Mid-Century Gothic : the Agency and Intimacy of Un- Canny Objects in Post-War British Literature and Cul- Ture

Mid-Century Gothic : the Agency and Intimacy of Un- Canny Objects in Post-War British Literature and Cul- Ture

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Mid-century gothic : the agency and intimacy of un- canny objects in post-war British literature and cul- ture https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40189/ Version: Public Version Citation: Mullen, Lisa (2016) Mid-century gothic : the agency and in- timacy of uncanny objects in post-war British literature and culture. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Mid-Century Gothic: The Agency and Intimacy of Uncanny Objects in Post-War British Literature and Culture by Lisa Mullen Thesis submitted to Birkbeck, University of London in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Birkbeck, University of London 2016 1 The work presented in this thesis is the candidate’s own. Signed __________________________________ Date ____________________________________ 2 ABSTRACT This thesis reassesses the years 1945-1955 as a hingepoint in British culture, a moment when literature, film and art responded to the wartime hiatus of consumer capitalism by resisting the turn towards conspicuous consumption and self- commodification. This resistance can be discerned in a gothic impulse in post-war culture, in which uncanny encounters with haunted, recalcitrant or overassertive objects proliferated, and provided a critique of the subject/object relationship on which consumerism was predicated. In the opening chapter, the ubiquity of bombsite rubble is brought into dialogue with mid-century mural painting both in literature and at the Festival of Britain. In the second chapter, Barbara Jones’s Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibition of ephemera is considered alongside the work of the Independent Group. The third chapter examines how the period’s new media and computing hardware further complicated the status of the subject, through an analysis of the work of George Orwell, Alan Turing and William Grey Walter. In the fourth chapter, haunted furniture and domestic ephemera threaten to become rival subjectivities, in works including Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise Longue. The fifth chapter considers the ways in which mid-century clothes and apparel enabled or restricted the autonomy of their wearers, through a comparative analysis of the Coronation, the British Everest expedition, and Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana. Finally, the onset of atomic anxiety is explored through stories about bombs, prosthetics and bodily penetration including Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room. The thesis concludes that the intimacy and agency of these unruly objects remain as half-submerged cultural signposts offering an alternative understanding of twentieth-century materialism. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Mid-century Things – an introduction 8 The mid-century moment 10 Theories of objects and things 16 Mid-century gothic 21 ‘The world of things’: chapter summaries 25 PART ONE: AGENCY 1 Rubble, walls and murals: the threshold between abstraction and materiality 28 ‘A wall will fall in many ways’: William Sansom’s war stories 31 ‘A good wall will paint itself’: Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth 33 ‘An ivy-clad ruin in the foreground’: the murals of Brideshead Revisited 45 ‘A place of stillness, a place apart’: Hugh Casson and the bombed churches of London 52 ‘The nature of the wall’s surface’: ruins as refuge in The World My Wilderness 59 ‘Exploding the Regatta Restaurant’: murals at the Festival of Britain 65 2 Seeing things: found objects and the eye of the beholder in the exhibitions of Barbara Jones and the Independent Group 71 ‘I know what I like’: Black Eyes and Lemonade 75 ‘Much better to have real, smaller things’: Jones and the ‘camera eye’ 83 ‘Monstrosities and curiosities’: outsider cultures and disrupted temporality 87 ‘A little dog is nice’: autonomous objects gaze back 90 ‘Oriental flavour’: popular alterity and mass alienation 95 ‘Torture through the ages’: laughing machines and working-class dreams 101 ‘So different, so appealing’: the Independent Group’s mediation of art and objects 105 4 3 Machines and spectrality: the gothic potential of technology in Orwell, Grey Walter and Turing 115 Visions of the uncanny: cathode ray tubes, telepresence and the mediated subject 120 ‘Involuntary and compulsive transmitters’: radar and the ghosts of war 124 ‘A tiny world with its atmosphere complete’: Winston’s glass paperweight in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four 126 Ghosts, machines and ‘the thing in the head’: reflection and speculation