ADAM PATCH: We'll go back now, Shuttleworth—

(And that is all. He turns, and assisted by his cane goes out through
the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentousness
his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the
August moon.) (231)

Anthony can never patch things up again with his grandfather. The rented
grey house is a scene of family trust torn asunder, and no rapprochement
is possible. The setting also conveys the characteristic rootlessness
of American society, uneasy with the complexities of urban life and
nostalgic for a return to nature, and therefore always living nowhere
in-between. Anthony and Gloria are spoiled and aimless childish adults,
and their temporary residence is dissatisfying because they are forever
dissatisfied, perpetually waiting for the golden moment, hoping for the
release of funds from his grandfather's will, held in limbo financially as
well as spiritually.

After the climactic and life-changing incident at the grey house,
when Anthony and Gloria travel back to New York City by car, passing
through small towns and residential suburbs: "The drab visions of train-side
Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with
intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country"
(236). The inconsequential and vaguely noticed chain of locations reflects
the couple's insecure future and the state of the nation, progressing
haphazardly forward into metropolitan modernity. The narrator conveys
Anthony's thoughts:

Life, it seemed, must be a setting of props around one—otherwise
it was a disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in
longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no
one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of
indecision and regret. (236)

The imagery of dangerous natural and psychological forces here runs
counter to the Edenic visions of American frontier mythology and the
all-conquering determination of Manifest Destiny. Earlier, Anthony had
reflected upon what the new era entailed for him, when capitalist prosperity
limited opportunities for meaningful work and heroic action "—And there
used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things
a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or
juggling someone else's money" (98). Recognizing that "it's impossible for
an American to be gracefully idle" (60), he fails to perform any role other
than an inebriated idler, and the props he sets up are mainly bottles of
bootleg alcohol and glasses on speakeasy bars. While America builds its
smoky industrial landscape and raises titanic banking institutions to hold
all of its despoiled natural wealth, Anthony inhabits a world of temporary
residences—from his first, luxurious bachelor apartment on 52nd Street,
Manhattan, interspersed with three summers in the grey house, and
lastly to an insalubrious apartment with Gloria on Claremont Avenue,
"two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds" near Central Harlem.

One winter evening Gloria looks out from a window-sill of this
apartment to see "Palisades Park, where the brilliant revolving circle of
the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection
of the moon" (339). The mirrored artificiality of the wheel reflects the
whirling spiral of the Patches' fortunes as well as their distance from
the solid reality of nature. Natural rhythms and life cycles also play a
part in the associations with the moon, for Gloria at this point is also
at the end of her third decade and has no children, having earlier either
experienced a false pregnancy or induced a miscarriage with the aid
of an abortifacient. The loss or at least absence of children for Gloria
is another consequence of the emptiness of purpose associated with
the rented grey house. That is the locale where "It had occurred to the
estimable Gloria that she was probably with child" (172), the narrative
casually and uncertainly announces. Anthony takes an insouciant tone
in his discussion with her about a pregnancy and potential termination,
while Gloria's reluctance to accept parenthood is allied to her fear of
losing her beauty, as she complains: "afterward I might have wide hips
and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair" (173).
He says in frustration at both her and his indecision about what course
of action to take: "See here, Gloria, I'm with you whatever you do, but
for God's sake be a sport about it" (173). After confirming the end of
reflected upon what the new era entailed for him, when capitalist prosperity
limited opportunities for meaningful work and heroic action "—And there
used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things
a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or
juggling someone else's money" (98). Recognizing that "it's impossible for
an American to be gracefully idle" (60), he fails to perform any role other
than an inebriated idler, and the props he sets up are mainly bottles of
bootleg alcohol and glasses on speakeasy bars. While America builds its
smoky industrial landscape and raises titanic banking institutions to hold
all of its despoiled natural wealth, Anthony inhabits a world of temporary
residences—from his first, luxurious bachelor apartment on 52nd Street,
Manhattan, interspersed with three summers in the grey house, and
lastly to an insalubrious apartment with Gloria on Claremont Avenue,
"two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds" near Central Harlem.

One winter evening Gloria looks out from a window-sill of this
apartment to see "Palisades Park, where the brilliant revolving circle of
the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection
of the moon" (339). The mirrored artificiality of the wheel reflects the
whirling spiral of the Patches' fortunes as well as their distance from
the solid reality of nature. Natural rhythms and life cycles also play a
part in the associations with the moon, for Gloria at this point is also
at the end of her third decade and has no children, having earlier either
experienced a false pregnancy or induced a miscarriage with the aid
of an abortifacient. The loss or at least absence of children for Gloria
is another consequence of the emptiness of purpose associated with
the rented grey house. That is the locale where "It had occurred to the
estimable Gloria that she was probably with child" (172), the narrative
casually and uncertainly announces. Anthony takes an insouciant tone
in his discussion with her about a pregnancy and potential termination,
while Gloria's reluctance to accept parenthood is allied to her fear of
losing her beauty, as she complains: "afterward I might have wide hips
and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair" (173).
He says in frustration at both her and his indecision about what course
of action to take: "See here, Gloria, I'm with you whatever you do, but
for God's sake be a sport about it" (173). After confirming the end of
the (phantom or real) pregnancy, "[t]hey rejoiced happily, gay again with
reborn irresponsibility" (177).

However, Gloria's unwillingness to give space in her body to new
life haunts her for the rest of the narrative. After a shopping trip, Gloria
is lying asleep on a sofa, and "[h]er face was as untroubled as a little
girl's, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child's
doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and childish
heart" (191). At the same time when her final chance for a career as a
movie actress fails because she is considered too old after a screen-test
for a starring part, she walks along a street that Fitzgerald describes
through sentence fragments that act like abortive thoughts: "Little
girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks. The
nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets" (332).
Her own loss of youth and her unwillingness to commit to engendering
new life both collapse in her affective realisation: "'Oh, my pretty face,'
she whispered, passionately grieving. 'Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don't
want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what's happened?'" (333). Her
question reaches beyond solipsistic grief. Without a future in which she
can be her ideal self, or one in which she can reproduce her youth in a
child, Gloria cannot accommodate herself to the mutability of time and
matter. She and Anthony simply float along on a journey to nowhere,
renting space instead of building meaning and genuine substance into
their lives.

A sense of unrelenting unease in an unsettled universe is also reflected
in the final text that I wish to analyse. Nathanael West's novel *The Day
of the Locust* is usually read as a satire on the pitiable lives of people
who are drawn to the artificial world of Hollywood and the disconcerting
modern environment of Los Angeles, but I would like to consider some
deeper, philosophical claims. Of particular relevance is the depiction
of rented accommodation, starting with the San Bernardino Arms, the
apartment complex known to its residents as the San Berdoo, located in
the hills outside of central Los Angeles. The three-story building has a
plane back and sides but Moorish pink columns on the façade—a cultural
misrepresentation that is mirrored in the Hollywood studio sets and that
is replicated in the many other incongruous pre-postmodern houses that
the (phantom or real) pregnancy, "[t]hey rejoiced happily, gay again with
reborn irresponsibility" (177).

However, Gloria's unwillingness to give space in her body to new
life haunts her for the rest of the narrative. After a shopping trip, Gloria
is lying asleep on a sofa, and "[h]er face was as untroubled as a little
girl's, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child's
doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and childish
heart" (191). At the same time when her final chance for a career as a
movie actress fails because she is considered too old after a screen-test
for a starring part, she walks along a street that Fitzgerald describes
through sentence fragments that act like abortive thoughts: "Little
girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks. The
nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets" (332).
Her own loss of youth and her unwillingness to commit to engendering
new life both collapse in her affective realisation: "'Oh, my pretty face,'
she whispered, passionately grieving. 'Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don't
want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what's happened?'" (333). Her
question reaches beyond solipsistic grief. Without a future in which she
can be her ideal self, or one in which she can reproduce her youth in a
child, Gloria cannot accommodate herself to the mutability of time and
matter. She and Anthony simply float along on a journey to nowhere,
renting space instead of building meaning and genuine substance into
their lives.

A sense of unrelenting unease in an unsettled universe is also reflected
in the final text that I wish to analyse. Nathanael West's novel *The Day
of the Locust* is usually read as a satire on the pitiable lives of people
who are drawn to the artificial world of Hollywood and the disconcerting
modern environment of Los Angeles, but I would like to consider some
deeper, philosophical claims. Of particular relevance is the depiction
of rented accommodation, starting with the San Bernardino Arms, the
apartment complex known to its residents as the San Berdoo, located in
the hills outside of central Los Angeles. The three-story building has a
plane back and sides but Moorish pink columns on the façade—a cultural
misrepresentation that is mirrored in the Hollywood studio sets and that
is replicated in the many other incongruous pre-postmodern houses that
populate the city. These houses are built in a variety of styles ranging from "Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, [and] Tudor cottages [...]" (8). The multi-cultural blend suggests that modern California either has not found its own distinctive identity or that this is its identity, a world-embracing mélange, a global appropriation of architectural styles and borrowed cultural referents that combine into a universal declaration of America's exceptional right to claim everything and understand nothing. "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance," West's narrative voice declares, "no matter how tasteless, even horrible the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous" (8).

A pitiable monster in *The Day of the Locust* inhabits the saddest house in the Pinyon Valley, a bit higher up the road from the San Bernardino Arms. This is the residence of Homer Simpson (the original Homer Simpson), an innocuous lost soul, whose most distinguishing feature is his self-propelled hands. They operate independently of his own will:

> One day, while opening a can of salmon for lunch, his thumb received a nasty cut. Although the wound must have hurt, the calm, slightly querulous expression he usually wore did not change. The wounded hand writhed about on the kitchen table until it was carried to the sink by it mate and bathed tenderly in hot water. (42-43)

Martin Rogers argues that "Homer's inability to control his hands—to keep them ordered—results in a compulsive display of monstrosity, a body bereft of control and behaving as if animated but effectively dead" (374). Like Frankenstein's creature in his alienation, and like his detached, rented house—which Homer takes on the first day he is shown around LA “because he was tired and because the agent was a bully” (32)—Homer's hands reflect his whole existence, detached from companionship, not self-determined, unwilling and unable to form a lasting bond with his environment. His rented house is filled with artificial objects and strange incongruities: “Some of the plants were made of rubber and cork; others were real.” He also finds
populate the city. These houses are built in a variety of styles ranging from "Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, [and] Tudor cottages [...]" (8). The multi-cultural blend suggests that modern California either has not found its own distinctive identity or that this is its identity, a world-embracing mélange, a global appropriation of architectural styles and borrowed cultural referents that combine into a universal declaration of America's exceptional right to claim everything and understand nothing. "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance," West's narrative voice declares, "no matter how tasteless, even horrible the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous" (8).

A pitiable monster in *The Day of the Locust* inhabits the saddest house in the Pinyon Valley, a bit higher up the road from the San Bernardino Arms. This is the residence of Homer Simpson (the original Homer Simpson), an innocuous lost soul, whose most distinguishing feature is his self-propelled hands. They operate independently of his own will:

> One day, while opening a can of salmon for lunch, his thumb received a nasty cut. Although the wound must have hurt, the calm, slightly querulous expression he usually wore did not change. The wounded hand writhed about on the kitchen table until it was carried to the sink by it mate and bathed tenderly in hot water. (42-43)

Martin Rogers argues that "Homer's inability to control his hands—to keep them ordered—results in a compulsive display of monstrosity, a body bereft of control and behaving as if animated but effectively dead" (374). Like Frankenstein's creature in his alienation, and like his detached, rented house—which Homer takes on the first day he is shown around LA “because he was tired and because the agent was a bully” (32)—Homer's hands reflect his whole existence, detached from companionship, not self-determined, unwilling and unable to form a lasting bond with his environment. His rented house is filled with artificial objects and strange incongruities: “Some of the plants were made of rubber and cork; others were real.” He also finds
the [door] hinges had been carefully stamped to appear hand-forged
[....] a lamp with a paper shade, oiled to look like parchment [...] There
was a spool bed made of iron grained like wood [...] a Governor
Winthrop dresser painted to look like unpainted pine [...] On the wall
facing the dresser was a colored etching of a snowbound Connecticut
farmhouse, complete with wolf. (33-34)

The disconnection between Homer's core body and his appendages
emphasizes the aberrations of space in this description of the house's
furnishings, not just in the artificiality of materials made to look like plant
fibre, parchment, forged metal, or real wood. The "complete with wolf"
appended clause in the description of the painting strikes a further note
of intentionality, for the canine predator is not an artistic afterthought
but rather a necessary element to add regional authenticity to the fully
furnished New England landscape, making it even more oddly placed in
this western residence. The dissonance of a snowbound scene on the
wall of a California house lends a bizarre note of aesthetic derangement
that is reiterated in the incongruous movie-sets depicted elsewhere in
the text, where Napoleonic armies converge with Mississippi steamboats
(5-6) and a Greek temple collides with "Dutch windmills, the bones
of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan
temple" (98).

Homer's disjointed and blinkered view of the world does find some
relief in Nature, however; and *The Day of the Locust* offers other reminders
of how the natural world operates in contrast to the temporality and
uncertainty of modern civilization. In another scene, set far from the
housing estates, we are treated to a vision of the tough but beautiful and
refreshing original Pacific Coast territory: "It was full spring. The path ran
along the bottom of a narrow canyon and wherever weeds would get a
purchase in its steep banks they flowered in purple, blue and yellow. Orange
poppies bordered the path" (74)—and the passage runs for another three
paragraphs. Gardens on the grounds of houses feature in *The House of
the Seven Gables* and in *The Aspern Papers*. Gloria and Anthony Patch
in *The Beautiful and Damned* rent a bucolic country house in order to
escape the heat and boredom of summertime New York City. Homer's
the [door] hinges had been carefully stamped to appear hand-forged
[....] a lamp with a paper shade, oiled to look like parchment [...] There
was a spool bed made of iron grained like wood [...] a Governor
Winthrop dresser painted to look like unpainted pine [...] On the wall
facing the dresser was a colored etching of a snowbound Connecticut
farmhouse, complete with wolf. (33-34)

The disconnection between Homer's core body and his appendages
emphasizes the aberrations of space in this description of the house's
furnishings, not just in the artificiality of materials made to look like plant
fibre, parchment, forged metal, or real wood. The "complete with wolf"
appended clause in the description of the painting strikes a further note
of intentionality, for the canine predator is not an artistic afterthought
but rather a necessary element to add regional authenticity to the fully
furnished New England landscape, making it even more oddly placed in
this western residence. The dissonance of a snowbound scene on the
wall of a California house lends a bizarre note of aesthetic derangement
that is reiterated in the incongruous movie-sets depicted elsewhere in
the text, where Napoleonic armies converge with Mississippi steamboats
(5-6) and a Greek temple collides with "Dutch windmills, the bones
of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan
temple" (98).

Homer's disjointed and blinkered view of the world does find some
relief in Nature, however; and *The Day of the Locust* offers other reminders
of how the natural world operates in contrast to the temporality and
uncertainty of modern civilization. In another scene, set far from the
housing estates, we are treated to a vision of the tough but beautiful and
refreshing original Pacific Coast territory: "It was full spring. The path ran
along the bottom of a narrow canyon and wherever weeds would get a
purchase in its steep banks they flowered in purple, blue and yellow. Orange
poppies bordered the path" (74)—and the passage runs for another three
paragraphs. Gardens on the grounds of houses feature in *The House of
the Seven Gables* and in *The Aspern Papers*. Gloria and Anthony Patch
in *The Beautiful and Damned* rent a bucolic country house in order to
escape the heat and boredom of summertime New York City. Homer's
connection to nature is not exactly mysterious or transcendental, nor is
it purposely designed nor especially welcoming: he sits in his back yard,
facing the door of the garage, looking at "a sooty, brick incinerator and
a pile of rusty cans" as well as "the remains of a cactus garden in which
a few ragged, tortured plants still survived" (43). One of the cacti is in
flower, and Homer likes to watch a lizard who lives in a hole beneath it
and catches flies that stray over from the old cans.

As a betwixt and between resident of a rented house, accommodating
himself to a largely unnatural world, Homer is neither happy nor unhappy.
Alone in his empty house at night, he sings to himself the only song he
knows and afterwards feels "a pleasant sadness" about his life. The
many people and events that fill his life and his house from this point
are too numerous to recount here—covering chapters 13 through 25 of
the novel's twenty-seven chapters. But suffice it to note that after an
unruly party (more bezerk than the one in *The Beautiful and Damned*),
Homer is completely traumatized, his speech discombobulated so that
"[t]he words went behind each other instead of after" (145). His body also
reverts into a foetal position, and West uses free indirect discourse in a
passage that combines an image of the womb with earlier depictions of
the house into a philosophic thesis which could be applied to all of the
texts examined here:

> What a perfect escape the return to the womb was [...] Everything
> perfect in that hotel. No wonder the memory of those accommodations
> lingered in the blood and nerves of everyone. It was dark, yes, but
> what a warm, rich darkness. The grave wasn't in it. No wonder one
> fought so desperately against being evicted when the nine months'
> lease was up. (149-150)

The metaphor of the house has entered deeply existential territory, the
womb imagined not merely as a place of shelter and protection (or as a
void, as it is for Gloria in *The Beautiful and Damned*) but as a pre-existence
before a woeful and frustrating life begins, full of dissatisfaction and
confusion, and sometimes brutishness, where there is no refuge from
sadness, sorrow, humiliation, loneliness, and especially hopelessness.
connection to nature is not exactly mysterious or transcendental, nor is
it purposely designed nor especially welcoming: he sits in his back yard,
facing the door of the garage, looking at "a sooty, brick incinerator and
a pile of rusty cans" as well as "the remains of a cactus garden in which
a few ragged, tortured plants still survived" (43). One of the cacti is in
flower, and Homer likes to watch a lizard who lives in a hole beneath it
and catches flies that stray over from the old cans.

