Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography 9781501314308, 9781501314315, 9781501314322

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of figures
Introduction: Ordinary matters, modernity and women’s modernism
1. ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’: The street in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
2. Extraordinary actuality: Helen Levitt’s streets
3. Homely things: Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf
4. Mrs Brown and the face-to-face
5. Dorothea Lange: On photographing the familiar
6. Banalities of evil: Lee Miller’s ethics of seeing war
Coda: Margaret Monck and the labour of the everyday
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Ordinary Matters

Ordinary Matters Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography Lorraine Sim

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Lorraine Sim, 2016 Lorraine Sim has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Dorothea Lange, “Drought refugees from Abilene, TX.” Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b38482. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sim, Lorraine, author. Title: Ordinary matters : modernist women’s literature and photography / Lorraine Sim. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000137| ISBN 9781501314308 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501314322 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--Women authors--Great Britain--History and criticism. | English literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Literature and photography. | Women photographers--United States--History--20th century. | Women photographers--Great Britain--History--20th century. | Visual perception in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Classification: LCC PR116 .S56 2016 | DDC 820.9/9287--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000137 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1430-8 PB: 978-1-5013-4645-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-1433-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1432-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my mother

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  ix List of figures  xi

I ntroduction: Ordinary matters, modernity and women’s modernism  1 1 ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’: The street in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage  21 2 Extraordinary actuality: Helen Levitt’s streets  41 3 Homely things: Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf  67 4 Mrs Brown and the face-to-face  95 5 Dorothea Lange: On photographing the familiar  121 6 Banalities of evil: Lee Miller’s ethics of seeing war  153 Coda: Margaret Monck and the labour of the everyday  181

Bibliography  209 Index  221

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks, first, to my wonderful colleagues in the Humanities at Western Sydney University, who are not only exceptionally smart and inspirational but also so much fun to work alongside. I’m very grateful to Professor Peter Hutchings, Dean of the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and to Western Sydney University, for supporting a semester of research leave in 2015 that enabled me to complete this book; for funding three periods of overseas archival research that were essential to this project; and for providing financial support towards the cost of image copyright and reproduction fees. Thanks to my friends and fellow travellers in modernist studies at the Australasian Modernist Studies Network and the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia (UNSW). Sincere thanks to the following people who have provided astute advice and feedback on this project, or parts thereof: Prudence Black, Maryanne Dever, Jessica Gildersleeve, Melinda Harvey, Gail Jones, Scott McCracken, Chris Peterson, Amanda Third, Anthony Uhlmann and Ann Vickery. I’m extremely grateful to the lovely Melinda Jewell for applying her excellent copy-editing skills to the manuscript at the eleventh hour. To my publisher, Haaris Naqvi, and my editor, Mary Al-Sayed, at Bloomsbury, thank you for supporting this project, and for your expert assistance and guidance in seeing this book through to completion. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions on various aspects of the book. Anna Sparham, Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, kindly facilitated my two research visits to view materials in the Margaret Monck archive. Thanks to Sarah Williams at the Museum of London, and Luci Gosling at the Mary Evans Picture Library, for enabling me to reproduce several of Monck’s images here. Sincere thanks to the Lee Miller Archive, particularly to Kerry Negahban and Antony Penrose, for their invaluable guidance and for permitting me to reproduce Miller’s photographs here. Victoria Harris and Marvin Hoshino, as representatives of the Estate of Helen Levitt, kindly provided me with the necessary permissions to reproduce some of Levitt’s photographs as part of this study. Thanks to Tomeka Jones at the Library of Congress for furnishing me with digital copies of photographs by Dorothea Lange. Part of the introduction and of Chapter 5 were previously published as

x Acknowledgements

an article in Australian Feminist Studies (vol. 30, no. 84, 2015). An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published in Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies (vol. 6, 2013–14), and an earlier version of Chapter 6 has appeared in Modernist Cultures (vol. 4, no. 1, 2009). I thank the editors of those respective journals for allowing me to reproduce the material here. A big thanks to all of my fellow climbers in the Sydney region for fun times, adventures, and for keeping me challenged and engaged as a body as well as a mind. Special thanks to precious people who have been with me for much of this particular journey, or significant moments along the way: Nicola Harte, Alex Ling, Alison Moore, Jesse Sweeney and Veronica Trainor. The biggest expression of gratitude goes, as always, to my family, for their unconditional love and support every day: my parents, Alex and Alison, my beloved brother, David, and my beautiful sister-in-law, Sharon.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  45 Figure 2: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  51 Figure 3: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  53 Figure 4: Margaret Monck, Girls skipping rope, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck  54 Figure 5: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  56 Figure 6: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  57 Figure 7: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  58 Figure 8: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  60 Figure 9: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  61 Figure 10: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  63 Figure 11: Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt  65 All photographs by Dorothea Lange were obtained from the FSA/OWI Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Lange’s full, original titles are reproduced in each instance. Figure 12: Dorothea Lange, Power farming displaces tenants from the land in the western dry cotton area. Childress County, Texas Panhandle, June 1938. LC-DIG-ppmsc-00232. Library of Congress.  130

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Figure 13: Dorothea Lange, Drought refugees from Abilene, Texas, following the crops of California as migratory workers. ‘The finest people in this world live in Texas but I just can’t seem to accomplish nothin’ there. Two year drought, then a crop, then two years drought and so on. I got two brothers still trying to make it back there and there they’re sitting,’ said the father, August 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b38482. Library of Congress.  134 Figure 14: Dorothea Lange, Texan refugees’ car. They are seeking work in the carrot fields of the Coachella Valley. California, February 1937. LC-DIG-fsa-8b31657. Library of Congress.  135 Figure 15: Dorothea Lange, Once a Missouri farmer, now a migratory farm laborer on the Pacific Coast. California, February 1936. LC-DIGfsa-8e07318. Library of Congress.  136 Figure 16: Dorothea Lange, Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers, March 1937. LC-DIG-fsa-8b31723. Library of Congress.  137 Figure 17: Dorothea Lange, Pea picker’s home. The condition of these people warrant resettlement camps for migrant agricultural workers. Nipomo, California, February 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b27080. Library of Congress.  138 Figure 18: Dorothea Lange, Tent housing a family of four who will be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration. Imperial County, California, March 1937. LC-DIG-fsa-8b31750. Library of Congress.  138 Figure 19: Dorothea Lange, Children of destitute family. American River camp, near Sacramento, California, November 1936. LC-DIGfsa-8b29882. Library of Congress.  147 Figure 20: Dorothea Lange, Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California, November 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b31646. Library of Congress.  149 Figure 21: Photographer unknown, Still life, from Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, 1941.  163 Figure 22: Lee Miller, Freddie Mayor, London Air Raid Warden and Art Dealer, London, England 1940. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  164



List of Figures

xiii

Figure 23: Photographer unknown, The warden may be anybody: plain Mrs. Smith or a well-known art dealer, from Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, 1941.  164 Figure 24: Lee Miller, Dolphin Court, Chelsea, London, England 1940. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  165 Figure 25: Lee Miller, US Army nurses’ billet, Oxford, England, 1943. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  166 Figure 26: Lee Miller, Off-duty nurses resting, 44th Evacuation Hospital, near La Cambe, Normandy, France, 1944. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  170 Figure 27: Lee Miller, Fred Feekart with German Nurse POWs, near Dinan, St Malo, France, 1944. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  171 Figure 28: Lee Miller, German Prisoners, Beaugency, France, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  172 Figure 29: Lee Miller, Dead deportees lie beside the rail track, Dachau, Germany, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  174 Figure 30: Lee Miller, Bed in Eva Braun’s House, Wasserburger Strasse 8, Munich, Germany, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  176 Figure 31: Lee Miller with David E. Scherman, Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, Hitler’s apartment, Munich, Germany 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.  178 Figure 32: Margaret Monck, J. Bunyan Greengrocer’s Shop, 55 Henry Street, Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  191 Figure 33: Margaret Monck, Washing day, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  193 Figure 34: Margaret Monck, Street scene, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  195

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List of Figures

Figure 35: Margaret Monck, ‘Erith going home’, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  195 Figure 36: Margaret Monck, Street scene and working-class housing, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  196 Figure 37: Margaret Monck, Vacant lot and working-class housing, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  197 Figure 38: Margaret Monck, Street scene, London Docklands, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  198 Figure 39: Margaret Monck, Man and workhorse, London Docklands, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  200 Figure 40: Margaret Monck, Backyard of house in Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  202 Figure 41: Margaret Monck, Tenement backyard in Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  202 Figure 42: Margaret Monck, Children in house across from Charlie Brown’s, Limehouse, East London, 1937. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.  203

Introduction: Ordinary matters, modernity and women’s modernism

Everything can become everyday, everything can become ordinary: it is our greatest blessing, our most human accomplishment, our greatest handicap, our most despicable complacency. BEN HIGHMORE1

When my maternal grandmother died when I was twenty years old, I recall my mother talking about the distribution of my grandparents’ things among the family. My grandparents were the least materialistic people I’ve ever known, but a daughter-in-law was creating upset in the family by clambering after some ugly china or something – china my grandparents would never have used but left untouched in a cabinet reserved for ‘fine’ things. I recall sitting on my bedroom floor in Perth, Western Australia, crying, thinking that if I could take anything away from my grandparents’ home – a strange rectangular concrete building on a small-holding in the remote Orkney Islands in Scotland – it would have been my grandmother’s fireplace companion set.2 From my earliest memories as a child visiting them, I remember that tool set: silver, squat, chipped, unremarkable and utterly worn with use. It consisted of a poker, a brush and a tray on a metal stand. The bristles on the brush were permanently bent sideways from use, Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 1. In 1959 my grandparents purchased a property which had been a communications tower during the Second World War. It was a concrete, rectangular structure with a twelve-foot thick concrete roof, which was supposed to be impermeable to bombs. Pylon stands and soldiers’ lookouts surrounded the property which the family dubbed ‘The Ranch’.

1 2

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as if constantly bearing the brunt of an Orkney gale. In my mind those tools were almost an extension of my grandmother’s body: I’d seen her use them so many times and she taught me how to clean, prepare and stoke a fire. She’d kneel over the fireplace in her light-blue, checked smock, sweep out the ashes, and fill up the cavity with coal, kindling and the Orkney peats that always smelt so wonderfully aromatic. When I was growing up in Scotland we didn’t have an open fireplace in my parents’ house, so this was one of the many distinct thrills of going to visit my grandparents on the Islands, and perhaps one of the reasons for my deep attachment to those battered tools. As I think back on my response as a young woman to the loss of my grandmother, it seems to have reflected my intense regard, even then, for the ordinary. Of course that fireplace companion set had no monetary or conventional aesthetic value. My attachments to it were affective, personal and interpersonal: the tools formed part of my sense of my grandmother’s being, her daily habits, and were integral to happy moments in my childhood. But as this introduction will make clear, this personal anecdote also reflects some of the principal concerns of this book – about the ordinary and the various ways in which it matters for and to us, and about the relationship between gender, modernity and the everyday. My grandmother, who worked as a scullery maid before marrying my grandfather, would have had no idea what the words ‘modernity’ or ‘modernism’ meant, yet she lived through a period in the twentieth century in which her daily life was shaped and re-shaped by both. This book examines ideas and representations of the ordinary and related concepts such as the familiar in the work of selected British and American modernist women writers and photographers. More specifically, it considers how modernity shapes conceptions of the ordinary for these writers and photographers, and how it informs their artistic, personal, professional and sometimes ethical investments in that sphere. I focus on works by three writers – Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and four photographers – Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller and Margaret Monck, writers and photographers who, as I will discuss, reflect a sustained preoccupation in their work with the terrain of the ordinary and daily. The everyday is a key concept in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: it underpins the field of cultural studies and informs other disciplines such as sociology, literary studies, history and media studies. Furthermore, as Todd Avery observes, the everyday and related categories such as the ordinary have become a ‘keynote of the New Modernist Studies’, particularly revisionist approaches to modernist literature.3 Critics have

Todd Avery, review of Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Laughter, Boredom, and Anticipation, by Sara Crangle, The Virginia Woolf Bulletin, no. 36 (January 2011), 38.

3

Introduction

3

reappraised the long-standing view that modernism privileges epiphanic experience, the exceptional and the new at the expense of the quotidian, instead demonstrating modernism’s interest in and regard for the mundane, the ‘thingly’4 and the aesthetics and phenomenology of ordinary experience. Habit, repetition and daily time have been topics of particular interest in major studies in the field.5 My previous research, much of which has focused on the importance of the ordinary as a philosophical and aesthetic category in the writings of Virginia Woolf, has formed part of this sub-field.6 Ordinary Matters builds on this previous research and is motivated by two key concerns which speak to the fields of modernist studies and everyday life theory. Firstly, this study considers how an analysis of the ordinary in women’s modernism can provide us with an additional set of conceptual frameworks and cultural histories for the everyday as compared to the predominantly male-authored paradigms that have dominated the field in cultural studies. Secondly, Ordinary Matters explores how particular forms of modernity which shaped and sometimes radically transformed daily life in the first half of the twentieth century – for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression, and modern war – inform the selected writers’ and photographers’ ideas about and investments in the ordinary and daily. One of the central contentions of this book is that in contrast to theoretical paradigms in both Marxist and feminist traditions which see the everyday to be, in one sense or another, a problem and in need of transformation or transcendence – the women writers and photographers I discuss here draw attention to the value, import and richness of the quotidian. Through a series of case studies focusing on such topics as the street, familiar things, the face and gesture, homes and dwelling, I call attention to some of the ways in which the ordinary matters and becomes a matter for women writers and photographers during the modernist period. Sometimes this value is registered in personal and private terms: for example, the pleasure of walking down a street, or our affective investments in familiar things. On other occasions its import is understood in relation to the spheres of the social, political or ethical; for example, the ethical import of our encounter with the face or mundane gesture of another, or what it might mean to be Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58. Concepts of daily time in works by Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and H.D. is the key focus of Bryony Randall’s book Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The phenomenology of habit and a regard for the sufficiency of non-epiphanic experience are a primary focus of Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also the special issue on ‘Modernism and the Everyday’ in Modernist Cultures 2, no. 1 (2006), edited by Scott McCracken. 6 Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 4 5

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taken via a photograph in Vogue magazine into intimate proximity with Eva Braun’s bed or Hitler’s bathtub in the year 1945. In each case I argue that the paradigmatic shifts that define early-twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women’s conceptions of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. In the sections that follow I will map out this thesis in more detail, clarifying why I believe this is a timely juncture in the field’s genesis for a study dedicated to the ordinary as a site of value and its viability as a critical paradigm for modernist ethics, and my rationale for focusing on the work of women writers and photographers. But firstly, I want to begin with some comments on definitions and terminology.

Theorizing the everyday, ordinarily One of the observations often made in critical assessments of the everyday is that as a term and a concept it is self-evident but at the same time hard to define or pin down. Common sense tells us that the everyday refers to those repeated activities and practices that shape our day-to-day lives (working, cooking, eating, etc.), to the familiar environments we occupy and the things and people that populate them, and to particular forms of experience or attention (habit or inattentiveness, for example). But this also means that the everyday is a very capacious category and concept: it is difficult to decide where it begins and where it ends. As Rita Felski comments in her chapter ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’: What exactly does it refer to? The entire social world? Particular behaviors and practices? A specific attitude or relationship to one’s environment? At first glance, everyday life seems to be everywhere, yet nowhere. Because it has no clear boundaries, it is difficult to identify. Everyday life is synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the mundane, yet it is also strangely elusive, that which resists our understanding and escapes our grasp.7 That the everyday is elusive and ambiguous is a view suggested by earlier critics including Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot. For Lefebvre, the ambiguity of the everyday is related to the fragmentation and differentiation he believes everyday life has undergone in modern, bourgeois society – for example, the separation between the spheres of work and leisure, private consciousness and social consciousness, separations he contends did not Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 78.

7

Introduction

5

define the everyday in pre-modern societies.8 For Maurice Blanchot, the elusiveness of the everyday is related to our modes of attention to it: ‘It is the unperceived, first in the sense that one has always looked past it … the everyday is what we never see for a first time.’9 Michael Sheringham contends that, in contrast to Lefebvre, what Blanchot designates as the ‘indeterminacy’ of the everyday is a positive value, signalling its ‘energizing capacity to subvert intellectual and institutional authority’.10 Ben Highmore describes the everyday as paradoxical and heterogeneous. He argues it is not the case that the everyday and ordinary can be divorced from events, the unexpected or the extraordinary. Rather, the two are imbricated and interrelated: ‘Boredom, routine, habit and familiarity might characterise important aspects of ordinary life, but what is ordinariness without accident, without anxiety and joy, without surprise?’11 This echoes Lefebvre, who argues that while in modern, bourgeois society the everyday is often aligned with the ‘residual, defined by “what is left over” after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out’, the everyday is a totality and ‘profoundly related to all activities’. The everyday, he continues, ‘encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts … is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground’.12 Things that might be characterized as events or extraordinary (a spectacular sunset, falling in love, retrenchment) are always experienced in relation to ordinary life and incorporated into its schemas and structures. By contrast, the immediate human response to major crisis and catastrophe (a devastating earthquake, for example), is to try to restore some semblance of ordinary life amidst that chaos and disorder. While the everyday is generally associated with that which is familiar and regular, one of its most remarkable capacities is to accommodate change. As the epigraph to this introduction states, ‘[e]verything can become everyday, everything can become ordinary’, a capacity that can serve as both a blessing and a curse.13 As I explore in Chapter 6, extraordinary circumstances such as war can become routine – a mere matter of habit. Theoretically the everyday has consistently been aligned with modernity. Lefebvre understands the everyday as a critical concept to arise as an effect Henri Lefebvre, ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, 2nd ed., trans. John Moore (1958; London: Verso, 1991), 30–2. As Michael Sheringham explains, for Lefebvre the ambiguity of the everyday is a ‘symptom of alienation’; Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17. 9 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies 73 (1987 [1959]): 14. 10 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 17. 11 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 2. 12 Lefebvre, ‘Foreword’, Critique of Everyday Life, 97. 13 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 1. 8

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of modernity.14 Thus, a term that is often understood to be synonymous with routine, predictability, structure and familiarity (the everyday) is theoretically twinned with a term synonymous with change.15 This might account for the paradox, ambiguity and complexity that underwrites the concept of everyday life in the modern world. As Highmore notes, ‘[i]n modernity the everyday becomes the setting for a dynamic process: for making the unfamiliar familiar; for getting accustomed to the disruption of custom; for struggling to incorporate the new; for adjusting to different ways of living’.16 The relationship between the ordinary and modernity is one of this book’s central concerns and part of the reason why I resist clear-cut or one-dimensional definitions of the term (as equivalent to repetition or the known or given). So while this study examines key aspects or features of ordinary life – the street, familiar things, the face and gesture, home and the domestic – it considers how they are experienced and at times re-imagined or reconfigured by particular conditions and effects of modernity. Following the critical orthodoxy, thus far I have adopted the term ‘everyday’, but the title of this book is Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography. As I will clarify below, there are historical reasons for this choice, but it also reflects my sense that there is a need to interrogate the privileging of the term ‘everyday’ in cultural studies and theory. While the two terms – ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ – are most certainly closely related, and at times in this book I use them interchangeably, there are some subtle differences between them. I am also suspicious of the hegemonic authority of the term ‘everyday’ in cultural theory for reasons I will explore further in the following section. As I argued in Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience, the word ‘everyday’ connotes (often pejorative) ideas of repetition, routinization and even boredom that are not an implicit feature of the ordinary.17 The everyday is, by definition, that which occurs each day in succession.18 The ordinary is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as that which belongs to the regular order or sequence of things; that which is normal, commonplace and customary.19 However, many things can be ordinary without Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, trans. Christine Levich, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 9. 15 ‘Modernity may best be described as the age marked by constant change’; Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Modernity’, in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 164. 16 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. 17 Sim, Virginia Woolf, 2–3, 10–11. 18 ‘everyday, n. and adj.’, OED Online, June 2015, Oxford University Press; http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/65342 (accessed 20 July 2015). 19 ‘ordinary, adj. and adv.’, OED Online, June 2015, Oxford University Press; http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/132361 (accessed 20 July 2015). 14

Introduction

7

occurring every day. Also, to my mind, the everyday gestures more to the realm of individual experience: my day-to-day experience. While they can function as normativizing concepts, and historically carried pejorative class connotations, the ‘ordinary’ and ‘common’ also gesture to shared material, social and experiential worlds, a meaning that is very much engaged in the work of Virginia Woolf, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Monck.20 Also, unlike the everyday, the ordinary has a rich philosophical history spanning the fields of epistemology, ontology and aesthetics, and this is useful if we are analysing cultural productions and/or historical periods that predate the second half of the twentieth century when the field of everyday life studies gains momentum. Indeed, moving away from the dominant post-Second World War, Marxist-orientated theories of the everyday (e.g. Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault, the Situationists), several recent studies have explored cognate terms such as the ordinary and habit in relation to earlier philosophical and intellectual traditions such as eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and twentieth-century pragmatism.21 Another reason why I have elected to call this book Ordinary Matters is because the everyday is a contemporary term that was rarely, if at all, used by the modernist women writers and photographers I focus on here. There is, then, a historical specificity to such terms that is suggestive and should be attended to rather than obscured or overlooked.22 Virginia Woolf rarely used the word ‘everyday’ in her fiction and non-fiction preferring the terms ‘ordinary’ and ‘common’, and these latter terms imply a social and intersubjective dimension that is crucial to her exploration of the topic. Dorothy Richardson and Gertrude Stein often utilized the words ‘daily’ and ‘ordinary’. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the photographer Dorothea Lange who, like Woolf, expressed a deep commitment to the social and ethical dimensions of her work, adopts the words ‘familiar’ and ‘common’ in discussions of her photography. While there is little extant commentary by the street photographers Helen Levitt and Margaret Monck on their

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the ordinary was a descriptive term frequently aligned with people of the lower classes (persons not distinguished by rank or position) and carried pejorative connotations. See ‘ordinary, adj. and adv.’, OED Online, June 2015, Oxford University Press; http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132361 (accessed 20 July 2015). 21 For example, in Ordinary Lives Highmore discusses the fruitfulness of Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy (e.g. David Hume), and theories of aesthetics by John Dewey and Jacques Rancière for articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary, 24–37. The pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, and eighteenth- to twentieth-century British empiricism, have featured significantly in several recent studies of the everyday, particularly in relation to literary modernism; see Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism; Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary; Sim, Virginia Woolf. 22 From the seventeenth through to the late nineteenth centuries the term ‘everyday’ often appeared in hyphenated form, ‘every-day’; see ‘everyday, n. and adj.’, OED Online, June 2015, Oxford University Press; http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65342 (accessed 20 July 2015). 20

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own work, the language that does recur is their commitment to ‘reality’ and the ‘actual’ – terms that have specific epistemological and ontological resonances. Thus, in this book I approach all of these terms – the everyday, ordinary, common, familiar, reality – as close cousins but not necessarily identical and in each chapter I try to be sensitive to the different lexicons these writers and photographers employ and the subtle differences between their concepts of, and approaches to, the ordinary. The concept of the everyday, which was canonized through the very important work of Henri Lefebvre, gained currency in the decades following the Second World War. The post-war years was a period during which daily life in France, Britain and America was becoming increasingly homogenized and routinized for a larger portion of the population – from the working classes to the upper-middle classes – by an increasingly pervasive governmentality, bureaucratization, industrialization, and globalized commodity and consumer cultures. While these kinds of forces were certainly in effect in countries such as Britain and America during the period with which I am concerned here – from around 1900 until the Second World War – the ‘every-day-ness’ of the daily was not experienced in the same way that Lefebvre diagnoses the state of daily life in France in the post-war years.

The gender of everyday life theory Underpinning this project is an argument about the need for further feminist interventions in the ways in which the concept of the everyday is theorized and historicized in the academy. In the 1990s a number of feminist critics observed that many of the canonical theories of everyday life, such as those of Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, excluded or undermined the perspectives and experiences of women.23 At that time, dominant strands of everyday life theory tended to focus on post-Second World War to contemporary times, favoured the everyday of modernity and the public sphere, and were particularly shaped by the ideas of Lefebvre and de Certeau. Since that time a significant amount of scholarly work has been committed to a broader theorization and historicization of the concept and takes into account questions of difference – gender, class, cultural location and historical specificity.24 However, as I have argued elsewhere, I am struck by the extent to which canonical everyday life theory and recent cultural and

Laurie Langbauer, ‘Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday’, Diacritics 22, no. 1 (1992): 47–65. 24 See, for example, Ben Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002); Mary A. Favret, ‘Everyday War’, English Literary History 72, no. 3 (2005): 605–33; Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife 23

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intellectual genealogies of the concept in the humanities and social sciences are still markedly male-centric.25 For example, since the early 2000s a number of scholars have sought to trace a more extensive and diverse theoretical history of the everyday, one that extends back to the nineteenth century and takes into consideration a wider range of sources and cultural formations. But women and women’s intellectual and cultural productions have, to date, assumed a marginal position within such accounts. To be sure, these studies are excellent and illuminating but they are androcentric in terms of the writers and theorists they discuss. Three examples of such projects will illustrate my point and clarify why in this study I have sought to trace an alternative critical account of the ordinary through a focus on the cultural productions of modernist women writers and photographers. The British critic Ben Highmore has played a vital role in enriching critical paradigms and methodological approaches for studying the everyday, particularly for scholars working in the humanities. His work has been a shaping influence on my own research in the field. In the main, Highmore’s approach is very attentive to questions of difference and the politics of how we go about theorizing the category of the everyday. This is reflected in his anthology The Everyday Life Reader which discusses such issues in the introduction and includes the work of a number of female cultural critics and sociologists publishing in the 1970s and 1980s including Kristin Ross, Mary Kelly, Dorothy E. Smith and Carolyn Steedman. Similarly, in his essay ‘Homework: Routine, Social Aesthetics, and the Ambiguity of Everyday Life’, Highmore explores traditionally gendered forms of routine, such as housework and cooking, and examines Luce Giard’s socio-aesthetic study of women’s cooking.26 However, his 2002 monograph Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, which maps a theoretical history of the everyday in relation to modernity from the 1880s to the contemporary, charts a genealogy of the concept that is male-centric. This account begins by discussing figurations of the everyday in the work of various nineteenthcentury writers and critics such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl Marx and Max Weber, before turning to specific chapters on the work of Georg (New York: Berg, 2004); Christian Karner, Ethnicity and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2007); Felski, Doing Time, 77–98. 25 The arguments in the current section are drawn from my article ‘Theorising the Everyday’, published in Australian Feminist Studies 30, no. 84, on 24 July 2015, available online: http:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08164649.2015.1046712 (accessed 25 August 2015). 26 Ben Highmore, ‘Homework: Routine, Social Aesthetics, and the Ambiguity of Everyday Life’, Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2004): 306–27. Highmore explains that Giard’s study formed part of a project directed by de Certeau in France in the 1970s, and her focus on women’s cooking constituted an attempt to bring women’s experience and feminist issues into the study of everyday life; ‘Homework’, 317. Her analysis was published in the second volume of de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and an excerpt is included in Highmore’s The Everyday Life Reader, 319–24.

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Simmel, Surrealism (Highmore focuses on André Breton), Walter Benjamin, Mass Observation, Lefebvre and de Certeau. In a similar vein, Michael E. Gardiner’s equally excellent study Critiques of Everyday Life, which was published in 2000, maps some of the same territory, dedicating chapters to Dada and Surrealism, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lefebvre, The Situationist International and de Certeau, but Gardiner also dedicates two chapters of his book to the work of two twentieth-century female sociologists – Agnes Heller and Dorothy E. Smith.27 When we turn to a later and more extensive study, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (2006) by Michael Sheringham, one starts to feel that this gender imbalance is not simply a case of the constraints regarding space and selectivity that all authors confront. Sheringham’s ambitious study discusses a very broad range of predominantly Continental philosophers, cultural theorists, artists and writers including Martin Heidegger, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Dada, Surrealism (particularly André Breton, Jacques-André Boiffard, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris), Georg Lukács, Georges Perec, Lefebvre, Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, de Certeau and Jean Baudrillard, among others. From this list we can see that modernist writers, critics and movements feature prominently in his account. Sheringham dedicates a few pages of his book to a discussion of Agnes Heller’s sociological and philosophical study Everyday Life and to the experimental urban Journal du dehors by Annie Ernaux.28 Such an expansive critical appraisal of the everyday (Sheringham’s book is 400 pages in length) could be understood to suggest that women writers, intellectuals and artists from the late-nineteenth century to the present time had little worthwhile to say on the subject. As these influential studies indicate, women have assumed a marginal place in this emerging conceptual history in everyday life theory. I am by no means suggesting that it is the responsibility of these critics to chart such an alternative account. What I am suggesting is that while more critical attention has been paid to women’s experience of the everyday in recent years the grand hommes of everyday life theory is still very gender biased and there is a need for this bias to be interrogated and redressed. It could be argued that women are under-represented in the field of everyday life theory, particularly from a historical perspective, because they were largely excluded from the realm of theoretical discourse (broadly conceived) until around the 1970s. Women had limited opportunity to write and publish a formal ‘critique’ of any kind. As such, feminist critics would need to look to alternative genres and discursive modes such as

Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000). Sheringham also briefly discusses the work of the French writer, photographer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and cultural critic Luce Giard.

27 28

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literature, life writing, the essay, and potentially other mediums of cultural production such as photography, in which to locate ‘unofficial’ studies and representations of the everyday. Such a project accords with the methodological approach to the everyday proposed by Highmore. For Highmore, the complexity and heterogeneity of the everyday as a concept and realm of experience means that as a subject of analysis it resists the standard theoretical demands of rigour, system and structure. He proposes that theories of the everyday might be more fruitfully located in the realms of literature, art and other forms of cultural production: but what if rigour, system and structure were antithetical and deadening to aspects of everyday life? What if ‘theory’ was to be found elsewhere, in the pages of a novel, in a suggestive passage of description in an autobiography, or in the street games of children? What if theory (the kind that is designated as such) was beneficial for attending to the everyday, not via its systematic interrogations, but through its poetics, its ability to render the familiar strange? This is not to suggest that everyday life theory is anti-theoretical, far from it, but that in attending to the everyday such theory is never going to be a purely critical or deconstructive project.29 Highmore suggests that the future of everyday life studies might be located in a ‘blurring’ of genres and methods: ‘a form of articulation built on the fault line that divides the social sciences and art’, such as the blurring of sociology and literature to form a ‘literary sociology’.30 Indeed, if we look at the theories discussed in Sheringham’s Everyday Life and Highmore’s Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, they are often located in works of literature and experimental writing (Baudelaire, Breton, Perec), cultural essays and fragments (Benjamin), and ‘blurred’ genres such as the ‘philosophical impressionism’ of Georg Simmel.31 This fact makes the absence from such studies of women writers and critics of the everyday, such as George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, more puzzling still. Ordinary Matters takes seriously the idea that literature, art and various kinds of ex-centric materials can present rich sites for theoretical and critical explorations of the ordinary and daily, and that such an approach is vital for feminist interventions in the field. While some chapters in this study focus on well-known works of literature including Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, others concentrate on marginal or less obvious sources – a series of street

Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 3. Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 20. 31 Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 27. 29 30

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photographs, an essay, a diary entry, an inspirational quotation tacked on a darkroom door – as legitimate sources and springboards for critical studies in the ordinary. If the everyday is frequently equated with the residual, the overlooked, the seemingly insignificant, in this study I often focus close attention on materials and texts that have themselves been, to date, overlooked in studies of the everyday. While I have been arguing above that the contributions of women writers, intellectuals and artists have been under-utilized in contemporary critical introductions to and genealogies of everyday life theory, it is in the field of literary studies that such gaps have begun to be addressed. Several of the first monographs published in the field of modernism and the ordinary focused on the work of women writers. For instance, drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and William James, and the theories of Lefebvre and de Certeau, Bryony Randall’s Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007) examines modes of temporality and dailiness in texts by Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Virginia Woolf.32 In Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010), I explore how Woolf complicates normative and common-sense concepts of ordinary experience in relation to the philosophy Woolf read (for example, British empiricism and Romanticism) and the cultural contexts of her time. Liesl Olson and Lisi Schoenbach have examined Gertrude Stein’s treatment of repetition and habit in the context of Stein’s dialogues with American pragmatism.33 It is worth pointing out, however, that while this scholarship is well-known in modernist studies and perhaps literary studies more broadly, it has had a limited uptake in the field of everyday life studies as compared to the work of Sheringham and Highmore. It is unclear to me if this has to do with disciplinary positioning and marketing, book titles (the books by Highmore, Gardiner and Sheringham that I have mentioned above all have ‘everyday life’ and/or ‘theory’ in their titles), or content. It could also point to broader, historical patterns relating to the gender of ‘Theory’ that I will not pursue here. But it seems to me that more work remains to be done in terms of staking claims about women’s theoretical contributions to, and historical positioning within, the field, both in the past and the present. To that end, one of my aims in this study is to foreground the women writers and photographers I discuss as critical thinkers and theoretical sources in their own right, rather than reading their work (be it a novel, an essay or

See also Bryony Randall, ‘“Telling the day” in Beatrice Potter Webb and Dorothy Richardson: The Temporality of the Working Woman’, Modernist Cultures 5, no. 2 (2010): 243–66, which forms part of an evolving project on work time. 33 Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary and Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism do not focus exclusively on the work of women writers but include chapters on women writers, specifically Woolf and Stein, in addition to male writers of the period (for example, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Henry James and Marcel Proust). 32

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a photograph) in a uni-directional fashion through some other accepted or more authoritative critical lens – Lefebvre, de Certeau, Blanchot, William James and so on. To recall Highmore again: we can find theory in the ‘pages of a novel’, a ‘passage of description in an autobiography’, or ‘the street games of children’.34 While I of course engage with relevant theories of the everyday as well as other theoretical sources in my analyses, I consider how the primary work in question might also challenge or supplement existing critical frameworks in productive ways.

Interdisciplinary approach In addition to texts by modernist women writers – Woolf, Stein and Richardson – Ordinary Matters focuses on the work of four earlytwentieth-century women photographers, none of whom have previously been discussed in studies of the everyday. Like the writers, these photographers have been selected because their oeuvres reveal a preoccupation with the idea or concept of the ordinary as well as its representation. In addition, they offer an account of ordinary life in relation to modernity that extends and sometimes challenges dominant ideas and attitudes of the period and/or contemporary everyday life theory. For example, in Chapter 2, I argue that Helen Levitt’s New York street photography of the 1930s and 1940s comprises a significant intervention in cultural and visual histories of the street – that quintessential site of everyday life.35 Levitt’s New York departs from both the dystopian and utopian conceptions of the city common to canonical modernism and nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury discourses of modernity. Chapter 6 considers how Lee Miller’s war photography and journalism from the 1940s offer a complex meditation on the relationship between war and ordinary life – a topic that is almost entirely overlooked in everyday life theory. There are several reasons why I have elected to focus on the media of photography in addition to literature. Firstly, photography has remained a relatively overlooked media in scholarship on modernism and the everyday, which has in the main focused on literature. The notable exception here would be Surrealist photography which has received some critical attention.36 Moreover, photography garners less critical attention in modernist studies as compared to other forms of visual media such as painting and

Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 3. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 12. 36 See Sheringham, Everyday Life, 86–94, 95–102; Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Inter-war Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 34 35

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cinema. Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, and more than any other visual media, photography has maintained a very close engagement with the sphere of ordinary, everyday life. This has of course reached fever pitch in contemporary times with the advent of social media. From middleclass women’s domestic photography in the Victorian period, to avant-garde studies of commonplace objects during the 1910s and 1920s, to the rise of documentary traditions in the 1930s with their focus on the lives of average people,37 the everyday and humble has been, as Susan Sontag observes, perhaps the perennial subject matter of photography.38 In this study I focus on street photography (the work of Helen Levitt and Margaret Monck) and documentary photography (some of Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the Great Depression and Lee Miller’s war photography). However, as I discuss in the chapters that follow, the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘document’ is resisted by, and hard to apply to, practitioners such as Lange, Miller, Levitt and Monck – as is the case for contemporaneous male photographers of the period such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Bill Brandt. While the European photographic avant-garde lost its ascendency following the crash of 1929 to give way to new forms of photographic realism more suited to the times, the avant-garde left many traces, and emerging documentary approaches and vernaculars were groundbreaking in their own way.39 Jane Livingston argues that ‘Depression-era photography in the United States gave rise, directly or indirectly, to a fundamentally new way of seeing and a set of desires at least as important to the future [of photography] as those attached to [Paul] Strand, [Walker] Evans, early Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz himself’.40 According to Karin Becker Ohrn, while documentary photography had many early exemplars in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the idea of social documentary photography was not a widely acknowledged or regarded one, even in the 1930s.41 Thus, in the early years of the Depression, photographers such as Lange were not working within a clearly articulated genre or approach. Furthermore, and as I stress throughout this book, while the 1930s and 1940s saw a shift in

Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 34. 38 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; London: Penguin, 1979), 102. 39 Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 68. 40 Jane Livingston, ‘The New York School Photographs 1936–1963’, in The New York School Photographs 1936–1963, by Jane Livingston (Tokyo: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1992), 261. 41 ‘Initially, the potential of using the camera as an instrument for interpreting social conditions and encouraging social change had little impact on the way photography was regarded by intellectuals and the general public during the Depression’; Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange, 31–2. 37

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photography towards what critics describe as accurate record,42 a ‘sharpfocus realism’ and ‘spontaneous witness’,43 ‘record’ was by no means always seen as admitting comprehension or epistemological certainty, and a modernist aesthetic and style informed much documentary photography during the 1930s.44 The interdisciplinary approach between verbal and visual media that I pursue here also coincides with the general temper of modernism and the interests of the writers and photographers under consideration. As is wellknown, Virginia Woolf was influenced by Post-Impressionist painting and had a keen interest in photography.45 Gertrude Stein was centrally involved in European avant-garde art circles and her literary aesthetics frequently interpreted as a form of literary Cubism.46 Dorothy Richardson’s literary style was influenced by the technologies of cinema and photography and she, like Woolf, wrote essays on the cinema.47 Throughout her career, Lee Miller had close ties to Surrealism and other avant-garde milieus in America, Europe and Britain.48 The interdisciplinary approach of this project is not, however, to talk about historical or stylistic relationships between literature and photography: for example, the treatment of teacups in modernist poetry versus avant-garde photography, or the influence of photography on Woolf’s or Richardson’s literary aesthetics. Such topics are very interesting, but not the primary concern of this book. Ordinary Matters focuses on conceptions of the ordinary and how particular forms of modernity shaped and influenced modernist women’s personal, artistic and ethical investments in the ordinary and daily. As such, the connections and comparisons I draw

Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange, 30. Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), xvi. Garner makes this claim specifically in relation to American photography from the 1920s to the 1960s. 44 Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange, 30; Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011), 279. 45 On these topics see, for example, Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 46 For one assessment of this critical approach to Stein’s aesthetics see Marianne DeKoven, ‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism’, Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1 (1981): 81–95. 47 On Richardson’s writings on the cinema see James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, eds, Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). For one account of the intersections between Richardson’s literary aesthetics and the cinema see Harriet Wragg, ‘“Like a Greeting in a Valentine”: Silent Film Intertitles in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 4 (2011): 31–50. 48 Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 73–141. 42 43

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between these writers and photographers are conceptual and thematic rather than stylistic. While the inter-media relationships between literature and the visual arts in the work of Stein and Woolf are well documented, here I draw attention to the lesser-known inter-media contexts of the selected photographers. For example, I pay close attention to two of Dorothea Lange’s essays on photography and the role of testimony in her practice, to Lee Miller’s war reports and, wherever possible, to the marginal writings and commentaries of Monck, Lange and Levitt. These women writers and photographers do not fit neatly under one definition or school of modernism and their degree of self-identification with modernist milieus and traditions vary, but I find these differences productive rather than limiting. I bring their work into dialogue in terms of their shared investigations in, and approaches to, the concept of the ordinary as well as their relationship to modernism. In line with revisionist approaches in modernist studies, in this project I focus on lesser-known as well as canonical figures from the period. Woolf, Stein and Richardson are familiar names: each of these women made a major contribution to the development of modernist literary aesthetics and were important cultural commentators of the period. Since the 1980s, the American photographer Lee Miller has become a more well-known figure, particularly in terms of her contributions to Surrealism, first through her collaborations with the likes of Man Ray and Jean Cocteau and later through her involvement in British Surrealism and the avant-garde with her second husband – the artist, critic and curator, Roland Penrose. In Chapter 6, I focus on the later period of Miller’s career as a war photographer and correspondent for British Vogue, one that is still inflected with Miller’s avant-garde sensibility and approach. Like Miller, the American street photographer Helen Levitt, who was active from the late 1930s until the 1990s, reflects a surrealist sensibility in much of her work and had links to various figures and circles in American and European modernist photography and literature: for example, James Agee, Walker Evans and Henri CartierBresson. Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 2, Levitt was an elusive and independent figure who developed her own unique style of street photography. Both the American photographer Dorothea Lange, whose career spanned the late 1910s to the early 1960s, and the British photographer Margaret Monck, who was a non-professional street photographer active during the late 1930s and early 1940s, contributed to an emerging documentary tradition that reflected modernism’s reorientation in the 1930s and 1940s to more realistic modes and social and, for Lange, political and ethical concerns. Lange became a key figure in the development of American documentary photography, an emerging genre that was, in its own ways, experimental and ground-breaking.49 Across the Pacific, Monck, who had ties to both British

See Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange.

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and Continental modernisms – particularly documentary and avant-garde film and social realist photography – was developing her own brand of street photography which, in the tradition of the then emerging Mass Observation project, focused on the daily lives of ordinary, working-class people.50 Broadly speaking, the chapters in this book move from a focus on works that are more explicitly avant-garde in approach (experimental fiction by Richardson, Stein and Woolf, and Levitt’s enigmatic, often Surrealist-inflected photography), to works more commonly aligned with non-fiction and documentary modes (Woolf’s non-fiction, Lange’s Depression-era photography and essays, Miller’s war photography and reports, and Monck’s proto-Mass Observation photography). This is coupled with an analysis of the ‘matter’ and a valuation of the ordinary that progressively moves outwards from the personal (for example, a subject’s affective encounters on/with the street, our non-pecuniary investments in ordinary things) to the social, political and ethical (our relationship to the other, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and working-class industrial modernity).

