy, of reading historical, quotidian American photography as objects with inherent aesthetic value, continues to resonate in the work of American regional photographer David Plowden. Working 40 years on from Evans and the FSA, the same curious themes of haunted domestic spaces, ‘Main Street’ decline, and blue-collar environs in Plowden’s work challenge once more the blurred distinction between documentary and art photography.
By tracing the lineage between Evans and Plowden, this paper explains that the legacy of modernist photography, and of hybridising historical and aesthetic sensibilities, remains a powerful and necessary force in the criticism on regional American photography.
Biography
I am a first-year English Literature PhD student at University of Birmingham, exploring the interwar narratives of small-town America and spatial representation in regional America across literature, art, photography, and other media.
Ahmed Honeini
Royal Holloway, University of London
“Ah’m goan home”: Spirituality, “homegoing”, and the African-American dwelling space in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black”
At the core of Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black” is the home of Rider and Mannie, an African-American couple who have been married for six months. Faulkner’s narration describes Rider’s meticulous maintenance of the house, which involves ‘(reflooring) the porch and (rebuilding) and (roofing) the kitchen, doing the work himself on Saturday afternoon and Sunday with his wife helping him, and (buying) the stove.’ In the first half of this paper, I argue that, by creating a home, Rider and Mannie establish a haven which functions because of their mutual respect for one another and their insistence upon working as a team; together, they achieve stability and normalcy. Through his labours with the house and his relationship with Mannie, Rider transcends the stereotypical, bigoted view of African-Americans which prevailed in the South during the early-twentieth-century through this assertion of independence. Rider and Mannie make good on the intentions of the Emancipation Proclamation, living a version of the American Dream. As John T. Matthews writes, ‘the pride in order, cleanliness, thrift, and consumption mark Rider and Mannie as New Negroes in the making.’
The second half of this paper explores how, after Mannie’s sudden death, Rider initiates a suicidal “homegoing”, which Suzanne E. Smith outlines thus: ‘Historically, death in the African American cultural imagination was not feared but rather embraced as the ultimate “homegoing,” a welcome journey to a spiritual existence that would transcend the suffering and injustices of the mortal world.’ Consumed by intense, extreme grief, Rider embarks on a journey back home to Mannie in order to recapture those blissful ‘six months’ before her death. Rider endeavours to cross ‘the insuperable barrier’ between life and death which divides them, and enter a spiritual space where Mannie no longer fades from his gaze.
Biography
Ahmed Honeini has just completed his doctorate, which examines the representation of death in selected fictions of William Faulkner. He is currently a Visiting Tutor in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, his home department. His research interests include Faulkner, literary modernism, and the American novel, 1900-present.
Lottie Whalen
Independent
‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’: the post-decadent domesticity of New York’s avant-garde salons
In a series of articles for The New York Evening Sun, Djuna Barnes guides her reader around the city’s bohemian hot-spot Greenwich Village; she observes exotically-attired figures like the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, visits notorious bars, and peeks behind the door of an opulent artist’s studio. The studio’s dazzling interior is scented with incense, decorated with Japanese prints and tapestries, and features ‘a copy of Rogue [magazine] on a low table open at Mina Loy’s poems’. This is typical of the post-decadent lifestyle that the 1910s New York avant-garde espoused – a style often overlooked in critical examinations of New York Dada and contemporaneous little magazine culture. The salon acted as a crucial site in the formation of this aesthetic: a boundary-blurring spaces that provided a home for international artists and their innovative collaborative art practices.
This paper argues that it was not only the culture of collaboration that was crucial to the work produced, but also the design and decoration of the space itself. Focussing on the Arensberg and Stettheimer salons, I argue that these sensuous interiors gave rise to a decadent, sensory language of modernism that subverted the boundaries of modern art. Considering key artistic and literary outputs, specifically Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a piece of ‘decadent plumber’s porcelain’, in the words of Louise Norton) and Rogue magazine, I explore the ways these works deploy a playful post-decadent aesthetic to blur boundaries between the public and the private, transforming spaces of the everyday. Moving beyond art and literature, this paper will further argue that the public’s interest in ‘becoming intimate with the bohemians’ resulted in the wider dissemination of modernist modes of decoration and design; turning to middle-brow arts magazine Arts and Decoration reveals the extent to which the eclectic aesthetic styles developed in avant-garde salons were transformed into markers of modernity in middle-class American homes.
Biography
Dr Lottie Whalen recently completed an AHRC funded PhD at QMUL entitled ‘Mina Loy’s Designs for Modernism’, which explored Loy’s interdisciplinary art practice and decorative aesthetic. Her research interests include: the role of decorative art in modernism, the visual arts, and material culture. She is the co-founder of ‘Decorating Dissidence’, an interdisciplinary project aimed at exploring the political, aesthetic, and conceptual qualities of feminine-coded arts from modernism to the contemporary.
Harriet Baker
Queen Mary, University of London
“Against the grated carrot, folk-pottery way of life”: Sylvia Townsend Warner and rural domesticity
In 1930, the novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner bought the freehold of a small, plain cottage in the Dorset village of East Chaldon. She envisaged the division of her time between town and country, intending to stay in London to write and to visit the cottage at weekends. But in Dorset she met the poet Valentine Ackland – tall, trouser-wearing and taciturn – with whom she would live for the rest of her life. The cottage (called ‘Miss Green’ after its previous owner) had no running water, a back-kitchen with a copper, and a ramshackle garden. Together, the writers painted the woodwork coral pink, sewed patchwork quilts for the bedroom, and planted a kitchen garden. Though it was modest, and often uncomfortably cold, it was private and secure, and the setting for their ‘marriage’.
This paper explores the connections between rural place and domesticity in the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, both in her life-writing and in autobiographical essays concerning the early thirties. The paper’s focus in biographical and material; using unpublished archival material – including gardening notebooks, recipe books and housekeeping books – it explores Warner’s connection to her home through her leftist politics and the landscape culture of the 1930s. As suggested in her autobiographical text I’ll Stand By You – in which she writes, “we declared against the grated carrot, folk-pottery way of life” – Warner resisted the temptations of ‘the good life’ and conservative ideas of national culture, instead structuring her rural daily life through her progressive politics and her queer sexuality.
Her move to rural Dorset coincided with her political awakening: witnessing the conditions of rural poverty – from the laborer’s unpaid overtime to dilapidated estate cottages – she began producing journalism for Left Review and The Countryman, anticipating her membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1935.
As such, this paper proposes that her writings be examined as the congruence of her Communism and queerness, giving a new context to her ruralism of the 1930s.
Biography
Harriet Baker is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on the rural writings of late modernist and interwar women writers including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Barbara Comyns Carr and Rosamond Lehmann. Her prize-shortlisted MA thesis – ‘Landscape and Embodiment in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and The True Heart’ – was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. Alongside her academic studies, Harriet writes for publications including the FT, TLS, Apollo and frieze. She is the winner of the 2018 Tony Lothian Prize for an commissioned first biography.
Peter Swaab
University College London
‘An exhibition of the heart’: ‘Mutton’s Only House’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Mutton is Jane Mutton, a woman in her 60s, the architect of her own house (but not, the story notes, to be confused with Lutyens). In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brief and brilliant story from her wartime collection A Garland of Straw (1943), Mutton meets two soldiers on a train. They notice the house, briefly visible from the train, and are interested in it, so she invites them to visit – but without revealing that she is herself its architect. The visit starts well, with the two soldiers – a gay couple it’s strongly hinted – impressed by the outside of the house. But the inmost room, a music room with glass cocktail bar and terrible paintings, saved till last, is a wild offence against good taste. One of the soldiers, Jim, wrongly decides that a man must have designed the tasteful exterior, with only the interior being the work of a woman’s hand. The other, Pinky, whom the narrator starts by calling ‘the pretty one’, is shrewder. He sees the offending room as a lesson in their hostess ‘going too far’: ‘he could feel for her, for he too, according to Jim, went at times too far’. With wit, pathos and an element of mystery, the story explores how densely and contradictorily people may express themselves by where they live. The exhibitionism of Mutton’s music room does something to defy her inhibited ways; its brashness betrays the nouveau riche class origins that keep her from being approved by the local gentry; and its romance expresses something unfulfilled in her solitary life.
Biography
Peter Swaab is a Professor of English Literature at University College London. He is the editor of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Journal and is currently working on a book about Warner. As an editor he has published the Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings of Edward Lear (Carcanet Press) and the first ever editions of Sara Coleridge’s poetry (Carcanet) and critical prose (Palgrave Macmillan). His other publications include a BFI Film Classic book on Bringing Up Baby and a co-edited book about the British film director Thorold Dickinson
Claire Gale
The Open University
The permeable boundaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s homes
This paper will analyse Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story ‘A Love Match’ (1961) in the context of the politics of home design after WW1. The story’s plot encompasses both world wars and retells the Tizard siblings’ incestuous relationship and the domestic arrangements which facilitate and conceal that relationship. The main action occurs soon after WW1, contemporaneous with significant governmental housing-building initiatives. These schemes were promoted by George V who, in a 1919 speech to housing planners, claimed that ‘the adequate solution of the housing question is the foundation of all social progress’ further asserting that ‘if ‘unrest’ is to be converted into contentment, the provision of good houses may prove one of the most potent agents in that conversion’. My reading of Warner’s story reveals how the psychological impact of war prevents homes from being the safe havens of political quiescence that George V proposes, owing to trauma’s ability to make homes permeable. Justin Tizard’s traumatic recollections catalyse the incest with his sister, Celia. Their later home then, conversely, becomes the safe house for their continuing incest, an incest which directly challenges patriarchy’s assumptions about violence and war, reinstating the primacy of an egalitarian physical tenderness. Warner casts Justin as a ‘housewife’ and offers alternative non-domestic households, upending prevalent assumptions about gender roles for men and women. Gay Wachman reads this story as ‘a narrative of day-to-day life in a humdrum, middle-class closet’ but this paper posits that the home remains a politically expressive and radical locus throughout the story, not just during the scene of the incest’s initiation.
Biography
Claire Gale is an English teacher completing an MA in English Literature at the Open University. Her dissertation, entitled ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’s resistant homes’, considers how domestic settings in Warner’s work challenge both patriarchal norms and the standard forms of feminist resistance to those norms. She hopes to continue her work on Warner at PhD level, researching how Warner’s presentations of and participation in different histories reveal her politics and illustrate her oblique relationship with modernism.
Ben Highmore
University of Sussex
‘A Home is Not a House’ Revisited
In 1965 the architectural critic Reyner Banham published one of the most ecstatic statements of anti-domestic, late techno-modernism – ‘A Home is Not a House’. It imagined architectural forms released from the rigid geometries of the pre-modern as well as the classic modernist house. It imagines architecture as determined by the service functions of the house. Banham’s vision could be seen to have been realised in ‘statement’ architecture such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building in London, while having had little or no impact on the architecture of the domestic house.
Yet as Victoria Rosner put it, we might need to look at interior design rather than architecture to get a sense of the extraordinary changes in private life during the twentieth century, changes that we understand under the banner of modernism and modernity. Banham’s usefulness isn’t the architectural forms he prophesises, but the arena of domesticity that he alerts us to, which we need to register as we explore our modern ‘interior life’. Services and domestic infrastructures mostly go unnoticed. Central heating and electric sockets are the taken-for-granted services of the contemporary home (we would only notice them by their absence). Their gradual introduction over the course of the twentieth century (mostly after 1945) altered domestic life and were often the precondition for such modernist forms as open-plan living, and less obvious modernist forms such as the ‘teenage bedroom’.
In this paper I will revisit Banham’s essay and discuss its historical moment in relation to a new emphasis on domesticity as the scene of the ‘good life’.
Biography
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex in England. He is currently working on a book about taste and shopping in the last third of the twentieth century. His most recent books are The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (Yale University Press) and Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics (Routledge) both published in 2017. Previous books include The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (Profile Books 2014) and Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Routledge 2011).
Ella Kilgallon
Victoria & Albert Museum
Between privacy and neighbourliness: the tower block and domestic design
‘I prefer the good old days with a key on a piece of string. The doors were close together then and there was more contact with people…’ – these are the words of one nostalgic housewife interviewed in 1960 as part of the Housewives’ Survey of residents in East London housing blocks. The results of the survey highlighted the challenges of re-housing East London communities in Modernist tower blocks. But, contrary to accepted narratives about the problems of medium- to high-rise homes, it wasn’t primarily the vertical living that the housewives were opposed to – many had come from flats – rather, it was the designed privacy resulting in isolation that caused them unhappiness. This paper will consider the results of the 1960 Housewives’ Survey in relation to the principles behind domestic tower block design. In particular, it will focus on one of the blocks in the survey, Keeling House, designed by Denys Lasdun and built between 1957 and 1959. In designing Keeling House, an experimental ‘cluster-block’ with four towers, Lasdun anticipated the concerns expressed in the 1960 Housewives’ Survey and strove to balance the existing East End kinship networks with modern ideals of privacy. Despite Lasdun’s best intentions, in the 1960 Survey Keeling House ranked the worst for isolation. Taking the Housewives’ Survey as a point of departure, this paper will reflect on changing notions of neighbourliness and domestic privacy in the early and mid-twentieth century as they were informed by class and gender.
Biography
Dr Ella Kilgallon is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Design, Architecture and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has recently co-curated a collaborative display presented by the V&A + RIBA Architecture Partnership: A Home for All: Six Experiments in Social Housing (V&A, 24 November 2018 – 30 June 2019). Ella has a PhD in History from Queen Mary University of London.
Neil Jackson
University of Liverpool in London
Production Houses from the Pierre Koenig Archive
The Case Study House Program (CSH), promoted by the California magazine Arts & Architecture, is widely recognised for establishing a standard for the modern, post-war house. One of the best known, due as much as anything to Julius Shulman’s memorable night-time photograph showing the house high above the lights of Los Angeles, is CSH22, designed by Pierre Koenig in 1958-60. Yet this was a one-off and not, in Koenig’s opinion, his best. That was CSH 21, a proto-type Production House, completed eighteen months earlier.
Although the CSH Program served Koenig well, his ambition to develop the modern house had begun with the 1957 Burwash House, published in Arts & Architecture under the title ‘Low-cost Production House’. The Production House would be factory-made, using standard sizes of materials and pre-assembled, as far as possible, off-site. This was a modus operandi which he had learned while working as a student for Raphael Soriano and one which he was to retain for the rest of his career. Using only original drawings and contemporaneous photographs from Pierre Koenig’s archive, now held at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, this paper shall show how Koenig continued to develop the idea of the Production House, paradoxically, through a number of one-off houses.
Despite the applicability of the Production House to mass-housing, the schemes were often abandoned before they broke ground. The Production Houses for St John, Quebec (1960), got no further than a dry-assembly prototype while the housing development for the Chemehuevi Reservation at Lake Havasu, California (1971-76), resulted in only a covered shelter and a toilet block. Yet the potential of the Production House, as this paper will show, was considerable, but because its promotion was aimed at clients and architects, rather than the contractors who built the majority of all housing, it failed.
Biography
Neil Jackson is an architect and architectural historian and the Charles Reilly Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, where he has been since 2005. He was previously the Hoffman Wood Professor of Architectural Engineering at the University of Leeds (2000-2005) and Reader in Architectural History at the University of Nottingham (1990-2000). He has been a resident scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles (2013) and taught for six years in the US, first at Kansas State University (1983-84) and then at the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (1985-90). He has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth-century architecture, most recently concentrating on the Pacific Rim. His books include Nineteenth-century Bath: Architects and Architecture (1991, 1999), The Modern Steel House (1996), Craig Ellwood (2002), California Modern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood (2002), Pierre Koenig (2007, 2017) and Saltaire: The Making of a Model Town (2010). His two forthcoming books are Japan and the West: an Architectural Dialogue (2019) and Pierre Koenig: A View from the Archive (2019). He is currently the President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and has been a member of the Japan Research Centre at SOAS since 2009.
Johanna Agerman Ross
Victoria & Albert Museum
Lubetkin and Lounging – Modernism and the relaxed posture
‘Something new has appeared. It could be called a movement, a wave, a fashion, a passion, a new feeling for life; this is a reality that has inundated, pursued, inspired, reformed and influenced millions of people,’ writes Wolfgang Graeser about the new body culture in Body, Sense, Gymnastics from 1927 [published in German]. The focus on the healthy body and the active body culture in Modernism has been explored at length, but how did this body awareness influence the way people used and designed furniture? In 1936 he Georgia-born architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990) designed the interior for his penthouse apartment in Highpoint II (designed by Lubetkin and Tecton) in London and as part of this interior he created three lounge chairs and a sofa of proportions and materials wildly different to the Modernist aesthetic. Made from unfinished trunks of yew wood and with wide seats covered in cowhide, their form stand in stark contrast to the ruling hegemony of tubular steel and steam bent wood. However, one of the most striking differences with these objects are how they enable a different seating posture. Lubetkin explored this in an illustration of the chair where a suited character reclines on the chair with both feet up. This paper explores the idea behind and the execution of this set of furniture and how they were influenced by new attitudes to the body and the rules that were applied to it in private and public contexts.
Biography
Johanna Agerman Ross is the Curator of Twentieth Century and Contemporary Furniture and Product Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is also the founder and owner of the quarterly design journal Disegno, founded in 2011. Originally from Jönköping in Sweden, Johanna moved to London to study Fashion Promotion at the London College of Fashion and History of Design at the Royal College of Art. She recently worked on the acquisition of one of Lubetkin’s chairs for the V&A collection.
