Abstract
This chapter provides an account of the “spatial turn,” first in the broader context of the humanities and social sciences, then in the field of modernist studies, and finally in critical readings of Woolf. Acknowledging the significance of spatial questions in Woolf’s work, as illustrated by the much-discussed representations of urban space and the figure of the flâneuse, Zink contends that rooms are essential to Woolf’s engagement with space. The chapter also offers a framework for “reading rooms,” based on Woolf’s own insights into the nature of space and place, arguably anticipating later observations by theorists such as Bachelard and Lefebvre. The discussion ends with a “biographical detour,” designed to show how Woolf’s own spatial history informs her writing of rooms.
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Notes
- 1.
Wegner provides an extensive list of contributors to current debates on space and spatiality, including geographers, architects, anthropologists, philosophers, art, literary and cultural critics. Another, “contentious”—in the editors’ words—because inevitably incomplete, list of thinkers on space features in the volume Key Thinkers on Space and Place (2004), edited by Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine .
- 2.
However, as Richter points out, Bergson’s theory was very much part of the philosophical climate at the time, and so Woolf had at least indirect access to it. She also came in touch with it via Marcel Proust’s work, which she started to read in 1922.
- 3.
Frank responded to criticism in “Spatial Form: an Answer to Critics” in Critical Inquiry 4.2 (1977): 231–52 and “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections” in Critical Inquiry 5.2 (1978): 275–90.
- 4.
For a brief discussion of the effect of the telephone on the individual’s experience of space in Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years, see the chapter “Writing Spatial History.”
- 5.
As Robert T. Tally Jr. notes, here Jameson draws on Raymond Williams’s “distinctions between dominant, residual and emergent cultural forms” in Marxism and Literature (1977), 121–7 (40).
- 6.
For recent summaries of this debate, see Andrew Thacker (2005) and Wendy Gan (2009).
- 7.
See, for instance, Deborah L. Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000).
- 8.
The name of the movement itself “drawn from military theory […] asserts ideals of art as onslaught and of the artist as hero” ( Reed 2).
- 9.
The introduction organises a variety of theoretical thinking on space under the headings “spaces of language,” “spaces of self and other,” “metonymic spaces,” “agitated spaces,” “spaces of experience” and “spaces of writing” ( Crang and Thrift 3–25).
- 10.
Edward S. Casey’s impressive study “The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History” charts the development of different conceptions of place and space and explains what he sees as “the marginalization of place as a significant concept” (134). According to Casey , the latter is not typical of the first centuries of modernity alone but goes back as far as late Hellenism and Neoplatonism through to the medieval and Renaissance periods (134). For Casey, this can be explained by the increasing awareness of place being restricted to “the specificities of a given locale” and therefore not comprehensive enough to “account for such things as distance and extension, indeed anything sheerly quantitative that refuses to be pinned down to place” (134). In the early modern epoch, place gives in to the rising significance of space to the effect that at the end of the eighteenth century, with Kant, space takes on a decidedly transcendental meaning: “space is no longer situated in the physical world but in the subjectivity of the human mind that formally shapes this world” ( Casey 136).
- 11.
Like Freud, Jung accompanies his analogy with a disclaimer, observing that built space cannot entirely account for the mind as a living organism, “for in the mind there is nothing that is just a dead relic, since all is living, and our upper story, the conscious, is under the constant influence of the living and active foundations” (119).
- 12.
For the links between Bloomsbury and psychoanalysis, see Stephen Frosh’s “Psychoanalysis in Britain: ‘The Rituals of Destruction’” in A Concise Companion to Modernism (Blackwell, 2003), 116–37.
- 13.
Frosh sees the relationship between modernism and psychoanalysis as a case of cross-fertilisation, arguing that “psychoanalysis , at least in its pre-World War II form, is an emblematic modernist discipline” (116).
- 14.
Lefebvre defines the spatial practice of a society as what “secretes that society’s space,” in other words, the material production—through people’s use—of space (38). He views representations of space as “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists,” which is suggestive of maps and other forms of encoding of space (38). This dimension underscores the political/ideological potential of such conceptualisations, as, for instance, in maps charting imperial expansion. Woolf alludes to these practices in her debut novel by telling Santa Marina’s story of colonialisation in terms of the change of colour on cartographic representations of the island. As for representational spaces, these refer to “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (39).
- 15.
Significantly, Chap. 2 in Lee’s biography is entitled “Houses” and retells in hauntingly beautiful prose the Stephen siblings’ return to Talland House in 1905, years after their mother’s death.
- 16.
Woolf refers to the Duckworth and Stephen branches of the family as well as to “Thackeray’s grand-daughter” (MB 182).
- 17.
Significantly, Vanessa Bell’s painting “Apples: 46 Gordon Square,” dated circa 1909–10, incorporates a section of exterior space into her still life, inviting the viewer’s gaze to slip from the apples on the tray to the aperture in the background.
- 18.
Letter to Violet Dickinson, dated 30 October 1904.
- 19.
“Bohemian,” however, didn’t mean doing away with the privileges of their class completely. As Hermione Lee points out, the Stephen siblings still used the services of their old cook Sophie Farrell as well as those of “a maid to open the door to visitors” (Virginia Woolf 205).
- 20.
V. Bell to V. Woolf, 24 October 1904, Berg.
- 21.
V. Bell to V. Woolf, 1 November 1904, Berg.
- 22.
Details can be found in Anna Snaith’s “‘At Gordon Sq. And nowhere else’: The Spatial and Social Politics of Bloomsbury.”
- 23.
Letter 227 to Violet Dickinson, dated May 1905 (L1: 190).
- 24.
Three of the titles considered by Woolf for Three Guineas—The Open Door, Opening the Door, A Tap at the Door—revolve around the same spatial metaphor of liberation from the oppression of “the private house.”
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Zink, S. (2018). Rereading the Modern. In: Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_2
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