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Reviewed by:
  • Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life
  • Jane Garrity
Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Victoria Rosner . New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 219. $27.50 (cloth).

Victoria Rosner's fascinating new study proposes that the spaces of private life are a generative and influential site for our understanding of literary modernism. She observes that a preoccupation with domestic interiors is central to many British modernist texts, persuasively arguing that the confluence between private space, architectural history, psychic life, and modernist literature has gone largely unremarked by critics (8), and demonstrating how the modernist novel "draws a conceptual vocabulary from the lexicons on domestic architecture and interior design, elaborating a notion of psychic interiority … that rests on specific ideas about architectural interiors" (2). Rosner seeks to go beyond the cliché of "modernist interiority" (12) by observing that that interiority has a spatial as well as a cognitive dimension. The strength of this book lies in its productive juxtaposition of engaging close readings and an informed understanding of the influence that architectural history and the structure and functioning of domestic spaces have had upon the development of literary modernism.

Rosner's study resembles other recent work in modernist studies that puts material culture and history in conversation with literature, but its distinctive contribution is its placement of British modernist writers in dialogue with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, designers, and architects. The book begins with a compelling introduction, entitled "Kitchen Table Modernism," that succinctly addresses the values and hierarchies implicit in the design of living spaces, offering readers a concise historical overview of the role that domestic architecture and British design history have played in the formation of both modernist literary aesthetics and middle-class private life. Rosner tells us early on that Virginia Woolf is the "guiding spirit" of her study because she "stands at the center of any account of modernist literature that is organized around the radicalization of domestic space" (15). As a result, Woolf figures prominently in discussions that attempt to foreground the gendered dimensions of architectural spaces dedicated to reading and writing. The book is divided into four chapters that are intriguingly titled "Frames," "Thresholds," "Studies," and "Interiors." These chapters are organized according to the logic of what Rosner calls an "extrotropic scheme" (16), that is to say, an interest in looking in several different directions simultaneously. Toward this end, each of the book's chapters are designated by a term that "contains two histories, one a history of design and the other a history of modernist literary aesthetics" (16). For example, the chapter on "Studies" narrows the focus to a single room in the private home, one that has historically been associated with masculinity. Rosner traces the history of the study and, through an examination of texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, Radclyffe Hall, and Woolf, asks what role the study has had in the construction of modern female authorship. The books she examines depict the study as "the crucible of a masculinity that is linked to secrecy and authorship, even as they show how women attempt to usurp the study's privileges by prying masculinity away from biological maleness" (17).

In her discussion of Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, Rosner associates the secret of Stephen Gordon's inversion with her father's private study, the masculine space which stores the foundational sexological texts by Krafft-Ebbing and Ellis that Stephen discovers. Rosner reasonably argues that Stephen's emulation of her father—and in particular her strong identification with his study—is what launches her career as a writer. The chapter successfully couches Stephen's preoccupation with Sir Phillip's study within a larger discussion of nineteenth-century British home design. We learn, for example, that highly gender-differentiated spaces in the home were the norm, and that even though the house itself was considered a feminine space, the study served as a nucleus for the governance of the household. Rosner's analysis is enhanced [End Page 165] by illustrations and photographs of domestic interiors, as well as reproductions of architectural plans from Robert Kerr's home-design book, The Gentleman's House (1871), which shows...

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