Adam McKie
Royal Holloway, University of London
‘Embodying the Spirit of the Twentieth Century’: The Modernist Utopian Experiments of the Crittall Manufacturing Company, 1918-32
This paper is taken from a chapter in my thesis and will explore the architectural significance of the Clockhouse Way Estate (Braintree, 1918-19) and Silver End garden village (1926-32), both built by the Crittall Manufacturing Company (steel window producers). The two estates are unique in that they were two of only three working-class housing developments built in the interwar years in an international modernist style. While I am not an architectural historian, I will argue the aesthetics were consciously chosen in order to reject past models of utopian company villages (e.g. the renaissance-inspired homes of Saltaire, the ornate arts and crafts buildings of Bournville, or the timber façades of Tudorbethan Port Sunlight) and boldly embrace the future at a time when capitalism was in an ideological and functional crisis.
The paper will be organised into three sections. I will firstly discuss the idealism (social, utopian and architectural) which gave birth to the experimental estates. Clockhouse Way, the first estate in Britain resembling a modernist style and which embraced new construction methods, was labelled ‘Concrete Town’ and was intended to act as a model for future housebuilding in Britain. Silver End meanwhile, was a far more aspirational attempt to build a ‘modern utopia’. I will briefly discuss the successes and failures of the settlements and the houses, as well as their reception. I will conclude by discussing their historical importance as visions of a partly-unrealised future, but one which reflected a liberal-capitalist utopian ideology that embraced technological innovation, mass production and corporatocracy. The ideology, while seemingly benefitting workers, was as superficially innovative as the homes themselves: I will conclude by arguing the futuristic external aesthetics of the estates concealed the lack of modernism inside the home, and this was mirrored in the Crittalls’ ‘utopian’ capitalist ideology.
Biography
I am a third-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. My research explores the concept of ‘capitalist utopianism’ and the political economy of interwar England via the self-proclaimed workers’ paradises of Silver End and East Tilbury, both built in Essex between the wars. My wider research has investigated the history and development of women’s sport in England, from which I published my first book in 2018, Women at the Wicket: A History of Women’s Cricket in Interwar England. I am co-ordinator for The Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender at Royal Holloway, which includes acting as editor of the Centre’s blog series.
Charlie Pullen
Queen Mary, University of London
Experiment House: Modernism, Home Education, and the Radical Boarding School
The early twentieth century witnessed an explosion in new ways of conceptualizing and organizing the school. In the 1910s and 1920s, a number of British educators and intellectuals experimented with establishing schools that would be run on very different lines from the ones they had experienced as children in the nineteenth century. Founded in 1921, the infamous boarding school Summerhill was set up by Scottish teacher A.S. Neill as a space that would allow children to live freely and free from what he thought of as the traumatising effects of bourgeois family life. Bertrand Russell and Dora Russell, too, opened the Beacon Hill School in 1927, so their own children could develop independent, critical intelligence. Vanessa Bell even attempted to set up her own school at Charleston as an extension of her commitment to living creatively. Such experiments were often based on radical redefinitions of the aims of education, but also of what the home should be for a modern child. At these schools, children would not only learn differently but live differently, too.
Taking Summerhill as my focus, I will frame these schools as specifically modernist spaces in which discourses of both the home and education were challenged and reimagined. Neill’s creation of a libertarian school, where children could grow up without coercion or traditional moral demands, was inspired by his reading of important proto-modernist figures, like Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, and H.G. Wells. Summerhill was (and continues to be) a utopian experiment in living, one which can be usefully contextualised in modernist literary culture. Here, I will propose that we can ‘read’ Summerhill as a modernist boarding school, a venture which shares the impulses to newness that motivated many of the formally innovative literary productions in this period.
Biography
Charlie Pullen is a PhD researcher and Teaching Associate in English at Queen Mary University of London, where he is working on the rise of progressive education in early twentieth-century literature and culture.
Sean Ketteringham
University of Oxford
Blast Domesticity? Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, W.R. Lethaby and revolutionary architecture
According to scholarly consensus, Wyndham Lewis and his short-lived, avant-garde, vorticist journal Blast was largely antagonistic to the notion of the home as a radical, progressive platform from which to affect public change. This paper queries this dynamic in light of Lewis’s 1919 pamphlet, The Caliph’s Design, and his later insistence on the centrality of ‘architectural reform’ and ‘theory’ to vorticism. Lewis’s friend and collaborator Frederick Etchells, a much-neglected figure within British histories of domestic modernism, plays a fundamental role in demonstrating how vorticism holds value as an architectural and specifically domestic intervention in modern British culture.
Etchells attended the Royal College of Art from 1905 to 1908 and was influenced by W.R. Lethaby, a prominent architect associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Archival materials reveal the experimental curriculum Lethaby taught at the RCA. simultaneously traditional and progressive, it initiated Etchell’s interest in stained glass and gave him early exposure to Lethaby’s provocative ideas of ‘rational’, ‘functional’ design. When Lewis notes that Etchells was one of the only artists at the Omega Workshops who was skilled in the manufacture of furniture, this is due to his study under Lethaby and provides a previously unrecognised connection between Arts and Crafts theory and the modern domestic design. Etchells’s contribution of speculative architectural abstractions to both issues of Blast should be seen as an extension beyond his work in furniture design, deploying Lethaby’s teaching to advocate radical domestic reform.
Lewis sought to retrospectively elucidate the vorticist position on architecture with the publication of The Caliph’s Design in 1919. His views on the revolutionary potential of the home are made clear here and, tellingly, the architectural theory of Lethaby features prominently. This indicates Etchells’ influence and establishes a concrete link between Lewis’s proposals and Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture, first translated into English by Etchells in 1927. Addressing these links, and filling the stubborn lacuna around Etchells with long overdue archival research, reveals his influence on Lewis and Blast’s role as a foundation for the ‘domestication’ of European architectural modernity in Britain after the First World War.
Biography
Sean Ketteringham is completing a DPhil in English Literature at the University of Oxford with a thesis provisionally titled Modern Homes, Modern Britain: domestic architecture and the popularization of the avant-garde, 1914-1951. The project is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award partnered with the National Trust at 2 Willow Road.
Michael Harrison
Independent
Tradition and experiment: Bournville, 1895-1950
Started in 1895, the Model Village at Bournville was a reaction against the slums and a genuine attempt to establish a viable example of low-density and healthy community. The early houses and public buildings were by W.A. Harvey. His aim was to achieve a balance between ‘art and economy’. The dwellings were varied in size and style. The desire was to create a varied streetscape and encourage a degree of social mix. Even in the smallest houses unusual efforts were made to provide a bath. All the houses were provided with large gardens (which were partially laid-out and planted). In addition, open spaces were created and natural features were retained. The response to the Model Village was very positive. It was even described as ‘a practical Utopia’.
In the early years the scheme was largely funded by members of the Cadbury family and, after 1900, by the Bournville Village Trust. Before and after the First World War, Public Utility Societies were used to develop the Estate on land provided by the Trust. The Weoley Hill Society built houses for sale on 99 year leases. The Bournville Works Housing Society provided simpler and mainly smaller dwellings for rent to Cadbury workers. Throughout Estate care was taken with the planning, the internal layout of the houses and the provision of parkways and recreational facilities in these developments.
An ongoing feature was the provision of bungalows for the elderly. More unusual was the provision of accommodation for working women in bungalows, maisonettes and flats.
The Trust conducted a number of experiments using different building materials for the construction of dwellings, the use of electricity within the home, and experiments in furnishing 1906 – 1946. J.B. Priestley and Mass Observation confirmed the ongoing popularity and quality of ‘this pleasant and well-laid out estate’.
Biography
Michael Harrison was educated at the Universities of Leicester, Leeds and Manchester. He was awarded a Ph.D for his study of the Manchester social and environmental reformer, Thomas Coglan Horsfall. He has published essays and articles on housing reform and town planning in late Victorian and Edwardian Manchester, garden suburbs, the German influence on the early town planning movement in Britain, art and philanthropy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and Bournville between the Wars.
Dr Harrison taught for many years in the School of Theoretical and Historical Studies in Art and Design at Birmingham City University. At various times, Dr Harrison has been a member of the International Planning History Society, the Victorian Society and the 20th Century Society. He has given papers and led tours for these and other societies, both national and local.
With Professor Michael Durman, Dr Harrison was the joint organiser of two exhibitions on the early history of the Bournville Estate. In 1999 he published a full-length study of the Estate: Bournville. Model Village to Garden Suburb.
Since retirement, he has led a U3A architecture group, lectured to various local and regional organisations and acted as a tour guide.
Alix Beeston
Cardiff University
The Photographer at Work, the Woman at Home: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight
In the early twentieth century in the United States, the photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession sought to situate photography within the traditions of fine art. Their efforts were staged in connection with the doubled modalities of the medium: between documentation and illusion, between automation and artistry. Yet inasmuch as photography’s imbrication of visual truths and visual pleasures generates allusive and contingent forms of knowledge, its impulse is toward the disarticulation of established genealogies of aesthetics, culture, and politics. It is also toward the destabilisation of the ground on which such genealogies are mapped, making unstable the boundaries between, for instance, the public, professional spaces of men, and the private, domestic spaces of women.
This paper attends to Gertrude Käsebier as the photographer at work and the woman at home. Käsebier was the most successful portrait photographer in the U.S. at the turn of the century, and Stieglitz initially championed her work; but by 1907, he had turned against her for what he saw as her crass commercialism—which was, more plainly, her need to make a living, to support her household. I examine a number of the family photographs Käsebier produced in 1907–1912, at the moment when she seceded—or succeeded—from the Photo-Secession. These photographs have been rightly critiqued as props for white supremacy and bourgeois social norms. But they are also, I argue, an archive of the home as workplace and studio: a crucial site in which the New Woman constituted herself as an artist among women. If the maternal line of sight is an authorizing line of descent, Käsebier’s images of her daughters and granddaughters cut against the patriarchal narratives that still dominate our accounts of modernist art
Biography
Alix Beeston holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney. She is currently Lecturer in English at Cardiff University, where she teaches modern and contemporary literature and visual culture, feminism and gender studies, and critical race studies. Her first book, In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen, was published as part of the Modernist Literature and Culture Series at Oxford University Press in January 2018. She is also the author of Object Women: A History of Women in Photography, a digital project developed in partnership with the George Eastman Museum (www.instagram.com/objectwomen). Beeston’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere. The proposed paper represents an early draft of a chapter on photography commissioned for a new Edinburgh Companion to modernism and technology.
Naomi Baguley
University of Leeds
Eating Back Through Our Mothers: Virginia Woolf’s Culinary Inheritance
This paper will discuss Woolf’s encounters with food both in her writing and in her own life in order to trace a female history of cooking and eating that acknowledges the influence of working-class women and servants on Woolf’s protagonists and herself.
By using examples from Orlando, To The Lighthouse, Woolf’s own diaries, and contemporary recipes, I will argue that food can be seen as not just supplementary to the deeper stuff of life, but central to it. Food is inscribed with personal and cultural histories of class, gender, nationality, age, and power; and mealtimes act as scenes of community, joy, and unity, as well as dissociation, strife, and tragedy.
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf writes that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’, and I will suggest ways in which women are able, not just to ‘think back’, but eat back, and cook back, through a female history. Much scholarship has been done on Woolf’s own literary and personal female forebears, as well as her relationship to her own mother, Julia Stephen. I will suggest that a more expansive and intersectional view of Woolf’s ‘mothers’ should be taken in order to include discussions of how her own domestic servants and working-class women in her novels not only influence the protagonists’ interactions with food, but grapple with their own inherited relationships to food, eating, and domesticity.
Biography
Naomi Baguley is currently studying a Masters in Contemporary and Modern Literature at the University of Leeds. Her research investigates how gender, class, and nationality intersect through food and mealtimes in Virginia Woolf.
Peter Fifield
Birkbeck, University of London
Illness and Domestic Care in Winifred Holtby
This paper will argue that Winifred Holtby politicizes the experience of illness and its domestic care, both in her journalism and novels. In journalism such as ‘First Catch Your Cold, Then Enjoy It’, she parodies homespun wisdom and the moralizing advocacy of domestic fortitude. Advocating performative malingering, this writing draws on the neighbouring registers of personal and fashion advice in order to mock the pretentions and absurdities of bourgeois housekeeping.
In her fiction, Holtby superficially reproduces a view of the home as a female-coded sphere within which nonprofessional women are benign, nurturing figures. But from Holtby’s Anderby Wold (1923) to South Riding (1936), the assumed responsibility of women for the care of the sick is recast as an expertise that reaches beyond the home into the public arena. In the earlier novel she depicts a conservative community where the care for sick workers cements the authority of Mary Robson as social ‘queen’. InSouth Riding she depicts Mrs Beddows’s withdrawal from the domestic restrictions of marriage through medical crisis to become an alderman and an advocate of health reform.
Biography
Peter Fifield is Lecturer in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of work on Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, E. M. Forster, and, most recently, an article on bacteriology in late Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. He is currently completing Sick Books (OUP, 2020), on modernism and physical illness.
Charlotte Hallahan
University of East Anglia
The post-war family home and the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein
This paper looks at the relationship between the family home at the end of the Second World War and the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein in the period of late modernism. First, I will show that representations of the perfect and supportive nuclear family (the loving mother, the providing father, and the doting children) often represented a successful healing or restoration of Britain after the devastation of war. This was pervasive in the new proposed conceptions of postwar welfare-era citizenship, and was reflected, significantly, in contemporary aesthetic and cultural production. These discourses paired the family home with the preservation of the ‘social health’ of the nation and its citizens—with good moral and social behaviour.
I will go on to argue that contemporary psychoanalytic narratives of childhood development were continually reacting to cultural anxieties about the preservation of the family. I will argue that Klein’s psychoanalytic interpretations and conclusions in wartime expose her ambivalent attitudes towards this new form of family-oriented welfare-state citizenship. This is clear in her dual ideas that the family was at once ‘good’—moral, ethical—but also the place of devastation, violence and destruction. On the one hand, Klein incorporates this valorisation of the heterosexual nuclear family home, but on the other the radical aspects of her theory far surpass forms of subjectivity supposed by the social and cultural discourse of the time. For all the importance Klein gives to a healthy familial home and bond, we cannot ignore that it is the ‘mother object’ that also encourages the most primitive impulses for ruin and violence. In this paper, I argue that we can see a radical resistance to the heteronormative family unit at the end of the modernist period in Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic writings.
Biography
Charlotte Hallahan is a PhD Candidate at the University of East Anglia. Her project looks at women’s writings and work during the Second World War. The project hopes to draw together several disciplines (psychoanalysis, film, personal diaries, and literature) by proposing that these all are responding to new socio-political notions of wartime citizenship and belonging.
Vincent Chabany-Douarre
King’s College London
Star in Your Own Home: Tradition, Modernity, and the Performance of Domestic Life in Midcentury Los Angeles
This paper will discuss the internal contradictions of suburban culture in midcentury Los Angeles. When it comes to urban studies, as sociologist Janet Wolff boldly argues, the “literature of modernity describes the experience of men.” Indeed, seminal theorists such as Stanley Milgram or George Simmel have almost exclusively grappled with the experience of modernism through a focus on transient, fleeting interactions in male public spaces. If anything, ‘traditional’ female spheres such as the home have often been understood as opposed to urban modernity, closer to a recreation of what Robert Redfield calls the folk society, a tightly-knit, imagined community that essentially reverses the complexities of city life, harkening back to the communal experience of the village and the family.
Due to the understanding of the folk society as a structure marked by coercive conformity, the home has often been analyzed as a decidedly anti-modern, anti-progressive space. This paper, however, will use the case study of Los Angeles in the postwar suburban boom, to demonstrate that the cultural messaging of home and gender roles, while frankly conservative in some of its aspects, also carried inherent complexities and contradictions. Owing to Lynn Spigel’s argument that the fifties home was particularly in tune with the register of performance and theatricality, and the special role Hollywood played in Los Angeles as a promotional machine, my cultural analysis will be rooted in filmic history as well as objects of cinematic textuality such as fan magazines, and will show the home to be a space where modernity and tradition were constantly negotiated, and where key experiences of modernism -loss of identity, for example- were actively addressed, through, for example, the language and logic of consumerism or white supremacy.
Biography
Vincent Chabany-Douarre is a PhD candidate at King’s College London, working on the culture of home and its role in the logic of segregation, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. He holds a BA and an MA in American Studies from La Sorbonne, Paris, and has previously presented his research at Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rothermere American Institute, and La Sorbonne.
Peter Wyeth
Independent
A modernist mystery: discovering a new domestic modernism (digital paper)
Post-War British domestic architecture tended to be a little dull and derivative, even the modernist variety. To discover something different, an unpublished house by an unnoticed designer, not even registered as an architect, but one that proposed a domestic economy of space that was an advance on many of the best pre-war examples, was quite unexpected.
The brief period of optimism after 1945 led to the Festival of Britain, precisely when this design was conceived. The drawings are dated April 1st 1952, yet the house seems to be of the 70s.
It has a radical open plan from front to back of the house, and a unique open roof that dispensed with the flat ceiling of flat-roof pre-war modernism to achieve an airy interior. Light flooded in from a rear facade wholly glazed and simple glazing under the full width, front and back, of the asymmetric pitched roof, a modernist version of the traditional roof.
A radical formula – but in a low-cost, modest house fully in the spirit of the Minimum House of the heroic era. Whilst the exterior design shows a creative discipline exceeding many well-known names of the time, it is the interior that shows a new domestic spirit.