As a betwixt and between resident of a rented house, accommodating
himself to a largely unnatural world, Homer is neither happy nor unhappy.
Alone in his empty house at night, he sings to himself the only song he
knows and afterwards feels "a pleasant sadness" about his life. The
many people and events that fill his life and his house from this point
are too numerous to recount here—covering chapters 13 through 25 of
the novel's twenty-seven chapters. But suffice it to note that after an
unruly party (more bezerk than the one in *The Beautiful and Damned*),
Homer is completely traumatized, his speech discombobulated so that
"[t]he words went behind each other instead of after" (145). His body also
reverts into a foetal position, and West uses free indirect discourse in a
passage that combines an image of the womb with earlier depictions of
the house into a philosophic thesis which could be applied to all of the
texts examined here:

> What a perfect escape the return to the womb was [...] Everything
> perfect in that hotel. No wonder the memory of those accommodations
> lingered in the blood and nerves of everyone. It was dark, yes, but
> what a warm, rich darkness. The grave wasn't in it. No wonder one
> fought so desperately against being evicted when the nine months'
> lease was up. (149-150)

The metaphor of the house has entered deeply existential territory, the
womb imagined not merely as a place of shelter and protection (or as a
void, as it is for Gloria in *The Beautiful and Damned*) but as a pre-existence
before a woeful and frustrating life begins, full of dissatisfaction and
confusion, and sometimes brutishness, where there is no refuge from
sadness, sorrow, humiliation, loneliness, and especially hopelessness.
But, perhaps thankfully, the novel suggests, human life is also on a short lease, and it is not long before we either go insane or die.<fnref n="68" />

I could end there with that cheerfully morbid thought, in the Inferno of Hollywood—the novel ends with an apocalyptic scene of a riotous mob of people in front of a cinema for a movie premiere: “—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence” (166).<fnref n="69" /> But West’s image of the womb as a rented accommodation could be extended into a useful conclusion. In The House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe and Holgrave, reborn in marriage, leave the mother house of seven gables to a new life together in the country. In The Aspern Papers, the unnamed narrator returns to his study in England with the umbilical cord of his deception and loss of integrity still attached in the form of a baby, miniature portrait of the poet Jeffrey Aspern given to him by the spurned, virginal Miss Tita. If the theme of invasion and deceit dominates the image of rented rooms within larger houses in those two nineteenth-century texts, then the theme of dis-ease and dislocation runs through the two twentieth-century novels, in which semi-settled locations are aborted or miscarried. But novels also give our imaginations a new lease of life, a rebirth of creative energy within the house of fiction. These four texts reveal that depictions of rented accommodation are flexible conduits for questioning American national identity, for examining the moral fabric of American lives, and for exploring critical philosophical issues about the human condition.

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ The logical conclusion of that line of thought is expressed in the title of David Benatar’s philosophical argument *Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence*.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ My emphasis on Homer Simpson's lack of agency is explained by Chip Rhodes in a different way, as a failure of romantic desire (600-601). However, he finds a sense of self-awareness in the crowds of the novel's ending: "They are subjects who are angry because they can see through their ideological construction" as products of consumer-orientated mass culture (591). Peter J. Pappas also explores desire and autonomy in the novel, while Martin Rogers provides valuable cultural-historical context in relating *The Day of the Locust* to the horror-movie genre.</footnote>
But, perhaps thankfully, the novel suggests, human life is also on a short lease, and it is not long before we either go insane or die.<fnref n="68" />

I could end there with that cheerfully morbid thought, in the Inferno of Hollywood—the novel ends with an apocalyptic scene of a riotous mob of people in front of a cinema for a movie premiere: “—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence” (166).<fnref n="69" /> But West’s image of the womb as a rented accommodation could be extended into a useful conclusion. In The House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe and Holgrave, reborn in marriage, leave the mother house of seven gables to a new life together in the country. In The Aspern Papers, the unnamed narrator returns to his study in England with the umbilical cord of his deception and loss of integrity still attached in the form of a baby, miniature portrait of the poet Jeffrey Aspern given to him by the spurned, virginal Miss Tita. If the theme of invasion and deceit dominates the image of rented rooms within larger houses in those two nineteenth-century texts, then the theme of dis-ease and dislocation runs through the two twentieth-century novels, in which semi-settled locations are aborted or miscarried. But novels also give our imaginations a new lease of life, a rebirth of creative energy within the house of fiction. These four texts reveal that depictions of rented accommodation are flexible conduits for questioning American national identity, for examining the moral fabric of American lives, and for exploring critical philosophical issues about the human condition.

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ The logical conclusion of that line of thought is expressed in the title of David Benatar’s philosophical argument *Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence*.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ My emphasis on Homer Simpson's lack of agency is explained by Chip Rhodes in a different way, as a failure of romantic desire (600-601). However, he finds a sense of self-awareness in the crowds of the novel's ending: "They are subjects who are angry because they can see through their ideological construction" as products of consumer-orientated mass culture (591). Peter J. Pappas also explores desire and autonomy in the novel, while Martin Rogers provides valuable cultural-historical context in relating *The Day of the Locust* to the horror-movie genre.</footnote>
Works cited

BENATAR, David. *Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence*. Oxford, Clarendon P, Oxford UP, 2006.

BROWN, Ellen. "Revising Henry James: Reading the Spaces of *The Aspern Papers*." *American Literature*, vol. 63, n° 2, June 1991, pp. 263-278.

DIAMOND, David B. "'The black moment became at once a blissful one': Holgrave's Transformation in *The House of the Seven Gables*, a Psychoanalytic Reading." *Nathaniel Hawthorne Review*, vol. 46, n° 1, 2020, pp. 30-64.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. *The Beautiful and Damned*. 1922. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York, Cambridge UP, 2008.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. *The House of the Seven Gables*. 1851. Oxford UP, 1998.

INVESTOPEDIA. "bordereau." https://www.investopedia.com/search?q=bordereau. Accessed 9 Sept. 2021.

JAMES, Henry. *The Aspern Papers and Other Tales*. London, Penguin, 2014.
—. *The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces*. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908.

KELLY, Sean J. "Hawthorne's 'Material Ghosts': Photographic Realism and Liminal Selfhood in *The House of the Seven Gables*." *Papers on Language and Literature*, vol. 47, n° 3, summer 2011, pp. 227-260.

MASTERSON, Kelly. "'As Nice a Little Salesman, As I Am a Housewife': Domesticity, Education, and Separate Spheres in Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The House of the Seven Gables*." *Canadian Review of American Studies*, vol. 48, n° 2, 2018, pp. 191-209.

PAPPAS, Peter J. "Leaving Something to Be Desired: Affective Strategies and the Everyday-Spectacular in Nathanael West's *The Day of the Locust*." *Arizona Quarterly*, vol. 71, n° 1, spring 2015, pp. 129-150.

RHODES, Chip. "Mass Cultural Populism and the Hollywood Novel: The Case of Nathanael West's *The Day of the Locust*." *Prospects*, vol. 24, Oct. 1999, pp. 589-604.

ROGERS, Martin. "Monstrous Modernism and *The Day of the Locust*." *The Journal of Popular Culture*, vol. 44, n° 2, 2011, pp. 367-384.

SCHOLL, Diane G. "Secret Paternity in James's *The Aspern Papers*: Whose Letters?" *Modern Philology*, vol. 111, n° 1, Aug. 2013, pp. 72-87.

TRACHTENBERG, Alan. "Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in *The House of the Seven Gables*." *American Literary History*, vol. 9, n° 3, autumn 1997, pp. 460-481.
Works cited

BENATAR, David. *Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence*. Oxford, Clarendon P, Oxford UP, 2006.

BROWN, Ellen. "Revising Henry James: Reading the Spaces of *The Aspern Papers*." *American Literature*, vol. 63, n° 2, June 1991, pp. 263-278.

DIAMOND, David B. "'The black moment became at once a blissful one': Holgrave's Transformation in *The House of the Seven Gables*, a Psychoanalytic Reading." *Nathaniel Hawthorne Review*, vol. 46, n° 1, 2020, pp. 30-64.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. *The Beautiful and Damned*. 1922. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York, Cambridge UP, 2008.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. *The House of the Seven Gables*. 1851. Oxford UP, 1998.

INVESTOPEDIA. "bordereau." https://www.investopedia.com/search?q=bordereau. Accessed 9 Sept. 2021.

JAMES, Henry. *The Aspern Papers and Other Tales*. London, Penguin, 2014.
—. *The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces*. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908.

KELLY, Sean J. "Hawthorne's 'Material Ghosts': Photographic Realism and Liminal Selfhood in *The House of the Seven Gables*." *Papers on Language and Literature*, vol. 47, n° 3, summer 2011, pp. 227-260.

MASTERSON, Kelly. "'As Nice a Little Salesman, As I Am a Housewife': Domesticity, Education, and Separate Spheres in Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The House of the Seven Gables*." *Canadian Review of American Studies*, vol. 48, n° 2, 2018, pp. 191-209.

PAPPAS, Peter J. "Leaving Something to Be Desired: Affective Strategies and the Everyday-Spectacular in Nathanael West's *The Day of the Locust*." *Arizona Quarterly*, vol. 71, n° 1, spring 2015, pp. 129-150.

RHODES, Chip. "Mass Cultural Populism and the Hollywood Novel: The Case of Nathanael West's *The Day of the Locust*." *Prospects*, vol. 24, Oct. 1999, pp. 589-604.

ROGERS, Martin. "Monstrous Modernism and *The Day of the Locust*." *The Journal of Popular Culture*, vol. 44, n° 2, 2011, pp. 367-384.

SCHOLL, Diane G. "Secret Paternity in James's *The Aspern Papers*: Whose Letters?" *Modern Philology*, vol. 111, n° 1, Aug. 2013, pp. 72-87.

TRACHTENBERG, Alan. "Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in *The House of the Seven Gables*." *American Literary History*, vol. 9, n° 3, autumn 1997, pp. 460-481.
TRADING ECONOMICS. "Home Ownership Rates." https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/home-ownership-rate. Accessed 10 Sept. 2021.

VOLTAIRE. *Candide or Optimism*. Trans. John Butt. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1947.

WEST, James L. W. III. "The Question of Vocation in *This Side of Paradise* and *The Beautiful and Damned*." *The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 48-56.

WEST, Nathanael. *The Day of the Locust and The Dream Life of Balso Snell*. London, Penguin, 2000.
TRADING ECONOMICS. "Home Ownership Rates." https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/home-ownership-rate. Accessed 10 Sept. 2021.

VOLTAIRE. *Candide or Optimism*. Trans. John Butt. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1947.

WEST, James L. W. III. "The Question of Vocation in *This Side of Paradise* and *The Beautiful and Damned*." *The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald*. Ed. Ruth Prigozy. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 48–56.

WEST, Nathanael. *The Day of the Locust and The Dream Life of Balso Snell*. London, Penguin, 2000.
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>
Chapter
4

Houses and Rooms:
Virginia Woolf's
Architectural
Metaphors
of the Self

Floriane Reviron-Piégay
Chapter
4

Houses and Rooms:
Virginia Woolf's
Architectural
Metaphors
of the Self

Floriane Reviron-Piégay
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>
Chapter 4

Virginia Woolf changed houses quite a lot in her life. 22 Hyde Park Gate, Talland House, 46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square, Hogarth House, Asheham and Monk's House are as famous to her readers as her novels, and houses occupied a large part of her imagination, time and writing all her life long. Her diary and letters are a detailed record of her interest in changing places, buying new homes, and the excitement and anxiety triggered by each new acquisition and settlement. From Kensington to Bloomsbury, London to Richmond and then Lewes and Rodmell, changing houses meant changing lifestyles, Woolf's sanity and creativity depended and fed on this alternation between the calm and remoteness of the Sussex countryside and the bustling activity of party-going and socializing in London.<fnref n="70" /> Her work and life attest to the permanent crossing of boundaries between writing and living, and house decorating was part of her worldly preoccupations. Monk's House which the Woolfs occupied from 1919 to 1941, at first only as a summer residence, then permanently as the war drew nearer and destroyed their London flat, still attests to the care and taste with which it was decorated notably by Vanessa Bell

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Leonard Woolf was naturally well aware of the importance of houses in Virginia Woolf's life, which is the reason why he chose to organize his recollections of his life with her during the years when she wrote her major novels around the houses they inhabited together. This is the justification of his choice: "Facts about the houses in which one lives during the whole journey from the womb to the grave are not unimportant. The house—in which I include its material and spiritual environment—has an immense influence upon its inhabitants. [...] The house determines the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute quality, colour, atmosphere, pace of one's life; it is the framework of what one does, of what one can do, and one's relations with people" (L. Woolf 13–14). No doubt Virginia Woolf herself would have agreed with him.</footnote>
Chapter
4

Virginia Woolf changed houses quite a lot in her life. 22 Hyde Park Gate, Talland House, 46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square, Hogarth House, Asheham and Monk's House are as famous to her readers as her novels, and houses occupied a large part of her imagination, time and writing all her life long. Her diary and letters are a detailed record of her interest in changing places, buying new homes, and the excitement and anxiety triggered by each new acquisition and settlement. From Kensington to Bloomsbury, London to Richmond and then Lewes and Rodmell, changing houses meant changing lifestyles, Woolf's sanity and creativity depended and fed on this alternation between the calm and remoteness of the Sussex countryside and the bustling activity of party-going and socializing in London.<fnref n="70" /> Her work and life attest to the permanent crossing of boundaries between writing and living, and house decorating was part of her worldly preoccupations. Monk's House which the Woolfs occupied from 1919 to 1941, at first only as a summer residence, then permanently as the war drew nearer and destroyed their London flat, still attests to the care and taste with which it was decorated notably by Vanessa Bell

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Leonard Woolf was naturally well aware of the importance of houses in Virginia Woolf's life, which is the reason why he chose to organize his recollections of his life with her during the years when she wrote her major novels around the houses they inhabited together. This is the justification of his choice: "Facts about the houses in which one lives during the whole journey from the womb to the grave are not unimportant. The house—in which I include its material and spiritual environment—has an immense influence upon its inhabitants. [...] The house determines the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute quality, colour, atmosphere, pace of one's life; it is the framework of what one does, of what one can do, and one's relations with people" (L. Woolf 13–14). No doubt Virginia Woolf herself would have agreed with him.</footnote>
and Duncan Grant who lived nearby at Charleston. Hermione Lee notes that Woolf made a pencil sketch of a new bathroom and study addition to Monk's House on the back of some quotation from Geraldine Jewsbury, or that she listed the rooms that needed painting in the middle of her notes on Henry James letters. This just goes to show that what is now called home interior design was a source of creation and pleasure for Woolf no less than her own literary creation.<fnref n="71" /> This may explain her obsession with houses and buildings in her fiction. As Rebecca Sinclair and Mark Taylor point out in "Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton," many of Woolf's titles allude to the importance of architecture and interior spaces in her works: *Jacob's Room*, *To The Lighthouse*, *A Haunted House*, *A Room of One's Own*, *The Mark on the Wall* to quote but a few,<fnref n="72" /> indeed draw attention to the materiality of space, houses and architecture but we shall see that they serve different and sometimes jarring purposes and that titles can be misleading. Likewise, Woolf's evocation of her childhood homes has a dual role: although the affective dimension of the term "home" badly fits the descriptions Woolf made of 22 Hyde Park Gate,<fnref n="73" /> we shall see that together with Talland House and 46 Gordon Square they stand prominently among her childhood reminiscences and memoirs and help chart her ambiguous relationship with space and home in her later fiction.

In a second move, we shall discuss *A Room of One's Own* and the way it affects our reading of rooms in Woolf's fiction: the rooms reserved to women in her essays and fictions are very ambiguous and liminal spaces, offering porous boundaries with the exterior world. These are places that are continuously threatened by male interruption and hegemony, only partly affording the means for woman's self-expression and privacy. "While private, domestic space, the woman's room is at the hub of her feminist politics, it is from this room that she became one of the key writers of

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ For further information about Woolf's interest in the renovations at Monk's House see Victoria Rosner (181-194).</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² One may add "The Leaning Tower," "The Elisabethan Lumber Room," "Reflections at Sheffield's Place" among the lesser known essays.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Woolf spoke about her personal reminiscences of 22 Hyde Park Gate in three different essays which were gathered by Jeanne Schulkind in her 1976 edition entitled *Moments of Being*. This article refers to the second edition of these autobiographical fragments, published in 1985. See in particular "A Sketch of the Past" (Schulkind 116-126, 147-159), "22 Hyde Park Gate" (Schulkind 164-177), "Old Bloomsbury" (Schulkind 181-184).</footnote>
and Duncan Grant who lived nearby at Charleston. Hermione Lee notes that Woolf made a pencil sketch of a new bathroom and study addition to Monk's House on the back of some quotation from Geraldine Jewsbury, or that she listed the rooms that needed painting in the middle of her notes on Henry James letters. This just goes to show that what is now called home interior design was a source of creation and pleasure for Woolf no less than her own literary creation.<fnref n="71" /> This may explain her obsession with houses and buildings in her fiction. As Rebecca Sinclair and Mark Taylor point out in "Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton," many of Woolf's titles allude to the importance of architecture and interior spaces in her works: *Jacob's Room*, *To The Lighthouse*, *A Haunted House*, *A Room of One's Own*, *The Mark on the Wall* to quote but a few,<fnref n="72" /> indeed draw attention to the materiality of space, houses and architecture but we shall see that they serve different and sometimes jarring purposes and that titles can be misleading. Likewise, Woolf's evocation of her childhood homes has a dual role: although the affective dimension of the term "home" badly fits the descriptions Woolf made of 22 Hyde Park Gate,<fnref n="73" /> we shall see that together with Talland House and 46 Gordon Square they stand prominently among her childhood reminiscences and memoirs and help chart her ambiguous relationship with space and home in her later fiction.

In a second move, we shall discuss *A Room of One's Own* and the way it affects our reading of rooms in Woolf's fiction: the rooms reserved to women in her essays and fictions are very ambiguous and liminal spaces, offering porous boundaries with the exterior world. These are places that are continuously threatened by male interruption and hegemony, only partly affording the means for woman's self-expression and privacy. "While private, domestic space, the woman's room is at the hub of her feminist politics, it is from this room that she became one of the key writers of

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ For further information about Woolf's interest in the renovations at Monk's House see Victoria Rosner (181-194).</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² One may add "The Leaning Tower," "The Elisabethan Lumber Room," "Reflections at Sheffield's Place" among the lesser known essays.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Woolf spoke about her personal reminiscences of 22 Hyde Park Gate in three different essays which were gathered by Jeanne Schulkind in her 1976 edition entitled *Moments of Being*. This article refers to the second edition of these autobiographical fragments, published in 1985. See in particular "A Sketch of the Past" (Schulkind 116-126, 147-159), "22 Hyde Park Gate" (Schulkind 164-177), "Old Bloomsbury" (Schulkind 181-184).</footnote>
urban modernity, particularly in its feminist articulation" (Snaith and Whitworth 1). Rooms are present in Woolf's texts as a feminist metaphor for women's imagination and creativity and they also pervade her metatextual comments about her own creation. But paradoxically, rooms and houses also bear witness to the writer's inability to grasp and create character. The materiality of walls is indeed a stumbling block which prevents the writer from truly expressing his characters' iridescent personality. More than a feminist tool, rooms and houses are also a metatextual tool that allows Woolf to pit the realist and materialist writers' technique against that of the Georgian or modern ones, to the benefit of the latter. Rooms therefore also helped her articulate the modernist ethics and aesthetics she theorized and explored in her novels.

I would finally like to argue that the one work that best expresses Woolf's interest in homes while exploring her fascination for the multifarious aspects of personality is also one of Woolf's most innovative, the one that equally challenges genre and gender: *Orlando* may indeed be read both as a recreation of Knole, the Sackville-Wests' ancestral home and as Vita's mock biography. It seems to me that *Orlando* subsumes all the inner contradictions the rest of her œuvre is fraught with, all the tensions between masculinity and femininity, outer and inner spaces, privacy and publicity, stability and change to finally create the perfect metaphor of the home as mindscape.

