The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century Tita Chico Cynthia Sundberg Wall . The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiii+316pp. US$35 (hb). ISBN 978-0-226-87158-5. When our students question the veracity of Defoe's and Richardson's first-person narration or fail to be convinced by Haywood's and Behn's plots, they remind us of certain basic problems about early narrative form. These first-time readers can also remark that novels today are expected to provide what creative writing classes call "setting," or a rhetoric of spatial description. That many early novels do not offer spatial description is the focus of Cynthia Sundberg Wall's The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. In a thoughtful study of a variety of prose forms, Wall narrates the transformation of description from the allegorical landscapes of late seventeenth-century prose narratives such as The Pilgrim's Progress to the well-wrought interior spaces of the Victorian novel. The argument of this capacious book is rather straightforward: Wall contends that Bunyan's readers were all too familiar with the settings he evoked emblematically, and thus did not require spatial description or even imagine that it was necessary; they shared what Wall calls a "cultural storehouse of visual expectation" (177). By the end of the eighteenth century, however, interior spaces were so varied that print texts devoted to their rendering needed to describe, rather than imply, these spaces and the objects within them. To elucidate this transformation, Wall traverses what she calls the "textual praxes of description" (20–21), a paradigm she develops from Philippe Hamon's argument that description is functional as well as aesthetic. In this way, Wall attends to the utilitarian purposes of description—she frequently refers to the "workhorses" (95) of description—and this recalibration of description helpfully supplements the ornamental reading of the eighteenth-century detail that Naomi Schor offered in Reading in Detail twenty years ago. While Wall's preoccupation is the convention of spatial description, she introduces two related "textual praxes of description" that culminated in the visually rich interiors of the Victorian novel. Wall first focuses on technologies and practices of seeing, and then considers eighteenth-century objects themselves. In the first conceptual section of the book, which extends from chapters 2 to 5, Wall reads diaries, cartographical surveys, maps, and scientific treatises to understand how technologies of seeing transformed spatial description. The "textual praxes" evident in the professional texts of cartographers, surveyors, diarists, and members of the Royal Society transformed seeing into a self-conscious activity, one that is best reflected in detailed description. Spliced along with these [End Page 250] observations are Wall's readings of novelistic examples by the likes of Defoe, Behn, Haywood, Aubin, and Richardson. Wall argues that these earlier writers were still operating under the cultural assumption shared by Bunyan that the reader will supply description and so needs only the implication of spatial description. Things in these texts operate in ways that spatial description will later. The architectural features of rooms in Clarissa, for instance, are rendered as the narrative requires them—that is, when Clarissa is at a doorway and not allowed to pass. In chapters 6 and 7, Wall turns to the increasing number of consumer objects that came to populate domestic interiors through the course of the century, arguing that consumerism and commerce both encouraged and depended upon the proliferation of spatial description. The argument that domestic spaces were newly adorned with a variety of utilitarian and decorative objects, many of which were purchased rather than inherited, is not new. But The Prose of Things offers a focused look at how commercial spaces and urban fashionability occasioned the spatial description of "things." The sheer number of decorative possibilities required that objects in this world be described and differentiated. By mid-century, interiors were not filled with uniformly familiar objects that readers could visualize without any specifics. Wall draws attention to the textual representation of these "things" in advertisements, auction catalogues, travellers' diaries, and country-house guidebooks, selecting passages that illuminate how...