The centre of the house, from back to front, is open-plan – but also open in the vertical plane to the pitched roof – creating an airiness belying the modest budget. The radicality lies not in showy formalism but full use of the envelope of the house – itself limited by postwar restrictions of space and materials. An interior more public than private, defiantly modern in an anti-modern culture. British in its modesty, not cosily feminine, but a radical domestic space, an early moment in the shifting boundaries the War brought on.
Biography
‘Twelve Views of Kensal House’ (55’) History is Now, Hayward Gallery, 2015. Runner-up documentary of the year, Grierson Award.
Programme Director, Film and TV Division, London College of Communication (1999-2003) Director of Development, Film and TV Division, London College of Communication (2003-9)
‘The Matter of Vision, Affective Neurobiology and Cinema’, John Libbey Media, 2015: ‘A genuinely original insight into the visual character of thought…far better than Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) in that it is original.’
The Modernist – Twenty successive articles on Architecture and Design, issues 9 – 28 (Summer 2018).
Mid-Century Modern – articles on post-war British modernist furniture: Ernest Race and James Leonard.
20C soc. journal: ‘A Paris Oddity’ Article on a deserted avant-garde house in Paris of 1933, the Maison Zilveli, and its architect, Jean Welz.
‘The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz’ Book on the architect and painter recently completed after six years’ research. Forthcoming, 2019.
Edwina Attlee
London Metropolitan University
Moving Walls: Living with Housework’s Imperfect Industrialisation at Unité d’Habitation and Cité de Refuge
This paper will discuss Charlotte Perriand’s designs for the domestic interiors at Unité d’Habititation and the furniture and interior arrangements of Cité de Refuge, in the context of Leslie Kanes Weisman’s research into fantasies about ‘the home in the future’. As part of a summer school programme for women in the 1970s, Weisman and her collaborator noticed themes emerging from the shared experiences of their students. One theme was a desire to be able to adjust the physical arrangements of their dwellings according to changes in their moods, activities and relationships.
This thirst for mutability can be read outwards, as a critical stance on the fixed and ungenerous domestic accommodation the women were used to, and it can also be read inwards, as articulating something of the mutable experience of being and working ‘at home’. Elena Ferrante’s character Lila experiences a ‘blurring of boundaries’ at points of high stress and tension, the objects she can name (such as a frying pan, a houseplant, or a dustpan and brush) seem to slip their confines, and at one point this slippage is coincidental with an earth quake. I want to read Lila’s blurring, experienced by the character as a flaw or disturbance, alongside Perriand’s shifting walls and multipurpose spaces. Both will be presented as reactions to what Ruth Schwartz Cohen has described as housework’s imperfect industrialisation.
Perriand (with Corbusier and Jeanneret) imagined an alternative to the domestic interior, for people without or between homes in their project for the Salvation Army, the Cité de Refuge. This manifestation of ‘home’ suggests another possible reaction to imperfect industrialisation, albeit one where the organising social unit of ‘the family’ and the economic expectation of going to or helping someone else go to work, has been expunged from the programme.
Biography
Edwina Attlee is a writer and lecturer. She has published two pamphlets of poetry, Roasting Baby (if a leaf falls press, 2016) and the cream (clinic, 2016). Her poetry has also appeared in Test Centre 8, Poetry & Audience and Litmus. Her writing has appeared in The White Review, The Architectural Review, Poetry London, Dandelion, the Guardian and The Poetry Review. She teaches Critical and Contextual Studies at the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design and is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from the London Consortium and runs the reading series Sitting Room. Her current book project is a feminist history of laundry.
Pollyanna Rhee
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Toward an Improved Ecology: Ellen Swallow Richards and the Creation of an Efficient and Modern Domesticity
Scholars often note the word ecology’s Greek roots from oikos meaning house and acknowledge Ernest Haeckel’s role in providing the modern definition of ecology. At the same time, scholars rarely mention Ellen Swallow Richards’ role as the individual who introduced Haeckel’s term to English-language audiences in 1892. Like Haeckel, Richards held an expansive vision of ecology that encompassed natural and human environments, including—perhaps even especially—the home. Despite her efforts, others who employed the term defined it narrowly and limited its realm to the natural world, jettisoning the role of human’s within ecology’s scope.
Nevertheless, in the early twentieth-century Richards, the first female graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote several volumes stressing the importance of home economics for environmental quality and coined a new term—euthenics—to describe her objectives. Rather than being only synonymous with nature, environment referred to human surroundings, a place that could be improved through the application of euthenics, the science of controllable environments. In contrast to domestic ideals that emphasized tradition and private life, Richards viewed her proposals as thoroughly scientific, oriented towards efficiency, and therefore a modern way of improving the home, “unhampered by … the past” and oriented toward the “proper care of the human machine.” Designing clean, hygienic homes was a key aspect improving the human condition, one individual at a time. This paper examines Richards’ conceptions of euthenics and ecology, her role in the development of home economics as a science, and the reception of her ideas to argue for the central place of the home in the development of efficient and industrious human beings. The ultimate objective of improving the home was to seamlessly integrate environment and society—or ecology in the broadest sense—in service of maintaining a capitalist status quo.
Biography
Pollyanna Rhee is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an architectural and environmental historian with research interests in the history of the built and natural environments, environmentalism, material and visual culture, and environmental governance particularly in the United States. Currently she is revising a manuscript for publication on the rise of conservative environmentalism in California. Her research has been supported by a number of institutions including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library. She has taught at California College of the Arts, Columbia University, and New York Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in History and Theory of Architecture at Columbia University.
Jade Elizabeth French
Queen Mary, University of London
‘like the tell-tale rings of the oak’: Djuna Barnes, Hoarding & Late Life Creativity
When Djuna Barnes took up residence at number 5 Patchin Place in September 1940, she notoriously stayed there, semi-reclusively, for over 40 years. Despite her only publications during this time being The Antiphon (1958), the posthumously published Creatures of the Alphabet (1982) and a handful of poems, these years have been importantly re-examined as a time of intense creativity (Herring, 2015; Caselli, 2009; Herring & Stutman, 2006). Building on this critical viewpoint, this paper will not only argue for Barnes’ late life poetry as engaging with modernist techniques but also that her mode of living turned into a type of bricolage. The layering effect of stuff calls to mind Sophia’s walls in Ryder (1928), which strain ‘like the tell-tale rings of the oak, [the collaged pictures] gave up her conditions… for she never removed, she covered only’. Barnes hoarded scraps of paper and drafts of poetry and in doing so turned her home into a living, groaning archive. Using cultural gerontology to anchor this examination of late life creativity, I will suggest that homes and domestic spaces are important environments for older people to express their subjectivity. The lived experience of ageing complicates what, on the surface, looks like hoarding, as Barnes’ pursuit of poetic experimentation became a creative outlet. Barnes, as high-modernist hoarder, is not only weighed down by copious amounts of notes and belongings but also the pursuit of seeking a final creative vision in light of illness and ageing. Thus, the aim of this paper is to situate Patchin Place as a site for Barnes’ late life poetic output, arguing that in the hoarded drafts we also find a powerful creative process.
Biography
Jade Elizabeth French is a PhD researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work explores the poetics of female ageing in avant-garde texts, with a specific focus on the H.D., Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes. She edited the book Let’s Start a Pussy Riot (Rough Trade, 2013) and is also the founder of the London-based academic/arts collective Liminal Spaces, which tackles issues of mental health and interdisciplinary modes in academia.
Rachel Hynes
University of Limerick
Warp, Woof and Woolf: Home Dressmaking and Household Textile ‘Stuffs’ in the Writing of Virginia Woolf
The artistic dressmaker or needlewoman is an overlooked narrative agent in the fiction of Virginia Woolf whose bright fabric textiles and dressmaking implements are charged with transformative potency within the domestic sphere. Subject to the often ‘magical’ Woolfian needle are textile fabrics ranging from the mundane to the luxurious: cotton trousers in need of patching; the hazy outline of a sock in reddish-brown wool and mercurial green silk gathered into the belt of a sumptuous Westminster party frock. The errant thimbles, flashing knitting needles, changeant materials and simple cards of wool prized by her industrious, highly visible knitters, milliners, and seamstresses are inextricable from Woolf’s illustrations of enlivened, deftly material domestic spaces.
In her crepuscular evocations of fluttering domestic drapery such as curtains and blinds—as well as the patterns of tweed, silk, serge and muslin spindling through her fiction—Woolf persistently champions the dressmaker and her métier, regularly blurring the boundaries between the dressed body, the dressed interior and dressed subjectivity. Clarissa Dalloway, for example, is described adorningly by her housemaid Lucy as “mistress of silver, of linen, of china” while Mrs Ramsay’s soft, webbed cashmere shawl flees the maternal body to become a rhizomatic, anthropomorphised dress-object of nursery décor, and, there remains the curious (and understudied) case of Nurse Lugton’s curtain. As pictorial, utilitarian and sartorial textiles were becoming increasingly modernist forms of ideological and imaginative transit, Woolf’s domestic interiors—and the textile stuffs, fabrics, and crafts within them—possess a rustling artistic life of their own and might be read in sympathy with the idea of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or ‘the total work of art’ endorsed by period artists such as William Morris, Sonia Delaunay, Klimt, and the sartorial and decorative designs of the Omega Workshops.
This paper will offer an introduction to the scenes and stuffs of Woolfian dressmaking by way of objectbased analysis of an extant dress (1893) made by Woolf’s own much adored dressmaker, the late Victorian Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young. Intriguingly, Young’s dress is cut from an earlier textile fabric by William Morris dating from about 1879. I will then focus on providing a ‘feel’ of the textile stuffs that materialise Woolf’s oeuvre by looking a little more closely at the fictional curtains, cushions, dresses and textile threads that furnish Woolf’s glowing kitchens, front rooms and drawing-rooms.
Biography
Dr Rachel Hynes completed her PhD at the University of Limerick (November 2018). A former Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences PhD Teaching Fellow, her thesis entitled “Text(ile)s in Fashion: The Making and Unmaking of modern(ist) Dress, 1910-1939” textually and texturally analysed a range of garments commonly found in modernist literary wardrobes such as the woman’s period hat, ‘the modernist frock’ and various items of lingerie. Rachel also researches within the field of ‘Irish’ fashion history with a particular interest in the dress cultures of Edwardian Ireland, the Dun Emer Guild, the Irish revolutionary period (1916-1924), and, more broadly, within modalities of dress and fashion in early twentieth-century Irish women’s writing.
Zachary Hope
University of Chicago
Blitzing Mrs. Brown: Unhousing Domestic Fiction & the Fate of Character
If the history of the English novel can be told through a sequence of characters in houses, then what does the event of the Blitz do to the form of the novel by rendering the contents of its fictions disposable? My paper takes its initial provocation from Woolf’s dispute with Arnold Bennett over how best to accommodate Mrs. Brown, who represents for Woolf the “eternal” life of character, of “human nature,” in her movement “from one age of English literature to the next” (“Character in Fiction”). Even as Woolf argues for the priority of character in relation to its ever-changing inhabitations, its historical forms of representation, the analogical relation between home and novel remains for her the primary means of domesticating fiction, of reproducing character at its most hospitable scale. I argue that in rendering this form of literary-historical emplotment vulnerable, the Blitz provides insight into how character goes on in fiction when put outside the scale of the home. Looking first at two stories by Elizabeth Bowen, and then closing with a scene from Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, I look at both the destructive and reparative gestures that emerge from a form of life—the life of character, of Mrs. Brown—that is, in Bowen’s words, “emotionally torn and impoverished by changes,” yet still has “to complete itself in some way” (The Demon Lover). By imperiling the household, by making the contents of its history destructible, the Blitz turns the form of the novel into the content of the matter of fiction. In doing so, a reading of Blitz literature allows me to argue for an instability built into the structure of the novel, into the home, from the beginning, and also suggest an alternative future for the novel that is opened briefly by Blitz-time.
Biography
Zachary Hope is a PhD student, Fulbright Scholar, and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Chicago. He received his BA and MA from the University of Toronto. He is currently thinking about the volatilities and vulnerabilities produced by certain late modernist, wartime, and postwar forms of literary-historical containment, or how characters come to be in novels like readers are in houses like cats are in boxes.
Colin Ripley
Ryerson University
The House of the Thief
There is a curious absence of houses in the novels of Jean Genet. The characters in these books inhabit cheap hotels, rooms, flophouses, even caves; they live in institutional settings – ships, reformatories, and especially prisons – but almost never houses.
And yet, we understand that the concepts of house and its corollary family are central preoccupations in Genet’s work and life – both most striking in their absence, on the one hand (for Genet the orphan, for Genet the homosexual, for Genet the vagabond, for Genet the petty thief), but also striking in their transformation, in their erotic transubstantiation by Genet the writer. And striking for the role(s) houses played, or did not play, in Genet’s (private) life.
On a number of occasions – at least three and perhaps as many as five – Genet played the part of architect, designing and arranging for the construction or renovation of houses. In this paper, I will focus on the house Genet designed between 1947 and 1952 in Le Cannet, a suburb of Cannes. Genet built the house as a wedding gift for his lover Lucien Sénémaud, on the occasion of Sénémaud’s marriage to Ginette Chaix. As was typical of these houses, Genet set aside a bedroom for himself – but a bedroom that would remain empty, as he preferred to sleep in the hotel.
Centred on an interview I conducted with Jacky Maglia, Ginette Chaix’s son and Genet’s longtime companion, in the Le Cannet house in 2005, this paper raises and interrogates questions of absence in relation to the modern house, and of course in relation to modernity writ large.
Biography
Colin Ripley is a Professor in and Past Chair of the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is also a director of RVTR (www.rvtr.com). RVTR operates simultaneously as a professional architectural practice and as an academic research platform with studios in Toronto and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. RVTR has been extensively published and the winner of a number of major awards, including the 2009 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture. Colin Ripley holds a Bachelor of Engineering from McMaster University, a Master of Science in theoretical physics from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, and is currently working on a doctorate in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is author or editor of several books about architecture as well as journal papers on a wide range of topics, including megaregional urbanism, responsive envelope systems, sonic architecture, Canadian modern architecture, and the modern concept of the house as understood through the writings of Jean Genet.
Greg Chase
College of the Holy Cross
“To see with the same eyes”: The Limits of Heterosexual Intimacy in Ford’s The Good Soldier
My paper will explore how Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) critiques the Victorian cultural tendency to privilege heterosexual marriage as what philosopher Stanley Cavell calls a “best case” of human knowledge. John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) provides a representative example of this idealized conception of marital bliss: “[E]ach completes the other, and is completed by the other: … the happiness and perfection of both depends upon each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.” Such rhetoric portrays intimacy between husband and wife in Platonic terms, as the merging of separate halves into one unified whole.
Ford’s novel presents John Dowell as someone who has believed deeply in this ideal. Dowell expresses the view that “[t]he real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears…” The novel indicates that his stubborn commitment to this conception of marriage has enabled Dowell to ignore or look past the abundant evidence of his wife’s adultery: having internalized a set of Victorian domestic norms according to which “socially inappropriate emotions, and sexual transgressions” are excluded from conversation, Dowell willfully conflates idealized rhetoric and lived reality.
In fact, however, Dowell’s narration suggests that his strongest attachment has been—not to his wife Florence—but rather to his friend (and Florence’s lover) Edward: “I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward… —and that I love him because he was just myself.” John’s assessment of Edward as “just myself” signals his retrospective attempt to paint this relationship as a version of the idealized intimacy he formerly associated with heterosexual marriage. Ford’s novel thereby imagines more culturally subversive possibilities for intimate relation, even as Dowell’s deep commitment to Victorian social mores prevents him from realizing these possibilities himself.
Biography
Greg Chase is a Visiting Lecturer in English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He holds a PhD in English from Boston University. His book project, “‘The Silent Soliloquy of Others’: Language and Acknowledgment in Modernist Fiction,” reads novels by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others in conjunction with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. It argues that modernist novels offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might acknowledge the inner lives of socially marginalized figures. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Modernism/ modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Arizona Quarterly.
Allan Kilner-Johnson
University of Surrey
The Fractured Houses of Bernard Shaw
Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) sets out to complicate the familiar modernist narrative of returning home for redemption by placing its central action in a bizarre, uncomfortable house. Captain Shotover’s nautical-themed home is built to resemble a merchant ship, which, in housing the matching relics and retinue of a sea-faring vessel, comes to comically overestimate the possibility of aesthetic and ideological coherence in the lived experience of domestic space. When the house finally comes under attack from modern mechanical warfare at the conclusion, debates on idealism and pragmatism rehearsed throughout the play are complicated to the point of irrelevancy. Furthering this awareness of futility, classic country house comedy set-ups of mistakenness and cliché are broken by an unnerving demonstration of what is actually taking place in this strange house: that is, the vague formulation of plans to, in the words of one of the conspirators, “blow up the human race if it goes too far.” This paper will consider Shaw’s treatment of the purifying and perfecting drives of domestic space in Heartbreak House and Misalliance (1910) alongside his largely-forgotten forward to the catalogue for the inaugural Modern Architectural Research Society (MARS) exhibition in London. Shaw’s sustained fascination in domestic architectural space has been notably underestimated in considerations of his stylistic and technical contributions to modern British drama. As both a patron of the Omega Workshops—the influential if often-subversive Bloomsbury interior design enterprise—and a regular commentator on architectural design, Shaw plumbed the thematic potentials of domestic space throughout his dramatic writing.
Biography
Allan Kilner-Johnson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature: Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning (2017), and the forthcoming The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World, as well as numerous articles and chapter on literary modernism.
Leslie de Bont
Université de Nantes
‘No other house will ever be to you what I have been’: Place-identity, Marriage and Writing in May Sinclair’s Far End
Drawing on social and environmental psychological research on place-identity and on the object-relation theory, this paper will explore the construction of spatial identification and identity formation in Sinclair’s Far End (1926).