Ordinary matters This book builds on existing scholarly appraisals of the ordinary in modernism and everyday life studies through a focus on the ways in which it is figured as a positive value and/or linked to conceptions of the ethical – particularly in terms of intersubjective relations, responsibility and the ethics of representation. Affect and intimacy recur as important themes in this broader analysis. Through its focus on the ordinary as a site of positive value, Ordinary Matters works in counter-point to a long-standing critical tradition that views the everyday as, for one reason or another, a problem, and in need of transformation. The politicizing of the everyday has been central to post-Second World War theories on the topic. While such politicizing is extremely important, it has meant that the positive values of the quotidian have been under-examined or ignored. Negative critiques of the everyday take various forms, from Marxist-orientated approaches, such as Lefebvre’s which view modern everyday life under capitalism as a site of alienation,51 to Foucauldian approaches which emphasize unequal power relations embedded within modern institutions and practices, to secondwave Feminist accounts such at Betty Friedan’s that highlight women’s everyday oppression under the structures of patriarchy.52 Such negative appraisals of the everyday of course have their antecedents in modernism: I discuss Monck’s life and work in detail in the Coda. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 94. 52 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 50 51

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for example, the alienated modern worker of T. S. Eliot’s poetry or Franz Kafka’s fiction. In everyday life studies, the corollary to such theoretical assessments has been a call for resistance and transformation in order to effect positive change in the sphere of everyday life. This resistance has been imagined on both the microscopic (personal) and macroscopic (social/ political) levels, from the tactics of de Certeau’s street walker and oppositional forms of consumption and use to the cultural revolution proposed by Lefebvre.53 The problematizing of everyday life is a trend that Mary A. Favret has investigated in her article ‘Everyday War’. As I discuss further in Chapter 6, Favret interrogates a tendency in post-Second World War theory to view the everyday through what she terms the ‘logic of war’:54 For [twentieth-century theorists] the everyday sustains under the veneer of peace the work of war even after its formal end. It serves as the ground for unceasing resistance to established or legitimate authority. The everyday, in other words, becomes a weapon for contesting peace.55 Favret examines how the logic of oppression and resistance operates in the theories of Lefebvre, Foucault and de Certeau, among others. Similarly, Highmore notes that one of the crucial questions for the study of everyday life is ‘the duality [of] resistance and/or power’,56 but he is also cautious of a critical tradition that insistently problematizes the everyday and overlooks the various ways in which ordinariness also functions as ‘a positive value’ and ‘accomplishment’.57 Similarly, in the ‘Invention of Everyday Life’, Rita Felski challenges the ways in which often historically gendered aspects of the everyday, such as habit and repetition, have been negatively encoded by critics including Lefebvre, de Certeau and Louis Althusser, thereby obscuring the ways in which such modalities and forms can be life-affirming and enabling.58 For example, she comments that the ‘tendency, clearly visible in the work of Lefebvre, to equate repetition with domination and innovation with agency and resistance’, means we ‘remain trapped within a mind-set that assumes the superior value of the new’.59 For de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, the everyday is a space of repression whereby the individual’s daily behaviours are dictated by overarching ‘systems’ implemented by those in power. However, the ‘weak’ everyman has the capacity to resist such systems through cunning ‘tactics’ and creative, oppositional acts of consumption. The rhetoric of warfare is integral to his discourse and theoretical conception; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 40. 54 Favret, ‘Everyday War’, 609. 55 Favret, ‘Everyday War’, 608. 56 Highmore, Everyday Life Reader, 5. 57 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 6. 58 Felski, Doing Time, 81–4, 89–93. 59 Felski, Doing Time, 84. 53

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Indeed, a reassessment of modernism’s commitment to ‘newness’ and radical innovation has informed recent scholarship on modernism and the everyday. Liesl Olson has contributed to the critical redress I describe above, arguing in Modernism and the Ordinary that for modernists such as Woolf, Stein, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, the non-transformative power of the ordinary is its most compelling aspect. That is, ordinariness, she contends, presents itself in much literary modernism as a ‘final good’.60 For many modernists the ordinary presents ‘particular values’ such as ‘stability, efficiency, and comfort’.61 Olson contends that the valuing of the ordinary in literary modernism is registered in three ways: the ordinary as an ‘affective experience of the world characterized by inattention or absentmindedness’ (rather than heightened experiences such as the epiphany); a regard for unheroic events and overlooked things (the ordinary as genre); and as ‘a mode of organizing life and representing it’ (as a style, best exemplified according to Olson by aesthetic forms such as repetition and the list).62 Olson’s focus is on an ordinary that remains untransformed and unheightened – spared from the jolting processes of what the Russian Formalists termed ostranenie, an aesthetic defamiliarization they deemed necessary to bring the world back to us afresh, no longer obscured by the dulling effects of habit.63 The account of modernism and the ordinary that I consider here is somewhat different, in part because I resist clear-cut definitions of the ordinary as, for example, the overlooked or habitual, and because I consider forms of defamiliarization in the sphere of ordinary life that are not, in the first instance, the product of artistic experimentation but the forces of modernity itself. Building on the work of Felski, Highmore, Favret and Olson, Ordinary Matters pushes against a critical tradition that insists on problematizing or demonizing the everyday, and offers alternative ways of thinking about the intersections between the ordinary, modernity and concepts of value and the ethical in relation to women’s modernism. How modernist women evaluate and imagine the sphere of ordinary life is, I suggest, informed by their particular experience of modernity – one that often differs from that of their male contemporaries. For example, in Chapters 1 and 2 I examine how Dorothy Richardson in the novel Pilgrimage and Helen Levitt in her New York street photography challenge dominant nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century accounts of the street – as a dystopic site of individualism, alienation and social degeneration, or an arena of relentless psychic shock Here, Olson is quoting from Wallace Steven’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942); ‘round and round, the merely going round,/Until merely going round is a final good’; Modernism and the Ordinary, 4. 61 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 5. 62 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 5–6. 63 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 4–5. 60

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– instead foregrounding the street as a site of sociality, positive affective encounter, and imaginative possibility. In Chapter 3 I explore Gertrude Stein’s and Virginia Woolf’s literary explorations into the life of ordinary things as not mere instruments for use but affectively charged sites that form a vital part of our personal and interpersonal lives and networks of intimacy. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Chapter 4 considers the role of the mundane body (the face, gesture) in several of Woolf’s non-fictional and fictional representations of encounters with an urban stranger, and argues that the ordinary assumes an important role in both her and Levinas’ account of alterity and responsibility. Chapter 5, on Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photography, and Chapter 6, on Lee Miller’s war photography, propose that conceptions of the ordinary and familiar are integral to their respective ethics of seeing and representing scenes of personal and social crisis and, in the case of Miller, unprecedented violence and moral aporia. Thus, I am interested in the ways in which the ordinary can be understood to offer a fruitful paradigm for a modernist ethics, and how it at times informs an ethically-inflected modernist aesthetics. While Chapter 4 discusses the ethical with reference to a very particular philosophical framework – the poststructuralist philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas – for much of the book I use the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘ethics’ more broadly to refer to the project’s concern with issues such as intersubjective relation, responsibility, affect and intimacy. Otherness and the representation of society’s ‘others’ is also a recurring topic throughout this book. This was not something I had originally intended but is perhaps a product of the fact that the ordinary has long been aligned with the marginal and common (in the class-based sense of the term). Many of the texts and examples that I discuss focus on the representation and experience of social others and outsiders of various kinds: a single, middle-class woman working and living in London at the turn of the twentieth century (Richardson’s heroine Miriam Henderson in Pilgrimage), the working classes, urban and rural poor (Chapters 2, 4, 5 and the Coda), children, streetwalkers, even the hidden voices of those ‘obdurately insentient’ objects we live among every day.64 As I will show, the works by Woolf, Richardson, Levitt, Monck and Lange counter stereotypical representations of such social others and afford them a different kind of representation and/or voice. I never recovered my grandmother’s fireplace tool set, but I hope in what follows to recover and shed new critical light on some other lost or overlooked things: objects, sites or figures within texts, the texts themselves, and in some cases, the person who created them. I begin with Miriam Henderson’s remarkable relationship to the paving stones and streets in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.

Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58.

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1 ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’: The street in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

At six o’clock the front door closed behind her, shutting her out into the multitudinous pattering of heavy rain. With the sight of the familiar street shortened by darkness to a span lit faintly by dull rain-shrouded lamps, her years of daily setting forth into London came about her more clearly than ever before as a single unbroken achievement. Jubilantly she reasserted, facing the invitation flowing towards her from single neighbourhoods standing complete and independent, in inexhaustibly various loveliness through the procession of night and day, linked by streets and by-ways living in her as mood and reverie, that to have the freedom of London was a life in itself.1 In the above passage from Deadlock (1921), the sixth volume in the Pilgrimage series, Dorothy Richardson describes Miriam Henderson’s reflections as she stands at the threshold of her place of employment, a dental surgery in Wimpole Street, about to walk home through the streets of West

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage, Introduction Gillian E. Hanscombe, 4 vols (London: Virago, 1979), vol. 3, 106. All further references to the novel will be abbreviated as P and cited parenthetically in text.

1

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London after a long day’s work. Here, the everyday is clearly experienced as a positive value: Miriam feels that it is her ‘daily setting forth’ into the streets of London that comprises her ‘single unbroken achievement’. This passage is also representative of Miriam’s unconventional conception of, and relationship to, the street and city in Pilgrimage. By conventional standards the prospect of the street here is unappealing: it is winter in London, 1903,2 shortly after the New Year. It is cold, wet and dark. Yet to Miriam the streets and the surrounding neighbourhoods are welcoming and invite her into their company. Their ‘various loveliness’ is inexhaustible, their network of ‘streets and by-ways’ encoded as a part of her own being and affective map: ‘living in her as mood and reverie’. Miriam’s reflections on her ‘daily setting forth into London’ follows on from a scene in which she is having tea with Mrs Orly and others at the surgery, attempting to feign sympathy for the Christmas-time dramas Mrs Orly is relating to her, and reflecting on the constraints of family and social life: ‘They were all so hemmed in, so closely grouped that they had no free edges, and were completely, publicly, at the mercy of the things that happened’ (P3, 105–6).3 This section from Deadlock describes a central tension of the novel as a whole: that is, Miriam’s sense that in order to realize her own identity she must remain independent of any relationships that might threaten her autonomy or force her into normative social roles that she feels would be akin to an act of bad faith. As such, Miriam repeatedly turns to the society of the street, rather than other people, for companionship. While the term ‘society’ generally refers to association, connection and participation with other people (and in some cases with animals), as I will discuss, in Pilgrimage Miriam imagines the street not only as a companion but as a part of her own being, that is, as connected to her in kind.4 Pilgrimage is one of modernism’s most important novels of the everyday but has only in the past decade started to receive the level of scholarly attention it deserves.5 Like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Pilgrimage is centrally concerned with the daily: patterns of work and leisure, and activities such as walking, socializing and eating. Distinct from other modernist novels of the everyday, Pilgrimage

For the best estimate of the dates during which Miriam’s pilgrimage takes place, see George H. Thomson, A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1996), 17–56. 3 Mrs Orly is the wife of one of the partners at Mr Hancock’s dental practice. 4 ‘society, n.’, OED Online, June 2015, Oxford University Press; http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/183776?redirectedFrom=society (accessed 26 August 2015). 5 This is in large part due to the establishment of Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, the only journal devoted to the study of Richardson’s work, edited by Scott McCracken. I thank Scott for his suggestions and input on an earlier version of this chapter. 2



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explores in detail the new forms and structures of everyday life that were becoming available to middle-class women from the end of the nineteenth century, such as clerical work and independent city living. A pioneering work in stream-of-consciousness narration, Richardson’s novel comprises one of modernism’s earliest and most radical attempts to narrate the patterns and structures of what Woolf coined in her 1925 essay, ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’.6 In addition to the workaday world and forms of daily temporality – topics that Bryony Randall has explored in her analysis of the novel7 – Pilgrimage is also centrally concerned with space. A considerable amount of scholarship has focused on the importance of everyday spaces such as Miriam’s private rooms and the city of London to Miriam’s emerging sense of identity as a New Woman in Britain at the turn of the century.8 As Elisabeth Bronfen argues in Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text, Miriam’s identity-formation is fundamentally shaped by her passage through, and experiences within, different spaces and places. Scholars including Deborah Parsons and Jean Radford have observed that Richardson’s account of the city in Pilgrimage departs from canonical representations in the work of male modernist writers and nineteenth-century discourses of urban modernity to the extent that Richardson figures Miriam’s relationship to London in largely positive and enabling terms. London in Pilgrimage is, as Radford observes, a ‘[c]ity with a difference’ that sits in stark counterpoint to the anti-urban sentiment and dystopian figurations of cities such as London that were prevalent from the mid-nineteenth century.9 Negative encodings of the city from the mid-Victorian period onwards assumed various forms in both literary narratives and social investigative

Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols 1–4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5 and 6) (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986–2011), vol. 4, 160. It was the modernist writer and critic May Sinclair who applied William James’ phrase ‘stream-of-consciousness’ in a literary context in her 1918 review of the first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs; May Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, Egoist 5 (April 1918): 57–9, and Little Review 4 (April 1918): 3–11, reprinted in Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 442–8. 7 Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 59–91. 8 The studies most relevant to the present discussion are Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 44–65; Elisabeth Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text, trans. Victoria Appelbe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and Yvonne Wong, ‘The Self in London’s Spaces: Miriam’s Dwelling and Undwelling in Pilgrimage’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 3 (2010): 31–52. See also Abbie Garrington, ‘Touching Dorothy Richardson: Approaching Pilgrimage as a Haptic Text’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 1 (2008): 74–96. 9 Radford, Dorothy Richardson, 62. 6

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studies. The city of London was commonly portrayed as a space of vice, physical danger, moral decline and disorder (particularly in London’s poorer East End districts), as well as an environment that induced feelings of alienation and a loss of community. Such dystopian renderings of the city can be found in the work of Charles Dickens, Charles Booth, Henry Mayhew, George Gissing, H. G. Wells and T. S. Eliot.10 For cultural critics such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the city was a site of debilitating psychic shock against which the metropolitan subject had to shield himself.11 While some male modernists certainly did celebrate the city – for example, James Joyce in Ulysses and the pro-modernity ideals of the Vorticists and Futurists – there is a general tendency in accounts of the city by male writers of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to conceptualize the metropolis and its social and experiential effects in negative terms.12 The risks and negative effects of the city were of course deemed to be more significant for women whose proper place, according to the Victorian ideology of separate spheres, was the safe, protective realm of home and hearth. As Jean Radford and Deborah Parsons have argued, Richardson’s positive portrayal of Miriam’s experience of the city is related to issues of gender. From the 1880s in both Europe and America, more women sought to enter and seek a ‘legitimate place in [the] urban and professional landscape of modernity’, and the city was a space that offered

Some representative examples in this tradition are Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851; New York: Dover, 1968); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; London: Penguin, 2002); T. S. Eliot, ‘Preludes’ (1910–11) and ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974). 11 For Simmel, as for Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, the transition from the pre-modern to modern world posed all kinds of challenges to the subject’s psychic life and required various forms of psychic adaptation and protection. Anticipating Freud’s theory of the stimulus shield, Simmel maintained in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) that the metropolitan person ‘develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him’, and develops responses that are intellectual rather than emotional in nature; Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 176. For Walter Benjamin’s famous account of ‘shock’ as integral to the experience of modernity and which is developed with reference to Freud’s theory of the stimulus shield, see his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–54. 12 For a discussion of the ‘literary construct of the metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinth’ in literary and sociological writings of the late-nineteenth century see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), Ch. 1; 17. As Walkowitz argues, a major determinant in conceptual mappings of London from the 1880s was that of class along a West End and East End divide. Miriam’s experience of London in Pilgrimage centres on the comparatively wealthy, middle-class areas of the West End. 10



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women new and exciting opportunities.13 It is this shifting experiential and social landscape that Pilgrimage traces, narrating the experiences of Miriam from the time she leaves her middle-class, suburban home in England in the 1890s, through her period of employment as a governess in Germany and outer London, to her modern working life as a dental secretary, and later writer, in West London at the turn of the century. Analyses of urban space in Pilgrimage have tended to discuss Miriam’s experience of London or the city in general. That is, the various sites that comprise the city – such as streets, squares, cafes, clubs, shops, parks, omnibuses and so on – are often discussed collectively or relationally. For example, Elisabeth Bronfen includes streets in the category of London’s ‘exterior spaces’ (along with boroughs and parks) and incorporates her analysis of the street into a broader discussion of Miriam’s relationship to London (for example, as companion and interlocutor).14 These various urban spaces are of course quite different, as is Miriam’s relationship to them and the relative amount of attention they are afforded by Miriam and within the confines of the novel. My analysis here focuses specifically on Miriam’s relationship to the physical streets of London; for example, pavements, roads and adjacent shopfronts­and buildings. This focus is motivated by the fact that the street is one of the privileged sites in the novel (urban or otherwise): it is afforded a considerable amount of textual space, is a lived space of particular significance and value to Miriam throughout the novel, and her relationship to it is complex, nuanced and unconventional for the period. Focusing on selected passages from the middle city volumes of the novel, I will examine the various forms or modalities that Miriam’s relationship to the street assumes – ontological, intersubjective, epistemological and affective – foregrounding how the street takes on a central existential value in her life. My discussion builds on analyses by Parsons, Radford and Bronfen in that it foregrounds Miriam’s positive ‘city consciousness’.15 As she seeks through the musings of her heroine to challenge and rewrite patriarchal discourses on the nature and possibilities of woman, so too Richardson effectively rewrites the ontology and phenomenology of the street. Another reason for my focus on the street, not only in this chapter but also Chapter 2 and the Coda, is because the street assumes a privileged place in cultural histories and theories of the everyday but it is not a space traditionally aligned with women (rather, the home is conventionally viewed as the sphere of the feminine everyday). Many critics have deemed the street Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 8. Bronfen suggests that these ‘exterior spaces’ of London are ‘perceived as … open, free, exciting and mysterious’, and as spaces of ‘movement and discoveries’, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory, 20. 15 Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 7; Radford, Dorothy Richardson, 62. 13 14

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as the quintessential site of everyday modernity. In Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, which examines intersections between modernity and concepts of the everyday in the work of critics including Simmel, Benjamin, Lefebvre and de Certeau, Ben Highmore observes: ‘It will become evident, as this book progresses, that the masculinist perspective predominates: it is the street rather than the home that is seen as the privileged sphere of everyday life’.16 Confirming Highmore’s point, in his essay ‘Everyday Speech’ Maurice Blanchot contends that if the everyday is anywhere ‘[i]t is in the street’.17 Everydayness, he contends, ‘belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centres’, as it is within these ‘admirable deserts that are the world’s cities’ that ‘the experience of the everyday’ overtakes us. The everyday is not, he claims, ‘at home in our dwelling-places’ – offices, churches, the home.18 While Blanchot’s essay was written in France in the 1950s, his characterization of the street coincides with male-authored accounts of the city that extend back to the nineteenth century. He describes the street as a site of anonymity and individualism – a space within which the individual exists outside of the realms of specificity, the ‘true and the false’ and responsibility.19 People pass us by, ‘unknown, visible-invisible, representing only the anonymous “beauty” of faces and the anonymous “truth” of people essentially destined to pass by, without a truth proper to them and without distinctive traits’.20 As I will discuss in Chapter 2 and the Coda, Blanchot’s characterization of the street as a site of social anomie and anonymity is challenged in the street photography of both Helen Levitt and Margaret Monck. Miriam’s experience of the street in Pilgrimage also deviates from Blanchot’s account in a few key ways. The first relates to modes of attention – what it is that Miriam notices in the course of her urban perambulations. As a modernist flâneuse,21 Miriam is a keen observer of her urban environment and inwardly critical of her fellow pedestrians, who exhibit what Georg Simmel coined the ‘blasé attitude’; ‘the trooping succession of

Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 12. Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 17. 18 Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 17. 19 Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 17. 20 Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 18. 21 The character of Miriam and Richardson’s own life experience upon which the novel is based, supports feminist scholarship that has interrogated the historical assumption that the activity of flânerie was one exclusively available to men. See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’, New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Catherine Nesci, ‘Flora Tristan’s Urban Odyssey: Notes on the Missing Flâneuse and Her City’, Journal of Urban History 27, no. 6 (2001): 709–22; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis. 16 17



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masked life-moulded forms’ with ‘unobservant eyes’, as Miriam describes it in Revolving Lights (P3, 240).22 However, unlike the male flâneur whose gaze tends to focus on the crowd (Blanchot’s ‘faces’ and ‘people’) – and particularly striking women within it – Miriam’s observations centre on the physical streets themselves (pavements, buildings, shop fronts, the quality of light and so on) thereby removing, and herself avoiding, the power dynamic that is so central to the gaze of the middle-class, male flâneur. As I will discuss, the conventional subject–object dichotomy as it is constructed in traditional male-authored models of flânerie becomes transformed under Richardson’s/Miriam’s gaze. Secondly, while Miriam’s experience of the street coincides with Blanchot’s characterization of it as a site of anonymity (one which Miriam values), it is not encoded as a site of individualism or social anomie. Miriam may, for the most part, remain aloof from her fellow pedestrians but she becomes literally and figuratively interconnected with the streets themselves. As such, as one of the most detailed and innovative explorations of ordinary experience and everyday life in modernist literature, Richardson’s representations of Miriam’s ‘daily setting forth’ (P3, 106) into the streets of London not only comprise a significant intervention in cultural histories of gender and urban space but also critical and cultural histories of modernity and the everyday.

‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’ Throughout Pilgrimage, Miriam’s positive city consciousness is aligned with West London, specifically the streets and squares between the British Museum and Euston Road. This is the area within which she lives and works from the start of the fourth volume, The Tunnel (1919).23 She first moves to London in 1896 at the height of the fin-de-siècle, a cultural milieu and mood which permeates middle volumes of Pilgrimage such as The Tunnel. In general, Miriam’s perceptions of the streets of West London lie in stark contrast to her characterizations of North London which she typically associates with homogeneity, ugliness and a constraining middlebrow culture: ‘Here was the wilderness, the undissembling soul of north London, its harsh unvarying all-embracing oblivion’ (P2, 313). Indeed, this is the Simmel contended that the sensory overstimulation integral to modern life precipitated a condition of nervous stress comparable to that of the neurasthenic, or conversely, an attitude of indifference which he termed the ‘blasé attitude’; Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 178. 23 At this stage of the novel, Miriam is working as a dental secretary at a surgery in Wimpole Street and renting a room at a boarding house in Tansley Street run by Mrs Bailey. 22

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comparative framework that Yvonne Wong adopts in her Heideggerian analysis of space in the novel, contending that Miriam achieves a state of dwelling in Central London (which Wong aligns with feelings of security, belonging and identification) and remains in an alienated condition of undwelling during her time in North London.24 While this is certainly true for much of the novel, one of the first scenes in Pilgrimage which deals with the theme of Miriam finding her – in quite literal terms – footing on the streets, and in which she acquires a sense of the possibilities that the city presents to her, occurs when she is walking through North London in the second volume of the series, Backwater (1916). At this stage of Pilgrimage, Miriam is working at a small, public school in Branbury Park, North London. Finding herself increasingly exhausted towards the end of the winter term, Miriam is advised by her doctor to get more fresh air, so she starts to take afternoon walks between school and tea-time (P1, 279). Initially, she walks in a nearby park but finds that the pleasure and ‘reality’ (P1, 279) that she had obtained from this space leaves her – the companionship with nature’s beauty breaks down: Looking up uneasily into the forest of leaves above her head she found them strange. She walked quickly back into the sunlight, gazing reproachfully at the trees. There they were as she had always known them; but between them and herself was her governess’s veil … The warm comforting communicative air was round her, but she could not recover its secret. (P1, 279) In the following days she struggles with the ‘empty vistas’ of the park and momentarily imagines that her loneliness might be resolved through heterosexual romance (possibly marriage), as she watches the ‘figure of a man’ walking towards her through the park: ‘For a moment her heart cried out to him. If he would come straight on and, understanding, would walk into her life and she could face things knowing that he was there, the light would come back and would stay until the end’ (P1, 280). But Miriam knows that this would be an act of bad faith: ‘she turned away and dragged her shamed heavy limbs rapidly towards home’ (P1, 280). At this stage of her pilgrimage, neither marriage nor nature will provide Miriam with the companionship or sense of ‘reality’ she seeks. Thus the subsequent passage (which is set a little later, in early May), sees Miriam walking through the streets of North London, an experience that while initially confrontational brings her a fraction closer to her urban identity as well as the scene of reading/writing.

Wong, ‘The Self in London’s Spaces’.

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Approaching the railway station on the way to the shops Miriam finds herself walking against the heavy flow of peak-hour pedestrian traffic and initially feels herself out of place: ‘Hard intent faces, clashing umbrellas, the harsh snarling monotone of the North London voice, gave her the feeling of being an intruder’ (P1, 280). Yet she persists ‘against the tide’ and soon finds herself ‘in a quiet street … looking into a shop window’ at packets of notepaper and then notices a sign advertising a ‘Circulating Library’ (P1, 280–1). In this shop Miriam rediscovers books deemed taboo for her as a young woman (‘Ouida’s books’), realizes that out of the confines of the family home she is now free to read whatever she chooses, and begins to indulge in the pleasures of late-night reading. Through this she rediscovers the ‘refuge of silence and books’, her ‘intimate self’, and the promise latent within her own hands (P1, 282): … it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing self – not dead. Her hands lying on the coverlet knew it. They were again at these moments her own old hands, holding very firmly to things that no one might touch or even approach too nearly, things, everything, the great thing that would some day communicate itself to someone through these secret hands with the strangely thrilling finger-tips. (P1, 282–3) In this scene from Backwater, the crowd is presented as an obstacle, adversary and challenge, whereas the street itself functions as a site of opening and possibility. Miriam’s determination to walk against the tide of human traffic flowing from a railway station in North London not only symbolizes the ways in which she will insist on pursuing her own path and refuse the conventional feminine roles and behaviours expected of women of her time, it also anticipates the central role that the street, and the experiences it offers, assumes in her passage towards the scene of writing. The second example also comes from one of the earlier volumes of Pilgrimage, Honeycomb (1917), and is representative of the way in which Richardson quite pointedly dissociates Miriam’s relationship to the street from the conventional middle-class, gendered activity of shopping – a model that is also subverted in Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’.25 Rather, in this episode Richardson foregrounds a relationship that is intersubjective, whereby Miriam imagines the street to be a part of her own being or ontology. That is, rather than being in or on

In ‘Street Haunting’ (1927), the narrator uses the ‘pretext’ of buying a pencil as an ‘excuse’ to ‘indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London’. The pencil is never purchased; Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in Essays, vol. 4, 480.

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the street, Miriam frequently feels herself to be a part of it, an experience that recurs throughout the middle volumes of the novel. Chapter 6 of Honeycomb describes one of Miriam’s perambulations around the West End, walking along Regent Street and eventually making her way to a nearby newspaper shop where she writes a letter to her friend Bob Greville. The chapter is fragmented and impressionistic, detailing Miriam’s close attention to the streets and buildings and the sensations and feelings her urban surroundings elicit in her: ‘The West End street … grey buildings rising on either side, angles sharp against the sky … softened angles of buildings against other buildings’ (P1, 416, original ellipses). She imagines the pavement to be not only an aesthetic space but a sacred or transcendent one: ‘The pavement of heaven’ (P1, 416). The pavement is also likened to a kind of life force, ‘[l]ife streamed up from the close dense stone’, which becomes part of her own being, ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’ (P1, 416). The street elevates her mood (‘[w]ith every footstep she felt she could fly’; ‘[t]o walk along the radiant pavement of sunlit Regent Street, for ever’; P1, 416–7), and leads to a sense of expansion of her being: The edge had gone from the keenness of the light. The street was a happy, sunny, simple street – small. She was vast. She could gather up the buildings in her arms and push them away, clearing the sky … a strange darkling, and she would sleep. She felt drowsy, a drowsiness in her brain and limbs and great strength, and hunger. (P1, 417, original ellipses) The adjectives that Miriam aligns with the street here – such as ‘clean’, ‘radiant’, and ‘happy’ – are a counterpoint to conventional characterizations of the street as dirty, dull (the colour of asphalt) and, of course, inanimate and impersonal; for example, the ‘blackened’, ‘sawdust-trampled street/ With all its muddy feet’ of T. S. Eliot’s Preludes.26 Rather than producing a sense of anonymity and insignificance (whereby the subject is dwarfed by the scale and/or impersonality of his/her urban surroundings) in this passage from Pilgrimage the street facilitates an experience of subjective expansion, plenitude, ‘strength’ and ‘hunger’. On her walk through the streets, in this chapter Miriam does not engage in the act of window shopping through the conventional matrix of commodity fetishism but instead perceives the objects in the window in abstract, aesthetic and affective terms. Indeed, in the previous chapter Miriam accompanies her employer, Mrs Corrie, hat shopping, an expedition Miriam finds frustrating and exhausting (P1, 410–12).27 In

26 27

Eliot, Collected Poems, 24, 25. As part of the feminist revisionary account of flânerie, critics including Judith Walkowitz



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Chapter 6, as she speeds along the shop fronts of Regent Street, Miriam looks ‘at nothing. Shops passed by, bright endless caverns screened with glass’ (P1, 417). When she does recognize objects in the window in terms of their commodity status they are described in negative, threatening terms (‘forests of hats’, ‘sly, silky, ominous furs’, ‘close prickling fire of jewels’) and she reflects on the ‘strange people who bought these things’ (P1, 417). When she stops in front of one shop window which is filled with glassware, the items are not perceived as commodities but as a constellation of light and colour which she imagines, like the pavement, to merge with her own body: She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the middle of the pavement, in the midst of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours … clear green glass shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and falling with her breathing. (P1, 417, original ellipses) Feeling ‘rooted’ to the pavement like a tree in its natural habitat, the shift from ‘middle’ to ‘midst’ likewise indicates the transition from a distinct subject-object relation demarcated in terms of location, to a sense of ontological merging, as the ‘tide’ of colour and light flows from the window into her blood and commingles with her breathing. In this passage Richardson disrupts conventional models of exchange and identification between woman and the commodity form: Miriam only perceives the objects in the window in positive terms when they lose their commodity status and are perceived, like the pavement, as part of her own physical and affective geography. This sense of being a part of the street’s ontology, whether imagined in bodily terms or as a mode of kinship, recurs throughout the middle volumes of Pilgrimage and reflects the fundamental and reciprocal relation that Miriam feels she shares with

and Anne Friedberg have argued that from the middle of the nineteenth century activities such as shopping provided a legitimate basis upon which women could occupy and move around the city, opening up forms of urban participation and visual consumption that had historically been thought the exclusive province of the (male) flâneur; see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 46–50 and Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Chs 1–3. However, Richardson generally distances Miriam from conventional forms of window shopping and cultures of consumption – besides that of eating – but Miriam’s participation in even that form of consumption is limited due to her paltry salary.

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the streets and spaces of West London.28 In a reverse sense, Miriam also increasingly feels that the city becomes her: ‘Now, once she was free again, to be just a Londoner, who would ask nothing more of life […] She would be again, soon … not a woman … a Londoner’ (P2, 266, original ellipses unless indicated otherwise). Towards the end of Chapter 6 of Honeycomb it is clear that Miriam is intimidated by the prospect of going into a small, unfamiliar newspaper shop to write her letter to Bob. Significantly, the unfriendliness and brusqueness of the shopkeeper is then contrasted to the welcoming embrace of the streets which ‘revelled and clamoured softly all around her’ (P2, 419). This chapter from Honeycomb indicates a number of ways in which Miriam’s modes of urban observation and her methods of ‘knowing’ the streets differ from the models we find in canonical accounts of flânerie by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, Miriam’s flânerie, like Helen Levitt’s street photography which I discuss in the following chapter, does not aspire to the transparent, encyclopaedic forms of knowledge of the city and its inhabitants that tend to underpin canonical masculine models of flânerie as well as the writings of middle-class urban ‘explorers’ and philanthropists such as Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew.29 Moreover, as Deborah Epstein Nord explains, women could not act as the ‘all-seeing eye or the investigator of public life’ in the same way that men could during the period because their very femininity made them an object of curiosity and scrutiny within the public sphere.30 By contrast, Baudelaire’s flâneur is a ‘man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses’. He desires ‘to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe’, and is a ‘spiritual citizen of the universe’.31 Like Richardson herself, who felt from childhood ‘a deep-rooted suspicion of “facts” and ordered knowledge’, Miriam criticizes totalizing and encyclopaedic paradigms of knowledge at various points in Pilgrimage and views them as inherently masculinist in nature (P3, 37; 111).32 Miriam’s knowledge See also Pilgrimage, vol. 3, 85–8. Walkowitz suggests that mid- and late-Victorian urban investigators such as Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew attempted to ‘read the “illegible” city, transforming what appeared to be a chaotic, haphazard environment into a social text that was “integrated, knowable, and ordered”’; City of Dreadful Delight, 18. The theme of il/legibility is central to Ben Highmore’s study Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), which writes against the historical/cultural tendency to perceive the illegibility of the city as a problem. 30 Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 240. 31 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 7. 32 This quotation comes from the sketch ‘Data for a Spanish Publisher’, which was 28 29



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of the street (and city more broadly) never aspires to totalizing forms or ordering functions and is not acquired solely through the visual. Rather, it relies on other sensory, often synaesthetic, modes and is affective and sometimes spiritual as opposed to intellectual in nature. Such an epistemological and experiential model is in sharp contrast to Georg Simmel’s canny metropolitan subject who copes with the excessive stimulation of the city by reacting with ‘his head instead of the heart’, that is, in a detached and intellectual fashion avoiding the personal risks of affectivity in the urban realm.33 As Catherine Nesci argues of the urban writings of the nineteenth-century French feminist and socialist philosopher Flora Tristan, Miriam’s relationship to the street is not centred on issues of power, mastery and control but rather ideas of ‘participatory exchange’ with the being of the street itself.34 As such, Miriam’s encounters with the street are often represented by Richardson in terms of a fundamental breaking down, rather than a reiteration of, the subject–object dichotomy. Miriam imagines herself as a participatory part of the street rather than a discrete subject who must intellectually master or shield herself against the myriad impressions that, in the tradition of Simmel and Benjamin, threaten the individual’s psychic integrity. Furthermore, the models of intersubjectivity that we find in canonical models of flânerie differ from the versions presented by Richardson via the experiences of Miriam. Baudelaire’s ‘man of the crowd’ seeks to merge with the anonymous crowd and become ‘one flesh’ with it.35 This is of course a crowd within which the male flâneur never thinks to question his right to be or his capacity to remain inconspicuous given that he is always in possession of, not the object of, the gaze. By contrast, for the female wanderer such as Miriam who is still negotiating and seeking her rightful place within that ‘tide’ (P1, 280), she seeks kinship and a becoming one flesh with the material stuff of the street itself: ‘I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone’ (P1, 416). Indeed, later in the novel-series the religious dimension of that becoming one flesh with the city is made explicit when Miriam likens her relationship to London as a ‘continuous communion’ (P3, 223). In her analysis of the opening chapter of Revolving Lights, Deborah Parsons has argued that Miriam, like later conceptions of the flâneur in Benjamin, adopts a perspective on the city and crowd that is at times panoramic and detached:

posthumously published in the London Magazine in 1959 and is cited in Deborah Longworth, ‘Subject, Object and the Nature of Reality: Metaphysics in Dorothy Richardson’s Deadlock’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 2 (2009): 7. 33 Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 176. 34 Nesci, ‘Flora Tristan’s Urban Odyssey’, 711. 35 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 9.

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Miriam may be a supreme example of a female flâneur who walks in the streets of her city, but she also shares this tendency to a panoramic position away from the street, in a position of superior detachment … she is torn between sympathy with the crowd and the constant assertion of independence that is the mark of her feminism.36 As I discuss in more detail below, while Miriam does express a desire to remain aloof from the crowd – and other people in general given her overall desire for autonomy and self-determination – for Miriam, modes of attachment, embeddedness and community are repeatedly relocated away from people and onto the physical streets themselves. So her ‘detachment’, I would suggest, is specific to the crowd, not the street.

‘not a woman … a Londoner’ Deborah Parsons observes that modernist women writers including Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson reflect in their fiction on the ‘essential dilemma’ common to many women venturing into the city in the 1880s and 1890s: namely, ‘the attempt to resolve the public/ private dichotomy of street/house, independence/company, in a connective relationship of the three realms of street, private room, and workplace’.37 Entering into new structures and forms of daily life that incorporated paid work, independent living and greater presence in the public sphere, women had to actively construct a sense of being ‘at home’ in the city while negotiating new conceptions of self and identity.38 Throughout Pilgrimage Miriam values autonomy, is committed to a project of selfrealization, and periodically reflects on the threat that she perceives close personal relationships and conventional society poses to that project. On the one hand, as a New Woman Miriam resents the feminine masquerade and is critical of women who dress, talk and behave in ways that pander to conventional patriarchal ideals of femininity.39 Furthermore, she not only rejects several of the conventional professional and social roles available to her – such as governess, carer and wife – but also sacrifices some of her closest emotional and intellectual relationships, such as her romance with the Russian-Jewish émigré Michael Shatov, as she feels they threaten her own ‘personal realization’ (P3, 75). Thus, Miriam’s desire for freedom

Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 76. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 110. 38 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 46–7; Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 110–16. 39 See, for instance, Chapter 9 of Honeycomb in which Miriam is invited downstairs to join the Corries and their party of upper-class guests for the evening; Pilgrimage, vol. 1, 434–7. 36 37



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and autonomy, and her commitment to solitude, frequently leads her away from companionship with people or sees her personal relationships become fraught with tension or a sense of impossible compromise. As such, in the volumes spanning The Tunnel to The Trap, Miriam often turns to the street for a different kind of society – one which satisfies her need for companionship but that does not threaten her project of self-discovery and autonomy. The sociality of the street that Richardson imagines in the middle volumes of Pilgrimage is not one that centres on concrete social relationships between people in an urban setting but rather the kind of social, embodied and affective ties that Miriam feels she shares with the street itself. As an instance of Richardson’s interrogation of the Victorian dichotomy of public and private spheres, Miriam increasingly comes to associate the street with qualities historically aligned with the home, and it is these qualities that in part facilitate the sense of intimacy and sociality with the street that I am investigating here. Miriam takes pleasure in her increasing sense of familiarity with the streets and areas that connect her room, work and favourite urban haunts (such as ABC cafes and restaurants), a sense of familiarity that leads her to repeatedly describe the street as safe, protective and homely (P2, 29; P3, 235). The public realm is often, and paradoxically, figured as a ‘shelter’ from private realms (P3, 235). In Chapter 9 of The Tunnel, Miriam reflects on the range of social invitations open to her on the coming weekend (from her friend Alma, her fellow New Women Mag and Jan, her sisters and so on), but determines not to leave the familiarity and security of Bloomsbury: ‘all the people who halfexpected her, the Brooms, the Pernes, Sarah and Harriett, the Wilsons, would be in their homes far away; she safe in Bloomsbury, in the big house, the big kind streets, Kenneth Street; places none of them knew; safe for the whole length of the week-end’ (P2, 146). Thus Richardson contradicts the conventional nineteenth-century characterization of the street as a site of physical danger and moral corruption, particularly for women, and instead suggests that the street takes on the role of protector (indeed, protecting her from the threats of the suburbs). This characterization is partly due to the fact that Miriam primarily conceives of her relationship with the streets of the West End in existential terms – they facilitate and protect her independence. The above quotation describing the streets as ‘kind’ indexes another way in which their social dimension is figured in Pilgrimage: through a series of personifications whereby the street is conceived as akin to a friend, interlocutor and even lover. The following passage from Interim (1919) once again demonstrates how Miriam’s experience of the street is not – in the tradition of the male flâneur or urban investigator – intellectual, distant, or grounded in a desire for totalizing forms of knowledge, but rather visceral, affective and imagined in intersubjective terms:

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Roaming along in the twilight she lost consciousness of everything but the passage of dark silent buildings, the drawing away under her feet of the varying flags of the pavement, the waxing and waning along the pavement of the streams of lamp-light, the distant murmuring tide of sound passing through her from wide thoroughfares … the rising of the murmuring tide to a happy symphony of recognizable noises, the sudden glare of yellow shop-light under her feet, the wide black road, the joy of the need for the understanding sweeping glance from left to right as she moved across it, the sense of being swept across in an easy curve drawn by the kindly calculable swing of the traffic, of being a permitted co-operating part of the traffic, the coming of the friendly kerb and the strip of yellow pavement, carrying her on again. (P2, 373–4) Miriam’s entire conscious experience here focuses on her passage through the street, a street that is described in cooperative and ‘friendly’ terms. Her knowledge of the space and its operations is an embodied and affective one: she feels herself a part of the general ‘happy symphony’ of sound and movement. She understands and reads the rhythms of the street (the knowing ‘glance’ at the traffic from ‘left to right’), yet is at the same time propelled along by those rhythms (‘the sense of being swept across in an easy curve drawn by’). Thus, if Baudelaire’s flâneur seeks to become part of the rhythms of the crowd, Miriam sees herself as a part of the rhythm of the physical streets themselves – her bodily movement shaped by the geography and choreography of pavement, road and traffic, as well as the ‘symphony’ of familiar sounds.40 To describe the experience of walking in the city in such intimate and resolutely positive terms is uncharacteristic for the period, but to describe the traffic as ‘calculable’ and ‘co-operating’, and the pavement as ‘friendly’, is unconventional indeed. In stark contrast to the many vitriolic accounts of modern traffic and its threat to the defenceless pedestrian that is played out in much mainstream modernism from Le Corbusier, to E. M. Forster, to Virginia Woolf, Richardson here proposes an uncharacteristic blending of the organic and inorganic (as in the earlier example where she images herself to be ‘rooted’ to the pavement), the human and technological aspects of the street, imagining the city as one big, friendly and cooperative life force.41 Moreover, Miriam’s passage through

‘For Baudelaire, flânerie was an indispensable modality for reading urban modernity, it allowed a form of spectatorship that was simultaneously both detached and immersed in the rhythms of the crowd’, Highmore, Cityscapes, 40. For another passage – almost ecstatic in tone – in which Miriam’s commingling with the rhythms, sounds and forms of the street take precedence over the presence of other pedestrians see Pilgrimage, vol. 3, 85–6. 41 This is not to say that traffic is always presented positively in Pilgrimage. See Miriam’s description of Oxford Street in Revolving Lights, Pilgrimage, vol. 3, 246. For critical accounts 40



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the streets here, which is figured in terms of psychological absorption (‘she lost consciousness of everything but the passage of dark silent buildings’), familiarity, physical intimacy, and a sense of ease, again indicates that this is not simply a spatial but an intersubjective and affective relation. It presents, I would argue, the kind of easy, unselfconscious pleasure and interpersonal exchange that one might find in the company of a lover or close friend. Elsewhere in Pilgrimage the streets are not only described as ‘friendly’ but as a ‘friend’ and in terms that highlight a physical intimacy and playfulness that is absent from her comparatively reserved physical relationships with other people: ‘The tappings of her feet on the beloved pavement were blows struck hilariously on the shoulder of a friend’ (P3, 288). Miriam’s love of and ‘continuous communion with … the West End’ (P3, 223), which she demonstrates and builds via her daily walks through the streets, is often figured in terms of reciprocity. When Miriam feels lonely and questions her life choices and the emotional sacrifices her quest for independence demands, the street and/or city is sometimes presented as responding to her need. For example, in Chapter 2 of Interim, Miriam spends New Year’s Eve ‘alone in a cold bedroom’ mending her stockings, and is struck by a feeling of sadness and a sense that ‘the old year ought to be seen out with people’ (P2, 320). However, she also resolves that to have spent the evening with other people would have made ‘life stop, while reality went on far away’ and interfered with the sense of ‘realization’ and ‘unbroken peace with the resolutions’ she achieves during her evening alone (P2, 320–1). As she meditates on the costs and fruits of extended solitude, her thoughts are interrupted by a ‘tap … in the air’ which touches ‘the quick of her mind’ – the chiming of St Pancras’ clock (P2, 322). Miriam responds to this invitation by flinging open the window to let the sounds and ‘breath’ (P2, 323) of the New Year flow into her room: a colloquy of bells (St Pancras, Big Ben, bicycles), ‘cab whistles, dinner bells, the banging of tea-trays and gongs’, voices, cheers and song sounding up from the street – ‘She could hear the Baileys laughing and talking on their doorstep’ (P2, 323). Thus, the dichotomies of private and public, solitude and sociality are again reshaped by the street which moves into Miriam’s quiet room and enables her to have her ‘share in a Bloomsbury New Year’ without demanding that she relinquish the solitude and ‘inward peace’ she has opted for that evening (P2, 323, 321). Similarly, and as Elisabeth Bronfen has observed, the street is also figured as an ‘addressee for Miriam’s dialogue’, the silent interlocutor that assists her to develop her thoughts and make

of the automobile, particularly in terms of its threat to the pedestrian, see Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1924), trans. Frederick Etchells (London: Architectural Press, 1971); Virginia Woolf, ‘The cheapening of motor-cars’ (1924), in Essays, vol. 3, 440; E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (1910), ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1983).

