Rooms Not Quite Their Own: Two Colonial Itinerants, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, and Narratives of Roomlessness

Abstract

Rooms Not Quite Their Own:Two Colonial Itinerants, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, and Narratives of Roomlessness Ruchi Mundeja (bio) After all books and plays are written some time, some place by some person affected by that time, that place, the clothes he sees and wears, other books, the air and the room and every damned thing. (Wyndham and Melly 101; emphasis added) In 1910, a pamphlet written by Mary Higgs and Edward E. Hayward and commissioned by the National Association for Women's Lodging Homes was published in England. The title and sub-heading are arresting in their urgency: "Where Shall She Live? The Homelessness of the Woman Worker." The urgent note is struck even more insistently when the writers begin by stating that England is "face to face with a new problem in our national life—the woman worker" (2). This pamphlet preceded by just about twenty years the publication of Virginia Woolf's landmark A Room of One's Own, a text that went on to address, seemingly for all times to come, the subject of women and space. It is however necessary to recognize the decided difference in standpoints. The Higgs and Hayward document addressed the question of space for the woman worker in England at a very rudimentary level. Woolf's polemics, by contrast, incline towards spaces that would be conducive to women's creativity. Widely divergent as these tracts may be, one looking at the subject in a utilitarian manner and the other world-changing in its vision, the [End Page 87] question of women's rooms is at the center of both these inquiries. And yet Higgs and Hayward, in suggesting the upheaval in England's urban fabric as more women emerged into public space and hence looked for places of habitation, undeniably provoke a recalibration of our understanding of the 'room' as private, secluded, domain. The bias towards understanding the word 'room' as a space of shelter and retreat is supported by its etymological origins. What stands out at first glance is its association with the roomy. For example, the ancient Germanic variant carries implications of spaciousness (Ayto 428).1 An entry in the Oxford English Reference Dictionary invokes associations of "capaciousness" and another entry defines room as a partitioned space, suggestive of its contours of seclusion (Pearsall and Trumble 1252). The Old English word for room was "cofa," which as the ancient equivalent for the modern-day "cove," inclines towards notions of protection and sanctuary (Ayto 428). The Higgs and Hayward survey reveals the state of women's rooms in the England of the early twentieth century to be an embattled space, where the private and public are divided only by a thin line. Admittedly, their tone is conservative since it is women's safety from the potential moral danger of fluid living arrangements that concerns the authors. The document is nevertheless starkly suggestive of the squeezed spaces that passed as rooms for lower class working women in early twentieth-century England. Their inquiry covers the gamut from private lodging houses to municipal lodgings, girls' hostels, and shelters. These are rooms contoured differently from the bourgeois understanding of room as private domain. Most importantly, Higgs and Hayward's document is an indicator of the marked rise in boarding houses and bedsits for single women in this period; given that these were often cramped and porous spaces, reading the room through the exclusive lens of privacy is rendered untenable. A lot of significant work on the phenomenon of women's boarding houses by historians and literary scholars has been published in recent times. Emily Cuming, in Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012, emphasizes how invocations of home are all too often tied to ideas of self-contained units "as opposed to multiple occupancy; home ownership rather than rentings" (2). Configuring the idea of dwelling along a less nostalgic, more materialist axis, Cuming's work asks us "to reevaluate conventional ways of linking interiors, housing and identity" (1). [End Page 88] Historians such as Leonore Davidoff in her work on "The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century England" and literary scholars like...