In her introduction to The Closed Door, Sinclair’s description of Bosschère’s maison is reminiscent of her own fictionalisations: “it is essentially the thing that [man] builds around himself: it stands for the total of his nearest loves and interests; it is invested with his soul […]. It is part of his personality”. The complex relations between masculinity and domesticity is indeed central in Far End. Sinclair’s eponymous home is first an idyllic, pre-war haven for Christopher, the male protagonist. As the first chapters recount his future wife’s first visits and marked interest in its mirrors, lights and windows, suggesting a metonymic blur between home and heroine, Far End is then seemingly forgotten as the couple moves to London to help Kit pursue his successful writing career. After a series of ordeals, the couple returns to their home but the isolation and peculiar, enduring influence of Far End have become inauspicious.
Far End is both peripheral and prominent in the couple’s life journey. Family life and relationship crises systematically happen in other homes, suggesting a strong sense of repression, displacement and censorship. Both protagonists also feel threatened by their house, which almost becomes a character in itself. A complex construct, Far End embodies the couple’s domestic delusions and diverging projections, it crystallises distortions and eventually deconstructs the prelapsarian symbiosis between husband, wife and home. Offering an interesting counterpoint to Woolf’s 1929 essay, it also echoes other Sinclairian homes where writing, always hindered or constrained, cannot fit in domestic life.
Biography
Leslie de Bont completed her PhD on May Sinclair’s dialogic approach to fiction and non-fiction in 2015 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She is now the Deputy Director of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Nantes in Western France, where she teaches English (ESL) to psychology students. She has given talks and published articles on May Sinclair and early modernist authors and is a member of the May Sinclair Society. Her current research interests include modernist spirituality and altered consciousness as well as place-identity and spatial identification in modernist fiction. She is the individual volume editor of Sinclair’s Far End, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026. Her monograph on Sinclair, Le Modernisme singulier, is currently in press (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle).
Laurie McRae Andrew
Royal Holloway, University of London
Domestic space and regional modernism: Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor
How does the space of the home figure in relation to regional modernism? Recent work on the geographies of modernism has brought a renewed focus on how ‘modernist texts are typically located within, and shuttle restlessly between, multiple and overlapping spatial frames: local, regional, national, and international,’ as Neil Alexander and James Moran put it. This focus has been applied in particular to Eudora Welty’s story ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ (1941) by David McWhirter, for whom the story registers the complex intersections of localised identity and the cosmopolitan culture of cinema. This paper takes up the placing of Welty under the heading of regional modernism, reading Welty’s story alongside Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’ (1955) as late modernist texts deeply concerned with the construction of regional geographical identities. My focus, though, is on how both writers pivot not only towards the larger scales of national and cosmopolitan space, but also towards the smaller scale of the home—a scale omitted from Alexander and Moran’s list. Both stories revolve around key movements from core domestic spaces to more ambivalent interiors annexed or supplementary to these spaces. Both also give prominence both to the boundaries of domestic interiors and to the points (doors, windows) at which these boundaries are permeated or crossed. Concerning themselves with the shifting of borders and the crossing of thresholds, this paper explores how the two stories make domestic architecture and the space of the home central to their explorations of regional belonging and its place in the imaginative geography of modernity.
Biography
Laurie McRae Andrew is a final-year PhD student in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His thesis explores the geographies of David Foster Wallace’s novels, and he has wider research interests in literary geography and modern American fiction.
Nicolas P. Boileau and Rebecca Welshman
“The Horrors of the Dark Cupboard”: self-effacement and domestic space in the works of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf
For Woolf and for Plath the concept of a trapped interior self was[NB1] intricately connected to the condition of inarticulacy or wordlessness. Quoting from entries in both authors’ works and personal journals this paper suggests that although the 1940s and 1950s offered increased visibility for the feminine self, both authors individually interpreted the domestic environment as an experimental space of self-effacement that was intricately[NB2] linked to their creative processes. Plath’s ‘Wordless Cupboard’ and ‘stomach of indifference’ are not dissimilar to the ‘dark cupboard of illness’ depicted by Woolf in her journals; which when Plath read she felt her life ‘linked somehow’ to Woolf. In both authors’ works symbols of the domestic world that would ordinarily suggest comfort, satiety, and security are inverted to suggest a more unsettled, and yet experimental state of mind. In addition, periphery domestic spaces without natural light – cupboards, wainscots, cellars and attics – represent the darker unreachable territories of the psyche, which make sudden and unwelcome interruptions in ordinary dialogue and thought. Such a vision is not unrelated to their experiences of being conditioned by the medical establishment. Yet these spaces offer significant potential for creativity and subjective freedom. The sensitive self that is ‘caged’ and inarticulate alludes to a tradition of self-consciousness that can be traced to the Victorian era and beyond: to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, for example, in which ‘the little cell called your life’ is shaped by conditions beyond one’s control. This form of imposed confinement becomes all the more resonant when considered in light of the changing concept of woman’s place, which Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic traces through the works of Brontë, Dickinson, Plath and others. In this paper, domestic space will therefore be addressed as an ambiguous site of subjective demise (as an experience) and subjective empowerment (in the creative act of writing).
Biography
Nicolas P. Boileau is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aix-Marseille, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rennes 2, which was titled Experiencing the Impossible: Autobiographical Writing in Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Janet Frame’s An Autobiography (2008). He has published papers on autobiography and Modernism in relation to psychoanalysis and the representation of madness. He published a scholarly edition of Mrs Dalloway and co-edited a collection of articles on Rachel Cusk (http://erea.revues.org/2966), with Clare Hanson (University of Southampton) and Maria Tang (University of Rennes 2). He is currently working on a book on Autobiography and Psychoanalysis and is in charge of a research group on Women’s Resistance to Feminism.
Rebecca Welshman completed a PhD on Victorian literature and archaeology at the University of Exeter in 2013, and held an Honorary Fellowship of the University of Liverpool (2014-2017). She has published various essays and book chapters on Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence, including an essay in Thomas Hardy in Context, published by Cambridge University Press. She has a forthcoming critical edition of essays by the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019, and is currently working on a book about Thomas Hardy’s vision of the past.
Elizabeth Anderson
University of Aberdeen
‘It was small, but wonders could wrought here’: domesticity in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha
This paper focuses on the African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks’ only novel, Maud Martha (1953), asking how analysis of her writing brings issues of class and race to the fore in consideration of the formation of domestic space and the role of things in its formation, maintenance and destruction. Critics have focussed on the representation of the struggle for Black, female, subjectivity in Brooks’s work, yet a neglected aspect of her work is the significance of objects in both enabling the coming to subjectivity and their status as markers of the problems for subjectivity and expression caused by racism and sexism. The paper considers how the permeability between inside and outside registers in crowded urban space, looking at how the liveliness of objects inform a range of domestic spaces: from the small house of Maud Martha’s childhood, to her married home of the kitchenette, to the luxurious white woman’s home in which she labours (for one day). In Maud Martha, the fraught relationship between women and domesticity is rendered more complex in its relation to black female subjectivity. For Brooks, home space alternates between being restrictive and liberating.
Biography
Elizabeth Anderson holds a PhD in Literature, Theology and the Arts and English Literature and a MLitt in Modernities from the University of Glasgow and a BA in English from Kenyon College. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Stirling before taking up a post as Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Aberdeen in 2017. She is currently finalising her second monography for Bloomsbury, titled Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: a Piercing Darkness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her articles have appeared in Modernist Cultures, Literature and Theology, Christianity and Literature and Women: A Cultural Review. She serves on the editorial board of Literature & Theology.
Mallory Alexandre
University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Nails and Snails: Revisiting the Drawing-Room in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction
Even though she is well-known for writing “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf doesn’t write much about rooms or homes in her shorter fiction. Getting rid of excruciatingly detailed descriptions that feigned realism was one of the changes in literature she advocated in her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” in 1924 ; and which seems to have been part of a more general shift in rejection of stuffy Victorian ideas and home interiors. When Woolf does mention homes in her short stories, she usually focuses on living-rooms, those half-private, half-public living spaces where a good proportion of our ordinary lives happens. Although most of the domestic settings she describes or rather, alludes to, have a rather Victorian or Edwardian feel (unlike the modernist Bloomsbury interiors examined by Christopher Reed for instance), they are pervaded by a very modern(ist) narrative voice: a disembodied, acousmatic voice, bearing resemblance to the bodiless voice of the radio, or the bodiless eye of a photograph. I would like to argue that Woolf’s shorter fiction works as a liminal space where domesticity is at a turning point between old and new, private and public, between haven and confrontation. Through the study of short stories like ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’, ‘Blue and Green’ or ‘The Shooting Party’ among others, we will see how in this space, the genderless narrative voice can be seen as an embodiment of the changing culture of the early 20th century, and enables a rediscovery of aesthetic and ethical possibilities within the home and society.
Biography
Mallory Alexandre is a PhD student in English Literature at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France. She is a member of EMMA and her research work, under the supervision of Professor Christine Reynier, explores the aesthetics and ethics of the ordinary in Virginia Woolf’s shorter fiction.
Rebecca May Johnson
Newcastle University
Cooking up the Continent: The Kitchen as a Site of Transnationalisation in the Novels of Barbara Pym
‘Dinner was a very pleasant meal. Rowena was a very good cook and would have liked to make exotic dishes, but the tyranny of Harry and the children made it necessary for her to keep to plain wholesome English food.’
— Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings, 1958
Decades before British citizens voted to remain in the European Economic Community in 1975, a European transformation was underway in British kitchens. As was reported in the 1949 report ‘A London Middle Class Housewife and her Problems’ as part of Mass Observation, ‘‘Many middle-class housewives have a considerable interest in continental dishes and continental cooking and if they were to follow their own desires rather than their family’s tastes, it seems likely a good deal more experimental cooking would go on…it may well be a reflection of things to come.’ The term ‘continental’ generally referred to continental Europe, but could also encapsulate Chinese recipes in contemporary cookery books: it was a kind of shorthand for ‘foreign’.
Rather than viewing the decision of British people to remain in the ECC through the lens of public political discourse, this paper places the home at the centre of a cultural-historical investigation of post-war attitudes to Europe. Drawing theoretically on Luce Giard’s ethnographic methodologies in A Practice of Everyday Life vol II(1994),I offer close readings of moments in the novels of Barbara Pym where ‘foreign’ food is a significant vector of change, that brings linguistic, cultural, sensory and imaginative encounters with the ‘Continent’ into British kitchens. The reach of Pym’s female characters towards liberating modes of self-authorship is often articulated through their desire to read about, cook, or eat ‘Continental’ food. This paper will concludes by reflecting on the unacknowledged public effects of activities that unfold within so-called ‘private’, domestic settings.
Biography
Dr Rebecca May Johnson is a writer, academic and literary curator based in London. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD about a contemporary feminist reworking of the Odyssey at UCL in 2016 and currently works as researcher and teacher in the English department at Newcastle University. Her monograph ‘Unweaving Power and Patriarchy: Unweaving Power and Patriarchy: Barbara Köhler’s Contemporary Odyssey, is forthcoming in the competitive, peer-reviewed Bithell Dissertation Series in early 2019.
Rebecca is currently undertaking archival research into the state-subsidized canteens, dubbed ‘British Restaurants’, for an article in a special issue of the London journal.
She is co-founder and curator of sell out literary food salon ‘Voices at The Table’ and co-curates ‘Sitting Room’, a long-running series of readings in people’s houses and public spaces. She created the Food Memory Bank, a digital project to collect public memory about food and eating. Rebecca is writing a book of non-fiction about cooking and gender, represented by the agent Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates.
Daniel Jenkin-Smith
Aston University
Objet petits pois: Peas and Domestics in James Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants’ (1914)
Upon hearing that his potential publisher was wavering over Dubliners, over the story ‘Two Gallants’ in particular, James Joyce asked if it is ‘the small gold coin in the story or the code of honour which the two gallants live by which shocks him?’ When electing to stay publication for almost a decade, the publisher had presumably paid little attention to the midpoint of the story, during which Lenehan consumes a seemingly innocent meal consisting solely of ‘hot grocer’s peas seasoned with pepper and vinegar.’ I contend however that the peas are the hidden linchpin of Joyce’s story: linking the climactic image of the ‘small gold coin’ to the ‘code of honour’ that forms the story’s premise. This I will demonstrate first by tracing peas’ transhistorical significance as a bearer of value in both eighth- and twentieth-century Ireland – by arguing for their continued valency from a social order predicated upon honour and personal dependence to a society ostensibly governed through the atomised ‘shifts and intrigues’ of the market.
Through this economic reading, the peas are obliquely related to the story’s figure of the ‘slavey’ (domestic servant). Like the peas, the ‘slavey’ is simultaneously a representative figure of anonymous exchange-value (in the form of the gold coin she provides) and an emblem of the home life that the gallants sorely lack. The story thus traverses a dichotomy of home and rootlessness bisected by that of captivity and independence, at the centre of which are the peas and the ‘slavey’. The peas are therefore at once a symbolic stand-in for the absent presence that is the ‘slavey’ herself, but they also maintain a complex metaphorical system of their own; one, in keeping with the general tone of Dubliners, appealingly belied by their apparent banality.
Biography
Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a second-year PhD student at Aston University in Birmingham. His research is focussed on the portrayal of office work, and office workers, in nineteenth-century literature.
Catherine Burgass
Staffordshire University
Dream Kitchen? Meat and materialism in the work of Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf
This paper will focus on beef stews that feature in Riceyman Steps (1923) and To the Lighthouse (1927), assessing the relative literary and domestic competences of their respective authors in the context of Woolf’s attack on Bennett’s materialism.
In Riceyman Steps Bennett shows us the domestic space and the apparatus of cooking as the lady of the house prepares her husband’s ‘tea’. But Henry Earlforward is pathologically mean – anorexic – and at this point has reduced his diet to bread and margarine and weak tea. In spite of the much-despised materialism of the ‘Edwardian’ novelist, in this later work food has a particular sexual symbolism as well a functioning as a weapon in the battle of the sexes. Henry Earlforward’s adamantine refusal of (Violet’s) yielding flesh – a plate of braised beef, coquettishly presented – represents a clear and bitterly felt sexual rejection. In the context of post-war society, this refusal of meat (the premium food of men) acquires an additional resonance, serving to emasculate Henry even further.
Woolf’s boeuf en daube, on the other hand, emerges from an unseen kitchen. We do learn something of the recipe, but it is the cook who has been slaving for days behind the scene. This stew, whose ingredients have merged sublimely in great, brown dish, is emblem of the feminine principle as well as the product of largely hidden domestic labour. It encapsulates Mrs Ramsay’s power to create domestic harmony from disparate elements, the ceaseless generation of which ironically precipitates her death. The boeuf en daube scene demonstrates Woolf’s consummate mastery of technique, but suggests at the same time the author’s class-related and possibly wilful incompetence in the culinary sphere.
The paper will conclude that while Woolf won the battle of words, her and Bennett’s beef dishes serve an equivalent symbolic function, materialist predilections notwithstanding.
Biography
Catherine Burgass is Lecturer in English at Staffordshire University and Visiting Research Fellow at Keele University, also teaching short courses and adult education. She is Chair of the Arnold Bennett Society. Research interests include the local literary/industrial heritage of Stoke-on-Trent and domesticity, especially food, in fiction. She has lectured, given conference papers and published on these topics, literary theory (feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction), Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Alice Thomas Ellis, Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt.
Eliza Murphy
University of Tasmania
Lobster à la Riseholme: Food and Party Performance in E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia
In E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1931), almost all of the novel’s action takes place in and around the central characters’ homes, taking the form of dinner parties, bridge evenings, and afternoon teas. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from the overtly calculated behaviour of its characters in these social situations. Performance is the norm; impulse is the exception. A satire of domestic village life, the novel charts the battle for social dominance between two middle-aged women: Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas. Central to this tussle for power is Elizabeth’s desire to obtain Lucia’s secret recipe for lobster à la Riseholme, a delicious and coveted dish frequently served at Lucia’s dinner parties.
This paper seeks to evaluate the relationship between food, parties, and performance in Mapp and Lucia. I argue that because no one in the novel knows how to act impulsively, festivity becomes a calculated and deliberate ritual: it exemplifies the performances that the characters enact in their bid for social excellence. In particular, the provision and quality of the meal served functions as a means with which to judge whether a party is a success. As Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brian note, food is inextricably tied to “to the ritual structures of […] celebration” (2). In Mapp and Lucia, food also becomes a key part of party performance. Food takes on heavy symbolic meaning in the novel’s festivities, epitomising the lengths to which its characters will go to present an idealised version of themselves, with the menus served acting as indicators of social excellence and cultural capital. Moreover, as an author writing on both sides of the fin de siècle, Benson offers a unique perspective on the changing modes of domestic entertaining brought on by the advent of modernity.
Biography
Eliza Murphy is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her doctoral research explores the role and representation of parties in comic novels of the interwar period, with a focus on the works of E. F. Benson, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, and Evelyn Waugh. More broadly, Eliza is interested in early twentieth-century literary culture, literary taste, and the relationship between modernist and middlebrow literature.
Maebh Long
University of Waikato
‘a clattered milkcan, a postman’s double knock’: Irish modernism and the mail
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Woolf remarks upon the perception of letters as permitted forms of writing for women; literary endeavours that left domestic spaces and masculine literary scenes untroubled: ‘Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them’. This paper looks at letters as an integral part of domestic routines for women and men in early to mid twentieth century Ireland, but emphasises their subversive potential by engaging specifically with the ways in which the political and the literary were integrated into the domestic through the mail.