# 1. The Original Home: Masculine and Feminine Spaces Revisited

Woolf's fictional and non-fictional writing is consistently concerned with the politics of spaces: national spaces, civic spaces, private spaces or the textual spaces of the writer/printer. The psychology of space resonates in particular through her autobiographical writing. (Snaith and Whitworth 8)

Woolf made no mystery that her childhood memories were shaped like a sacred place, likening her childhood to a "great Cathedral space" ("A Sketch of the Past" 81):
urban modernity, particularly in its feminist articulation" (Snaith and Whitworth 1). Rooms are present in Woolf's texts as a feminist metaphor for women's imagination and creativity and they also pervade her metatextual comments about her own creation. But paradoxically, rooms and houses also bear witness to the writer's inability to grasp and create character. The materiality of walls is indeed a stumbling block which prevents the writer from truly expressing his characters' iridescent personality. More than a feminist tool, rooms and houses are also a metatextual tool that allows Woolf to pit the realist and materialist writers' technique against that of the Georgian or modern ones, to the benefit of the latter. Rooms therefore also helped her articulate the modernist ethics and aesthetics she theorized and explored in her novels.

I would finally like to argue that the one work that best expresses Woolf's interest in homes while exploring her fascination for the multifarious aspects of personality is also one of Woolf's most innovative, the one that equally challenges genre and gender: *Orlando* may indeed be read both as a recreation of Knole, the Sackville-Wests' ancestral home and as Vita's mock biography. It seems to me that *Orlando* subsumes all the inner contradictions the rest of her œuvre is fraught with, all the tensions between masculinity and femininity, outer and inner spaces, privacy and publicity, stability and change to finally create the perfect metaphor of the home as mindscape.

# 1. The Original Home: Masculine and Feminine Spaces Revisited

Woolf's fictional and non-fictional writing is consistently concerned with the politics of spaces: national spaces, civic spaces, private spaces or the textual spaces of the writer/printer. The psychology of space resonates in particular through her autobiographical writing. (Snaith and Whitworth 8)

Woolf made no mystery that her childhood memories were shaped like a sacred place, likening her childhood to a "great Cathedral space" ("A Sketch of the Past" 81):
That is a rough visual description of childhood. This is how I shape
it; and now I see myself as a child, roaming about, in that space of
time, which lasted from 1882 to 1895. A great hall I could liken it to;
with windows letting in strange lights; and murmurs and spaces of
deep silence. ("A Sketch of the Past" 79)

If Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth have noted the change from
the claustrophobic Victorian rooms of 22 Hyde Park Gate, heavy with
tangled emotions, to the airy, liberating rooms of 46 Gordon Square, in
Bloomsbury, they have overlooked Talland House, the house where the
Stephen family summered regularly from 1882 (the year Virginia was born)
to 1894, just before her mother died. Yet it figures no less prominently in
her autobiographical fragments. Situated in St Ives, in Cornwall, it stands
in sharp contrast to 22 Hyde Park Gate, not just in terms of geographical
and spatial setting: Talland House was "a square house, like a child's
drawing of a house" at the top of a hill, with a "perfect" view onto the Bay
and Godrevy Lighthouse ("A Sketch of the Past" 128), whereas 22 Hyde
Park Gate was situated at the end of a "little irregular cul-de-sac" ("Old
Bloomsbury" 181). Talland House also represented the most blessed and
cherished memories of a happy childhood, before the period of "Oriental
gloom" ("Reminiscences" 40) engulfed the family.<fnref n="74" /> Woolf first wrote
about "22 Hyde Park Gate" in an eponymous memoir which she read as
a contribution to the Memoir Club in 1920. But contrary to what the title
seems to indicate, the memoir is more about her coming of age and her
half-brother's role as an abusive chaperone than about the house itself.
The essay finishes on George Duckworth stealthily entering her room
and her bed after an evening in the glittering London society. The final
revelation that "George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother
and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also" definitely
associates 22 Hyde Park Gate to masculine intrusion and aggression
("22 Hyde Park Gate" 177). It is synonymous with no less than oppression
and invasion of the young Virginia's mental and bodily integrity. Almost

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Julia Margaret Cameron died in 1895, then her first daughter and Virginia's half-sister Stella Duckworth died in 1897, then Leslie Stephen himself in 1904.</footnote>
That is a rough visual description of childhood. This is how I shape
it; and now I see myself as a child, roaming about, in that space of
time, which lasted from 1882 to 1895. A great hall I could liken it to;
with windows letting in strange lights; and murmurs and spaces of
deep silence. ("A Sketch of the Past" 79)

If Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth have noted the change from
the claustrophobic Victorian rooms of 22 Hyde Park Gate, heavy with
tangled emotions, to the airy, liberating rooms of 46 Gordon Square, in
Bloomsbury, they have overlooked Talland House, the house where the
Stephen family summered regularly from 1882 (the year Virginia was born)
to 1894, just before her mother died. Yet it figures no less prominently in
her autobiographical fragments. Situated in St Ives, in Cornwall, it stands
in sharp contrast to 22 Hyde Park Gate, not just in terms of geographical
and spatial setting: Talland House was "a square house, like a child's
drawing of a house" at the top of a hill, with a "perfect" view onto the Bay
and Godrevy Lighthouse ("A Sketch of the Past" 128), whereas 22 Hyde
Park Gate was situated at the end of a "little irregular cul-de-sac" ("Old
Bloomsbury" 181). Talland House also represented the most blessed and
cherished memories of a happy childhood, before the period of "Oriental
gloom" ("Reminiscences" 40) engulfed the family.<fnref n="74" /> Woolf first wrote
about "22 Hyde Park Gate" in an eponymous memoir which she read as
a contribution to the Memoir Club in 1920. But contrary to what the title
seems to indicate, the memoir is more about her coming of age and her
half-brother's role as an abusive chaperone than about the house itself.
The essay finishes on George Duckworth stealthily entering her room
and her bed after an evening in the glittering London society. The final
revelation that "George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother
and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also" definitely
associates 22 Hyde Park Gate to masculine intrusion and aggression
("22 Hyde Park Gate" 177). It is synonymous with no less than oppression
and invasion of the young Virginia's mental and bodily integrity. Almost

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Julia Margaret Cameron died in 1895, then her first daughter and Virginia's half-sister Stella Duckworth died in 1897, then Leslie Stephen himself in 1904.</footnote>
20 years later, "A Sketch of the Past" (1939) would silence the abuse
but indict George Duckworth in an acerbic way, linking him ever more
closely to the corseted and conventional Victorian world of 22 Hyde Park
Gate. "A Sketch of the Past" spans the childhood and adolescence of
Woolf until after her father's death, it comes and goes between different
places, different spaces, but it is essentially an oxymoronic exploration
of two main houses. Talland House is the site of the first, very sensual
memories of her mother, whereas Hyde Park Gate is linked to her father's
histrionic grief. The "idyllic," sunny and insouciant seaside summers are
contrasted to the gloomy, dark and cramped atmosphere of Kensington.
Talland House is associated with bliss, rapture, perfection, freedom and
the loving and beautiful motherly presence, whereas Hyde Park Gate
stands for constraints, decorum and the tyrannical presence of the
father. Not only do the two houses evoke very different memories, but
they are also alluded to in a very different way: St Ives and Talland House
are evoked through sense impressions and emotions. As we have seen,
the house itself is very simply and sketchily described. The large garden
is as much part of her reminiscences as the house itself; there is no
boundary between inside and outside. What matters is not so much the
architecture of the house as the sensations Woolf associates with it. She
only mentions the kitchen and its situation beneath the children's nursery
to say that she can remember the different sensations of drawing the
heavy basket up when Sophie, the cook, sometimes put in it left-overs
from the grown-ups' dinner. She only mentions the nursery's balcony
joining the balcony of her parents' bedroom to link her first memory of
lying half asleep, half-awake in bed, to the presence of her mother on this
balcony. In an incredibly powerful synesthetic vision, Woolf associates
the sound of waves breaking on the beach, the yellow blind and its acorn
being drawn across the floor, the passion flowers growing on the wall
next to the balcony and the figure of her mother in a white dressing
gown:

If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow,
silver and green [...]. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of
these first impressions [...]. The quality of the air above Talland House
20 years later, "A Sketch of the Past" (1939) would silence the abuse
but indict George Duckworth in an acerbic way, linking him ever more
closely to the corseted and conventional Victorian world of 22 Hyde Park
Gate. "A Sketch of the Past" spans the childhood and adolescence of
Woolf until after her father's death, it comes and goes between different
places, different spaces, but it is essentially an oxymoronic exploration
of two main houses. Talland House is the site of the first, very sensual
memories of her mother, whereas Hyde Park Gate is linked to her father's
histrionic grief. The "idyllic," sunny and insouciant seaside summers are
contrasted to the gloomy, dark and cramped atmosphere of Kensington.
Talland House is associated with bliss, rapture, perfection, freedom and
the loving and beautiful motherly presence, whereas Hyde Park Gate
stands for constraints, decorum and the tyrannical presence of the
father. Not only do the two houses evoke very different memories, but
they are also alluded to in a very different way: St Ives and Talland House
are evoked through sense impressions and emotions. As we have seen,
the house itself is very simply and sketchily described. The large garden
is as much part of her reminiscences as the house itself; there is no
boundary between inside and outside. What matters is not so much the
architecture of the house as the sensations Woolf associates with it. She
only mentions the kitchen and its situation beneath the children's nursery
to say that she can remember the different sensations of drawing the
heavy basket up when Sophie, the cook, sometimes put in it left-overs
from the grown-ups' dinner. She only mentions the nursery's balcony
joining the balcony of her parents' bedroom to link her first memory of
lying half asleep, half-awake in bed, to the presence of her mother on this
balcony. In an incredibly powerful synesthetic vision, Woolf associates
the sound of waves breaking on the beach, the yellow blind and its acorn
being drawn across the floor, the passion flowers growing on the wall
next to the balcony and the figure of her mother in a white dressing
gown:

If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow,
silver and green [...]. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of
these first impressions [...]. The quality of the air above Talland House
seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil [...].

The next memory—all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives—was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all make a whole that even now makes me stop [...]. It was such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt, looked. (“A Sketch of the Past” 66)

The evocation of Talland House in the memoir is not architecturally rich but very suggestive and evocative. Hyde Park Gate “led nowhere” (“A Sketch of the Past” 119) Woolf said and this could be interpreted in a metaphorical way, whereas Talland House led her to the creation of what remains one of her most elegiac evocations of childhood: “the novel of her childhood is Talland House, and of its loss is *To the Lighthouse*” (Lee 23).<fnref n="75" /> Hyde Park Gate is described in a much more clinical and analytic way in all of the memoirs where it was dealt with, chronologically in “22 Hyde Park Gate” (written around 1920), then in “Old Bloomsbury” (written between 1921 and 1922) and finally in “A Sketch of the Past” (written in 1940), which attests to the long-lasting impressions the house left on Woolf. The house was “a complete model of Victorian Society” (“A Sketch of the Past” 127). It was a sectarian microcosm, a many-tiered place with landings and half landings, each being identified by different smells. Its different storeys represented the different strata of society, with the servants at the bottom in the basement, and her father’s study at the top. It was an overcrowded house accommodating seven maids and ten family members. In Woolf’s memoirs 22 Hyde Park Gate is personified, becoming a fully-fledged character in the tragedy that unfolds behind its doors: the tea-table represents the belly (the centre of Victorian family-life), the double-bedroom is the sexual centre, Eros and Thanatos being linked because the mother and father die in the bed where the children were born, her father’s study is the brain of the house.

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ See Hermione Lee for further references as to how the memories linked to Talland House also went into the making of *Jacob's Room* and *The Waves* (24–25).</footnote>
seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil [...].

The next memory—all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives—was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all make a whole that even now makes me stop [...]. It was such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt, looked. (“A Sketch of the Past” 66)

The evocation of Talland House in the memoir is not architecturally rich but very suggestive and evocative. Hyde Park Gate “led nowhere” (“A Sketch of the Past” 119) Woolf said and this could be interpreted in a metaphorical way, whereas Talland House led her to the creation of what remains one of her most elegiac evocations of childhood: “the novel of her childhood is Talland House, and of its loss is *To the Lighthouse*” (Lee 23).<fnref n="75" /> Hyde Park Gate is described in a much more clinical and analytic way in all of the memoirs where it was dealt with, chronologically in “22 Hyde Park Gate” (written around 1920), then in “Old Bloomsbury” (written between 1921 and 1922) and finally in “A Sketch of the Past” (written in 1940), which attests to the long-lasting impressions the house left on Woolf. The house was “a complete model of Victorian Society” (“A Sketch of the Past” 127). It was a sectarian microcosm, a many-tiered place with landings and half landings, each being identified by different smells. Its different storeys represented the different strata of society, with the servants at the bottom in the basement, and her father’s study at the top. It was an overcrowded house accommodating seven maids and ten family members. In Woolf’s memoirs 22 Hyde Park Gate is personified, becoming a fully-fledged character in the tragedy that unfolds behind its doors: the tea-table represents the belly (the centre of Victorian family-life), the double-bedroom is the sexual centre, Eros and Thanatos being linked because the mother and father die in the bed where the children were born, her father’s study is the brain of the house.

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ See Hermione Lee for further references as to how the memories linked to Talland House also went into the making of *Jacob's Room* and *The Waves* (24–25).</footnote>
Two characteristics stand out in this description of childhood space in Kensington: the lack of privacy and the tensions between the different functions of the rooms. 22 Hyde Park was indeed divided/quartered into private spaces and public places: the dining room was also used for the children's lessons, the drawing room was the theatre of social life, synonymous with constraint, decorum and hypocrisy. "The division in our life was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them" ("A Sketch of the Past" 135). It is no wonder that Woolf started her eponymous memoir with the evocation precisely of the black folding doors that partitioned the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gate (142), they are a fitting synecdoche of the multiple divisions that reigned supreme in the house, between private life and public receptions, between convention and intellect, between two ages, the Victorian Age and the Edwardian ("A Sketch of the Past" 126). The private spaces are barely alluded to, except for Leslie Stephen's study and Virginia's bedroom, which is also divided into the sleeping half and the living half: "I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized [...]" ("A Sketch of the Past" 124). She was promoted to that bed-sitting room when she was fifteen, a young lady, and suggests she felt both rapture and anger in that space. Her bedroom was indeed not really a room of her own: she explains how, enthralled by a book, she would suddenly be interrupted by the irruption of "Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, my father" ("A Sketch of the Past" 123), the litany of names forcefully signifying the masculine invasion of her privacy. We therefore understand why the move out to 46 Gordon Square was a relief when Leslie Stephen died. Somehow, the new address where Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby lived until Vanessa's marriage was in stark contrast to 22 Hyde Park Gate, all for the better. Whereas 22 Hyde Park Gate stood for a schizophrenic mapping of space where Woolf failed to establish connections,<fnref n="76" /> 46 Gordon Square, forever identified with the

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ The very last pages of "A Sketch of the Past" are fraught with references to the "lack of connection," they read like the culmination of Woolf's exasperation with this state of things: see in particular Jeanne Schulkind's second edition of *Moments of Being*. Woolf, speaking about convention and intellect: "But there was no connection between them" (157), "There was no connection. There were deep divisions" (158). And about the great figures like Meredith, Henry James, Burne-Jones, Sidgwick, Haldane and Morley who belonged to her parents' close circle of acquaintances she said: "But with them again, we had no close connection" (158), and a little further down: "And I, sitting by the table, was quite unable to make any connection" (158).</footnote>
Two characteristics stand out in this description of childhood space in Kensington: the lack of privacy and the tensions between the different functions of the rooms. 22 Hyde Park was indeed divided/quartered into private spaces and public places: the dining room was also used for the children's lessons, the drawing room was the theatre of social life, synonymous with constraint, decorum and hypocrisy. "The division in our life was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them" ("A Sketch of the Past" 135). It is no wonder that Woolf started her eponymous memoir with the evocation precisely of the black folding doors that partitioned the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gate (142), they are a fitting synecdoche of the multiple divisions that reigned supreme in the house, between private life and public receptions, between convention and intellect, between two ages, the Victorian Age and the Edwardian ("A Sketch of the Past" 126). The private spaces are barely alluded to, except for Leslie Stephen's study and Virginia's bedroom, which is also divided into the sleeping half and the living half: "I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized [...]" ("A Sketch of the Past" 124). She was promoted to that bed-sitting room when she was fifteen, a young lady, and suggests she felt both rapture and anger in that space. Her bedroom was indeed not really a room of her own: she explains how, enthralled by a book, she would suddenly be interrupted by the irruption of "Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, my father" ("A Sketch of the Past" 123), the litany of names forcefully signifying the masculine invasion of her privacy. We therefore understand why the move out to 46 Gordon Square was a relief when Leslie Stephen died. Somehow, the new address where Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby lived until Vanessa's marriage was in stark contrast to 22 Hyde Park Gate, all for the better. Whereas 22 Hyde Park Gate stood for a schizophrenic mapping of space where Woolf failed to establish connections,<fnref n="76" /> 46 Gordon Square, forever identified with the

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ The very last pages of "A Sketch of the Past" are fraught with references to the "lack of connection," they read like the culmination of Woolf's exasperation with this state of things: see in particular Jeanne Schulkind's second edition of *Moments of Being*. Woolf, speaking about convention and intellect: "But there was no connection between them" (157), "There was no connection. There were deep divisions" (158). And about the great figures like Meredith, Henry James, Burne-Jones, Sidgwick, Haldane and Morley who belonged to her parents' close circle of acquaintances she said: "But with them again, we had no close connection" (158), and a little further down: "And I, sitting by the table, was quite unable to make any connection" (158).</footnote>
Thursday evenings which launched the Bloomsbury Group, proved to be
a place where long-lasting connections would be established.

We may say that this irreducible dichotomy between Virginia Woolf's
two childhood homes and the way she presents her childhood places as
divided may explain the ambiguities and contradictions which inhabit
her essays and fiction when it comes to spatial representation. In other
words, the way she mapped her childhood territory be it mental or spatial
in her autobiographical essays reverberates in the novels and essays she
wrote from the 1920s. Later Woolf was to turn back to her room at Hyde
Park Gate and imagine people having read *To the Lighthouse*, *A Room of
One's Own* and *The Common Reader* saying "This room explains a great
deal" ("A Sketch of the Past" 124-125) which means she was very much
aware of the porosity between her own personal vision of space and
the way she analysed and represented it in her novels and essays. The
tensions between femininity and masculinity, domestic bliss and domestic
agony, private and public, inner and outer were to remain at the core of
her literary and political preoccupations.

## 2. Houses and Rooms: a Means to Explore Feminist Topoi

We have just seen that Woolf attributed a very symbolical dimension
to her bedroom, to her childhood homes and to the way space shaped
her own psyche and vice versa. It is perhaps not surprising to see the
persistence of such themes in her essays and fiction and notably in her
feminist texts. Rooms and architecture stand prominently in Woolf's
feminist writing. The argument in *A Room of One's Own* that each woman
must have money and a room of her own to write is famous enough and
has been diversely appreciated. Elaine Showalter's *A Literature of Their
Own* (1977) criticized Woolf's privileging of domestic space in her 1929
essay, arguing that "the concepts of androgyny and the private room
are neither as liberating, nor as obvious as they first appear. They have
a darker side that is the sphere of the exile and the eunuch" (285). In
other words, as Ángel Luis Jiménez argues, the private room "ultimately
dissociates women from a socially and politically engaged life" (3). Julie
Robin Solomon, conversely, asserts that "'the room' serves as a potent
Thursday evenings which launched the Bloomsbury Group, proved to be
a place where long-lasting connections would be established.

