Drafty Houses, Imperial Boredom, and Collecting in Woolf’s Lumber Room

Abstract

Drafty Houses takes its title from a reference made by Woolf in her 1919 essay, “Modern Fiction.” “There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards,” she complains about conventional novels. “And yet—if life should refuse to live there?” Forster, Eliot, and Woolf’s symbolic uses of space and place register the inescapable impact of war and colonialism in interconnected English and non-English imagined spaces. By challenging the underlying spatial logic that governs the fitness or rightness of rooms, houses, churches, gallery spaces, and the like, these authors offer different routes out of and away from normative and conventional modes of thinking about modern life and modernity. To be slightly fanciful, we may imagine the authors as themselves walking through the house of British culture, critically surveying the rooms they enter, and recommending renovations that alter how such spaces feel. Woolf assigns certain positive valences to draftiness that a typical architect or interior decorator would not; and certainly in their own ways, as I have shown in the previous two chapters, Forster and Eliot also ascribe value to transgressions like forgetting and making exits that disrupt the insularity of their ideological, symbolic houses. Reading spatially foregrounds two interconnected insights. First, it shows how deeply English places and Englishness as a cultural construct were marked by war consciousness. This has become almost a critical commonplace in Woolf studies, but Forster’s Alexandrine and London writings, and Eliot’s prose about London’s churches and the “Idea of Europe” also prove fertile grounds for the kind of critical cross-pollination that Clare Buck calls for, to “integrate the methods and insights of transnational First World War studies into analysis of mainstream twentieth-century literature.” Second, all three writers register in different ways that there is no England without empire. Directly in Forster’s experiences with Mohamed El-Adl or diffusely through Eliot’s criticism of wealthy English drawing-room culture, I show in previous chapters that colonialist mentalities shape and constrain early twentieth-century British spaces. Here, I will look at Woolf’s museum spaces which she enters as reviewer, and then at her novelistic forays into drawing-room parties through the perspective of two men whom I characterize as bored young men. In each case—reviewer, Jacob Flanders, and North Pargiter—their expressed and evident boredom at highbrow museum exhibits or in society parties hinges on a criticism of empire that is elided by most others assembled there too. The resistant perspectives of these three very different writerly personae fixate on reminders of imperialism that robs London of its glamour as the first city of the British Empire in the interwar era.