One vital aspect of this is Dublin’s General Post Office, because if we are to speak of Irish modernity we must speak of the GPO, the birthplace of modern Ireland. The GPO was the site through which information on Ireland was relayed to Britain, and a vital point though which British rule infiltrated every home. Its occupation during the 1916 rising symbolised the reclamation of lines of communication, and therefore power, from British control. Once rebuilt, its opening by W.T. Cosgrave in 1929 marked an exemplary moment in a new, modern, independent Ireland.
But although the importance of the general post office in Irish modernity is well-established, more work is needed to secure the position of the letters that An Post circulated in the history of Irish modernism. This chapter studies Irish modernism in the home through the national and transnational circulation of letters, and engages with both their content and their material form. From letters to the editor to notes to friends, this chapter engages with the movement, the erasures, the identities, and the games we see in letters arriving in modern Irish mailboxes.
Biography
Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her areas of interest include modernist and contemporary literature and culture in Ireland, Britain, and Oceania, as well as literary theory and continental philosophy. Her work as been published in journals such as Textual Practice, Parallax, Symploke, Australian Humanities Review, and Pacific Dynamics, as well as in numerous collected editions. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), and her edited edition of the letters of Brian O’Nolan has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press as The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018). She is the co-investigator of the Oceanic Modernism project, which reads post-1960s independence and indigenous rights literature from the Pacific as a modernism. She is also in the early stages of a monograph entitled The Poetics of Immunology.
Sorcha O’Brien
Kingston School of Art
Kitchen Promises: Aspiration and Reality during Irish Rural Electrification (digital paper)
Kitchen Promises looks at the intersection of kitchen technologies and women in the home in rural Ireland, during a time period where the Irish Constitution stipulated that ‘that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ (Article 41.2.1) At the intersection of design and social history, it looks at the role that rural electrification played in introducing domestic electrical products to the post-war rural Irish home, unpicking the real and aspirational relationships between women and household work in the 1950s and 1960s.
It looks at the rollout of appliances such as washing machines and electric irons in the wake of the ESB’s post-war electrification project, particularly how they were advertised and promoted to the Irish housewife. The change from traditional domestic practices such as cooking on the hearth to electric cookers in modern fitted kitchens was negotiated through model kitchens and exhibitions, as well as by the ESB’s ‘lady demonstrators’ and the voluntary efforts of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. In addition to objects and archival sources, the exhibition uses oral histories collected from these women to consider the emotional meaning of these appliances to the women who used them, and the changes in their everyday life as modern consumption reached the countryside. It also looks at the role of memory and nostalgia in the oral history responses, as well as a participant-led process-based textile art project carried out in response to the exhibition and displayed in the gallery.
The Kitchen Promises exhibition is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in partnership with the National Museum of Ireland. It opens in the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life in Castlebar, Co, Mayo in July 2019, where it will run for a year.
Biography
Dr. Sorcha O’Brien is a design historian with interests in product and interior design, particularly the intersection of technology and identity. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Leadership Fellow at Kingston University London, working on the Kitchen Promises research project, which includes a monograph and journal articles, as well as the exhibition. Her book ‘Powering the Nation: Images of Electricity and the Shannon Scheme in Ireland’ was published in 2017, which looked at national identity and electrical power in 1920s Ireland, and she edited ‘Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture’ with Anna Moran in 2014.
Marisa Stickel
University of Tennessee
Silences and Syncopated Rhythms: The Unsaid, Unspoken, and Unsayable in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal
This paper will explore the presence and absence of sound within Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, specifically drawing attention to how both industrial and domestic spaces prompt her silence, which can be viewed as a form of insurrection. By evaluating how the Young Woman, or Helen, uses silence to disrupt the hegemonic system, I will address how Helen uses silence in both the industrial and domestic, or private and public spheres, to reject heteronormativity. Considering how the nine episodes of Treadwell’s play occur in both occupational and domestic spaces, Helen is constantly surrounded by machinery—whether that be machines for the purpose of home or work tasks. As Helen is trapped within the machine of a life she does not want, her silence provides her with a form of agency against the abrasive sounds around her.
By not fully vocalizing or expressing her inner desires, the silences she transmits represent a form of rebellion against the rhythmic functions and operations of the mechanical age. Helen’s silence is juxtaposed with the sounds of modernity and domesticity, and her silence, though a form of autonomy, eventually manifests through corporeal action. This paper will primarily focus on the role of silence in the play, while also exploring how the juncture between public and private affect Helen’s desire for freedom and escape, prompting her silence to explode out of her in a physical rage of murderous activity.
Biography
Marisa Stickel is currently a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, where she specializes in 20th American Literature and Feminist Studies, with interests in spatial theory, mobility studies, cognitive science, and embodiment. She holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and French from Fairmont State University, and a Master of Arts degree in English and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from The University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her work explores how women experience various places and how their movement through spaces is restricted or prohibited. She also explores mapping, memory, and empathy in early 20th century literature, calling special attention to texts that address issues of modernity, corporeal identity crises, and technological and mechanical advancement.
Michael McCluskey
University of York
Housing Modernism: Machines for Living in 1930s Documentary
A city is the creation of the human will.
Man imposes a human space,
a human skyline,
a human time,
a human order.
These lines were written by W. H. Auden expressly for The Londoners (1937), a documentary film aimed at informing audiences about the new order being imposed on the city of London. The film presents a range of problems faced by contemporary residents and offers models for solution including ‘a vista of new life’: the modernist housing estate. The architect Le Corbusier argued that the house is ‘a machine for living in’, and The Londoners as well as the films Housing Problems (1935) and Kensal House (1937) present to viewers modernist housing machines that could replace the inefficient schemes shoddily built by their Victorian predecessors. This paper looks at the models for housing these films propose and the strategies they use to sell the public on their radical, industrial design. It argues that these films were a crucial part of the broader campaign to update the British brand image that emerged in the 1930s and contributes to recent work in modernist studies that looks at the impact of new technologies on culture, society, and aesthetics. These films link the energetic architectures of new housing to the improvement of the residents themselves. Through their stunning visual images, the input of writers and artists such as Auden, and emphasis on efficiency, 1930s documentaries promote industrial estates designed to produce modern spaces and citizens.
Biography
Michael McCluskey is a Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of York. He received his PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2011 and was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s metaLAB (at) Harvard from 2012-2013. From 2013-2016 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in UCL’s Department of English. He is co-editor of Rural Modernity in Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Aviation in Interwar Culture and Literature (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on a monograph on 1930s British documentary.
Sue Ash
Oxford Brookes University
Breathe, stretch and relax: The Angel in the House loosens her shackles
In the inter-war period, quotidian young women are publicly performing rhythmic movements spectacularly. They boogie, leap, bend and spiral in dance halls, formal performance arenas and open-air spaces in a collective of rhythmic movement practices which stretch across the western world. Movement forms which begin in the radical new dance aesthetics of Isadora Duncan in the pre-war era are co-opted in the construction of a culturally specific, new female body type for the post-war era; that of the quotidian New Woman. Notably, the conditioning of this new public female body takes place in the privacy of the home:
Here are a few simple exercises which we can all do each day in our homes for a few moments to keep us supple, slim and healthy … wear as little as possible … a large space is not necessary … do not feel hurried … Take in a deep breath and let it out slowly … stretch as hard as possible and then relax …
Madge Atkinson is but one of many new movement pioneers who call on the quotidian new woman to take ownership of the health and condition of her body through regular private exercise in the home. The requirement for young women to keep “supple, slim and healthy” is central to the wider discourse of post-war regeneration and is disseminated through newspaper articles, items on the domestic radio and cinematic propaganda.
This paper will contest the ‘classic anti-domestic rhetoric of modernity’ by interrogating the way these domestically honed, silently moving female bodies articulate cultures of modernity. Through this reading of the domestic space, the practice of female regenerative exercise mediates technology and the moving image and expresses the torque dynamic between modernism and modernity.
Biography
Sue Ash is a dancer, historian and part-time doctoral student in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University. Her interdisciplinary thesis investigates cultures of Modernism through the lens of the moving body. Her essay Jeux (1913) forms a chapter in Bloomsbury Adaptations, Inspirations and Influences (2014). Sue formed the Panel ‘Modernism and Dance’ for BAMS international Conference: Modernism Now! (2014) After a professional career with Scottish Ballet, English Opera, film and teaching, Sue still dances.
Richard Hornsey
University of Nottingham
Of custard-mixing machines, egg slicers, and other kitchen gadgets
At the 1934 Ideal Home Exhibition, the popular cartoonist William Heath Robinson presented visitors with ‘The Gadgets’ – an almost life-size show-home filled with animatronic caricatures. Widely read as a satire on the ‘labour-saving’ houses propagated elsewhere at the exhibition, the residents of The Gadgets wrestled with an amusingly baroque set of labour-expending devices, including a ‘custard-mixing machine’ in the kitchen. This paper takes as its starting point the name that Heath Robinson chose for his model house. For although ‘gadget’ had only entered the OED at the end of the 1920s, by 1934, I argue, it was already deeply resonant with a certain British experience of domestic modernity.
The campaign to Taylorize the British kitchen in the years after the Great War is well known. Publications like Good Housekeeping and experts like Nancy Clifton Reynolds extended the logics of scientific management into the home to ease the drudgery of the professional housewife. The cultural prominence of ‘the gadget’, this paper argues, marked both the triumph and the failure of this domestic Taylorism, as American-inspired management techniques came up against the messy contingencies of everyday British life. The kitchen gadget embodied a particular set of paradoxes – at once scientifically managed and artisanal, both futuristic and retrogressive, whilst offering the housewife an experience of industrial labour that also protected her from it. By exploring the material culture and media promotion of kitchen gadgets, as well as the imagery of the ‘Gadget King’ Heath Robinson, this paper considers how, in turn, the kitchen gadget impacted the public image of the modern factory. Not only did Fordist mass-production inform the kitchen gadget, but the kitchen gadget produced a visual vocabulary for humanising the monotony of production-line labour.
Biography
Richard Hornsey is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). He is currently writing a book about the cultural impact of mass production on everyday life in inter-war Britain.
Marie Hologa
TU Dortmund University
Modernism and Domestic Squalor in the German period TV drama Babylon Berlin (2017)
Roughly a hundred years after the period depicted, German (and European) popular culture seems fascinated with a time that still has a lasting influence on the political, cultural, social and aesthetic present. It might be the centenary of the Great War that has initiated renewed interest in the early 20th century, or the fact that in contemporary Berlin, similar anxieties about nightlife transgressions, organised crime, political subversion, right-wing polemicists and, above all, housing shortage seem to just mirror the city of one hundred years ago.
The TV series Babylon Berlin (Sky, directed by Tom Tykwer) catches up on this exciting period with its screen adaptation of Volker Kutscher’s crime novel Der Nasse Fisch (The Wet Fish, 2007) and creates a visual spectacle of the aesthetics of the Berlin underworld, night clubs, brothels, and bars – but also police offices, administrational buildings and the characters’ private residences from different social spheres.
My suggested paper focuses on elements of modernism in the series and footage of housing and interiors of 1920s Berlin. It argues that social and political conflict in the Weimar Republic manifests itself in the aesthetic representation of public and private spaces in the series. Thereby, political clashes between the Communist Party and right-wing elements foreshadow the emergence of Hitler’s Third Reich and the horrible consequences a decade later, which of course not only German viewers among the audience are aware of.
The visual representation of working-class domestic squalor predicts social unrest and stratification, modern urbanisation and the atmosphere of political conflicts, while the more bourgeois settings continue to suggest fin-de-siècle splendour with private libraries, housemaids and chauffeurs. In the public sphere intellectuals, criminals and sexual subcultures enjoy a new and short-lived permissiveness, which is not least symbolised through a very careful and sophisticated scenic design, props, costumes choice of music and cultural practices like dancing, the consumption of drugs and a certain slang. These culminate in the visualisation of the (partly) fictional Moka Efti nightclub – reminding contemporary viewers of today’s notorious Berghain club in Berlin.
Biography
Marie Hologa (PhD) is research fellow in the department of British Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University. Her dissertation project was completed in 2014 and analyses nationalism in contemporary Scottish fiction (published as Scotland the Brave? Deconstructing Nationalism in Contemporary Scottish Novels, 2016, WVT). Since then, she has been working on a second monograph on the representation of slavery and race in Romantic Imagination. Her further research and teaching interests are on contemporary British culture and media, postmodern theory, gender studies and postcolonial studies, which she published articles and co-edited several volumes on. She has been a long-time member of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures and has taken part in and co-organised several conferences.
Rebecca Moore
University of Leicester
Syrie Maugham Satirised: ‘Vogue Regency’ style in the work of Evelyn Waugh and Osbert Lancaster
Modern interior design was revolutionised in 1920s and 30s by Syrie Maugham, who led the way for female interior designers in Britain. Cecil Beaton famously used her ‘all-white’ drawing room as a backdrop for many of his iconic photographs, and though her work was popular among her high society clientele, she was not universally celebrated. Maugham was a satirical target for novelist Evelyn Waugh and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, who saw her work as all style and no substance, and her penchant for placing Recamier sofas atop contemporary rugs by Marian Dorn became shorthand for everything they saw as inauthentic about design in the period. This paper will examine criticism of Maugham’s style as part of larger concerns about design in this epoch: the notion that the inauthenticity of Modernist style was the beginning of a complete degeneration of aesthetic values in decoration and architecture.
The prevailing image of the 20s and 30s has the stark, shiny finish of a Maugham room, but it is nonetheless important to examine the dissenting “anti-Modern” voices of writers like Waugh to better understand the context of these new radical designs. Maugham is satirized in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) as the enterprising figure of Mrs Beaver, an aspiring interior designer. Her rooms, clad in mirrored chromium, merely reflect their own aesthetic emptiness, and by extension those who live in these spaces. In this light I will also consider the legacy of Modernist interior design. Lancaster coined the phrase ‘Vogue Regency’ in 1939 to describe Maugham’s influence on style that appealed to those ‘ultra-smart householders who reacted instantaneously to every change of fashion and whose houses seldom presented the same appearance two years running’. When interior decoration is influenced by fleeting fashions can anything be said to have lasting aesthetic value?
Biography
Having recently submitted her doctoral thesis ‘Art, Architecture and Aesthetics: Evelyn Waugh and the Visual Arts’, Rebecca Moore was the University of Leicester PhD student for the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project, 2014 – 2018. Still very much involved with the project, Rebecca is currently Research Assistant to General Editor, Alexander Waugh, in support of the forthcoming second volume of Personal Writings. Her research interests include the intersection of the visual arts and literature and depictions of ecclesiastical architecture in Waugh’s non-fiction.
Alexandra Chiriac
University of St Andrews
Integral Domesticities and Modernist Myths: Displaying the Modern Interior in Bucharest
The emblematic image of the modern domestic interior in Bucharest comes from the cover of the avant-garde magazine Integral, published in December 1926. The photograph shows a living room corner in which geometries harmoniously combine captioned: ‘Modern Interior by M.H. Maxy: Furniture, Cushions, Carpets, Paintings’. A prominent member of the Romanian interwar avant-garde, Maxy has long been incorrectly credited with bringing Bauhaus-inspired design to the country’s capital by opening an academy of applied arts equipped with a showroom for exhibiting and selling its output.
Drawing on newly uncovered archival sources, my research challenges the narrative inherent to Integral’s cover image by examining the contribution of Mela Maxy, the artist’s wife. Recently discovered in a private collection, a legal contract between Mela herself and the academy’s actual founders reveals she was the creator of the institution’s selling exhibition space. As well as funding and managing this commercial venture, she was the architect of the displays themselves, which she arranged to resemble functional living areas. Archival images reveal the existence of at least two carefully designed rooms, where only the discreet labels next to the objects indicate that this seemingly private space is for public consumption. Under Mela’s leadership, the academy’s showroom came to embody the modernist aesthetics of Bucharest’s avant-garde, hosting contemporary dance performances, serving as the inspiration for theatrical stage sets, and eventually being immortalised in a 1933 novel that became a literary classic.
When the displays were photographed for Integral’s famous cover, a double dissimulation thus occurred: Mela Maxy’s contribution was subsumed to that of her husband, and the private domestic interior was made both public and commercial. This new interrogation of a well-known space aims to challenge preconceived ideas surrounding gender, domesticity and modernism.
Biography
Alexandra Chiriac is an art historian and curator currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of St Andrews on modernism in Romanian applied arts and design. She holds an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art and has previously worked for Sotheby’s and for GRAD, a non-profit cultural platform for Russian and Eastern European arts based in London. Her most recent publications are ‘Myth, Making, and Modernity: The Academy of Decorative Arts and Design Education in Bucharest’ in Caietele Avangardei, the journal of the Romanian National Literature Museum, and ‘The Magical and the Mechanical: M.H. Maxy, Iacob Sternberg and the Bukarester Idishe Theater Studio’ in the Journal of Jewish History in Romania.
Qiong He
Australian National University
Adrift at Home: Trauma, Modernity, and the Anglo-Irish History in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September
The big house in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) is often interpreted as a gothic space signifying colonial violence and marking the decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency (Corcoran 2004, 39-60, Ellmann 2003, 40-68, Lassner and Derdiger 2009, 195-200). Nevertheless, Bowen’s big house is much more complicated than the above general reading, for while providing a shelter in the present, allowing the occupants to repress knowledge or experience of the Anglo-Irish war, it also bears traces of the past, since it is haunted by the traumatic memory of a woman’s failed rebellion against the confinement of the domestic space. Reading the big house in relation with trauma, this paper explores how the shelter offered by domestic space to the traumatized characters in the present is undermined both by the present forces of modernity and the return of traumatic memories of the past. The previously safe and stable space signified by the big house becomes unsettled and disoriented, unveiling the social and historical contexts behind trauma, that is, the disorientation of national identity as the result of the war, and the force of modernity, as modern ideas about women unset traditional models of domesticity. To secure her national and female identity, the female protagonist has to cope with the traumatic memory and the past traditions embodied in the family home while establishing a new basis to fulfil her needs to be a modern subject adrift outside the roles proscribed by the traditional domestic space.
