The Bourgeois Interior

5 Virginia Woolf andthe Passing of VictorianDomesticity

103 qWWe u U Q฀w฀wE 5 Virginia Woolf and the Passing of Victorian Domesticity The fate of Poynton in James’s story suggests the imperiled state of the Victorian home. It is almost as if Poynton were “unable to survive the passage to Modernity,”1 so rooted is it in what James called the “Old Things” of the past. Howards End, in E. M. Forster’s novel by that name, also has difficulty making the transition to modernity and does so only after sacrificing its bourgeois character. At the end of Howards End (1910) an unconventional family—an illegitimate child its heir—has replaced the traditional family that once occupied the domestic interior. In To the Lighthouse, published seventeen years after Howards End, a house deteriorates with the death of the Victorian mother, and the world is reimagined by an unmarried woman artist who lives in rooms “off the Brompton Road” that we never see.2 After World War I, the bourgeois home as mythological configuration came to an end. While the bourgeois class continued in full force, the domestic interior was reconceived by the antibourgeois energies of Bloomsbury, as recent work on the Omega workshops, the design collective active between 1913 and 1919, has shown.3 The domestic interior now becomes the explicit imaginative space, or space for experimentation in living, that earlier novelists had shown us it always implicitly was. As the art historian Christopher Reed suggests, Bloomsbury painters and writers attempted to create domestic environments suitable to their aspirations for new and unconventional ways of life.4 In the domain of architecture, Le Corbusier launched an- 104 The Bourgeois Interior other sort of attack on the Victorian interior. First appearing in the 1920s, Le Corbusier’s writings articulate the modernist antagonism to the conventional function of the Victorian home as a private refuge. With their lightness, airiness, and continuity of inner and outer space, his buildings defied the monumentality of the Victorian home and its protectively enclosed interior.5 If the Corbusian metaphor for the house is industrial, a “machine for living in,” the Victorian metaphor for the home is organic. “The traces of its inhabitants are molded into the interior,” writes Benjamin.6 The Victorian interior wears the physiognomy of its occupants, especially its female occupants. As we have seen, domestic space was not always the provenance of the woman. Robinson Crusoe is identified with his well-stocked cave, Darcy with the tasteful furnishings of Pemberley , but in the process of industrialization the husband’s labor was removed from the home and the specifically feminine domesticity of the Victorians arose.7 As industrial management came to dominate the work life of middle- and upper-class men, “so the family, and by extension the house, expanded in tandem to act as an emotional counterweight.” The home became “the source of refuge and retreat but also strength and renewal,”8 its regenerative emotional energies arising from what Coventry Patmore called “the angel in the house.” In his best-selling work by that name, Patmore describes the domestic angel as the “aim” and the “epitome” of womanhood, a figure who typifies the entire gender.9 The publication of The Angel in the House (1854–62) was closely followed in 1865 by John Ruskin’s brilliantly evocative “Of Queens’ Gardens,” an immensely popular didactic essay that likewise characterized woman’s intellect as peculiarly suited to the private sphere. A more resounding voice than that of Patmore, Ruskin enjoyed great prestige in England and abroad and was admired by writers of the generation coming after him, Virginia Woolf among them.10 When Ruskin claimed that woman’s exalted role was to perpetuate civilization through her benevolent and moral influence over Woolf and Victorian Domesticity 105 men, people took note. If not for her, he warned, civilized life would fall to ruin.11 In many ways this is exactly what happens in To the Lighthouse . Without Mrs. Ramsey, the house, the family, and the little social world she has created around her all fall apart. The physical deterioration of the house is strikingly narrated after her death: “The swallows nested in the drawing-room; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots.”12 The type of bourgeois womanhood that Mrs. Ramsey represents is so closely identified with the life of...