We may say that this irreducible dichotomy between Virginia Woolf's
two childhood homes and the way she presents her childhood places as
divided may explain the ambiguities and contradictions which inhabit
her essays and fiction when it comes to spatial representation. In other
words, the way she mapped her childhood territory be it mental or spatial
in her autobiographical essays reverberates in the novels and essays she
wrote from the 1920s. Later Woolf was to turn back to her room at Hyde
Park Gate and imagine people having read *To the Lighthouse, A Room of
One's Own* and *The Common Reader* saying "This room explains a great
deal" ("A Sketch of the Past" 124-125) which means she was very much
aware of the porosity between her own personal vision of space and
the way she analysed and represented it in her novels and essays. The
tensions between femininity and masculinity, domestic bliss and domestic
agony, private and public, inner and outer were to remain at the core of
her literary and political preoccupations.

## 2. Houses and Rooms: a Means to Explore Feminist Topoi

We have just seen that Woolf attributed a very symbolical dimension
to her bedroom, to her childhood homes and to the way space shaped
her own psyche and vice versa. It is perhaps not surprising to see the
persistence of such themes in her essays and fiction and notably in her
feminist texts. Rooms and architecture stand prominently in Woolf's
feminist writing. The argument in *A Room of One's Own* that each woman
must have money and a room of her own to write is famous enough and
has been diversely appreciated. Elaine Showalter's *A Literature of Their
Own* (1977) criticized Woolf's privileging of domestic space in her 1929
essay, arguing that "the concepts of androgyny and the private room
are neither as liberating, nor as obvious as they first appear. They have
a darker side that is the sphere of the exile and the eunuch" (285). In
other words, as Ángel Luis Jiménez argues, the private room "ultimately
dissociates women from a socially and politically engaged life" (3). Julie
Robin Solomon, conversely, asserts that "'the room' serves as a potent
political metaphor for women because it concretizes visually, tactilely
the politicization of the personal and the personalization of the political"
(331-332). Again, according to Ángel Luis Jiménez, "this debate epitomizes the
most salient feature of scholarship devoted to Woolfian space: a sustained
focus on the relationship between domestic and public space, considered
both materially and metaphorically" (6). The rooms and houses in Woolf's
fiction are at times places where the feminine self finds expression, at
other times, they are the locus of internal strife. Katherine Hilbery's room
in *Night and Day* is a case in point. It is at the top of her parents' house.
The large looking-glass (another common feature to Virginia Woolf's
room and Clarissa Dalloway's) reflects her as she should look to take her
place within the upper-middle class to which she belongs, that is, pouring
out tea in the drawing room or entertaining her parents' guests in the
dining-room. Except that among the bills on her mantelpiece and reminding
us of her domestic duties, one can see a large Greek dictionary hiding
sheets of paper covered with mathematic problems. Although these pages
make Katherine feel as if she were the mistress of her "own kingdom,"
she hides them from intruders into her room because she recognizes
"the unwomanly nature of the science." As Smith argues "Her room, like
Clarissa's fails to offer her a private space in which she can define herself
in terms other than those imposed by her society" (222). Clarissa Dalloway
represents the perfect "Angel in the House," at one with her home, the
perfect hostess who knows how to organise a party: "strange [...] how a
mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house!" (*Mrs
Dalloway* 160). But she also feels the need to have a room of her own.
As she stitches her dress before the party she is organising on the very
same evening she feels quiet, calm and contented, alone in her attic room.
It is a room which figuratively represents a kind of haven, away from the
hustle and bustle of the household and yet at the same time, it does not
really afford her the peace of mind she searches for, nor the opportunity
to grasp her own desires. She is interrupted by Peter Walsh who enters
the room unannounced and unexpectedly, a nuisance akin to the incessant
interruptions Woolf mentions both in "A Sketch of the Past"<sup>77</sup> and in

<footnote n="77">77 See supra.</footnote>
political metaphor for women because it concretizes visually, tactilely
the politicization of the personal and the personalization of the political"
(331-332). Again, according to Ángel Luis Jiménez, "this debate epitomizes the
most salient feature of scholarship devoted to Woolfian space: a sustained
focus on the relationship between domestic and public space, considered
both materially and metaphorically" (6). The rooms and houses in Woolf's
fiction are at times places where the feminine self finds expression, at
other times, they are the locus of internal strife. Katherine Hilbery's room
in *Night and Day* is a case in point. It is at the top of her parents' house.
The large looking-glass (another common feature to Virginia Woolf's
room and Clarissa Dalloway's) reflects her as she should look to take her
place within the upper-middle class to which she belongs, that is, pouring
out tea in the drawing room or entertaining her parents' guests in the
dining-room. Except that among the bills on her mantelpiece and reminding
us of her domestic duties, one can see a large Greek dictionary hiding
sheets of paper covered with mathematic problems. Although these pages
make Katherine feel as if she were the mistress of her "own kingdom,"
she hides them from intruders into her room because she recognizes
"the unwomanly nature of the science." As Smith argues "Her room, like
Clarissa's fails to offer her a private space in which she can define herself
in terms other than those imposed by her society" (222). Clarissa Dalloway
represents the perfect "Angel in the House," at one with her home, the
perfect hostess who knows how to organise a party: "strange [...] how a
mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house!" (*Mrs
Dalloway* 160). But she also feels the need to have a room of her own.
As she stitches her dress before the party she is organising on the very
same evening she feels quiet, calm and contented, alone in her attic room.
It is a room which figuratively represents a kind of haven, away from the
hustle and bustle of the household and yet at the same time, it does not
really afford her the peace of mind she searches for, nor the opportunity
to grasp her own desires. She is interrupted by Peter Walsh who enters
the room unannounced and unexpectedly, a nuisance akin to the incessant
interruptions Woolf mentions both in "A Sketch of the Past"<sup>77</sup> and in

<footnote n="77">77 See supra.</footnote>
"A Room of One's Own" about women writers in the early 19th century and about Jane Austen in particular: "If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain [...] she was always interrupted" ("A Room of One's Own" 86). Clarissa's attic room is no more private than Jane Austen's sitting-room because it lacks a lock on the door. The whole scene, her stitching being interrupted by a man and her attempt at hiding her dress "like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy," (Mrs Dalloway 161-162), recalls Jane Austen (and her predecessors) being careful that their "occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors":

> Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper [...]. I wondered, would *Pride and Prejudice* have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? ("A Room of One's Own" 86-88)

By bringing together the image of the Angel in the House and of the writer in the same character, Woolf indicts a common enemy, the intrusion of masculine presence in a space that is supposed to preserve the privacy of her soul.<fnref n="78" /> In fact, most of Woolf's rooms within the family home, fail to afford women a real sense of property, intellectual or material, because they do not protect them from what Smith calls "the family hegemony" (219). These rooms limit these women<fnref n="79" /> to roles sanctioned for them within their culture. Only Mary Datchet's room in *Night and Day* (1919) seems to offer the possibility of genuine emancipation because

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Interestingly Peter Walsh does not just interrupt Clarissa while she is stitching, but he also interrupts a moment of reverie, a memory of the very fleeting but very pleasurable kiss she received from Sally Seton years ago during a stroll outside. The kiss was in effect interrupted by Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf who suggested they should all start star-gazing (so Peter Walsh interrupts both the kiss and its reminiscence). The memory of this interruption is evoked in the following way by Clarissa: "It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!" (Mrs Dalloway 159). See Lenora Penna Smith's "Spaces, Places, Houses, Rooms: a Feminist Perspective" for a very interesting reading of this scene as allowing Clarissa to revise "the homoerotic moment with Sally to fit into the larger scheme of heterosexuality" (Smith 221).</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Katherine Hilbery and Mrs Dalloway belong to two very different novels but to similar environments: *Night and Day* has often been considered as "the most traditional of Woolf's novels" (Raitt xiii) whereas *Mrs Dalloway* is a much more modernist novel. Yet although different in terms of age and experience, Katherine and Clarissa are two versions of the same upper-or upper-middle class woman about to be married or married for quite a while who experiences frustration and resents the role ascribed to women in her *milieu*.</footnote>
"A Room of One's Own" about women writers in the early 19th century and about Jane Austen in particular: "If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain [...] she was always interrupted" ("A Room of One's Own" 86). Clarissa's attic room is no more private than Jane Austen's sitting-room because it lacks a lock on the door. The whole scene, her stitching being interrupted by a man and her attempt at hiding her dress "like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy," (Mrs Dalloway 161-162), recalls Jane Austen (and her predecessors) being careful that their "occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors":

> Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper [...]. I wondered, would *Pride and Prejudice* have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? ("A Room of One's Own" 86-88)

By bringing together the image of the Angel in the House and of the writer in the same character, Woolf indicts a common enemy, the intrusion of masculine presence in a space that is supposed to preserve the privacy of her soul.<fnref n="78" /> In fact, most of Woolf's rooms within the family home, fail to afford women a real sense of property, intellectual or material, because they do not protect them from what Smith calls "the family hegemony" (219). These rooms limit these women<fnref n="79" /> to roles sanctioned for them within their culture. Only Mary Datchet's room in *Night and Day* (1919) seems to offer the possibility of genuine emancipation because

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Interestingly Peter Walsh does not just interrupt Clarissa while she is stitching, but he also interrupts a moment of reverie, a memory of the very fleeting but very pleasurable kiss she received from Sally Seton years ago during a stroll outside. The kiss was in effect interrupted by Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf who suggested they should all start star-gazing (so Peter Walsh interrupts both the kiss and its reminiscence). The memory of this interruption is evoked in the following way by Clarissa: "It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!" (Mrs Dalloway 159). See Lenora Penna Smith's "Spaces, Places, Houses, Rooms: a Feminist Perspective" for a very interesting reading of this scene as allowing Clarissa to revise "the homoerotic moment with Sally to fit into the larger scheme of heterosexuality" (Smith 221).</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Katherine Hilbery and Mrs Dalloway belong to two very different novels but to similar environments: *Night and Day* has often been considered as "the most traditional of Woolf's novels" (Raitt xiii) whereas *Mrs Dalloway* is a much more modernist novel. Yet although different in terms of age and experience, Katherine and Clarissa are two versions of the same upper-or upper-middle class woman about to be married or married for quite a while who experiences frustration and resents the role ascribed to women in her *milieu*.</footnote>
it does not confine her to a domestic activity. It is perhaps the room
which most resembles the "room of one's own" Woolf was to imagine ten
years later as Smith argues very convincingly (219-220). Woolf's vision
of women's rooms in these 1920s novels casts an interesting light on
the way fiction shaped the feminist thoughts she expressed later on in
essay-form.

But it remains that Woolf's fiction offers relatively few examples
of consistent descriptions of rooms and homes. Rooms and houses were
in fact probably too tightly linked to the "tedious materialism" of the
Edwardian writers she wanted to do away with (Wisker 5). In 1924, in
her essay entitled "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" describing the method
used by Mr Bennett (whom she ranked amongst the Edwardian writers
together with Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy) she denounced his fallacious
belief that "because he has made a house, there must be a person living
there" (330). And she argued that by looking at their characters' house
and furniture, by giving us details about their social environment the
Edwardians used the wrong tools:

> House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians
> found it easy to proceed to intimacy. [...]. The Edwardian tools are
> the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress
> upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope
> that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there
> [...]. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people,
> and only in the second about houses they live in, that is the wrong
> way to set about it. ("Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" 332)

Woolf's own tools were different: she limited the reference to houses
and rooms in her works, eschewing the hard materiality of walls to the
benefit of character building and she used them instead as means to
show that they failed to give access to the personality they were meant
to represent.<fnref n="80" /> Interestingly she described the Edwardian method by

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ She also “fused elements of the English country house tradition with psychological insight and the supernatural,” as Gina Wisker has consistently argued in “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses” (5).</footnote>
it does not confine her to a domestic activity. It is perhaps the room
which most resembles the "room of one's own" Woolf was to imagine ten
years later as Smith argues very convincingly (219-220). Woolf's vision
of women's rooms in these 1920s novels casts an interesting light on
the way fiction shaped the feminist thoughts she expressed later on in
essay-form.

But it remains that Woolf's fiction offers relatively few examples
of consistent descriptions of rooms and homes. Rooms and houses were
in fact probably too tightly linked to the "tedious materialism" of the
Edwardian writers she wanted to do away with (Wisker 5). In 1924, in
her essay entitled "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" describing the method
used by Mr Bennett (whom she ranked amongst the Edwardian writers
together with Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy) she denounced his fallacious
belief that "because he has made a house, there must be a person living
there" (330). And she argued that by looking at their characters' house
and furniture, by giving us details about their social environment the
Edwardians used the wrong tools:

> House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians
> found it easy to proceed to intimacy. [...]. The Edwardian tools are
> the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress
> upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope
> that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there
> [...]. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people,
> and only in the second about houses they live in, that is the wrong
> way to set about it. ("Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" 332)

Woolf's own tools were different: she limited the reference to houses
and rooms in her works, eschewing the hard materiality of walls to the
benefit of character building and she used them instead as means to
show that they failed to give access to the personality they were meant
to represent.<fnref n="80" /> Interestingly she described the Edwardian method by

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ She also “fused elements of the English country house tradition with psychological insight and the supernatural,” as Gina Wisker has consistently argued in “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses” (5).</footnote>
using architectural metaphors. When she wrote *Jacob's Room* (which is considered as her first real attempt at reshaping the realist novel) Woolf was aware that the elimination of the "scaffolding" and "bricks" of a conventional plot and "the effort of breaking with strict representation" would be "unsettling" (*Diary* vol. 3, 13).<sup>81</sup> She conceived her method as shifting the focus from the mind of the narrator to the minds of the characters and it was during the writing of *Mrs. Dalloway* that she found a way to create character:

> I should say a good deal about The Hours & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; [...] the idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. (30<sup>th</sup> of August 1923, *Diary* vol. 2, 263)

Later she referred to this as her "tunnelling process" and she added, "I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it" (*Diary* vol. 2, 272). Like any builder then, the writer must excavate and build solid foundations if his/her work is to endure the passage of time. She conceived *To the Lighthouse*, in the same way. As *Mrs Dalloway* neared publication, *To the Lighthouse* began to take clearer shape. Her first notes for it began with the form of the book, and with an idea of Mrs Ramsay:

> All Character—not a view of the world.

> *Two blocks joined by a corridor.* (Lee 475) [emphasis mine]

This quotation from the holograph draft of *To the Lighthouse*, appendix A, added to the previous references, shows that Woolf repeatedly resorted to architectural metaphors to describe her creative process, but considered that this method was inadequate for drawing characters themselves. This shift may look innocuous enough but it is the (building) site of Woolf's revolution of fiction in the 1920s, no less. Woolf's novels deconstruct the Edwardian houses and rooms, showing that they

<footnote n="81"><sup>81</sup> For more on the way Woolf reformed the realist novel see Susan Dick, "Literary Realism in *Mrs Dalloway*, *To the Lighthouse*, *Orlando* and *The Waves*" (50–51).</footnote>
using architectural metaphors. When she wrote *Jacob's Room* (which is considered as her first real attempt at reshaping the realist novel) Woolf was aware that the elimination of the "scaffolding" and "bricks" of a conventional plot and "the effort of breaking with strict representation" would be "unsettling" (*Diary* vol. 3, 13).<sup>81</sup> She conceived her method as shifting the focus from the mind of the narrator to the minds of the characters and it was during the writing of *Mrs. Dalloway* that she found a way to create character:

> I should say a good deal about The Hours & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; [...] the idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. (30<sup>th</sup> of August 1923, *Diary* vol. 2, 263)

Later she referred to this as her "tunnelling process" and she added, "I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it" (*Diary* vol. 2, 272). Like any builder then, the writer must excavate and build solid foundations if his/her work is to endure the passage of time. She conceived *To the Lighthouse*, in the same way. As *Mrs Dalloway* neared publication, *To the Lighthouse* began to take clearer shape. Her first notes for it began with the form of the book, and with an idea of Mrs Ramsay:

> All Character—not a view of the world.

> *Two blocks joined by a corridor.* (Lee 475) [emphasis mine]

This quotation from the holograph draft of *To the Lighthouse*, appendix A, added to the previous references, shows that Woolf repeatedly resorted to architectural metaphors to describe her creative process, but considered that this method was inadequate for drawing characters themselves. This shift may look innocuous enough but it is the (building) site of Woolf's revolution of fiction in the 1920s, no less. Woolf's novels deconstruct the Edwardian houses and rooms, showing that they

<footnote n="81"><sup>81</sup> For more on the way Woolf reformed the realist novel see Susan Dick, "Literary Realism in *Mrs Dalloway*, *To the Lighthouse*, *Orlando* and *The Waves*" (50–51).</footnote>
are empty shells, unable to transmit personality in an efficient way. *Jacob's Room* is a very good example of this process, the deceptive function of rooms and houses in fiction is mirrored by the deceptive title which misleads the reader into thinking that Jacob's personality will be found in his room. The novel disappoints both the readers' and the characters' expectations and "ends with Jacob's mother and friend amazed at the mess and disorder in his room after his death; having finally penetrated its walls, they find they do not understand who Jacob was" (Taylor 4). The same applies to "The Lady in the Looking Glass" where the narrator muses about Isabella Tyson's personality while looking at the interior of her home and at her mirror only to discover at the end, when Isabella finally stands before the mirror in question, that "there was nothing":

> Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. ("The Lady in the Looking Glass" 219)

The actual description comes as a shock and as an anti-climax after the richness of the metaphors used by the narrator/writer to try and give her a life:

> She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses alight like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees. [...] Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial—they are cruel even, for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one's eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall. ("The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection" 216)

The hard wall represents the barrier that the biographer or novelist meets when trying to sum people up. Through this choice of architectural metaphors, Woolf articulates her rejection of biographical "materialism" in fiction.
are empty shells, unable to transmit personality in an efficient way. *Jacob's Room* is a very good example of this process, the deceptive function of rooms and houses in fiction is mirrored by the deceptive title which misleads the reader into thinking that Jacob's personality will be found in his room. The novel disappoints both the readers' and the characters' expectations and "ends with Jacob's mother and friend amazed at the mess and disorder in his room after his death; having finally penetrated its walls, they find they do not understand who Jacob was" (Taylor 4). The same applies to "The Lady in the Looking Glass" where the narrator muses about Isabella Tyson's personality while looking at the interior of her home and at her mirror only to discover at the end, when Isabella finally stands before the mirror in question, that "there was nothing":

> Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. ("The Lady in the Looking Glass" 219)

The actual description comes as a shock and as an anti-climax after the richness of the metaphors used by the narrator/writer to try and give her a life:

> She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses alight like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees. [...] Such comparisons are worse than idle and superficial—they are cruel even, for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one's eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall. ("The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection" 216)

The hard wall represents the barrier that the biographer or novelist meets when trying to sum people up. Through this choice of architectural metaphors, Woolf articulates her rejection of biographical "materialism" in fiction.
The complexity of Woolf's reliance on architectural imagery throughout her work may have stemmed from the dichotomy between theory and practice which her work exhibits: If in theory, having a room of one's own meant independence and the ability to create, in practice, in her novels, rooms both fail to give women autonomy and to give writers access to their characters' innermost thoughts. This dichotomy is fully expressed and subsumed in a ground-breaking work in which the house is both liberating and emancipating and yet an indissoluble component of the main character, Orlando.