Biography
My name is Qiong He, a PhD candidate majoring in literature and arts at Australian National University, and I received my Master’s degree at Sichuan University, China in 2017. I am currently doing a project on place and trauma in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, demonstrating how Bowen utilizes place as a dimension to register trauma and to make trauma visible and representable, and how Bowen in this way provides a lifelong exploration of a sense of place, of “dwelling” in Heidegger’s sense. My research interest includes modernist literature, especially Elizabeth Bowen, and geographies of modernism; literary theory, especially trauma theory, place/space theory.
Sinéad Sturgeon
Queen’s University Belfast
“Strange Growths” in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover
This paper explores the intersection of the domestic and the natural world in Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime collection of short fiction The Demon Lover (1945). Through close readings of selected stories, the paper argues that Bowen’s well-recognized preoccupation with houses and domestic space is richly complicated by the much less scrutinized evocation of an intrusive, often hostile natural world. The conjunction of global war, domestic space and a hostile nature is couched in the imagery of the gothic, a favourite genre of the Anglo-Irish writer and one that appropriately registers her abiding concerns with the interplay of past and present, the figure of the ruin, decay, hauntings of all kinds. Bowen’s organic architecture offers her an opportunity not only to reappraise the tired conventions of gothic narrative but also to pose more fundamental questions about the ontology of the non-human and man’s complex relation to the unsettling otherness of the natural world. In Bowen’s wartime stories, in short, nature is not a backdrop or mute accessory but an active player in a sustained reflection on man’s brute existence in the world, at a time when extinction is a real possibility. There is no Romantic illusion of nature as pastoral haven or liberating escape in Bowen’s imaginative world, though neither does she share the Modernists’ marked turn away from the natural world towards the psychological, the urban, and the artificial. Characteristically, she forges her own path. With the onset of World War II, nature for Bowen becomes a force alongside history and time with which humanity must reckon for its place in the world, the otherness of its primeval power endowing it with gothic shades of haunting, desuetude and decay.
Biography
Dr Sinéad Sturgeon is a lecturer in Irish Writing in the School of Arts, English, and Languages, in Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research is mainly based on nineteenth-century Irish writing and culture,, with a particular interest in the work of James Clarence Mangan and the Gothic.
Farah Nada
University of Exeter
Domestic Discomforts: Habitability in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Stories
‘Am I not manifestly a writer for whom places loom large?’ Elizabeth Bowen asks in Pictures and Conversations (1975). Places of dwelling are at home in Bowen’s oeuvre; however, as Elke D’hoker argues in Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (2011), Bowen’s houses are frequently sites of contestation: spaces in which her characters undergo loss of identity (particularly female identity), domination, seclusion, and claustrophobia ─ indeed, Bowen’s novel To the North (1932) is home to the first recorded use of the word ‘claustrophobic’ as an adjective (OED). This paper will argue that Bowen’s domestic spaces (both real and imagined) are sites of continuous domestic failure because they lack and/or efface the traditional features of habitability, consequently inverting the conventional order of the ‘interior’ as a locale of stability. Bowen’s characters are often in search of le lieu idéal – a site composed of a constellation of elements deemed essential for comfortable living. Often, they object to muted or pervasive ‘forces of nature’ (‘Green Holly’) that invade their lived spaces, such as the ‘draught’ (‘The New House’), ‘the ivy’ (‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’), or ‘the siege of light’ (‘Mysterious Kôr’). At other times, they are unnerved by features of architecture or pieces of furniture that haunt them (‘The Shadowy Third’), confine them (‘Look At All Those Roses’), or distort their spatio-temporal realities (‘The Inherited Clock’). The paper will therefore trace Bowen’s self-proclaimed ‘topography’ in an assortment of her short stories – from pre-war to post-war, culminating in her survey of ruined homes in London in the wake of the Blitz – in order to examine how a certain distrust of domestic space evolves in her writing.
Biography
Farah Nada is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Before coming to Exeter, she completed a BA in Journalism and English Literature at the America University of Sharjah, and an MA in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary Studies at Durham University. Her current research focuses on the ‘other spaces’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s writings, reading Bowen’s topography through the lens of Michel Foucault’s heterotopia. She is a Research Assistant at the American University of Sharjah, working on historical and intergenerational transmission of trauma in the Middle East. Her areas of interest include modernism, narratology, spatiality, psychoanalysis, and trauma.
Emily Rees
University of Nottingham
Flexible Modernity: Domesticating the Television Set in Post-war Britain
This paper will examine the role that television played in re-shaping how living space was conceptualised in the post-war British home. It will consider television as a material object that had to be integrated into the existing material culture of the home, but also how the material culture of the home had to adapt to the arrival of television. In a British context, Deborah Chambers (2011) and Helen Wheatley (2016) have opened up a conversation about the object form of television and its place within domesticity, but this has not extended into thinking about how television was situated within a wider material culture of home, which has been explored in other fields such as post-war British history, sociology and design history.
The intervention of this chapter will be to show that television’s domestication in Britain was dependent on, and instrumental in, certain changes in the way in which modern living space was conceptualised, which was relational to other domestic objects and technologies, taking place at a specific historical juncture in the life of the home. It will show how these discourses emerged in lifestyle magazines, home exhibitions and design publications, all of which advised television owners on how best to integrate televisions into their domestic lives. It will argue that for television to be accommodated in the home, it was necessary to construct living space as informal and flexible, which was a means to ensure television did not become too dominant; television’s domestication was dependent on disciplining the material form of the television set. I will term this model of domestication for television as ‘flexible modernity.’
Biography
Dr Emily Rees is currently a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham in the department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies. Her PhD thesis focused on the domestication of the television set in Britain from 1936-1976. She is working on a future project that examines the connections between health, home and visual media. She has a forthcoming article on television, domesticity and comfort in the Journal of Popular Television in April 2019.
Robert Chesters
Loughborough University
Demanding Modernity: Consumer expectations and the British domestic radio during the 1930s
Although it has long been understood that, during the interwar period, a relationship between modernity and radio existed, the complexity of the socio technological network connecting modernism, radio cabinet design and the British domestic environment is little appreciated. It is even less recognised that the wireless was a key agent of modernism for the domestic consumer.
In this paper, I intend to argue that modernistic wireless cabinets were not a stylistic imposition upon the UK public but instead a valuable marketing strategy which recognised the demand for modernity amongst British consumers. Women were recognised as being of high importance in that marketing equation. During the 1930s there was a significant marketing of radio products to women. That marketing focused upon adapting the user interface, eliminating “ugly knobs” and offering ease of use which reduced the technological element in favour of functionality and purpose and by so doing offered women freedom from masculine exclusion.
Adrian Forty and Artemis Yagou observed that the wireless industry developed across three distinct phases, those being: scientific, pseudo scientific and furnishing. Such a system of classification is quite reasonable, however it places too much emphasis upon the distinction between technology and furnishing style and in so doing over looks an important aesthetic statement made by British radio manufacturers.
While during the 1920s many wireless cabinets were constructed according to preexisting stylistic conventions or else in the style of scientific apparatus, during the 1920s they began to recognise a change in public expectations and by the 1930s manufacturers in Britain had almost uniformly adopted the modernist aesthetic for their cabinetry. As a result the industry recognised the agency modernism offered and that the public expected their domestic radios to connect their homes with a new way of living.
Biography
Design historian, curator and lecturer specialising in modernism and its relationship with the domestic environment, entertainment and leisure. My Phd concerned the relationship between Modernism, the domestic wireless and the interwar British consumer. I have made numerous contributions to publications and conferences, in particular the Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Design. For a number of years I was a curator at On the Air Broadcasting Museum and have acted as an historic advisor to Sacrewell Farm Museum and Northamptonshire Museums Services.
For over thirty-five years I have pursued an interest in design which has included travelling to architectural sites across Europe and America ranging from the Penguin House at London Zoo to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bank at Winona, Wisconsin.
Presently, I lecture at Loughborough University and I am interested in the development of British interwar cinema architecture and am developing various ideas for publication. I have made a variety of media appearances related to my field of expertise including for BBC Radio Scotland, Radio 4’s Going Places with David Stafford and in the Guardian. I play jazz guitar and am a Freeman of the City of Chester, a member of the Twentieth Century Society, the Design History Society and the British Vintage Wireless Society.
Rae Gaubinger
Connecticut College
Cutting the House into Flats: The Architecture of the Family Saga in Virginia Woolf’s The Years
After the death of the family patriarch in the Virginia Woolf novel The Years, the eldest daughter puts the family house on the market. When, in a passing conversation, she’s asked whether the house has sold, she reports that it has not: the house agent, she says, wants her to “cut it up into flats.” Taking this overlooked detail as my starting point, my talk considers the interrelationship of three forms in The Years. Those forms are the family, the house, and the novel itself. By the time of the agent’s proposed renovation, the characters have all moved out of the family home and into the individuated and provisional living arrangements of the modern city. I argue that the shift in the form of architectural spaces represented in The Years mirrors the revisions Woolf introduces to the form of the “family novel” itself, as she attempts to rewrite the spatial and emotional configurations of family life.
My broader aim in the talk is to explore the affordances of the apartment as a domestic space that offers unique correspondences to modernist formal investments. In contrast to the family saga’s logic of linear progression, for example, The Years’ disjunctive temporal structure and its emphasis on lateral kin relations (on brothers, sisters, cousins) suggest a different way to account for time: one that emphasizes accumulation and layering, juxtaposition rather than sequence. Like the apartment building, Woolf’s renovation of the family novel offers an imagination of family life marked not by hierarchy but by adjacency.
Biography
Rae Gaubinger is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College, where she teaches Victorian and Modernist fiction. Her current book project, Sibling Plots: Form and Family in the Modernist Novel argues that British and Irish writers across the turn of the twentieth century used narratives about siblings to address and rework the legacy of Victorian realism, which often tied narrative structure to the reproduction of the patriarchal family. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, her project recovers the importance of siblings to writers seeking new ways to construct family stories.
Stefano Rozzoni
University of Bergamo
From Knole to Sissinghurst: Castles and Modern Writing in Vita Sackville-West’s House Poems
Despite extensive scholarship on Modernism, several so-called minor authors have been widely neglected by critics: although the main features of their works usually differ from the literary experimentation of major artists like J. Joyce or T. S. Eliot, these writers can be considered representative voices of the cultural turmoil of the epoch. Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) is perhaps a peculiar case study in these terms. Notwithstanding the fame of her literary persona, the popularity of biographical speculations has diverted attention from a deep analysis of her works, often labelled and too hastily dismissed as “traditional” and “conservative”. In contrast to this dominant interpretation, this paper aims to highlight the peculiarities of her writing style – lying on the fault-line between vanguard and tradition – claiming a more visible positioning in the literary landscape of the first half of Twentieth-century England.
I wish to shed new light on possible parallels between the formal and stylistic features of her poems and the peculiarities (e.g. architecture, furniture, ornaments) of the two houses playing a relevant role in her life and career: the aristocratic 356-room chateau of Knole and the Elizabethan rural castle of Sissinghurst.
Adopting a trialectic perspective on space (Lefebvre), this work will focus on the relational dynamics of Vita Sackville-West’s literary domestic spaces, which, in a mutual exchange, became both sources of inspiration and artistic artefacts themselves, replicating in different ways the aesthetic features of her literary works.
In this research I will put on display a textual analysis of some poems she expressly devoted to her beloved castles. By including a critical reading of the many non-fiction works she dedicated to her houses, gardens and family history, I aim to offer an original contribution on the stylistic peculiarities of a writer whose complex and non-conventional works still represent an unexplored and resourceful narrative in the studies on the Modernist period. [Note: This is part of my larger thesis project in progress A New “Ec(l)o-Critical” Perspective on Early Twentieth-Century English Pastoral Poetry]
Biography
Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, Italy, where he previously worked as a Lecturer of English language. His research interests focus on Environmental studies and Pastoral poetry, on which he is developing an original critical perspective merging Posthuman, Post-Anthropocentric, Ecocritical studies and stylistic textual analysis. More specifically, he studies early Twentieth century English pastoral poetry, in particular the works of Vita Sackville-West (of whom he is also working on the first Italian translation of Poems of West and East) and Georgian poets. His critical approach includes Geocriticism and Spatial studies, through which he is working on the words “place” and “space” in the first Italian edition of the “Posthuman dictionary”. He is also interested in tolstoyism, on which he published articles and translations from Russian. He is the chairman of TAE Teatro, contemporary theatre of research Italian company. He is a member of Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and he will chair a panel titled “Beyond Retreat: (Re)thinking Pastoral Landscape in the Posthuman Turn” at “ASLE 2019 Conference”, University of California, Davis, June 26-30. He has recently presented a paper on Vita Sackville-West’s poems at the “Literary Birds Conference”, Durham University, October 11-13, 2018.
Jane de Gay
Leeds Trinity University
Reconfiguring Domestic Sacred Space: Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House
In her statement that she had to ‘kill the Angel in the House’ in order to write, Virginia Woolf rejected Victorian female domesticity with all its religious connotations. Nonetheless, Woolf recognized the importance of the home as a sacred space for spiritual regeneration and inspiration: she wrote that she ‘often … entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat’ at her home in rural Sussex, Monk’s House (Diary, vol. 3 p. 196). In feminising the name of Monk’s House to ‘nunnery’, a place of psychological and sexual freedom from men, Woolf envisaged a feminine domestic space that was liberating rather than confining.
Drawing on architectural theories about the empowering effects of reconfiguring space (including the work of Barbara Penner, Jane Rendall, and Helen Hills), this paper will explore how Woolf re-appropriated Victorian Evangelical rhetoric about the home in A Room of One’s Own and ‘Professions for Women’, to devise her own modernist and feminist understanding of domestic sacred space as a locus for writing. Building on Victoria Rosner and Emily Blair’s work on Woolf’s modernist responses to the Victorian domestic, the paper will show how Woolf reconfigured the study, the domain of the paterfamilias, not as a place of confinement (as Elaine Showalter once suggested) but as a space where interior and exterior, public and private intersected, because the occupant could view skyscapes and landscapes, and engage with the wider world through reading and writing. The paper will explore how Woolf put these principles into practice in her adaptations of Monk’s House: notably, her single bedroom that was accessed from the garden and had an extensive view of the sky, and her writing lodge that was located in the garden and abutted not the house, but the public space of Rodmell Church.
Biography
Revd Professor Jane de Gay is Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University and an Anglican priest. Her most recent book, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh UP, June 2018), which draws on insights from both vocations, reveals that Woolf was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. The Review of English Studies has described it as ‘a richly textured critical text … a significant and welcome contribution to both Woolf scholarship and modernist studies more broadly’.
Prof. de Gay has published widely on Woolf. Her first monograph was Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh UP, 2006), and her most recent publications include a chapter on intertextuality for Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley’s collection Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh UP, 2018); a chapter on Mysticism for Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina Groover; and a chapter on ‘Allusion and Metaphor’ for the Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Fernald. Prof de Gay is on the Editorial Board of Woolf Studies Annual, and was organizer of Virginia Woolf and Heritage: The 26th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, held at Leeds Trinity University in June 2016.
Silvia Pizzirani
University of Bologna
This Electric Age is Woman’s Opportunity! Consumption Policies of the Electrical Association for Women, between Domestic Emancipation and Conservative Modernity
After the First World War, women were dismissed from factories; some of them created, in January 1919, the Women’s Engineering Society, whose aims were to «promote the study and practice of engineering among women; and, secondly, to enable technical women to meet and to facilitate the exchange of ideas respecting the interests, training and employment of technical women and the publication and communication of information on such subject». It was during a WES meeting in 1924 that Mabel L. Matthews was able to present her essay On a scheme for popularizing the domestic use of electricity, and she explained her idea about the foundation of an all-female organization, with the aim of spreading the electrical message among women and eliminating the «drudgery of the average home»; the Electrical Association of Women was born in 1924. Through their activities they wanted to educate women to modernity, specially regarding the domestic environment in which women were usually confined, and they also tried to open new job opportunities for women (such as female demonstrators for the electric industry). Their magazine, The Electrical Age, «came into being as a modest attempt to act as a medium for the expression of the woman’s point of view on Electrical Development»: they believed that the modern woman needed a modern home with beautiful and functional electrical equipment, only in this way she would have been truly emancipated. They thought that their strategy, which I would like to analyse (with its gains and contradictions), could have been a way for women to obtain more labour and social rights, after the Great War.
Biography
Silvia Pizzirani was born in 1991 in Bologna. She studied History at the University of Bologna, where she graduated cum laude in 2017 with a final dissertation entitled: Female Associations and Energy Consumption in England, between the Twenties and the Fifties. Now she is attending a PhD in History and Global Cultures, in Bologna. She is a Postgraduate Member of the Social History Society and she attended The Social History Society Annual Conference as one of the speakers (June 2018).
