Adrift at Home: National Belonging and Narrative Form in the Rooms of Twentieth-Century British Fiction

ADRIFT AT HOME: NATIONAL BELONGING AND NARRATIVE FORM IN THE ROOMS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION BY TANIA E LOWN-HECHT DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Kirkpatrick Professor Vicki Mahaffey, Chair Assistant Professor Matthew Hart, Columbia University, Director of Research Professor Antoinette Burton Assistant Professor Andrew Gaedtke ii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines representations of interior space in twentieth-century British and Irish texts, where the question of “home” has an urgency that is particular to a century in which personal and national spaces underwent extraordinary transformation. I examine national change at the level of the interior room, where characters expressly or tacitly pursue a stable home, even as the rooms that constitute their houses are increasingly drafty, mobile, and unsettled. In novels by Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, J.G. Farrell, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing, and W.G. Sebald, I analyze how representations of destabilized interior spaces are mobilized on behalf of larger arguments about imperial politics in which the relatively stable framework of national identity in the nineteenth century gives way to a more dispersed and disrupted sense of Englishness in the twentieth century. The novels I read stage a conflict between the house as a secure space of the nation or national symbolic, and the house as a space unsettled by colonial encounters, war, and immigration. Political upheaval is not merely experienced in but enacted through domestic space, where the room becomes a site of national conflict and occasionally the source of military, imperial, or political power. Through their representation of unsettled interiors, these novels critique “territorial nationalism” as a key geographical construct that delineates subjectivity. In these novels, the “home” is disoriented in both its material forms (the house) and metaphorical forms (citizenship and national affiliation). In the twentieth century, changes to interior life give rise to changes in literary form. The representation of rooms as bounded but continually changing spaces works as a critique of realist form, which presupposes more stable versions of subjectivity and more stable narrative forms. These novels offer an alterative model that privileges fluidity, instability, and unsettledness. The room offers a distinctive metaphorical territory for novelists because as an enclosed but fluid iii space, it can simultaneously work as a metaphor for England’s unsettled national interior space, for the space of the novel, and for the interior space of the mind. Space was once considered the sphere of fixity and solidity, in contrast to time, which was conceived as boundless and unstable; in the last few decades, human geography has countered these assumptions to show that space is also a sphere of heterogeneity. The novels I read both anticipate and critique human geography by representing interior spaces as at once stable and shifting. That is, rather than present interior spaces as endlessly in flux, they show interior space as a site of tension between the desire for solidity and the reality of continuous change. These fictional rooms work to expose how spaces that are assumed to be coherent, closed, and safe are unstable, open, shifting. The breakdown of the solidity of the room is enacted through the breakdown of the stability of the realist narrative. Disorienting narrative spaces perform the disoriented space of the home; these “disorienting” formal choices take shape through shifting narrative points of view, grammatical evasiveness, digressive sentence or chapter structures, and interruptions or revisions to genre. Interior spaces are continuous with a changing social world and offer new ways of understanding how this social world is destabilized by imperial and late imperial political conditions and war in Britain, especially in relation to interior consciousness. I argue that rooms are a mechanism for demonstrating disruption and disorientation in characters’ social worlds and their subjectivity. As a metaphor, the room exposes the interrelation between disruptions to material life and to psychological life; interior space is at once a more compelling and more unstable metaphor for national and individual identity. Whereas the home was once seen as a site of seclusion, safety, or escape, these novels demonstrate that the relative stability of national interiors and local interiors give way, making everyone an exile, even at home. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful for the support of the many wonderful mentors that helped guide this dissertation and I am touched and proud to see their imprints on every page of this project. First, I am indebted to my chair, Vicki Mahaffey, who nurtured this project from its inception and whose encouraging words and sage advice helped this project and its author grow tremendously. Her guidance and love goes far beyond advisor and advisee, and I will always be grateful to have her as an example and a friend. I am also grateful for the demanding and consistent feedback of Matt Hart and for our early independent study that helped feed my understanding of space, Sebald, and how to argue for my ideas. Antoinette Burton taught me to ask better questions, and this has been an invaluable skill for my work and for my life. I admire her scholarship and her approach to academic work more deeply than I can express. Her warm and encouraging guidance during the early drafts of these chapters was an oasis during the challenging years of writing and her intuitive mentorship amazed me throughout my time in graduate school. I am also grateful to Andy Gaedtke for his perceptive and astute responses to this project. Finally, I am indebted to Gaurav Majumdar, who has advised, harangued, mothered, and championed me for ten years now. Gaurav taught me how to be a scholar in the first place and has continued to be my most ardent supporter through all the ups and downs of graduate school. His impact on my life and work has been profound. I am also lucky to have had many brilliant and supportive friends and colleagues to read my work over the years. My dissertation writing group, Claire Barber and Ryan Sheets, kept me accountable and provided crucial insight on the first, most dreadful drafts of each of these chapters. My brother-in-law, Michael Simeone, talked me through panicked moments more times than I can count and helped me stay positive about my writing and about my future. From v my exams to my defense to my career choices, Michael has always asked me the questions that have helped me see more clearly, and I am grateful to call him family. I am grateful to my parents who always encouraged me to pursue my passion for literature. I would be remiss not to thank them also for tolerating me during the early years of graduate school when my taste in family-friendly movies left a lot to be desired. Finally, I am grateful to my husband, Christopher, who is not only my favorite human being but also my favorite editor. He has read every word of this dissertation, and his insight on each chapter improved this project immeasurably. Thank you for listening to me talk through each idea, for encouraging my progress, and for always believing my ideas are worth sharing. This project is dedicated to you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: OUTSIDERS WRITING INTERIORS…………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1: “NOTHING SETTLED OR STAYED UNBROKEN”: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S HOUSE OF FICTION………………………………………………………………………… 21 CHAPTER 2: “GOING TO PIECES”: POLITICAL SPACE AND VIOLENT FORMS IN THE ANGLO-IRISH COUNTRY HOUSE………………………………………………………… 62 CHAPTER 3: MAPPING THE POSTCOLONIAL INTERIOR………………………………111 CHAPTER 4: QUEER SEBALD………………………………………………………………156 CONCLUSION: GOING HOME: FICTIONS OF BELONGING…………………………….193 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………201 1 INTRODUCTION: OUTSIDERS WRITING INTERIORS I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born […] Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it.” Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (91) Historical upheaval in the twentieth century shook the physical and figurative foundations of home in Europe. In a century where two world wars demolished countless buildings, the growth and decline of empire remapped territories across the globe, and immigration radically transformed the populations of major European cities, both the place and the idea of “home” became increasingly indefinite, insecure, and unlocatable. Georges Perec, the son of Polish Jews who were forced into exile during World War II, describes losing both the site of home (the “house where I may have been born”) and the sense of home (a point of “reference, of departure, of origin”).1 For Perec, the desire for a “stable, unmoving” place to call home is offset by his recognition that “such places don’t exist,” especially for an orphan raised by distant family members in a country where he never felt at home (91).2 Perec’s 1974 collection of essays, Species of Spaces, is a melancholy catalog of spaces he occupies but never feels at home in, from the page to the bedroom to the apartment.3 In his essays, his longing for spatial stability 1 Perec, a prolific and light-hearted writer, was best known for La Disparition (in English, A Void), a novel he wrote without the most commonly-used letter in both French and English--the letter “e.” Born in Paris in 1936, Perec was forced to uproot and move when Paris was occupied, and both his parents died in the war (his father in the Foreign Legion, his mother in Auschwitz).

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