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decisions. It is the subject who can offer comfort and companionship without compromising Miriam’s need for autonomy: ‘Miriam is able to be engulfed by [London] without losing herself, preserving her autonomy while in contact with another’.42 As the ‘mighty lover’ (P3, 272) that remains a constant companion in her daily life, London is nevertheless at times imprisoning and, in the tradition of Simmel and Benjamin, poses a strain on Miriam’s metropolitan nerves (P2, 224). However, throughout the middle volumes of Pilgrimage it is a welcome imprisonment, an ‘immortal compact’ that she daily renews (P3, 215). The intimacy and intensity of Miriam’s relationship with the West End is at times set in counterpoint to her intimate relationships with men, and from The Tunnel to The Trap London ultimately trumps her relationships with her potential suitors. In Chapter 3 of Deadlock (1921), following on from the quotation with which I began this chapter, Miriam is reflecting on the ‘pillar of cloud and fire’, the ‘free gift’ that is London, only to find that her suitor, Michael Shatov, has come to meet her after work (P3, 107). The encounter is described in physical, almost sexual, terms – as a series of invasions, transgressions and manoeuvres between Miriam, Shatov and the street: He had come to meet her … invading her street. She fled exasperated, as she slackened her pace, before this postponement of her meeting with London, and silently drove him off, as he swept round to walk at her side, asking him how he dared unpermitted to bring himself, and the evening, and the evening mood, across her inviolable hour. (P3, 107 – original ellipses) When she turns to look at him, Miriam feels sympathy for Shatov’s loneliness, but nevertheless feels that it is he, not the streets or London, that is the ‘jailer, shutting her in’ (P3, 107). As Shatov embarks on a description of his day, his ‘carefully pronounced sentences’ leave ‘the world she had come out to meet … disregarded all about her’ (P3, 108). Later in Deadlock when Miriam’s relationship with Shatov encounters difficulties, due both to their different religious backgrounds and his confession to having had sexual relations with prostitutes as a young man, Miriam again finds solace in the streets which awaken her from an ‘abyss of … fatigue’ and disillusionment and provide a ‘balm’ against her troubled thoughts (P3, 210, 211): ‘Look at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and whole, spangled with light. We are here. We, are the accomplished marvel’ (P3, 210–11). Thus, the many instances in which Richardson personifies the city in Pilgrimage do not amount to ‘mere rhetorical flourish[es]’ but reflect how

Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory, 84, 85.

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spaces such as the street assume ‘a subject position in Miriam’s life which is equal to [and more-often exceeds] that of other people’.43 In Pilgrimage Richardson not only challenges the negative, dystopian conceptions of the city common to much canonical modernism and discourses of modernity authored by men but offers a radically different account of the street and its potential relationship and meaning to the urban subject, particularly middle-class, working women who were relatively new to the city and forging their own distinctive position in, and relationship to, that sphere. Eschewing the traditional subject–object dichotomy that underpins the logic of modernity, Richardson rewrites the street as an intersubjective, intimate and existentially generative site. It is the space to which Miriam returns most consistently during the middle volumes of the novel, one that increasingly becomes her, acts as companion, and guides her in her quest in both geographical and existential terms. So too Miriam does not, in the tradition of the male flâneur and urban investigator, seek to intellectually master and psychically order the street and its occupants through positivist or rationalist paradigms. She accepts and embraces the street as it metaphorically embraces her, and her sense and understanding of it are garnered in affective and embodied ways. Indeed, in Revolving Lights the identification between self and street is made complete. While reflecting on the ‘mighty lover’ (London) that ‘[n]o one in the world would oust’, and anticipating falling asleep to its ‘spread’ around her, Miriam reverses the conventional city as body metaphor,44 instead imagining her body as akin to a radial system of streets flowing ‘outwards, north, south, east and west, to all [the city’s, and by extension her own] margins’ (P3, 272–3). The following chapter examines the work of another flâneuse – Helen Levitt – and the highly nuanced and often playful observations of her camera-eye. Like Richardson, Levitt’s oeuvre reflects a deep commitment to attending to and representing the ordinary and everyday: indeed, the street was the sole topic of Levitt’s seventy-year long career in photography. As Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage challenges dystopian literary and sociological accounts of the city, Levitt’s photography offers a similar intervention in visual histories of the street. As I will show, her work comprises a rich poetics of the ordinary and a vivid reimagining of the sphere of everyday urban modernity.

Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory, 85. On the city as body metaphor and metaphorics of the city more generally see Highmore, Cityscapes, 3–4, 131–9, 159.

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2 Extraordinary actuality: Helen Levitt’s streets

Like the everyday, Helen Levitt has been described as ‘elusive’, her photographs ‘undemonstrative’, ‘seemingly artless’1 and akin to a ‘white style’.2 However, critics are quick to note that their seeming artlessness belies an approach that is sophisticated, lyrical and, according to Jane Livingston, ‘inimitable’.3 That Levitt’s photography occupies a liminal position between the documentary and artistic, the styleless and idiosyncratic, reflects – and is perhaps itself a product of – the ambiguity and paradox inherent to the subject matter of her photographs: the ordinary. As I discussed in the introduction, many critics of the everyday observe that it is indeterminate – ubiquitous yet difficult to define, familiar yet often escaping our attention, universal (in that we are all immersed in our own version of the everyday) yet always particular and idiosyncratic in its lived forms.4 Moreover, representing the ordinary carries opportunities and risks. Such representations can draw our attention to that which is overlooked or taken for granted – the aesthetics of a mundane object, the significance of commonplace gestures, the expressive richness of the face. However, some critics propose that the very act of representing the ordinary in a work of literature or art runs the risk of transforming or transcending it. For example, with reference to novels such as James Joyce’s Sandra S. Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, Helen Levitt, eds Sandra S. Phillips and Maria Morris Hambourg (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 16, 15. 2 Roberta Hellman and Marvin Hoshino, ‘The Photographs of Helen Levitt’, The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (1978): 731. 3 Livingston, ‘The New York School Photographs 1936–1963’, 279. 4 Henri Lefebvre discusses the indeterminacy of the everyday in the first volume of his Critique and it is a key aspect of Blanchot’s analysis in ‘Everyday Speech’, 12–14. The theme of indeterminacy is also discussed by contemporary critics including Sheringham, Everyday Life, 16–58; Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 1–5; and Felski, Doing Time, 77–81. 1

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Ulysses and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Rita Felski argues that the ‘act of magnifying and refracting taken-for-granted minutiae transcends the very dailiness it seeks to depict. Literature’s heightened sensitivity to the microscopic detail marks its difference from the casual inattentiveness that defines the everyday experience of everyday life.’5 While I would agree that some art can transcend or eclipse the everyday that is its source – in photography this could be argued of a work such as Edward Weston’s Pepper (1930), in which an ordinary vegetable becomes almost unidentifiable and is figured as an abstract sculptural form – not all art results in such a transcending or eclipsing of the everyday. Furthermore, Felski’s argument rests on the assumption that everyday experience is defined by an attitude of ‘casual inattentiveness’, an attitude I would argue is but one of many modes of experience that forms part of ordinary life, and certainly would not adequately describe some people’s daily experience (children, for example, who happen to be a favourite subject in the photography of Helen Levitt). Maintaining an absolute fidelity to the ordinary while respecting its privacy – its curious indeterminacy – is the challenge that Helen Levitt seems to have set herself. Levitt’s oeuvre stands as a homage to the ordinary and everyday. As I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, the street comprised the sole subject matter of her seventy-year long career in photography, particularly the streets of New York where she lived and worked.6 The local, the incidental, the ephemeral, and the forms of intimacy and sociality that can be glimpsed in the world of another’s everyday, define much of her work.7 In addition to photography, Levitt spent approximately a decade of her career in film. In the early 1940s she worked as an assistant film cutter with Luis Buñuel, who was making pro-American propaganda films for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1945 and 1946 she worked as a cinematographer with James Agee and Janice Loeb on the film In the Street, which documented daily life on the streets of East Harlem. In 1946 and 1947 Levitt collaborated with Loeb, Sidney Myers and Agee on the film The Quiet One, about a troubled, runaway black child, which was nominated for two Academy Awards. In 1959 Levitt returned to still photography but this time using colour.8 Felski, Doing Time, 90. Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913 and died in New York in 2009. She lived in New York her entire life; Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 3rd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 2010), 354. 7 Levitt’s interest in the ephemeral and the aesthetics of the everyday is evident in her documents of children’s chalk drawings, messages and art on the sidewalks, walls and alleys throughout the Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt documented many such drawings throughout the 1930s and 1940s; see Helen Levitt, In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938–1948, eds Alex Harris and Marvin Hoshino, with an essay by Robert Coles (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). 8 This biographical information is drawn from Rosenblum, A History of Women’s 5 6



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This chapter examines representations of the ordinary and everyday street life in Levitt’s New York street photography of the late 1930s and 1940s. In particular, I consider how this body of work unsettles and places in a dialectical relation concepts of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the familiar and the enigmatic. Levitt’s street photography, like Dorothy Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, comprises a significant break from dominant cultural, and in the case of Levitt, visual, histories of the street. Levitt’s New York departs from the dystopian and utopian conceptions of the city common to canonical modernism and discourses of modernity of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Rejecting dominant paradigms which configure the street as, for example, a site of degeneration and social anomie, or a masculine sphere aligned with work and labour, Levitt captures an alternative, everyday poetics of the street that sees it as a stage for the imagination and play, sociality, affective encounter and intimacy. I also discuss Levitt’s aesthetics of the everyday – one based on a commitment to the ‘actual’ and ordinary which nevertheless foregrounds its indeterminacy, complexity and elusiveness.

‘the aesthetic is in reality itself ’ Throughout the modernist period, ‘reality’ was an extremely important if labile term. While the conventional story of modernism emphasizes its radical break from the realisms that defined much European art and literature of the nineteenth century, modernists were of course committed in their own way to representing the reality of modern life and devising new artistic forms that they felt would do it justice. ‘Reality’, like ‘life’, becomes a catchword in many of Virginia Woolf’s essays, and for novelists such as Woolf, Richardson and Joyce it is the complex reality of daily life – the patterns of ordinary consciousness and experience – that become the basis for a new aesthetics of the novel.9 Woolf famously proposes in her 1925 essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (a revised version of the 1919 essay ‘Modern Novels’), ‘[i]s it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit [i.e. life], whatever aberration or complexity it may display …?’10 Similarly, moving away from the impressionistic and painterly style of Pictorialism, which dominated European and American photography in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt,

Photography, 354. 9 See, for example, Woolf’s essays ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘Life and the Novelist’, in Essays, vol. 4, 157–65, 400–6. 10 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, Essays, vol. 4, 160.

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Dorothea Lange and Margaret Monck, express a renewed commitment to ‘reality’ and see it as the basis for new vernaculars in photographic aesthetics. In introducing Levitt’s inimitable style and her attitude towards the ordinary and actual, I will begin with two suggestive quotations. The first quotation comes from Helen Levitt who has been described as shy, self-effacing and notoriously tight-lipped about her work, which she believed should speak for itself without the aid of commentary or critique.11 The second quotation is from the American poet Wallace Stevens (another modernist whose work reflects a fundamental commitment to reality and the commonplace), which Levitt transcribed into one of her scrapbooks: All I can say about the work I try to do, is that the aesthetic is in reality itself.12 In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of the imagination.13 The first quotation captures two important aspects of Levitt’s work. Firstly, she does not see reality (the actual, everyday world) and aesthetics to be distinct or opposed. Rather, she contends that any style or aesthetic in her work is derived from, or present within, actuality itself. Here, Levitt anticipates contemporary scholarship that argues that ‘aesthetic experience need not be severed from everyday life’.14 In Levitt’s work this approach is evident in the way in which a poetics of the body, expression and movement (Figure 1) – one indebted to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson – and an at times surrealist attunement to the surprising or extraordinary in the ordinary (Figure 2) are present in a photographic practice that is at base straight15 and non-interventionist in approach.16 Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 16. Quoted in Garner, Disappearing Witness, 12–13. For a discussion of the importance of the ‘commonplace’ to Wallace Stevens’ poetry see Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 115–48. 13 Wallace Stevens quoted in Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 39. The quotation comes from Stevens’ Adagia. 14 Felski, Doing Time, 80. In a movement away from art-centred aesthetics, a number of scholars have explored the aesthetics of the everyday in relation to non-art sources such as the built environment, landscape, food and objects; see Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith eds, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005) and Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 15 The term ‘straight’ photography emerged around 1904 and describes a general approach to photography during the modernist period that rejected the painterly styles of Pictorialism and manipulations to the image during processing. For a brief description of the term see ‘Straight Photography’, MOCA: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; http://moca.org/pc/ viewArtTerm.php?id=36 (accessed 11 August 2015). 16 Levitt was one of several New York photographers who experimented with Surrealism which she came into contact with via the work of Cartier-Bresson as well as exhibitions of modernist 11 12



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FIGURE 1 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

This particular relationship between art and the actual in Levitt’s work is succinctly expressed by her friend and collaborator, James Agee, in his introductory essay to Levitt’s collection of photographs entitled A Way of Seeing.17 Agee writes: In every other art which draws directly on the actual world, the actual is transformed by the artist’s creative intelligence, into a new and different kind of reality: aesthetic reality. In the kind of photography we are talking about here, the actual is not at all transformed; it is reflected and recorded, within the limits of the camera, with all possible accuracy. The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual photography and art at the Julien Levy Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s; Livingston, ‘The New York School’, 273; Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 26–9. Levitt first saw an exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs at the Levy Gallery in 1935 and he had a significant influence on her work, evidenced in particular in Levitt’s appreciation for dynamism and movement, her focus on suggestive, evanescent moments, and in her choice of instrument – she purchased her first Leica in 1936 after seeing Cartier-Bresson’s work; Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 28–32; Livingston, ‘The New York School’, 277–9, 303. 17 This collection was compiled and planned for publication in the 1940s but not actually published until 1965.

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world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization.18 Thus, for Agee, photography has a privileged relationship to the actual world as compared to other forms of art, one which is more direct and pure. The second attitude towards ‘reality’ and the actual that is evident in Levitt’s oeuvre and succinctly expressed in the quotation from Wallace Stevens, is that the actual is not necessarily equivalent to the familiar or mundane, but often a locus of the mysterious and extraordinary. In such moments, receptiveness to the extraordinary in the ordinary cancels the need for imaginative transformation. The imbrication of the extraordinary in the ordinary is central to a range of cultural and literary explorations of the commonplace from William Wordsworth’s Romanticism to Walter Benjamin’s urban aesthetics and Surrealism.19 Many of Levitt’s photographs reveal the surprising, semantically dense or puzzling within the ordinary: qualities often overlooked because the quotidian is either too proximate or too ephemeral to grasp in its fullness (see Figure 3). Such an attunement to the richness of the actual and ordinary is a key part of Levitt’s artistic sensibility. Unlike the abstract approaches to ordinary objects or everyday scenes employed by contemporaneous photographers such as Imogen Cunningham, or later photographers such as Diane Arbus who actively sought out the deviant and weird, the extraordinary in Levitt’s ordinary is never contrived or forced. Like many American photographers of the 1930s, Levitt’s work blurs and complicates the divide between the documentary and artistic. Sandra Phillips has argued that the documentary mode was the ‘compelling aesthetic’ in American photography during the 1930s: a language that proved ‘adaptable to the poetic use’ of photographers such as Levitt, Paul Strand and Walker Evans as well as the social advocacy work of social documentary photographers such as Dorothea Lange.20 Similarly, Gretchen Garner contends that American photography from the 1920s through to the 1960s was connected by a common approach which she calls ‘spontaneous witness’ which emphasized a ‘sharp-focus realism’, ‘chance, alert presence

James Agee, introductory essay to A Way of Seeing, by Helen Levitt (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), vii–viii. 19 William Wordsworth, from ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, 7th ed., eds M. H. Abrams and Jack Stillinger (New York: Norton, 2000), 238–45. For a discussion of Surrealism in relation to the ordinary and everyday see Sheringham, Everyday Life, 59–133. The dialectic between the ordinary and extraordinary is central to Highmore’s study Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. 20 Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 25. 18



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in the real world and quick response’.21 She argues that this was common to all photographic approaches – both documentary and art – during the period. While the new art photographers on both the East and West coasts of America were enthusiastically rejecting the aesthetic of Pictorialism in favour of a ‘sharp-focus realism’, documentary photographers such as Dorothea Lange argued that the social and moral potential of photography depended on a fidelity to the actual and an aesthetics of the familiar.22 In the documentary tradition, Levitt used small, light-weight cameras (she used a 35mm Leica from 1936), available light, privileged the moment of exposure, and assumed a non-interventionist approach to her subjects and prints. Like Dorothea Lange, Levitt sought to be ‘invisible’ and unobtrusive around her subjects, an aim aided for Levitt by the use of a right-angle viewfinder – a device which created the impression that she was shooting in another direction.23 While her work privileges the actual, incorporates documentary modes and focuses on working-class, African-American and immigrant subjects and communities, her work could not be classified as social documentary. The 1930s saw the rise of the social documentary tradition facilitated by initiatives such as the Photo League which was established at the New School for Social Research in 1930, and the Photographic Unit of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA) – later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – which was established by Roy Stryker in 1935.24 And while Levitt was close friends with people involved in the FSA, particularly Ben Shahn and Walker Evans, and her work admired by people affiliated with the Photo League, she was never interested in photojournalism as a career and eschewed explicit social issues and political and moral agendas in her work.25 In an interview with Garner, Disappearing Witness, xv–xvi. I examine Lange’s photography in relation to the concept of the familiar in Chapter 5. On the West coast of America, the ‘sharp-focus realism’ that Garner refers to was evident in the work of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and photographers aligned with the ‘f.64’ group. On the East coast, the work of Paul Strand, Edward Steichen and Berenice Abbot adopted a similar approach but their subject matter tended to be architectural or mechanical rather than (as with the f.64 group) natural, and incorporated the aesthetic influences of Cubism; Garner, Disappearing Witness, 30–3; Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 19. 23 Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 16. 24 Originally called the Workers’ Film and Photo League, the Photo League was composed of a group of photographers and filmmakers who were committed to representing urban life, particularly in poorer neighbourhoods, and provided images for left-wing publications. The League offered lectures, classes and cooperative projects. Members included W. Eugene Smith and Jerome Liebling; Warner Marien, Photography, 294. The Resettlement Administration (RA), which was one of President Roosevelt’s initiatives to fight the Depression, was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937; Warner Marien, Photography, 280. 25 Livingston, ‘The New York School’, 259; Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 24. According to Phillips, Levitt’s work was exhibited at the Photo League in 1943 and 1949; ‘Helen Levitt’s 21 22

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the Chicago Tribune in 2003 in the context of the photography of social reform, Levitt stated: ‘I never intend to make statements in my pictures’.26 Walker Evans once described Levitt’s work as ‘anti-journalism’.27 Her photography undoubtedly assumes a politics in the sense that it focuses on poor neighbourhoods, the working classes, women and children, and often African-American and immigrant subjects – and in ways that depart from stereotypical representations of these groups – but she did not make social issues, such as poverty or unemployment, the focus or driving force of her work. The ideological tone of Levitt’s work marks a complete departure from stereotypical representations of the poor and the working classes. As Francine Prose has argued, Levitt does not aestheticize or objectify her subjects into ‘art objects’ or ‘noble heroes of poverty and desolation’.28 Rather, as Alan Trachtenberg has suggested, she presents her subjects ‘entirely on their own terms’, not as victims (see, for example, Figures 1 and 6).29 A lyricism, playfulness and semantic opacity further complicate the status of her images as straight-forward documents and give rise to a unique and suggestive vision of the street.

Levitt’s streets As I discussed in Chapter 1, critics such as Maurice Blanchot identify the street as the quintessential site of everyday modernity. Blanchot’s characterization of the street is a familiar one in terms of male-authored cultural histories of the city and modernity, many of which viewed the street and city in negative or ambivalent terms. The negative encodings of the city that we find in the work of writers and social investigators such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, of course find their parallel in photography, particularly photographers who focused on poorer social districts such as the East End in London or the Lower East Side in New York. For example,

New York’, 40, note 27. Alan Trachtenberg offers the most politicized reading of Levitt’s street photography, arguing that she presents the streets as ‘sites of daily resistance’, particularly children’s ‘avant garde’ play as acts of resistance and self-assertion; ‘Seeing What You See: Photographs by Helen Levitt’, Raritan 31, no. 4 (2012): 4. 26 Cited in Mary Rourke, ‘Helen Levitt dies at 95: New York street photographer of poignant dramas’, Los Angeles Times, 1 April 2009; http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-mehelen-levitt1-2009apr01-story.html#page=1 (accessed 13 August 2015). 27 This comment was made with reference to Levitt’s picture of three boys playing with sticks and branches in a vacant lot (Figure 1). The quotation is cited on the back cover of A Way of Seeing (the 1989 Duke University Press edition). 28 Francine Prose, Introduction to Crosstown, Helen Levitt (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001), 6. 29 Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing What You See’, 4.



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the Scottish photographer John Thomson compiled a book entitled Street Life in London (1878) which documented the lives of impoverished street people in London during the 1870s. In America, Jacob Riis and, later, Lewis Hine, documented and reported on social issues such as slum housing and, in the case of Hine, child labour and factory work. Writing in the late 1950s, the city that Blanchot imagines in ‘Everyday Speech’ is not one of material poverty or social destitution but a kind of social and moral aporia – a site within which the individual exists outside of the realms of specificity, the ‘true and the false’ and responsibility. He writes: the man in the street is fundamentally irresponsible; while having always seen everything, he is witness to nothing. He knows all, but cannot answer for it, not through cowardice, but because he takes it all lightly and because he is not really there. Who is there when the man in the street is there? At the most a “who?,” an interrogation that settles upon no one.30 This absence of responsibility is a product of the fact that, for Blanchot, the everyday entails the erasure or dissolution of the subject: ‘The everyday escapes. Why does it escape? Because it is without a subject.’31 Like Blanchot, Levitt views the street as one of the key sites of the everyday, but like Richardson her representation of that space and the people in it differs from Blanchot’s account in several key ways. On the one hand, it is not – as Blanchot’s language implies – a primarily masculine sphere populated by ‘man’. So too, Levitt challenges such characterizations of the street as a site of anonymity in which subjectivity is erased, and as a social and moral vacuum or aporia. Rather, as I will show, sociality and interpersonal relations are placed centre stage in her representations of the street and she produces a record of that space that provides a radical counterpoint to the negative and dystopian accounts common to much canonical male modernism and theories of modernity. A curious observer, her camera bears witness to a different history of the street. The conception of the city revealed in Levitt’s images of New York also sits in counterpoint to prevailing trends in American and European street photography of the period. Her work departs from the socially and politically motivated street photography of the time which focused on issues Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 17. Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 18. Sheringham argues that the anonymity that Blanchot views as an integral aspect of the experience of the everyday should not be understood as ‘purely negative’ but rather as a ground for limitless possibility: ‘the quotidian manifests our relationship to the fundamental indeterminacy of human possibility’; Everyday Life, 22, original emphasis.

30 31

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such as urban poverty, ethnic diversity or crime, evident in the work of photographers such as Arnold Eagle, Alexander Alland and Weegee.32 Levitt’s work also departs from the utopian ideal of the modern city as a rational, orderly, machine-like and depopulated space, one represented in the Cubist-influenced photographs of Paul Strand, Edward Steichen and Berenice Abbott.33 Levitt eschews iconic urban landmarks, such as the Chrysler or Empire State Building, in favour of ex-centric, overlooked urban spaces. To quote Francine Prose, Levitt’s city is neither a ‘futurist construct’, a ‘dreamy, romantic American version of Atget’s Paris, nor an abstract wonderland of geometric form’, but rather ‘a theatre and a playground’.34 One of the striking features of Levitt’s streets – like Margaret Monck’s photographs of London’s East End and docklands in the 1930s – is who occupies them. On the one hand, as Levitt worked predominantly in neighbourhoods around Harlem and the Lower East Side, her photographs focus on working-class, immigrant and black subjects and communities. This was not to foreground a politics of class struggle or to present poor people as victims but because she was drawn to the vitality of daily life in those neighbourhoods – ones subsequently erased through the post-war projects of urban renewal. Levitt’s streets are also unconventional in terms of the categories of gender and age. Historically, the street has of course been conceptualized and encoded as a masculine and adult realm: a place where women could not wander freely without an element of personal or moral risk or resistance until the early decades of the twentieth century, and a place where well-to-do children wouldn’t play. Only in poor, workingclass districts would women and children be visible at work and at play, but such activity was often viewed by social investigators and commentators as socially and morally problematic.35 While, by the 1930s, women had greater freedom to occupy and walk around the city, it is important to stress that the subjects that populate Levitt’s images of the street are atypical. Her streets are in the main occupied by children, women, mixed social groups and the elderly – even pets feature quite prominently. Critics have always noted Levitt’s preference for photographing children, citing Arnold Eagle, a Hungarian émigré, was a member of the Film and Photo League and his projects in the 1930s included a series on the slums of New York. During the 1940s, Alexander Alland, a Russian émigré, undertook projects on New York’s diverse ethnic groups and was concerned with issues such as immigration and acculturation. Weegee (Arthur Fellig), a New York press photographer and photojournalist during the 1930s and 1940s, took gritty and often confronting images of urban crime, accident, death and injury. 33 For a discussion of the ‘ideal American city of the time’, its sources and models, see Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 17–18. 34 Prose, Introduction, 8. 35 See, for example, Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Isbister and Co., 1904) and the slum photography of Jacob Riis or Arnold Eagle. 32



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that she was drawn to their energy, freedom of expression and playfulness.36 However, I would contend that Levitt’s choice of subjects is more radical than simply capturing the play of children: her work comprises one attempt to rewrite cultural and artistic histories as to who occupies the street and what happens there. Consider, for example, the selection of black and white photographs taken between 1936 and 1948 in the collection Crosstown.37 Of the approximately eighty photographs featuring one or more people on the street (including sidewalks, vacant lots and stoops), almost half (thirtyfive) feature only children, eleven comprise a mix of children and adults, ten feature just women, and only six focus on one or more adult men.38 The images that only feature men present quiet, often meditative moments of respite from work, social and intimate exchanges, or scenes of play. For example, Figure 2 features two men: one is well-dressed in suit, tie and fedora with a cigar in his mouth, sitting in a rather small bathtub on the back of a truck which is parked on the street; another man stands by smiling.

FIGURE 2 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt. See Ellen Handy, ‘Helen Levitt: Childhood as Performance, City as Theatre’, The Lion and the Unicorn 25, no. 2 (2001): 206–25; Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing What You See’; and Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 27–32. 37 Crosstown, published in 2001 following a major retrospective exhibition of Levitt’s photography, is to date the most comprehensive monograph on her work. 38 Five images focus on elderly subjects and eight include pets or animals. 36

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With its nod to the found juxtaposition, the imagery here presents a striking reversal of norms relating to gender and space. We have what appears to be a businessman of sorts, in the public realm, sitting in the normally private and domestic space of the bathtub, looking pretty happy with himself. Another image (Figure 3) focusing only on men could be interpreted as a playful reworking of the politics of the surrealist juxtaposition. The coupling of passive male bodies and domestic objects for sale serves to disrupt the commonplace alignment in Surrealism between the female body, objectification and desire. In more literal terms, the image presents an intimate portrait of men not at work. There is something warm and beguiling about their unselfconscious and homosocial body language, their expressions of curiosity and puzzlement (what is that woman photographing down the street?), and the way their passive bodies seem to be one with the items of furniture around them, which are so haphazardly positioned as to seem almost animate, uncanny. The three refrigerators, which mirror but also juxtapose the three men, look, by contrast, highly motivated, ready to march off down the street in search of an owner. The few images of men on the street in this section of Crosstown serve to disrupt the conventional association among men, work and action in the city (one constantly recapitulated in popular media of the period due to the Depression) and instead show them in reflective, social, intimate and sometimes playful scenarios. Levitt presents us with an unconventional, intimate vision of modern, urban masculinity. While one might argue that Levitt’s approach is politically irresponsible given the serious social effects of the Great Depression and its enormous impact on the American male psyche during the 1930s and 1940s (one famously captured in Dorothea Lange’s photograph White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933), Levitt’s disruption of the association among masculinity, labour and capital could also be read in political terms, in that she figures male subjectivity and experience as more than simply the labour they provide or the capital they accrue. A considerable amount of scholarship on Levitt’s photography of the 1930s and 1940s discusses her representations of children – for example, the way she captures the child’s natural expressiveness and unselfconsciousness or, conversely, the child’s engagement in forms of role-play and masquerade that prepares them for the adult world.39 As Sandra Phillips, Ellen Handy and others have observed, Levitt’s images of children are not sentimental or cute: they present a range of moods and scenarios from the

Ellen Handy, who has provided the most in-depth analysis on this topic, argues that Levitt shows the street as a theatre for ‘children’s continuing performances’ and also ‘a factory of identity in which they labor to form themselves through their engagement with the world’; ‘Helen Levitt’, 207.

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FIGURE 3 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

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joy of dance and play to images that are quite sinister or unnerving (see Figures 5 and 6).40 In terms of Levitt’s representation of the ordinary, her images of children show how they routinely transform the street and other everyday spaces into sites of play, imaginative possibility and wonder – and this vision operates parasitically on the viewer who, through the lens of the child’s experience, sees the city anew. Foregrounding the play, curiosity and positive experience of children from working-class neighbourhoods is another way in which Levitt – like Margaret Monck (Figure 4) – contradicts conventional histories of the street and the urban poor, revealing how ex-centric urban spaces and the detritus of everyday modernity are utilized by children in creative and enabling ways.

FIGURE 4 Margaret Monck, Girls skipping rope, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.41

For example, Figures 1 and 5 feature stereotypical vacant lots that are reconfigured through the play and games of children. In the first of these images, a conventionally dystopian urban landscape becomes subsidiary Handy, ‘Helen Levitt’, 214–15; Phillips, ‘Helen Levitt’s New York’, 27–32. There are no official titles for Monck’s images. The descriptive titles that I have included in captions are my own.

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to, and transformed by, the vitality of the boys’ movement, laughter and play. Their bodies and the sticks and branch they wield create a circle of movement within an otherwise static and planar landscape; their dynamism and evident joy creates the impression that they exceed and might well orbit out of the space altogether. Rather than romanticizing or demonizing the vacant lot, Levitt shows how, through bricolage and play, the boys’ experience of this space is in counterpoint to its conventional associations and configurations in the adult world. Similarly, in Figure 5 a stereotypically dystopian urban landscape is transformed into a scene that is at once mysterious, slightly threatening and humorous. The tree splits the composition in two: the left-hand side showing boarded up lodgings, the right-hand side showing the markers of a habitus (we see a milk bottle and other items by the windowsill). As the two figures in the image are ambiguous – a strange admixture of the threatening and funny, tiny in stature yet unnerving in their bandit masks – the imaginative scenario in which they are engaged remains a mystery to the viewer. The dirty brick walls are oppressive as they loom towards us, yet the bent tree (like the branch in the previous image) works in counterpoint to the building’s geometric form and splits out into the top of the frame, as if offering an escape route. Many of Levitt’s photographs of children feature frames – sometimes literal frames or the framing device of a mask (as in Figure 5) – which are expressive of the way in which the child’s imagination and curiosity lead them to experience the ordinary through a different, non-habituated perspective.42 In one example (Figure 6) a ‘piece of street trash’43 – a broken mirror – serves not only as a source of amusement but seems to present the promise of a portal into another reality. The two worlds of adulthood and childhood are here super-imposed onto one another, the child’s frame sitting in the centre of, and in contrast to, the reality of the adult world which lies behind. The background scene speaks of everyday chores and commodities. We see signs for a hand laundry, a shop selling daily commodities and a shoe repairer, but these boys have another, far more compelling project to hand. Teenagers and adults in the background continue going about their day, clearly unmoved by this spectacular opportunity. A mysterious, androgynous-looking figure wanders by in the background and, as

The child’s vision, as a point of contrast and resistance to the ossifying effects of modern life on perception, has been observed from the time of the Romantics, is discussed by nineteenthcentury critics of modernity such as Charles Baudelaire in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), and is one of the forms of ‘vision’ discussed by the modernist art critic and painter Roger Fry in Vision and Design (along with other forms like ‘practical vision’ and ‘aesthetic vision’). See Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 7–9; Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920). 43 Handy, ‘Helen Levitt’, 211. 42

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FIGURE 5 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.



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the only solitary figure in the image (every other figure is engaged with another person in some way), they seem detached, almost mythical, adding to the picture’s sense of the extraordinary or otherworldly erupting into the everyday. Another instance of Levitt’s extraordinary actuality shows a group of young girls, about six years old and of mixed race, walking along a nondescript sidewalk observing a series of bubbles floating in the air above the road next to them (Figure 7). The image suggests the quality of an urban miracle: the evanescent, fragile bubbles a vivid contrast to the dark, solid wall behind. Their lightness, freedom and sphericity seem a cheeky rebuttal to the linearity and hardness of the wall and road, just as the girl’s wonder and absorption in the beauty and inexplicable fact of these bubbles sits in counterpoint to Georg Simmel’s blasé attitude or Blanchot’s indifferent streetwalker.

FIGURE 6 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

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FIGURE 7 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.



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Levitt also challenges cultural histories of the street by figuring it as a rich, positive and dynamic social sphere, not, as was historically the norm, a site of alienation, depopulation or social degeneration. From the ghostly streets of Eugène Atget’s Paris, to Berenice Abbott’s depopulated, angular streetscapes in Changing New York, to the seedy urban underworlds represented by contemporaneous photographers such as Weegee (Arthur Fellig), the positive, social dimensions of the city had rarely been a feature of urban photography.44 Furthermore, the tone and affective register of Levitt’s photographs operate in stark contrast to one of the prevailing iconographies of cities such as New York and San Francisco that was emerging from the mid-1930s – that is, the scene of the Great Depression. While it is clear in Levitt’s pictures that her subjects are poor they are not presented as socially isolated or desolate (an idea evoked in well-known images of the Depression such as Lange’s White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933). The broader historical event is not privileged by Levitt but, rather, absorbed into the everyday. The social focus of Levitt’s streets is in part due to the fact that most of her pictures were taken in Harlem and the Upper and Lower East Side rather than the corporate districts of Manhattan. Nevertheless, she focuses on an equally legitimate, if different, record of the street. To take the selection of 1930s and 1940s black and white photographs in Crosstown as again illustrative, the vast majority of these images feature more than one person (or subject, if we include non-human animals) in the frame and detail social situations and interactions: for example, neighbours, couples or families chatting, hanging out, passing the time or, in the case of children, playing (see Figures 8 and 10). The sidewalk and stoop are a stage not for fleeting, anonymous encounters, but a theatre of social relations. While a few images show tense or ambivalent encounters, the majority are positive, neutral or playful in tone. Many index the pleasure and normalcy of neighbours, friends or families chatting and passing the time outside residences or shops. While there is a long critical and literary tradition that views the street and city as an individualistic, amoral space or a site of social degeneration (e.g. George Gissing, T. S. Eliot, Jean Rhys) – one recapitulated in much

Berenice Abbot’s project (which was undertaken from 1935 to 1939 and funded by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project) documented the emergence and transformation of New York into a symbol of twentieth-century urbanism. People remain subsidiary to architectural forms throughout the book, particularly in the sections on Wall Street and City Hall; Bonnie Yochelson, ed. and Introduction, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York: New Press, 1997). Abbott, who went to Paris in 1921, worked as Man Ray’s assistant for a time and was influenced by the work of Eugène Atget. Abbott was responsible for ‘saving’ Atget’s photography after his death – she purchased and brought his collection back to the United States in 1929 and later (in 1968) sold the archive to the Museum of Modern Art; see Yochelson’s introduction to Changing New York, 11–12.

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FIGURE 8 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

street photography of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – Levitt’s photographs often present an embodied poetics of moral relation and intimacy as integral features of daily life in the streets that she observes. Several images focus on commonplace interpersonal and ethical gestures – an arm extended out in friendship or comfort (see Figure 8) – the small, often automatic gestures that form much of the fabric of our daily social lives. But, moreover, Levitt reveals the choreography of the mundane body – of commonplace gesture and movement – as a language of aesthetic significance, grace and beauty. Figure 9, the last photograph in the collection A Way of Seeing, relocates our attention away from the event as such (the burst water hydrant) to the everyday poetics of gesture and intimacy to which it gives rise. The protective arm of the mother formally sits in contrast to the powerful stream of water bursting from the hydrant: one is for the child the locus of threat, the other the zone of safety. The child walks tentatively, pigeon-toed, across the pavement towards the woman, the child’s visible distress and vulnerability contrasted to the mother’s knowing smile. As a public domain, the street is not traditionally thought of as a stage for unrestrained personal emotion or affective display, yet many of Levitt’s photographs focus on just that: the eruption of the private realm of emotion into the public sphere, or the particular affective register of the sidewalk or stoop. Whether the glee of a small child or what Sara



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FIGURE 9 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

Crangle describes as the more ‘prosaic feelings’ of the daily, such as the boredom borne from simply hanging around, Levitt’s sidewalks and stoops are resolutely human, intersubjective, and often emotionally and morally charged sites.45 Thus, Levitt’s New York photography of the late 1930s and 1940s offers an alternative record of the street as the quintessential space of the everyday in terms of who occupies that space, how it is experienced, and the social reality that unfolds there.

Extraordinary actuality Critics have observed the semantic ambiguity integral to much of Levitt’s work and this is one of the qualities that makes it distinctly modernist. Epistemological certainty and closure are not states readily achieved when looking at a Levitt photograph: ‘Meaning can never be known with frontal assurance.’46 Alan Trachtenberg attributes this semantic ambiguity to Levitt’s particular ‘way of seeing’, one which for him is ‘drawn to mystery and enigma’, ‘obliquity’, and which requires from the critic a ‘measured Sara Crangle, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 46 Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing What You See’, 5. 45

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delicacy and reticence, a balance between description and speculation’.47 As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, it could be argued that the indeterminacy inherent to many of her pictures is not only a product of Levitt’s particular way of seeing but of the subject matter of her work: the ordinary. Many of the terms used by critics to describe Levitt’s photography, such as secrecy, disguise, elusiveness, paradox, ambiguity and puzzle, are descriptors or themes in critical evaluations of the everyday by Blanchot, Lefebvre, Sheringham, Highmore, Felski and others. There are, I suggest, two ways in which Levitt’s photographs suggest the indeterminacy of the everyday: one relates to their temporal register, the other relates more broadly to the hermeneutics of the ordinary in her work. Ellen Handy has argued that the nature of Levitt’s photography is temporal rather than spatial and that she captures not random moments or events but ‘significant instants’.48 Levitt’s photographs often focus on the in-between – the moment when it appears something might happen or has just happened, or, conversely, when nothing in particular is happening – but in eschewing all appeal to narrative Levitt, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely gives us any clues through which we might deduce a broader framework or narrative for the instants she presents.49 Cartier-Bresson’s work is often discussed with reference to the idea of the ‘decisive moment’, the English translation to his 1952 collection, Images à la sauvette. However, Colin Westerbeck has argued that this is a misleading translation. À la sauvette is, he writes, a ‘colloquialism roughly equivalent to “on the run,” but … there is also an untranslatable future element involved’.50 It refers to a moment of anticipation, of possibility, rather than conclusion. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, Westerbeck contends, and the temporality of street photography more generally, are more appropriately described as ‘indecisive’ moments: actions yet to be resolved, ‘events that are inchoate’, images that ‘remain forever irresolvable, equivocal, ambivalent’.51 Similarly, earlier in the century Julien Levy characterized Cartier-Bresson’s work as ‘“equivocal” and “ambivalent”’.52 Such descriptions point to the similar temporal and epistemological register of Cartier-Bresson’s and Levitt’s photographs. As Blanchot observes in ‘Everyday Speech’, the everyday is commonly aligned with the non-event, the time that lies on either side of events,

Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing What You See’, 5, 1. Handy, ‘Helen Levitt’, 209. 49 This coincides with much modernist fiction of the everyday in which experience and moments are privileged over plot or narrative. 50 Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 156. 51 Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, Bystander, 156, original emphasis. As an example of this see Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932. 52 Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, Bystander, 156. 47 48



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unremarked and unremarkable: ‘Nothing happens; this is the everyday.’ And yet, he continues, ‘[f]or whom does “nothing happen” if, for me, something is necessarily always happening?’53 The very happenings of the everyday are those things that for Blanchot escape us, much like Virginia Woolf’s description of the experiential category she terms ‘non-being’ in her memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’.54 Like Blanchot and Woolf, Levitt troubles the assumed distinction between the event and the everyday and what the in-between time of the quotidian looks like. Her work presents the everyday as not residual but suggestive, charged and significant in its own particular way. For example, one photograph presents a cinematic street scene that is poised, labile; a something-about-to-happen instant in which the individual figures in the frame are dynamically connected by their gazes and lines of movement. A man is theatrically posed beside a fire hydrant, his body about to break into … what … a dance (?) as three figures appear to look on, expectant. In another image, members of a family sit in graceful arrangement on a stoop, passing the time (Figure 10). The gazes

FIGURE 10 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 15. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt, 1985), 70.

53 54

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of the young boy and two women suggest that something is happening up the street, but Levitt keeps the focus on the everyday, presenting a striking image of the quiet, idle moment that is nevertheless dynamic and into which the event enters and presses indirectly. As Bryony Randall argues in her discussion of dailiness in the work of Virginia Woolf, ‘[d]aily life, or everydayness, is not a thing apart from life in general, it is the dailiness of life which enables us to structure and organise public events, moments of being, our inner self and the chiming of Big Ben’.55 Similarly, in Levitt’s streets, down time is never dead time: things are always going on. The opacity and ambiguity that characterizes much of Levitt’s work can be understood in terms of the hermeneutic perplexity of the ordinary itself. As Rita Felski observes, the everyday is ‘synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the mundane, yet it is also strangely elusive … resists our understanding and escapes our grasp’.56 Alan Trachtenberg observes the unsettling way in which what initially appears familiar, known and of ‘easy access’ in a Levitt photograph often becomes, on closer scrutiny, unfamiliar and semantically dense.57 This can be the case for the scenarios that she depicts, the faces and expressions she captures, the gestures she frames, and the emotions she indexes. What are we to make of the image showing two small girls connected by a paper ribbon (Figure 11)? On one interpretation the ribbon symbolizes a line of connection between the two girls who are joined in a moment of friendship and play. But on the other hand, the paper ribbon seems to threaten to strangle the little girl whose body language appears hesitant, unsure in its advance, and the out-of-focus expression on the face of the little girl on the stoop strikes one as playful, coy and demonic by turns. Here, does Levitt capture the ambivalent and complex zone of friendship, and human relations more broadly, that we daily navigate? Commonplace gestures, too, announce their potential paradox or indeterminacy. In a number of Levitt’s photographs the embrace as a gesture of affection and care, can simultaneously be read to suggest constraint, restraint, possession or even violence, again alluding to the complexity and ambiguity that can underlie our everyday social interactions and relationships. As in many of Lange’s photographs, which I will discuss in Chapter 5, expressions and faces often conceal as much as they reveal in Levitt’s oeuvre. While the tradition of documentary and particularly street photography may seem ethically suspect through its inherent tendency to ‘steal’ something from another, often surreptitiously and without consent, Levitt’s photographs withhold and, like Lange’s, often keep something in reserve: they invite analysis yet deny full comprehension. The subjects in many of

Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 161. Felski, Doing Time, 78. 57 Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing What You See’, 5. 55 56



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FIGURE 11 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. © Estate of Helen Levitt.

her photographs remain hermetically sealed vessels refusing the viewer’s attempts at full knowledge or possession. If street photography constitutes one instance of flânerie, both Levitt and her camera – like the metropolitan gaze of Miriam Henderson – depart from canonical models of the flâneur. Unlike the middle-class male flâneur or social urban investigator of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries who sought to know and order the manifest chaos and diversity of the city through his totalizing and authoritative gaze, Levitt and her ragpicking camera foreground epistemological limit and a kind of ethics of (il)legibility. Thus, on the one hand, Levitt presents us with an understated yet suggestive alternative record of the street in the twentieth century: what it looks like, who occupies it and what happens there. More broadly, and perhaps as a consequence of her purported shyness and respect for privacy, Levitt gives us access to the secret life of the ordinary without disclosing all of its secrets. Her work suggests that any such complete disclosure is impossible. In spite of their indexical quality, her photographs foreground the indeterminacy of the ordinary and the extraordinary within the everyday, and she achieves this without pretence or trick making the effect all the more disarming and, in the history of photography, extraordinary. In the following chapter I move from the site of the street to the home and the secret life of some of the commonplace things that live there.