in the human brain 136 ‘Jigging like a clumsy Narcissus’: Grey Walter’s neurotic robots 143 ‘Machine wins’? Lacan, Turing and the problem of consciousness 148 ‘Ghosts and bogies’: machine intelligence and the supernatural 155 PART 2: INTIMACY 4 Neophilia and nostalgia: the trouble with gentrification 167 ‘Something awful will happen’: ‘The Haunted Mirror’ and the murderous bourgeoisie 170 ‘Arrested energy’: immovable objects in Bowen’s domestic gothic 174 ‘True purposes’: the thingly agenda of The Victorian Chaise Longue 183 5 Strange beauty: Costume, performance and power in 1953 200 ‘It’s the Red Shoes that are running away’: the uncanny power of costume 203 ‘Clothes disappear’?: libidinal transactions in Corridor of Mirrors 208 ‘Cheap material cannot please’: sartorial status and human finery 211 ‘Dazed by ritual’: materializing excess at the Coronation 213 ‘As crooked as her carcase’: the failure of royal glamour in Gloriana 222 ‘It looks as if it’s wearing you!’: science, synthetics and society in The Man in the White Suit 230 The crucifix and the cloth cat: disputed materials on the summit of Everest 235 5 6 Bombs, prosthetics and madness: the troubling intimacy of things 243 ‘Now you see into the atoms themselves’: scale and the problem of nearness 246 ‘It was a personal matter’: putting things in their place 252 ‘Shocked out of speech’: fragmentation and integration in The Undefeated 258 ‘If I’d known it was going to be like this, I’d never have started’: boffins as human prosthesis 263 ‘Doing what the machine wants’: C. P. Snow’s The New Men 268 ‘“Or something” doesn’t exist’: use-value as resistance in The Offshore Island 271 ‘Stop worrying’: phallic weapons and comic bombs 273 Conclusion: Beyond the mid-century 278 Bibliography 286 Acknowledgements 298 6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS P. 60 Cover of Bombed Churches as War Memorials, illustration by Barbara Jones. (Architectural Press, 1945); cover of The World My Wilderness, illustration by Barbara Jones (Collins, 1950) P. 69 The Englishman’s Home, mural by John Piper displayed on the outside of the Homes and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival of Britain South Bank Exhibition (Liss Llewellyn Fine Art) P. 76 Poster for Black Eyes and Lemonade by Barbara Jones, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1951 (Whitechapel Gallery Archive) p. 80 Cover of The Things We See: Indoors and Out by Alan Jarvis (Penguin, 1946) P. 85 Installation view of Black Eyes and Lemonade, Whitechapel Art Gallery. (Whitechapel Gallery archive); ‘A little dog is nice’: the Airedale fireplace at Black Eyes and Lemonade, installation view. (Whitechapel Gallery Archive) P. 110 Installation view of Parallel of Life and Art, ICA 1953 (The Estate of Nigel Henderson); installation view of ‘Patio and Pavilion’ at This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery 1956. (The Estate of Nigel Henderson) P. 116 Advertisement for Pye televisions, Daily Mail Television Handbook (Associated Newspapers) P. 144 William Grey Walter’s ‘tortoise’ robots in front of a mirror, illustration from 1951 Exhibition of Science guide, p.33 (HMSO, 1951) P. 171 Stills from The Haunted Mirror, showing the two interiors reflected by the mirror. The Dead of Night, dir. by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer (Ealing Studios, 1945) P. 207 Moira Shearer as Vicky in quasi-royal garb visiting Lermontov’s villa. Still from The Red Shoes, dir. by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Archers, 1948); Edana Romney as Mifanwy, dehumanized by her accessories. Still from Corridor of Mirrors, dir. by Terence Young (Apollo Films, 1948) P. 231 Alec Guinness as Sidney wearing, or being worn by, his creation. Still from The Man in the White Suit, dir. by Alexander Mackendrick (Ealing Studios, 1951) P. 254 David Farrar as Sammy Rice, menaced by a giant brandy bottle. Still from The Small Back Room. (The Archers, 1949) P 266 Integration of man and machine. Still from The Dam Busters, dir. by Michael Anderson (ABPC, 1955) 7 Mid-century things: An introduction The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia.1 This thesis reassesses the years 1945-1955 as a hingepoint in British culture, a moment when literature, film and art responded to the wartime hiatus of consumer capitalism by resisting the turn towards conspicuous consumption and self- commodification which threatened to be – and arguably would become – definitive of the later 1950s and 1960s. This resistance can be discerned in a gothic impulse in postwar culture, in which uncanny encounters with haunted, recalcitrant or overassertive objects proliferated, and provided a critique of the subject/object relationship on which consumerism was predicated. A sense

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