Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text (review)

Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text. Elisabeth Bronfen. Translated by Victoria Appelbe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 254. $89.95 (cloth).

Along with the 1979 Virago reissue of Pilgrimage and Gloria G. Fromm's 1977 critical biography, the "retrieval" project of second-wave feminist literary analysis (or "gynocriticism" as Elaine Showalter famously dubbed it) can be credited with the current lively interest in the writings of Dorothy Richardson. ¹ Since Gillian Hanscombe's landmark 1982 study The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness, feminist critics have provided us with four full-length works of secondary criticism as well as countless shorter studies of Richardson's life and writings. ² This body of analysis has, for all its characteristic sophistication and erudition, tended to read Richardson through the critical framework of three women modernists--May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and Winifred Bryher--whose oft-quoted espousals diagnosed Pilgrimage as, respectively, an experiment in modernist stream-of-consciousness technique, a precursor of what was later called écriture féminine, and a document of a woman's life in turn-of-the-century London. ³

While I do not mean to question the legitimacy or efficacy of such an approach here, it does seem that Elisabeth Bronfen's new book on Dorothy Richardson (first published in German as Der literarische Raum: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel von Dorothy M. Richardsons Romanzyklus Pilgrimage [1986]) is all the more valuable precisely because it offers us a rendition of Pilgrimage outside of the traditional trajectory of feminist criticism. ⁴ In sidestepping the issues of "gender, genre and modernism" (vii) in order to give a largely phenomenological account of the uses of real and imagined spaces in Pilgrimage, Bronfen avoids not only the pitfalls left behind by gynocriticism but also the quagmires that have been exposed by the theorists of difference this decade. ⁵ Instead, capitalizing on recent interest in spatial theory, Bronfen takes "the lonely track" in order to pursue a reading of material, psychic, and textual topographies in Richardson's novel. ⁶

Starting from the premise that Pilgrimage articulates its existential concerns in a manner akin to the phenomenological tradition of philosophical thought, Bronfen's text is a painstaking examination of the interconnections between body, memory, and the world of things as evinced by the novel's protagonist, Miriam Henderson. Employing, for the most part, the discursive strategies and terminology of key German and French accounts of "lived space," Bronfen argues that Miriam moves through material sites "semantically encoding" her surroundings to produce "significant space"--that is, space that carries "personally inflected" meaning supplied by the experiencing subject (43, 72). In Bronfen's view, then, Miriam is a kind of ragpicker, hoarding significant spaces from the past for later remembrance and ultimate revisioning in creative activity. With its protagonist increasingly exchanging material places ("neutral" and "atmospheric" space) for recollected and imagined sites ("contemplative space"), her room acting as a type of dragon's lair or storehouse for the art of "world-making," Richardson's novel becomes a Künstlerroman and, as such, its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Not at all a drab grab-bag of random and discordant fragments, Pilgrimage possesses an organizational system Bronfen labels the "art of memory"--a spatial, not temporal, narrative form that allows for the simultaneous presence of past, present, and future in the text. Once and for all, Bronfen's book rebukes Katherine Mansfield's charge that Richardson has no capacity for reflection or selection, insisting instead that Memory "mounts his throne and judges all" from his silent "cave of contemplation" in the novel. ⁷

By investigating Richardson's lifework in this way, Bronfen attempts to put the "depth" back into Pilgrimage, to unyoke criticism from the "muddled-headed" appellation of consciousness as a stream, and reconstitute it according to Richardson's alternative metaphor of the bottomless "pool." ⁸ This, of course, is not a departure for Richardson criticism or...