Eighteenth Century Fiction, vol. 20, n. 3 (printemps 2008) - Interiors

Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both English and French on all aspects of imaginative prose in the period 1700–1800, but will also examine papers on late 17th-century or early 19th-century fiction, particularly when the works are discussed in connection with the eighteenth century.

Vol. 20, no 3 (printemps 2008) - Interiors

INTRODUCTION

Julie Park
Moving Parts: The Life of Eighteenth-Century Interiors
Messages in code, petticoat hoop skirts, tie-on pockets, erotic cabinets, far-flung grottoes, ornamental dairies, and the gilded quarters of colonial parvenus in London: these interiors make up this special issue. Unlike the ancestral homes that have supplied our visions of eighteenth-century interiors—from the prison of Mr B's Lincolnshire estate to the “lofty and handsome” rooms of Darcy's Pemberley—the interiors here are move able, protean, and eminently malleable. And unlike the Gothic grandeur of Squire Allworthy's Paradise Hall or the terror-ridden corridors of Udolpho, Otranto, and Mazzini, these interiors spring from fresh lineages and inventions, and belong more to the laws of imagination than to those of patrimony and history. (Extrait)

SECRECY

Katherine Ellison
Cryptogrammatophoria: The Romance and Novelty of Losing Readers in Code
Though his language schemes may have been practical failures, John Wilkins knew how to make readers feel as if by opening the pages of his cryptography manual, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), they were embarking on an underground adventure of intrigue, an exploration as exciting as traveling to a new world but even more dangerous because of its secrecy. As Barbara Shapiro finds, this “science-fiction writer, linguist, encyclopedist, scientific entrepreneur and administrator, bishop, politician, and preacher” was “England's single most influential and effective organizer and purveyor of the scientific culture.” In Mercury, which anticipates his later work in An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) and builds from ideas of global and even interplanetary communication in The Discovery of a New World (1638) and A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (1640), Wilkins builds suspense through twisting plots, alternates science with embedded stories of historical trickery, and showcases impossible codes—the manual's version of fiction—only to self-reflexively tease the reader for not being able to reach the correct solutions. Richard West, in a poem introducing Mercury, writes: “ ' Tis not like Juglers tricks, absurd, when shown; / But more and more admir'd, the more 'tis known” (lines 77–79). Yet Wilkins's manual is a trick, though not an absurd one. In the beginning, readers “know.” They solve code alongside the narrator, gradually gaining confidence in their new subversive literacy. By the end of the manual, however, more is left unknown than solved. Mercury invites readers into a new world, emphasizing that the way will be “easie,” yet, halfway through, abandons readers to codes that cannot be solved based on the explanations provided (89) (Extrait) 

ARTIFACT

Ariane Fennetaux
Women's Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century
Although eighteenth-century women were increasingly in charge of running the house, the domestic interior afforded them very little actual privacy. Having a locked writing desk, let alone a room of one's own, was a luxury that few eighteenth century women enjoyed. Yet, from the end of the seventeenth century, every woman, regardless of her rank or status, had one or several pairs of tie-on pockets, which were detachable items of clothing rather like bags worn under a woman's skirt and accessed through slits in her overdress. Often hand-made by women from remnants of fabric and allowing them to keep at hand all the instruments needed for needlework, they encapsulated, in their making and use, the domestic role of women as keepers of the house. But they also allowed women to go out of the domestic interior and, as one of the few places women could call their own, pockets were key to their experience of privacy. The artifacts not only enable us to address the question of women's relationship to the interior but also the construction of female interiority. (Extrait)

Paul J. Young
“Ce lieu de délices”: Art and Imitation in the French Libertine Cabinet
By 1777, when Damon, the young protagonist of Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain, admits: “j'avais beaucoup de curiosité; ce n'était plus Mme de T... que je désirais; c'était [son] cabinet,” architecture had become an important motif in eighteenth-century French literature, and space, as Denon's tale demonstrates, was often pressed into the service of eroticism. Nowhere was architecture's erotic potential more widely explored than in the number of libertine writings that appeared during the last century of the ancien régime, and throughout the century, the libertine text provided an arena in which authors reflected upon the changes that architecture underwent in France as early as the latter part of the seventeenth century. As architects moved to incorporate “commodité” into their plans for living spaces, creating smaller and more intimate rooms that contrasted with the larger, more formal spaces of the previous century, libertine writers put these spaces into play, mining them for their erotic potential, and making the niche, the alcôve, the boudoir, and the cabinet, which were central to eighteenth-century French notions of architecture, mainstays of the libertine text. (Extrait)