3 Homely things: Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf

The history of modernity, propelled both by capital and by instrumental reason, is the history of proscribing objects from attaining the status of things, proscribing any value but that of use or exchange, secularizing the object’s animation by restricting it to commodity fetishism alone. BILL BROWN1

We speak about things, but we seldom hear the things speak to us. MAX WEBER2

In the first epigraph from A Sense of Things, Bill Brown describes how modernity marks a new phase of relation to the object world: one shaped by the dictates of capitalism and instrumentalism. Modernity impedes objects from obtaining the status of particular things: radiant, auratic, unique. However, in his study Brown demonstrates how many American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries challenged this emerging conception of objects and our relationship to them in the modern world. For example, he argues that in The American Scene, Henry James insists on ‘defining nonpecuniary value’ and ‘exhibits an exchange between the physical object world and its human subjects that stands outside the structure of ownership’.3 Echoing Max Weber’s claim in the second epigraph Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 185. 2 Max Weber, ‘Things’, in Essays on Art (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1916), 31. 3 Brown, A Sense of Things, 185. 1

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above that we need to hear things ‘speak’ to us, Brown suggests that James confers ‘rights’ to the material world ‘in the mode of conferring voice in order to grant objects some belated yet originary right to narrate their own stories, and thus to express the longing to have their rights realized’.4 Brown argues that much of the literature of the nineteenth century and thereafter demonstrates that our relationship to the object world cannot be reduced to ‘the cultural logic of capitalism’.5 Indeed, he explores the many other ways in which things matter, signify and become animate in the prose fiction of the late-nineteenth century.6 Similarly, Douglas Mao has explored modernism’s fascination with the world of things and modernists’ commitment to their recuperation and expression. He contends that ‘[t]here is very little in previous fiction in English … that resembles Woolf’s fascination with the eerily proximate distance of physical things or Joyce’s obtrusive catalogues of urban detritus and household debris’.7 One of the projects of modernism which Mao examines – and which is anticipated by Weber and echoed by Brown – is the desire to maintain ‘the object’s extrasubjective integrity’ and otherness over and against the colonizing powers of subjectivity and consciousness.8 Such a fascination with and regard for the life of things and the ways in which they ‘act on us’ is evident in the work of modernist women writers including Richardson and Woolf.9 As I discussed in Chapter 1, in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Miriam’s orientation to the object world is not one of commodity fetishism: she dislikes shopping and her encounter with objects tend to disrupt or break down the conventional subject/object dichotomy that underpins the logic of modernity. Woolf’s preoccupation with things, her attunement to the object’s animation and liveliness,10 and her recognition of the importance of particular objects to our daily lives and relations with others are in evidence throughout her fiction. For instance, in the 1920 short story ‘Solid Objects’, she presents us with a character named John who abandons a promising career in politics in favour of a search for unique objects. However, they are not conventional objects of beauty or commercial value but the overlooked fragments and detritus of modernity (fragments of china and glass, pieces of metal, etc.) which John – like Walter

Brown, A Sense of Things, 184. Brown, A Sense of Things, 5–6. 6 Brown’s study focuses on a reading of three American novels from the mid-1890s: Frank Norris’ McTeague, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Henry James’ Spoils of Poynton. 7 Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13. 8 Mao, Solid Objects, 10. Original emphasis. 9 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58. 10 Brown, A Sense of Things, 186–8. 4 5

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Benjamin’s ragpicker – hunts for in the marginal spaces of the modern city: ‘pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighbourhood of London’.11 To the perplexity of his political colleagues, John displays his objet d’art on his mantelpiece and is increasingly transfixed by their affective power, uniqueness and beauty: The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world, let alone to stand upon the same narrow strip of marble in the same room.12 The story of John’s solid objects is not simply one in which modernism’s ‘fetishized thing’ is ‘saved from the fate of the mass-produced object’ and the ‘tyranny of use’.13 His objects fall well outside both categories from the outset.14 In this chapter I move away from the public sphere of the street – the typical locus of the objet trouvé – to investigate some domestic literary landscapes and the things that populate them. Focusing on the ‘Objects’ section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and selected things in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I examine how the writing of familiar things in these texts contribute to the reanimation and revaluation of the object world explored by critics such as Brown and Mao. I am also interested in the comparative extent to which Stein and Woolf present the lives of things and people as mutually constitutive – the ways in which ‘[t]hings act on us’ and we in turn ‘act on things’.15 In his chapter on ‘Familiar things’ in Ordinary Lives, Ben Highmore characterizes the relationship between people and things as a ‘symbiotic’ and (implicitly) ethical one.16 As he observes, ‘our ordinary lives are lived out in the midst of things’; ‘keepsakes’, ‘mementos’, furniture, utensils and tools. But, at the same time, ‘things turn towards us: they call to us, sidle up to us. Tools subtly weathered by daily human contact demand to be held and used. Soles of shoes scuffed smooth like pebbles seem to yearn for our feet.’17 Given that there exists ‘a mutually

Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd edn. (London: Hogarth, 1989), 105. 12 Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction, 105. 13 Brown, A Sense of Things, 8. 14 Woolf’s story not only playfully explores the pitfalls of aestheticism and an obsessive desire for unusual objects, but it also offers, through the character of John and his unsympathetic colleague Charles, a serious critique of instrumentalism and the effects of habit on our relationship to the material world. I discuss this short story and its exploration of different modes of relation to the object world in Chapter 1 of Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience. 15 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. 16 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. 17 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. 11

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constituting interaction between people and things’, Highmore suggests that we ‘shouldn’t start out by privileging the one over the other’, but acknowledges the human tendency to do just that.18 He wonders what it might ‘mean to aspire to some equality between us and them when the “them” in question remain so stubbornly mute, so obdurately insentient’.19 This chapter examines how Woolf and Stein seek, if in quite different ways, to give familiar things a voice and legitimacy and how they imagine the relationship and ‘osmosis between the thingly and the creaturely’.20

Tender Buttons and the everyday Bill Brown suggests that, for the most part, Stein showed little interest in physical objects, focusing instead on the ‘human “history” of everyone’.21 He also contends that Stein never conflated ‘the organic and inorganic worlds’.22 For Brown, A Long Gay Book, which was composed in 1911 and published in 1933, is an exception to this as it is a work that ‘moves toward an engagement with the sensuous world’.23 However, he suggests that in that work and in the ‘Objects’ section of Tender Buttons, which was composed around 1912, encounters with the object world transform into ‘linguistic experiment’ and ultimately ‘leav[e] the matter at hand far behind’.24 He does not provide a sustained discussion of Tender Buttons, but Brown’s comments about Stein’s treatment of the object world resonate with the reading of Tender Buttons that I want to pursue here. While Stein’s linguistic experiments in Tender Buttons can be viewed as an attempt to liberate everyday objects from the ossifying and dulling effects of ordinary (read: patriarchal) language, I suggest that her poetic-prose limits our access as readers to the things that she seeks to linguistically recuperate. While Tender Buttons does celebrate our sensuous and affective experience of everyday spaces and the things in them, the affective power and liveliness

Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. 20 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 59. 21 Brown, A Sense of Things, 74. 22 Brown, A Sense of Things, 74. 23 Brown, A Sense of Things, 74. 24 Brown, A Sense of Things, 74. Tender Buttons was first published in 1914. When and in what order Tender Buttons was composed is unclear. The Yale Catalogue lists them as 1910 to 1912, but on the basis of Stein’s own recollections the volume was not commenced until 1912; Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 125. For another discussion of the composition dates of Tender Buttons see Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 75–6. 18 19

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of those things remain somewhat obstructed for us as readers because Stein’s nominal objects are occluded in favour of the object of language. To this extent, my reading of Tender Buttons coincides with William Carlos Williams’ assessment in his essay ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, that Stein’s writing is the object rather than a transparency disclosing other objects: ‘The words, in writing, she discloses, transcend everything.’25 Nevertheless, in spite of what I argue to be Stein’s failure to give us access in Tender Buttons to the life or voice of things, the volume reflects what many critics view as some of the defining features of the everyday: namely, its opaqueness and resistance to critical scrutiny. My reading therefore moves away from attempts to discern what the prose-poems may or may not ‘mean’ to the question of their relative engagement with the world of things. I begin my discussion with some observations about the curious title of this work. I then consider how Stein’s linguistic experimentation in Tender Buttons reflects several key contemporary ideas about the nature and phenomenology of the everyday before turning to a closer reading of some of the prose-poems in terms of their engagement with the world of things. While Tender Buttons has always been recognized as one of modernism’s most perplexing and hermeneutically challenging experiments, several critics have noted that it is grounded in the ordinary. Richard Bridgman writes that while it is ‘all but impossible to transform [Tender Buttons] adequately into normal exposition … it is founded in the ordinary world’.26 Towards the end of her analysis of this work, Susan Hawkins asks: ‘is there anything else going on in Tender Buttons besides innovative technique and radical syntactic experimentation?’27 Hawkins’ answer is yes, and she observes that what ‘Stein reveals to us, in an extraordinary way, [is] the house we live in every day.’28 For Hawkins, Tender Buttons comprises an affirmation of what has historically and culturally been defined as ‘the William Carlos Williams, ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, in Modern Critical Views: Gertrude Stein, ed. and intro. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 22. As such, Tender Buttons in some respects evidences Felski’s claim that some experimental literary approaches that magnify and refract the everyday ultimately transcend the dailiness they strive to depict; Doing Time, 90. 26 Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 127. 27 Susan E. Hawkins, ‘Sneak Previews: Gertrude Stein’s Syntax in Tender Buttons’, in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, eds. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 123, original emphasis. 28 Hawkins, ‘Sneak Previews’, 123. Other critics who have discussed Tender Buttons in relation to the everyday include Bryony Randall and Nicola Pitchford. See Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 92–203 and Nicola Pitchford, ‘Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein’s Tender Buttons’, American Literary History 11, no. 4 (1999): 642–77. Randall suggests that Tender Buttons invites a reconsideration of the binary relationship between work and recreation, arguing that Tender Buttons attaches positive value ‘to a kind of temporality or attention which does not involve the accepted attributes of “what is known as work”’, Modernism, Daily Time, 92. 25

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female domain’ of the home and its objects, the domain so ‘often evoked negatively’ in feminist and patriarchal discourse.29 Tender Buttons, she argues, reminds us that our experience of this domain can also be one of ‘caring love’, sensuousness and pleasure.30 At the end of her essay, Hawkins states – somewhat provocatively – that ‘[w]e know what buttons are for’.31 We do, but I want to return to this title and reflect on what it might tell us about Stein’s approach to the daily and familiar things in this text. Bettina Knapp offers an analysis of the title words – tender and buttons – that focuses on their etymological meanings.32 Here I focus on their everyday meanings in the modern, domestic world. Buttons can be for pressing and turning (a bell, light switches, appliances and so on). These kinds of buttons are very often involved in the business of getting things done: we ring a door-bell so that we can gain access to a particular space, lights are turned on so we can see what we are doing. This sense of doing – of activity and process – is captured in the vitality and rhythm of Stein’s language in Tender Buttons: ‘Cover up cover up the two with a little piece of string and hope rose and green, green.’33 The other sorts of buttons are those we find on garments. Sometimes buttons are used for decoration but they also serve to connect two pieces of fabric so as to create a cover, a sheath. Thus, buttons in this sense are a connective and potentially protective agent. Similarly, the everyday can be characterized as the substratum, and potentially also cover or surface that binds and integrates the complex and often disparate elements of our experience. This is the interconnected, continuous nature of the everyday which can be experienced as a source of familiarity and stability.34 This idea of the everyday as a site of often ‘improvisational’35 interconnection and relation is suggested throughout Tender Buttons, not least in terms of the way Stein brings all kinds of things and ideas into often unexpected association and relation. Similarly, the everyday as continuous – day after day – is reflected in Stein’s preference for the use of the continuous present tense, while her syntactical ‘insistence’36 with minor variation mirrors the everyday (and

Hawkins, ‘Sneak Previews’, 123, original emphasis. Hawkins, ‘Sneak Previews’, 123. 31 Hawkins, ‘Sneak Previews’, 123. 32 Bettina L. Knapp, Gertrude Stein (New York: Continuum, 1990), 114–15. 33 Gertrude Stein, ‘Book.’ Tender Buttons, in Stein: Writings 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 326. 34 Although it can also take on negative connotations: for Virginia Woolf, the ‘cotton wool’ of the everyday refers to those aspects of everyday life which pass us by unnoticed, and, while the metaphor suggests comfort and protection, it also connotes suffocation and indistinction: ‘When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger’; Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 70. 35 Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 113. 36 On this aspect of Stein’s writing see her essay ‘Portraits and Repetition’, in Lectures in 29 30

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also human character) as grounded in repetition with slight variation: ‘A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.’37 Buttons, when paired with the word ‘tender’, can take on a sexual connotation – evoking in particular the tender, sensitive clitoris – a meaning that certainly gains resonance as we read through the volume and note its intimate, sexual imagery and lesbian subtexts.38 ‘Tender’ can be linked to ideas of pleasure in the domestic sphere in other ways too, for example, the (for some) pleasure of tender, well-cooked meat. The word ‘tender’ also alerts us to a particular affective and interpersonal register: to be tender is to be caring, gentle, affectionate, loving – descriptors that have all historically been aligned with the feminine and the domestic sphere. But the word ‘tender’ also suggests fragility and delicacy, and in the title Tender Buttons the word ‘tender’ functions as an adjective, not a verb. If a part of the body is tender it will hurt when touched – it is vulnerable, delicate, exposed – and this could allude to the fragility of the everyday, Stein’s ‘buttons’. Not only does the everyday have a tendency to slip by and evade our full attention, but the structures and patterns that form the bedrock of daily life – no matter how inflexible or monotonous they might sometimes seem – and the things and people that populate them, are fragile. While the fragility of ordinary, daily life is a key theme in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and one that is explored through the novel’s representations of objects, I suggest that Tender Buttons highlights the fragility of the everyday as conceptual/critical elusiveness and that Stein achieves this through her poetics. Stein’s linguistic experimentation in Tender Buttons not only comprises a radical critique of patriarchal language and the systems of signification and meaning-making it privileges: it performatively reveals something fundamental about our relationship to, and experience of, the everyday. Critics have discussed how Stein disrupts the conventions of syntax, grammar and signification and the models of meaning and sense they privilege; what Marianne DeKoven describes as Stein’s ‘attempts to confront and reform essentialist structures of conventional language’ and her ‘lifelong commitment to freeing language from the hierarchical grammars of patriarchy’.39 From this, critics have put forward a range of theses about the alternative ways in which the prose-poems in Tender Buttons generate

America, Introduction by Wendy Steiner (London: Virago, 1988), 166–9. 37 Stein, ‘A dog.’, Tender Buttons, 325. 38 For analyses of Tender Buttons that focus on issues of sexuality and lesbian code see Knapp, Gertrude Stein, 111–35; Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 190–252; Doris T. Wright, ‘Woman as Eros-Rose in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Contemporaneous Portraits’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 74 (1986): 34–40. 39 Marianne DeKoven, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon’, in Gertrude Stein and the

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meaning, either individually or collectively.40 However, the challenge that Tender Buttons presents to ends-orientated reading and conventional modes of interpretation mean that the text engages us as readers in a particular phenomenology of the everyday: that is the everyday as elusive. As I discussed in the introduction and the previous chapter, a core strand of cultural theory approaches the everyday as hard to define and elusive when subject to critical scrutiny. Blanchot suggests that the everyday ‘escapes’,41 while Felski observes that the everyday ‘seems to be everywhere, yet nowhere’, has ‘no clear boundaries’, and is therefore ‘difficult to identify’.42 In her analysis of Tender Buttons and Three Lives in relation to concepts of work and recreation, Bryony Randall suggests that Stein’s textual techniques in Tender Buttons ‘resonate with the improvised, fluid, sensual and evasive operations that we have come to associate with the everyday’.43 Tender Buttons presents the sphere of the domestic everyday (for example, its objects and spaces) as a site that resists boundaries and attempts to pin it down conceptually, experientially and linguistically. Stein emphasizes this evasiveness and refusal of clear-cut boundaries through the radical contrast between the titles of the works and the prose-poems associated with them. She boldly titles the sections ‘Objects’, ‘Food’ and ‘Rooms’, luring the reader into a false sense of security that they are about to come into proximity with things and spaces that are familiar, definite, and capable of delineation. She titles many of the prose-poems in the ‘Objects’ section with equally commonplace and familiar nouns (‘A chair.’, ‘A piano.’, ‘A long dress.’, ‘A petticoat.’ etc.), titles which bear, at best, an oblique relationship to the material that follows.44 This semantic rupture between titles and text not only signals Stein’s rejection of the referential model of language,45 but also suggests a conception of the everyday as fundamentally paradoxical Making of Literature, eds Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 10, 9. 40 There are conflicting views as to whether or not, and to what extent, Tender Buttons lends itself to a coherent reading or interpretation. Critics including Lisa Ruddick and Bettina Knapp argue that it can, and provide sophisticated analyses of the prose-poems, both individually and as a collection. Other critics, such as Marianne DeKoven, reject the view that Stein’s writing asks to be interpreted and argue that attempts to ‘interpret or unify either the whole of Tender Buttons or any part of it … violate the spirit of the work’; A Different Language, 74, 76. While I think it is possible to excavate all kinds of meanings from Tender Buttons and see no problem with such attempts, here I’m suggesting how the text’s resistance to critical scrutiny and conventional modes of analysis might be understood in terms of the experience of the everyday which Stein is, at least in part, attempting to render. 41 Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 14. 42 Felski, Doing Time, 78. 43 Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 92. 44 See, for example, the prose-poems ‘A red hat.’, ‘A piano.’, ‘An umbrella.’ and ‘Shoes.’ in Tender Buttons, 318, 319, 322, 324. 45 Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 112.

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and more complex than our common-sense or instrumental assessments of it admit. Tender Buttons suggests that the sphere of ordinary life is familiar yet strange, proximate yet elusive, heterogeneous and fluid. As we read the unfamiliar syntax and grammatical arrangements of Tender Buttons our attention tunes in and out, shifting from one idea or perception to another, thereby mimicking the fluid, shifting modes of attention and thought that comprise much of ordinary experience. In some of the poems (e.g. ‘A carafe, that is a blind glass.’, ‘A long dress.’) we recognize the nominal object but find that it is, like the associative fabric of everyday consciousness, muddled and mixed so that the thing itself is not neatly separated from other things, ideas and sensations. So, for example, ‘A long dress.’ describes the mechanisms through which a dress is made: it evokes the rhythms and energy of sewing and labour, the ‘current’ and ‘crackle’ of electricity that powers the machines used in the factory, but also the ‘current’ fashion trends that influences the style, form and colour of the dress: What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is the wind, what is it.46 Randall suggests that through refusing the referential model of language Tender Buttons reflects how we actually relate to familiar objects in our daily lives: ‘It is not necessary for us to name a book, a train, the rain, for us to be able to make sense of them in relation to us.’47 She argues that ‘[t]he attention we pay to Stein’s texts mirrors that which we pay to real everyday objects, according to what we can or need derive from them at that moment’.48 Tender Buttons also reflects the heterogeneity and refusal of boundaries that, for critics such as Felski, characterize everyday experience. So, on the one hand, in Tender Buttons Stein liberates things from the ossifying and over-simplifying operations of referential naming, while at the same time generating modes of reading that mimic the forms of attention and perception that for many critics characterize daily experience. Fluid, heterogeneous and resisting a hermeneutics of depth, on one level decoding particular prose-poems in Tender Buttons is as tricky as attempting to define the everyday. But what about the objects that comprise the nominal focus of the section entitled ‘Objects’? To what extent does Tender Buttons express the life of, and our life with, ordinary things?

Stein, Tender Buttons, 318. Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 118. 48 Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 122 46 47

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Ordinary buttons: ‘portraits of anything’ In ‘Portraits and Repetition’, Stein describes Tender Buttons as her attempt to make ‘portraits of anything’.49 She explains that during this period she was interested in ‘simply looking’;50 that is, experiencing things in their immediate existence in the present moment (‘to realize the one thing as existing’) not through the operations of memory (‘remembering’).51 For Stein the activity of looking and the phenomenology of seeing are intimately tied to language: ‘I did express what something was, a little by talking and listening to that thing, but a great deal by looking at that thing.’52 She also expresses an interest in synaesthetic modes of perception: ‘Did one see sound, and what was the relation between color and sound.’53 These comments suggest that she was concerned with the independent life of the thing (its ‘talking’). To recall Weber, Stein seems to be interested in hearing what things have to say. She goes on to state that during the composition of Tender Buttons she was interested in ‘colour’ and its relationship to ‘sound’, and unconcerned with ‘emotion’ or events.54 While Stein claims to have been unconcerned with personal emotion, Tender Buttons does explore networks of affect – how things affect us and we in turn affect them. This coincides with the title of the collection, as ‘tender’ alludes to sensitivity and the capacity to be easily affected. Indeed, much of Tender Buttons represents the sphere of the home in terms of sensation – touching, seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling – and as affectively charged: A new cup and saucer. Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.55 This is a good example of modernism’s revitalization of the thing which here bursts out of its instrumental trappings into a site of colour (‘clouded yellow’), affective relation (‘enthusiastically hurting’) and animism (hurting, bite, bud and the capacity to be enthused). There is often pleasure and excitement in acquiring new things for the home, but in ‘A new cup and saucer.’ Stein aligns two unlikely terms – enthusiasm and hurt – affording the enthusiasm a somewhat unfamiliar, even sinister, quality. Stein could be suggesting an alignment between the economy of the gift (the cup and Stein, Stein, 51 Stein, 52 Stein, 53 Stein, 54 Stein, 55 Stein, 49 50

‘Portraits and Repetition’, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, Tender Buttons, 321.

176. 191. 176. 190. 191. 191.

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saucer are ‘new’, possibly decorated by a ‘ribbon’) and violence (‘hurting’ and ‘bite’). Perhaps while the formal function of gift wrapping is to decorate and conceal the object within (the yellow bud here is ‘clouded’), the above description suggests that it, like the logic of the commodity form, constrains the material life of those objects. ‘Enthusiasm’ could also refer to the affective register of yellow, a vibrant and energizing colour. Other prose-poems explore the affective power of colour and the ways in which colour ‘speaks’:56 A petticoat. A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.57 Here the description of the petticoat through relations of colour seems tied to codifications of female sexuality and propriety. A ‘light white’ suggests purity and innocence, the ‘ink spot’ perhaps a stain or the pubis which the petticoat conceals. The ‘disgrace’ is situated between these two clauses, so it is unclear if the disgrace refers to the stain (which would align with the patriarchal disavowal of female sexuality and normative expectations about domestic cleanliness and hygiene) or whiteness (through which Stein rejects this discourse by aligning whiteness with disgrace). In his analysis of Tender Buttons, Richard Bridgman argues that Stein does not construe ‘dirt, dust and spots’ negatively but as a necessary part of everyday domestic life, and he suggests that Stein’s avowal of dirt can be linked to her broader project to encourage moral tolerance for things normatively thought ‘dirty’, such as lesbian desire.58 The ‘rosy charm’ in ‘A petticoat.’ continues the disruption of patriarchal constructions of femininity and propriety as it not only suggests the conventional decorations of femininity – a rosy charm on the petticoat, the charm of rouged cheeks, the desirability of youth – but also, and more subversively, the private, sexual charm that is hidden beneath the petticoat and the ‘ink spot’. This is one example of the way in which Stein takes us through a particular set of somewhat hermetically encoded affective relationships between the speaker and the nominal object. ‘A purse.’ provides another example of the intimate, personal but also hermetically sealed objects that proliferate in Tender Buttons, objects that are present to the speaker/perceiver (Stein), but not readily available to us the reader, who is instead tendered the object of language or the prosepoem itself. ‘A purse.’ also provides one example of the way in which Stein disrupts or complicates conventional use-value relations in Tender Buttons

‘Did one see sound, and what was the relationship between color and sound’; ‘Portraits and Repetition’, 191. 57 Stein, Tender Buttons, 322. 58 Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 128. 56

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by associating an object with multiple and often private/intimate uses and meanings. The purse is described through negations (‘not green’, ‘not straw color’, ‘hardly seen’, ‘not misplaced’) and in spite of the fact it has ‘a long use’, the only function it is afforded is that it is ‘open’.59 This contrasts with our normal assumption that the function of a purse is to remain closed so as to safe-keep whatever valuables may be within. But, on further reflection, the reader gets the sense that this physically open purse is a hermetically sealed object, presenting a secret code for the private ‘purse’ of sexual pleasure and desire that the speaker has access to through her lover’s body. The purse is, after all, not green or straw coloured, ‘hardly seen’ (private, personal), in ‘long use’ (suggesting commitment and longevity of relation), always connected to the speaker (‘the chain was never missing’), in the right place (‘not misplaced’), and available (‘open’).60 Prose-poems like ‘A purse.’ indicate how Stein rejects modernity’s proscription of objects to their material or instrumental value, instead transforming this object – which is normally associated with economies of money – to object–subject economies that are private, pleasurable, embodied and interpersonal. ‘A shawl.’ begins with the kind of patterns of associative thought that recur throughout Tender Buttons and is another example of Stein’s interrogation of instrumentalism. The shawl is not limited to one thing or function for the speaker – it can be a ‘hat’, a ‘red balloon’, an ‘under coat’ and is, more ambiguously, ‘a sizer of talks’.61 It is also associated with weddings and, perhaps through the associative link of whiteness, ‘a piece of wax’, and building. A wedding marks the bringing together of two people in union, wax can function as a binding agent, and, in this poem and the collection as a whole, Stein is concerned with the process of constructing new relations and the re-creation of language. This poem is then, ‘a little build’, a little act of re-creation.62 From here, things become considerably more opaque and the shawl recedes from view: Pick a ticket, pick it in strange steps and with hollows. There is hollow hollow belt, a belt is a shawl. A plate that has a little bobble, all of them, any so. Please a round it is ticket. It was a mistake to state that a laugh and a lip and a laid climb and a depot and a cultivator and little choosing is a point it.63

Stein, Stein, 61 Stein, 62 Stein, 63 Stein, 59 60

Tender Tender Tender Tender Tender

Buttons, Buttons, Buttons, Buttons, Buttons,

320. 320. 325. 325. 325.

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Here Stein seems to suggest that it would be a ‘mistake’ to assume that this playfulness (‘laugh’), act of articulation and even cheek (‘lip’), cultivation and choosing between words from the ordinary collection (‘depot’) has a point to it, or points to something (for example, a shawl). It would be a mistaken assumption and a mistaken approach to reading this text. We know that Stein resists the pointing system64 of language and the idea of reading as ends-orientated. Dekoven has argued that the objects or subjects that comprise the basis for Stein’s linguistic experiments are often arbitrary.65 We might pick any ‘ticket’, ‘all of them, any so’ and subject it to these ‘strange steps’ or linguistic plays which leave many semantic ‘hollows’ or gaps.66 Which thing it is, is often irrelevant for Stein: they are, as she stated in Lectures in America, ‘portraits of anything’.67 And this presents something of an obstacle, or limitation, if one wants to argue that Tender Buttons offers a celebration or revaluation of ordinary things. It could be argued that what Tender Buttons fails to do is to preserve what Douglas Mao describes in Solid Objects as ‘the object’s extrasubjective integrity, to take the part of this radical other without, as it were, resubordinating it to consciousness’.68 In Tender Buttons the ‘equality’ between things and people that Highmore champions is never achieved as things are made subordinate to consciousness and linguistic play.69 While Tender Buttons celebrates the sphere of domestic everyday life and explores the phenomenology of our encounter with commonplace things, many of the nominal objects in Tender Buttons become subordinate to linguistic experiment and/or ensconced in private histories that keep the reader somewhat distant from the thing itself. While Stein describes sensuous, intimate and idiosyncratic domestic landscapes the reader remains (even with considerable effort) on the perimeter of those private landscapes. But perhaps this is a necessary outcome of the project that is Tender Buttons. I would venture that Stein performs here what Lefebvre refers to as the untellability of the everyday,70 and demonstrates that while recognizable in its outline (its generic naming), anybody’s everyday is absolutely unique and specific in its particulars. In the previous chapter I argued that Helen Levitt’s photography demonstrates a respect for the

Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 112. ‘Rather than writing about them or even re-creating them, Stein used her subjects as relatively arbitrary focuses of the concentration which helped her enter the state of consciousness from which she wrote’; DeKoven, A Different Language, 78. 66 Stein, Tender Buttons, 325. 67 Stein, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, 176. 68 Mao, Solid Objects, 10. 69 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58. 70 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, intro. Philip Wander (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984), 24. 64 65

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privacy of the everyday yet adopts an aperture sufficiently open to enable us, as spectators, to gain an appreciation for its potential wonder and richness. By contrast, what Stein offers us in the ‘Objects’ section of Tender Buttons is not so much the matter or stuff of the everyday but the rhetoric of its untellability. In ‘Things’, Max Weber claims that ‘[i]deas of ideas are futile. Professional thinking is destruction. It is a mental vandalism of the concrete.’ For Weber, ‘[t]o think is to see with the eyes upon the memory of things in time and place and environment … to speak with inner sight upon the concrete’.71 While I am not suggesting that Stein enacts a ‘mental vandalism of the concrete’, in Tender Buttons things do invariably get lost. To the Lighthouse is a text that is deeply concerned with lost things and the possibility of their recovery. Attentive to the alterity of commonplace objects, the novel also explores the complex interdependencies that exist between humans and the thingly world, the ways in which ‘[w]e are in things’ and things, in their turn, are in us.72

‘Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables’ From the opening page of To the Lighthouse we enter into a world in which ordinary things are both renovated and a subject of narrative curiosity. The opening scene of the novel describes the young child, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor next to his mother carefully cutting out pictures of everyday commodities from the Army and Navy Stores illustrated catalogue. To James, these images do not represent commodities or practical items but radiant and affectively charged things: ‘James Ramsay … endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy.’73 Here, James reflects the child’s capacity to imbue the most ordinary of things with a sense of wonder, a point of view that the novel values and which is endorsed elsewhere in Woolf’s writing.74 This opening scene introduces another important aspect of the novel’s exploration of the object world to which I will return later: the fundamental

Weber, ‘Things’, 33. Weber, ‘Things’, 33. 73 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol, Introduction by Hermione Lee (London: Penguin, 1992), 7. All subsequent references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. 74 See, for example, the short story I mentioned earlier ‘Solid Objects’, as well as other early short stories such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917) and ‘Blue & Green’ (1920) in The Complete Shorter Fiction. The child’s sense of wonder is also represented in Jacob’s Room (1922) through the character of the young Jacob. 71 72

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– and reciprocal – interrelation that the novel posits between the lives of people and the lives of things. Thus, in this opening scene, the joy that James attaches to the picture of the refrigerator is connected to the sound of his mother’s voice, while his mother’s joy is in part generated by the pleasure she gains from watching her son attentively cutting out the picture. Indeed, the early sections of the novel reveal how profoundly To the Lighthouse is concerned with characters’ contrasting orientations to the object world. As readers, our sense of and sympathies for particular characters are in part shaped by this issue. In part one, ‘The Window’, a table functions as one of the entry points for the reader into the minds and characters of Lily Briscoe and Mr Ramsay. The table is a common example of intellectual enquiry in the philosophical tradition with which the novel engages (British empiricism),75 but it is also an object strongly aligned with the domestic everyday. For the character of Mr Ramsay, a British philosopher whose work creates all kinds of tensions within the realm of the domestic quotidian, the kitchen table functions as both a symbol of his work and an illustration of the way in which his philosophical preoccupations (and egotism) have estranged him from the world of concrete things. This is a condition for which he is inwardly criticized by both Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay. For example, Mrs Ramsay reflects on her husband’s failure to not only notice beauty in others or the world, but very practical things, like what he is eating: His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. (77)76 Mr Ramsay is an example of Max Weber’s claim about the potential violence of intellectualization and ‘[i]deas of ideas’ on the concrete.77

The table is one of the examples used by John Lock in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) – two philosophers whom Mr Ramsay mentions. It is also a central example in Bertrand Russell’s essay ‘On Our Knowledge of the External World’, in Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926). 76 There are several other references in the novel to Mr Ramsay’s failure to see the things that are in front of him because he is preoccupied or distracted: ‘He glared at them [Lily and William Bankes] without seeming to see them. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable,’ Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 23; ‘so without distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified [Mr Ramsay] and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind’, 38–9; ‘He never looked at things,’ 78. 77 Weber, ‘Things’, 33. 75

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Indeed, at times Mrs Ramsay perceives her husband’s unflagging pursuit of the truth as an act of violence against others and civilization, as when he insists (in spite of his son’s or wife’s feelings) that a trip to the lighthouse the following day is out of the question because of the weather (37). Mr Ramsay’s absorption in his work and his anxieties about its significance and legacy comes at a personal cost as he frequently feels alienated from the concrete, embodied domestic world he lives in but generally fails to properly inhabit. In the early stages of the novel, the character of Lily Briscoe serves as a contrast and a foil to Mr Ramsay’s perspective. When she attempts to imagine Mr Ramsay’s work by pursuing Andrew Ramsay’s thought experiment (“‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there”’, 28) the table that Lily imagines is at once concrete, practical and particular, ‘one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted … laid bare by years of muscular integrity’ (28), but also defamiliarized and surreal, as she imagines it stuck upside-down ‘in the fork of a pear tree’ with ‘its four legs in the air’ (28). An artist, Lily sees the world through what Roger Fry coined in Vision and Design as the ‘artist’s vision’,78 and she struggles to concentrate her mind on the ‘phantom kitchen table’ as opposed to the ‘silver-bossed bark of the tree’ or its ‘fish-shaped leaves’ (28). Interestingly, Lily’s thought experiment also takes the table back to its source or origins – a tree. Thus, in the early stages of the novel contrasting perceptions of and modes of relation to the object world are set up via the characters of Mr Ramsay (philosophical/abstract), James Ramsay (child’s wonder and fascination) and Lily Briscoe (the artistic), and some modes of seeing and engaging with the object world are endorsed while others are criticized in the narrative. Mrs Ramsay, as the domestic centre of the novel, is the character in part one who is most attuned to her domestic environment and the things in it: she is constantly noticing and reflecting on the condition of various pieces of furniture, wallpaper, paintings and so on, often concerned at their state of wear and tear: ‘things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping’ (32). Rather than rehearse well-established arguments about the novel’s exploration of epistemological problems, or focus on the novel’s more obviously significant objects such as the ‘phantom kitchen table’, the lighthouse, or Lily’s painting, I want to examine some of the other less-discussed things that populate the text: the knitted stocking, shawls, boots, jewellery, chipped tea cups, and the ‘crazy ghosts of chairs’ (32). In fact, things abound in To the Lighthouse. They are lively, sometimes uncanny, and integral to the novel’s broader thematic concerns. I will examine two ways in which these objects function in the novel and are shown to matter. Firstly,

Fry, Vision and Design, 48–51.

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To the Lighthouse suggests that the lives of people and things are mutually constitutive and illustrates the significant ways in which everyday things mediate human relationships and the social. That is, in To the Lighthouse things often assume a vital bridging function between people and are encoded in networks of intimacy and feeling. Objects are not overcome by the colonizing effects of consciousness but serve as an affective bridge connecting the interior worlds of different characters. Secondly, objects – such as Mrs Ramsay’s shawls – figure centrally in the novel’s exploration of vulnerability (to the elements, to suffering, to loss) and point to the importance of everyday rituals and objects in managing, if not staving off, the often violent effects of impermanence and change.

‘He had hold of her bag’ Critics have been attentive to the narrative and symbolic significance of objects in Woolf’s writing. Sometimes objects function metonymically for a character and become sites of pathos, as has been argued of Jacob’s shoes at the end of Jacob’s Room.79 On other occasions, objects stand forth in what Bill Brown would designate as their ‘thingness’ – an alterity that is ‘irreducible to the history of human subjects’, which Brown contends of the things collected by the character John in Woolf’s story ‘Solid Objects’.80 Alison Light has argued that in Woolf’s fiction things become a ‘repository of the immaterial – feelings, obsessions, needs and longings’, providing evidence of a hidden inner life that cannot be known.81 Building on Light’s analysis, Monica Miller has argued that ‘the objects that clutter Woolf’s novels serve not merely as placeholders for unrepresentable inner lives’, but often provide oblique representations of the interior lives of Woolf’s servant characters who are not represented through Woolf’s preferred aesthetics of interiority via free indirect discourse.82 My analysis of objects in To the Lighthouse shifts the focus from the mechanisms by which objects represent

For an alternative reading of Jacob’s shoes that forms part of a broader analysis of shoes in Woolf’s writing in relation to ideas of exemplarity and classification see John Nash, ‘Exhibiting the Example: Virginia Woolf’s Shoes’, Twentieth-Century Literature 59, no. 2 (2013): 283–308. 80 Bill Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 13. 81 Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Penguin, 2008), 151. 82 Monica J. Miller, ‘Odds, Ends, and Others: Objects and the Narration of Woolf’s Servant Characters’, Woolf Studies Annual 16 (2010): 112. For Miller, through ‘experiments with Cubism’s indirection and attention to surfaces, Woolf attempts to solve a political problem with narrative innovation, seeking a method of characterization better suited to representing the other’s interiority’, 113. 79

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the inner lives of characters, to the way everyday objects are shown to bridge affective and even epistemological gaps or fissures between characters and thereby become encoded in lived networks of affect, intimacy and intersubjectivity. Where language and knowledge are shown to fall short in human relationships, small humble things come to the rescue. One of the central thematic preoccupations of To the Lighthouse is, in Lily’s words, the ‘relation between those masses’ (161). This concern manifests in the novel as an aesthetic problem, a philosophical problem, and a social and ethical one. In part three, ‘The Lighthouse’, Lily returns to a problem in a painting that she had started and abandoned ten years earlier – the relationship between ‘the wall; the hedge; the tree’ (161). These three objects all, suggestively, provide varying degrees of shelter and protection from external elements, a theme to which I will return later. But Lily’s aesthetic problem is representative of a larger question and problem in the novel – the relationship and ‘space’ between people – whether those gaps be defined in epistemological, experiential or emotional terms. As Woolf characterizes the problem in Mrs Dalloway, using rooms as a metaphor for people: ‘here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?’83 Both Lily and Mrs Ramsay are acutely aware of the gaps and fissures in human relationships and Lily in particular seeks to bridge these gaps: ‘She [Lily] would never know him [Mr Tansley]. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought’ (101). Ordinary things assume an important connective and mediating function between characters in the novel. Not only are things presented as conterminous with the identity or being of a character, they also assume an important role in the novel’s interpersonal and affective networks. As such the significance of things in Woolf’s novel marks a radical departure from the instrumental and pecuniary models that Brown and Mao identify as characteristic of the logic of modernity. Many such objects in the novel serve to connect other characters to Mrs Ramsay – that most desired and sought after character in the novel. For example, in part one, when Mrs Ramsay and Charles Tansley head off on an ‘expedition’ into town (14), Mrs Ramsay’s bag becomes an important object in the personal exchange that unfolds between them. Where conversation proves to be an awkward or unsatisfactory medium of exchange, things come to the rescue. Initially, before they set off, Charles Tansley offers to take her bag but Mrs Ramsay refuses: ‘As for her little bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried that herself’ (15, original emphasis). During the course of their walk into town, Tansley’s social awkwardness and self-consciousness become clear and Mrs Ramsay starts to feel sympathy for him:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Introductions by Carol Ann Duffy and Valentine Cunningham (London: Vintage, 2000), 112.

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‘Let’s go,’ he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. ‘Let’s go to the Circus.’ No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not? She wondered. What was wrong with him then? (16) … she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man … she would see to it that [her children] didn’t laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. (16) Later in the passage, when they are visiting a sick woman at her home, Tansley is ‘determined to carry [Mrs Ramsay’s] bag’ and this offering is made when Mrs Ramsay comes back downstairs: ‘He took her bag’ (18). While their attempts to connect through conversation achieves only moderate success (because Mrs Ramsay has trouble following his ‘ugly academic jargon’ and finds him an ‘insufferable bore’, 16) it is through the temporary exchange of a personal object that Tansley’s fragile masculinity is momentarily affirmed and he feels closer to the beautiful, if aging, Mrs Ramsay: ‘Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman for the first time in his life. He had hold of her bag’ (19). Things and their circulation in networks of intimacy and affect (as opposed to capital) feature prominently in Mrs Ramsay’s relationships with her children. The ‘little ceremony of choosing jewels’ for their mother ‘which was gone through every night’ is one that Rose and Jasper look forward to, and ‘what Rose liked best’ (88–9). The mother’s jewels are not important in this ritual because of their material value but because they offer the children an opportunity to spend private time with their mother each day and enable Rose and Jasper to participate in the process of shaping their mother’s beauty for the evening ahead. It is a ‘ceremony’ that Rose in particular takes very seriously and is, Mrs Ramsay intuits, an expression of her ‘deep feelings’: [Rose] had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age. (89) Again, objects function to communicate things that words cannot: the feeling is ‘speechless’ but the ritual gesture is not. Intuiting Rose’s intensity of feeling, Mrs Ramsay offers her daughter the additional pleasure of choosing her mother’s shawl for the evening – another important object in To the Lighthouse that I will return to in the following section (89). This

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scene in which Rose and Jasper choose their mother’s jewels (part one, section 16) mirrors an earlier scene (in section 14) in which the party at the beach search frantically for Minta’s lost brooch. Again, the brooch is not deemed important for its material value but because it is a family heirloom and formed part of her grandmother’s everyday: ‘the sole ornament she possessed – a weeping willow … the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life’ (84). With the frantic search on the beach for the brooch as the tide comes in, Minta’s suitor, Paul Rayley, becomes enmeshed in the affective geography of this object, the recovery of which constitutes a test of his masculinity and a deonstration of his love for Minta: ‘Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the rock where they had been sitting’ (84); ‘The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly, and different from usual) …’ (84). The brooch, of course, is not recovered and forms part of the novel’s broader exploration of loss and impermanence: ‘Nancy felt, though it might be true that [Minta] minded losing her brooch, she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for’ (85). Mrs Ramsay’s relationship to her youngest child, James, also unfolds in the novel through references to various objects – the catalogue from which he cuts pictures, the ‘reddish-brown stocking’ that she knits at various stages in ‘The Window’, the book that she reads to him, and the skull on the bedroom wall.84 The knitted stocking, like a number of other things in the novel, becomes synonymous with Mrs Ramsay, either as an expression of her in life or a haunting reminder of her in death. For example, Lily muses that some of Mrs Ramsay’s possessions express her in an essential way: ‘What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?’ (55). The twisted finger is perhaps the result of the particular way that Mrs Ramsay removes her gloves, but could also be interpreted as a physical embodiment of her tendency to manipulation. Similarly, when Mrs McNab returns to restore the house to order in ‘Time Passes’, she opens a cupboard to find Mrs Ramsay’s clothes still hanging there and is particularly struck by the apparition of her ‘old grey cloak’: There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening. (Mrs McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers … she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. (148)

She reads to James ‘The Fisherman’s Wife’ from the Grimm’s fairytales; Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 44.

