Details of Space: Narrative Description in Early Eighteenth-Century Novels

Details of Space: Narrative Description in Early Eighteenth-Century Novels Cynthia Wall ... the Father walking in a Field behind his Garden, finds one of his Children wandred out, all alone, under a Row or Walk of Trees, sitting upon a little rising Ground, by it self, looking about, and mighty busie, pointing this way, and that way; sometimes up, and sometimes down, and sometimes to it self. Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor, 1715 In the opening scene of the first part of The Family Instructor, the father watches his young child Tommy puzzle over the relative spatial positions of heaven, earth, and self: "I was wondring what Place that is." The father sits down with the child and rather laboriously discusses eternal and temporal dwellings, divine creation and human obligation, and the proper ways of inhabiting God's world. Defoe claims in the introduction that "the Way ... taken for this [work], is entirely New,"1 referring presumably to its dialogic form, its individualized characters, its sustained variety of different points of view, and its leisured, spacious narrative.2 But The Family 1 Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor (1715), ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1989), pp. 5-6, 2. 2 See Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 336. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 4, July 1998 388 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Instructor also prefigures Defoe's later fiction in its attention to the details of physical space, to the differently charged significance of a father's chamber or a daughter's closet, an apprentice's refuge in a hayloft, a husband 's grieving in a garden, a wife's repentance downstairs. The details are not so much physiognomic as geographic; the child is situated very particularly in space: in a field by himself, behind the garden, under a row oftrees and upon a little hillock, at the centre of a moving, individuated perspective (pointing up, down, and within). Domestic relations and spiritual revelations are plotted within well-defined walls; we know when characters rush downstairs or out the door, when they lurk in the lime-walk, when the emblematic authority of a father calls his child "upstairs" for reckoning.3 The Family Instructor, unlike any earlier work of Defoe's, begins to spread itself luxuriously into imaginative space and anticipates the novels' sophisticated explorations ofpsychophysical structures. Defoe's representation of a child's first spatial self-orientation to the world sharpens and expands within a decade into surprisingly detailed explorations of novelistic space. Yet the presence of physical detail in the novels of Defoe—and the eighteenth-century novel in general—has been historically and systematically overlooked. Rachel Trickett argues that for much of the eighteenth century many forms of specific visual detail were considered the province of poetry; the novel had to mark out its own spatial fields, which began in human action and worked through the human psyche.4 But those spatial fields of action and thought have seemed to many twentieth-century critics to be conspicuously and even culpably lacking in any sort of selfrespecting visual detail. Dorothy Van Ghent argues, for example, that the 3 In his Serious Reflections ( 1 720), Robinson Crusoe reinforces the significance ofthe child's looking up, down, and to himself, and of the father's chamber upstairs: "providence calls upon us either, First, To look up,—and acknowledge ... the power of God in delivering and protecting us; ... Secondly, Or to look out,—and take the needful caution and warning given of evil approaching, and prepare either to meet or avoid it. Thirdly, Or to look in—and reflect upon ... the summons to repent and reform" (London, 1790, 3:223). The same spatial/directional trope appears again in The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Biilbring (London: David Nutt, 1890): "[Uneducated gentlemen] neither look in, or look out, or look up; if they look'd in, they would see what empty, what weak, what unform'd things they are; if they look'd out, that is, look'd round them, they would see how bright, how beautifull learning rendred other men ... as the last, their looking up, they that cannot...