©2007 Danielle Bobker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2007 Danielle Bobker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Shape of Intimacy: Private Space and the British Social Imagination, 1650-1770 By: DANIELLE BOBKER Dissertation Directors: Jonathan Kramnick Michael McKeon “The Shape of Intimacy” explores the significance of a growing material culture of privacy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literary history. In recent years, places such as the drawing room and coffee house have come to exemplify emergent norms of domestic and civil sociability. My project shifts our focus to less familiar spaces: the many variations of the closet, the period’s quintessential private room, and the carriage, sometimes characterized as the closet’s mobile counterpart. Closets and carriages, I argue, are not merely incidental settings in an increasingly quotidian literary landscape; rather, for many British writers of the period, they serve as vehicles for an array of charged and unstable extrafamilial encounters. Tracking the wide range of formal innovations and affective investigations associated with closets and carriages, my dissertation illuminates the double movement of the period’s social imagination, which retreats into real and projected intimacies even as it reaches out into ever more expansive, abstract, and anonymous public realms. The first chapter studies the convention of naming printed collections after closets and cabinets. I argue that publishers invoked these elite, exclusive spaces to affirm the cultural capital of knowledge circulating faster and further than ever before, thereby ii shoring up an enduring paradigm of reading as voyeurism. Turning from printed closets to courtly ones, Chapter Two considers the slippery navigations of power and pleasure in Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count de Gramont, suggesting that the orientalist flourishes in an intrigue set in a Restoration bathing closet – an interior Charles II had redesigned in Ottoman fashion – work to underscore the declining political stakes of homoerotic alliances. Chapter Three centers on Jonathan Swift’s poem about the pair of privies he built on his friends’ country estate. Composed a few decades before water closets would become the newest site of intra-domestic retreat, “Panegyric on the Dean” links the breakdown of communal values to the excretory solitude that seems a travesty of closet prayer. The final chapter contrasts carriage sociability in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey with earlier satirical scenes of awkwardness between strangers on the road. The vehicle called the Vis-a-vis is Sterne’s figure for the possibility of intimate anonymity. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jonathan Kramnick, Michael McKeon, Paula McDowell, and Joan Scott, my awe-inspiring dissertation committee, for their generosity from the start to the finish of this project. My gratitude is also owing to Elin Diamond, Marcie Frank, Matt Buckley, Carol Percy, and Carol Sanders for formative courses and encouragement at crucial moments, and to many friends and colleagues at Rutgers who read and discussed my work with me at various phases and provided much-needed distraction, including Kristie Allen, Joseph Chaves, Kristin Girten, Natasha Hurley, Kathy Lubey, Lisa Lynch, Carla McDougall, John Rogers, Alison Shonkwiler, Sunny Stalter, Kathryn Steele, Alex Socarides, Rich Squibbs, and Margaret Anderson. I am indebted to the Rutgers English Department and the Graduate School for financial assistance for studying, writing, and traveling over the course of the degree. Among the many excellent forums for discussion and collaboration I benefited from, two Mellon programs, the Summer Dissertation Workshop and the Historical Interpretation Seminar, were especially great. The pleasure of completion is immeasurably enhanced by the love and friendship of Claudine Crangle, Tracy Bohan, Andrea Aster, and Dahna Weber, and my family, Ann, Ron, and Adam Bobker, Nadine D’Aguiar, Hannah and Sadie Bobker, and Millie Allaun. I thank them, and above all my tireless and fearless partner, Sina Queyras. This is for her. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv List of Illustrations vi Introduction: The Shape of Intimacy, 1650-1770 1 Chapter One: Closets Broken Open and Cabinets of Love: 14 Figuring the Intimacy of Print Courtly Closets • Prayer Closets • Cabinets of Curiosity • Virtual Closets and Cabinets • Peeping: Virtual Erotics in the Cabinet of Love Chapter Two: Orientalism, Female Favoritism, and the Bathing Closet 68 in Memoirs of Count de Grammont Whitehall Inside Out • Orientalism, Intimacy, and the Bath • Miss Hobart, Miss Temple, and Roxane Chapter Three: Jonathan Swift’s Privy for Two 108 Doesn’t shit have a history? • The Rise of the Water Closet • Problematizing the Privy • Intimacy at the Edge of the Country House Chapter Four: Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental Journey 153 Part One: Before Sterne • Spectacular Coaches: Looking up and looking down • Pedestrians: Looking in to look down • Reluctant Familiarities: Looking across Part Two: A Sentimental Journey • Sterne’s Post-Chaise • The Desobligeant, the Preface, and the Closet • The Vis a Vis and Lust in Transit • Intersubjective Form Conclusion 202 Vita 205 v List of Illustrations Figure 1. The axis of honor in a formal house. 