Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels by Karen Lipsedge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels by Karen Lipsedge Trevor Speller Karen Lipsedge. Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. xi + 215. $95. Homes are built as much by the imagination as by brick and mortar: this is one of the central insights of Gaston Bachelard’s classic The Poetics of Space. Poetry, memory, and dreams, when read together, can produce a “poetics” of houses and other places. Bachelard’s claim—that we experience space in literary and cultural terms—makes his phenomenological account an important origin for contemporary readings of literary spaces. In scouting the locations of eighteenth-century novels, Ms. Lipsedge comparably reads “the domestic interior as represented in the eighteenth-century British novel” by putting these imaginary rooms into a meaningful historical and literary context. Domestic Space therefore builds on such previous studies as Alistair Duckworth’s The Improvement of the Estate, Simon Varey’s Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, and Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of Things. Ms. Lipsedge’s chief end is to bridge the imagined and real spaces of domestic life. Reversing Bachelard’s emphasis, she writes that “if the modern reader is to have [a] . . . clear understanding of these imagined houses, he or she needs to know about the ‘real’ eighteenth-century house and garden.” This “real” architectural space is largely conceived and produced by architects’ and interior decorators’ writings, blueprints, paintings, and engravings, proffered to the Georgian “polite élite.” Discussions of Palladian architecture and the writings of architect and translator Isaac Ware form a helpful groundwork for the study. Changes in Georgian rooms and interior design are catalogued. For instance, interior decoration developed “a lighter, more inviting appearance . . . due to innovative materials . . . and the increased use of lighter hues for painting.” Her inverted commas around “real,” however, merely wink at a more complicated theoretical issue. She passes over why the influence of architecture should outweigh that of other cultural products and practices in defining domestic space. Architects and interior designers can make claims about how interiors ought to be used, but poets, painters, and essayists speak just as forcefully as they imagine such spaces. Ms. Lipsedge allows plays and pictures to help define her sense of domestic space, but standard works seem overlooked, for example, Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” or the response to it by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Similarly, there is a brief reference to one of Hogarth’s engravings for Marriage à la Mode, but its inclusion only reveals the shortcoming of not examining the cultural impact of Hogarth, and other artists, more fully. The chapters of Domestic Space consistently cycle back to rooms in Harlowe Place, Mr. B’s estates, and Vauxhall Gardens, so much so that these spaces begin to feel familiar and lived in. There are readings of Richardson and Burney in the chapters on “Social Rooms,” “Private Rooms,” and “Garden Rooms.” Each chapter also begins with a brief architectural and cultural exposé of the room investigated. This allows Ms. Lipsedge to compare domestic spaces between authors. For instance, chapter four considers garden rooms in Pamela, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Evelina. The chapter’s conclusion frames garden rooms as a stepping-stone for Evelina, Betsy Thoughtless, and Pamela. They are surprised and empowered by the hero’s intrusion [End Page 122] into the arbor, which “facilitates the novel’s happy ending.” Clarissa’s fortunes are reversed, for Lovelace’s entrance into the ivy-summerhouse ultimately proves fatal to her. The strength of Domestic Space is in its readings of Clarissa. Recognizing Clarissa’s private spaces as necessary to her sense of interiority, much is made of the closets, parlors, and gardens in the novel. For instance, Ms. Lipsedge argues that Clarissa’s small parlor initially constitutes a gendered social space under her control. Clarissa has her own parlor for private retirement and spiritual reflection, which is anomalous, for such rooms were meant for family gatherings, sometimes with guests. Her division from the rest of the family is thus spatially coded. Solmes later proposes to Clarissa in this very room, transforming it into “a public and artificially...