### 3. Knole: The Home

Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf met in 1922 and they immediately embarked into one of the most intimate and important relationships Woolf engaged in with a woman. The admiration and rivalry were reciprocal for different reasons. Vita was impressed by Virginia's brilliant intellect and by her by then well-established reputation as a gifted novelist and literary critic,<fnref n="82" /> Woolf was somewhat intimidated and impressed by Vita's long line of aristocratic ancestors and notably by their home, Knole, an exceptional country house which dated back to the 15th century and was said to be a calendar house.<fnref n="83" /> The house itself partook of the fascination exerted by Vita onto Virginia.

Soon after Woolf met Sackville-West, she wrote to ask her for a copy of the recently published book entitled *Knole and the Sackvilles* that traced the history from the 13th to the 20th century of Vita's ancestral home in Kent. (DeSalvo 197)

<footnote n="82">⁸² In her letters to her, Sackville-West often praises Woolf's "genius," calling her "a very remarkable person" (DeSalvo and Leaska 66, 74, 144). Conversely, Woolf who half-jokingly described herself as a "coronet snob" in one of her autobiographical essays admired "the high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson and novelist...." Mitchell A. Leaska quoting one of Woolf's letters to a friend (DeSalvo and Leaska 9).</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Vita Sackville-West herself participated in spreading the legend that Knole had "seven courtyards correspond[ing] to the days of the week, [...] fifty-two staircases to the weeks of the year, [...] three hundred and sixty-five rooms to the days of the year," but she added wistfully "I do not know that anyone has ever troubled to verify it" (Sackville-West 47).</footnote>
The complexity of Woolf's reliance on architectural imagery throughout her work may have stemmed from the dichotomy between theory and practice which her work exhibits: If in theory, having a room of one's own meant independence and the ability to create, in practice, in her novels, rooms both fail to give women autonomy and to give writers access to their characters' innermost thoughts. This dichotomy is fully expressed and subsumed in a ground-breaking work in which the house is both liberating and emancipating and yet an indissoluble component of the main character, Orlando.

### 3. Knole: *The Home*

Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf met in 1922 and they immediately embarked into one of the most intimate and important relationships Woolf engaged in with a woman. The admiration and rivalry were reciprocal for different reasons. Vita was impressed by Virginia's brilliant intellect and by her by then well-established reputation as a gifted novelist and literary critic,<fnref n="82" /> Woolf was somewhat intimidated and impressed by Vita's long line of aristocratic ancestors and notably by their home, Knole, an exceptional country house which dated back to the 15th century and was said to be a calendar house.<fnref n="83" /> The house itself partook of the fascination exerted by Vita onto Virginia.

Soon after Woolf met Sackville-West, she wrote to ask her for a copy of the recently published book entitled *Knole and the Sackvilles* that traced the history from the 13th to the 20th century of Vita's ancestral home in Kent. (DeSalvo 197)

<footnote n="82">⁸² In her letters to her, Sackville-West often praises Woolf's "genius," calling her "a very remarkable person" (DeSalvo and Leaska 66, 74, 144). Conversely, Woolf who half-jokingly described herself as a "coronet snob" in one of her autobiographical essays admired "the high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson and novelist...." Mitchell A. Leaska quoting one of Woolf's letters to a friend (DeSalvo and Leaska 9).</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Vita Sackville-West herself participated in spreading the legend that Knole had "seven courtyards correspond[ing] to the days of the week, [...] fifty-two staircases to the weeks of the year, [...] three hundred and sixty-five rooms to the days of the year," but she added wistfully "I do not know that anyone has ever troubled to verify it" (Sackville-West 47).</footnote>
Right from the start then *Orlando* was to be as much about Vita as it was to be about Knole: it was the result of several visits from Woolf to Knole. At the time Woolf conceived *Orlando*, Vita had been dispossessed of her home because of the old Kentish inheritance law of male primogeniture. It has often been said that thanks to her pen, Woolf gave it back to her, forever associating the place with Vita rather than with her cousin Eddy Sackville, the actual inheritor.<fnref n="84" /> And as it was written just before *A Room of One's Own*, *Orlando* could be read as a plea in favour of the equality between men and women concerning the inheritance laws (as we have seen, Vita could have inherited more than a room of her own). The realism of the descriptions of Knole is in stark contrast to the fantasy which characterizes the portrait of Vita as Orlando, a character who lives for 400 years and changes sexes half-way. The house is the only sign of the passage of time: it functions like Dorian Gray's portrait and seems to age in Orlando's stead. Because Orlando barely ages during her four-century-long life, the passage of time is only registered thanks to the changes in the furniture and interior decoration of Knole. Yet a feeling of historical continuity also emanates from the rooms Orlando roams through, remembering or evoking the famous historical figures who have been received at Knole:

> Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had stood there in their ermine [...] There were the long tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its nest of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes. (*Orlando* 79)

Orlando's mansion to which (s)he returns continually throughout the novel functions as a constant: while all around the world is changing, the house has a timeless quality, acting as a mirror of Orlando's essentially unchanging character (despite his/her change of sex). The house is

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ For the way *Orlando* was acknowledged by Vita as a compensation for the loss of Knole see in particular Nigel Nicolson—"*Orlando* became a memorial mass and gave Knole back to Vita by identifying her with it forever" (40)—and Glendinning (204).</footnote>
Right from the start then *Orlando* was to be as much about Vita as it was to be about Knole: it was the result of several visits from Woolf to Knole. At the time Woolf conceived *Orlando*, Vita had been dispossessed of her home because of the old Kentish inheritance law of male primogeniture. It has often been said that thanks to her pen, Woolf gave it back to her, forever associating the place with Vita rather than with her cousin Eddy Sackville, the actual inheritor.<fnref n="84" /> And as it was written just before *A Room of One's Own*, *Orlando* could be read as a plea in favour of the equality between men and women concerning the inheritance laws (as we have seen, Vita could have inherited more than a room of her own). The realism of the descriptions of Knole is in stark contrast to the fantasy which characterizes the portrait of Vita as Orlando, a character who lives for 400 years and changes sexes half-way. The house is the only sign of the passage of time: it functions like Dorian Gray's portrait and seems to age in Orlando's stead. Because Orlando barely ages during her four-century-long life, the passage of time is only registered thanks to the changes in the furniture and interior decoration of Knole. Yet a feeling of historical continuity also emanates from the rooms Orlando roams through, remembering or evoking the famous historical figures who have been received at Knole:

> Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had stood there in their ermine [...] There were the long tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with its million leaves and its nest of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes. (*Orlando* 79)

Orlando's mansion to which (s)he returns continually throughout the novel functions as a constant: while all around the world is changing, the house has a timeless quality, acting as a mirror of Orlando's essentially unchanging character (despite his/her change of sex). The house is

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ For the way *Orlando* was acknowledged by Vita as a compensation for the loss of Knole see in particular Nigel Nicolson—"*Orlando* became a memorial mass and gave Knole back to Vita by identifying her with it forever" (40)—and Glendinning (204).</footnote>
personified by numerous pathetic fallacies which reinforce the symbiosis
between Orlando and Knole:

As soon would she come home, and leave her own grand-mother
without a kiss as come back and leave the house unvisited.
She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in; stirred,
opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence.
(Orlando 284)

The house is given permanency thanks to a series of repetitions: the
tapestry hanging in the Leicester Gallery is described at different moments
and comes back in the text like a leitmotiv, it rises and falls in the faint
breeze like a heart beating. Each time Orlando comes back to Knole
(s)he feels the need to walk the long corridors, to visit each room, in a
kind of pilgrimage which allows him/her to keep his/her memory intact.
In a kind of exchange, as the house is personified, Orlando's mind is
described thanks to architectural metaphors: "Orlando was mounting up
the spiral stairway into his brain—which was a roomy one—" (17) or else
"some change it was suspected must have taken place in the chambers
of his brain" (48). As Emily Clark argues:

> During the linear yet cyclical narrative, Orlando seeks comfort in the
> familial crypt located in the house, (s)he finds solace and renewal in
> the presence of the deceased upon which the house is literally and
> figuratively based. Orlando's visits to the crypt serve as interludes in
> the recurrence of the themes of gender, time, history and literature.
> (Clark 50)

The crypt which lies quiet and undisturbed and is the *inner sanctum*
of the house, an actual Mausoleum, is seen by Emily Clark as the sub-
conscious part of the house: Woolf intertwines death and the house
in Orlando's life as a wellspring to which (s)he returns for restoration.
Just as life and death are intrinsically linked in the house, Knole is both
a public and a private space: it is compared to a city many times and
so many servants and domestics are necessary to its upkeep that the
personified by numerous pathetic fallacies which reinforce the symbiosis
between Orlando and Knole:

As soon would she come home, and leave her own grand-mother
without a kiss as come back and leave the house unvisited.
She fancied that the rooms brightened as she came in; stirred,
opened their eyes as if they had been dozing in her absence.
(Orlando 284)

The house is given permanency thanks to a series of repetitions: the
tapestry hanging in the Leicester Gallery is described at different moments
and comes back in the text like a leitmotiv, it rises and falls in the faint
breeze like a heart beating. Each time Orlando comes back to Knole
(s)he feels the need to walk the long corridors, to visit each room, in a
kind of pilgrimage which allows him/her to keep his/her memory intact.
In a kind of exchange, as the house is personified, Orlando's mind is
described thanks to architectural metaphors: "Orlando was mounting up
the spiral stairway into his brain—which was a roomy one—" (17) or else
"some change it was suspected must have taken place in the chambers
of his brain" (48). As Emily Clark argues:

> During the linear yet cyclical narrative, Orlando seeks comfort in the
> familial crypt located in the house, (s)he finds solace and renewal in
> the presence of the deceased upon which the house is literally and
> figuratively based. Orlando's visits to the crypt serve as interludes in
> the recurrence of the themes of gender, time, history and literature.
> (Clark 50)

The crypt which lies quiet and undisturbed and is the *inner sanctum*
of the house, an actual Mausoleum, is seen by Emily Clark as the sub-
conscious part of the house: Woolf intertwines death and the house
in Orlando's life as a wellspring to which (s)he returns for restoration.
Just as life and death are intrinsically linked in the house, Knole is both
a public and a private space: it is compared to a city many times and
so many servants and domestics are necessary to its upkeep that the
crypt is the only place where Orlando can retreat when (s)he needs
privacy.

Through this very original text, Woolf tackles the essential ques-
tions of ownership, property and identity: she shows that a woman may
manage an estate as well as a man given that Orlando's relationship
to the house does not change when she changes sexes. The house is
both a *locus*, and a *topos*, both very concrete and metaphorical. It is her
attempt to reconcile "granite and rainbow," the hard materiality of facts
and fiction, of walls, houses and rooms on the one hand and personality
on the other.<fnref n="85" /> But unlike Emily Clark who claims that Orlando's "organic
kinship with the house is not broken: she believes that in death she will
become part of the structure and furnishings just as her ancestors reside
in the crypt"(57), I would like to suggest that severing the metaphorical
link between Orlando and Knole might have been an attempt on Woolf's
part to force Vita to turn her back on the painful question of inheritance
and loss. It might indeed have been Woolf's attempt at giving Vita a
therapeutic shock in order to help her transmute her grief into a life-saving
instinct. The moment when Orlando must part from the house is partially
compensated for by the fact that she becomes a wife, a mother and that
her long narrative poem entitled "The Oak Tree" gets published: a new
lease of life which only imperfectly atones for the loss of the ancestral
home turned into a public place, a museum. "The house was no longer
hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past
the touch and control of the living. [...] The great wings of silence beat
up and down the empty house" (*Orlando* 286). Yet *Orlando* ends on a
lyrical evocation of loss that associates Knole with death while Orlando,
as a character, decidedly embraces life. At the very end of the text, in an
unusually erotic and ecstatic moment, akin to a "modernist epiphany,"<fnref n="86" />
Orlando bares her breast to the moon for her gleaming bosom and pearls

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ The phrase “granite and rainbow” stems from Woolf’s article entitled “The New Biography,” first published in *The New York Herald Tribune* on the 30th of October 1927, while Woolf was working at *Orlando*. In this ground-breaking article in which she theorized the advent of a new form of biography which would revolutionize the Victorian biography she argued that the task of the biographer was a “stiff one” as (s)he had to weld into a “seamless whole” the “granite-like solidity” of truth and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of personality (“The New Biography” 229).</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ This phrase was suggested by one of the two readers who reviewed this article and I take this opportunity to thank them both for their valuable comments which helped me improve this paper.</footnote>
crypt is the only place where Orlando can retreat when (s)he needs
privacy.

Through this very original text, Woolf tackles the essential ques-
tions of ownership, property and identity: she shows that a woman may
manage an estate as well as a man given that Orlando's relationship
to the house does not change when she changes sexes. The house is
both a *locus*, and a *topos*, both very concrete and metaphorical. It is her
attempt to reconcile "granite and rainbow," the hard materiality of facts
and fiction, of walls, houses and rooms on the one hand and personality
on the other.<fnref n="85" /> But unlike Emily Clark who claims that Orlando's "organic
kinship with the house is not broken: she believes that in death she will
become part of the structure and furnishings just as her ancestors reside
in the crypt"(57), I would like to suggest that severing the metaphorical
link between Orlando and Knole might have been an attempt on Woolf's
part to force Vita to turn her back on the painful question of inheritance
and loss. It might indeed have been Woolf's attempt at giving Vita a
therapeutic shock in order to help her transmute her grief into a life-saving
instinct. The moment when Orlando must part from the house is partially
compensated for by the fact that she becomes a wife, a mother and that
her long narrative poem entitled "The Oak Tree" gets published: a new
lease of life which only imperfectly atones for the loss of the ancestral
home turned into a public place, a museum. "The house was no longer
hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past
the touch and control of the living. [...] The great wings of silence beat
up and down the empty house" (*Orlando* 286). Yet *Orlando* ends on a
lyrical evocation of loss that associates Knole with death while Orlando,
as a character, decidedly embraces life. At the very end of the text, in an
unusually erotic and ecstatic moment, akin to a "modernist epiphany,"<fnref n="86" />
Orlando bares her breast to the moon for her gleaming bosom and pearls

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ The phrase “granite and rainbow” stems from Woolf’s article entitled “The New Biography,” first published in *The New York Herald Tribune* on the 30th of October 1927, while Woolf was working at *Orlando*. In this ground-breaking article in which she theorized the advent of a new form of biography which would revolutionize the Victorian biography she argued that the task of the biographer was a “stiff one” as (s)he had to weld into a “seamless whole” the “granite-like solidity” of truth and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of personality (“The New Biography” 229).</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ This phrase was suggested by one of the two readers who reviewed this article and I take this opportunity to thank them both for their valuable comments which helped me improve this paper.</footnote>
to guide her husband's aeroplane towards her. Orlando's body is made
alive to the present time by her lover's return to her, and in a synesthetic
and highly sensual move<sup>87</sup> she embraces life and her husband while the
house stands, remote and spectral, bearing witness to a past that is no
longer hers:

All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over
the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon the earth. There
stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or
substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit
for the coming of a dead Queen. (Orlando 294-295)

The insubstantiality of walls and windows is precisely the reason why
Orlando gains substance and enjoys the present moment so fully: she is
finally free to be her own self. The end of the text therefore dis/locates
the spatial frame of the mythopoetic biography, the better to highlight
the temporal frame: the text ends on an epiphany, or to use Woolf's term,
a "moment of being" which grants Orlando/Vita eternal life as it forever
associates, not so much Vita/Orlando and Knole, but Vita and Orlando,
the date upon which the text concludes being the date when the book
was released.

Thus, the final departure Orlando takes from the house proves
biographers wrong: however symbiotic their relationship, Orlando should
not be confused with Knole which belies Helen Clare Taylor's assumption
that "Orlando is Knole" (4). In an essay she wrote just one year before the
gestation of *Orlando* for the *Yale Review* (October 1926) Woolf pondered
over what she described to Vita as "a matter of dazzling importance
and breathless excitement" (*Letters* vol. 3, 220): "How should one read
a book." The essay is as much about how one should read a book as
how writers should write as writing and reading are one and the same
reversible process:

<footnote n="87"><sup>87</sup> In a single paragraph, Orlando's senses of hearing, touch and sight are awakened: "As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously to the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer" (Orlando 295).</footnote>
to guide her husband's aeroplane towards her. Orlando's body is made
alive to the present time by her lover's return to her, and in a synesthetic
and highly sensual move<sup>87</sup> she embraces life and her husband while the
house stands, remote and spectral, bearing witness to a past that is no
longer hers:

> All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over
> the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon the earth. There
> stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or
> substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit
> for the coming of a dead Queen. (Orlando 294-295)

The insubstantiality of walls and windows is precisely the reason why
Orlando gains substance and enjoys the present moment so fully: she is
finally free to be her own self. The end of the text therefore dis/locates
the spatial frame of the mythopoetic biography, the better to highlight
the temporal frame: the text ends on an epiphany, or to use Woolf's term,
a "moment of being" which grants Orlando/Vita eternal life as it forever
associates, not so much Vita/Orlando and Knole, but Vita and Orlando,
the date upon which the text concludes being the date when the book
was released.

Thus, the final departure Orlando takes from the house proves
biographers wrong: however symbiotic their relationship, Orlando should
not be confused with Knole which belies Helen Clare Taylor's assumption
that "Orlando is Knole" (4). In an essay she wrote just one year before the
gestation of *Orlando* for the *Yale Review* (October 1926) Woolf pondered
over what she described to Vita as "a matter of dazzling importance
and breathless excitement" (*Letters* vol. 3, 220): "How should one read
a book." The essay is as much about how one should read a book as
how writers should write as writing and reading are one and the same
reversible process:

<footnote n="87"><sup>87</sup> In a single paragraph, Orlando's senses of hearing, touch and sight are awakened: "As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously to the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer" (Orlando 295).</footnote>
Shall we read [biographies and autobiographies] to satisfy the curiosity
which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front
of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and
each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life
in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of
these people—the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl
dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting.
Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations,
their thought and adventures? Biographies and memoirs answer such
questions, light up innumerable such houses, they show us people
going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating,
hating, loving, until they die. ("How Should One Read a Book?" 3-4)

The implied answer to the initial question in this quotation is "no" and in fact
*Orlando* may be read as an attempt to show how fallacious and beside the
point such readings are. Both the biographer and the reader should resist
the temptation to write/read the biographees' personalities in the homes
they inhabit, in the objects they possess as personality is fundamentally
irreducible to materiality. Because in the end, Orlando proves to be much more
than Knole and reinvents herself as a woman, a lover, a mother and a poet.

