Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both Englishand French on all aspects of imaginative prose in the period 1700–1800,but will also examine papers on late 17th-century or early 19th-centuryfiction, particularly when the works are discussed in connection withthe 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, eroticcabinets, far-flung grottoes, ornamental dairies, and the gildedquarters of colonial parvenus in London: these interiors make up thisspecial issue. Unlike the ancestral homes that have supplied ourvisions of eighteenth-century interiors—from the prison of Mr B'sLincolnshire estate to the “lofty and handsome” rooms of Darcy'sPemberley—the interiors here are move able, protean, and eminentlymalleable. And unlike the Gothic grandeur of Squire Allworthy'sParadise Hall or the terror-ridden corridors of Udolpho, Otranto, andMazzini, these interiors spring from fresh lineages and inventions, andbelong more to the laws of imagination than to those of patrimony andhistory. (Extrait)
SECRECY
Katherine Ellison
Cryptogrammatophoria: The Romance and Novelty of Losing Readers in Code
Though his language schemes may have been practical failures, JohnWilkins knew how to make readers feel as if by opening the pages of hiscryptography manual, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger(1641), they were embarking on an underground adventure of intrigue, anexploration as exciting as traveling to a new world but even moredangerous 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 andeffective 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, alternatesscience with embedded stories of historical trickery, and showcasesimpossible codes—the manual's version of fiction—only toself-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 moreand more admir'd, the more 'tis known” (lines 77–79). Yet Wilkins'smanual is a trick, though notan absurd one. In the beginning, readers “know.” They solve codealongside the narrator, gradually gaining confidence in their newsubversive literacy. By the end of the manual, however, more is leftunknown than solved. Mercuryinvites readers into a new world, emphasizing that the way will be“easie,” yet, halfway through, abandons readers to codes that cannot besolved 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 ofrunning the house, the domestic interior afforded them very littleactual 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 orseveral pairs of tie-on pockets, which were detachable items ofclothing rather like bags worn under a woman's skirt and accessedthrough slits in her overdress.Often hand-made by women from remnants of fabric and allowing them tokeep at hand all the instruments needed for needlework, theyencapsulated, in their making and use, the domestic role of women askeepers of the house. But they also allowed women to go out of thedomestic interior and, as one of the few places women could call theirown, pockets were key to their experience of privacy. The artifacts notonly enable us to address the question of women's relationship to theinterior 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... queje désirais; c'était [son] cabinet,” architecture had become animportant motif in eighteenth-century French literature, and space, asDenon's tale demonstrates, was often pressed into the service oferoticism. Nowhere was architecture's erotic potential more widely explored thanin the number of libertine writings that appeared during the lastcentury of the ancien régime,and throughout the century, the libertine text provided an arena inwhich authors reflected upon the changes that architecture underwent inFrance as early as the latter part of the seventeenth century. Asarchitects moved to incorporate “commodité” into their plans for livingspaces, creating smaller and more intimate rooms that contrasted withthe larger, more formal spaces of the previous century, libertinewriters put these spaces into play, mining them for their eroticpotential, 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 1694elicited an outpouring of national grief that manifested itself inmassive funeral processions and a splendid mausoleum designed byChristopher 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: “Howgood, how happy a life was this! ... not of vain pleasure, and soft andunprofitable 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 herladies. She was also praised for her self-restraint. In the thirdedition of King William's Royal Diary(1705), which contained a section on “The character of his royalconsort, Queen Mary ii,” the anonymous author points out that, if thequeen had indulged at times in projects of “Architecture andGardenage,” “she had no other inclinations besides this, to anyDiversions that were expensive; and since this employed many Hands, shewas 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 decorationas an allegory of internal colonialism in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee(1812). My title and epigraph quote a souvenir fridge magnet, a popularitem of interior decoration, found in the gift shop of the New YorkPublic Library. I quote it for its suggestion of déjà-voodoo as a siteor place, and for its spatialization of temporality and temporalizationof space. Edgeworth's fiction satirically exposes the fashionableinterior space and temporalization of regional space that are the outdating and anachronizing of Ireland by imperial England. In examininghow this occurs, my essay adapts the syncretic religious cult of voodooto an Irish colonial context. Where voodoo involves magic and witchcraft, especially the use of charms and spells, andcombines political, cultural, and religious uses, I use the term“déjà-voodoo” to describe Edgeworth's alle gorical practice, whichmeets the act of imperial anachronizing with the spell of Irishcultural memory, reclaiming outdated, unfashionable, or defunct formsof Irish culture, making them present, and resignifying them with newmeaning. The term déjà-voodoo refers then to an oppositional form ofIrish memory work. (Extrait)
IMAGINATION
Kathleen Lubey
Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison's Imagination
The interiors of the eighteenth-century mind housed a singular andcelebrated faculty that endowed each subject with a self-containedcapacity for excitement, appreciation, and pleasure: the imagination.The pleasures of the imagination, writes Joseph Addison, edify anddiversify a subject's autonomous capacity for delight because theyallow him to “converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companionin a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, andoften feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields andMeadows, than another does in Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kindof Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivatedParts of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So that he looks upon theWorld, as it were, in another Light, and discovers in it a Multitude ofCharms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind.” Addison's famous lines describe the polite aesthetic stance of the Spectator'spresumably refined and self-conscious readers. The imagination,portable and ever available to the subject's own use, accommodates aninterior, “secret” life replete with beautiful spectacles, narrativeengagement, and the satisfaction of virtual ownership, a “kind ofProperty” in all visible things. Addison envisions an infinitelyrenewable dynamic of pleasure between a man and his world, one in whichthe realms of rational discourse are extended byhis ability to generate “conversations” with the beautiful objects thattraverse the boundary between his exteriors and his mind. In short,this scene describes an English gentleman whose imagination orders hisbody and mind, offering him the energy of internal action, the calm ofbodily composure, and the pleasures of feeling as though he masters hissurroundings. (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 notionswith which I am in complete agreement. The first is that Robinson Crusoeis a realist text. This has been argued forcibly by what seems like anarmy of critics from Walter Scott in the nineteenth century to Ian Wattand Michael McKeon in the twentieth. Scott praised the “unequalleddexterity with which our author has given an appearance of reality tothe incidents which he narrates,” and Watt argued that Defoe was thefirst master of “formal” or “circumstantial” realism.2The second (and perhaps more controversial) point is that fictionalnarratives that are generally considered realist texts are frequentlymade to seem more real by the use of dream andfantasy, from the dreams and drug-induced scribbles of Clarissa aftershe has been raped to the grotesque figures and grim cityscapes ofDickens'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 impressedcritics from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Virginia Woolf. If my discussionseems to stress the less tangible aspects of the island, at no time doI consider these as being in opposition to the real. (Extrait)