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In the novel, Woolf implies that certain things become a part of people beyond simple mechanisms of use, association and sentimental attachment. There is a sense in which particular things become animated by their owners while at the same time and reciprocally expressing those owners. The knitted stocking is another object which expresses Mrs Ramsay – it represents her role as mother, carer and homemaker, her capacity to weave social situations and ‘moments of being’ (like the dinner scene), and her penchant for gift-giving. For James, the red stocking signifies ambivalently. In the early stages of the novel it is a comforting presence as his mother sits knitting her stocking while he cuts out his pictures, James feeling they are safely enclosed in their shared activities from the threat of interruption (particularly by his father). However, James becomes jealous when he is used as a ‘measuring-block’ for the stocking, which is intended for the lighthouse keeper’s son who is ‘threatened with a tuberculous hip’ (31; 8). Later, in section seven of ‘The Window’, the book and stocking form part of a complex circuit of affective relation between James, Mrs and Mr Ramsay. James and Mrs Ramsay have been happily reading a book but are interrupted by Mr Ramsay’s demand for reassurance and sympathy from his wife, which James tries to deflect with the help of the book: ‘By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother’s attention’ (42). But Mrs Ramsay’s attention does shift, she takes up her stocking again, and gives Mr Ramsay what he demands: ‘Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself … seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy … (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again)’ (42). Many years after his mother’s death, travelling out by boat to the lighthouse with his father and sister, James reflects on the topic of women and sympathy as Mr Ramsay tries to coax Cam out of her pact of silence with James. James recalls a woman knitting as somehow an integral part of the broader picture of the tyranny of patriarchy: She’ll give way, James thought, as he watched a look come upon [Cam’s] face, a look he remembered. They look down, he thought, at their knitting or something. Then suddenly they look up. There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry. It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low chair, with his father standing over her. (183–4) For James his mother’s knitting returns as a haunting reminder of those moments in which he felt she was emotionally exploited by his father and unable, therefore, to be emotionally present for him. One final example illustrates the essential role that mundane objects assume in forging human relationships in the novel, an example which also

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centres on the issue of female sympathy. The second section of part three of the novel details a very strained encounter between Lily Briscoe and Mr Ramsay. It is early morning on the party’s first full day back at the house after a ten-year absence. Lily is out on the lawn painting and Mr Ramsay is waiting for James and Cam to come outside so they can embark on the expedition to the lighthouse. Mr Ramsay wants from Lily what she feels he always wants from women: sympathy. But in spite of his sighs, groans, palpable grief and self-dramatization (‘he was acting, she felt, this great man was dramatising himself’, 166), Lily finds that she has nothing to say to him at all: ‘Still she could say nothing; the whole horizon seemed swept bare of objects to talk about’ (166). Lily feels guilty that she cannot perform what the world deems her womanly duty (165): His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush. (167) This emotionally tense situation is drawn out over several pages in the novel and broken by something quite unexpected. As Lily longs for James and Cam to arrive so that she might be relieved of this immense emotional ‘pressure’ to dispense sympathy (165), Mr Ramsay bends down to tie his ‘boot-laces’ and Lily notices his boots: Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at them: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay wore, from his frayed tie to his half-buttoned waistcoat, his own indisputably. She could see them walking to his room of their own accord, expressive in his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-temper, charm. ‘What beautiful boots!’ she exclaimed. (167) This object, like many others in the novel, is figured as animate (Lily imagines them walking off of their own accord) and fundamentally expressive of Mr Ramsay. After praising his boots ‘when he asked her to solace his soul’, Lily fears ‘complete annihilation’ (167) but is surprised to find Mr Ramsay smiling: ‘His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Ah yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots’ (167–8). Much to Lily’s surprise, in a sea of silence and awkwardness they have come upon ‘a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots’ (168). But not only do Mr Ramsay’s boots offer a safe island of conversation, they inadvertently provide Lily access to the feeling that she had never previously been able to bear towards Mr Ramsay: sympathy. As Mr Ramsay embarks on a demonstration of

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how to tie a good knot (‘Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it,’ 168), Lily is overcome ‘with sympathy for him’: Why, at this completely inappropriate moment … should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face … she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. (168) It is through literally bonding (tying knots) over an ‘interest in ordinary human things’ (170) and seeing Mr Ramsay resituated from the rarefied philosophical realm of phantom kitchen tables to the concrete, physical realm of ordinary things, needs and actions (buying boots, tying knots, having someone to talk to) that Lily not only comes to better understand, but also care for, Mr Ramsay: ‘now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour’ (170).85 Ordinary things function in parts one and three of the novel as an expression of character and provide crucial sites of mediation and exchange between characters. Indeed, in spite of their obvious differences and conflicts, it is Lily and Mr Ramsay who are associated in the novel with shoes and boots, as they connect through that same object in the novel’s final stages.86

‘another fold of the shawl loosened’ If continuity is a defining feature of the quotidian, as a novel fundamentally concerned with loss and impermanence, To the Lighthouse explores the object world though this prism of continuity and rupture, presence and haunting absence. The novel’s concern with continuity and change, exposure and the desire to protect, is not only explored through an analysis of human life but the life of quotidian things. While central to ‘Time Passes’, it is anticipated in ‘The Window’, both through Mrs Ramsay’s reflections on the house and the things in it, and through the figure of the shawl. As James and Cam arrive at this moment, Lily does not have the chance to act on this sympathy she feels and she carries it around like an awkward burden all morning until, when she intuits they have reached the lighthouse, the emotion seems to release itself from her: ‘What-ever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last’; Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 225. 86 For example, early in the novel Mr Bankes notices Lily’s shoes to be ‘excellent’ because they are, like her, practical and down-to-earth: ‘They allowed the toes their natural expansion’; To the Lighthouse, 22. Mrs Ramsay reflects during the dinner scene that her husband ‘would talk by the hour about his boots’; To the Lighthouse, 113. 85

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Mrs Ramsay is attuned to the state of the house and reflects in particular on the shabby condition of things and the wear and tear caused by the elements and the passage of time: ‘things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer’ (32). Things are figured as alive yet, like Mr and Mrs Ramsay, past the prime of life: ‘She looked up [from measuring the knitted stocking against James’ leg] … and saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor’ (31). Mrs Ramsay imagines the objects in the summer house as in semi-retirement and a state of gradual demise: ‘Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done’ (32). Even here, in part one, domestic things take on a spectrality and uncanniness: chairs have entrails and are not only ghostly but unstable (they are ‘crazy’ ghosts); the floral pattern on the wallpaper is an absent presence, remembered by Mrs Ramsay but no longer visible (32). Reflecting on the state of the room as she knits the stocking that is designed to protect the tuberculous hip of the lighthouse keeper’s boy, Mrs Ramsay perceives the house as a space that is both subject to and threatened by the external elements: ‘The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping … Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open … things must spoil’ (32). Mrs Ramsay’s reflections on the degeneration of the house and the furniture in it are sadly ironic as many of the objects will outlive and come to serve as a haunting reminder of her. As the servant Mrs McNab reflects while preparing the house again for visitors after many years of it standing empty: ‘There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if [Mrs Ramsay] expected to come back to-morrow’ (148). It is in the context of Mrs Ramsay’s reflections on the domestic space and its vulnerability to external elements – wind, sand, sea water, damp – that the green shawl makes its first appearance in the novel: ‘What was the use of flinging a green Cashmere shawl over the edge of a picture frame? In two weeks it would be the colour of pea soup. But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open’ (32). Here it is unclear if the shawl over the picture frame is supposed to serve as an object of decoration or (strangely) protection, but at many successive points in the novel the shawl becomes integral to the novel’s broader exploration of exposure/vulnerability and the desire to protect. That protection is frequently figured as a desire to protect the private, domestic sphere from external/public threats whether the threat takes the form of the natural elements (on the furniture and house), a lack of public recognition (in regards to Mr Ramsay’s ‘work’), death through childbirth (via Pru’s entry into the public sphere via marriage), war, or the more subversive, alien alterity of death itself. For example, Mrs Ramsay desires to ‘surround and protect’ (44) Mr Ramsay from his self-doubt, as he desires in his own way to protect the family from a public sphere of which he thinks them entirely naïve and innocent. These acts of protection are connected at various points in the novel to the figure of the shawl:

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And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her. 12 She folded the green shawl about her shoulders. She took his arm. (72) The shawl, of course, also serves to protect Mrs Ramsay. She asks Rose before dinner to ‘[c]hoose [her] a shawl’ as it ‘might be cold’ (89). Early in the dinner-party scene, when things have not yet come ‘together’, Mrs Ramsay reaches for her shawl which seems to function as a supplement against some inexplicable lack: ‘Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her, Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking’ (102). Following the dinner, the shawl is once again recruited in a protective role, but in this instance hiding a boar’s skull which is attached to the wall of the bedroom in which Cam and James sleep. Cam cannot sleep with the skull in the room, but James (who needs a light left on in order to sleep) protests if the skull is touched, so Mrs Ramsay determines they will “‘cover it up’”: ‘not seeing anything [in the drawer] that would do, she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round’ (124). Through hiding the skull the shawl protects Cam from shadows that frighten her, but also (at James’ behest) the shawl functions here to keep the boar’s skull safe: ‘they had just done what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt. He made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl’ (125). When James then asks if they will be going to the lighthouse the following day and his mother replies in the negative, she reaches – as if in a protective gesture – for the shawl that is no longer there (125). In this scene the shawl reflects how civilization (the knitted shawl, the stories Mrs Ramsay weaves to her children as they go to sleep) serves to protect against the fact of death and mortality (signified through the skull), but the limits of that protection is made palpable at the end of the scene as the ‘indifferent chill night air’ (125) meets Mrs Ramsay through the open window, anticipating the ‘little airs’ that will stalk the depopulated Ramsay household in ‘Time Passes’ (138). Thus, the figure of the shawl functions as a metonym for Mrs Ramsay but also forms part of a broader thematic preoccupation in ‘The Window’ with vulnerability, exposure and the desire to protect, enfold and cover. In ‘Time Passes’, the shawl periodically reappears as a haunting reminder of the now dead Mrs Ramsay but also as a symbol of the object’s quest to endure in spite of the ‘repeated shocks’ of time (145). ‘Time Passes’ describes the Ramsay’s summer house when subject to the passage of time without the people (guests and servants) who had previously

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animated and looked after it. The everyday (most of ‘The Window’ occurs during the day) is succeeded in ‘Time Passes’ by a long night – the night of darkness, war and death, all of which highlight the fragility of the everyday. Mr Ramsay stumbles along a passage ‘one dark morning’ only to find the person who has always been there to occupy his arms is no longer (140). Inside the now empty house ‘the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt … loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups’ (145). Indeed, this depopulated world is a temporal vacuum in which the concept of the day-to-day no longer exists or makes sense: ‘(for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games’ (147). If ‘The Window’ emphasized the extent to which our sense of another and our relationships are bound up with very ordinary things – a table, a shawl, a twisted glove – ‘Time Passes’ suggests that, in a reverse sense, these objects don’t make sense without people and existentially depend on those who make use of and inhabit them. To recall Ben Highmore, ‘things turn towards us: they call us, sidle up to us. Tools subtly weathered by daily human contact demand to be held and used.’87 The ‘stray airs’, ‘advanced guards of great armies’ of time (140), enter the house after Mrs Ramsay’s death and meet no resistance: ‘only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked’ (140–1). A strange scene of haunting artefacts, previously homely things become increasingly unhomely: ghostly, idle, lonely, chaotic. With no one to admire and tend them, the flowers in the garden urns behold nothing and stand ‘eyeless, and so terrible’ (147). Inside the house, only the things people have left behind, ‘a pair of shoes … some faded skirts’, serve as spectral reminders that the space was once ‘filled and animated’ (141). While the empty room is silent, indifferent, peaceful (141), the things in it remain without purpose or vocation: ‘Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro’ (150). The ‘dressing-table drawers were full of things … handkerchiefs, bits of ribbon’, but there is no-one to make use of them (148). ‘Time Passes’ presents a house that is populated – with things and the ‘little airs’ that move around them – but the novel suggests that they no longer make sense. An indifferent nature increasingly threatens to take over the Ramsays’ things: ‘Let the broken glass and china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries’ (150–1). Having been abandoned for many years – ‘shut up, locked, alone’, ‘life [having] left it’ (149), the house requires the hard physical labour of Mrs McNab, Mrs Bast and the other servants to restore it to order and keep ‘oblivion’ at bay (151). The restoration through domestic labour of the spaces and objects that previously formed part of the Ramsays’ daily life is presented as an act of resistance against death, the passage of time and the historical and social rupture of war:

Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58.

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Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and a tea-set one morning; in the afternoon restored … a brass fender and set of steel fire-irons. (151–2) Here, people come to the rescue of things as, earlier in the novel, things had protected and connected people. By restoring and rescuing the house, the servants play an indirect but instrumental role in restoring interpersonal and family relationships in the novel (for example, between Lily and Mr Ramsay) that had long been laid to waste. In ‘Time Passes’ things and the house itself are presented as animate but the novel suggests that ordinary things depend, not only for their continued endurance but their existential meaning, on people. The novel affirms the ‘symbiosis’ and ‘mutually constituting interaction between people and things’.88 Things live through us and, as Mrs Swithin observes in Between the Acts as she sits down on the bed in which she was born, ‘[w]e live in things’.89 While the lighthouse and painting are significant objects in To the Lighthouse, both raised to symbolic significance, throughout the text’s quiet background murmur – the white noise of subsidiary plots and narrative asides – Woolf asserts the fundamental significance of humble, ordinary things to our lives.

Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 58. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. and Introduction by Frank Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 64.

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4 Mrs Brown and the face-to-face

[Mrs. Brown] sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. VIRGINIA WOOLF1

The first things to remember about the face-to-face encounter between the self and the other person are that it is concrete and particular. It is not an idea or concept nor a type of action or event. It is a concrete reality, an occurrent event; it occurs. MICHAEL MORGAN2

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. EMMANUEL LEVINAS3

Lily Briscoe’s encounter with Mr Ramsay and his boots, which I discussed in the previous chapter, marks one of many moments in Virginia Woolf’s writing in which gesture – a trivial action, a mannerism, an expression – can function as a catalyst for an ethical encounter with another person. It is through observing Mr Ramsay perform a very mundane physical action – the tying and retying of Lily’s shoelace – that Lily gains access to a

Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), in Essays, vol. 3, 424–5. Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 61. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1961; Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50. 1 2

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feeling and relation to him that had previously never been available to her: sympathy and a sense of responsibility. She reflects: Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping over her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her callousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears. Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots.4 Reflecting modernism’s ambivalent relationship to the sentimental, such moments are sometimes qualified or even undercut in Woolf’s fiction. For example, Lily does not immediately have the opportunity to give Mr Ramsay the ‘feeling’ to which she suddenly has access, as the children arrive and they head off on their sailing expedition.5 Nevertheless, moments of ethical feeling (e.g. care, responsibility) are frequently connected in Woolf’s writing to the ordinary, particularly small gestures and seemingly trivial acts.6 In this chapter I examine how the rhetoric of the mundane body – for example, the face, gesture, mannerisms – informs accounts of self-other relations and responsibility in Woolf’s writing, with a particular focus on three examples that deal with the figure of the urban stranger or streetwalker. Liesl Olson has observed that in the tradition of writers such as George Eliot, Woolf ‘elicits our sympathy for characters by virtue of the small detail’.7 It is, of course, not always the case that a character’s gestures evoke a sympathetic response (sometimes quite the opposite). However, in the tradition of philosophies and literatures of sentiment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as distinct from the later derisory category of the sentimental), Woolf’s fiction consistently engages the reader, and shows characters themselves engaging in, a process of what she calls

Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 168. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 168–9. 6 Another example from To the Lighthouse occurs in part one when Lily is engaged in a conversation with William Bankes about Mr Ramsay. In this moment of being, Lily’s feelings about Mr Bankes (‘his severity; his goodness’) and her respect for him are crystallized and ‘released’ via a tiny gesture – ‘the movement of his hand’, 28–9: ‘Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him’, 28–9. However, the moment is again qualified. While recognizing that she respects him ‘in every atom’, she quickly recalls his all-too-human imperfections: ‘But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours’; To the Lighthouse, 29. 7 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 22. 4 5



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‘character-reading’.8 Character-reading is, for Woolf, intimately tied to the activity of judgement, networks of feeling and moral relation: every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help.9 According to James Chandler in his study An Archaeology of Sympathy: [sentiments] are the result of a projective imagination across a network or relay of regard. By “regard,” I mean attention, respect, heed, care, but I also mean something closer to the French sense of regard: a look or a gaze, an act performed with the eyes. The regard in question involves a sense of how another is regarding us, what our eyes can see in the eyes of another, or more generally in the face of another.10 In this chapter I explore a number of scenes in Woolf’s writing which could be assessed in relation to the tradition of sentiment as defined by Chandler above, and indeed, I have previously argued for correspondences between Woolf’s ethics and Hume’s moral philosophy.11 However, my analysis here turns to a more contemporary philosophical account of the ethical relay and exchange that can arise from the encounter with another’s face or body. With reference to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I focus on three examples in Woolf’s non-fiction and fiction in which the encounter with the other’s concrete and particular body gives rise to a recognition of alterity (rather than projective identification) and responsibility. In my concluding chapter in Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience, I touched briefly on Levinas’ ethical philosophy in my analysis of Woolf’s essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’. Having returned to Levinas’ philosophical writings on several occasions since that Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 421. Two of the key eighteenth-century philosophers of sentiment were David Hume (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751) and Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759). Woolf was familiar with the writings of both Hume and Smith. I discuss some of the intersections and divergences between Hume’s philosophy and Woolf’s epistemology and ethics in Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience. 9 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 421. 10 James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: the Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 12. Chandler explores the history of sentiment in the Western philosophical and literary tradition and sentimental modes in literature and cinema. 11 Sim, Virginia Woolf, 178–85. 8

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time, I have come to a different assessment as to the role of the concrete and particular in his ethical philosophy and therefore its application to an analysis of the ordinary as a site of value.12 In this chapter I propose that both Levinas and Woolf offer an account of the ethical that has its ground in a specific orientation to the ordinary and particular. For Woolf, as in Levinas’ account of the face-to-face, the mundane body of the other can give rise to a form of expression (what Levinas sometimes calls ‘saying’) which exceeds knowledge, concepts and language, and functions as the ground for the ethical relation and demand. Starting with an overview of Levinas’ account of totality and infinity (the latter of which, for Levinas, arises through our encounter with the face of the other), my discussion focuses on three examples from Woolf’s writing that centre on the figure of the streetwalker or urban stranger, that most ubiquitous other in the landscape of everyday modernity. In ‘Everyday Speech’ Blanchot suggests that the anonymity that is, for him, an integral (and potentially productive) feature of the experience of the everyday presents a challenge to responsibility and concepts of value: ‘he [the I who lives the everyday] is the one and the other in their interchangeable presence, their annulled irreciprocity – yet without their being an “I” and an “alter ego” able to give rise to a dialectical recognition’.13 Nevertheless, for Blanchot it is within this potentially anarchic anonymity that the everyday holds the seeds of its own transformation.14 In Chapter 2 I argued that Helen Levitt’s photography rejects the everyday as a site of anonymity (‘interchangeable presence’) and social and moral aporia: she explores rich expressions of subjectivity as well as reciprocity and intersubjective relations on the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side, although admittedly such relations are between intimates (friends, neighbours, family), not strangers. In the examples from Woolf’s non-fiction and fiction

12 In Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience I suggested, in line with the conventional reading of Levinas’ work, that his account of the face-to-face describes a relation that supersedes the empirical, 189–90. However, as my analysis in this chapter will show, I no longer hold this view but instead see the ordinary and particular as central to his ethical philosophy. As I will discuss, the role of the empirical and embodied in Levinas’ account of the face is a key debate among readers and scholars of his work, which is notoriously open-ended. 13 Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 18–19. Original emphasis. 14 While Blanchot sees the everyday as a fundamental challenge to ethics and all forms of established order (‘[t]he everyday challenges heroic values, but even more it impugns all values and the very idea of value’) he simultaneously recognizes, like Lefebvre, that it contains the principle of its own critique: ‘To experience everydayness is to be tested by the radical nihilism that is as if its essence, and by which, in the void that animates it, it does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique’; Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, 19. On the issue of the indeterminacy of the everyday as a transformative capacity for Blanchot see Sheringham, Everyday Life, 19–22.



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that I explore here, we see another counterpoint to Blanchot’s assessment (or perhaps one could also argue a realization of his sense of the everyday’s anarchic possibility and potential), whereby the urban everyday is a site in which the specificity and alterity of the metropolitan stranger is made manifest through the ordinary, and self and other enter into an encounter of dialectical recognition and, potentially, reciprocity.

Totality and infinity In recent years, critics have examined how aspects of Woolf’s thinking about aesthetics and ethics anticipate or resonate with Levinas’ philosophy. In particular, critics have demonstrated how self-other relations in novels such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves can be productively read through a Levinasian framework.15 Another consonance between Levinas and Woolf is their shared critique of what Levinas calls ‘totality’, that is, all-encompassing philosophical concepts or systems of thought and the political institutions and everyday practices to which they can give rise. Levinas’ critique of totality, and his desire to develop an alternative philosophy which proceeds from a recognition of the ‘nonsynthesizable’ Other,16 and the self’s fundamental responsibility to that other person, stemmed from his reflections on Nazism, Stalinism and other violent regimes which he saw as characteristic of the twentieth century.17 His writings from the 1930s onwards provide an account of how the European or Western philosophical tradition culminated in the production of such totalitarian regimes and what kind of paradigmatic shifts in our philosophical thinking are needed in order to avoid them in the future.

Tamlyn Monson and Jessica Berman have examined self-other relations and the ethics of representation through a Levinasian framework in, respectively, The Waves and To the Lighthouse; Tamlyn Monson, ‘“A Trick of the Mind”: Alterity, Ontology, and Representation in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’, Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (2004): 173–96; Jessica Berman, ‘Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (2004), 151–72. In Prosaic Desires, Sara Crangle argues that a Levinasian model of desire that sees desire as the (productive and enabling) turn towards an endlessly unknowable and unassimilable other, can be traced in the work of modernist writers such as Woolf, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), Todd Avery assesses Woolf’s and Bloomsbury’s ideas about language, aesthetics and ethics in the context of Levinas’ philosophy. 16 Adriaan T. Peperzak, preface to Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), x. 17 A Lithuanian Jew who became a French citizen in 1930, Levinas spent most of the Second World War in a labour camp in Germany and most members of his family in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis; Peperzak, ‘Preface’, ix. 15

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In Totality and Infinity Levinas characterizes the history of Western (specifically European) philosophy as an ontology, that is, a philosophical tradition centred on Being that privileges the ‘primacy of the same’ at the expense of the other.18 He sees repeated throughout the history of European philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger, ‘a striving for totalization, in which the universe is reduced to an originary and ultimate unity by way of panoramic overviews and dialectical syntheses’.19 Western philosophy, Levinas contends, has historically been self rather than other-centred and betrays an imperialistic impulse: The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to the same. Such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an I. Thematization and conceptualization, which moreover are inseparable, are not peace with the other but suppression or possession of the other.20 Through its assimilation and suppression of the other via the terms of the self ontology, as ‘first philosophy’, is a philosophy of ‘power’ and ‘injustice’.21 Against the assimilating gestures of ontology, or the philosophy of the Same, Levinas proposes an alternative philosophy that proceeds from a recognition of alterity which is revealed to us, Levinas contends, through the face of the Other (another person), a relation he claims is primary and ethical. Totality and infinity are always, for Levinas, coexistent, but in the tradition of Western philosophy the latter has been suppressed or denied by the former. Levinas’ critique of totalitarian thinking finds strong resonance in Woolf, particularly her critique of systematic philosophy and intellectual dogmatism. This critique became more urgent and polemic in her writing during the 1930s, for example, in her political essay Three Guineas (1938), as the profound human consequences of such thinking became manifest across Europe. While Woolf’s critique of professional philosophy and philosophical systems (through figures such as Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse) is not the focus of the present discussion, and has been the subject of considerable attention in Woolf criticism over the years, one example from the diaries will prove illustrative.22 In her 1932 diary, while reflecting on Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 45, 43. Peperzak, preface, x. 20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 45–6. 21 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46. 22 While Woolf was of course very conversant in the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks to early-twentieth-century British philosophy, several critics have observed her 18 19



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the ‘system’ she believed to be expressed in D. H. Lawrence’s letters, she reflects: I dont [sic] want ‘a philosophy’ in the least; I dont [sic] believe in other people’s reading of riddles … I mean its [sic] so barren; so easy; giving advice on a system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematise – not till you’re 70: & have been supple & sympathetic & creative & tried out all your nerves and scopes … L[awrence]. would only say what proved something … Hence his attraction for those who want to be fitted; which I dont [sic] … Why all this criticism of other people? Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be – a system that did not shut out.23 The reference here to the importance of suppleness, sympathy and creativity and the alignment of systems with exclusion is instructive. Like Levinas Woolf implies that philosophical systems (for Levinas, totalizing philosophies), leave no space for the Other and ethics (‘Why not some system that includes the good?’; ‘What a discovery that would be – a system that did not shut out’). Her comments on Lawrence’s system and his desire to fit others into it also recalls Woolf’s repeated critique of egotism – the ‘shadow … across the page … shaped something like the letter “I”’ as she describes it in A Room of One’s Own24 – at both the level of ideas and creative practice. This is a further sentiment she shares with Levinas who often characterizes totalitarian thinking as ‘egoism’.25

ambivalent attitude to professional philosophy, particularly realist and emerging analytic traditions in British philosophy. One of the first critics to examine Woolf’s complex relationship to the philosophical tradition, her resistance to philosophical systematicity and her critique of the philosophical worldviews espoused by contemporary thinkers such as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell (who exerted a considerable influence on many of Woolf’s Bloomsbury peers), was Mark Hussey in his landmark study, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986). I have examined Woolf’s engagement with the Western philosophical tradition, as evidenced in texts including To the Lighthouse, in Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (see Chapter 1 for a discussion of that novel). For a more extreme position that argues for Woolf’s ‘ultimate rejection of philosophy’ see Michael Lackey, ‘Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf’s Critique of Philosophy’, Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 76. Assessments of Woolf’s philosophical persuasions vary considerably. While critics such as Ann Banfield and S. P. Rosenbaum argue for the influence of British realists such as Moore and Russell on Woolf’s thought, scholars, such as Mark Hussey, A. O. Frank and myself, see substantial divergences between their respective worldviews and explore Woolf’s fiction through alternative, often Continental and Romantic, frameworks. 23 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt, 1977–1984), vol. 4, 126–7. 24 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 90. 25 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 38–9.

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A philosophy which starts from a recognition of alterity – as that which exceeds and remains exterior to me and my systems of knowledge and thematization – marks, for Levinas, a paradigmatic move away from the Western philosophical tradition. Totality is broken up and disrupted, according to Levinas, by the face of the Other: ‘The face is present in its refusal to be contained.’26 While the encounter with the face of the Other, as radical alterity, is something which ultimately breaches or exceeds the orders of knowledge, concepts and representation, it has its ground in the concrete, everyday world. As Michael Morgan argues, ‘the face-to-face encounter between the self and the other person’ is always ‘concrete and particular’, and unfolds in the realm of everyday life: [The face-to-face] occurs as utterly particular: The self is a particular person, and the face-of-the-other is a particular revelation of a particular person. What is occluded, hidden, or forgotten in our ordinary lives is not some idea or value; it is this presence of the other’s face to me – and my responsibility to and for this person.27 Thus, the epiphany of the Other ‘opens in the sensible appearance of the face’.28 While always grounded in the particular – my encounter with this child or this man in front of me – the ‘face’, in Levinas’ special sense of the term, ultimately exceeds or breaches the realms of vision and thematization which form part of the order of totality and therefore potentially possession and violence. The face of the other ‘breaks through’29 those ‘plastic’ forms30 – such as expression or physical appearance – to give rise to another, more fundamental, recognition of and relation to the other which is metaphysical (in the sense that the face is linked to infinity or transcendence) and ethical (as it centres on a recognition of responsibility):

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 61. 28 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. In discussing debates about the relationship between the ‘phenomenal appearance of the other and the source of ethical obligation as non-phenomenal’, Derek Attridge suggests that commentators such as Alain Badiou in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002), have been too quick to assume that Levinas’ ‘other register’ is religious and to discount the phenomenal dimension of the face-to-face; Zahi Zalloua, ‘Derek Attridge on the Ethical Debates in Literary Studies’, SubStance 38, no. 3 (2009): 19. Attridge contends that the face is ‘not simply an allegorical way of presenting the apprehension of a non-physical alterity’ but that the ‘psychological experience of being looked at by the eyes of another is quite specifically being evoked’, although he believes it is unclear ‘exactly what role this plays in the theorization of obligation’; Zalloua, ‘Derek Attridge’, 19. Attridge maintains that Levinas ‘cannot evacuate’ the face of its phenomenal, embodied ground ‘without losing the force of the model he is using’; Zalloua, ‘Derek Attridge’, 20. 29 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. 30 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 66. 26 27



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The face, still a thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.31 Thus, the face is grounded in but exceeds descriptive features as such: its epiphany is the expression of the demand or plea of the Other that arises from or breaks through the particular (physical) face or body of the other.32 This ‘expression’33 or ‘plea’ or ‘command’ of the face is generally described by Levinas through metaphors of speech rather than vision, a topic to which to which I will return shortly. Throughout Totality and Infinity and his later writings, Levinas describes the face-to-face encounter in terms of the Other’s vulnerability, exposure and nakedness which call out to me and make a demand on me. He often aligns the Other with figures of marginalization and physical need: the ‘poor one’, the ‘widow’, the ‘orphan’ and ‘stranger’.34 It is not the case, however, that the other is necessarily on the social, economic or political margins: every other person is potentially an Other for me. Levinas uses these metonyms to foreground that the expression or call of the Other is one which announces their vulnerability and my responsibility to answer to that need and acknowledge the Other’s right to be. The face challenges my freedom, my place in the world, revealing it to be ‘arbitrary and violent’ and prompts a questioning of the self’s right to be. I can usurp the other person’s place in the world and have to answer to that demand – do not hurt or kill me.35 To accept the call of the Other is to recognize their right to be and a willingness to share the world with her: The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenceless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it,

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198, see also 66. As Morgan explains: ‘This particular young girl, with curly dark hair, smiling, and gangly, whatever else she means to me, also and even “before” in a sense calls out to me, burdens me with responsibility, singles me out for an appeal and a demand. Moreover, there is no way correctly and precisely to sever that appeal and command from the way she looks to me; the appeal and demand is in the look, so to speak; it is something that the look means, something primary and fundamental’; Discovering Levinas, 67. That the ‘face’ for Levinas is not only or necessarily revealed via the physical face (or eyes) is clear in his discussion of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959). In one part of the novel a woman named Yevgenia is visiting her husband who is imprisoned at Lubyanka in Moscow, and she reflects on the way the backs and necks of the other visitors in the line in front of her express their anxiety and desperation. Levinas describes this as an instance of the face-to-face; Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 4–5. 33 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 51. 34 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 213, 215. 35 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84–5. 31 32

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my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with an opposition that is opposition itself. The being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression … [I]t is not the no of a hostile force or a threat; it is the impossibility of killing him who presents that face … The face is the fact that being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative.36 The epiphany of the face is the first given, or injunction, of moral consciousness: ‘The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.’37 It is ‘determinative and unconditional’ and precedes thought, concepts and rules.38 The face-to-face refers not to a single, isolated encounter but a plea that is made over and over again in ‘episode after episode’ in our everyday lives.39 Levinas describes the face-to-face relation through metaphors of language (such as calling, saying, response, appeal, expression and dialogue) rather than vision, the latter of which tends to define the rhetoric of knowledge and being in the Western philosophical tradition: ‘Inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them.’40 The ‘epiphany of infinity’, he writes, ‘is expression and discourse’.41 This terminology foregrounds the intersubjective and dialogic nature of the face-to-face relation as Levinas understands it. Language, specifically via the model of conversation, is how we coexist with the Other, sharing our worlds while leaving her otherness intact.42 Levinas does not mean that the face-to-face involves any actual linguistic exchange; it is the primary encounter from which language, as a system of shared cultural significations, proceeds. While our everyday use of language is functional and systematic (a form of language that Levinas sometimes terms the ‘Said’ as opposed to ‘Saying’), he contends that a desire for the social necessarily precedes such cultural systems – the individual chooses to welcome the stranger and share his world with her, which inaugurates the need for language proper.43 In ‘Meaning and Sense’ (1964), Levinas proposes a distinction between ‘meaning’, which is aligned with signification (linguistic, symbolic, Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 21. Original emphasis. See also Totality and Infinity, 199. 37 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 201; Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 92. 38 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 61. 39 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 61. 40 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. 41 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200. 42 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 39; John Wild, Introduction to Totality and Infinity, by Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 13–14. 43 Wild, Introduction, 14. 36



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etc.) and pluralism, and ‘sense’ which he describes as a singular, grounding ‘univocity’ which arises through our ‘orientation’ towards the Other.44 Sense, he argues, is something that precedes language and signification, and is a condition of their possibility: ‘[The Other] is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is sense primordially, for he gives sense to expression itself, for it is only by him that a phenomenon as a meaning is, of itself, introduced into being.’45 In the course of this chapter, I will consider how Levinas’ emphasis on sense, expression (as opposed to impression) and the face-to-face encounter as a dialogic one which exceeds ordinary language compare with Woolf’s representations of the ethical encounter in the examples I discuss. Alterity assumes an important role in Woolf’s conception of the self and human relationships. As I discussed in Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience, her fiction repeatedly reflects on the limits of our understanding and knowledge of others, and at times this can be read, and has been understood, as a problem or lack.46 Thus, the novel Jacob’s Room circles around a haunting, absent centre – Jacob’s empty room – the narrator advising us that ‘[i]t is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.’47 In To the Lighthouse Lily is preoccupied with how we know and judge others, desires unity and intimacy with Mrs Ramsay, yet feels incapable of ever really knowing her: ‘Fifty pairs of eyes’ she muses are ‘not enough to get round that one woman.’48 As Tamlyn Monson has argued, Bernard’s final speech in The Waves is an extended meditation on the nature of, and limits to, our knowledge of other people and the difficulty, and danger, of attempting to ‘sum up’ or represent the other via the terms of the self.49 While the problem of knowing another and the mysteriousness of the self are recurring themes in Woolf’s novels, there is also an alignment in her writing between alterity and ethics, one which, like Levinas’ account of the face-to-face, sometimes emerges from an encounter with the ‘saying’ or rhetoric of the other’s mundane body.50 I will explore this proposition through an analysis of three examples in Woolf’s writing – a 1936 diary entry, an essay (‘Character in

Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense’, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, 47, 46. Original emphasis. 45 Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense’, 52. Original emphasis. 46 Sim, Virginia Woolf, 191. 47 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 24. 48 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 57, 214. 49 Monson, ‘“A Trick of the Mind”’. 50 Sara Crangle also argues, although in different ways, for the productive function of alterity in the work of Woolf and other modernists. In Chapter 2 of Prosaic Desires she explores the movement from boredom to creativity in Woolf’s narratives as the turn from the limitations of the self-same to ‘interesting, unpredictable otherness’, 74. 44

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Fiction’), and an example from Mrs Dalloway – all of which centre on an encounter with the urban stranger or streetwalker. It is of course not always the case, or even consistently the case, that Woolf’s representations of others in her writing are free from the kinds of judgements and thematizations that Levinas views as products of totality or the philosophy of the ‘Same’ (reducing the other to the terms of the self). In a forum on ‘Woolf and Jews’ in the Woolf Studies Annual, Beth Rosenberg argues that Woolf’s invariably offensive representations of Jews need to be assessed in relation to Woolf’s wider social and discursive contexts: that is, the ‘totality’ within which she lived and discursively operated. Rosenberg suggests that we need to take into account the ‘cultural history’ that contributed to Woolf’s ‘aesthetic and ethical choices’ including her representations of Jews: ‘[o]ne cannot escape the circulation of discourse during one’s time, and it can be demonstrated that Woolf’s world view was part and parcel of her cultural network, whether she was conscious of it or not’.51 Over the years, critics have debated Woolf’s sometimes stereotypical representations of the working classes in her novels and comments in her diaries and letters which express class-based or racial prejudices or assumptions. Critics have struggled to reconcile and account for what Rebecca Walkowitz and Leena Kore Schröder describe as the ‘good Woolf’ and the ‘bad Woolf’.52 That is, the Virginia Woolf so well known for her progressive political views on women and education, her critique of patriarchy, Fascism and Empire, and the Woolf who could say (particularly in the private space of the diary) deeply offensive things about the working classes or Jews. But such contradictions are not inconsistent with Levinas’ assessment of the relationship that holds between totality and infinity and our relation with the other which, in the ethical framework he describes, is particular and lived, not ideological or theoretical. These two modes of orientation towards the other coexist, and we live in a constant condition of demand from the other, one to which we may sometimes listen and respond and other times ignore. I am not proposing that Woolf can be upheld as a moral paragon in her representation of others, but seek here to trace moments in her writing that can be productively read through Levinas’ account of the face-to-face and responsibility. Moreover, a Levinasian conception of alterity and ethics is not readily traceable in the work of other modernist writers who, like Woolf, presented the everyday as positive value. For example, Gertrude

Beth C. Rosenberg, ‘The Belated History of Woolf and Jews’, Woolf Studies Annual 19 (2013): 7–9. 52 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism’, Bad Modernisms, eds Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 119–44; Leena Kore Schröder, ‘“A question is asked which is never answered”: Virginia Woolf, Englishness and Antisemitism’, Woolf Studies Annual 19 (2013): 30. 51



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Stein’s conception of identity as grounded in set types (often determined along the lines of class, ethnicity and nationality), repetition and predictable modes of behaviour that are transparently ‘knowable’, falls squarely within the kind of totalitarian thinking that Levinas critiques. Similarly, in the previous chapter I argued that the object’s extrasubjective integrity – its otherness – is effectively subsumed by language and ideation in works such as Tender Buttons.

‘a girl, fainting’ The first example of what I am proposing can be read as a Levinasian faceto-face encounter in Woolf’s writing comes from a diary entry composed on 20 March 1936 – a time at which Woolf was anxious about The Years, which was at proof stage, and the increasing political instability in Europe. It describes an encounter between Woolf and an impoverished young Jewish woman who, in a state of dehydration, hunger and exhaustion, knocks on the Woolfs’ window at 52 Tavistock Square seeking help. This diary entry comprises a striking contrast to the many references to Jews in Woolf’s diary which, as Leena Kore Schröder has argued, ‘efface the individual Jew and reduce him or her to an identity that is generalized and conceptual rather than unique’.53 As an example of the face-to-face, the encounter disrupts such conceptual categories which are a part of the structure of totality or the ‘system’ that the entry critiques. The diary entry is quoted below in full and without amendment: Book again very good: very bad yesterday. And what a horrid evening. First Lady Simon & Harry: then Raymond: then, longing for dinner, down I go to the Press, to see if my Macaulay’s come: & theres a tap on the window. I thought it was a little dressmakers apprentice come Leena Kore Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf’s and Leonard Woolf’s “Jewish” Stories’, Twentieth-Century Literature 49, no. 3 (2003): 298. In many cases, these are references to Leonard Woolf’s family, particularly his mother, Marie Woolf. Virginia would often frame her personal dislike of Marie’s attitudes and behaviour via offensive generalizations about Jews and the middle-classes (see, for example, the Diary, vol. 1, 29; Diary, vol. 3, 193, 194–5, 320–1). However, their relationship improved somewhat over the years (see Diary, vol. 3, 231; Diary, vol. 4, 277; Diary, vol. 5, 223–5). The present diary entry also serves as a striking contrast to the essay ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’ which Woolf was working on throughout the 1930s, and which was revised in response to criticisms from an editor at Harper’s Bazaar that the story’s representation of a Jewish jeweller relied on typecasting and stereotype; see Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection’, for a discussion of Woolf’s representation of Jews and Jewishness in the diaries and in ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’. For recent discussions on this very complex and contentious topic in Woolf studies see the 2013 Woolf Studies Annual special issue on ‘Virginia Woolf and Jews’, vol. 19.

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with my dress. But it was oh dear – a girl, fainting. Can I have a drop of water? She was hardly able to walk. Sat on the area steps while I got one. Then I took her in: got L.: hotted soup. But it was a horrible thing. Shed been walking all day to get work, had neuritis – cdnt sew, had had a cup of tea for breakfast, lived in one room alone in Bethnal Green. At first she cd hardly speak – “I’m hungry” she said. Gradually livened. Half dazed. Said You look like brother & sister, both have long noses. I’m a Jewess – a curious stress on the word as if a confession. So’s he I said. Then she perked up a little. But my God – no one to help her, she said. Friends? Oh they only think of enjoying themselves. May I take this home? taking a bun. We gave her tongue, 2 eggs, & 5/- Did you make this yourself – of the soup. Can you afford it – of the money. And a mere wisp – 22 –suffering. Never saw unhappiness, poverty so tangible. And felt its our fault. And she apologised. And what could we do. I shall stay in bed if I’m feeling bad & then go to the Labour Exchange. But I cant get any work. Think of one of our ‘class’: & this is what we exact. Now its raining, & I suppose . . well, whats the use of thinking? As usual what was so vivid I saw it all the evening becomes stylised when I write. Some horror become visible: but in human form. And she may live 20 years … What a system.54 In the manner of Levinas’ face-to-face, this diary entry describes a concrete, embodied encounter that opens out to an ethical one: it recounts ‘a particular revelation of a particular person’.55 As Schröder observes, ‘what so easily could have turned into a conceptualized description of the “wandering Jew” remains scrupulously personal to the girl’.56 As is so often the case in Woolf’s fiction, in this diary entry she sets up an encounter with another that proceeds from a careful attention to the material and ordinary: work, weather, bodies (hunger, clothing, fainting, thirst, fatigue, walking, neuritis, noses, thinness), food (dinner, soup, breakfast, buns, tongue, eggs) and affect (pity, shame, guilt). Indeed, physical need, a failure of the senses, and the body in extremity are recurring themes. At the start of the passage Woolf mentions the physical need that takes her down to the Press in the first instance (‘longing for dinner’), which is quickly displaced by the much more urgent physical need of the young woman. While much of the first half of the passage focuses on a detailed description of the physical – the girl’s bodily condition, her material circumstances, what transpired during Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, 19. A brief additional note (perhaps added later) appears on the left-hand side of the entry. This adds further information about the girl’s background (that she was an orphan and possibly Russian), describes her voice and hands (‘[v]ery small, white, swollen’), and their exchange (‘Shook hands. And keep well she said’). 55 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 61. 56 Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection’, 323. 54



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their meeting, the hospitality and sustenance that the Woolfs provide – it is ultimately the girl’s need, her ‘unhappiness’, ‘poverty’ and the ‘horror’ of her situation that are ‘so tangible’. The call of the Other, of responsibility, breaks through the concrete encounter as such. The end of the passage indicates that Woolf finds the encounter, like Levinas’ face-to-face, exceeds the limits of both thought and representation: when she tries to write about the ‘vivid’ encounter in terms of themes and concepts it becomes ‘stylized’ and she finds ‘thinking’ a futile response. Here, the call of the Other breaches or exceeds the structures of totality. Like Levinas’ face-to-face, this passage describes the rupture and ultimate failure of ordinary language which is underpinned by a different, unspoken dialogue – the non-verbal exchange of call and response that occurs between the girl and Woolf. The prose of the diary entry is increasingly fragmented as the syntax, punctuation and distinction between the girl’s voice and Woolf’s voice break down. Initially the girl ‘cd hardly speak’ and by the end of the passage Woolf admits that while the encounter was ‘so vivid [she] saw it all the evening’, she cannot represent it in words, it becomes ‘stylized’ when she tries to write about it. The epiphany of the Other exceeds or resists language and instead functions as its ground, as the basis for reciprocity and a sharing of worlds. Here, Woolf cannot fall back onto the glib stereotypes and clichés about the Jew or Jewishness that are elsewhere peppered in the diaries. Her description of the encounter in this entry is comprised of many abbreviations, short-forms and sentence fragments (‘cdnt sew’, ‘Half dazed’, ‘cd hardly speak’), and unconventional, ungrammatical language (‘got L.: hotted soup’), indicating the degree to which ordinary language and its ontological underpinnings come under strain here. There is also an increasingly blurred distinction between Woolf’s voice and that of the girl (‘And what could we do. I shall stay in bed if I’m feeling bad’) which is suggestive of Levinas’ sense of the inseparable relation between call and response that comprises the ethical dialogue. In this entry, the encounter between Woolf and the girl is described in relation to concepts of totality as well as infinity. For example, when first hearing the tap on the window Woolf imagines it might be the ‘dressmakers apprentice come with [her] dress’, a relation based on economics, service and unequal power relations. This relation transforms to one of hospitality and responsibility whereby Woolf responds to the girl’s acute need and demand: ‘I took her in.’ The girl later describes, with a sense of shame and ‘confession’, her otherness as determined via the logic of the Same (‘I’m a Jewess’), but also gestures towards identification with the Woolfs: ‘You look like brother & sister, both have long noses.’ Thus, the girl imagines the Woolf’s relation, and potentially their own relation, in terms of kinship: that Leonard and Virginia are siblings, and they all potentially Jews. Schröder reads Virginia’s response here as one of recognition and ‘resemblance’: ‘[Woolf] implicates her own self into this identity, firstly by acknowledging

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the girl’s remark on the similarity between herself and Leonard, and secondly by identifying Leonard to the girl as her fellow Jew’.57 She suggests it is Woolf who extends the ties of resemblance from marriage to ‘a blood tie’ between the three, but it is the girl who gestures to this common relation.58 While reassuring the girl of her shared identity with Leonard as Jewish, Woolf herself neither confirms nor denies this identification, and while she certainly does not enact the forms of ‘self-distancing’59 evident in other diary descriptions, she maintains a recognition of difference here that is crucial to the ethical relation as Levinas conceives it. Throughout the passage Virginia emphasizes the radical difference between the girl’s circumstances and conditions and that of her own: a level of plight and suffering Woolf has trouble comprehending and describing. This recognition underpins her sense of responsibility (‘And felt its our fault … and what could we do’) and her awareness that the girl’s plight is a product of the kind of totalitarian thinking (e.g. concepts of racial difference) and ‘systems’ (of class and race) that the entry critiques. Importantly, and in contrast to many other diary entries, Woolf never refers to the girl as a ‘Jewess’: it is the girl who identifies herself as a Jew. Throughout the passage Woolf refers to her as the ‘girl’ and ‘she’: she emphasizes the girl’s utter particularity throughout and resists generalizations (here as ‘stylization’). On her own account, Woolf’s encounter with the girl breaches the orders of representation, conceptualization and understanding. As Levinas says of the face: ‘In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp.’60 In this diary entry, Woolf never moves beyond the recognition that this girl’s plight is her (Woolf’s) responsibility, and yet she feels incapable of adequately meeting or answering that demand or need. The experience is one that Woolf clearly found overwhelming, and it was one that made her question, in Levinas’ terms, her own ‘right to be’: ‘And felt its our fault … And what could we do.’ The lack of a question mark here is suggestive, indicating that not only is the question rhetorical but resists a quantifiable answer, because the epiphany of the Other gives rise to a recognition of responsibility that is infinite, without limit.

