All 4 entries tagged Space

Dickens's buildings and the partial perspective

What do we imagine when we think of Dickens, and why?

This was the question with which Lynda Nead began her keynote at Dickens and the Visual Imagination this week, and one which I kept coming back to over the last few days, with a couple of instances prompting further reflection on Nead's talk.

The first instance was watching David Lean's Great Expectations, having realised this week that I've never seen the film in full; crucially though, I felt as though I had because its key images are so familiar - as Nead said, it's so much a part of our visual imagination of Dickens. On reaching the scene in which Pip arrives in London for the first time, I was reminded of an instance a few years ago when my memory of the text had become confused by memory of the film, which previously I'd seen fragments of in undergraduate lectures. At the time, I was writing a section of my PhD thesis on arrivals into London, and dug out Great Expectations intending to write about Pip's entrance into London and the foreboding vision of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral that looms over his arrival. Upon re-reading the book, I was surprised to find that the episode is only a slight, brief mention in which Pip recounts "I saw the great black dome of St Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison" (chapter 20); a mere handful of words for what had become, for me, a strikingly visual image.

Image of Pip's arrival in London in Lean's Great Expectations

I was convinced that the episode was textually described in far more vivid and lengthy detail; it wasn't the text, but the image from Lean's film that I had in mind. The image had mingled into my memory of the text to create a new, composite image existing, for me, somewhere between text and film. Nead spoke this week about how the visual imagination isn't so much a process of "geological layering" but rather one of creative transformation which explodes the boundaries of both text and image and creates new imaginative forms in its wake; it's a description that seemed more than fitting for my memory of Great Expectations.

In watching Great Expectations this week I was particularly attentive to a further point of Nead's talk, in which she noted that we never see a complete vision of the exterior of Miss Havisham's house, only partial fragments - the clock tower, the gate, the steps. We might think that we have a complete vision of the house, but in fact this is largely constructed through the house's interior; so powerful are the images of Miss Havisham's rooms that they work to build a vision of the house from the inside out.

The interior of Miss Havisham's house

This resonated strongly with the theme of Andrew Sanders's talk on Dickens's rooms, in which it was notable that so many of the illustrations from the novels depict interiors; rarely (at least, from what I can think), do we see exteriors of the houses. And today, as I was reading Julian Wolfreys' Writing London, these ideas came to mind again. Discussing a passage from Our Mutual Friend, he notes the resistance to the whole, complete vision in Dickens's architectural description: 'the entire architectural meaning is brought into question, deconstructed as it is into a series of ambiguously architectural details... The eye is moved from piece to piece, but the gaze is ultimately refused an overall meaning, a monumental, organized presence on which it can fix' (p. 150)

How often does Dickens give us a description of the exterior of a house? When are we given the complete perspective of the whole, or is Nead's idea of Lean's construction of Satis House from "inside-out" true also of the written descriptions in Dickens's novels? How often are buildings constructed only from within or with a view to partiality?

And, to reorient Nead's question, what do we imagine when we think of Dickens's houses, and why? That is to say, what role does film play in the visual imagination of Dickens's buildings? Where do film/tv adaptations give us the complete exterior perspective that the text denies, and how does this play into our visual idea of Dickens's houses and other architectural forms?

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David Lean, Great Expectations (1946)

Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Palgrave, 1998)

Charlotte Mathieson : 15 Jul 2012 16:21 |  Tags: Architecture Charles Dickens Film Space Victorians |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spaces of Work, Britain 1770–1830 @ University of Warwick, 28th April 2012

This one-day conference held at the University of Warwick provided an excellent interdisciplinary analysis of the intersections between space and various forms of work in the Romantic period.

The discussions began with Karen Harvey's paper "Thinking through Boundaries: The House, Gender and Work" which explored masculinity and domesticity in the eighteenth century. Harvey began by suggesting a conceptual shift from the use of the word "home" to the concept of "the house" in studies of domesticity, positing that "house" can be used to signal more than the physical shell but that it carries a set of meanings that are distinct from the idea of "home". Harvey then turned to look at masculine identity and the house, exploring men's role in the management of the house through a selection of notebooks of 18th century men. These displayed the active role of men in household management, and demonstrated the irrelevance of the division between discourses of home, work, business and so on. She ended by moving out to the position of the house in the wider space of national community, and how men's domestic management helped to understand the porosity of the house to the wider world. The paper drew on her recently published book The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain which I'm hoping to read at some point.

Of the papers on the two panels that followed, I was most interested in Kate Smith's paper on "The Work of Shopping". Smith argued for a reconceptualisation of shopping as "work", by way of offering a renewed understanding of critiques of female shopping - which become repositioned as critiques of the public act of female work. Smith looked at how shopping could be understood as skilled work, involving embodied knowledge, active participation, and a keen eye for quality; this focused in particular on the importance of female hands, looking at the surrounding contexts of female hands as signifiers of identity and class status, and the problematic visibility of female hands on display when shopping. This opened up an interesting set of intersecting discourses between embodiment, space and work, drawing out new ways of understanding the typical discourses around female bodies in public spaces; I was also reminded of ideas around the meanings of skin as a physical boundary, and associated issues around encasing the female body.

Other spaces of work discussed throughout the day included the bookshop, rural spaces, wharfs and warehouses, and theatres - a rich and varied set of contexts that made for an interesting and engaging day.

Charlotte Mathieson : 09 May 2012 20:13 |  Tags: Conferences English Literature Nineteenth Century Space |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Update: Rural Geographies CFP Deadline Extended

Follow-up to Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840–1920 from Charlotte's Research blog

The deadline for paper proposals for the symposium Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920 has been extended to the 15th August.

See the previous blog or webpage for more information.

Charlotte Mathieson : 25 Jul 2011 13:51 |  Tags: Conferences English Feminism Gender Space Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840–1920

I'm pleased to publish the Call for Papers for a symposium that I'm organising with my colleague Gemma Goodman on Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920.

Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth- to early-twentieth century have typically focused on “women and the city”, rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.

This half-day symposium offers a long-overdue forum in which to resituate the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives we aim to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces and contribute to discussions about theoretical approaches to the (rural)space-gender intersection.

Proposals are invited for short papers from scholars in literary studies, history, geography, and any other discipline; postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. Themes for discussion could include:

Ø theories of gender and rural place: what do we mean by rural space, how do we theorise “the rural” as a spatial context, and how does gender intersect?

Ø the impact of modernity;

Ø mobility: walking, vagabonds, pedestrians, wayward women;

Ø labour, class and gender in the country;

Ø masculinities;

Ø different ruralities;

Ø visibility/ invisibility

Please send a 300-word proposal for 15 minute papers by 29^th July to the conference organisers Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson

Gemma.Goodman@warwick.ac.uk  c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk

Charlotte Mathieson : 28 Jun 2011 21:10 |  Tags: Conferences English Feminism Gender Space Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem