The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film (review)

Julia Prewitt Brown's The Bourgeois Interior shares many of the traits of the middle-class domestic spaces she describes: it is rich, evocative, full, yet implicitly cognizant of the foundations upholding it and the boundaries imposed upon it. But unlike those interiors, Brown's argument refuses to be pinioned in space or time. Instead, Brown conducts readers through room after room—Daniel Defoe's island sanctuaries, Jane Austen's country homes and rented quarters, the clinging mid-Victorian households in Charles Dickens and Henry James, Virginia Woolf's and Ingmar Bergman's more modern refractions of domestic living—in order to examine the story of spaces, the fabric of "the mask itself, … the protective material expressions of bourgeois life" (xii). Thus, rather than using the trappings of the home to critique bourgeois values (or to show how authors consciously or unconsciously mime these values), Brown stresses that the interior is always a "medium" (7), creating symbolic weight but not reducible to a symbol itself.

Given the historical range of her texts, it's not surprising that these expressions should be varied and shifting, or, even more generally, that the domestic interior might be read in such a way. What distinguishes Brown's study, then, is less the premise that the inhabitant can be known from his or her room than how ambivalent and volatile this knowledge comes to be. For a character to reckon fully the ramifications of a physical interior is to confront, unsoftened and unadorned, the psychological interior. Through this process, Brown argues, we can detect the inherent fragility of the bourgeois way of living. But even more compellingly, Brown reveals a particular valence of nostalgia where loss is apprehended not simply from a sense of absence or vacancy, but from a heightened awareness of all the objects that continue to remain.

On one level, The Bourgeois Interior presents the rise and fall of acquisition: Robinson Crusoe's cave, "the first bourgeois interior in English fiction" (25), leads to the object-rich interiors of Mansfield Park, which then explode into the stuff-choked rooms of Dickens's Miss Havisham and Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, only to be eradicated (and elegized) in the memory-work of Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). On a deeper level, though, Brown reveals that this evolutionary thesis is far from pat, and she is most suggestive in the chapters engaging most directly with this ambiguity. Her analyses of novels by Austen, Dickens, and James (though often zeroing in on a single text for the bulk of her chapters) are particularly supple, and her discussion of them uses a more overt tension—the idea that just as the bourgeois interior seemed to be cemented, culturally, as a desirable attainment, it became a location of ambivalence—to mine their depictions of time and recollection. Fanny Price, for example, "revives the history" of the East Room through its accretion of souvenirs (55), and plumbs her own evolving estrangement from pre-bourgeois culture. Similarly, David Copperfield's "entrance into the coveted space of the bourgeoisie is … imagined as a profound self-effacement" of his earlier autobiography (69), and Fleda Vetch in James's The Spoils of Poynton (1897) embraces a fetishism akin to haunting. If none of these readings breaks startlingly new ground—Victorianists especially will find Brown's contextual emphasis on Dickens's traumatic stint in the blacking factory and his involvement in the Urania Cottage project something of a retread—they are nonetheless powerful in highlighting how pervasive and immediate this conflicted response to bourgeois advancement actually was, how quickly questions of subjectivity became enmeshed in literary and filmic representation. And it is this attention to representation—structure, pattern, voice, narration, the full arsenal of formal analysis—which proves most satisfying: in a thesis all about the power of details, the whole of the parts, we, as much as the...