Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjær (review)

Maria Damkjær's Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain provides a study of ambitious scope that interrogates the role of time and temporality in literary and material cultural production. Damkjær asserts that while a great deal of work has been done on space in domesticity, the dynamism of time within that space has largely been overlooked in literary studies. By engaging with the critical theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, and Julia Kristeva, Damkjær builds effectively into the burgeoning conversation of time and the everyday, and the implications of time for cultural constructions of gender and class. With a scope ranging from daily organization of the household, to the impact of periodicals in formulating time structures, to busywork, to meals, Damkjær draws together the relationship between the need for mechanistic time structures to create order, and the simultaneous need to have those structures disrupted in order to resist the oppressive banality of repetition.

While this timely study engages effectively with the relationship of time to consumption—from the consumption of food to the consumption of the written word, and even the consumption of time itself through activity or idleness—there is a clear agenda from the start to elucidate the gendered nature of time in nineteenth-century culture, and the ways in which gender informs temporality. This role is revealed both through the repetition of activities, as well as the impact of interruption on time-order; and while Damkjær goes on to discuss class divides through different types of needlework, it is the preoccupying nature of gender in time that dominates the text. The gendered politics of time, and therefore the malleability of time, are set up from the opening questions of the study: "Why must women be interrupted? What structure of time makes that interruption possible? What does it mean to put your work aside, and to choose occupations that allow, even ensure, interruption?" (1). Damkjær succinctly states in relation to Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1865), "When Mrs Gibson experiences an interruption, domestic time binds together wider fields of association—space, time, gender, the genre of domestic fiction and the unspoken assumptions about what it is, and is not, an important event—into a politicized whole" (7). This conversation is carried through into the auditory marking of time with Esther Summerson's jingling keys in Dickens's Bleak House (1852–1853), which has the effect of both sustaining and connecting moments in time and disrupting them. It is then furthered through the imposition on Margaret Hale in Gaskell's North and South (1854–1855), on the death of her mother, to "[deny] her own interiority…[by filling] void-time with domestic time, with domestically related 'little nothings', with toast and tea-making" (Damkjær 112). One of the most provocative observations of this study is the tension between what the author refers to as the "rhetorical emptying of domestic time" (2) through mechanized timetabling and scheduling and the necessity to fill time with activity as a means to push aside the subsequent emptiness. The dangers of idleness in this context take on a broader meaning that ties time and its uses more closely to the outworking and angst of industrialization and modernity.

Damkjær's discussions of Dickens and Gaskell effectively engage with the impact of periodical time—that is, the restrictions and freedoms created through serialization, such as word length and product placement—in a way that reveals their awareness of time and its politics in their narratives. This understanding of the connection between time and print form, and its cultural significance, also feeds into her discussions of conduct manuals and their role in constructing social expectations of order. Indeed, the range of texts that Damkjær is able to bring together with such cohesion in this work is admirable, from the range of fictional works (including Dickens, Gaskell, Bront...