Modernism, the City and the “Domestic Interior”: Fid-Bau Portal

Modernism, the City and the “Domestic Interior”

Shiach, Morag

This article argues that the overwhelming critical and historical focus on the figure of the flâneur in readings of literary modernism has led to the marginalization of key aspects of the experience of living and writing in the modern city: the marginalization, in fact, of the domestic interior. Having situated the reasons for the dominance of this critical paradigm, the article then explores whether we might be able to generate a comparably historicized cultural project, based on readings of Woolf, of Richardson, and of Pound and his circle, that engages with the more confined, and the more static terrain of the room as a way of reading the modern city. It analyzes some of modernism's key interiors, beginning with rooms in a number of Virginia Woolf's texts, and considering how they figure as a space of memory, as a framework for identities, and as a locus of security. It then examines the hierarchies of domestic spaces, the relations between the boundaries of the self and the boundaries of the room, and the troubling landscape of the suburban in Dorothy Richardson's novel Pilgrimage. Finally, in examining the cultural milieu of Ezra Pound, it considers how London interiors provide the physical and the metaphorical landscape for particular forms of modernist innovation in the early years of the twentieth century.