The Bourgeois Interior

Notes

155 Notes Preface 1. Barthes, Mythologies, 138; 140–41. 2. Rybczynski, Home, vii. 3. Pocock, Virtue, 122; 71. Introduction 1. Benjamin, Arcades, 220–21. 2. Benjamin writes of “man’s imperious need to leave an imprint of his private existence on the rooms he inhabits” (Arcades, 14). 3. Miller, Speech Acts, 190. 4. James, The Aspern Papers, The Spoils of Poynton, 308. 5. Sebald, The Emigrants, 21. 6. On the first appearance of the word bourgeois, see Rybczynski, Home, 24. For a brief history of the term middle class and a discussion of some of the problems associated with defining it, see Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Example of the English Middle Class.” See also R. S. Neale’s Class in English History 1680–1850, 1–46. In “The Bourgeois Interior,” John Lukacs also discusses the difficulties associated with the word bourgeois . 7. On the “bewitched element,” see Bianconi, “Notes,” 94. In “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat,” Roland Barthes’ essay on Jules Verne in Mythologies, Barthes likens Verne’s world to that of a Dutch painter, in which “the world is finite, the world is full of numerous and contiguous objects.” Verne reveals his bourgeois lineage in the way “his work proclaims that nothing can escape man, that the world, even in its most distant part, is like an object in his hand, and that, all told, property is but a dialectical moment in the general enslavement of nature.” In Barthes’ critique, the bourgeois reduces the world “to a known and enclosed space, where man could . . . live in comfort: the 156 Notes to Pages 8–12 world can draw everything from itself; it needs, in order to exist, no one else but man” (65–66). 8. Westermann, Art, 56. See also the discussion of Jacob Ochtervelt ’s 1665 painting, Street Musicians at the Door (74–75). 9. Ibid., 47. 10. See Westermann, Art, 46–47; see also Willemijn Fock’s “Semblance or Reality?” 11. Stewart, On Longing, ix. 12. See Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory. 13. Westermann, Art, 69. See Westermann’s brief disquisition on “the human interior” (69–74), which cites the important work of John Lukacs, Witold Rybczynski, and Simon Schama on this subject. Westermann discusses the emergence of the private study within the home and “the social and religious evolution of a reading culture” that is reflected in the many Dutch genre paintings that portray individuals reading. The cult of familiar letter-writing in the home, which arose in the eighteenth century, is also relevant to this development and to the emergence of the epistolary novel. (See the seminal chapter 4 of Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, “Private Experience and the Novel” [174–207].) In a more recent literary-biographical study, Diana Fuss places emphasis on the literal space that makes the construction of subjectivity possible (The Sense of an Interior, 1–21). For a broader sociological and theoretical context in which to consider these questions, see Jürgen Habermas’s influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity. The latter elaborates on evolving relations between the public and private spheres in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. 14. Lukács, Georg, Theory, 41. 15. Ibid., 17; 122. 16. Quoted in Benjamin, Arcades, 218. 17. Lukács, Theory, 122. 18. See Liedtke, Vermeer, 138. 19. See R. S. Neale’s Class in English History, 130–33. Neale calls into question the traditional three-class model as an adequate representation of the English class system as it changed and developed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He proposes instead a five-class model, one that takes account of the complex variety of the middle class. (To Neale, the middle classes include big property owners, military and professional men, the petit bourgeois, aspiring professionals, and other literates and artisans. He recognizes women as a subgroup in each class.) Broadly conceived, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeoisie is made up of a group of classes between the very wealthy and the working class. As the following chapters in this work will Notes to Pages 13–21 157 demonstrate, these middle classes were in the process of developing a powerful imagination of life in this period. 20. See John E. Crowley’s The Invention of Comfort (141–70) for a discussion of the rise of the standard of living. 21. Benjamin, Arcades, 20. 22. See Benjamin, “On...