Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts

Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary ActsCynthia Wall Every person of rank here is either a member of the legislation, or entitled by his condition to take part in the political arrangements of his country, and to enter with ardour into those discussions to which they give rise; these circumstances lead men to live more with one another, and more detached from the society of ladies. The eating rooms are considered as the apartments of conversation, in which we are to pass a great part of our time. This renders it desireable to have them fitted up with elegance and splendour, but in a style different from that of other apartments. ... Next to the great eating-room, lies a splendid with-drawing room, for the ladies ...· In the last quarter of die eighteenth century, the fashionable architects Robert and James Adam articulated and affirmed a social as well as structural change in the interiors of upper and middle-class English houses. The dining-room had become the explicit territory of men, the space for political and other kinds of discourse; the drawing-room came under the supervision of women. But where the dining-room had dominated the floorplan in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when men and women tended to co-occupy its space in shared entertainment , by the end of the eighteenth century the division into gendered 1 Robert and James Adam, Works in Architecture, 1773-79, 3 vols (reprinted Dourdan: E. Thézard Fils, 1900), 1:9. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 4, July 1993 350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION space between the dining and drawing-rooms corresponded to altered proportions : the drawing-room became the usually symmetrical counterpart to die dining-room, both architecturally and socially.2 It would appear that a bargain of sorts had been struck, consciously or unconsciously: in exchange for increasing exclusion from formerly shared space, women were given or (assumed) a separate (but equal?) space of their own. The changing significance of and relationship between drawing-room and dining-room mark new patterns of behaviour between women and men, and these changes surface in a diachronic sampling of eighteenthcentury novels through characters acting both within and against the evolving patterns of domestic interiors.3 In Roxana (1724), Clarissa (1747-48), and Pride and Prejudice (1813),4 the central characters all work to define, protect, or resist die boundaries of inhabited space, although the actions and reactions of each are shaped by die changing dimensions and significations of her domestic interiors. Roxana, in the first quarter of the century, enacts a more general—less specifically or architecturally gendered—struggle to understand, possess, and control the rooms she inhabits. At her famous ball she seems to command the centre of her rooms, carefully arranging them to announce and confirm her social and sexual power, although the rest of the novel charts the disintegration of her spatial and psychological control. In midcentury , in accord with increasing popular awareness of architectural issues, Richardson fits the massive story of Clarissa into smaller and smaller spaces, each carefully described and circumscribed. At the narrative centre of the novel, Clarissa tries to define and defend a sanctuary of ?! 2 See Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 203-6, 232-34. 3 The boundaries of my project here—the fictional habitation of culturally and sexually determined interior space within otherwise widely dispersed canonical works—naturally suggest what will be left outside. I reserve for future work the inspection of architectural spaces in marginal texts, where I suspect that, as in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), different and perhaps more harmonious configurations of interior space may be imagined and enacted. Another line of questioning—which also belongs in a different essay—is the position of canonical novels that do not fit in the literary or ideological contexts I am establishing here. The novels of Fielding and Smollett, for example, pay a distinctly different kind of attention to architectural structures (both interior and exterior) from those of Defoe, Richardson, and Austen. I see Fielding's and Smollett's architectural imagery emerging from but loyal to...