‘an old lady in the corner opposite’ If the above diary entry is a striking contrast to Woolf’s often stereotypical and clichéd representations of Jews, her portrayal of Mrs Brown

Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection’, 322. Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection’, 322. 59 Schröder, ‘Tales of Abjection’, 322. 60 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. 57 58



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in ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924) provides the same in regards to her representations of the working classes. This essay, which was also published under the alternate title ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’,61 is about the status of character in the modern novel and the responsibility involved in the writing or creation of character. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the essay also reflects more broadly on the practice or art of ‘character-reading’ and its role in human relations and life.62 In line with Levinas’ account of totality and infinity, ‘Character in Fiction’ charts a transition from a conception of the other that is abstract and generic to one grounded in an affirmation of the other’s utter particularity and infinity. This view of the other and of character emerges from what can be understood as another instance of the face-to-face in Woolf’s non-fiction. One of Woolf’s contentions in her essay is that while we are all ‘practised’ in the art of ‘character-reading’, for the novelist it is akin to an ‘obsession’ and that ‘character in itself’ is both ‘permanently interesting’ and of ‘overwhelming importance’.63 Here we see the language of particularity (in itself, in its own terms), excess (‘overwhelming’) and value (‘importance’). As I will show, in this essay Woolf describes the activity of expressing character as an ethical imperative, but one that entails difficulty and risk. At the start of her essay, she engages in the language of the hunt, suggesting that all novelists are propelled by the desire to ‘catch’ some elusive character, a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, ‘[s]ome Brown, Smith, or Jones’, who comes seductively before them.64 But the language of the generic and middling (‘[s]ome Brown, Smith or Jones’, ‘the figure of a man, or of a woman’) and pursuit and fixity, is replaced by a conception of human being and characterwriting that is grounded in alterity and limitlessness.65 Woolf maintains that the other – Smith, Brown, Jones – is elusive and all the author generally catches hold of are fragments of the most ordinary things: ‘a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair’.66 Moreover, while ‘some character’ presents its importance to the prospective writer with the force of an imposition – as if akin to a demand – Woolf warns of the ‘hideous perils’ and dangers that beset the novelist should she or he try to fix the complexity of character in itself and ‘describe it in words’.67 Hence, from the very early stages of the essay the tension between the other and language is in evidence, a tension that Tamlyn Monson has explored through a Levinasian framework in The

Woolf, Woolf, 63 Woolf, 64 Woolf, 65 Woolf, 66 Woolf, 67 Woolf, 61 62

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Waves.68 The radical revision to modes of characterization and the style of the novel that Woolf calls for in ‘Character in Fiction’ emerges from, and reflects on, this tension. In illustrating her claim that the writer’s task is fuelled by both the demand of the Other (‘some character that has thus imposed itself’), and a responsibility to remain responsive to their alterity (as an elusive ‘phantom’), Woolf decides to desist from ‘analysing and abstracting’ and to instead share with her reader a story that is ‘simple’ and ‘true’.69 This story details her recent encounter with an old lady, whom she names Mrs Brown, on a train journey from Richmond to Waterloo. It is an encounter which, in the manner of Levinas’ face-to-face, describes a ‘particular revelation of a particular person’ which gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for Woolf that is both personal and professional.70 Like the diary entry discussed above, Woolf’s well-known story of Mr Smith and Mrs Brown on the train commences with an emphasis on the concrete and particular, and an analysis of the rhetoric of gesture and the body. Upon entering the train carriage, Woolf feels that she has interrupted a conversation between an elderly, working-class woman (Mrs Brown) and a middle-aged man (Mr Smith), who Woolf surmises is a ‘man of business’, dressed in ‘good blue serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief’.71 From overhearing their conversation and observing their expressions, appearance and body language Woolf deduces that they are engaged in some kind of disagreement or ‘unpleasant business’, perhaps regarding monies owed, and that Mr Smith has ‘some power over’ Mrs Brown which he is ‘exerting disagreeably’.72 Woolf’s description of Mrs Brown emphasizes her poverty and vulnerability, but also her dignity and composure: She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness – everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up – suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her – a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor.73

Monson focuses specifically on the character of Bernard who throughout the novel, but particularly in his final ‘summing up’, reflects on the tension between subjectivity, the other and language. As Monson observes: ‘[Bernard’s] monologue is punctuated by references to the inadequacy of language and its inability to communicate or represent, demonstrating once again the paradox of representation and the writer’s Sisyphean task in trying to approach the Other through the only tool available: language’; ‘A Trick of the Mind’, 188–9. 69 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 421, 422. 70 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, 61. 71 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 423. 72 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 423, 424. 73 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 423. 68



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Thus Woolf’s description emphasizes Mrs Brown’s ‘suffering’, ‘apprehension’ and smallness: she imagines Mrs Brown is a ‘widow’ with ‘nobody to support her’.74 Nevertheless, her response to Mrs Brown is not simply one of ‘pity’. When the woman starts to cry quietly and ‘composedly’, likely due to her sense of shame and disempowerment, Woolf is struck by her ‘superb dignity’ and she perceives the woman to be at once ‘very frail and very heroic’.75 Thus, in Levinasian terms, Mrs Brown is a figure who is at once in need, in a position of vulnerability – making an appeal – yet also in a position of height and command.76 When Mr Smith leaves the carriage and the two women are left alone, the order of the relation between them changes from one of appearances and concepts to the order of epiphany. The literal dialogue that had ensued between Mrs Brown and Mr Smith is replaced by the unspoken dialogue between Mrs Brown and Woolf: Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of – that overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions.77 Here, the face of the other ‘breaks through the form that … delimits it’ and exceeds concepts and representation.78 The ‘impression’ is both ‘overwhelming’ and ‘peculiar’ and Woolf describes a situation of conceptual excess and confusion (‘myriad’; ‘incongruous’ ideas). Later in the essay, Woolf again associates Mrs Brown with ideas of value and a resistance to comprehension and category: the ‘oddity and significance of some character’, an ‘overpowering sense of Mrs Brown and her peculiarities’.79 Woolf’s metaphor for the face in the above passage, ‘it came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning’, echoes Levinas’ claim that the face breaches and ruptures the order of totality. Recognizing her difficultly in accounting for Mrs Brown in conceptual terms and at the level of representation (‘that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you’80), Woolf suggests that the ‘important thing was to realise

Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 76 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 212–16. 77 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 78 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. 79 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 80 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 74 75

vol. 3, 423. vol. 3, 424, 425. vol. 3, 424–5. vol. 3, 433. vol. 3, 432.

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her character, to steep oneself in her atmosphere’.81 Here, Woolf gestures to a relation that is affective (another’s ‘atmosphere’) rather than strictly visual (she refers to it as a ‘vision’ but one which resists representation); a relation of service (the responsibility to ‘express character’ rather than privilege personal impressions thereof), and other-directed. It is grounded in a recognition of and sense of responsibility for the other. The relation that unfolds between Woolf and Mrs Brown is in direct contrast to that between Mr Smith and Mrs Brown which is based on instrumental social and economic relations and power differentials, and in which Mr Smith seems angered and not at all responsive to Mrs Brown’s situation and call: ‘he went on talking, a little louder, a little angrily, as if he had seen her cry often before; as if it were a painful habit. At last it got on his nerves.’82 Thus, Woolf’s description of her encounter with Mrs Brown can be understood to qualify an earlier comment in the essay that has been criticized for its classism. In seeking evidence to support her famous claim that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’,83 Woolf notoriously directs her reader’s attention to their servants, the cook in particular, who having once lived like a ‘leviathan’ in the depths of the Victorian basement, neither seen nor heard, has now emerged into the sunshine and fresh air of the Georgian drawing-room to borrow the Daily Herald or ‘ask advice about a hat’.84 Later in the essay that mythical working-class woman is placed in a different context in all her particularity and humanity, no longer defined in the economic terms of a master–servant relation, but an ethical one in which the Other places the demands on Woolf. Levinas contends that ‘[t]he being that expresses itself imposes itself … by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity … without my being able to be deaf to its appeal’.85 Woolf describes a similar process in her account of Mrs Brown in ‘Character in Fiction’ but proceeds to relate this to the purpose and ethics of the modern novel. Woolf claims that the point of her story is to illustrate that ‘all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite’ – from ‘a character imposing itself upon another person’ – and that the expression of character serves as the basis for, and ethical potential of, the novel.86 It is, she writes, ‘to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel … has been evolved’.87 The task of the modern novelist and the modern reader, she contends towards the very end of her

Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 83 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 84 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 85 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200. 86 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 87 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, 81 82

vol. vol. vol. vol.

3, 3, 3, 3,

425. 424. 421. 422.

vol. 3, 425. vol. 3, 425.



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essay, is to ‘insist that [Mrs Brown] is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what’.88 Her uniqueness, ‘the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence’ have ‘an overwhelming fascination’ and are of the utmost ‘significance’.89 Such comments are not solely about a modernist aesthetics of the ordinary: they suggest that a recognition of and respect for the other is central to the purpose and ethics of the modern novel as Woolf conceives of it here. Indeed, as I have previously argued, Woolf’s criticism of Edwardian novelists such as Arnold Bennett is that through an emphasis on facts and social convention they ignore or suppress the Other and reduce them to the logic and language of the Same: ‘But we cannot hear [Hilda Lessway’s] mother’s voice, or Hilda’s voice; we can only hear Mr Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyhold fines.’90 It is of course not the case that all of Woolf’s characters escape fixity and typecasting in the service of her own political and moral agendas (we might think of Dr Bradshaw or Charles Tansley), and her work meditates on the perennial tension between language, representation and the Other. However, in ‘Character in Fiction’ Woolf calls for a conception of character and the writing of character that is grounded on a recognition of, and respect for, alterity – that ‘overmastering impression’ – one that is reflected in the particularity, complexity and often elusiveness of character that defines so much of her fiction.91 For Woolf, as for Levinas, the epiphany of the Other arises within the scene of their mundane particularity: the tying of a shoelace, the movement of a hand, the nape of a neck, someone’s habit of opening and closing a penknife.

‘a frail quivering sound’ The final example of the call of the Other that I will explore comes from Mrs Dalloway – ‘the battered woman’ and her song that Peter Walsh and Rezia Warren Smith encounter near Regent’s Park Tube Station on their respective perambulations around London.92 This woman, who takes on mythic proportions and significance, is representative of the experience of love and loss, but also the precarious position of women in early-twentieth-century British society and their vulnerability under the structures of patriarchy and

Woolf, Woolf, 90 Woolf, 91 Woolf, 92 Woolf, 88 89

‘Character in Fiction’, ‘Character in Fiction’, ‘Character in Fiction’, ‘Character in Fiction’, Mrs Dalloway, 71.

in in in in

Essays, Essays, Essays, Essays,

vol. vol. vol. vol.

3, 3, 3, 3,

436. 436, 433. 430; Sim, Virginia Woolf, 187. 431.

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capital. This old woman – another widow (‘he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills’)93 – appears in the novel in the context of a number of narrative threads that deal with the topic of women, love, vulnerability/exposure and patriarchy.94 Prior to the scene with the street woman, Peter sees Rezia and Septimus in Regent’s Park and wonders ‘what had the young man [Septimus] in the overcoat been saying to her [Rezia] to make her look’ so miserable and ‘absolutely desperate’.95 Later, Rezia pities the street woman’s desperate situation and the reader has an uncanny sense that Rezia – a young foreigner who later that day will herself become a widow – is not immune from a similarly tragic fate of loneliness and desolation.96 Shortly after seeing Rezia and Septimus in the park, and thinking about the loosening of social mores that had occurred in Britain in the post-war years, Peter recalls Sally Seton’s progressive feminist politics as a youth, and how she scolded Hugh Whitbread for his conservatism saying that ‘he represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class life’ and held him ‘responsible for the state of “those poor girls in Piccadilly”’.97 It is, potentially, a much older version of one such girl that the singing street woman is representative. Peter then thinks about love: his current lover in India, Daisy (who he believes is provoking his jealousy by telling him about her recent lunch with Major Orde), and about Clarissa (whose calmness in the face of his earlier emotional outburst and tears that day led him to feelings of shame and vulnerability). Peter comes to the conclusion that women ‘don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men.’98 This assertion is then powerfully contradicted by the song of the old street lady, a figure who functions as both a mythic representation of love and loss, but also a concrete embodiment of woman’s vulnerability under the structures of patriarchy. The street woman is described in terms that are both particular and mythic. She is presented predominantly through her ‘song’ which takes on two forms: as a call and appeal which transcends ordinary language, operating in a discursive realm that is both supra-linguistic and timeless; and as a song about a lost love which she sings to passersby for money. These two enunciations or songs unfold in parallel in the narrator’s description. Initially, the ‘sound’ which interrupts the flow of Peter’s thoughts about women and love comes from a ‘voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end’, a voice that has an ‘absence of all human meaning’, is of no specific ‘age or sex’, and is described as primordial and eternal: ‘the Woolf, Woolf, 95 Woolf, 96 Woolf, 97 Woolf, 98 Woolf, 93 94

Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs

Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway,

71. 62–70. 62. 72–3. 64. 70.



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voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’, resonating ‘[t]hrough all ages’:99

ee um fah um so foo swee too eem oo –

100

This song or call announces the woman’s vulnerability but also her position of command and height. She is ‘a tall quivering shape’ and the voice that issues from it a ‘frail quivering sound’ that runs ‘weakly and shrilly’, yet is also likened to an ‘invincible thread of sound’ that demands the attention of passersby and permeates the everyday urban landscape of London:101 the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.102 The ‘ancient song’ is, according to the narrator, a song about lost love, ‘love which has lasted a million years’,103 but for the most part the actual song is relayed to the reader in terms that exceed language proper, and articulates a different kind of call or, in Levinasian terms, ‘saying’. Physically, the woman is described as at once particular and without boundary. She is a ‘tall quivering shape’, immense, mythic, ‘like a windbeaten tree [that] … rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze’, but she is also a ‘battered old woman’ who wears a ‘skirt’ with ‘her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side’.104 What unfolds between Peter and the old woman can be understood as another potential face-to-face encounter, but the extent to which Peter responds to the call of this woman and her effect on him is uncertain as we do not gain access to his thoughts in this part of the narrative. The only response from him we know of is a fiscal one: he gives her money. The lines of the ‘love’ song that are relayed in the narrative, which the woman addresses to Peter as he walks by, illustrate how this scene collapses a song about romantic love into an ethical call or appeal: she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite clearly) ‘look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,’ she no longer saw brown Woolf, Woolf, 101 Woolf, 102 Woolf, 103 Woolf, 104 Woolf, 99

100

Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs

Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway,

70–1. 71. 70–2. 71. 71. 71.

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eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face, but only a looming shape, a shadow shape, to which, with the bird-like freshness of the very aged, she still twittered ‘give me your hand and let me press it gently’ (Peter Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor creature a coin as he stepped into his taxi), ‘and if some one should see, what matter they?’ she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she smiled, pocketing the shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed blotted out.105 While framed as a love song, the woman’s appeal to Peter’s eyes and for his hand can be read as another face-to-face encounter: she implores him and there is, as in the earlier examples I have been discussing, a rupture or dislocation in the realms of vision and form: Peter is now just a ‘looming shape’, the eyes of passersby are ‘blotted out’, ‘passing generations … vanished’. The passage also deals with the affect of shame: ‘and if some one should see, what matter they?’ The woman is not ashamed, but it appears, instead, that it is Peter who is made uncomfortable by this encounter and appeal: he gives ‘the poor creature a coin’, but his response could be read as one of discomfort and embarrassment rather than a genuine concern and response to the call of this woman. It is Rezia’s response to the woman which is more sympathetic. She feels pity for the ‘poor old wretch!’ and imagines her situation: what if it was a wet night on the streets? What if ‘one’s father’ or ‘some-body who had known one in better days’ should walk by?106 But Rezia’s reflections about the old woman’s situation merely function as a springboard for her own latent feelings of shame (about Septimus’ behaviour) and unhappiness.107 In this scene, which perhaps offers one of the most striking examples of the call of the Other in Woolf’s fiction – a call that is conveyed via some of her most experimental prose (‘ee um fah um so/foo swee too eem oo’) – it is questionable whether Peter or Rezia adequately open themselves to the full force of that appeal. Both, I would suggest, offer responses that are still situated within the logic of totality: Peter responds with money and retreats from the gaze and hand of the woman into a taxi, while Rezia swiftly turns the woman’s condition into a mirror for the self. As she reflects on her and her husband’s visit to Sir William Bradshaw and his ‘nice’ sounding name, Rezia’s assumption that the ‘old woman singing in the street “if some one should see, what matter they?”’, is somehow an affirmation that ‘everything was going to be right’, is sadly mistaken.108 Sir William Bradshaw, like Dr Holmes, remains deaf to the call and appeal of another Other – Septimus Warren

Woolf, Woolf, 107 Woolf, 108 Woolf, 105 106

Mrs Mrs Mrs Mrs

Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway, Dalloway,

72. 72. 72–3. 73.



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Smith. Mrs Dalloway suggests, pessimistically, that this old woman and her suffering are eternal: she ‘would still be there in ten million years’.109 Her suffering is not just the perennial condition of loss that all human beings must suffer, her situation seems specifically marked by her gender. Like the young Jewish woman in Woolf’s 1936 diary entry, and Mrs Brown on the train, this ‘battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers’, suffers under the structures of patriarchy and the hierarchical systems that it produces.110 In this chapter I have argued, through the framework of Levinas’ account of the face-to-face, that the ordinary – in the form of the creaturely, mundane body – assumes an important position in Woolf’s ethics, particularly her account of self-other relations and responsibility, as well as in her account of the ethics and aesthetics of characterization in the modern novel in the essay ‘Character in Fiction’. Similarly, the category of the familiar assumes a central position in Dorothea Lange’s assessment of the social, aesthetic and ethical potential of photography. Like Woolf, Lange understands the familiar, the common and ordinary as a potential ground for intimacy and hospitality which can lead to greater social understanding. Yet, as I will discuss, the familiar in Lange’s work is not necessarily equivalent to the given or known. Like the scrap of Mrs Brown’s dress with which the novelist must make do, Lange’s poetics of the familiar give rise, as in Levitt’s street photographs, to ideas of epistemological limit, secrecy and reserve.

Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 71. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 71.

109 110

5 Dorothea Lange: On photographing the familiar

In order to see the familiar, [the photographer] must act and feel the familiar. His impulse can be a movement of the common; his instinct can be a gesture of the ordinary; his vision can be a focus on the usual … Among the familiar, his behavior is that of the intimate rather than of the stranger … an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience. DOROTHEA LANGE1

Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. SUSAN SONTAG2

In On Photography, Susan Sontag characterizes photography as a media that has had a long-standing preoccupation with the commonplace and overlooked. In one essay in that volume, ‘America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly’, she traces a tradition in American photography that

Dorothea Lange, with Daniel Dixon, ‘Photographing the Familiar’, in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (1952; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966), 71. 2 Sontag, On Photography, 110. 1

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is, for her, Whitmanesque in its ‘democratic transvaluation of beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality’.3 The mundane, trivial and ugly become, through the medium of the photograph, aestheticized and subjects of value – a tradition that Sontag traces from the work of Lewis Hine and Edward Steichen, to the later work of Paul Strand and Walker Evans.4 This tradition turned the public’s attention to the overlooked significance and beauty of ordinary things (a milk bottle), marginal spaces and people (a vacant lot; the faces of the poor). ‘[T]he most enduring triumph of photography’, she writes in the essay ‘The Heroism of Vision’, ‘has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is – beauty.’5 However, Sontag’s claim that this transvaluation of aesthetic value and subject matter is particularly evident in early-twentieth-century photography seems suspect. Is it not mirrored in the many works of literary modernism that celebrate and treat as serious aesthetic material the banal (a red wheelbarrow, a crowd at a train station), the commonplace (Stein’s objects, Woolf’s ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’), the everyman and woman (Leopold Bloom and Miriam Henderson) – a tradition that has its beginnings in the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge? For Sontag, the aestheticization of the banal and humble in earlytwentieth-century photography and photographic projects that sought to bring together the ‘most heterogeneous subjects’ under the banner of a ‘fictive unity’, are both underpinned by the ideology of humanism, and it is in this regard that photography’s relationship to the ordinary is problematic for her.6 In discussing the later ‘touristic, world anthologizing’ photography of Paul Strand, which spanned ‘“Bowery derelict, Mexican peon … Hebrides fishermen … the village idiot or the great Picasso”’, Sontag poses the rhetorical question ‘What is humanity?’7 Humanity, she answers, ‘is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs’.8 At base, the essays that comprise On Photography posit the camera as an aggressive and often exploitative tool,9 reject claims that

Sontag, On Photography, 27. Sontag, On Photography, 28–31. She argues that this tradition loses momentum after the Second World War; On Photography, 31–3. 5 Sontag, On Photography, 102. 6 Sontag, On Photography, 110. 7 Sontag, On Photography, 110–11; here Sontag is quoting from another critic describing Strand’s pictures from the last period of his life, but the particular critic is not mentioned. This kind of approach which sees photography as a medium that can express something fundamental about the human condition, or a universal humanity, was perhaps most famously suggested in Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man. 8 Sontag, On Photography, 111. 9 Sontag, On Photography, 7. 3 4



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photography – even in its most earnest documentary efforts – can have a redeeming social purpose or moral function, and see all photography to aestheticize, and therefore depoliticize, its subject matter.10 As the second epigraph for this chapter indicates, in spite of its moral claims or ambitions, for Sontag photography converts the world into an aesthetic scene for the viewer’s visual pleasure and consumption.11 Sontag’s critique of photography has been influential and some of her arguments are persuasive, but it is guilty, I think, of the fault she levels against humanism – a tendency to universalization, generalization and therefore over-simplification. Sontag’s assessment of twentieth-century photography largely erases the significant differences between the work and approach of individual photographers, assumes (without ever really arguing for) an incompatibility between aesthetics and ethics, ignores the specificity of the image, and pays limited attention to the context of production and circulation, as well as questions of historical reception. Sontag’s low regard for photography and her limited efforts to take seriously the specificities of the image are reflected in the fact that her book does not reproduce one single photograph, tacitly implying that the images themselves don’t really matter. This chapter examines the relationship between photography and the everyday in the work of Dorothea Lange and considers her work in the context of some of Sontag’s claims about the moral risks and limits of photography. More than most twentieth-century photographers, Lange’s oeuvre reflects an ongoing commitment to the sphere of the everyday (what she calls the ‘familiar’) and in many ways I find that Lange’s career and her often subtle, intimate and complex images resonate with Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the ordinary as, potentially, an ethically significant sphere. In her essays, and through her photographs, Lange makes a claim for the fundamental importance of the familiar to the social and moral potential of photography at the time. In a sense, Lange’s manifesto for the familiar in photography is comparable to Virginia Woolf’s claims in essays such as ‘Modern Fiction’ that a faithful representation of ordinary experience should be the principal aim of the modern novelist. As I’ve argued elsewhere, if Woolf’s career as a writer can be viewed as an expression of her commitment to the sphere of ordinary life and common experience,12 so too Lange’s photographic oeuvre from her Depression-era work onwards consistently meditates on that same sphere. I will begin with a close-reading of two little-discussed essays by Lange – ‘Documentary Photography’ (1940) and ‘Photographing the Familiar’ (1952) – and use these as a framework for examining a selection of her photographs taken for the

Sontag, On Photography, 19–21, 110. Sontag, On Photography, 110. 12 This is one of the principal claims of Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience. 10 11

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Farm Security Administration (FSA) of farmers and migrant farm labourers working in California during the Depression years. In particular, I want to unpack Lange’s claims about the role of the familiar in photography and its close relationship to what she designates in the first epigraph to this chapter as ‘intimacy’. In the following chapter I will continue to pursue some of Sontag’s comments about photography’s ‘ethics of seeing’ in the context of Lee Miller’s war photography.13

‘The contemplation of things as they are’ This subtitle refers to a passage from the English philosopher and scientist, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), which Dorothea Lange held as her credo:

The contemplation of things as they are without substitution or imposture without error or confusion is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

From 1923 until her death in 1965, Lange attached this quotation to her successive darkroom doors.14 This quotation reflects Lange’s commitment to an investigation of ‘things as they are’, a phrase that recalls Helen Levitt’s commitment in her photography to ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’, and one that, as I will discuss in the Coda, is also central to the work of Margaret Monck. However, this quotation is suggestive of other elements of Lange’s practice and approach. For example, the emphasis on ‘contemplation’ suggests that the nature of things ‘as they are’ might not always be self-evident but requires considered attention and reflection. Similarly, the warning against ‘substitution’ or ‘imposture’ coincides with Lange’s collaborative, non-aggressive approach to photography, which I discuss in detail below. It also recalls Woolf’s encouragement in ‘Modern Fiction’ that the modern novelist ‘convey’ ordinary experience ‘with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible’, no matter what ‘aberration or complexity’ she might find therein.15 Lange’s preference for the ‘contemplation of things as they are’ rather than a ‘whole harvest of invention’ might seem to place her well outside the modernist project with its aim to, as Ezra Pound exclaimed,

Sontag, On Photography, 3. This is discussed in George P. Elliott’s introductory essay, ‘On Dorothea Lange’, in the monograph that accompanied Lange’s 1966 retrospective, Dorothea Lange (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 6. 15 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Essays 4, 160–1. 13 14



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‘make it new’.16 And yet, the contemplation of things as they are underpins many areas of modernism – Imagism and its legacies being just one example here. Furthermore, as this chapter and the photographs I discuss will illustrate, Lange’s photography incorporates various components of a modernist aesthetic – such as sharp-focus realism, the utilization of frames within frames and juxtaposition – and Lange contributes to modernism’s exploration of, and meditation on, modernity as the ongoing project of invention. Like several photographers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries whose work would later become aligned with the genre of social documentary, Lange’s work reflects a preoccupation with the ordinary and everyday. Her career in documentary photography began in the 1930s, a time in which the political and social possibilities of the medium were starting to be recognized in more formal ways; for example, as illustrative evidence in government reports and through the increasing importance of photojournalism as reflected in publications such as Picture Post and Life magazines. Indeed, Anne Whiston Spirn notes that the first illustrated government report that Lange prepared in 1935 with her collaborator and later husband Paul Taylor, which I discuss further below, comprised an entirely new genre – a kind of modernist act of collage and avant-gardism but in the genre of the government document. Whiston Spirn writes that ‘Lange’s photographs and her field notes provided the raw material for a new sort of government report: essays comprising photographs with handwritten captions, many with quotations from the people she photographed.’17 This particular report comprised longer texts by Taylor (which included statistics), Lange’s hybrid essays combining images, testimonials and text, and maps drawn by Lange’s then husband, the artist Maynard Dixon.18 A successful portrait photographer in the 1920s, Lange first began taking photographs of the effects of the Depression in 1933 in the streets of San Francisco outside her studio. The now famous picture White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, is one example of this new phase in her work.19 At the time Lange felt the need for a change in the direction and purpose of her practice, a

For a discussion of the complex history and source of this famous Poundian injunction see Michael North, ‘The Making of “Make it New”’, Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, 15 August 2013; https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-making-of-making-it-new/ (accessed 9 September 2015). 17 Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18. 18 Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 18. 19 This image can be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art’s online collection; http:// www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3373&page_ number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 (accessed 10 September 2015). 16

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shift she described as one from portraiture to ‘people’.20 Thus, from the outset, Lange’s documentary career was motivated by a social concern and, shortly thereafter, a sense of moral and political purpose. The street photographs Lange started taking in 1933 had no broadly recognized aesthetic or social value and she had no idea at the time what she was going to do with them.21 While what came to be known as social documentary photography did have several early exemplars in America – for example, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine – it was not until later in the 1930s that the practice of documenting the social conditions of the time with a camera came to acquire a more widely recognized social and political function and became an important component of print-media culture.22 The agricultural economist Paul Taylor had been impressed by Lange’s street photographs which he first saw at an exhibition in Oakland in 1934, and he subsequently asked her to accompany him to take photographs for a report he was compiling for the State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA) on the ‘fate of migrant workers who had gone to California to escape the economic disaster of the Dust Bowl in the central plains’.23 This field trip in early 1935 marked the beginning of a lifelong personal and professional collaboration between Taylor and Lange (they were married later that year). On the basis of the illustrated reports that Taylor and Lange compiled from this field trip, Lange was hired by, and worked intermittently for, the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA) and its successor, the FSA, from 1935 to 1940. The role of the FSA photographers who worked for the Historical Section was not only to document the problems faced by tenant farmers, sharecroppers and migrant rural workers across America during the Depression years but to assist in effecting change through those records.24

20 Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 21–4; Pierre Borhan, ‘Destiny and Determination’, in Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, ed. Pierre Borhan (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 8. 21 Borhan, ‘Destiny and Determination’, 8. 22 Becker Ohrn suggests that ‘[i]nitially, the potential of using the camera as an instrument for interpreting social conditions and encouraging social change had little impact on the way photography was regarded by intellectuals and the general public during the Depression’; Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 31–2. 23 Gilles Mora and Beverley W. Brannan, FSA: The American Vision (New York: Abrams, 2006), 24. 24 Lange’s work focused on the interlocking problems of farm tenancy and rural migration; Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 76. The problems faced by farmers and migrant workers were of course economic: the fall in commodity prices caused by the Depression; the financial exploitation of workers due to an excess of migrant labour; and displacement and loss of employment and land by tenant farmers due to the effects of mechanized farming. However, the challenges were also environmental (the dust bowl crisis, successive droughts, sometimes frozen crops), industrial (a lack of political representation for migrant workers and their interests), and social (migrants were often unwelcome in the places they travelled to seeking work).



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FSA photographers also documented government initiatives designed to assist farmers and migrant workers. While each photographer was assigned projects by Roy Stryker, the director of the Historical Section, and given instructions in regards to possible themes and subject matter, they worked with a fair degree of autonomy and this is evidenced by the different techniques and styles of FSA photographers such as Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee.25 Lange was viewed as particularly single-minded, desiring control over her work from beginning to end (i.e. processing), a disposition that created tensions in her relationship with Stryker and led to her eventually being fired from the FSA in 1940.26 Lange’s extensive field research contributed to numerous government reports, which resulted in the implementation of initiatives such as the provision of government funded transit camps for migrants, and formed the basis for her collaborative book with Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). Thus, from the mid-1930s Lange perceived her photography to have, primarily, a social and political purpose. Visual testimony – she, Taylor, Stryker and many others believed – could effect change at the political and material level, and did. For example, when her images of ‘Migrant Mother’ were published in the San Francisco News in March 1936, the public response was immediate and the government shipped twenty thousand pounds of food to the fields of California.27 The first report that Lange and Taylor compiled for the SERA in 1935, entitled ‘Establishment of Rural Rehabilitation Camps for Migrants in California’, resulted in the establishment of the first federally funded migrant camps.28 Many migrants lived in appallingly squalid and dangerous conditions, in makeshift dwellings with no running water, sanitation or adequate food. Migrant camps provided facilities such as toilets, hot showers, stoves, tent platforms, an office for the camp manager and a community building.29 Many more migrant camps were subsequently established across rural America in the ensuing years. Such outcomes clearly challenge the kind of blanket claims made by Sontag regarding the limited political and moral

Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 54–5. For a comparative discussion of the differences between the styles and approaches of Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee see Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, ch. 5. 26 Lange’s relationship with Stryker was complex and at times volatile. She was dismissed and then rehired by Stryker on various occasions. This relationship is discussed by Whiston Spirn in her essay ‘Dorothea Lange and the Art of Discovery’, in Daring to Look, 7–58. See also Whiston Spirn’s ‘Appendix A: Chronology of Dorothea Lange’s Life’, in Daring to Look, 299–301. On the topic of Lange’s production process upon returning from field trips see Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, Ch. 6. 27 Elizabeth Partridge, Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (New York: Penguin, 1998), 5. 28 Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 18. 29 Partridge, Restless Spirit, 52–3. 25

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efficacy of the still image, as well as the interrelationship between text and image. For example, Sontag rejects what she calls the moralists’ claims about the potential of ‘words’ to ‘save the picture’ by securing its meaning or reception: ‘no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture’s meaning’.30 While it is of course doubtful that any text – written or visual – can have a fixed, permanent meaning (an unreasonable demand Sontag makes of photography throughout her book), the interrelationship between text and image was particularly important and efficacious to Lange’s work and the developing print-media culture of the 1930s. As someone who had been crafting her own documentary poetics since the early 1930s, and who would influence the work of other FSA photographers including Ben Shahn and Walker Evans, Lange’s work comprised an important part of an emerging tradition that emphasized the social and moral, as well as aesthetic, potentials of photography.31 And it is, as I will elaborate below, a specific conception and valuation of the everyday and ‘familiar’ that underwrites Lange’s photographic practice.

On photographing the familiar While her 1952 essay ‘Photographing the Familiar’, published in Aperture, provides a more detailed account of her thesis on photography’s relationship to the familiar, Lange’s very short essay ‘Documentary Photography’ published in 1940 in A Pageant of Photography, also articulates the close association she perceives between documentary photography and everyday life.32 In that essay she suggests that documentary photography ‘records the social scene of our time’.33 Its remit is ‘man [sic] in his relation to mankind’34 and the customs, practices, routines and institutions that comprise the everyday: Sontag, On Photography, 107, 108. While Shahn acknowledged the influence of Lange on his work, Evans was not so forthcoming, but according to Shahn’s wife, Shahn and Evans talked incessantly about Lange’s work upon first encountering it through Stryker’s division in the FSA; see Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 28. 32 According to Whiston Spirn, this text was a ‘definition’ that Lange wrote in collaboration with Taylor at Ansel Adam’s request; Daring to Look, 48. The text is indeed very short (about 500 words in length), but I will continue to refer to it throughout as an essay. The collaborative history of this text is in keeping with much of Lange’s work; similarly, the essay ‘Photographing the Familiar’ was written collaboratively with her son, Daniel Dixon, although it (unlike some sentences in ‘Documentary Photography’) reads very much as Lange’s own writerly voice, and certainly resonates strongly with her photographic practice. 33 Dorothea Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (1940; Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966), 67. 34 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 67. 30 31



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[Documentary photography] records his customs at work, at war, at play, or his round of activities through twenty-four hours of the day, the cycle of the seasons, or the span of a life. It portrays his institutions – family, church, government, political organizations, social clubs, labor unions.35 These photographs do not seek to show ‘merely [the] facades’ of such institutions and practices: that is, their function for Lange is not simply indexical.36 Rather, and perhaps in a project not unlike Lefebvre’s critique, she believes that documentary photography can ‘reveal the manner in which [such institutions and forms] function, absorb the life, hold the loyalty, and influence the behaviour of human beings’.37 Itself a product of the technological modernity with which Lange was so preoccupied, the camera is for Lange ‘pre-eminently suited to build a record of change’.38 In this text she describes the camera as a mechanism that can capture the complex intersections between everyday life and modernity: ‘the simultaneous existence of past, present, and portent of the future … conspicuous in old and new forms, old and new customs, on every hand’.39 This kind of tension is evident in many of her images, Figure 12 being just one example of this.40 Lange views the photograph as a media that possesses the kind of generic ambiguity that critics such as Ben Highmore see as particularly fruitful for the study of everyday life.41 According to Lange ‘[a] single photographic print may be “news,” a “portrait,” “art,” or “documentary” – any of these, all of them, or none’. It can straddle the fault line between ‘social science’ and art, the realms of the public and the private. Lange was resistant to the categorization of her work as either documentary or art.42 She also

Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 37 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 38 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 39 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 40 ‘Advancing technology raises standards of living, creates unemployment, changes the face of cities and of the agricultural landscape’; Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 41 Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 20. 42 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. Lange’s ambiguous position in relation to the categorization of her work reflected a broader debate in the 1930s about the relative relationship between art and document in photography. This was in part because, as previously mentioned, documentary photography was an emerging genre, but also because the Depression gave rise to new forms of documentary expression that often cut across ‘traditional divisions between different media’; Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 26. As Lange and Taylor’s 1935 field trip for the SERA illustrates, new collaborations between governments, artists, scientists and economists occurred in an effort to understand and respond to the conditions of the time. The different destinations and audiences of Lange’s Depression-era photography is a case in point. Her photographs featured in government reports, newspapers, photo-magazines and in various exhibitions at the Museum 35 36

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FIGURE 12 Dorothea Lange, Power farming displaces tenants from the land in the western dry cotton area. Childress County, Texas Panhandle, June 1938. Library of Congress.

viewed documentary photography as an inherently democratic genre, one which, in the tradition of the Mass Observation project undertaken in Britain from the 1930s, must involve the participation of ‘amateurs’ as well as professionals.43 For it is only through the work of amateurs that the ‘documentation by the camera of our age and our complex society [can] be intimate, pervasive, and adequate’.44 Critics often comment that Lange tended to under-emphasize her role as an artist, sometimes referring to herself as a ‘tradesman’ and ‘witness’.45 Thus, in her very short essay ‘Documentary Photography’, Lange claims photography as a medium that has the potential to map and investigate the complex sphere of everyday modern life in a way that is both democratic and generically flexible and open-ended. of Modern Art in 1949, 1952 and 1966 (shortly after her death). Whiston Sprin suggests that Lange had ‘the eye of an ethnographer and the vision of an artist’; Daring to Look, 48. She states that Lange ‘rarely called herself an artist and, by the 1960s, no longer considered her work documentary (perhaps because she had been married first to an artist [Maynard Dixon], then to a social scientist [Paul Taylor], and identified fully with neither’; Daring to Look, 48. 43 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 44 Lange, ‘Documentary Photography’, 68. 45 Bohran, ‘Destiny and Determination’, 6, 11.



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Her 1952 essay ‘Photographing the Familiar’ was motivated by Lange’s view that photography had abandoned the everyday or ‘familiar world’, and sets out her claim that the ‘function’ of photography rests on a fidelity to that sphere.46 At the beginning of her essay she states that photography ‘appears to be in a state of flight’ (68). Having exhausted the technical aspects of his equipment, the photographer has instead turned to an experimental exploration of subject matter: ‘this time he gropes, not for the new chemical or lens, but for what he calls the “new angle”’ (69). The flight she describes is from the familiar into the avant-garde realms of abstraction, shock, defamiliarization and the spectacular: Thus the spectacular is cherished above the meaningful, the frenzied above the quiet, the unique above the potent. The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses; the world is forced by the professional into unnatural shapes. Landscape, season, occasion – these are compelled to a twisted service in which they need not be interpreted but, like a process, invented. (69–70) Lange criticizes what she understands to be a preference for inventing the world rather than interpreting it – a recurring theme throughout the essay. The above quotation also describes an approach that is aggressive by forcing, compelling and twisting the subject matter to certain ‘unnatural’ ends. Here, Lange anticipates Sontag’s critique of a photography that is aggressive and appropriative towards its subject matter, but certainly does not, like Sontag, see all photography to function in this way.47 While Lange does not mention specific photographers in her essay, European avantgarde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism exerted a considerable influence on American photography during the inter-war period and beyond. The abstracting eye (for example, through the close-up) and experimental approaches are evident in the work of Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White and Man Ray among many others. Becker Ohrn suggests that these comments could also refer to Lange’s ambivalence regarding the approach of photo-magazines such as Life during the 1950s which favoured the ‘dramatic, eye-catching view’ over ‘thoughtful examination’ of social issues.48 However, in her essay Lange suggests that the issue lies not in a particular tradition or approach per se but the photographer’s changed relationship to their

Lange, ‘Photographing the Familiar’, 70, 72. All subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 47 Sontag, On Photography, 4. 48 Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 160. 46

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machine, the camera. Having recorded the negative impact of mechanized farming practices on the lives of many tenant farmers and sharecroppers during the Depression years, and writing in the shadow of a Second World War that saw rationalist technologies utilized to ever more appalling ends, Lange’s assessment of photography is intimately tied to her understanding of humans’ relationship to machines, and how machines can be best used in the service of, rather than against, people. She describes the camera as a machine that can be put to both creative and destructive ends, and contends that part of the photographer’s ‘responsibility’ as an artist is to use and endow the camera with ‘passion’ and ‘humanity’, so that the machine will work in the service of human interests: ‘an agent more of good than of evil’ (69). The creative work of photography rests, Lange claims, on a focus on the ordinary world rather than eschewing it, escaping it, or attempting to transform it through stylistic experimentation: ‘That the familiar world is often unsatisfactory cannot be denied, but it is not, for all that, one we need abandon … We need not be seduced into evasion of it any more than we need be appalled by it into silence. We need not, for fear of the world’s image, either hide in or ruin technique’ (70). Moreover, as I will discuss further below, it is through the common ground of the familiar that Lange believes a dialectical exchange and ‘intimacy’ (71) can be achieved between photographer, subject and audience. It is certainly not Lange’s contention that the familiar, everyday world is always satisfactory or a transparent, knowable realm. To return to the quotation from Bacon, to contemplate things ‘as they are’ is ‘nobler’ than a ‘harvest of invention’. The familiar world is, in her view, the proper subject matter of photography and, potentially, a vehicle for greater social understanding. This is a sentiment expressed by Virginia Woolf in the essay ‘Character in Fiction’ in which she likens the novelist to a ‘hostess’ who must make use of familiar topics such as the ‘weather’ in order to then engage the reader in the ‘the far more difficult business of intimacy’.49 Woolf asserts that ‘[a] convention in writing is not much different from a convention in manners’ and ‘[b]oth in life and in literature’ some common ground is needed in order to bridge ‘the gulf’ between ‘the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other’: The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this

Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 431.