19 Source: Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Figure 2. Frontispiece. William Dawes, Duties of the Closet. 23 Engraving by J. Pine. Figure 3. Frontispiece. John White’s Rich Cabinet 41 Figure 4. Frontispiece. Curiosities: Or, The Cabinet of Nature. 48 Figure 5. The Serraglio Point of Constantinople. 83 Engraving by B. Randolph. Figure 6. Les quatre Facardins. Engraving by J.M. Moreau. 87 Figure 7. Miss Hobart and Miss Temple. Engraving by C. Delort. 92 Source: Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, Sir Walter Scott, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1905). Figure 8. Miss Hobart and Miss Temple. 93 Source: Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, Henry Vizetelly, ed. (London: Vizetelly, 1889). Figure 9. “A plaine plot of a privie in perfection.” 116 Figure 10. “A godly father sitting on a draught.” 129 Figure 11. “A plaine plot of a privie in perfection” (detail). 131 Figure 12. A mid-seventeenth-century traveling coach. 166 Source: Liza Picard, Restoration London (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997). Figure 13. The Stage Coach, Or the Country Inn Yard (1747). 169 Source: William Hogarth, Complete Engravings, eds. Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968). vi Figures 14 and 15. Two vis-à-vis carriages. 181 Source: A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry (Volume 2), ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (New York: Dover, 1959). Figure 16. Whitsuntide Holidays (1783). 186 Source: Guildhall Library Print Room. vii 1 Introduction: The Shape of Intimacy, 1650 - 1770 Intimacy is still a very flexible category of experience, just as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Naming a sense of interpersonal connection or, more generally, the pull we feel towards any object of interest as we come to know it better, intimacy draws into a conceptual continuum many different forms of closeness: physical, verbal, erotic, emotional, and intellectual alike. Stronger than mere acquaintance, intimacy insists on intensity rather than endurance: an attachment that flares up then fades away is not for that reason any less eligible for the category. We can easily grasp intimacy’s ongoing and essential breadth if we compare it to conversation, for instance, or intercourse, words that were roughly interchangeable with it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but whose common meanings have narrowed considerably in recent usage.1 Intercourse defined a wide range of commercial, verbal, sexual, and spiritual transactions, and could also refer to a physical space, a passageway or entrance. Conversation originally denoted what we would call “co-presence,” the “action of… having one's being in a place or among persons.” It was crucially a physical relation, hence “criminal conversation,” the legal term for adultery in the period. Despite intimacy’s ongoing resonance and reach, however, our literary and historical research in this area has tended to focus on the feelings and relationships we can most easily recognize and name, such as marriage and the family, romantic love (and romanticized forms of erotic love, straight and queer alike), and friendship.2 This dissertation calls attention to some of the less familiar – in many ways less conventionalized and institutionalized – forms of intimacy of the past by approaching them from the outside in as it were, through the lens of two prevalent and prominent 2 intimate spaces in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain: the many variations of the closet, the period’s quintessential private room, and the carriage, sometimes characterized as the closet’s mobile counterpart. Closets and carriages, I argue, give shape to some of the most compelling interpersonal dramas in the writing of the period. Focusing particularly, though not exclusively, on the moment of closets’ and carriages’ concomitant proliferation in British material and literary culture, from around the time of the Interregnum, when closets (and texts called closets) began filling up with all kinds of curios and collections, to the later eighteenth century, when the thrill of driving displaced the primacy of the passenger seat in carriages (and writing about carriages), I show