Interior Description and Perspective in Deloney and Bunyan

Abstract

I. Described Interiors and Perspectival RepresentationThe essays in this special issue investigate question of how interior spaces were rendered before widespread use of narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse, which permit internal focalization on a fictional world and its contents (among other effects). The strong metaphorical relation between inside of a room (and its contents) and inside of a mind (and its thoughts and perceptions) has been reinforced in literary criticism both by terminology of insides and inwardness and by literary history. Indeed, sense of that indicates beginning of a modern subjectivity has been associated with Renaissance lyric poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Donne (Ferry) and with soliloquys of Elizabethan stage.1 This project began with a search through early modern prose fiction for descriptions of interiors so that they might in turn be examined for traces of perspectivism.A cognitivist approach would suggest that an association of interiors of physical spaces and perceptions is a nearly inevitable consequence of human embodied consciousness and natural language.2 George Lakoff writes, the CONTAINER schema is inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily (Lakoff 273). Building on work of Mark Johnson, Lakoff explains that body-based experience of our human selves as containers that exist inside containers such as buildings (272) predisposes us to treat boundaries of our visual field as walls of a container (e.g., of sight, out of mind) and to extrapolate spatial metaphors for consciousness such as knowing is seeing and mind is a body moving in space (Lakoff and Turner 158). The metaphorical relation can also be directed inward, as when an individual's mind, like a room, is represented as open, closed, cluttered, or even furnished with books.A culturally and historically sensitive cognitivism should be open to different expressions of container schemas in earlier literary periods, and literary history does indeed note their presence, with variations. A Cartesian image of body as container for soul-lodged in flesh like pilot of a ship-locates perceptive soul looking outwards and steering self {the mind moves body in space)? Other early modern images employ container schema to pry into its metaphorical contents. A locus classicus for representation of a mind as a container for books occurs in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser represents memory as a library filled with books and decaying scrolls inside skull of House of Alma, which itself takes form of a body containing Alma, soul.4 In part because of religious allegories that associate consciousness, memory, visuality, and soul, as in this Spenserian example, inwardness has been tethered to a Protestant poetics of emblems, meditations, and progresses of soul.5 Inwardness is an Anglo-Saxon word of ancient vintage, while according to OED first usage of to indicate inner character or nature dates to 1701, beginning of century of novel. English literary history associates closeted self-examination of Protestant conscience with development of early novel's themes of containment and emergent consciousness, as in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), where Pamela retreats to a private room to pour out her heart in letters.In historical period between Renaissance meditative lyric of inward eye and interiority of early eighteenth-century novel falls period of emergent early novel, represented here by fiction of Thomas Deloney (c. 1543-1600) and John Bunyan (1628-1688). Writing about sixteenth-century romances, Elizabeth Hart asks when writers' techniques developed intermental and intramental subframes discussed by Alan Palmer (2004). …