DECOR

Meredith Martin
Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition
The sudden death of England's Queen Mary ii (1662–94) in December 1694 elicited an outpouring of national grief that manifested itself in massive funeral processions and a splendid mausoleum designed by Christopher Wren. In his eulogy at her funeral, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, praised Mary for being an “incomparable wife” to William iii, and extolled her charity, economy, and humility: “How good, how happy a life was this! ... not of vain pleasure, and soft and unprofitable ease, but of true usefulness and comfort.” Later writers similarly celebrated Mary's domestic virtues—recalling, for instance, how she spent her days practising needlework with her ladies. She was also praised for her self-restraint. In the third edition of King William's Royal Diary (1705), which contained a section on “The character of his royal consort, Queen Mary ii,” the anonymous author points out that, if the queen had indulged at times in projects of “Architecture and Gardenage,” “she had no other inclinations besides this, to any Diversions that were expensive; and since this employed many Hands, she was pleased to say, That she hoped it would be forgiven her.” “As to the Sobriety which relates to the Palate,” the author continues, she “was so far from being fond of great Dainties, that I heard her once say, That she could live in a Dairy.” (Extrait)

Clara Tuite
Maria Edgeworth's Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity, and Colonial Allegory in The Absentee
This essay explores the fictional representation of interior decoration as an allegory of internal colonialism in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812). My title and epigraph quote a souvenir fridge magnet, a popular item of interior decoration, found in the gift shop of the New York Public Library. I quote it for its suggestion of déjà-voodoo as a site or place, and for its spatialization of temporality and temporalization of space. Edgeworth's fiction satirically exposes the fashionable interior space and temporalization of regional space that are the out dating and anachronizing of Ireland by imperial England. In examining how this occurs, my essay adapts the syncretic religious cult of voodoo to an Irish colonial context. Where voodoo involves  magic and witchcraft, especially the use of charms and spells, and combines political, cultural, and religious uses, I use the term “déjà-voodoo” to describe Edgeworth's alle gorical practice, which meets the act of imperial anachronizing with the spell of Irish cultural memory, reclaiming outdated, unfashionable, or defunct forms of Irish culture, making them present, and resignifying them with new meaning. The term déjà-voodoo refers then to an oppositional form of Irish memory work. (Extrait)

IMAGINATION

Kathleen Lubey
Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison's Imagination
The interiors of the eighteenth-century mind housed a singular and celebrated faculty that endowed each subject with a self-contained capacity for excitement, appreciation, and pleasure: the imagination. The pleasures of the imagination, writes Joseph Addison, edify and diversify a subject's autonomous capacity for delight because they allow him to “converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another Light, and discovers in it a Multitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind.” Addison's famous lines describe the polite aesthetic stance of the Spectator's presumably refined and self-conscious readers. The imagination, portable and ever available to the subject's own use, accommodates an interior, “secret” life replete with beautiful spectacles, narrative engagement, and the satisfaction of virtual ownership, a “kind of Property” in all visible things. Addison envisions an infinitely renewable dynamic of pleasure between a man and his world, one in which the realms of rational discourse are extended by his ability to generate “conversations” with the beautiful objects that traverse the boundary between his exteriors and his mind. In short, this scene describes an English gentleman whose imagination orders his body and mind, offering him the energy of internal action, the calm of bodily composure, and the pleasures of feeling as though he masters his surroundings. (Extrait)

Maximillian E. Novak
The Cave and the Grotto: Realist Form and Robinson Crusoe's Imagined Interiors
In this essay on Daniel Defoe's use of the related images of the cave and the grotto in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, I will stress his imaginative processes and their sources. I think, then, that at the outset it is important to state two critical notions with which I am in complete agreement. The first is that Robinson Crusoe is a realist text. This has been argued forcibly by what seems like an army of critics from Walter Scott in the nineteenth century to Ian Watt and Michael McKeon in the twentieth. Scott praised the “unequalled dexterity with which our author has given an appearance of reality to the incidents which he narrates,” and Watt argued that Defoe was the first master of “formal” or “circumstantial” realism.² The second (and perhaps more controversial) point is that fictional narratives that are generally considered realist texts are frequently made to seem more real by the use of dream and fantasy, from the dreams and drug-induced scribbles of Clarissa after she has been raped to the grotesque figures and grim cityscapes of Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop. Crusoe has his dreams and fears of otherworldly beings on the island, but his island and its objects have a concreteness that has impressed critics from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Virginia Woolf. If my discussion seems to stress the less tangible aspects of the island, at no time do I consider these as being in opposition to the real. (Extrait)