It is perhaps vain to look for a consistent and stable representation
of home in Woolf's work. Because houses can change, decay and be
renovated like Mrs Ramsay's house in *To the Lighthouse* or Orlando's
Knole, they point at time passing and as such they are important
reminders of the transience and fragility of life. Woolf was aware of the
significance of houses and rooms in the making of character, but she
was more interested still in the intangible manifestations of the mind, a
dichotomy expressed through the metaphors of the "granite-like solidity
of truth," facts and material objects versus "something of rainbow-like
intangibility," personality and the workings of the mind. Interestingly
it is when she reflected upon the particularities of biography that she
best managed to express this dichotomy: the task of the new biographer
she said was to weld these two "into one seamless whole" ("The New
Biography" 229). It is no wonder her conception of houses should have
Shall we read [biographies and autobiographies] to satisfy the curiosity
which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front
of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and
each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life
in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of
these people—the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl
dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting.
Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations,
their thought and adventures? Biographies and memoirs answer such
questions, light up innumerable such houses, they show us people
going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating,
hating, loving, until they die. ("How Should One Read a Book?" 3-4)

The implied answer to the initial question in this quotation is "no" and in fact
*Orlando* may be read as an attempt to show how fallacious and beside the
point such readings are. Both the biographer and the reader should resist
the temptation to write/read the biographees' personalities in the homes
they inhabit, in the objects they possess as personality is fundamentally
irreducible to materiality. Because in the end, Orlando proves to be much more
than Knole and reinvents herself as a woman, a lover, a mother and a poet.

It is perhaps vain to look for a consistent and stable representation
of home in Woolf's work. Because houses can change, decay and be
renovated like Mrs Ramsay's house in *To the Lighthouse* or Orlando's
Knole, they point at time passing and as such they are important
reminders of the transience and fragility of life. Woolf was aware of the
significance of houses and rooms in the making of character, but she
was more interested still in the intangible manifestations of the mind, a
dichotomy expressed through the metaphors of the "granite-like solidity
of truth," facts and material objects versus "something of rainbow-like
intangibility," personality and the workings of the mind. Interestingly
it is when she reflected upon the particularities of biography that she
best managed to express this dichotomy: the task of the new biographer
she said was to weld these two "into one seamless whole" ("The New
Biography" 229). It is no wonder her conception of houses should have
reached such an elaborate stage in her biography of Vita Sackville-West who, with the legend of Knole attached to her, proved the perfect object of study and allowed Woolf to be "subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow" ("The New Biography" 235).

## Works cited

CLARK, Emily. "The Walls are Crumbling Down: Houses as Death Metaphors in Virginia Woolf's *Orlando* and *To the Lighthouse*." *Constructing the Literary Self: Race and Gender in 20th-Century Literature*. Ed. Patsy J. Daniels. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 49-64.

DESALVO, Louise A. "Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf." *SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society*, vol. 8, n° 2, Winter 1982, pp. 195-214.

— and Mitchell A. LEASKA, eds. *The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf*. London, Virago, 1992.

DICK, Susan, ed. *The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf*. London, Hogarth, 1986.

—. "Literary Realism in *Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves*." *The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf*. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 50-71.

GLENDINNING, Victoria. *Vita, The Life of V. Sackville-West*. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983.

HUMM, Maggie, ed. *The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts*. Edinburgh UP, 2010.

JIMÉNEZ, Ángel Luis. *The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf's The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters*. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. St. Petersburg, U of South Florida, 2009. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2030. Accessed 29 Jan. 2019.

LEE, Hermione. *Virginia Woolf*. London, Vintage, 1997.

NICOLSON, Nigel. *Long Life. Memoirs*. New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1998.

RAITT, Suzanne, ed. "Introduction." *Virginia Woolf, Night and Day*. 1919. Oxford UP, 1992, pp. xii-xvii.

ROSNER, Victoria. "Virginia Woolf and Monk's House." *The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts*. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh UP, 2010, pp. 181-194.
reached such an elaborate stage in her biography of Vita Sackville-West who, with the legend of Knole attached to her, proved the perfect object of study and allowed Woolf to be "subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow" ("The New Biography" 235).

## Works cited

CLARK, Emily. "The Walls are Crumbling Down: Houses as Death Metaphors in Virginia Woolf's *Orlando* and *To the Lighthouse*." *Constructing the Literary Self: Race and Gender in 20th-Century Literature*. Ed. Patsy J. Daniels. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 49-64.

DESALVO, Louise A. "Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf." *SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society*, vol. 8, n° 2, Winter 1982, pp. 195-214.

— and Mitchell A. LEASKA, eds. *The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf*. London, Virago, 1992.

DICK, Susan, ed. *The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf*. London, Hogarth, 1986.

—. "Literary Realism in *Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves*." *The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf*. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 50-71.

GLENDINNING, Victoria. *Vita, The Life of V. Sackville-West*. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983.

HUMM, Maggie, ed. *The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts*. Edinburgh UP, 2010.

JIMÉNEZ, Ángel Luis. *The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf's The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters*. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. St. Petersburg, U of South Florida, 2009. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2030. Accessed 29 Jan. 2019.

LEE, Hermione. *Virginia Woolf*. London, Vintage, 1997.

NICOLSON, Nigel. *Long Life. Memoirs*. New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1998.

RAITT, Suzanne, ed. "Introduction." *Virginia Woolf, Night and Day*. 1919. Oxford UP, 1992, pp. xii-xvii.

ROSNER, Victoria. "Virginia Woolf and Monk's House." *The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts*. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh UP, 2010, pp. 181-194.
SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita. *Knole and the Sackvilles*. London, Heinemann, 1922.

—. "Knole and its Owners." *Knole*. Ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, The National Trust, 1984.

SCHULKIND, Jeanne, ed. *Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf*. 2nd edition. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985.

SHOWALTER, Elaine. "Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers." *The Antioch Review*, vol. 32, n° 3, Autumn 1972, pp. 339-353.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4637559. Accessed 11 May 2017.

—. *A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing*. Princeton UP, 1977.

SINCLAIR, Rebecca and Mark TAYLOR. "Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton." *Conference Proceedings - Habitus 2000: A Sense of Place*. Ed. John R. Stephens. Perth, Curtin University, 2000, pp. 1-10.

SMITH, Lenora Penna. "Spaces, Places, Houses, Rooms: A Feminist Perspective." *Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations*. Ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York, Pace UP, 1993, pp. 216-225.

SNAITH, Anna and Michael WHITWORTH, eds. *Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place*. New York, Palgrave, 2007.

SOLOMON, Julie Robin. "Staking Ground: The Politics of Space in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas'". *Women's Studies*, vol. 16, n° 3-4, 1989, pp. 331-347. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1989.9978773. Accessed 30 Jan. 2019.

TAYLOR, Helen Clare. "Houses, Rooms and Walls: biography and architecture in Virginia Woolf's fiction." *Virginia Woolf Miscellany*, vol. 46, n° 4, Fall 1987, p. 4.

WISKER, Gina. "Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf's Haunted Houses." *Hecate*, vol. 37, n° 1, May 2011, pp. 4-26.

WOOLF, Leonard. *Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939*. London, Hogarth, 1968.

WOOLF, Virginia. *Night and Day*. 1919. World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1992.

—. *Jacobs' Room*. 1922. *Virginia Woolf, Four Great Novels*. Oxford UP, 1994.

—. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." 1924. *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 1. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London, Chatto & Windus, 1966, pp. 319-337.

—. *Mrs Dalloway*. 1925. *Virginia Woolf, Four Great Novels*. Oxford UP, 1994.

—. "The New Biography." 1927. *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 4. London, Hogarth, 1966-1967, pp. 229-235.

—. *Orlando: A Biography*. London, Hogarth, 1928.
SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita. *Knole and the Sackvilles*. London, Heinemann, 1922.

—. "Knole and its Owners." *Knole*. Ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, The National Trust, 1984.

SCHULKIND, Jeanne, ed. *Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf*. 2nd edition. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985.

SHOWALTER, Elaine. "Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers." *The Antioch Review*, vol. 32, n° 3, Autumn 1972, pp. 339-353.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4637559. Accessed 11 May 2017.

—. *A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing*. Princeton UP, 1977.

SINCLAIR, Rebecca and Mark TAYLOR. "Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton." *Conference Proceedings - Habitus 2000: A Sense of Place*. Ed. John R. Stephens. Perth, Curtin University, 2000, pp. 1-10.

SMITH, Lenora Penna. "Spaces, Places, Houses, Rooms: A Feminist Perspective." *Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations*. Ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York, Pace UP, 1993, pp. 216-225.

SNAITH, Anna and Michael WHITWORTH, eds. *Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place*. New York, Palgrave, 2007.

SOLOMON, Julie Robin. "Staking Ground: The Politics of Space in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas'". *Women's Studies*, vol. 16, n° 3-4, 1989, pp. 331-347. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1989.9978773. Accessed 30 Jan. 2019.

TAYLOR, Helen Clare. "Houses, Rooms and Walls: biography and architecture in Virginia Woolf's fiction." *Virginia Woolf Miscellany*, vol. 46, n° 4, Fall 1987, p. 4.

WISKER, Gina. "Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf's Haunted Houses." *Hecate*, vol. 37, n° 1, May 2011, pp. 4-26.

WOOLF, Leonard. *Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939*. London, Hogarth, 1968.

WOOLF, Virginia. *Night and Day*. 1919. World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1992.

—. *Jacobs' Room*. 1922. *Virginia Woolf, Four Great Novels*. Oxford UP, 1994.

—. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." 1924. *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 1. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London, Chatto & Windus, 1966, pp. 319-337.

—. *Mrs Dalloway*. 1925. *Virginia Woolf, Four Great Novels*. Oxford UP, 1994.

—. "The New Biography." 1927. *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 4. London, Hogarth, 1966-1967, pp. 229-235.

—. *Orlando: A Biography*. London, Hogarth, 1928.
—. "A Room of One's Own." 1929. *Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas*. Ed. Morag Shiach. World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 3–149.

—. "Reminiscences." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 28–59.

—. "A Sketch of the Past." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 64–159.

—. "22 Hyde Park Gate." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 164–177.

—. "Old Bloomsbury." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 181–201.

—. *The Diary of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 2: 1920–1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London, Hogarth, 1978.

—. *The Diary of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 3: 1925–1930. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London, Hogarth, 1980.

—. *The Letters of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 3: 1923–1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London, Hogarth, 1977.

—. "The Lady in the Looking Glass." *Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction*. Ed. Susan Dick. London, Triad Grafton Books, 1991, pp. 221–225.

—. "How Should One Read a Book?" *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 2, London, Hogarth, 1966–1967, pp. 1–12.
—. "A Room of One's Own." 1929. *Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas*. Ed. Morag Shiach. World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 3–149.

—. "Reminiscences." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 28–59.

—. "A Sketch of the Past." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 64–159.

—. "22 Hyde Park Gate." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 164–177.

—. "Old Bloomsbury." *A Sketch of the Past: Moments of Being*. 1976. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London, Harcourt Brace, 1985, pp. 181–201.

—. *The Diary of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 2: 1920–1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London, Hogarth, 1978.

—. *The Diary of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 3: 1925–1930. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London, Hogarth, 1980.

—. *The Letters of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 3: 1923–1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London, Hogarth, 1977.

—. "The Lady in the Looking Glass." *Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction*. Ed. Susan Dick. London, Triad Grafton Books, 1991, pp. 221–225.

—. "How Should One Read a Book?" *The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf*, vol. 2, London, Hogarth, 1966–1967, pp. 1–12.
Chapter
5

Home Bittersweet Home.
Hemingway and the
Maternal Sovereign

Rédouane Abouddahab
Chapter
5

Home Bittersweet Home.
Hemingway and the
Maternal Sovereign

Rédouane Abouddahab
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
Chapter
5

He was in his home where he had made it.
Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River" (1925).

— there's more to the making of home
than I ever expected:
a process of excavation, of finding [...]
John Burnside, "Settlements."

There are numerous houses in Hemingway's fiction but, more often
than not, their description is stripped down to the essentiality of their
objective structure, as if they were soulless places made for dwelling,
not for *inhabiting*.<fnref n="88" /> Suzan E. Farrell contends in a study she devotes to
the notion of home in *The Sun Also Rises*, *A Farewell to Arms*, and *For
Whom the Bell Tolls*, that the male protagonists' attempt to create a
home through love relationships never reaches a successful outcome: "In
each of these works Hemingway's male soldiers repeatedly try to create
safe, domestic spaces for themselves while at war or while suffering the
repercussions of war," yet they fail (Farrell 16). This deficiency is due to
the damaging effects of the war: "[A]ll three of the novels finally offer

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ To inhabit a place means much more than to live in it or occupy it. See the quite significant etymology of "inhabit" that denotes to have and to hold (*habere*). In this sense, it is possible to say that to inhabit a place means to take hold of it not only in the financial (or military!) sense of the word, but also creatively and spiritually. According to Heidegger, inhabiting a house corresponds to transforming it into a "world"; it means, too, finding one's place in this terrestrial life.</footnote>
Chapter
5

He was in his home where he had made it.
Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River" (1925).

— there's more to the making of home
than I ever expected:
a process of excavation, of finding [...]
John Burnside, "Settlements."

There are numerous houses in Hemingway's fiction but, more often
than not, their description is stripped down to the essentiality of their
objective structure, as if they were soulless places made for dwelling,
not for *inhabiting*.<fnref n="88" /> Suzan E. Farrell contends in a study she devotes to
the notion of home in *The Sun Also Rises*, *A Farewell to Arms*, and *For
Whom the Bell Tolls*, that the male protagonists' attempt to create a
home through love relationships never reaches a successful outcome: "In
each of these works Hemingway's male soldiers repeatedly try to create
safe, domestic spaces for themselves while at war or while suffering the
repercussions of war," yet they fail (Farrell 16). This deficiency is due to
the damaging effects of the war: "[A]ll three of the novels finally offer

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ To inhabit a place means much more than to live in it or occupy it. See the quite significant etymology of "inhabit" that denotes to have and to hold (*habere*). In this sense, it is possible to say that to inhabit a place means to take hold of it not only in the financial (or military!) sense of the word, but also creatively and spiritually. According to Heidegger, inhabiting a house corresponds to transforming it into a "world"; it means, too, finding one's place in this terrestrial life.</footnote>
a tragic vision in which such unity is impossible, in which the trauma of
war destroys the possibility of home," with greater reason since "[o]ld
gender roles, upon which the traditional homes were based, no longer
make sense" (Farrell 16). This is probably true but it is also true for Pound,
Fitzgerald and other contemporary expatriate modernists, who are all
dramatically familiar with the "waste land" wailed by T. S. Eliot.

It has often been discussed that Hemingway and the expatriates
of the 1920s rejected momentarily life in America during those "roaring"
years, when life in Europe seemed altogether freer, more artistically
rewarding, and proved more advantageous financially speaking. Alex
Small, a reporter, wrote in 1929 an article about those Americans who
would rather "go into exile" than undergo the oppressive policies and
infantilizing dogmas of the administration in office then. He notes:
"[...] many an American who feels outraged at living under a government
which treats its subjects like a set of naughty children, who shall be told
what to drink, to read, to wear, and to see at the theatre, prefers to go
into exile" (Small 51). But they went back home where they remained
somehow uprooted, for, as Malcolm Cowley wrote in 1934 in his *Exile's
Return*, the American expatriates' "real exile was from society itself, from
any society to which they could honestly contribute and from which they
could draw the strength that lies in shared convictions" (Cowley 214).
This generalization gives to Cowley's comments on the relation between the
American expatriates and their homeland a much less historical dimension
and a much more philosophical one. He confirms the point further when
he writes that, after all, his and the expatriates' experiences "follow the
old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, that
is repeated in scores of European myths and continually re-embodied in
life" (Cowley 289). Hemingway, one of the main expatriate writers Cowley
deals with in his book, dramatizes home along these political and ethical
lines. Yet, what is particularly interesting is the way the fictionalized
intimate story of the writer explains these macrostructural ideologies
and existential choices Cowley, Small and Farrell refer to.

In Hemingway's work, the impossibility of home is tainted with
a sharp sense of rejection that seems visceral. Hemingway's complex
relation with his own past branches out into different effects around the
a tragic vision in which such unity is impossible, in which the trauma of
war destroys the possibility of home," with greater reason since "[o]ld
gender roles, upon which the traditional homes were based, no longer
make sense" (Farrell 16). This is probably true but it is also true for Pound,
Fitzgerald and other contemporary expatriate modernists, who are all
dramatically familiar with the "waste land" wailed by T. S. Eliot.

It has often been discussed that Hemingway and the expatriates
of the 1920s rejected momentarily life in America during those "roaring"
years, when life in Europe seemed altogether freer, more artistically
rewarding, and proved more advantageous financially speaking. Alex
Small, a reporter, wrote in 1929 an article about those Americans who
would rather "go into exile" than undergo the oppressive policies and
infantilizing dogmas of the administration in office then. He notes:
"[...] many an American who feels outraged at living under a government
which treats its subjects like a set of naughty children, who shall be told
what to drink, to read, to wear, and to see at the theatre, prefers to go
into exile" (Small 51). But they went back home where they remained
somehow uprooted, for, as Malcolm Cowley wrote in 1934 in his *Exile's
Return*, the American expatriates' "real exile was from society itself, from
any society to which they could honestly contribute and from which they
could draw the strength that lies in shared convictions" (Cowley 214).
This generalization gives to Cowley's comments on the relation between the
American expatriates and their homeland a much less historical dimension
and a much more philosophical one. He confirms the point further when
he writes that, after all, his and the expatriates' experiences "follow the
old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, that
is repeated in scores of European myths and continually re-embodied in
life" (Cowley 289). Hemingway, one of the main expatriate writers Cowley
deals with in his book, dramatizes home along these political and ethical
lines. Yet, what is particularly interesting is the way the fictionalized
intimate story of the writer explains these macrostructural ideologies
and existential choices Cowley, Small and Farrell refer to.

In Hemingway's work, the impossibility of home is tainted with
a sharp sense of rejection that seems visceral. Hemingway's complex
relation with his own past branches out into different effects around the
notion of home in the normative sense, whose quasi-total absence in his
fiction, becomes a textual symptom worth analyzing as such. Therefore,
the critic needs to look for other much more deeply rooted reasons than
the ones that History might offer, even if its determining forces are to
be taken into account, too.

Significantly enough, both home and mother are interlocked by the
same forces of negativity. Apart from a brief mention in "The Doctor and
the Doctor's Wife," "Now I Lay Me," an even more fleeting allusion in the
posthumous unfinished novel *The Last Good Country*, and a laconic hint
dropped in *For Whom the Bell Tolls*, the protagonist's mother is nowhere
to be seen. Not unlike the houses, when she is physically present she is
never described. Thus the omission of one corresponds to the omission
of the other. That elision can be considered as a negative paradigm that
concentrates a whole set of dark undertones implying trauma ambivalent
affects, denials, and strategies for psychic survival.