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common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.50 Woolf’s visual metaphors of darkness notwithstanding, her emphasis in this passage on the ordinary and everyday as a site of hospitality, a potential ‘meeting-place’ and a ground for both ‘intimacy’ and understanding resonates strongly with Lange’s thesis in ‘Photographing the Familiar’. For example, in discussing the role of the familiar in photography Lange likewise draws on metaphors of hospitality as well as kinship and relationality. Most of us live in worlds, she writes, that are ‘at least cousin to each other’ and when placed in proximity seem compelled to interact and enter into dialogue and exchange: ‘worlds that visit and entertain, quarrel and gossip’ and can be ‘companion to each other’ (70). This coincides with Lange’s approach to fieldwork which, as I discuss further below, was very much centred on dialogic exchange. ‘[W]hat is familiar to one of us’, she writes, ‘may very likely be familiar to another’ and here she cites examples such as work, physical sensations (‘sun on the back’), emotions (‘cold in the heart’), quotidian things (‘a board fence’) and daily activities such as eating and sleeping (70). It is our shared experience as physical, affective and social beings that constitutes our common ground: ‘Hard work, warm weather, pain, we all have enough in common to make most of our many worlds companion to each other’ (70). Lange’s attitude and practice was undoubtedly informed by a humanism that was widely accepted in America during the 1950s following the war, but it is a modest one centred on our common share in the everyday rather than grand claims about a universal rationality or human nature. However, much like Woolf’s emphasis on the complexity and particularity of ordinary experience in works such as the essay ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), it is important to stress that while all our lives are embedded in the everyday,51 for Lange as for Woolf, the everyday life of another is always particular and a matter of relation, not identification. It does not appear transparently before the knowing gaze of the photographer or audience. In a departure from avant-garde concepts of defamiliarization that have their ground in the unconscious, the imagination, or acts of artistic innovation and shock, much of Lange’s Depression-era photography, like Lee Miller’s war work, presents a world that is defamiliarized and made strange due to the disorientating and disruptive effects of modernity itself. Lange’s photographs of farmers and migrant labourers in California during the 1930s – which focus on key markers of American everyday life such as cars, homes and dwelling, domestic objects and commodities, billboards and

Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 431. Felski, Doing Time, 79.

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FIGURE 13 Dorothea Lange, Drought refugees from Abilene, Texas, following the crops of California as migratory workers. ‘The finest people in this world live in Texas but I just can’t seem to accomplish nothin’ there. Two year drought, then a crop, then two years drought and so on. I got two brothers still trying to make it back there and there they’re sitting,’ said the father, August 1936. Library of Congress.

advertising, faces and gestures, and activities such as work, domestic labour and walking – present an everyday that while in some degree ‘cousin’ to the viewer’s own, has been radically recast by economic crisis and displacement. For example, motor cars feature prominently in Lange’s photographs of migrant workers, not only because they were essential to the livelihoods of many migrants who followed the crops seasonally from state to state, but because cars, like the open road, were a familiar icon of 1930s American



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FIGURE 14 Dorothea Lange, Texan refugees’ car. They are seeking work in the carrot fields of the Coachella Valley. California, February 1937. Library of Congress.

consumer culture which is recast in Lange’s images. Conventionally a mode of transport and a symbol of social status, leisure and the good life, the cars that feature in Lange’s photographs are, by contrast, dilapidated, cluttered and often stalled due to failed mechanics, flat tyres or a lack of tyres (see Figures 13 and 14). Her representations of automobiles not only sit in stark contrast to contemporary advertising of the time but also the iconography and celebratory rhetoric of the machine central to avant-garde movements such as Futurism. Rather than dynamism, speed and freedom, Lange’s vehicles invariably signify uncertain or arrested passage and constraint as in Figure 15 which goes by the alternate titled Ditched, Stalled and Stranded.52 Often referred to in Lange’s notes as ‘homes on wheels’ (a conflation of the domestic and technological that would have been anathema to the Futurists) cars usually double as mobile dwellings, loaded with families and everyday domestic objects and furniture – a box of ‘Mother’s Oats’, buckets, jars, a cabinet and frying pans – commonplace domestic items which in Figure 13 appear precarious and decontextualized. Images such as this one and Texan refugees’ car (Figure 14), which shows a car that is

See the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s entry for this image: http://www.sfmoma. org/explore/collection/artwork/12480 (accessed 18 September 2015).

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FIGURE 15 Dorothea Lange, Once a Missouri farmer, now a migratory farm laborer on the Pacific Coast. California, February 1936. Library of Congress.

stationary in a field with a trunk, a child’s highchair, and a tyre all precariously balanced on the bonnet, serve as a stark counterpoint to the billboard advertisements touting the American way of life which Lange documented with a blank irony throughout her field trips so as to illustrate the extreme contrast between the American Dream and the reality in these parts of the country (see Figure 16). As homes on wheels, transporting families and their belongings from place to place, cars also become part of temporary dwellings, attached to tents, stoves and makeshift furniture – shelters that are fragile, transient and unhomely (see Figure 17). Lange’s pictures of migrants’ temporary homes not only evidence their rudimentary nature but their isolation. In



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FIGURE 16 Dorothea Lange, Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers, March 1937. Library of Congress.

Tent housing a family of four who will be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration (Figure 18) it is not only the material inadequacy and fragility of this dwelling that is evident but its isolation, located in a depopulated and barren landscape, just like the car in Figure 14. In such images the surrealist strategy of the uncontrived juxtaposition – a child’s highchair on a car bonnet situated in the middle of a field (Figure 14), a coat serving as a screen on part of a makeshift house (Figure 18) – takes on a very different tone. In effect, such images reappropriate the surrealist juxtaposition from the affective region of the bizarre or humorous to the sombre and haunting: what of the person who usually occupies the coat that hangs spectrally in Figure 18, like Mrs Ramsay’s empty coat in part three of To the Lighthouse? In such images and throughout her Depression-era work, Lange frequently draws on the most familiar aspects and figures of American everyday life, such as cars, home, dwelling and family, in order to index how they have become transformed and threatened for so many by the effects of modernity (for example, capitalism, environmental degradation, industrialized farming practices). Indeed, it is the paucity, fragility and transience of these markers of everyday life – ones that would normally

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FIGURE 17 Dorothea Lange, Pea picker’s home. The condition of these people warrant resettlement camps for migrant agricultural workers. Nipomo, California, February 1936. Library of Congress.

FIGURE 18 Dorothea Lange, Tent housing a family of four who will be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration. Imperial County, California, March 1937. Library of Congress.



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denote stability, security and comfort – that powerfully communicates the migrants’ desperate circumstances. As Lefebvre comments quoting Hegel, ‘[t]he familiar is not necessarily the known’.53 If Lange’s conception of the familiar has the everyday as its ground – work, everyday objects, family, dwelling and so forth – her photographs make manifest through that visual rhetoric of the familiar the ‘genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts’54 that differentiate people’s everyday lives, but that also place them in ethical proximity.

Photography, intimacy and the familiar Earlier I noted that in her essay ‘Character in Fiction’ Woolf posits the familiar and common as a ground for greater intimacy between hostess and guest, writer and reader, and in Chapter 3 I explored how familiar domestic things become encoded in networks of intimacy and interpersonal relations in To the Lighthouse. Throughout ‘Photographing the Familiar’, Lange connects the familiar to ideas of intimacy, and intimacy is perhaps one of the most apt terms to describe the tonality of much of Lange’s work.55 Intimacy has become an important concept in the contemporary Humanities and some recent studies of everyday life. For example, in Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, it is one of three themes that structures Highmore’s analysis.56 He notes that everyday life is ‘full of intimate knowledges precisely because the everyday is the arena of the world most closely met. Intimacy connotes proximity, familiarity and habit’.57 Highmore uses the term in two ways. Firstly, it points to the ‘arena of life that is materially closest to us’ and highlights the fact that ‘proximity matters’.58 In this sense intimacy ‘suggests a form of attention that looks at the proximetrics of everyday life’. If we were to consider the micro-geography of the material world of work by way of example, this

Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 132. Sontag, On Photography, 33. 55 Lange commented in a 1964 interview that her work possessed a particular, distinctive ‘tonality’, a term she preferred over ‘style’; quoted in Whiston Sprin, Daring to Look, 55. As Whiston Sprin observes, Lange was ‘speaking of far more than the actual tones of her prints’, however, their physical tonality is ‘revealing’. Lange’s photographs, Whiston Sprin continues, ‘are almost always composed of shades of gray from dark to light with complex overtones’ and her prints are ‘low key, speaking with a softer voice than the loud shout of high-contrast print’. Thus, the physical tones of Lange’s photographs contribute to their often quiet, meditative and intimate tonality; Whiston Sprin, Daring to Look, 55. 56 The other two are aesthetics and humanism. 57 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 15. 58 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 15. 53 54

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might involve looking at the ‘office furniture, factory humour, coffee and tea breaks’.59 The other sense of intimacy that Highmore utilizes is intimacy’s ‘connotations of emotional, sexual and psychological closeness’, a form of intimacy that has ‘traditionally desired secrecy’ (the discretion of lovers, the trustworthiness of friends and so on).60 I suggest that through her work Lange seeks to establish the first kind of intimacy which Highmore associates with ‘proximetrics’ – putting the audience into closer proximity with the everyday material world of another – while through her visual poetics, she engages the viewer in the second version of intimacy through ideas of secrecy and reserve. Through her images Lange sometimes offers a glimpse into the private, interior world of another, but it remains only a glimpse as the secrecy of that world is ultimately respected and retained. In ‘Photographing the Familiar’, Lange proposes that in order to ‘see the familiar’ the photographer ‘must act and feel the familiar’: thus modes of photographic seeing here depend on a particular affective relationship to the subject at hand (71). Again drawing on metaphors of hospitality and kinship, the photographer must himself ‘become a familiarity’, entering the house of another not as ‘a man from Mars’ but by becoming ‘a member of the family’ (71). However, as will become clear, this differs from Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ approach which is abstract and archetypal. Proximity, like Woolf’s act of ‘bridging the gulf’61 between author and reader, hostess and guest, is established for Lange through a sharing of and focus on the quotidian: ‘His impulse can be a movement of the common; his instinct can be a gesture of the ordinary; his vision can be a focus on the usual’ (71). It is through this process that the photographer can achieve an ‘intimacy’ with her subjects, one Lange contends is shared not only between the photographer and subject ‘but by the audience’ (71). Thus, both Woolf and Lange contend that relations of intimacy can be established between author– reader/subject–photographer–viewer through a focus on the ordinary, both as common meeting-point (the weather, a gesture) and subject matter. This ideal of intimate exchange took the form of actual conversation in Lange’s fieldwork practice: in this sense it was a concrete intimacy, not simply a theoretical or abstract one. In another striking consonance with Woolf, Lange believed that conversation with migrants provided what she termed a ‘common ground’ which she believed was necessary in order to do the work she did.62 She talked to people about their background, the intimate details of their day-to-day lives (work and pay rates, food, shelter), and Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 15. Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 15. 61 Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 3, 431. 62 Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 44. To continue with the comparison between Lange and Woolf, as I discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Character in Fiction’ similarly draws on a purportedly actual exchange between Woolf and a woman she met on 59 60



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would later transcribe these details – often verbatim – into her notebooks. This information formed the basis for captions. Even though some of her photographs do possess an archetypal quality (the image that has come to be known as Migrant Mother being an obvious example), Lange’s captions and notes from the field were always detailed, factual and specific rather than tending to the universal or generic (‘Man leaning on a fence’, etc.).63 Lange’s approach to captions was very different to that of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White in their book You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a photo-essay which examined rural poverty and inequality in the South during the 1930s. While Bourke-White never worked for the FSA, she was an important figure in American documentary photography in the 1930s and 1940s. Caldwell, who wrote the text for You Have Seen Their Faces, and Bourke-White, who took the photographs, comment in their preface to the book that while ‘[n]o person, place or episode’ is ‘fictitious’, the names of people and places have been changed and ‘[t]he legends [captions] under the pictures are intended to express the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals portrayed; they do not pretend to reproduce the actual sentiments of these persons’.64 As such, Caldwell and Bourke-White deny their subjects their own voice. You Have Seen Their Faces confuses the issue of authenticity further by ventriloquizing their subjects through attributing captions that have the appearance of direct quotations, quotations that are at times offensive and even racist.65 In order to achieve intimacy, testimony and the establishment of trust were central components of Lange’s practice. If people were wary Lange would explain that she was working for the government to report on the problems faced by farmers and migrants and that she was there to assist their cause. This in conjunction with her limp, which was the result of a the train, someone who is initially cast in archetypal and universal terms (Mrs Brown) but by the end of the essay is presented in all of her alterity and particularity. 63 The actual title for the picture is Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. The image can be viewed through the Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue at the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/fsa1998021539/PP/ (accessed 9 September 2015). For a background on the image and the Migrant Mother series see: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html. This was actually a rare instance in which Lange did not speak at great length to the subject, Florence Owens Thompson, before taking her photographs. 64 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937; New York: Arno Press, 1975), n.p. 65 For example, one image of a black woman sitting on a porch with a small child in her arms and another young girl sitting next to her has the following title and caption: Ocelot, Georgia ‘I got more children now than I know what to do with, but they keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime’; Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 39. While the book does reflect a genuine concern for rural poverty and racial and social inequality in the South, it nevertheless disempowers its subjects (black and white) by denying them their own voice and falling back on class-based and racial stereotypes.

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childhood attack of polio, made Lange, on her own account, more readily accepted and trusted by the people she photographed.66 Aware of the vulnerability of the people she was working among and the power differentials at play, Lange’s aim was to make the process of taking a photograph not only consensual but cooperative and collaborative: ‘“I never steal a photograph,” she told [Rondal] Partridge. “Never. All photographs are made in collaboration, as part of their thinking as well as mine.”’67 This is again in sharp contrast to Caldwell and Bourke-White’s approach in You Have Seen Their Faces. Bourke-White would set up a flash light on the person to be photographed and, while Caldwell chatted to them, take the photograph when the subject revealed the desired expression or gesture. Their description of the process engages in the kind of language of aggression and appropriation that Sontag critiques in On Photography: ‘It might be an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.’68 This statement reflects the language of intent and pre-conception, aggression and fixity (‘imprisoned’), and the unsolicited (‘before they knew what happened’). By contrast, Roy Stryker and numerous critics have commented that of all the FSA photographers, Lange ‘had the most sensitivity and the most rapport with people’,69 something that is evidenced in the intimate tonality of many of her images – an intimacy that is completely lacking in Bourke-White’s photographs for You Have Seen Their Faces. Furthermore, more than any other FSA photographer – and perhaps any American documentary photographer of the period – Lange emphasized the importance of conversation and written testimony which also contributed to her aim to create an intimate,

Becker Orhn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 58. Lange’s physical impairment (which she referred to as her ‘lameness’) had a profound impact on her personally and professionally. She stated, ‘I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once’; quoted in Borhan, ‘Destiny and Determination’, 12. Lange’s physical impairment not only shaped her personal and political sympathies for the socially marginalized but is reflected in her preoccupation with movement, the body and gesture – what Sally Stein refers to as the ‘testimony of the body’; Sally Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body’, in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, ed. Elizabeth Partridge (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 58–89. For another discussion of Lange’s limp and its influence on her work see Therese Thau Heyman, ‘A Rock or a Line of Unemployed: Art and Document in Dorothea Lange’s Photography’, in Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, eds Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips and John Szarkowski (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 1994), 55–75. 67 This comment was relayed to Whiston Spirn in her 2005 interview with Rondal Partridge, Lange’s long-time assistant in the field; Daring to Look, 23. 68 Caldwell and Bourke-White, ‘Notes on photographs by Margaret Bourke-White’, in You Have Seen Their Faces, 187. 69 Roy Stryker quoted in Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 58. 66



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democratic and dialogic relationship between photographer, subject and audience.70 Her collaborative book with Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, likewise sought to let its participants ‘speak … face to face’ with the audience.71 Thus, Lange sought to develop an intimacy with her subjects through dialogue and what Highmore designates as ‘proximetrics’ – learning about and documenting in both visual and written forms the material reality of their daily lives. In addition to an intimacy achieved through actual conversation and an attention to the material particularities of everyday life, many of Lange’s images present a visual poetics and dialectic of intimacy between subject and audience through framing, point of view and the gaze. This mode of intimacy in her work does not necessarily equate to ‘knowledge’ per se, in the manner that an intimacy based on proximetrics can, but gives rise to a different hermeneutic and ethical register – one connected to ideas of secrecy and reserve. Indeed, Sally Stein has observed the same quality in Lange’s work, suggesting that an image such as White Angel Breadline ‘contains the force of compelling interest combined with a sense of reserve’.72 In her analysis of Lange’s engagement with the testimony of the body and the rhetoric of gesture, Stein notes how in White Angel Breadline Lange ‘appears to have stopped for this exposure midway between accustomed and desired points of view, resisting the impulse to probe more closely as the central, destitute figure leans forward in a way that both attracts our attention and blocks our gaze’.73 Stein proposes that some of Lange’s most memorable pictures are of ‘gestures that indicate something contained, coiled tightly’: a mute expression of something ultimately held in reserve from the viewer.74 A poetics of intimacy based on a dialectic of invitation and concealment, appeal and reserve, can be traced in many of Lange’s pictures. To return to Figure 13 by way of example, cars figure as intimate spaces in many of Lange’s photographs. They are small spaces into which families are piled and into which the camera and viewer are sometimes invited. However, such intimacy does not afford the viewer an assured, much less a totalized, gaze, and it is the oscillation between disclosure and concealment, invitation and reserve, that contributes to the dialectical According to Becker Ohrn, Lange placed more emphasis on conversation and testimony than any other FSA photographer and her captions have continued to feature in exhibitions of her work and to be reprinted in contemporary scholarly studies and critical biographies of her work; Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, 67–9. Similarly, Whiston Spirn has recently argued for the essential relationship between Lange’s images and captions; Daring to Look, 11–13. 71 Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, ed. Sam Stourdzé (1939; Paris: jeanmichelplace, 1999), 6. 72 Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 67. 73 Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 67. 74 Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 85. 70

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nature and ethical sensibility of this and many of Lange’s other photographs. Drought refugees from Abilene, Texas, following the crops of California as migratory workers (Figure 13) constructs a powerful but ambiguous visual exchange between the two young girls in the car and the viewer. The photograph builds a sense of intimacy through its focus on the family’s domestic belongings, the framing of the three faces which draws us in towards the interior of the car and the family within, and the posture of the girl at the front who leans out towards us. Nevertheless, the viewer’s visual access to all three subjects is limited. The half-opened car window and line of wire extending across it divides the visual frame, intercepting the exchange of gazes between the viewer and children. Indeed, the image is replete with horizontal lines which connote both forward passage and division: telegraph lines, road lines, roof-rack, poles, door frames, windows, rope and wire. Like the fragile lines of wire that attach the family’s worldly possessions precariously to the car, the intercepted frame of the car window suggests the relationality but also separation between their world and ours. The mother’s face is hidden in shadow and looks towards the road in front, while the faces of the two girls are either totally or partially obscured by shadow. Nevertheless, in spite of the various impediments to sight lines, the gazes of the two girls are firmly fixed on the viewer and their serious yet ambiguous expressions address us. Their intense gaze has the force of a question or an appeal: the basis for what Levinas describes as the encounter with the face of the other, a topic I will return to briefly in the concluding section of this chapter. In Figure 15, Lange has taken the photograph at close range so as to create the effect that we are inside the car – as if a passenger travelling with this migrant couple. Some reproductions of this photograph are heavily cropped so as to focus on the man’s torso and face, cutting out most of his wife and amplifying our sense of being a passenger in the car. Lange’s framing again constructs an intimate space but one which also conveys feelings of claustrophobia or constraint (which can be a negative effect of intimacy), thereby reflecting the couple’s situation. During her tenure at the FSA Lange generally encountered people experiencing extreme hardship. However, critics have often observed that while always empathetic in her approach, Lange never made her subjects appear pitiable or hopeless. Whiston Spirn contends that the ‘tonality’ of Lange’s ‘portraits is never derisive or demeaning’ but preserves the person’s ‘dignity’ and what I have termed their reserve.75 For example, Figure 15 has been shot from a low angle so that the couple are elevated in the frame and the man is visually placed in a position of power. In addition, their gazes look away which again places a limit on the degree of intimacy the image and encounter

Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 57.

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permits. Refusing to meet the camera’s gaze, we have been granted access into the intimate space of the car but are granted only partial access to the psychological and emotional space of the people that occupy it. The woman looks preoccupied but composed; the man’s look is distant but his face and posture communicate strain. In her analysis of gesture and Lange’s choreography of the body, Stein argues that Lange was ‘not inclined to expose secrets but rather sought to register the enormity of their pressure in and on the body’.76 She suggests that Lange ‘worked to indicate the force of such withholding while insisting upon the limits of comprehending that which, though it charged the surface, lay submerged beneath it’.77 While Stein’s analysis focuses on the gestural body (often a body that is crumpled or coiled), the same dynamic of expressiveness and reserve can be traced in the faces, as well as the bodies, of the subjects in several of the images I discuss here. Figure 17 also presents a complex dynamic of intimacy and reserve through what Chandler terms the ‘network or relay of regard’ that is central to the tradition of sentiment.78 In this photograph the camera draws us into another intimate space: the tent housing of a family of migrants. But as in so many of Lange’s pictures of migrant houses and tents, we remain on the periphery, in this instance peering into the dark interior only to find the family inside peering back out at us. Again, sight lines are intercepted or obstructed: the child peers from behind a stove pipe, the nursing mother bends down to look out at Lange/us from beneath the drape of the tent. Through its framing and forms of the gaze, the image functions as an opening into their world but does not present the illusion of a complete disclosure or full access. Furthermore, we are positioned to be as much a subject of curiosity and question to these migrants as they are to us. The kind of visual politics and poetics at work in these pictures coincides with Lange’s view that intimacy can give rise to a greater awareness of complexity and difference. It is through intimacy, she contends towards the end of her essay ‘Photographing the Familiar,’ that the photographer can be ‘admitted to subtleties and complexities shut to the stranger’: For in that intimacy, even with the commonplace, will be discovered passages and openings denied to the outsider … [The intimate] will find the simple to be complicated, the miniature to be enormous, the insignificant decisive. Through familiarity the photographer will find not only the familiar but the strange, not only the ordinary but the rare; not only the mutual but, the singular. (71)

Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 85. Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 85. 78 Chandler, An Archaeology, 12. 76 77

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Through an approach to the familiar grounded in an ethic and poetics of intimacy, Lange believes that the photographer and audience can gain an opening into the complex and particular world of another and think in more nuanced ways about the relationship between their world and the viewer’s own. For Lange a ‘great photograph’ should ask and then answer two questions: ‘Is that my world? What, if not, has that world to do with mine?’ (70). In her images, this correspondence is one that often depends as much on what is – visually or hermeneutically – withheld, or kept in reserve, as it is with what is shown.

Lange and the face-to-face In the previous chapter I explored a number of self-other encounters in Woolf’s non-fiction and fiction that I argued resonate with Levinas’ account of the face-to-face and responsibility. In line with critics such as Michael Morgan and Derek Attridge, I suggested that Levinas’ account of transcendence and his theory of responsibility have their ground in the ordinary: the encounter with the face of another person which affirms something outside of and irreducible to the self.79 The encounter with the face of another person, or persons, who are vulnerable and in need is of course central to much socially or morally concerned photography, and in this concluding section I want to turn briefly to a few images of the face in Lange’s work. Rather than presenting people as objects of pity – a mechanism by which the poor or dispossessed are reduced to the status of other – many of Lange’s portraits achieve a more complex affective and ethical register. To recall Whiston Spirn’s observation again, the ‘tonality’ of Lange’s ‘portraits is never … demeaning’ but preserves the person’s ‘dignity’.80 This arises in many of her pictures, including the ones I discuss below, through the dynamics of ‘regard’81 and the relay of the gaze between subject and audience. Lange’s work is attuned to the poetics and complex politics of sentiment and sympathy. She commented in an interview in 1960 that ‘[s]entiment and sentimentality … are difficult concepts to manage’.82 As I discussed in the previous chapter, for Chandler sentiments are ‘the result of a projective imagination across a network or relay of regard’, which ‘involves a sense of how another is regarding us’ as well as how we

Pierre Hayat, Preface to Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), xv. 80 Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 57. 81 Chandler, An Archaeology, 12. 82 Cited in Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 58. 79



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FIGURE 19 Dorothea Lange, Children of destitute family. American River camp, near Sacramento, California, November 1936. Library of Congress.

regard them and what we ‘see in the eyes’ and ‘face’ of another.83 Chandler’s definition of sentiment coincides with some contemporary definitions of affect in the sense that while ‘[v]ehement passion … draws a line around a human subject’, sentiments ‘spread us thin’ and involve a ‘structure of vicariousness’. Sentiments also involve an element of ‘speculation as to the meaning of another’s countenance, what it expresses and what it hides’.84 A network of regard giving rise to both speculation and structures of vicariousness aptly describes the photographs I discuss below, and these are Chandler, An Archaeology, 12. Chandler, An Archaeology, 12.

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images which, I would argue, also create an opening for the kind of faceto-face encounter described by Levinas. In interviews Lange commented on her profound interest in the human face as a phenomenon that is utterly particular yet shares in a language that she believed to be universal. Her skills as a portrait photographer during the 1920s were redeployed in her later fieldwork and she is perhaps best known, rightly or wrongly, for her pictures of people’s faces.85 It is in some of Lange’s Depression-era photographs of children that I see a particularly powerful Levinasian conception of exteriority and an ethical dynamic of appeal and demand through the gaze to be at work. This is perhaps because, as in Figure 15, in many of her portraits of adults during the Depression years her subjects look away: they do not engage the camera directly with their gaze but look off into the distance. There is proximity but also a limit to intimacy’s reach. By contrast, in Lange’s photographs of children they generally address the camera directly. This is perhaps because these children were less shaped by feelings of shame or the need to protect, through an averted gaze, a precarious sense of autonomy and control. And yet, these children are by no means stereotypical figures of pity or despair: they meet the camera with a look or regard that, in the tradition of Levinas’ face-to-face, establishes a dynamic of appeal and question, vulnerability and command. We, the viewer, seem to be held to account. This relay is evident in Figures 13, 19 and 20. In these three photographs the viewer is met by the penetrating gaze of not one but two children. The doubling in each image creates uncanniness (and arguably a kind of excess) that undercuts and destabilizes the authority and assurance of our position as viewer in possession of the gaze; here, we become the focus of a doubled and questioning gaze. In addition to the doubled gaze is the uncanniness of other forms of repetition and doubling: each pair of children look alike (they are likely siblings) and unwittingly mirror each other’s poses and/or expressions. In Figure 19 the two boys have almost identical eyes, eyes that are made salient as the lower half of the younger boy’s face is obscured by a stove pipe. The boys assume the same reserved, slightly nervous posture (hands clasped or in pockets), bear similar marks and stains on the front of their dungarees, and meet us with the same steady gaze, a look that expresses vulnerability but also bears the mark of a question. As in Figure 13, this image engages us in an encounter: a meeting of worlds, a recognition of need, and a look that, as in Figure 20, seems to ask ‘Who are you?’ while simultaneously holding Stein challenges the view that Lange focused primarily on the face and facial expressions, instead arguing for the important role of the body and the choreography of gesture in her work; ‘Peculiar Grace’, 67. Whiston Spirn likewise reappraises the conventional view that Lange was only a ‘photographer of people’, instead drawing attention to Lange’s interest in landscapes of various kinds; Daring to Look, 14.

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FIGURE 20 Dorothea Lange, Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California, November 1936. Library of Congress.

the viewer to account. As I discussed in Chapter 4, in Totality and Infinity Levinas describes the face-to-face relation through metaphors of language, such as calling, saying, appeal, expression and dialogue, rather than vision, the latter of which tends to define the rhetoric of knowledge and being in the Western philosophical tradition. He writes that ‘[t]o see the face is to speak of the world. Transcendence is not an optics, but the first ethical gesture.’86 While, as a photographer, Lange is of course dealing concretely with the realm of the visual, she believed that the photograph could attain the status of a kind of virtual dialogue or conversation, one which, again, I would argue must be understood through the terms of responsibility – the relationship between my world and that of another. She writes at the end of ‘Photographing the Familiar’ that by turning ‘attention to the familiarities of which we are a part’ the photographer can ‘speak more than of our subjects – we can speak with them; we can more than speak about our subjects – we can speak for them’ (72). However, the dialogue is by no means unidirectional as ‘[t]hey, given tongue, will be able to speak with and for us’ (72). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 174.

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As Levinas views the face of another person as the basis for alterity and transcendence and as the ground for a recognition of our fundamental responsibility to another, in her essay on the familiar Lange claims that through an intimacy established through the commonplace we can come into proximity with that which extends, challenges or exceeds our understanding and knowledge (the ‘complicated’, the ‘strange’, the ‘rare’ and the ‘singular’, 71). But like Helen Levitt’s exceptional street photography, to appreciate this requires an attention to the nuance and subtlety of Lange’s work. In composing an exhibition wall on personal relationships for her 1966 retrospective show for the Museum of Modern Art, Lange commented that her great aspiration and hope was that the viewer would say to himself: ‘Oh yes, I know what she meant. I never thought of it, I never paid attention to it.’ Or … ‘I’ve seen that a thousand times.’ But he won’t miss it again, won’t miss it again. You’ve told about the familiar, the understood; but in calling attention to what it holds, you have added to your viewer’s confidence or his understanding.87 Lange’s aspiration was that an intimacy established through the commonplace prompts the audience to reflect on the relationship between their world and that of another, a relationship that Lange understands through the terms of responsibility: ‘“Is that my world? What, if not, has that world to do with mine?”’ (70). Rather than an act of ‘didacticism’ or appropriation,88 through a focus on the familiar and an ethics and poetics of intimacy, many of Lange’s photographs of the Great Depression prompt a reflection on self-other relations and put into motion a dynamic of regard and, potentially, reciprocity and responsibility that stays with the viewer long after the image has disappeared from view. Lange has been overlooked in critical assessments and cultural histories of the everyday, but the concept is absolutely central to her work. In addition to being an important figure in the history of documentary photography, Lange’s essays and photographs present a sophisticated account of the everyday in relation to ideas of the familiar and intimacy and how they are connected to issues of social understanding and responsibility. In addition to offering a suggestive contrast to conventional modernist and avant-garde theories of defamiliarization, Lange’s account of the familiar is unusual in the history of everyday life theory in the sense that she – like Woolf and Stein – consistently positions the ordinary as a site of positive value: as something of fundamental importance before any

Quoted in Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 57. Sontag, On Photography, 7, 4.

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kind of transformation – be it political or material – has taken place. As I will explore further in the following chapter, there has been a tendency in many post-Second World War theories of the everyday to view it as, for one reason or another, a problem: for example, as the lived straightjacket of capitalist, bourgeois society, or as a system of patriarchal oppression. This is a tendency that critics including Mary Favret, Ben Highmore and Rita Felski have questioned. While Lange’s photography was motivated by her commitment to social justice and the possibility of facilitating positive change, at the same time her essays and photographs comprise one example of an approach which foregrounds the ways in which the everyday matters across numerous registers – the aesthetic, the personal, the social, the political and ethical. In the following chapter I turn to another body of work in which the ordinary becomes a mechanism or means for thinking through and exploring the social and moral complexities of another cataclysmic event of twentieth-century modernity: Lee Miller’s photojournalism of the Second World War.

6 Banalities of evil: Lee Miller’s ethics of seeing war

Lee Miller is perhaps best known as the beautiful muse, collaborator and lover of Man Ray in the late 1920s and early 1930s, not the woman who headed into combat zones with her Rolleiflex, Hermes Baby typewriter, and a jerrycan filled with cognac. This chapter focuses on Miller’s war photography – particularly the ways in which her war work seeks to develop what Susan Sontag calls an ‘ethics of seeing’.1 More specifically, I suggest that Miller – somewhat unexpectedly – seeks a language and an ethics of seeing war via its apparent antithesis: that is the language of the ordinary and domestic everyday. My discussion focuses on two bodies of work: Miller’s photographs of London during the Blitz, some of which were published in Britain and America in 1941 in the little-discussed book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire,2 and her dispatches from the Continent when working as a US accredited war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944 and 1945. The relationship between war and the everyday is complex, and as scholarship by Liesl Olson, Bryony Randall and others indicate, of vital importance to an analysis of the ordinary and daily in modernism.3 By way of introduction to my discussion of Lee Miller, I want to sketch out some of the various and often conflicting ways in which this relationship has been viewed by historians, cultural theorists and modernist writers, particularly in terms of the First and Second World Wars.

Sontag, On Photography, 3. The America edition was titled Bloody but Unbowed: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. 3 See, for example, Lee Rumbarger, ‘Housekeeping: Women Modernists’ Writing on War and Home’, Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 35, no. 1 (2006): 1–15; Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 89–114; Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 124–54; Lorraine Sim, ‘Modernist Women’s Memoir, War and Recovering the Ordinary: H.D.’s The Gift’, Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 38, no. 1 (2009): 63–83. 1 2

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Everyday war In a conversation with Siegfried Sassoon, Winston Churchill is claimed to have stated that war, along with gardening, is the normal occupation of man.4 In contrast to Churchill’s disturbing equivalence between gardening and war, in their diaries and memoirs women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Frances Partridge would often foreground domestic daily life and activities as a gesture of political and even moral defiance against war.5 Writing in her diary in September 1938 when a second war with Germany seemed immanent, Woolf positions the domestic and everyday in opposition to a conflict she viewed as senseless and unreal: Nobody in their senses can believe in it. Yet nobody must tell the truth. So one forgets. Meanwhile the aeroplanes are on the prowl, crossing the downs. Every preparation is made. Sirens will hoot in a particular way when there’s the first hint of a raid. [Leonard] & I no longer talk about it. Much better to play bowls & pick dahlias.6 Of course, playing bowls and picking dahlias in no way enabled Woolf to ‘forget’ about the war, but she is making a claim here about the kind of world and life she is willing to accept and participate in. If everyday life is, as contemporary critics in the field often define it, the ‘essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane’ activities – residual and often unnoticed – then war challenges our assumptions about, and relationship to, the everyday.7 During modern conflicts such as the First and Second World Wars everyday routines and activities were disrupted for the majority of people and little in daily life was ‘taken-for-granted’. The nature and patterns of paid labour, leisure and the domestic changed, ordinary life was daily under threat, previously commonplace commodities and goods became scarce, and familiar objects, spaces and routines assumed renewed personal value and social significance. While war is an event that disrupts, threatens and destroys everyday life it has often, and paradoxically, been purported to be necessary to its preservation. The historian Gerard De Groot suggests that ‘[w]ar is seldom fought to change society, but more often to preserve it’. He observes that with the armistice at the end of the First World War came ‘a widespread

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 234. 5 See Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen (London: B. T. Batsford, 1945), and Frances Partridge’s A Pacifist’s War (London: Hogarth, 1978). 6 Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, 167. 7 Felski, Doing Time, 77. 4



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desire among all classes, to return to normal. The extent to which normality is restored is the gauge of how worthwhile the sacrifice was’.8 The view that war is necessary to the preservation of everyday life and, as Churchill’s previously mentioned comment implies, an inherent part of normal life, has been traced back as far as the eighteenth century. In her article ‘Everyday War’, Mary A. Favret argues that from the time of the Napoleonic wars during which ‘ordinary men rather than battle-trained elites’ were recruited to fight, ‘the quotidian redefined itself both as the goal of warfare … and as the very practice of waging war, the daily routine of ordinary men’.9 There was from the late-eighteenth century, Favret contends, a troubling ‘marriage’ between war and the everyday, one which finds both expression and interrogation in the literature of the period.10 Developing her argument in relation to contemporary contexts, Favret goes on to highlight the recurring tendency in post-Second World War theories of the everyday, such as those by Lefebvre, de Certeau and Foucault, to conceptualize everyday life through the ‘logic of war’: For [twentieth-century theorists] the everyday sustains under the veneer of peace the work of war even after its formal end. It serves as the ground for unceasing resistance to established or legitimate authority. The everyday, in other words, becomes a weapon for contesting peace.11 The rhetoric of warfare is particularly evident in Michel de Certeau’s celebrated The Practice of Everyday Life which champions the individual’s tactical resistance to the bureaucracy, rationalism, and excessive surveillance of late-capitalist society: ‘Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the “weak” within the order established by the “strong”, an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter’s tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries.’12 Confirming Favret’s point, in his introduction to The Everyday Life Reader, Ben Highmore contends that the central question for the study of everyday life, and cultural and social theory more broadly, is the ‘duality [of] resistance and/ or power’.13 It is curious that while foregrounding conflict and power

Gerard de Groot, The First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 158–9. Favret, ‘Everyday War’, 610. 10 Favret, ‘Everyday War’, 608. Favret examines how the human cost of war is shown through representations of the everyday in the writings of Jane Austen, particularly in Persuasion, and configurations of the everyday in Romantic literature. 11 Favret, ‘Everyday War’, 608. 12 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 40. 13 Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 5. 8 9

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struggles as an inherent part of the landscape of modern everyday life, the key twentieth-century theorists of the everyday in fact assume a historical model of the everyday during peacetime, and this is in spite of the increasing imbrication of war and everyday life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In contrast to these historical and contemporary efforts to, in Favret’s term, ‘marry’ war and the everyday, much literature of the First and Second World Wars written by men emphasizes the seemingly irreconcilable gap that war created between combatants and normal life as it had been known and lived prior to the war. For soldiers in the First World War the pre-war everyday became an alien environment to which they could no longer relate and often resented, war instead creating new forms of the everyday.14 For the protagonist Paul in All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) war becomes a ‘matter of habit’ and patterns of life in the trenches familiar. When he returns home on leave his prior everyday life seems a ‘foreign world’:15 ‘There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.’16 He desires this ordinary world but it also ‘repels’ him.17 As historians and critics have noted, during the First World War a ‘great gulf … developed between those at the Front and those at home’,18 a gulf powerfully expressed in e. e. cumming’s poem ‘my sweet old etcetera’.19 In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell demonstrates how common this sense of separation between ordinary life and war was in war literature of the period written by men. In his anti-war novel Death of a Hero (1929), Richard Aldington presents a critical portrait of British civilians as not only separated from, but insensitive to, the suffering of soldiers. The protagonist George Winterbourne reflects that while his two lovers, Elizabeth and Fanny, ‘resented and deplored the War’ they were ‘admirably detached from it’ and failed to recognize ‘the widening gulf which was separating the men of that generation from the women’.20 However, as Angela K. Smith has argued, women’s war writing of the period, such as H.D.’s novel Bid Me to Live (1960), challenged the growing cultural perception following the First World War, and reinforced by novels such as Aldington’s, that

De Groot, The First World War, 23; Fussell, The Great War, 71. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. Q. Wheen (London: Mayflower, 1973), 93, 112. 16 Remarque, All Quiet, 107. 17 Remarque, All Quiet, 113. 18 De Groot, The First World War, 135. 19 e. e. cummings, ‘my sweet old etcetera’, in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. and intro. Jon Silkin, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1981), 140. 20 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Sphere Books, 1968), 227. 14 15



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women at home were left untouched by the war.21 The profound wounds inflicted on the sphere of ordinary life and the domestic – for both men and women – are explored in many war novels of the period including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), H.D.’s Bid Me to Live (1960; likely begun in 1918) and Asphodel (first drafted in 1921 to 1922, published in 1992), and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918).22 While the fissure between the experiences of non-combatants and soldiers was certainly a significant social issue during and in the aftermath of the 1914–18 conflict, the relationship between war and everyday life changed dramatically for civilians from the First to the Second World War. According to the historian Joanna Bourke, the latter conflict precipitated a complete breakdown ‘of distinctions between the battlefield and the home front’.23 Civilians were the targets of aerial bombing on both the German and Allied sides, civilian casualties exceeded that of military casualties in many European and non-European countries, and entire groups of civilians were being systematically killed by the Nazis.24 Thus, the very category of ordinary life was transformed and rendered unstable for civilians and combatants alike during the 1939–45 conflict. Since around 2005/06 several critics have explored and debated the aesthetic and political significance of the interrelationship between the everyday, the domestic and war in the fiction and non-fiction of women writers of the period including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Rebecca West. For some critics, including myself and Bryony Randall, the narrative re-inscription of ordinary, domestic daily life in the scene

Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 120–30. As Smith observes, the canon of First World War literature focuses on the experiences of men, particularly through trench warfare, and does not illustrate the ‘way that the war was lived and fought by the majority of men and women away from the front line’; 105. In her study Smith demonstrates the diverse ways in which war affected women’s lives, both those involved in the front line experience and those at home, and how women’s experience of war became embodied in a range of modernist styles and practices. Since the 1990s, a number of studies and anthologies of women’s war writing have been published which serve to redress the previous gender bias in histories of the First and Second World Wars. See, for example, Jean Gallagher, The World Wars through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996); Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds, Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 22 On the compositional dates and revisions of H.D.’s prose works see Caroline Zilboorg’s Introduction to Bid Me to Live, by H.D., ed. Caroline Zilboorg (1960; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), xxix–xxx. 23 Joanna Bourke, The Second World War: A People’s History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. 24 According to Bourke, in the First World War only 5 per cent of deaths were civilian as compared to 66 per cent during the 1939–45 conflict; The Second World War, 2. 21

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of wartime can at times function as a significant ideological, moral and/ or political gesture.25 In a similar vein, Lee Rumbarger has argued that modernist women’s writing about home becomes an important mechanism for registering ‘war trauma’s profound presence beyond the space of the battlefield [and] beyond the time of the battle’.26 She contends that writers including Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Stein ‘represent women’s experience of war and modernity through the home as trope, figuring the house as alive, not inert’, the ‘roof and four walls’ often imagined as a ‘sentient shell that absorbs or is broken by the shocks’ of modern war.27 Other critics have interpreted an actual and narrative retreat into the habits of domestic everyday life as a form of quietism – an argument that Liesl Olson has made in relation to Gertrude Stein’s accounts of living in occupied France in Wars I Have Seen and Mrs. Reynolds.28 What this introductory discussion indicates is that the relationship between the ordinary, the domestic everyday and war in modernism is very complex, and the political and ethical – not to mention aesthetic – implications of their interrelationship various. In what follows, I want to bring the media of photography into this critical debate and examine the ways in which a subtle and often unnerving correspondence between the ordinary, the domestic and war unfolds in Lee Miller’s war photography and correspondence.

