UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Disappearing Walls: Architecture and Literature in Victorian Britain Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1mk2h39c Author Cannon, Benjamin Zenas Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Disappearing Walls: Architecture and Literature in Victorian Britain By Benjamin Zenas Cannon A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Kent Puckett Professor Andrew Shanken Spring 2014 Disappearing Walls: Literature and Architecture in Victorian Britain © 2014 By Benjamin Zenas Cannon Abstract Disappearing Walls: Architecture and Literature in Victorian Britain By Benjamin Zenas Cannon Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Prof. Ian Duncan, Chair From Discipline and Punish and The Madwoman in the Attic to recent work on urbanism, display, and material culture, criticism has regularly cast nineteenth-century architecture not as a set of buildings but as an ideological metastructure. Seen primarily in terms of prisons, museums, and the newly gendered private home, this “grid of intelligibility” polices the boundaries not only of physical interaction but also of cultural values and modes of knowing. As my project argues, however, architecture in fact offered nineteenth-century theorists unique opportunities to broaden radically the parameters of aesthetic agency. A building is generally not built by a single person; it is almost always a corporate effort. At the same time, a building will often exist for long enough that it will decay or be repurposed. Long before literature asked “what is an author?” Victorian architecture theory asked: “who can be said to have made this?” Figures like John Ruskin, Owen Jones, and James Fergusson radicalize this question into what I call a redistribution of intention, an ethically charged recognition of the value of other makers. Reading novels by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and theory and history by John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, I show how authors use architecture to explore the deep kinship between textual and material production, and in doing so admit unsupervisable agencies—both human and natural—into their work. As I demonstrate, Ruskin and other prominent theorists imagine architecture as a set of dynamic surfaces which are open to the marks not only of humble workmen but also of everyday users and natural processes. Seen from the perspective of his architectural writing, I argue, Ruskin’s theories of literary and artistic vision locate the imaginative ground of literary representation not in unmarked nature but rather in a multiply authored object world. In the theory of the design reform movement and the daringly experimental architecture displays of the Sydenham Crystal Palace, I recover an understanding of creative work as embodied thought that opens itself up to transformative reconstruction and alteration over time. As Hardy struggles textually to embody architectural processes (in Jude the Obscure) and Dickens discovers utopian social possibilities in the failure of architectural planning (in Martin Chuzzlewit), I show how Victorian literature understands the work of the author as a participation, across time and space, in communal and material acts of making. 1 To Jon and Alice, for raising me curious i Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Disappearing Wall 16 Chapter 2. Working on History: Reconstruction and Reform 28 in the Sydenham Crystal Palace and Carlyle’s Past and Present Chapter 3. The Cathedral’s Labyrinth: John Ruskin 48 and the Allegorical Architecture of Victorian Representation Chapter 4. “Quite a Different Verisimilitude: 72 Sculpture and the Order of Resemblance Chapter 5. “The True Meaning of the Word ‘Restoration’”: 96 Architecture and Obsolescence in Jude the Obscure Chapter 6. Transatlantic Notworks, American Unbuildings 116 ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ian Duncan for his tireless support throughout the writing of this dissertation—for keeping me going, for keeping me honest, for providing a model of unflinchingly rigorous intellectual work that I will carry with me always. I would also like to thank Kent Puckett, whose incredible range of interest and uncanny instinct for the unthought thought has opened up potentials in my research that I never would have glimpsed on my own. I am very fortunate to have encountered my outside reader, Andrew Shanken, early in my graduate career. His expansive interdisciplinary engagement has profoundly shaped not only this project but my sense of the connections that are conceivable between different forms of cultural production. Thanks to everyone in the Berkeley English faculty for their intellectual generosity and heroic interestedness. Thanks, above all, to my fellow graduate students, for struggling against the stream with me. iii Introduction In his influential Against Architecture, Denis Hollier writes that “There is…no way to describe a system without resorting to the vocabulary of architecture. When structure defines the general form of legibility, nothing becomes legible unless it is submitted to the architectural grid. Architecture under these conditions is the archistructure, the system of systems” (33). Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, architecture, understood as this “system of systems,” occupied a central position in efforts to understand Victorian literature and culture. Literalizing a larger critical turn toward an architecturally metaphorized project of “deconstruction,” critiques of architecture as a mode of social discipline or bourgeois economic dominion formed the basis, in many ways, for a disciplinary understanding of Victorian culture. Gilbert and Gubar’s attic, Eve Sedgwick’s closet, David Miller’s omnipresent Chancery court, Tony Bennett’s exhibitionary complex, Nancy Armstrong’s and Mary Poovey’s domestic interiors—Victorian architecture has provided a model for understanding the very principle of modeling, the ways in which power shapes the world according to an abstract plan.1 At the heart of this disciplinary understanding are two works which continue, in more and less obvious ways, to frame interpretations of Victorian material culture. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish figures the panopticon as the paradigmatic epistemic form of the nineteenth century, a model of power relations that extends far beyond architecture proper. Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project argues that nineteenth-century architecture, with its historicist formal vocabulary and its emphasis on interiority, both expresses and obscures the actual political and economic relationships of the new industrial age. In combining and extending these two readings, mainstream Victorian criticism has generalized the complex configurations of the panopticon and the Benjaminian interior into explanatory figures for the rise of the bourgeoisie and the institutionalization of new social, sexual, and economic relations. Critics tend to read this process of quasi-architectural institutionalization, in turn, as accounting for the rise of the novel as the century’s dominant literary form. By this account, architecture and the novel are essentially interchangeable means by way of which culture exerts force in producing and policing bourgeois subjects. The novel, in this tradition, is essentially architectural—not in the sense of having a concrete aesthetic structure, but rather in that it takes on the cultural work that Foucault and Benjamin assign to real architecture. This dissertation has two interwoven purposes. First, it takes Victorian architecture theory and practice seriously, seeking to understand its own terms and protocols. I will treat architecture not as a cultural symptomatology but as a complex set of theories and practices that 1 Sarah Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; David Miller, The Novel and the Police, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments; Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. See chapter 1 of this dissertation for a more comprehensive consideration of this tradition and its continuing prevalence in Victorian studies. 1 is deeply interested in the unpredictable object histories of the buildings it produces and studies. By doing so, my dissertation moves beyond the Benjaminian and Foucaldian paradigms that have long dominated the critical framing of Victorian material culture. Though Foucault and Benjamin are, of course, distinct in important ways—most obviously, in the messianic telos that informs Benjamin’s project–they are univocal in their insistence that we read beyond the surface, that we attend to the structures that subtend the distracting particulars of cultural production. As I will demonstrate, important figures in Victorian thought do not consider architecture primarily as a functional and symbolic medium that builds social and economic structures into real space.2 For them, architecture is less a set of models for organizing subjects and more a surface that allows us to attend to the multiplicity of intentions that we encounter in the object world. Second, this dissertation reformulates the ways in which we might understand architecture as both a central