If things are so then, why write a study on the figure of home
in Hemingway? At least for two reasons. The first one corresponds to
the cornerstone of Hemingway's own theory of writing, based on the
hypothesis that the omitted diegetic element can be in certain cases
more important than the stated one. According to Hemingway's famous
"iceberg theory" as defined in *Death in the Afternoon*,

[i]f a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about
he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is
writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly
as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of
an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer
who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow
places in his writing. (153-154)

Bearing in mind this minimal definition of omission, the very absence
of home from most stories and nearly all novels becomes a significant
generative *textual* element, all the more so as that figure is the core of
a complex made of a series of rejections and sublimations. The second
reason lies in the intimate connection between home and the maternal
notion of home in the normative sense, whose quasi-total absence in his
fiction, becomes a textual symptom worth analyzing as such. Therefore,
the critic needs to look for other much more deeply rooted reasons than
the ones that History might offer, even if its determining forces are to
be taken into account, too.

Significantly enough, both home and mother are interlocked by the
same forces of negativity. Apart from a brief mention in "The Doctor and
the Doctor's Wife," "Now I Lay Me," an even more fleeting allusion in the
posthumous unfinished novel *The Last Good Country*, and a laconic hint
dropped in *For Whom the Bell Tolls*, the protagonist's mother is nowhere
to be seen. Not unlike the houses, when she is physically present she is
never described. Thus the omission of one corresponds to the omission
of the other. That elision can be considered as a negative paradigm that
concentrates a whole set of dark undertones implying trauma ambivalent
affects, denials, and strategies for psychic survival.

If things are so then, why write a study on the figure of home
in Hemingway? At least for two reasons. The first one corresponds to
the cornerstone of Hemingway's own theory of writing, based on the
hypothesis that the omitted diegetic element can be in certain cases
more important than the stated one. According to Hemingway's famous
"iceberg theory" as defined in *Death in the Afternoon*,

[i]f a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about
he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is
writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly
as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of
an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer
who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow
places in his writing. (153-154)

Bearing in mind this minimal definition of omission, the very absence
of home from most stories and nearly all novels becomes a significant
generative *textual* element, all the more so as that figure is the core of
a complex made of a series of rejections and sublimations. The second
reason lies in the intimate connection between home and the maternal
Other, whose 'volume' becomes coextensive with it in the double sense
of family and homeland.

Minimally and yet fortunately for the critic, there is one narrative that
presents the Hemingway protagonist (here a war veteran named Harold
Krebs) in an interactive situation at home with his family and especially with
his mother. "Soldier's Home" (1925) brings to light the complex interaction
between the subject, on the one hand, and the mother-home dyad, on
the other. Ruben De Baerdemaeker identifies in Krebs's detachment from
home distorting effects on the way he perceives his past. Krebs "has
come undone [...] because he is not in touch with home, or does not feel
at home in Oklahoma, and because this present unease taints his past,
rather than vice versa" (De Baerdemaeker 59). Yet, is it not possible to
see in the protagonist's past, determining factors and uncontrollable
forces that affect the present and distort the protagonist's perception
of what he has to go through and of what he cannot go through in the
present? A second level of analysis can also be taken into consideration:
writing per se is a way of sorting out the past in order to inhabit life and
consequently imagine and improve one's relation with the world as home.

In Hemingway, there is the persistent desire of the protagonist to
empty down the house from its 'hominess,' considering it as the simple
location of some action. To the notable exception of very few narratives,
houses are indeed mere settings stripped of any affective or socio-
cultural complexity. Strikingly enough, even in narratives that develop
a non-American protagonist's story, the reader can identify the same
process of negation and reduction. In "The Undefeated," for instance,
Zurito, the picador who enfolds Manuel with brotherly love, invites the
ageing matador to his house in a gesture of generous hospitality:

"Come on," said Zurito. "Come on up to the house."

Manuel reached under the seat for his suitcase. He was happy [...].

"Come on up to the house and we'll eat," Zurito said. (225)

For sure, this moment of warmth enlightens the gray life of the
waning and lonely bullfighter, who, like most Hemingway protagonists, has
Other, whose 'volume' becomes coextensive with it in the double sense
of family and homeland.

Minimally and yet fortunately for the critic, there is one narrative that
presents the Hemingway protagonist (here a war veteran named Harold
Krebs) in an interactive situation at home with his family and especially with
his mother. "Soldier's Home" (1925) brings to light the complex interaction
between the subject, on the one hand, and the mother-home dyad, on
the other. Ruben De Baerdemaeker identifies in Krebs's detachment from
home distorting effects on the way he perceives his past. Krebs "has
come undone [...] because he is not in touch with home, or does not feel
at home in Oklahoma, and because this present unease taints his past,
rather than vice versa" (De Baerdemaeker 59). Yet, is it not possible to
see in the protagonist's past, determining factors and uncontrollable
forces that affect the present and distort the protagonist's perception
of what he has to go through and of what he cannot go through in the
present? A second level of analysis can also be taken into consideration:
writing per se is a way of sorting out the past in order to inhabit life and
consequently imagine and improve one's relation with the world as home.

In Hemingway, there is the persistent desire of the protagonist to
empty down the house from its 'hominess,' considering it as the simple
location of some action. To the notable exception of very few narratives,
houses are indeed mere settings stripped of any affective or socio-
cultural complexity. Strikingly enough, even in narratives that develop
a non-American protagonist's story, the reader can identify the same
process of negation and reduction. In "The Undefeated," for instance,
Zurito, the picador who enfolds Manuel with brotherly love, invites the
ageing matador to his house in a gesture of generous hospitality:

"Come on," said Zurito. "Come on up to the house."

Manuel reached under the seat for his suitcase. He was happy [...].

"Come on up to the house and we'll eat," Zurito said. (225)

For sure, this moment of warmth enlightens the gray life of the
waning and lonely bullfighter, who, like most Hemingway protagonists, has
no home worthy of notice. Strikingly enough, the heartfelt words of Zurito
betray some unconcern, not as regards the invitation per se, but the way
he refers to his place as "the house." While the intention is cordial the way
the house is mentioned is somehow dried-up; the picador does not even
use a possessive pronoun to bring together the two. Zurito's invitation is
followed with a typographical blank that points to the obliteration of the
expected *life* within the house, not only from the diegetic scene but also
from the text being generated, in the sense that the narrator does not give
the reader the slightest indication on Zurito's house, let alone ' invite ' him
into it. This omission, which refers to the complexities of the affects that
determine the subject's relation with home, is structural in Hemingway's
fiction where home is usually nothing but a house, and is part of a poetic
ensemble that values the surface elements at the expense of inwardness.

Conceptually, home is a place teeming with the life of the people or
the person who reside in it, and the memories derived from that life.<fnref n="89" />
Far from being a simple structure engaging a reflection on the representa-
tion of space, home is indeed a "cradle," a temporal complex internalized
in the subject's mind, both at the conscious and the unconscious levels.
This is far from being the case in Hemingway's narratives. In *The Garden
of Eden* David's rooms in his long stay residence hotel are the locus of
the erotic experimentations he goes through with his young and daring
wife Catherine, and the private workshop for his regular writing activity.
But the features of this transient 'home' remain completely abstract. And
so is Jake's own flat in Paris in *The Sun Also Rises*: far from illustrating
positively the Bachelardian theory of the house as a complex space made
of memories and emotions, it presents no life of its own.

Indeed, Jake's flat is an anonymous stripped down setting that has
a simple diegetic function, being incidentally the place where the meeting
with Count Missipopolous, impulsively invited by Brett (and not by Jake!),

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ See Bachelard whose approach to the material imagination of space focuses on the emotional and psychological dimensions of the house. A house is "a body of images" (Bachelard 3), a complex structure made of memories, experiences, emotions, meanings... It is a protective shelter that connects past and present. Thus defined the house structures the mind of the human being. Deprived of this structuring factor the house is, man will be dissipated: "In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies [...]. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is 'cast into the world' [...], man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle" (6-7).</footnote>
no home worthy of notice. Strikingly enough, the heartfelt words of Zurito
betray some unconcern, not as regards the invitation per se, but the way
he refers to his place as "the house." While the intention is cordial the way
the house is mentioned is somehow dried-up; the picador does not even
use a possessive pronoun to bring together the two. Zurito's invitation is
followed with a typographical blank that points to the obliteration of the
expected *life* within the house, not only from the diegetic scene but also
from the text being generated, in the sense that the narrator does not give
the reader the slightest indication on Zurito's house, let alone ' invite ' him
into it. This omission, which refers to the complexities of the affects that
determine the subject's relation with home, is structural in Hemingway's
fiction where home is usually nothing but a house, and is part of a poetic
ensemble that values the surface elements at the expense of inwardness.

Conceptually, home is a place teeming with the life of the people or
the person who reside in it, and the memories derived from that life.<fnref n="89" />
Far from being a simple structure engaging a reflection on the representa-
tion of space, home is indeed a "cradle," a temporal complex internalized
in the subject's mind, both at the conscious and the unconscious levels.
This is far from being the case in Hemingway's narratives. In *The Garden
of Eden* David's rooms in his long stay residence hotel are the locus of
the erotic experimentations he goes through with his young and daring
wife Catherine, and the private workshop for his regular writing activity.
But the features of this transient 'home' remain completely abstract. And
so is Jake's own flat in Paris in *The Sun Also Rises*: far from illustrating
positively the Bachelardian theory of the house as a complex space made
of memories and emotions, it presents no life of its own.

Indeed, Jake's flat is an anonymous stripped down setting that has
a simple diegetic function, being incidentally the place where the meeting
with Count Missipopolous, impulsively invited by Brett (and not by Jake!),

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ See Bachelard whose approach to the material imagination of space focuses on the emotional and psychological dimensions of the house. A house is "a body of images" (Bachelard 3), a complex structure made of memories, experiences, emotions, meanings... It is a protective shelter that connects past and present. Thus defined the house structures the mind of the human being. Deprived of this structuring factor the house is, man will be dissipated: "In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies [...]. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is 'cast into the world' [...], man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle" (6-7).</footnote>
takes place, and a dramatic stage where the "funny" injury of Jake is alluded to. The reader will never know how the apartment is furnished, what colors it is painted or tapestried with, what kind of atmosphere prevails in it, or how far it might symbolize or reveal Jake's intimate world. More generally, the houses as presented in the novel show impenetrable façades whose interest is mainly aesthetic or architectural but is not emotional at all. They are "houses and villages [that] look well-off and clean," or "nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered" (91), that Jake Barnes looks at while riding a rented car through the Basque country. He does not pay heed to the life they might harbor, but seems only interested in the pattern they trace out against the majestic-looking Pyrenees. Strolling in the streets of Paris in company of his friends Bill and Mike, Jake looks at the buildings, recording their most salient visual features, such as the "high old houses" he can see on both sides of "smooth narrow streets," some of which "ju[t] out toward the street," while "others [are] cut back" (78). In Spain the house can be associated visually albeit vaguely to family, but no hominess and no nostalgic reverie flows through the edifice. Jake mentions generically and rather detachedly "whitewashed stone houses, [with] families sitting in their doorways watching" him and Bill on their way to the inn (109). The Hemingway house, like his texts, is a-psychological; it has no *character* and remains most of the time stripped down to its objective core.

There is doubtless a realistic explanation for that. As an expatriate living in Paris and a tourist travelling in the Basque country Jake has no a priori access to the interiors of the French and Spanish houses; he expresses no wish to enter one either. Most of the time his gaze unfolds from a distant, mobile point of view—in the above-given examples, he is walking and riding—that leaves no place for a close relation to blossom into affection or attachment, emphasizing on the contrary the fleeting dimension of the moment and would-be relation, in a world where home—that is, the feeling of familiarity and intimacy with the world—is to be founded yet. This having been said, one will be ill-advised to think that the reason for this apparent affective neutrality can solely be explained by the non-nativeness of Jake Barnes here, or Robert Jordan in *For Whom the Bell Tolls*, or David Bourne in *The Garden of Eden*.
takes place, and a dramatic stage where the "funny" injury of Jake is alluded to. The reader will never know how the apartment is furnished, what colors it is painted or tapestried with, what kind of atmosphere prevails in it, or how far it might symbolize or reveal Jake's intimate world. More generally, the houses as presented in the novel show impenetrable façades whose interest is mainly aesthetic or architectural but is not emotional at all. They are "houses and villages [that] look well-off and clean," or "nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered" (91), that Jake Barnes looks at while riding a rented car through the Basque country. He does not pay heed to the life they might harbor, but seems only interested in the pattern they trace out against the majestic-looking Pyrenees. Strolling in the streets of Paris in company of his friends Bill and Mike, Jake looks at the buildings, recording their most salient visual features, such as the "high old houses" he can see on both sides of "smooth narrow streets," some of which "ju[t] out toward the street," while "others [are] cut back" (78). In Spain the house can be associated visually albeit vaguely to family, but no hominess and no nostalgic reverie flows through the edifice. Jake mentions generically and rather detachedly "whitewashed stone houses, [with] families sitting in their doorways watching" him and Bill on their way to the inn (109). The Hemingway house, like his texts, is a-psychological; it has no *character* and remains most of the time stripped down to its objective core.

There is doubtless a realistic explanation for that. As an expatriate living in Paris and a tourist travelling in the Basque country Jake has no a priori access to the interiors of the French and Spanish houses; he expresses no wish to enter one either. Most of the time his gaze unfolds from a distant, mobile point of view—in the above-given examples, he is walking and riding—that leaves no place for a close relation to blossom into affection or attachment, emphasizing on the contrary the fleeting dimension of the moment and would-be relation, in a world where home—that is, the feeling of familiarity and intimacy with the world—is to be founded yet. This having been said, one will be ill-advised to think that the reason for this apparent affective neutrality can solely be explained by the non-nativeness of Jake Barnes here, or Robert Jordan in *For Whom the Bell Tolls*, or David Bourne in *The Garden of Eden*.
Hemingway shuns interiority and what seems to be haunting
depths, favoring on the contrary exteriority, as if focusing on the house,
analogically related to the self, would lead the protagonist to some
unpleasant memories and deeply buried traumas from the disquieting
past. The interior, usually figured by the intimacy of rooms, turns out
to be a hazardous place to be eschewed in a poetic system that fosters
the surface elements.

The famous initial chapter of *A Farewell to Arms* opens on the mention
of the house the narrator (Frederic Henry) lives in: "In the late summer
of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river
and the plain to the mountains" (7). Significantly enough, Henry's vision
remains centrifugal throughout the chapter, as he is absorbed by what
goes on outside, not paying the slightest attention to what the inside
looks like and even less to what it might be. It comes as no surprise
that Henry's attention should be drawn to the world outside and brush
aside the interior. Indeed, beyond the dynamic action of gaze and the
formal complexities of focalization, the incipit of Hemingway's war and
love novel has a symptomatic dimension to it that points not only to
the disinterest in, if not disregard for real homes, but to what might be
called home-phobia as the study of "Soldier's Home" will show us later.

The house usually plays the role of a prefatory structure through
which some action unfolds. It is almost systematically an interchangeable
place throughout the wide geography outlined by the indefatigable traveler
or "migrant" the Hemingway protagonist is. Houses are rather stages
where events occur without leaving a sensitive touch. The recurrent
hotel rooms, tents, cottages..., allude to change and instability in the
life of protagonists who are on the move or live in foreign countries, in
quest for some real home, that is, some powerful means for being closely
connected—both in the physical and the spiritual sense—with this world,
beyond the geographical national borders.

Unlike some of his major contemporaries such as Anderson, Faulkner
or Fitzgerald, whose works probe important social, historical, and cultural
aspects of America, Hemingway turned his back on his homeland in his
work. With the exception of a few short stories and the rather insipid
*To Have and Have Not*, all of his creative texts are located in foreign
Hemingway shuns interiority and what seems to be haunting
depths, favoring on the contrary exteriority, as if focusing on the house,
analogically related to the self, would lead the protagonist to some
unpleasant memories and deeply buried traumas from the disquieting
past. The interior, usually figured by the intimacy of rooms, turns out
to be a hazardous place to be eschewed in a poetic system that fosters
the surface elements.

The famous initial chapter of *A Farewell to Arms* opens on the mention
of the house the narrator (Frederic Henry) lives in: "In the late summer
of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river
and the plain to the mountains" (7). Significantly enough, Henry's vision
remains centrifugal throughout the chapter, as he is absorbed by what
goes on outside, not paying the slightest attention to what the inside
looks like and even less to what it might be. It comes as no surprise
that Henry's attention should be drawn to the world outside and brush
aside the interior. Indeed, beyond the dynamic action of gaze and the
formal complexities of focalization, the incipit of Hemingway's war and
love novel has a symptomatic dimension to it that points not only to
the disinterest in, if not disregard for real homes, but to what might be
called *home-phobia* as the study of "Soldier's Home" will show us later.

The house usually plays the role of a prefatory structure through
which some action unfolds. It is almost systematically an interchangeable
place throughout the wide geography outlined by the indefatigable traveler
or "migrant" the Hemingway protagonist is. Houses are rather stages
where events occur without leaving a sensitive touch. The recurrent
hotel rooms, tents, cottages..., allude to change and instability in the
life of protagonists who are on the move or live in foreign countries, in
quest for some real home, that is, some powerful means for being closely
connected—both in the physical and the spiritual sense—with this world,
beyond the geographical national borders.

Unlike some of his major contemporaries such as Anderson, Faulkner
or Fitzgerald, whose works probe important social, historical, and cultural
aspects of America, Hemingway turned his back on his homeland in his
work. With the exception of a few short stories and the rather insipid
*To Have and Have Not*, all of his creative texts are located in foreign
countries.<fnref n="90" /> In his novels and in most of his stories, the protagonist's homeland looms vaguely in the background or is not even mentioned. Like the Jamesian hero the Hemingway hero lives far from the motherland without managing to create a personal, stable one. There might be hints to America in the protagonist's mind, but more often than not they convey negative memories or ideas. For instance, the unique allusion to Robert Jordan's homeland in *For Whom the Bell Tolls* consists in the violent memory of a racial lynching that he witnessed as a child back home (121). The only "chapter" or short short story from *in our time*<fnref n="91" /> that refers to America, presents a racial crime committed by a police officer who hates Hungarians ("Chapter VIII"). More often than not the protagonist thinks, talks and behaves as if he had no home or no past. Furthermore, in the stories where action takes place partially or wholly in America, plot is most of the time built on a violent traumatic event (violent birth and suicide in "Indian Camp" (*In Our Time*), the disturbing destruction of the father's collection of objects in "Now I Lay Me," the impending murder in "The Killers" (*Men Without Women*) ...). Moreover, these "American" stories do not explore the dynamics of American society but most of the time use wild nature ("Big Two-Hearted River," "The Last Good Country") or dramatic anecdotes ("The Battler," "The End of Something," "Fathers and Sons") to stage the protagonist's inner conflicts and resolutions, as well as his personal perspective on what happened to him back then.