Suriyaporn Eamvijit
Thammasat University
“Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light”: Luminosity and Thresholds in Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture and Mina Loy’s The Lost Lunar Baedeker
Mina Loy and Le Corbusier were prominent figures in the modernist movement whose masterworks represent their revolutionary visions towards aesthetics. Both published in 1923, Loy’s The Lost Lunar Baedeker and Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (Towards an Architecture) can be regarded as the manifestoes of the two authors as designers, artists, and poets. Being a lamp designer, Loy incorporates in her poems the notion of light and lighting technology, a pivotal component discussed in Le Corbusier’s design principles as well. However, her feminism renders Loy’s attitude towards spatial aesthetics different from that of the male avant-gardists. The aim of this paper is to study the interrelationship between architecture, literature, and the politics of design in The Lost Lunar Baedeker and Towards an Architecture through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space. I argue that despite several similarities in the two works, Loy utilises the image of light, doors, and windows to illustrate her ambivalent stance towards modernists’ admiration of “machine aesthetics” that brings symmetric order and energy-driven future. On one hand, Loy appreciates the illumination and the modernist search for the pure form of beauty. On the other hand, her poems suggest that the obsession with light and order reflects the misogynist force of the male-dominant modernism. While Le Corbusier praises the luminosity and repetitive symmetry as a sign of a “man”’s heroic conquest of nature, Loy considers the rigid organisation of space oppressive. The windows and doors let the light in, but at the same time indicate the strict division between genders and the limitation of women, whose bodies are homogenised yet fragmented under the capitalist and phallocentric disciplines embedded in space. Furthermore, Loy does not consider modernism’s emphasis on light a utopian vision, but rather a blinding glare that destroys the aura of both art and human’s authenticity.
Biography
Suriyaporn Eamvijit is a literary scholar whose areas of interest include modernism, political philosophy in the twentieth century, spatial theory, and the intersection of architecture and literature. She is a lecturer at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Literature, Thammasat University and teaches courses related to modernism. Suriyaporn received her M.A in English in 2016 from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand and plans to apply for a phD next year. Her current research focuses on the representation of Brutalist architecture in modern literature. Apart from academic work, she is a guest speaker of Sao Sao Sao (Pillars), an architecture and lifestyle podcast in Thailand.
Stephanie Rains
Maynooth University
‘All-Electric Homes’: Technology, Modernism and the Irish Free State
When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, it emerged from a nineteenth-century independence movement founded on the principles of a romantic nationalism which reified cultural tradition, a strong attachment to the national past and a belief in a national future which would draw upon that past. However, 1922 was also referred to by Ezra Pound as Year One of modernism, a claim partly resting on the publication that year of Joyce’s Ulysses, itself a vivid expression of Irish modernism. And for all of its romantic origins, the Irish Free State immediately displayed a commitment to modernity for the new nation state, especially in terms of economic and technological modernisation in the public sphere. The most well-known of these was the building (at enormous cost) of the Shannon hydroelectric scheme in Co. Clare during the 1920s, and promoted to the Irish public as the technological embodiment of the modern Irish state.
This technological modernity extended into the private space of the Irish home as well, despite the fact that those homes were also central to the romantic nationalist imagining of Irish identity. The Electricity Supply Board was as concerned to promote demand for electricity as to ensure its supply, and from the mid-1920s onwards it actively promoted the concept of the ‘Electric Home’. This involved extensive advertisements in the press for electrical appliances and kitchens, displays of ‘model’ homes at exhibitions and trade fairs across Ireland, and even building and equipping several real ‘All-Electric Houses’ in the Dublin suburbs which potential customers could visit. This paper will explore the ways in which the ideal Irish home of the Free State was not a rural thatched cottage, but a modernist suburban home with all mod (electric) cons.
Biography
Stephanie Rains is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Maynooth University, having completed her PhD at Dublin City University in 2003 and previously worked at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. She published The Irish-American in Popular Culture, 1945-2000 with Irish Academic Press in 2007, and Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850-1916 in 2010, also with Irish Academic Press. In recent years her research focused on popular print culture in early-twentieth century Ireland and she has published articles on this in Media History, Irish University Review, New Hibernia Review and Irish Studies Review. She is now working towards a book on 20thC Irish advertising and consumer culture.
Katherine Fama
University College Dublin
Architectural Affects in the Modern “Homes of Single Women”
In 1877, Susan B. Anthony proclaimed: “A home of one’s own is the want, the necessity of every human being, the one thing above all others longed for, worked for” (146-7). Appropriating celebrations of the family home, Anthony envisioned a equitable future designed around the contours of the “Homes of Single Women.” While familiar romance plots traditionally concluded inside the marital home, a succeeding generation of American writers explored the potential of new architectures to sustain single women beyond the family home. Modern writers responded to the an emerging architecture of singleness in order to create narrative space for the city’s never-married, widowed, and divorced women. Their works resisted the relation between marriage and literary telos, revised the “proper” narrative temporality of singleness, and worked toward women’s domestic independence at novel’s end.
My paper explores the architectural core of modern fictions, revisiting the embodied and affective experiences of single space. Modern domestic fictions position independent spatial occupancy, emotion, and habit as catalysts for the transformation of women from future wives into roommates, renters, and owners. Scenes of emotional response to domestic architecture disrupt and restructure familiar narrative forms. I begin with the transformation of Edith Wharton’s marriageable Lily Bart, stranded in Grand Central Station after a missed train (5). The novel prepares for a romance plot, with its bachelor positioned to rescue Lily from public insecurity and loveless marriage. After a long introduction in the sites of an objectifying narrative gaze, Lily reaches Selden’s apartment.
I argue, however, that the bachelor’s flat resonates with Lily and disrupts her course, introducing the possibility of the apartment as independent home. Without warning, the novel slips into her architectural encounter, caught up in Lily’s experience of the unfamiliar, “delicious” bachelor apartment (9). This transition to apartment intimacy disrupts the novel’s approach to Lily-as-art-object. Her response exceeds the narrative gaze, bridging the distance between the text and aesthetic object, offering access to Lily’s sense of discovery, “pleasure,” and “inmost susceptibilities” (12,15) The apartment encounter reintroduces Lily—as single subject.
The paper will explore the affective impact of single architectures on the shape of the modern novel.
Biography
Dr. Fama is an Assistant Professor of American Literature in the School of English, Film, and Drama at University College Dublin, where she teaches architecture and literature, sexuality studies, and modern American fiction. Dr. Fama is at work on a monograph entitled The Literary Architecture of Singleness, which uncovers the reciprocal relationship between the early 20th-century novel, domestic architecture, and the single woman in America. Her recent work in narrative theory and modernism can be found in JML, on architecture, race and single women in MELUS, and on women’s narrative accounting in Studies in American Naturalism.
Dr. Fama co-organizes a Humanities Institute Research Project entitled Architecture and Narrative: The Built Environment in Modern Culture, with Professor Anne Fogarty. Dr. Fama also coordinates the SingleLives Research Group at UCD with Dr. Jorie Lagerwey (Film and Media Studies). Dr. Fama has served in the Delegate Assembly of the MLA and organized recent panels for the Modernist Studies Association and the American Studies Association. She serves as the Vice Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies.
Dr. Fama’s research has been sponsored by the Marie Curie Foundation, Konstanz Institute for Advanced Studies, NEH, Volkswagen Foundation, and the Winterthur, Sophia Smith, and Huntington Libraries.
Josie Cray
Cardiff University
A Houseboat of One’s Own
‘At last,’ Anaïs Nin exclaimed in her diary, ‘we have stepped off the earth […] into water’. After relocating to the bustling French capital in the autumn of 1936, Nin began renting the houseboat ‘La Belle Aurore’ on the river Seine. The houseboat becomes a prominent setting in Volume 2 and Fire as a writing retreat and a secret place to host her numerous lovers. It comes to double as both a liminal space where conversations take place between Nin’s fluid texts and fluid subjectivities, and as a metaphor for Nin’s unstable and disruptive position in literary studies. Across the expurgated and unexpurgated diaries, the houseboat emerges as a space where identities proliferate and the boundaries between public/private, inside/outside, fixed/unfixed, domestic/non-domestic, and European/American identity are unsettled.
This paper is concerned in particular with Nin’s negotiation of transnational subjectivity and focuses on the houseboat as a site for the transposition of South American culture and domestic imagery into the Parisian setting. Nicknamed ‘Nanakepichu’—a Quechua word meaning ‘not a home’— by her lover Gonzalo Moré, ‘La Belle Aurore’ is a liminal site where Nin recuperates and reconfigures her national identities. With its oversized furniture, lamps that flood the rooms in a blue glow, and combination of unexpected household spaces and erotic hideaways, the houseboat calls into question conventional configurations of ‘domestic’ space and offers a suggestive lens through which to explore Nin’s negotiation of home/not home and national identity. This paper argues that Nin’s mixed heritage—Cuban, French, and Danish—is emphasised through the houseboat’s mooring between European and South American cultures, and that the collection of repurposed domestic spaces provides Nin with a unique home in which to explore and dissolve the boundaries between her erotic, feminine, and transnational subjectivities.
Biography
Josie Cray is currently in the second year of her PhD at Cardiff University. Her PhD, titled The Edited Self: Versions of Anaïs Nin in her Diaries examines the dynamic relationship between diary, editing, and subjectivity that is revealed across the versions of journals. She is a member of Assuming Gender—a multidisciplinary student-led project which provides a space for reflecting upon and discussing issues broadly related to gender and its place in culture and society. Josie is also a committee member of the Modernist Network Cymru.
Addie Booth
University of Tennessee
‘A Human House’: Exploring Modern Domesticity through Objects and Decorations in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House
In her chapter in A History of the Modernist Novel, “Modernist Domesticity: Reconciling the Paradox in Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen,” Deborah Clarke briefly examines the role of domesticity in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and argues that “Cather explicitly distances modernism from domesticity” (198). Considering Godfrey St. Peter as a man of fragmented and individualistic mindset who struggles with accepting the identities, functions, and spaces of domesticity, Clarke’s argument is well-founded. However, Cather’s separation of modernism from domestic life is not as clear-cut as it first appears.
Shifting our attention away from the titular professor to the titular house(s), forces us to acknowledge the intersection of these two spheres. This paper is first concerned with taking a close look at the physical space and structure of the St. Peter’s two houses as well as the objects and artwork that decorate them to explore how both work to suggest a union of the modern and the domestic. Accompanying this analysis is the examination of Cather’s language of description (particularly of her characters, but also of places and objects), and how that language works to further splice the modern with the domestic. In The Professor’s House, Cather’s depictions are often ekphrastic, starkly Cubist, and severely fragmented; these descriptions — artistic and objectifying — both integrate her characters into the architecture of their home places as well as challenge their stereotypical roles within those spaces.
Often considered on the fringe of Modernism, with her writing not as formally experimental and revolutionary as that of her contemporaries, Cather’s place in modernity is more subtle, but no less subversive. It is in the details, her attention to the everyday objects and her jolting descriptions, that Cather challenges the conceptions of the domestic within the modern era, and it is these details, as they appear within The Professor’s House, with which this paper is concerned.
Biography
Addie Booth is a Master’s of Arts candidate at the University of Tennessee. She focuses her studies on 20th century American literature, and her research interests lie at the conjunction of Modern literature and Modern art. After graduating with her Master’s, Addie is planning to take a few years away from academia before returning to pursue her PhD in English and eventually teach at the university level.
Kitty Gurnos-Davies
University of Oxford
‘Yes; it lacks form doesn’t it?’: spatial dramaturgy of the modernist home and gender experimentation in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge (1921)
This paper takes Susan Glaspell’s play, The Verge (1921), as a crystallisation of experimentations with theatrical space responding to modernism’s shifting notions of women’s ideological, symbolic, and practical habitation of the home. In dialogue with the emergent American and British ‘New Drama’, Glaspell destabilises the signification of gendered domestic space through the demands her script makes of the set design and staging of her play. I take the American and British premieres of The Verge by, respectively, the Provincetown Players in 1921 and the Pioneer Players in 1925, as illustrative examples of how innovations in spatial dramaturgy are tied to social criticism at the start of the twentieth century. Using scripts and archival material including set designs, stage floor plans, and reviews, I argue that Glaspell’s experimental arrangement of domestic space on a vertical axis – rather than the conventional horizontal stage layout – is illustrative of modernist reconfigurations of women’s ideological and physical occupation of the home.
The two unconventional domestic settings of the play, a greenhouse-come-laboratory and a ‘queer’ misshaped tower positioned atop the house, are presented as the domain of the transgressive female protagonist, Claire Archer. Critics have focussed on Claire’s expressionistic dialogue and her symbolist experimentations with botanical life as a rejection of motherhood and evidence of Glaspell’s interrogation of oppressive gendered roles. Yet the spatial manifestations of this theme have been overlooked. The trapdoors and ladders used to navigate between the vertically arranged greenhouse and tower force the actors to inhabit the stage space in unfamiliar ways that challenge theatrical conventions. Horrified, a character exclaims in reference to the twisted tower, ‘it lacks form doesn’t it?’. Glaspell presents the topology of the deformed home as the physical manifestation of Claire’s desire to ‘break up’ and find a new ‘pattern’ for life beyond formal convention represented by the verge and its transgressive potential for self-expression. The innovation of the vertical axis of the play’s settings thus responds to contemporary modernist reconfigurations of the intersections between gender and domestic space within theatrical form.
Biography
Kitty Gurnos-Davies is a doctoral candidate in English at Merton College, University of Oxford. She works on the interrelationships between women’s activities, objects, and the question of agency in the material culture of regional theatre. Her research is facilitated by an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) designed to foster knowledge exchange between academia and external institutes. The project is partnered with The Theatre Chipping Norton and the Royal & Derngate in Northampton. Her research builds upon eight years of experience working in costume and wig departments.
Kitty is a co-convenor of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Theatre and Performance Network.
Vanessa Vanden Berghe
Kingston University
Considering the concept of staging in the consumption of the interior during the 1920s and 1930s in Britain.
The interwar period in Britain saw a rapid increase in the dissemination of images of well-photographed buildings and interiors in a variety of journals and magazines. Varied titles, such as The Architectural Review, Country Life, Vogue and The Sketch, all published seductive images of newly built architecture and its interiors. Taking a selection of contemporary images as a starting point this paper aims to look more closely at the consumption of the work of Oliver Hill (1887 – 1968), a quintessential architect and interior designer of the period, in contemporary media.
This paper will use an analysis of the interactions between the interior as space and the interior as staged in images as a way of expanding our understanding of how the interior was consumed during the 1920s and 1930s. To date, less thought has been given to how the visual languages, as seen by the public on stage or in the cinema, helped to influence and create ‘the modern interior’.
By analysing images of Hill’s interior designs for what they ‘do’ rather than for what they ‘are’ this analysis can offer an expanded view of what contemporary British audiences saw and how they were invited to see and experience those interiors.
Biography
Vanessa Vanden Berghe is a lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the University of East London. She studied History of Art at the University of Ghent, Belgium and received an MPhil (gained at UEL) researching the Enigma of British Modernism through the work of Oliver Hill. She is currently in her fifth year as a part-time PhD researcher at the Modern Interior Research Centre, Kingston University, London.
Her recent publications include “Architectural Photography, the Media and the Paradigm of Objectivity in the work of Oliver Hill” (Inter: photography and Architecture, Universidad de Navarra, Spain, 2016) and “Oliver Hill: a window on Regionalism in Britain during the interwar period” in Regionalism and modernity during the interwar period (edited by Leen Meganck, KADOC-Artes, 2013).
Patrizio M. Martinelli
Miami University
The Theatricality of the Modern Interior: Eero Sarinen’s Miller House in Columbus, Indiana
Recalling Aldo Rossi’s statement that describes the architecture of the city as the “fixed scene of the vicissitudes of man” and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “buildings are the background or framework for the human life”, the paper investigates the theatricality of the urban and domestic interior. Archetypes of the way the city, its buildings, its facades and its streets become an interior place are the 16th-17th century theaters in Vicenza, Sabbioneta and Parma: fragments of cities, reproduced in the interiors, are the backdrop of the actions in the theatrical play. But the home itself, can become a theater: home is where, like in a theatrical play, life, rituals and memories of the inhabitant are represented (as expressed in Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life); the spaces and the interactions with objects, devices, furniture are the context where the action is choreographed in home’s topography; the inhabitant, taking control (thanks to the interior spatial arrangements) of the different degrees of private and public life, is the actor, author and spectator of the mise-en-scène of the domestic interior. A paradigm of this “theatricality of the home” is the architecture of Andrea Palladio: in particular Villa Pisani in Bagnolo was designed as a set/stage in the Venetian landscape. And centuries after that, in Columbus (IN) Eero Saarinen seems to apply these same Palladian strategies in the Miller House, conceived as a small city (recalling Alberti and Serlio…and the “city inside the theater” of the 16th century) where some elements have a strong connection with theatricality. The interior façades as backdrop for the domestic actions and the (re)presentations of self, the sitting space as the place for the spectators, the window that frames the garden, the garden itself as natural/artificial stage, are all components of this “theatricality of the modern home”.
Biography
Patrizio M. Martinelli since 2017 is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Miami University, Oxford (Ohio), Department of Architecture and Interior Design. He studied at University Iuav of Venice where he earned a Master’s degree in Architecture and a PhD in Architectural Composition about the “façade as an architectural place” in some works of Le Corbusier. He has been involved in teaching and research at University Iuav of Venice with grants and fellowships about domestic interiors, adaptive reuse of industrial buildings and urban regeneration. From 2007 to 2016 he’s been guest critic in Münster School of Architecture (Germany). His researches have been published in his own monographs and in architectural magazines, and presented in conferences in Europe (Venice, Milan, Cracow, Toledo, Münster) and in the USA (NCBDS 2018 in Cincinnati, ACSA 2018 in Denver). His recent investigations focus on the theatricality of the urban and architectural interiors and on collage and photo-collage (with exhibitions in Milan, Venice and Cincinnati) as a tool for design, analysis, research and teaching.