Hemingway's fiction does not express directly a political, cultural or sociological judgment on the USA; it merely produces textual elements that connote a mute and nonetheless significant rejection of family and homeland, and concurrently bespeaks persistent forms of identification with other cultures, mainly African and Spanish. The acts and speech of the protagonist are often determined by an inner necessity as will be studied now through the focus on "Soldier's Home" a story where

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Actually, even the plot of *To Have and Have not* unfolds in between Cuba and Florida. This amphibological novel apart, the action in all of Hemingway's novels develops exclusively in international settings. As for the short stories, only a few of them are America based. The action in *The Torrents of Spring* published in 1926, develops in the USA, but this novella is a simple parody of Sherwood Anderson, written hastily and slyly by Hemingway in order to break his contract with Boni and Liveright, also Anderson's publisher.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ *In our time*, with a lower-case title, is a collection of numbered short "Chapters" or vignettes, published in Paris in 1924, one year before the publication in New York of the well-known short story collection *In Our Time*.</footnote>
countries.<fnref n="90" /> In his novels and in most of his stories, the protagonist's homeland looms vaguely in the background or is not even mentioned. Like the Jamesian hero the Hemingway hero lives far from the motherland without managing to create a personal, stable one. There might be hints to America in the protagonist's mind, but more often than not they convey negative memories or ideas. For instance, the unique allusion to Robert Jordan's homeland in *For Whom the Bell Tolls* consists in the violent memory of a racial lynching that he witnessed as a child back home (121). The only "chapter" or short short story from *in our time*<fnref n="91" /> that refers to America, presents a racial crime committed by a police officer who hates Hungarians ("Chapter VIII"). More often than not the protagonist thinks, talks and behaves as if he had no home or no past. Furthermore, in the stories where action takes place partially or wholly in America, plot is most of the time built on a violent traumatic event (violent birth and suicide in "Indian Camp" (*In Our Time*), the disturbing destruction of the father's collection of objects in "Now I Lay Me," the impending murder in "The Killers" (*Men Without Women*) ...). Moreover, these "American" stories do not explore the dynamics of American society but most of the time use wild nature ("Big Two-Hearted River," "The Last Good Country") or dramatic anecdotes ("The Battler," "The End of Something," "Fathers and Sons") to stage the protagonist's inner conflicts and resolutions, as well as his personal perspective on what happened to him back then.

Hemingway's fiction does not express directly a political, cultural or sociological judgment on the USA; it merely produces textual elements that connote a mute and nonetheless significant rejection of family and homeland, and concurrently bespeaks persistent forms of identification with other cultures, mainly African and Spanish. The acts and speech of the protagonist are often determined by an inner necessity as will be studied now through the focus on "Soldier's Home" a story where

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Actually, even the plot of *To Have and Have not* unfolds in between Cuba and Florida. This amphibological novel apart, the action in all of Hemingway's novels develops exclusively in international settings. As for the short stories, only a few of them are America based. The action in *The Torrents of Spring* published in 1926, develops in the USA, but this novella is a simple parody of Sherwood Anderson, written hastily and slyly by Hemingway in order to break his contract with Boni and Liveright, also Anderson's publisher.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ *In our time*, with a lower-case title, is a collection of numbered short "Chapters" or vignettes, published in Paris in 1924, one year before the publication in New York of the well-known short story collection *In Our Time*.</footnote>
homeland, home and the maternal are interlocked in a relation that implies
denial, hatred, and guilt.

"Soldier's Home" is centered on the complaint of Harold Krebs, a young man whose desires have been apparently atrophied by the experience of the war in France and Germany. Krebs feels somehow ridiculous to come back long after the end of the war, now that the "greeting of heroes was over" (138). His life is marked with the will for seclusion that paradoxically brings forth a continuous feeling of frustration. He only wants to "live without consequences," in other words, without having to pay the symbolic price of life as set by social intercourse, one of the causes of which lies in the problematic relation with the feminine. The horizon of Krebs is defined by the interiority of his home, which is dominated by his quite active mother, while his links with the outside, where masculinity is supposed to be demonstrated through competitive relations with other men and seductive ones with women, are on the whole reduced to mere distant noncommittal observations and brief occasional excursions down town.

To Krebs, the feminine is somehow generic and abstract. The young man finds the girls of his hometown "too complicated" and not engaging enough; in any case, he does not want to make the slightest effort to seduce one. Albeit he "vaguely" feels desire for some good-looking girl he does "not want to have to work to get her" (140). When he looks at the girls from a *safe* distance, he finds them pretty, especially since they almost all have short hair (140). But when he approaches them in town or in the tearoom, they leave him more or less indifferent. No girl stands out from the crowd. On the whole, the girls' "appeal to him [is] not very strong"; "he [does] not want them really," and does not even "like them when he [sees] them in the Greek's ice cream parlor" (140). This contradicts the sense of masculinity that is displayed, though ironically, at the beginning of the story, through the reference to two different pictures.

The very first lines of the story give realistic details about Krebs's enlisting in the Marines then fighting in the Rhine area, and about his return to his homeland two years later. Before enlisting Krebs was a student in a Methodist college in Kansas: "There is a picture which shows
homeland, home and the maternal are interlocked in a relation that implies
denial, hatred, and guilt.

"Soldier's Home" is centered on the complaint of Harold Krebs, a young man whose desires have been apparently atrophied by the experience of the war in France and Germany. Krebs feels somehow ridiculous to come back long after the end of the war, now that the "greeting of heroes was over" (138). His life is marked with the will for seclusion that paradoxically brings forth a continuous feeling of frustration. He only wants to "live without consequences," in other words, without having to pay the symbolic price of life as set by social intercourse, one of the causes of which lies in the problematic relation with the feminine. The horizon of Krebs is defined by the interiority of his home, which is dominated by his quite active mother, while his links with the outside, where masculinity is supposed to be *demonstrated* through competitive relations with other men and seductive ones with women, are on the whole reduced to mere distant noncommittal observations and brief occasional excursions down town.

To Krebs, the feminine is somehow generic and abstract. The young man finds the girls of his hometown "too complicated" and not engaging enough; in any case, he does not want to make the slightest effort to seduce one. Albeit he "vaguely" feels desire for some good-looking girl he does "not want to have to work to get her" (140). When he looks at the girls from a *safe* distance, he finds them pretty, especially since they almost all have short hair (140). But when he approaches them in town or in the tearoom, they leave him more or less indifferent. No girl stands out from the crowd. On the whole, the girls' "appeal to him [is] not very strong"; "he [does] not want them really," and does not even "like them when he [sees] them in the Greek's ice cream parlor" (140). This contradicts the sense of masculinity that is displayed, though ironically, at the beginning of the story, through the reference to two different pictures.

The very first lines of the story give realistic details about Krebs's enlisting in the Marines then fighting in the Rhine area, and about his return to his homeland two years later. Before enlisting Krebs was a student in a Methodist college in Kansas: "There is a picture which shows
him among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same
height and style collar" (138). The realistic detail actually offers a key
for understanding one of the reasons why Krebs rejects his home. The
picture mirrors a significant sense of identity suggested by the way these
young men, who look and are dressed "exactly" alike, are "all of them"
made to act and think in the same fashion. A similar image of conformity
appears later in the story when the narrator mentions the "pattern"
the girls of the town give shape to. Through Krebs's eyes Hemingway
associates social identity to a boring sense of uniformity that Krebs is
not in tune with anymore:

Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had
grown up. [...] He liked to look at them, though. There were so many
good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short [...].
They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars.
It was a pattern. (140)

Krebs is somehow attracted to the girls but the energy of desire is not
strong enough to make him move forward with it. The girls have become
mere images to be simply appreciated from some distance, a detachment
that indicates the gap which separates his "world" from theirs, since "the
world they were in was not the world he was in" (141). Like the fraternity
brothers the girls look alike. The word "pattern" unifies them into one
design, while the ironic "collar," also worn by the "brothers," points out the
social imprisonment Krebs does not want to be part of anymore. He feels
very different now from his fellow citizens, all trapped into conventionality
and imitation; yet he has not come up so far with any existential solution
to get out from all this crushing uniformity and from the circles his mind
moves in. Thus, what thins out Krebs's sense of liveliness is the tedious
endemic social sameness, a conformity he probably was not aware of
prior to going to war but that has now grown into a will for rupture. The
veteran's experiences abroad seem to have created a gap between himself
and what his homeland has to offer in terms of desire and evolution. That
gap gives the measure of the intellectual and spiritual evolution of Krebs,
who has developed a sharp sense of observation through his experience
him among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar" (138). The realistic detail actually offers a key for understanding one of the reasons why Krebs rejects his home. The picture mirrors a significant sense of identity suggested by the way these young men, who look and are dressed "exactly" alike, are "all of them" made to act and think in the same fashion. A similar image of conformity appears later in the story when the narrator mentions the "pattern" the girls of the town give shape to. Through Krebs's eyes Hemingway associates social identity to a boring sense of uniformity that Krebs is not in tune with anymore:

> Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up. [...] He liked to look at them, though. There were so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short [...]. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. (140)

Krebs is somehow attracted to the girls but the energy of desire is not strong enough to make him move forward with it. The girls have become mere images to be simply appreciated from some distance, a detachment that indicates the gap which separates his "world" from theirs, since "the world they were in was not the world he was in" (141). Like the fraternity brothers the girls look alike. The word "pattern" unifies them into one design, while the ironic "collar," also worn by the "brothers," points out the social imprisonment Krebs does not want to be part of anymore. He feels very different now from his fellow citizens, all trapped into conventionality and imitation; yet he has not come up so far with any existential solution to get out from all this crushing uniformity and from the circles his mind moves in. Thus, what thins out Krebs's sense of liveliness is the tedious endemic social sameness, a conformity he probably was not aware of prior to going to war but that has now grown into a will for rupture. The veteran's experiences abroad seem to have created a gap between himself and what his homeland has to offer in terms of desire and evolution. That gap gives the measure of the intellectual and spiritual evolution of Krebs, who has developed a sharp sense of observation through his experience
of otherness and of the tragic in Europe, a necessary achievement made
on the path towards artistic awareness.

Ironically, the American *uniform* does not fit him either, as the second picture mentioned in the story shows, where he is seen in company with “two German girls and another corporal” (138). Indeed, Krebs and his comrade “look too big for their uniforms” (138). Krebs is “too big” not simply for the garment but for the *uniformity* it connotes, which means that he has outgrown the nationalistic limitations that impose the way a citizen is supposed to inhabit the national space and make of it the home. This is probably why Krebs “did not want to leave Germany” and come back home (113). The war led the soldier to self-awareness and to the realization of his own otherness as well as the existence of a universal home, beyond the limits of identity. This widening sense of self has created a feeling of marginality Krebs cannot cope with now, but that he should overcome in order to get out of the double bind that endangers him mentally. And it is his mother who triggers the decisive action that forces him into making an existential choice, while the masculine model, normally incarnated by the father, remains absent and “non-committal.”

However, Krebs's mother uses the father or his function strategically and fittingly as an alleged source of authority to fuel the maternal sovereign she incarnates. What I call the maternal sovereign is a form of domination that derives its power from the patriarchal phallic supremacy the mother serves and preserves devotedly. But beyond *power*, which is, by definition, extrinsic and derived, the mother possesses *potency*, which can be defined here as an *intrinsic* disposition to dominate and to exert influence, the source of which are the omnipotent fantasies generated by the mother's unconscious, identifiable namely in the way she controls all the details of daily life and the way she *occupies* the home space. The maternal sovereign feeds too on social mimesis.

Krebs's mother sounds indeed like the guardian of social values,
calling her son to order for the good of the community, and reproaching
him with his idleness and lack of social ambition. She uses the ideology
of competition to stir her son's drives of rivalry into action, reminding
him that the "boys" his age are ""all settling down [and] determined to get
somewhere"" (143-144), and "'are on their way to being really a credit to
of otherness and of the tragic in Europe, a necessary achievement made
on the path towards artistic awareness.

Ironically, the American *uniform* does not fit him either, as the second picture mentioned in the story shows, where he is seen in company with “two German girls and another corporal” (138). Indeed, Krebs and his comrade “look too big for their uniforms” (138). Krebs is “too big” not simply for the garment but for the *uniformity* it connotes, which means that he has outgrown the nationalistic limitations that impose the way a citizen is supposed to inhabit the national space and make of it the home. This is probably why Krebs “did not want to leave Germany” and come back home (113). The war led the soldier to self-awareness and to the realization of his own otherness as well as the existence of a universal home, beyond the limits of identity. This widening sense of self has created a feeling of marginality Krebs cannot cope with now, but that he should overcome in order to get out of the double bind that endangers him mentally. And it is his mother who triggers the decisive action that forces him into making an existential choice, while the masculine model, normally incarnated by the father, remains absent and “non-committal.”

However, Krebs's mother uses the father or his function strategically and fittingly as an alleged source of authority to fuel the maternal sovereign she incarnates. What I call the maternal sovereign is a form of domination that derives its power from the patriarchal phallic supremacy the mother serves and preserves devotedly. But beyond *power*, which is, by definition, extrinsic and derived, the mother possesses *potency*, which can be defined here as an *intrinsic* disposition to dominate and to exert influence, the source of which are the omnipotent fantasies generated by the mother's unconscious, identifiable namely in the way she controls all the details of daily life and the way she *occupies* the home space. The maternal sovereign feeds too on social mimesis.

Krebs's mother sounds indeed like the guardian of social values,
calling her son to order for the good of the community, and reproaching
him with his idleness and lack of social ambition. She uses the ideology
of competition to stir her son's drives of rivalry into action, reminding
him that the "boys" his age are ""all settling down [and] determined to get
somewhere'"' (143-144), and "'are on their way to being really a credit to
the community''' (144), contrary to her son who, as his father allegedly thinks, has "'lost [his] ambition'" and has not "'got a definite aim in life.'" The mother specifies Krebs's purposeless and reprehensible situation even more harshly when she compares him to an acquaintance of his, a certain Charley Simmons, "'who is just [his] age,'" and yet has already got "'a good job and is going to be married'" (144).

Hence, the mother speaks on behalf of the whole community—which is the microcosmic representation of the nation—whose consistency should be maintained and not endangered by lazy outsiders like her own son. Social coherence and order are the supreme good in the mother's perspective. Her words bring together the sacrosanct social trinity of work, marriage, and community, in other words, work, family, and homeland, which constitute the old style conservatism Krebs's life abroad has alienated him from. In the mother's view, home as family and as nation are coextensive in the field of patriotic loyalty and religious devotion. This leaves no place for the modernist ethos that gave shape to Hemingway's worldview, specifically during those long years he spent in Paris in the 1920s, not unlike other 'subversive' expatriates. Krebs's unwillingness to come back home bespeaks Hemingway's awareness of the wide world out there, beyond the American way of life, seen no more as unique or exceptional. And yet, here he is sitting on "'the front porch'" of his family house, reading books or looking at the "good-looking" girls passing by (141).

Krebs's contradictory desires (he went back home against his own will) underline a mental situation that borders on a double-bind impasse, being both repelled and attracted by home and what it stands for. Yet, he seems to know why he likes being abroad. The comparison he makes between life in France and in Germany, which he prefers (141), presupposes a rational analysis of his situation. Nonetheless, he does not know why he came back home; there seems to be some unconscious desire that drew him back like an irresistible magnet. The security and comfort the maternal sovereign offers and the closely related regressive impulses might be the reason behind his return home. Krebs's presence at home is comfortable in spite of his feelings of disgust, because he seems to have regressed to childhood, spending most of his time in activities that imply enjoyment (playing pool, practicing the clarinet, reading, strolling
the community''' (144), contrary to her son who, as his father allegedly thinks, has "'lost [his] ambition'" and has not "'got a definite aim in life.'" The mother specifies Krebs's purposeless and reprehensible situation even more harshly when she compares him to an acquaintance of his, a certain Charley Simmons, "'who is just [his] age,'" and yet has already got "'a good job and is going to be married'" (144).

Hence, the mother speaks on behalf of the whole community—which is the microcosmic representation of the nation—whose consistency should be maintained and not endangered by lazy outsiders like her own son. Social coherence and order are the supreme good in the mother's perspective. Her words bring together the sacrosanct social trinity of work, marriage, and community, in other words, work, family, and homeland, which constitute the old style conservatism Krebs's life abroad has alienated him from. In the mother's view, home as family and as nation are coextensive in the field of patriotic loyalty and religious devotion. This leaves no place for the modernist ethos that gave shape to Hemingway's worldview, specifically during those long years he spent in Paris in the 1920s, not unlike other 'subversive' expatriates. Krebs's unwillingness to come back home bespeaks Hemingway's awareness of the wide world out there, beyond the American way of life, seen no more as unique or exceptional. And yet, here he is sitting on "'the front porch'" of his family house, reading books or looking at the "good-looking" girls passing by (141).

Krebs's contradictory desires (he went back home against his own will) underline a mental situation that borders on a double-bind impasse, being both repelled and attracted by home and what it stands for. Yet, he seems to know why he likes being abroad. The comparison he makes between life in France and in Germany, which he prefers (141), presupposes a rational analysis of his situation. Nonetheless, he does not know why he came back home; there seems to be some unconscious desire that drew him back like an irresistible magnet. The security and comfort the maternal sovereign offers and the closely related regressive impulses might be the reason behind his return home. Krebs's presence at home is comfortable in spite of his feelings of disgust, because he seems to have regressed to childhood, spending most of his time in activities that imply enjoyment (playing pool, practicing the clarinet, reading, strolling
down town, sleeping late...). Just like a child whose life is devoid of any
sense of responsibility or constraint, his life is thus organized around the
satisfaction of his pleasures (139).

Clearly enough, his perspective is temporally regressive, fueled
by unconscious fantasized feelings of might, just like those of a child
who thinks he is the center of attention and believes his mother holds
herself at his disposal: "He was still a hero to his two young sisters. His
mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had wanted it" (139).
The experience of the war has not propelled him forward regarding his
affects, but pushed his wishes back toward archaic repressed desires
and probably feelings of guilt, that turn out to be obstacles to sexual
gratification, preventing enjoyment and active participation in social life.
The belief that he could be served by his mother at will testifies to the
return of repressed archaic desires and thus to the failure of the process
of symbolization that should normally put an end to the problematics of
the Oedipus complex phase. On the contrary, Krebs's eroticism is passive:
"He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend
a long time getting her" (140). The refusal to go with girls despite some
feelings of sexual attraction just shows how sexual frustration has
triggered in part his neurotic symptoms.

Krebs thinks he can do without the symbolic order (that is, the
order of the signifier) which imposes intersubjectivity and language
as a relational tool and channel for desire. The subject is constantly
confronted with the risk of otherness in social interactions, in the sense
that his desire can be rejected by the other. Krebs is confined in the
Imaginary where everything is prefixed and easy to predict. It is the
girl, in a maternal unconscious position, who is the source of the active
erotic force, while Krebs remains an object satisfied to satisfy the Other,
a position that refers back to the archaic infantile position when the
baby, not yet a speaking subject, considers itself the object of desire of
its mother. Thus, in Krebs's fantasmatic scenario, the active source of
desire is external and structurally maternal: "Now he would have liked a
girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here at home it
was all too complicated" (141); "complicated": folded together, intricate,
just like the cultural complex.