Laura Blomvall
Independent
Sissinghurst and Monk’s House: Gardening, the Second World War and Late Modernism
‘With the prospect of devastation hanging over us, the impression of fecundity produced by the countryside during the past fortnight strikes one as painfully ironical.’ Writing about harvest and war in September 1939, Vita Sackville-West highlights the contrast between rural and military economies, with the first seeking to nourish and the other to destroy. Both Sackville-West’s family and the Woolfs spent the war living in rural counties outside of London, the Nicolsons living in their restored buildings of a ruined Elizabethan castle, Sissinghurst, in Kent, and the Woolfs at Monk House in Rodmell, East Sussex. However, these rural retreats were located in the Southeast coast and London; in other words, where Germans were expected to advance their troops first in the event of an invasion. This paper will explore how Sissinghurst and Monk’s House operate in Sackville-West’s and Virginia Woolf’s writing as a site of permanence, resistance and vulnerability to military invasion, and tease out the implications of their writing on our understanding of wartime homes and gardens, 1940s poetics and late modernism.
Biography
Laura Blomvall has a doctorate from the University of York, where she worked on lyric theory under the supervision of Derek Attridge and Hugh Haughton. She is currently working on an interactive map of digitised WWII government archives at Taylor and Francis as part of the War, State and Society project. Her publications include the book chapters ‘The Influence of Ted Hughes: the case of Alice Oswald’ in Ted Hughes: Nature and culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and ‘Ted Hughes and Feminism’ in Ted Hughes in Context (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Harriet Walters
University of Birmingham
The Arts and Crafts Garden: Art, Modernism and Rural Custom
The late Victorian and Edwardian Arts and Crafts garden imagines older versions of England in new ways, defining itself against landscape tradition. The gardens present a determination to represent the natural artistically, and a newly self-conscious involvement with landscape heritage, tracing a “Garden History” canon and using historical garden forms. This consciousness of the possible historicity of gardens stems partly from a growing awareness of a modern loss of rural and regional custom, as writers and designers including Gertrude Jekyll lament the homogenisation of a commercial age. Jekyll’s dismay that ‘common things of daily use’ were sold as ‘curiosity’ in the ‘modern exchange’ of good design for materials ‘from a distant manufacturer’s pattern-book’ (cf. Gertrude Jekyll, 1908) is expressed in her gardens, which marry modern horticulture with the reclamation of timeless regional sensibilities.
As artificially structured landscape, the garden implies a convergence of difference: between the wilds and domestic cultivation, between fenced-in plots and boundless space, and between art and nature. For the Arts and Crafts garden designers, the formal exploration of material elements within demarcated space offered the opportunity to perform different scenarios: imagining lost forms of Old England; remembering rapidly disappearing rural customs; and creating pastoral scenes attempting to elevate the natural through art. As noted, the Arts and Crafts garden designer appears to present a newly self-conscious awareness of their manipulation of these themes, and consequently the formal exploration of the garden plot seems a pre-modernist analysis into the writing of rural identity throughout an unfurling modernity. Within my paper, I explore these ideas, hoping to provide insight into how these gardens prefigure later examples of “high modernism”, how they struggle with the ramifications of reclaiming rural custom, and how their theorists struggle with a sense of loss that infiltrates into even their greatest creations.
Biography
Harriet Walters is an AHRC M3C student in her first year of a PhD in English Literature at The University of Birmingham. Working on the intersections between horticultural design and literary modernism, she looks for examples of the modernist pastoral across both texts and gardens. In particular, she is interested in how the modern garden from the Arts and Crafts style onwards displays a historiographical approach to the land which prefigures modernist approaches to time and history, and how regional and rural cultivated landscapes carry similar thematic and motivational concerns to “high” modernism.
Melissa Zeiger
Dartmouth College
Anne Spencer’s Garden Emancipation
Anne Spencer, an African American poet who has only recently been much studied, designed and planted a spectacular garden in Lynchburg, Virginia that became a meeting place for most key figures of the New Negro (or “Harlem”) Renaissance. At once a space for seclusion and a community center, it eased the pain of many black lives in the Jim Crow South.
Spencer’s poems often concerned her own and other gardens, and for that reason have frequently been seen as apolitical, although she was a fearless activist in other fora. Spencer’s relation to the garden in her life and poetry, however—to owning and shaping land, to aesthetic ambition, to forms of sociality, and to her own chosen and voluntary labor–forms part of a consciously new negotiation of personal and national identity for a black woman born in 1882 and living in the first generation after slavery.
As Christine Gerhardt has observed, “African American literature … functions as a significant site of environmental-ethical reflection . . . in texts that grant the natural environment a significant textual presence.” Her poems encoded these preoccupations, though in ways not always transparently accessible. Spencer’s garden methods were proto-ecological, and hers was a poetry of garden colors, attachment to the soil, and the love of wild nature and human freedom; its shadow story was often that of racial exclusion, imprisonment, and violence. In “Life-long, Poor Browning,” for instance, she chides her admired earlier poet for preferring England’s strictly bounded—to her, enslaved—landscapes (“the wild country-side tamely impaneled. . . .”) to those of lusher places. In “White Things,” she imagines that the hatred of white people for all color, including that of black men and women, has “blanched” nature, linking racial and environmental destruction. Rather than being apolitical, she engages in a process of poetic encoding and decoding that allows her to navigate her world.
Biography
Melissa Zeiger is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. She teaches courses and writes on: garden literature; ecocriticism; immigrant writing; Jewish women’s writing; feminist criticism and theory; queer poetry; politics of the love lyric; modern poetry; women’s poetry; Elizabeth Bishop; the poetry and politics of illness; cultural memory theory. Her first book was a feminist analysis of elegy (Beyond Consolation, 1997); she recently published an article on romance novels about heroines recovering from breast cancer and mastectomy; and she is currently writing a book on the poetics and politics of garden writing, one chapter of which appeared in 2017 as “Derek Jarman’s Garden Politics” in a special issue of Humanities Journal on “Crisis.”
Jasmine McCrory
Queen’s University Belfast
‘I make an offering, the the grass, of radishes and flowers’: Wallace Stevens, Gardening and the Mythic Imagination
Numerous critics have noted the complex relationship between the metaphysical poetry of Wallace Stevens and the physical environment it portrays. Yet, the dominant critical paradigms hold that for Stevens nature (including the sun and moon, earth and sea, flora and fauna) is a vast abstraction, a generalised experience entirely remote from any tangible experience; for some critics, Stevens’s devotion to the physical world is non-existent, the only ‘real’ nature existing for the poet in the realm of the imagination. Yet, Stevens himself argues that the “greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world”, and his journals and correspondences all evidence an avid interest in the physicality of the botanical and horticultural. Indeed, this paper wishes to reorient critical trends from a focus on Stevens’s interest in an abstract and universal nature; through an illumination of the poet’s passion for the physical, domesticized act of gardening, this paper shall highlight the centrality of tangible, sensory experiences of the natural for the poet. Utilising a two-sided eco-modernist and biographical framework, with a focus on Stevens’s Harmonium (for which I argue his time in friend John Wily’s garden was a primary influence), this paper posits that Stevens employs images of the ‘mythic imagination’, from the man on the moon to garden fairies, not in the creation of an abstract, universal and mythical nature, but to aid the reader in their understandings of the corporeal experience of being in the domestic garden. Thus, the physical immediacy of Stevens’s nature poetry is illuminated, the centrality of the garden to Stevens’s poetic project highlighted, and critical considerations of the poet’s use of the imagination reoriented from an understanding of myth as a fiction imposed on an existing world, towards an understanding of myth as a way of apprehending that world.
Biography
Having recently completed my MA in literary studies, I am currently a AHRC doctoral candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. My thesis is entitled “Botanical Modernisms: The Private Garden Space in American Modernist Poetry”, and my primary interests include American Modernist Poetry, horticultural and botanical modernisms, ecofeminisms and poststructuralism. I am currently editing papers for publication on Wallace Stevens, Buddha Dharma and meditation, and Virginia Woolf’s queer ecofeminist garden spaces.
Emma Liggins
Manchester Metropolitan University
“The very room hates us!”: Modernisation and haunted space in the stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Contemporary notions of the ‘ideal home’, a catchphrase current in the interwar period and linked to British building firm New Ideal Homesteads set up in 1929, are a significant context for reconceptualisations of the domestic in modernist women’s ghost stories. The growth in new housing estates after the war, and changes in domestic organisation following the widespread use of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, gas fires, Aga cookers and so on, transformed experiences of the British home. The Ideal Homes exhibition in London in 1923, showcasing new trends in interior decoration, architectural design and labour-saving devices, attracted 300,000 visitors. As Deborah Sugg Ryan has recently argued, ‘in media discourses on homemaking in the interwar years, there was much emphasis on modernising the home’ (2018: 81).
This paper considers haunting and homemaking in a number of interwar ghost stories written by Elizabeth Bowen. The titles of Bowen’s stories, ‘The New House’, ‘Coming Home’, ‘Human Habitation’, ‘The Back Drawing-Room’, ‘The Last Night in the Old Home’ and ‘Attractive Modern Homes’, draw attention to old and new domestic interiors, moving house and modernisation. Her developments of the haunted house narrative link the uncanny to the ‘house-proud’ woman’s new fears about architectural transformation. ‘The Shadowy Third’ shows both women and ghosts trying to find their ‘desired place’ within the home, locating women’s psychic terrors in the oppressive gendering of rooms and in their thwarted desires to create the ‘ideal home’.
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s arguments about the rules of space, I re-examine Bowen’s spectralisation of new and ‘unearthly’ suburban housing, particularly feminised intimate spaces. The haunted nursery becomes a particular focus for the uncertain maternity of the modern housewife, whilst unhomely drawing rooms draw attention to transformations in the feminine ideal, prompting a reconsideration of the modernity of the domestic.
Biography
Dr Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006), The British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2011) and Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014). She has published articles and chapters on New Woman fiction, sensation fiction, Vernon Lee and the supernatural, and modernist women’s ghost stories. Her article on Elizabeth Robins, motherhood and militancy is forthcoming in a special edition of the journal Women’s Writing (2018). She is currently working on a new book, The Haunted House in Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, to be published by Palgrave.
Cécile Varry
Université Paris Diderot
Home Hauntings: The Uncanny Domesticity of T.S. Eliot
In his article ‘The Domesticity of T.S. Eliot’, David W. Evans claims that Eliot, ‘more so than the household poets, […] is at home with homeliness’. I, for one, find this unconvincing. Eliot’s poems hardly suggest a history of happy domesticity. The home is never associated with comfort. Prufrock’s drawing room is oppressive; Gerontion’s house is ‘decayed’ and ‘draughty’. A quick skim through Eliot’s correspondence confirms our suspicions: from the moment Eliot left America for good in 1914, he never really felt at home anywhere. His difficult first marriage with Vivien Haigh-Wood was a whirlwind of constant – and constantly disappointing – flat-hunting across London. Vivien insisted on changing the wallpapers, but there is little record of Eliot really settling; he was not a poet who wrote from home.
And yet I do not think that we should dismiss Eliot as wholly unconcerned with, or scornful of, domesticity. On the contrary, I would argue that the home plays an important structuring role in Eliot’s works, a role that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.
Viewed a certain way, a home is a haunted house: a house haunted with memories of past lives and past expectations, emotions, desires, and thwarted attempts at being comfortable. It is an uncanny and, paradoxically, ‘unhomely’ conflation of the material and the emotional, the physical and the spiritual, the familiar and the unsettling. Eliot’s domestic images, from cats and coffee spoons to home-haunting furies and remembered rose gardens, perfectly encapsulate this essential ambivalence. The home matters to Eliot precisely because it is a place one cannot ‘be at home with’, and it is this unhomeliness of the home, this uncanny domesticity, that I propose to explore in my talk.
Biography
Cécile Varry is a second-year doctoral student at Université Paris Diderot, where she also gives introductory classes on British and American poetry. She works within the LARCA research team, under the supervision of Dr Jean-Marie Fournier. Her research focuses on emotions in the poetry of T.S. Eliot – especially on themes of relief, release, feelings of familiarity and the feeling of being at home. Her areas of interest include visual and literary modernism, modern and contemporary poetry, and emotional studies.
Anne Reus
Sheffield Hallam University
‘[It] has followed me, unwelcomed’: Victorian Legacies in Virginia Woolf’s Writing
One of the most productive domestic images of Virginia Woolf’s career is the tea table. Beginning as a symbol of witty but superficial literary criticism in ‘The Decay of Essay Writing’ (1905), it takes on additional significance with Woolf’s development as a Modernist and feminist writer and comes to represent the gendered rules of the Victorian family home as well as the conservatism of the society that produced it. Looking back on her life in A Sketch of the Past, Woolf again found the tea table perfectly captured her early journalistic voice, but also acknowledged its persistent and troubling endurance in her actual life: significantly, Hyde Park Gate’s supplementary folding tea table ‘has followed me, unwelcomed, even to Monks House’ (A Sketch of the Past).
In this paper, I will examine the spectral presence of Victorian desks and tables in Woolf’s writing life in conjunction with an exploration of her fascination with Mary Russell Mitford’s Wedgewood china. Woolf’s recognition of domestic objects as important witnesses to daily life and therefore history itself, expressed in a series of reviews in 1920, is evidence of the transformation of Victorian object biography into New Biography. I will therefore argue that although Woolf’s domestic spaces are haunted by Victorian legacies, her writing thrives on their transformation and subversion, thus offering a successful example of a Modernist reinvention of the most sacred of Victorian spaces, the home.
Biography
Dr Anne Reus is an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Her PhD thesis investigated representations of Victorian women writers’ lives in Virginia Woolf’s journalism, and her research interests include Victorian popular fiction as well as life writing. She was co-organizer of the 2016 conference on Virginia Woolf and Heritage and New Work in Modernist Studies 2017. She is co-editor of Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Liverpool UP, 2017) and has published on Woolf and Margaret Oliphant.
Kim Lockwood
University of East Anglia
Sharing a Bath with Amy Lowell
Despite her contributions to the development of a modern American poetics, and her overwhelming contemporary popularity, Amy Lowell is often left out of explorations of modernism – not least because of Ezra Pound’s blithe dismissal of her take on Imagism (“Amygism”). In this paper, I explore Lowell’s radical, imagistic portrayal of the domestic space in her 1916 prose poem, “Spring Day”. Thinking through the subversion of the gendered expectations of sensual experience, privacy, and daily domestic ritual as Lowell leads her audience from bathroom, to breakfast, and, later, to bed, I detail how her thoroughly modern poetics offer a performance of domestic intimacy. While Lowell’s meditations on her home life seemingly reiterate the gendered boundaries of the public and private sphere, such affirmation, I argue, positions the intimacy the home affords as a site of enormous feminine power, and offers a new model of modern, embodied, interiority.
Biography
Kim Lockwood is a postdoctoral researcher and associate tutor in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature, visual culture, and creative writing. Her research focuses on how American and European modernist writers, artists, and photographers explored and interrogated shifting cultural conceptualisations of materiality within the domestic space in their works.
Sarah Garland
University of East Anglia
“A House is a Mental Quality”: Style as affect in Anais Nin’s domestic interiors
From the outset, the domestic space is framed in Anais Nin’s diaries as a theatrical one, one which provides props for an artistic life, and from a young age Nin blends clothing and interior styling to produce her everyday life as a series of events. In keeping with the contemporary feminine ideal, Nin’s rooms begin as a way to create personalised spaces with a strong affective appeal. As her diaries from the twenties and thirties make clear, interiors soon become an imaginative support for her writing and selfpresentation, a way of substantiating and keeping together what she values aesthetically and emotionally. This self-presentation, however, is not without its challenges because, bound up in all of this, is Nin’s status as a self-mythologiser and the status of her diaries as documents that are highly edited, rewritten and often clearly falsified. This paper seeks to unpack the manner in which style in Nin’s work is functioning as affect, and to draw out considerations of how that affect intersects with a text which hovers on the edge of believability. These questions about a marginal modernist go to the heart of what it might mean to suspend disbelief, and what it might mean to ‘stage’ a domestic life.
Biography
Sarah Garland is a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and visual culture, with particular interest in the intersections between style, form and visual literary aesthetics, as well as in the connections between art as form and as lived experience. Her research areas include the twentieth century American avant-garde; transatlantic modernism; popular visual and print culture; taste, consumption, the body and the everyday aesthetic; collaboration across the arts, and image-text intersections, juxtapositions and configurations. She is the co-editor, with Catherine Gander (Maynooth) of the volume Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (Manchester UP: 2016).
Heleina Burton
University of East Anglia
“Coming home through all this”: Mourning and hope in A Wave
John Ashbery wrote A Wave (1984) as he was renovating his first home, and as AIDS was ravaging New York’s gay community. These two factors — one private, personal and provincial, the other communal, political and urban — imbue A Wave’s late-modernist examination of the capacities and limits of domestic space with a particular urgency. In this paper I will explore how the wave-like historical and familial continuity represented by Ashbery’s Victorian, ex-urban home provides a counterpoint to the devastating wave of disease that was sweeping through the city. I will also position the houses of A Wave as performative spaces in which the subject can both play out, and play with, radical and traditional notions of domesticity. In doing so, I hope to show how A Wave might be read as both revising and extending some longstanding modernist ideas regarding individuality, infirmity and resistance.
Biography
Heleina Burton is a PhD candidate in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where she is working on a thesis about relational spaces in John Ashbery’s poetry. Her other interests include nineteenth-century literature and visual studies
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