Lee Miller seeing war In On Photography Susan Sontag observes that photography is an ethically charged practice: ‘In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.’29 However, as I discussed in the previous chapter, in that book and her later study, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag interrogates the view that photography, particularly documentary photography, can have a social purpose and anything but a ‘fragile’ and tenuous moral function.30 Anticipating arguments that are now commonplace in contemporary debates about violence, representation and mediation, Sontag Sim, ‘Modernist Women Writers and Recovering the Ordinary’; Lorraine Sim, ‘“[A] background to our daily existence”: War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge’s A Pacifist’s War’, Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 4 (2008): 1–17; Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, 124–54. 26 Rumbarger, ‘Housekeeping’, 2. 27 Rumbarger, ‘Housekeeping’, 7–8. 28 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 89–114. 29 Sontag, On Photography, 3. 30 Sontag, On Photography, 21. 25



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contends that photographic images of scenes of war, human suffering and marginalization invariably operate at the level of visual spectacle, are objectifying in nature, desensitizing in effect and too readily assumed to obtain a moral effect or educational impact on the viewer. ‘Harrowing photographs’, she writes, ‘do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.’31 And in On Photography: The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote … At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached.32 While Sontag’s critique of photography was published in the 1970s,33 several decades after the historical period with which I am concerned here, and at a time by which the public had perhaps approached the ‘saturation’ point she describes, her study tackles questions about the ethics and social function of photography that preoccupied many photographers of the earlyand mid-twentieth century such as Dorothea Lange, Humphrey Spender and, indeed, Lee Miller. In what follows I want to suggest some of the strategies by which Miller’s war photography negotiates and seeks to avoid some of the ethical problems that Sontag identifies (such as objectification, distancing, and illusions of certain knowledge), and the ways in which the banal and ordinary assume a political and moral resonance in her war work. Miller’s reinvention as first an unofficial and then official war photographer was a sudden and radical one. A fashion model in America in the early 1920s, artistic collaborator and muse of Man Ray and other Surrealists in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, then celebrity and fashion photographer in her own right in the 1930s, Miller embraced an entirely new set of artistic and personal challenges when she redirected her camera to scenes of war. The period spanning 1940 to 1945 is regarded by Miller’s biographers and critics to be one of the most creative ones in her career as a photographer.34 Unlike much war photography of the period, Miller’s war work does not operate in the service of national myths of heroism or the glory of war. It avoids the visual conventions of propagandist war journalism, and

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 89. Sontag, On Photography, 20–1. 33 The essays that comprise On Photography first appeared in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. 34 See Antony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 103; Jane Livingston, Lee Miller Photographer (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 58; Burke, Lee Miller, Part 4. 31 32

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much of her war photography either (as in Grim Glory) eschews, or figures in unconventional ways, the brutality and destruction effected by war.35 Rarely just indexical in character and subverting documentary’s claims to objectivity and epistemological certainty, Miller’s war photography, like much of Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photography, mediates between art and document. As critics have observed, Miller’s war photography often assumes a dialectical quality, setting up what Jean Gallagher describes as a ‘tense’ ‘correspondence’ between the ‘seeing subject and visual object’.36 Through her manipulation of the gaze and modes of audience address, Miller often locates the viewer in relation to the experiences and practical and ethical dramas her photographs present, as she later places herself within the image on many occasions in her photographs for Vogue in order to explore ideas of bearing witness and ethical responsibility.37 A considerable amount of critical attention has focused on Miller’s representations of the war-damaged body.38 I want to suggest that a significant portion of her war photography foregrounds other, less-discussed, subject matter and that the moral tone and sensibility of much of Miller’s war work – both in terms of its content and modes of audience address – are a function of her sophisticated engagement with ideas and the subject matter of the ordinary and domestic everyday. As I will show, everyday objects, domestic scenes and private dwellings, and daily activities such as eating, socializing, bathing, working and resting feature prominently in her war work. Miller’s war photography invites the viewer to reflect on war’s threat to the everyday and the troubling transformations that it effects on normal life, particularly in the sphere of the ethical. As Lee Rumbarger argues in a different context (that of modernist women’s war writing), in many of her images of war Lee Miller asks the viewer to ‘invest in the familiar and knowable only to introduce the unfamiliar, unknowable’.39 Jean Gallagher has analysed Miller’s representations of the gendered body and space, particularly male bodies that have been damaged by war, and Miller’s challenge to specular (totalizing) forms of vision. She argues that Miller questions the ‘authority of vision and the unity both of the view and viewer of war’ that is common to wartime propaganda as well as Surrealist and fashion photography; Gallagher, The World Wars, 86. 36 Gallagher, The World Wars, 69. 37 This practice was not distinctive to Miller. According to Dagmar Barnouw, an allied witness of some form appears in almost all Allied images of concentration camps post-liberation signifying the evidentiary public perspective upon that which was hidden; Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 8. What is distinctive about Miller’s wartime photography for Vogue is the frequency with which she places herself in the image, a practice that alters the dynamics of viewer identification and documentary’s claim to objectivity. 38 See, for example, Gallagher, The World Wars and Annalisa Zox-Weaver, ‘When the War Was in Vogue: Lee Miller’s War Reports’, Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 32, no. 2 (2003): 131–63. 39 Rumbarger, ‘Housekeeping’, 3. 35



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In addition to the breakdown of the distinction between the home front and front line that comprised a key trait of the Second World War, there are two other reasons why the ordinary is a productive framework through which to analyse Miller’s war photography and reports. Firstly, Miller’s target audience was a civilian one and in the case of her reportage for Vogue, women. As such, her exploration of ideas of the ordinary and domestic spaces and scenes was important in terms of audience address. Indeed, the feminine everyday (and its imaginative transformation) is a key dimension of the fashion and beauty industries – industries that Miller had worked in for many years. Secondly, Surrealism, the avant-garde movement with which Miller was intimately involved from the late 1920s on, was centrally concerned with the aesthetics and latent politics of the banal and ordinary.40 While several critics situate Miller’s dialogue with the ordinary in her wartime photography in relation to Surrealism, it seems to me necessary to distinguish what must inevitably be the different politics informing their respective explorations of the everyday given the very different contexts within which such explorations were being undertaken.

Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire Grim Glory documents, and here I quote from the ‘Publisher’s note’ in the American edition; Bloody But Unbowed: Pictures of Britain Under Fire’, the experiences and ‘behaviour of ordinary people [living] under the most prolonged intensive battering ever inflicted on civilians … [and gives expression to] what total war has done to – and for – England and the English’.41 While described in the ‘Publisher’s note’ and Preface as a book, in many ways the publication is akin to a photo-essay whereby images and narrative interact with and complement each another. Grim Glory features 109 photographs contributed by Miller and several other unnamed photographers, and an accompanying narrative on the images and the broader civilian experience of war by the American reporter Edward Murrow.42 In order to create a structure and narrative flow, the book is divided into different sections with headings such as ‘The beginning’, ‘The See Sheringham, Everyday Life, 59–133; Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 45–59. 41 Ernestine Carter, ed., Bloody but Unbowed: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, Preface and text by Edward R. Murrow, photographs by Lee Miller and others (New York: Scribners, 1941), ‘Publisher’s note’. The British and American editions are identical except that the American edition has a slightly longer publisher’s note providing more context, and two picture captions vary between the two editions. In most instances I quote from the British edition. 42 At the time, Ed Murrow was reporting on the war to America from London everyday via the CBS network; Ernestine Carter, ed., Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, Preface 40

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contagion spreads’, ‘The battle of London’ and so on. The book was aimed at an American civilian audience: it sought to convey the British civilian experience at the time and to generate American support for the war. Inspiration for the book came from a series of photographs that Miller had been taking around London during the Blitz as a counter-point to pedestrian fashion assignments that she was completing for British Vogue which made scant reference to the war at that time.43 The rationale for the book, as described in Murrow’s preface, was therefore building on a visual politics of documenting London during the Blitz that was already present in Miller’s photographs. The images, Murrow writes, were selected with ‘great discrimination’ and do not index the graphic horrors of ‘broken bodies’ or ‘open graves’.44 This eschewal of the physical horrors and brutalities of war as potentially visual spectacle was, I suggest, not only a product of British censorship laws, but an integral aspect of Miller’s approach to recording scenes of war at that time. As her own body had been an object of aesthetic spectacle and appropriation as a model and artistic muse, Miller was very much aware of the politics of the body, its representation and visual consumption. Moreover, as a victim of sexual abuse at the age of seven, Miller had an acute awareness of the effects of violence and oppression, in its many forms, on embodiment and subjectivity.45 Participating in the ‘carry on as usual’ rhetoric that formed part of the British government’s propaganda machine, Grim Glory focuses on the ‘routine scenes’ and activities enacted by ordinary people in Britain during wartime.46 Dedicated to Winston Churchill and the ‘indomitable spirit of the common people’, it documents the nature of daily life for a ‘nation at war’: firefighters, munitions and factory workers and air-wardens at work; people sleeping in underground stations and shelters; the changed physical landscape of London; and more humorous scenes detailing the

and text by Edward R. Murrow, photographs by Lee Miller and others (London: Lund Humphries, 1941), ‘Publisher’s note’. 43 This is in contrast to Carter’s claim that Miller’s pictures were ‘taken especially’ for the book; Carter, Grim Glory, ‘Publisher’s note’. On the genesis of the project see Burke, Lee Miller, 206–7. On Vogue’s scant reference to the war at that time see Penrose, Lives of Lee Miller, 98. 44 Carter, Grim Glory, ‘Preface’ by Murrow. 45 In 1913, at the age of seven, Miller was raped while staying at the home of family friends, the Kajerdts, in Brooklyn, and she contracted gonorrhea as a result of this violent trauma. The perpetrator was Mrs Kajerat’s brother-in-law, ‘Uncle Bob’. For a discussion of this incident and its effect on Miller’s life and work see Burke, Lee Miller, 15–18, 21–2, 65–6. There has also been discussion of Miller’s unconventional relationship with her father, Theodore Miller, who took a series of photographic nudes of Miller when she was a young woman; see Burke, Lee Miller, 54–5. 46 Carter, Grim Glory, ‘Preface’ by Murrow.



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FIGURE 21 Photographer unknown, Still life, from Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, 1941.

ways in which life carried on in spite of the war.47 The book engages in propagandist celebrations of the heroism of the ‘ordinary’ man and woman and the purported ‘national character’;48 ‘every “little man” is’, it states, ‘a front line soldier in Hitler’s war’.49 The narrative attempts to render the landscape of war in more familiar terms for the American reader by comparing wartime scenes with everyday ones, thus crews taking balloons out of a hangar are likened to nannies guiding prams, plane traps are said to be as common as field mushrooms.50 The photographs in Grim Glory not taken by Miller are generally more denotative in function and less formal in composition; those that are metaphorical or symbolic often lack subtlety (see Figure 21). Miller’s photographs contrast with the peppy and heroic tone of the narrative and render the everyday character of war problematic and unnerving, particularly through her use of framing and point of view. While denoting the same subject, Miller’s photograph of an air-warden (Figure 22, featuring the art dealer Freddie Mayor) is immediately more arresting than that taken Carter, Grim Glory, dedication; ‘Preface’ by Murrow. Carter, Bloody but Unbowed, ‘Publisher’s note’. 49 Neither edition has page numbers, only numbered pictures which I will use as a basis to reference text printed on the same page; Carter, Grim Glory, next to image 20. 50 See images 7 and 8 in Grim Glory. 47 48

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by another of the Grim Glory photographers (Figure 23) as the subject of Miller’s image gazes directly at the viewer thereby implicating him/her in the scene. The subjects of Miller’s wartime photographs often address the camera and are rarely attributed the status of mere objects-to-be-looked-at. However, in her photographs for Grim Glory, and in contrast to her later work for Vogue, there is a conspicuous and ultimately haunting absence of people, and when they are in frame we are visually or narratively placed in close, sometimes intimate, proximity to them. Figure 22, which deals with the theme of evacuation, creates a tense scene through the interplay of interior and exterior spaces and perspectives. With the exception of the man’s hat, the photograph offers no direct reference to the war, making it disarmingly ordinary. Compositionally complex and highly fragmented, the photograph is divided vertically by the window frame and outside fence, and then horizontally by the window frame and wall. These linear forms are juxtaposed with the circular wheel of the bike which is backed by sky, the bike suggesting movement and potentially escape, as opposed to the stasis of wall, fence and window which are visually oppressive. The man is almost hidden in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame and peers in the window, looking for someone. His gaze is questioning but ultimately inscrutable. As the shot is taken from inside the house we, the viewer, assume the position of the person for whom he is looking. As we do not know if the person he seeks is there, somewhere else in the city, or even alive that day, our existential position is rendered ambivalent. An existentially assured, much less totalized gaze

FIGURE 22 Lee Miller, Freddie Mayor, London Air Raid Warden and Art Dealer, London, England 1940. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

FIGURE 23 Photographer unknown, The warden may be anybody: plain Mrs. Smith or a well-known art dealer, from Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, 1941.



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is denied: here, the viewing subject becomes a haunting presence in the scene. Positioning the viewer as a London civilian implicated in the daily trauma of survival, Miller disrupts any complacent gaze on the part of her American audience as war has here moved into the space of the home and private experience. The way the framing traps the viewer inside the space with glass, wood, metal and brick, alludes to the rubble under which hundreds of British civilians were daily trapped. Through its ambiguity and direct audience address the photograph is extremely arresting. It presents themes of bombing and entrapment through a different ‘ethics of seeing’ without recourse to spectacular – and later ubiquitous – images of damaged buildings and piles of rubble. Indeed, there are many images of bomb-damaged buildings in Grim Glory which make clear to an American audience the extent of destruction occurring throughout England but which also function as visual spectacle.51 Dolphin Court (Figure 24), which was taken as part of the Grim Glory series but did not feature in the final publication, also examines the experience of civilian bombing. By juxtaposing a view of a bomb-damaged building through an ordinary, domestic frame, the photograph sets up a tension between concepts of inside and outside, home front and front line,

FIGURE 24 Lee Miller, Dolphin Court, Chelsea, London, England 1940. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved. See the sections ‘The pride of architecture’ and ‘Elsewhere in England’ in Grim Glory.

51

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the familiar and the foreign. The delicacy and fragility of the lace curtain, with its detail of dots and frilled border, accentuates the formal distortion of the building opposite with gaping hole, distended wall partitions, shattered windows and flooring. Between the two buildings, at the centre-bottom of the photograph, are two civilians standing on the pavement, but they are dwarfed and barely seen amidst the rubble. The image draws into sharp relief the fragile line between safe, whole domestic spaces and war-damaged ones for Britons at that time. It shows the vulnerability of ordinary life from inside the kind of domestic setting Miller’s American audience occupied, thereby rendering the stability of such spaces, and the removed or detached viewing positions they may otherwise have afforded, tenuous. In eschewing representations of the injured and dead, several of Miller’s wartime photographs from the early 1940s portray war’s violence and the fragile status of bodies in other, more mediate ways. Some photographs explore themes of absence and physical vulnerability. For example, Miller’s picture of clothes hanging up to dry in a US Army nurses’ billet (Figure 25), which was published in an article entitled ‘American Army Nurses’ in British Vogue in 1943, is humble, everyday and unglamorous in nature. It subverts and parodies the genre of fashion photography with which Miller was still, if somewhat ambivalently, engaged. A contemporary viewer may have felt some discomfort gazing upon the mundane yet intimate items

FIGURE 25 Lee Miller, US Army nurses’ billet, Oxford, England, 1943. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.



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of clothing here on display. The photograph also has a disturbing and haunting quality. The viewer is placed in intimate proximity to the owner of this clothing and has clandestinely accessed her private space. The white coat, made salient by the band of light upon it, bears the fresh creases and shape of a woman who will remain for the viewer faceless, unknowable and absent. While banal and everyday, the image speaks of physical absence and dramatizes the ethics of voyeuristically looking in on the lives of others that the practice of documentary photography entails. Indeed, like the depopulated Ramsay house described in ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse which I discussed in Chapter 3, several of Miller’s images for the article ‘American Army Nurses’ evoke ideas of absence and a kind of haunting in the scene of the everyday.52 Miller took several photographs of the nurses’ rooms, such as collections of everyday objects and possessions by the nurses’ bedsides – a lamp, books, a radio and a photograph album – but without the nurses present in the image. Because of their context, these images and the objects in them assume a strangely staged and haunting quality; they are paradoxically intimate yet remote, familiar yet strange, and function as an uncanny reworking of the home or domestic features common to women’s magazines such as Vogue. A similar approach is evident in Miller’s photographs of Eva Braun’s apartment in Munich taken in 1945 which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. A number of Miller’s photographs for Grim Glory feature ordinary objects that are rendered surreal through their state of damage or the strange manipulations of the ordinary that war effects. Like the image of clothes hanging up to dry in the nurses’ billet, photographs such as Revenge on Culture (London, 1940), Remington Silent (London, 1940) and Piano by Broadwood (London, 1940) require the viewer to attend to familiar objects of everyday life, objects that here serve as metonyms for war’s violence on bodies and the activities and values seen as integral to modern British life such as work, communication and culture.53 Jane Livingston argues that Miller’s photography in the Paris years from 1929 to 1931 presented an ‘unforced Surrealism’ which evoked the ‘startling’ and ‘memorable’ in the ordinary.54 Rather than relying on ‘contrived … artful juxtaposition’, she argues that Miller preferred photographs that ‘found in the ordinary its own quality of strangeness or contortion’, and she and other critics have interpreted a significant portion of Miller’s oeuvre in terms of surrealist aesthetics.55 While undoubtedly assimilating the approaches and aesthetic of ‘US Army Nurses Billet’ folder, Lee Miller Archives, Falmer, Sussex. Consulted 28 August 2013. 53 These three photographs can be viewed online at the Lee Miller Archives website: http:// www.leemiller.co.uk/ (accessed 18 March 2016). 54 Livingston, Lee Miller, 31. 55 Livingston, Lee Miller, 35. Photographs from the Paris years that Livingston discusses in 52

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other Surrealists such as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and photographers whose work was later claimed as Surrealist, such as Eugène Atget by Man Ray, the politics underpinning Miller’s exploration of the ordinary differs from that of Surrealists during the inter-war period.56 For instance, while Surrealists were fascinated by urban and social margins, urban chaos and dereliction (as exemplified by Man Ray’s interest in Atget’s pictures of the Zone in Paris), such spaces were the norm in war-torn London in 1941, and these scenes held very different political meanings.57 The strange juxtapositions sought out in Paris flea markets by the likes of André Breton and Bill Brandt (who was Man Ray’s assistant for a time in 1930) were rendered banal in war-torn London – as some of Miller’s photographs subversively show. What Antony Penrose describes as Miller’s ‘Surrealist and poetic’58 presentation of the everyday in Grim Glory does not, in a Bretonian manner, merely celebrate its transformation into the extraordinary and bizarre but meditates, sometimes mournfully, on its literal devastation. While a surrealist humour is clearly present in some of Miller’s uncontrived juxtapositions in Grim Glory (for example, image 75, Baroque made rococo and image 104, War and Peace in a London Park), the human cost that attends such transformations within the realm of everyday life is palpable in several others.

On banality and evil: Miller’s reports for Vogue Miller’s engagement, both visual and discursive, with concepts of the ordinary and domestic everyday continues in the photographs and reports

terms of Surrealism include Ironwork (Paris, 1929), Chairs (Paris, 1929) and Rat Tails (Paris, 1930). Some of Miller’s Blitz photos are now, Livingston argues, firmly a part of the Surrealist canon. For other discussions of Miller’s relationship to French Surrealism see Whitney Chadwick, ‘Lee Miller’s Two Bodies’, in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, eds Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 199–221; and Burke, Lee Miller, 73–119. Burke discusses the surrealist influences in Miller’s Grim Glory photographs on pp. 205–7 of her biography. 56 It was Man Ray who ‘discovered’ Atget’s work and claimed it for Surrealism in the early 1920s, purchasing several of his prints and later publishing them (anonymously at Atget’s request) in issue no. 7 of La Révolution surréaliste in June 1926; Walker, City Gorged With Dreams, 90. See Chapter 5, ‘A Surrealist Atget’, of Walker’s book for a full discussion of the claiming of Atget’s work for French Surrealism in the late 1920s and 1930s. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, the American photographer Berenice Abbot played a crucial role in the preservation and dissemination of Atget’s work outside of France, see p. 59, note 44. 57 May Ray purchased seven of Atget’s photographs of the Zone, some of which feature shacks of the zoniers, great piles of junk and rags. Walker suggests that Man Ray also experimented with themes of chaos and disorder in his picture of a tipped ashtray entitled New York (1920) which Walker interprets as a microcosm of the city as debris; City Gorged with Dreams, 120. 58 Penrose, Lives, 103.



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she compiled as a US war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944 and 1945, many of which were also published in American Vogue.59 Both professionally and personally Miller was presented with a new set of challenges, witnessing as she did extreme human suffering and unimaginable atrocities while becoming aware of the political and moral complexities of the war that a front line perspective afforded. Miller’s position in the history of war photography is unique as she was the ‘only woman combat photographer to follow the Allied advance across Western Europe in World War II’.60 Initially ascribed what were thought to be ‘safe’ assignments appropriate for a woman photographer working for Vogue, Miller was soon seeking out each ground-breaking development in the war. The fact that her dispatches and images were appearing in both the British and American versions of Vogue was of course radical. As Antony Penrose comments, ‘Vogue’s printing of Lee’s material represented an achievement in fashion publishing which has never been repeated.’61 Vogue’s idealized world of glamour, commodity fetishism and beauty, suddenly brought, through Miller’s images and words, the front line into the living rooms of American and British women. Fashion spreads, cosmetics advertisements and features on the homes of the rich and famous were suddenly punctuated by Miller’s detailed and often harrowing articles and photo-narratives of violence, human suffering and resilience. Miller’s 1944 dispatches for Vogue covered subjects including a US evacuation hospital in Normandy near the recently invaded D-Day beaches, the Allied battle to regain the old citadel of St Malo, Paris after the Liberation, and the German surrender in the Loire. Many of the photographs featured in these reports are candid and intimate in style, capturing the personal as well as practical experience of war for soldiers, nurses, civilians and prisoners on both the Allied and German sides. Many focus on marginal scenes and – in the context of normative accounts of war – ‘non-events’: a GI chatting to an injured soldier who is recovering in bed in an evacuation hospital; a visibly exhausted nurse stopping to gain her bearings as she steps out of a hospital tent after a long shift; soldiers, nurses and civilians engaged in everyday activities such as eating, bathing, My discussion in this section is based on Miller’s complete Vogue reports, compiled from original manuscripts and/or Vogue articles by Antony Penrose and collectively published in Lee Miller’s War, Foreword by David E. Scherman (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005). Miller of course took more images for each story than could be published in the magazine and variations sometimes occur in the selection of photographs associated with a report as it appears in Lee Miller’s War, British Vogue and American Vogue. Miller did not have control over which photographs were published, their formatting, layout, or captions, so various issues relating to authorship arise in relation to her war photojournalism for Vogue which did not affect her contributions to Grim Glory to the same extent. I thank Condé Nast Publications in New York for permitting me to view the relevant 1944 and 1945 issues of American Vogue. 60 David E. Scherman, foreword to Lee Miller’s War, edited by Antony Penrose, 7. 61 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 205. 59

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FIGURE 26 Lee Miller, Off-duty nurses resting, 44th Evacuation Hospital, near La Cambe, Normandy, France, 1944. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

conversing and relaxing (see Figure 26). Such images do not propose that we overlook or deny the violent realities and trauma of war – such issues are made manifestly clear in Miller’s accompanying reports and other photographs. They do, however, place their subjects in contexts that are more familiar to a civilian reader so as to invite the viewer’s identification: Miller’s photographs ask the viewer to ‘invest in the familiar and knowable only to introduce the unfamiliar [and often] unknowable’.62 Through their engagement with ideas of the familiar and ordinary some of Miller’s photographs for Vogue complicate distinctions between the agents and victims of war and between enemy and ally, distinctions that are prevalent and absolute in most wartime media. As such, many of Miller’s images for Vogue create epistemological uncertainty and a sense of moral ambiguity or complexity for the viewer. There is, for example, a striking contrast in Figure 27 between the line of barbed wire, which functions as the official marker of distinction and separation between the German POW nurses and the Allied soldiers, and the subjects’ smiles, gazes and body language which all serve as a kind of affective rupture to this physical, national and political distinction. Miller’s dispatches express anti-German sentiment and engage anti-German

Rumbarger, ‘Housekeeping’, 3.

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FIGURE 27 Lee Miller, Fred Feekart with German Nurse POWs, near Dinan, St Malo, France, 1944. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

rhetoric, yet a ‘them’ and ‘us’ dichotomy is not always evident in her photographs. For example, the picture German Prisoners (Figure 28) from the report ‘How the Germans Surrender’, is confrontational because of its disarming ordinariness. As Annalisa Zox-Weaver has argued, key semiotic markers of national identity such as the insignia on the prisoners’ buttons and the small patch with eagle and swastika on the coat of the man on the left are blurred and, in terms of salience, peripheral. The subject matter – two men casually smoking – ‘bears a close resemblance to numerous photographs of allied soldiers interacting’.63 For Zox-Weaver, Miller’s images for Vogue are ‘[c]haracterized by a strangely circumscribed empathic perspective’ and are, by turns, ‘compassionate and intrusive, deeply sensitive, and provocatively curious’.64 Miller’s photographs of seriously beaten SS prison guards at the recently liberated camps of Dachau and Buchenwald also challenge clear-cut moral judgements and processes of emotional distancing on the part of the viewer because, once again, they confuse encodings of the foreign and familiar, victim and perpetrator. In these disturbing photographs, the guards are wearing civilian clothes, kneel before and directly address the camera with frightened eyes, and in some cases are heavily framed in small enclosures so as to create disconcertingly immediate and visually oppressive Zox-Weaver, ‘When the War’, 134. Zox-Weaver, ‘When the War’, 134.

63 64

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FIGURE 28 Lee Miller, German Prisoners, Beaugency, France, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

images.65 As Jean Gallagher argues: ‘The guards are not immediately recognizable as such but are, at first glance, simply beaten men or corpses in civilian clothes, objects of potential identification, pity, or pathos, impulses that must be countered by the viewer’s knowledge of the Holocaust’ – a knowledge gained from Miller’s accompanying report and photographs of the massed corpses that are the guards’ victims.66 In contrast to other Allied photographers, Miller’s photographs often dramatize the complex relationship between what Dagmar Barnouw describes as the ‘great visual clarity’ and power of images of Germany after the Allied victory and the ‘obscure meaning[s]’ and moral ambiguities such images often masked: After all, nothing was more clearly visible than the devastated, broken German army, cities destroyed and transformed into moonscapes, ghostlike people living in ruins, and the brutalized victims of the concentration camps. But what exactly did it mean, this absolute military and moral defeat of the Germans and victory of the Allies?67 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 164. Gallagher, The World Wars, 87. 67 Barnouw, Germany 1945, x. 65 66



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Barnouw discusses the central role that Allied photography, by both professional magazine journalists such as Margaret Bourke-White for Life magazine and Signal Corps photographers, assumed in creating a particular public conception of the German people. Allied photography sought to affirm notions of collective German guilt. Unsympathetic portrayals of the German military and civilians supported Allied assumptions about the justness of the Allied victory and the retributive behaviours that attended it, such as forcing German civilians, including women and children, to tour the camps and for adults to bury corpses. While Miller does at times engage in over-simplified estimations of ‘the German people’ in her reports, as for example in the article ‘Germans are Like This’ published in American Vogue in June 1945, and expressed intense anti-German sentiment in the post-war years,68 her photographs possess a semantic and moral ambiguity and complexity that distinguishes them from most Allied photojournalism of Germany and Germans post-victory. On travelling into Germany in March 1945, representations of the ordinary and domestic everyday assume new and often perverse dimensions in the photographs that Miller took at Dachau and at the residences of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in Munich in the following months. In her reports from Germany, Miller repeatedly alludes to an uncanny divide between everyday appearances and underlying realities, one that calls into question the epistemological reliability of her photographs and points to the ethical and political complexities such images inevitably obscure or cannot adequately present. In a letter to British Vogue editor Audrey Withers in December 1944, Miller writes that from the Blitz onwards while Europeans look normal, bearing ‘no visible signs or changes in manner … none the less they are ill – some kind of hidden and devitalizing microbe’, a state which she claimed rendered people unable to distinguish between right and wrong.69 In the report ‘Germany – The War That is Won’ composed sometime after April and published in Vogue in June 1945, Miller writes that while parts of Germany might look picturesque and normal, with ‘jewel-like villages’, ‘blossoms and vistas’ it is inhabited by ‘schizophrenics’, by which she means civilians who denied knowing about the camps despite their sometimes close proximity to the evidence.70 One particularly disturbing image puts into sharp relief the proximity of ordinary, domestic life and genocide in parts of Germany: the two are placed in an unsettling and undeniable correspondence (see Figure 29). Dachau, Miller writes, is ‘[j]ust outside of a picturesque town’: ‘The railway siding into the camp runs past quite a few swell villas and the last train of dead and semi dead

See Burke, Lee Miller, 267–89. Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 111. 70 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 161. 68 69

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deportees was long enough to extend past them.’71 This image of dead prisoners, abandoned and anonymous, is very confronting but it is rendered more disturbing when the viewer’s gaze moves from the dominant form of the train and corpses to the collection of neat, peaked-roofed dwellings with their orderly fences nestled in the back left-hand-side of the image. The, at the time, assumed complicity or acquiescence of German civilians to the Nazi’s Final Solution is here powerfully conveyed. This presencing of ordinary life so close to scenes of Nazi brutality and horror forms part of a larger narrative in Miller’s reports from Germany in 1945 which points to a crisis of the very concept of the ordinary in wartime and raises complex questions about responsibility and judgement. An issue that has since been debated by historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and which deeply disturbed Miller, was a growing

FIGURE 29 Lee Miller, Dead deportees lie beside the rail track, Dachau, Germany, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

71

Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 182.



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awareness that Nazi atrocities were committed not by ‘Godly elite’ but ordinary people, ‘rear echelon Nazi and public government officials, quite normal’, as well as civilians who ‘have known and acquiesced or at the very least suspected and ignored the activities of their lovers and spouses and sons’.72 As in Grim Glory, Miller recruits the language and symbols of ordinary life and the familiar so that her Vogue readers are unable to distance themselves from the terrible events she describes, while also destabilizing moral assumptions about, and the distinction between, ‘ordinary’ people and the agents of war and atrocity. As she remarks in an undated service message to Audrey Withers, Hitler only became ‘alive’ and more terrible after she visited his private apartment in Munich, his domestic space and habits sufficiently banal to make Hitler not an ‘evil machine-monster’ but a ‘caricature’ of a normal person: ‘He’d never really been alive for me until … I visited the places he made famous … dug into backstairs gossip and ate and slept in his house.’73 In her war dispatches and letters, but through an analysis of domesticity and the everyday, Miller anticipates by eighteen years Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis on the banality of evil.74 The ‘last front of fascist ideology and of the European war’75 that Miller presents to her British and American Vogue readers in an article entitled ‘Hitleriana’, is that of the interior domestic spaces of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, the latter of which, she writes, could as easily have been the residence of a merchant or ‘retired clergy’.76 In her detailed descriptions and visual inventories of these residences Miller ‘underscores the “normalcy”’77 – and in the case of Braun’s villa ‘supernormal[cy]’78 – of these domestic spaces, the objects that fill them, and the personal habits they convey, suggesting these rooms could have been occupied by anyone: Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 166, from the report ‘Germany – The War that is Won’. On historical discussions regarding the political, social and psychological processes by which ‘ordinary’ people cooperated with, and became involved in, the extermination programme see Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder’, New German Critique 72 (1997): 3–44; Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); and Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). For a detailed discussion of the ways in which ordinary citizens evaded or accepted the policies of, and life under, the Third Reich see Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 73 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 188. 74 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; New York: Penguin, 2006). 75 Gallagher, The World Wars, 89–90. 76 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 191. 77 Gallagher, The World Wars, 90. 78 Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 198. 72

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I was living in Hitler’s private apartment in Munich when his death was announced. It was an ordinary semi-corner old fashioned building on a Platz … Superficially, almost anyone with a medium income and no heirlooms could have been the proprietor of this flat.79 [Eva Braun’s] bathroom was supernormal, except for two medicine chests, both of which were crammed with drugs and patent preparations, enough for a ward of hypochondriacs … Evipan, eyewash, sleeping pills and nose sprays.80 Miller took a large number of photographs of Hitler’s and Braun’s residences documenting rooms and spaces (for example, a bed in Braun’s house, see Figure 30; Hitler’s study and bed); objects (chairs, desks, statues, cosmetic items, etc.) and Allied photographers, soldiers and liberated Russian families engaging in everyday activities and behaviours in these spaces (for example, eating, shaving, reading, sleeping and bathing). Indeed, Miller and the Allied forces set up base for a time in both Hitler’s and Braun’s residences.

FIGURE 30 Lee Miller, Bed in Eva Braun’s House, Wasserburger Strasse 8, Munich, Germany, 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 191, from the report ‘Hitleriana’. Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, 198, from the report ‘Hitleriana’.

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Some of these images are staged and performative and express a comic Surrealism – a sergeant on Hitler’s bed reading a copy of Mein Kampf; a staff officer asleep in Hitler’s chair with a tin that says ‘Pagan’ next to him. But many of these photographs, particularly the documents of objects and depopulated (empty) spaces, are uncanny as the viewer struggles to reconcile the banality of these things with the extraordinariness of their context; the superficial ordinariness of the owners’ daily lives with the unprecedented nature of their crimes. These images are also about power (the Allied forces literally occupying the most private spaces of the Fascist regime), and as Gallagher contends, function as a grotesque parody of the features and advertisements commonplace in Vogue magazine.81 Miller’s incredibly detailed inventory of Braun’s domestic space and the things in it also seems an attempt on Miller’s part to find answers (about Braun) and signs of difference – answers and signs she does not find. For Miller, and by extension for her readers, the epistemological and affective site of the ordinary and familiar is here radically ruptured and destabilized. Miller’s account of the intersections between banality and German Fascism are subtle, complex and far-reaching: she does not allow herself or her readers to maintain a comfortable distance from the very complex historical reality she is reporting on and she achieves this not through a series of political essays, but a perverse play on the semiotics of the women’s magazine and familiar encodings of the domestic everyday. Increasingly in her dispatches for Vogue Miller is present in the scene and in ways that go beyond the role of witness. The series of photographs of Miller in Hitler’s apartment taken by her friend, Life photographer David E. Scherman, add further dimensions to this complex narrative of Nazi genocide, the banal and Miller’s ethics of seeing war. Critics have noted the semiotic power of the image of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub which featured in the article ‘Hitleriana’ (Figure 31) and observed its many meanings: its subversive play through the staged statue on ideals of classical beauty and woman as the object of the eroticizing gaze; the manner in which this aesthetic ideal is then played against Miller’s physical exemplification of Hitler’s Aryan ideal; the dynamics of power suggested by Miller’s intrusion into Hitler’s most private of domestic spaces; the domestication and disempowerment of the figure of Hitler through the framed, posed photograph; the unsettling play on notions of cleanliness and purity; and the photograph’s troubling allusion to the gas chambers via the shower cord looped behind Miller’s head. In spite of its strange juxtapositions

81 Gallagher, The World Wars, 90. As Gallagher astutely observes, Miller’s ‘detailed catalogue’ of the objects and commodities, particularly in Braun’s apartment, function as ‘an enormous and grotesque parody of the pages of Vogue itself’ rendering the ‘very interiors of the body of the fascist regime’ not unlike the one inscribed in Vogue’s ‘advertisements and features’, 91.

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FIGURE 31 Lee Miller with David E. Scherman, Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, Hitler’s apartment, Munich, Germany 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

there is no surrealist humour in this image. It stages a complex series of identifications for the civilian woman reader and refuses a coherent or ideologically affirming viewing position. Miller, predominantly known to the American public as a fashion and beauty icon of the 1920s and 1930s, is here thoroughly unglamorous and in a very private activity that is not usually made visible to a 1940s magazine public. Her particular physical location in Hitler’s bathtub, associated as it would have been with her recent articles in Vogue about the death camps, would have been deeply disconcerting to her readers. Through sharing with her readers a banal yet intimate activity, Miller narratively and visually draws her Vogue readers into the discomfiting story of Nazi genocide. Unlike the horrifying, if necessary, photographs of the victims of Nazi violence, images such as this one do not initiate an immediate desire to look away and therefore pass over the underlying meaning or history of the image. It is in this sense that the photo-history presented by Miller from Munich is powerful and morally efficacious as it invites the viewer to not only bear witness to the horrific fact of Nazi violence, but to reflect on the ideologies that underscored and motivated it. If creating a ‘photo-history beyond a history of mere illustrations’ depends, as Bernd Hüppauf argues, on ‘[r]eplacing a gaze of understanding and empathy with a growing sense of the tensions,



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and twisted connections, between the foreign and the familiar’, it is such tensions and fraught connections that Miller crafts through her play on ideas of the ordinary and everyday in her photo-history of Germany in 1945.82 Through her interrogation of dichotomies such as appearance and reality, familiar and foreign, ally and enemy, beauty and horror, her correspondence from Germany demands that whether in Hitler’s bathtub, a neat house opposite the trains at Dachau, or a comfortable living room in Poughkeepsie, there is an ethical responsibility for every person to not only look upon the violent outcomes of war but reflect on their relationship, no matter how geographically remote, to that European theatre. Jane Livingston has argued that as a war photographer Miller possessed an ‘innate moral vision and formal approach’ that created an ‘ethically resounding body of images’ on war often focusing on ‘nothing less than personal human cruelty and depredation in its most graphic form’.83 While this is true, I suggest that her moral vision is facilitated through other means as well, not only graphic presentations of violence and war-damaged bodies. Miller engages her civilian and predominantly female audience through the common ground of the everyday, exploring the tragedy of its destruction and transformation by war, while also examining its complex presence in war and acts of genocide. It is, paradoxically, through her play on ideas and presentations of the familiar and ordinary that Miller’s images of war cannot, like the ‘familiar atrocity exhibition[s]’ that Susan Sontag critiques, be ‘banal’ thereby rendering their audience emotionally detached or morally complacent.84 Miller’s tenure as a war photographer and correspondent produced some of her most original and important work but it took an enormous toll on her physically, psychologically and emotionally. The labour of documenting the daily grind of total war during 1944 and 1945 cost her dearly. While this study has presented a critical and theoretical study of representations of the ordinary in women’s modernism, in the final section of the book I want to bring these women and their lived experience back into the frame. In other words, I want to reflect on the complex intersections between their work on the ordinary and their own daily lives.

Hüppauf, ‘Emptying the Gaze’, 15. Livingston, Lee Miller, 76. 84 Sontag, On Photography, 19. 82 83

Coda: Margaret Monck and the labour of the everyday

The ordinary and its close cousins – the daily, the familiar, the common, reality – are central to the work of Dorothy Richardson, Dorothea Lange, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Helen Levitt. It functions as a guiding concept, a thematic focus, and an aesthetic ground. As I argued in the previous chapter, while Lee Miller may seem an unlikely candidate for such a study, the quotidian is an important thematic in her war photography and correspondence, one that intersects in subtle ways with her background in Surrealism. What I have ignored until this point is the fact that all of this work unfolded within, and often produced tensions in, the private daily lives of these women. This is not to make a politically retrogressive gesture that suggests women cannot have successful professional/creative and personal lives, or that the two must necessarily be in conflict, but to acknowledge that the negotiation between these two spheres was in fact challenging for most of the women I have focused on in this book. For example, throughout her career Dorothea Lange struggled to juggle the demands of motherhood, running a house and work. Her two children, Dan and John, by her first husband Maynard Dixon, were regularly left in the care of neighbours, friends and, for a time, a boarding school, so that she could pursue her photography and fieldwork.1 The juggling act between motherhood and work continued through her second marriage to Paul Taylor, as they had five children to care for (Dan, John and three young children from Taylor’s previous marriage) and Lange was frequently on assignment on the road. From the 1930s Lange’s primary passion was fieldwork, one she could not pursue from the mid-1940s due to periods of

1

Partridge, Restless Spirit, see Chs 3–5; Stein, ‘Peculiar Grace’, 67.

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incapacitating physical illness.2 It was only in the later stages of her life, when Lange was in her late fifties, that she was able to devote more time to family life and the domestic activities she enjoyed, such as cooking. As Elizabeth Partridge comments, and as I discussed in Chapter 5, one of the ‘most delicate, vulnerable areas Dorothea explored was “Home”’.3 From the 1920s to the 1940s she had ‘mostly photographed other people’s homes, their lack of a home, or their settling down into a new home’; it was only in the last two decades of her life that she turned her camera towards her own home and family.4 Much like Lange in the 1930s and 1940s, following her tenure as a war correspondent for Vogue, Lee Miller didn’t want to leave her fieldwork behind and had great difficulty adjusting to what became, by Miller’s standards, a very domestic life in the post-war years. The psychological and emotional effects of the war had an enormous impact on her personal and professional life. She found subsequent fashion and lifestyle assignments for Vogue uninteresting, found writing excruciating, struggled to meet deadlines, and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol dependency.5 Her relationship to the domestic everyday in the post-war years was a complex and somewhat paradoxical one. While thrilled at the birth of her son, Antony Penrose, in 1939, Miller was a distant mother. Raised by a series of nannies and placed in boarding school from the age of eight, Antony Penrose’s relationship with his mother was, by his own account, volatile and fraught.6 Upon purchasing Farley Farm in East Sussex in 1949, Miller became immersed in country life and adopted a secondary and supportive role to her husband, the art curator and critic Roland Penrose, whose professional ‘star rose’ during the mid-fifties as ‘Lee’s declined’.7 Many of Miller’s friends and ex-colleagues felt saddened by the dramatic change in Miller’s life direction. Audrey Withers, who remained the editor of British Vogue until 1960 reflected: ‘Lee came into her own during the war … It had an extraordinary effect on her. Afterwards, nothing came up to it. She was not meant to be married, have children, or live in the country. She thought she wanted security but when she had it, she wasn’t happy: She couldn’t write.’8 However, Miller found pleasure and release in certain aspects of the domestic everyday. From the 1950s

Partridge, Restless Spirit, 94–5. Partridge, Restless Spirit, 110. 4 Partridge, Restless Spirit, 110. For a discussion of this phase of her photography see Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, Ch. 8. 5 Burke, Lee Miller, 294–313. For a full discussion of these issues see Chs 15 and 16 of Burke’s biography. 6 Burke, Lee Miller, 319, 325–6, 362. See also the ‘Afterword’, 371–3. 7 Burke, Lee Miller, 326. 8 Quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 313. 2 3

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her creative energies shifted from photography to cooking which she found therapeutic and which, in true Miller style, was not a pedestrian affair but a new outlet for her ingenuity and avant-garde sensibility.9 In many ways, cooking became her unofficial ‘work’.10 A complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship to the domestic everyday is also evident in the lives of several of the women writers I have been discussing. For Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, the demands of writing and intellectual labour were such that they depended a great deal on intimate others and servants to maintain the smooth running of daily life on the home front. For instance, it is well-known that while Stein took great joy in the rhythms and comforts of domestic daily life, Alice Toklas assumed the role of ‘wife’ taking responsibility for the maintenance of those rhythms. Similarly, Virginia Woolf loved the rhythms and patterns of her daily life – writing, reading, socializing and entertaining, walking, gardening – but she had little engagement or interest in the mistress’ role of running a house. As these women had to negotiate their professional lives and identities in the context of prevailing ideologies about women, family and the domestic, there is also, I believe, a degree to which their work and creative labour was more contingent and precarious than that of their male contemporaries. Several of the texts or bodies of work that comprise the focus of this study have, to varying degrees, existed at the cultural margins or been at risk of disappearing into the void (remaindered, lost, unpublished, forgotten, etc.). As is widely known, Stein had considerable difficulty getting her work published in the early years and, if we look at the critical landscape of modernist studies, the ‘major’ women writers of the period such as Stein, Richardson, Mina Loy and H.D. have received far less critical attention than canonical male modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Virginia Woolf is the one consistent exception to this trend. While in many ways coterminous with a work such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Richardson’s Pilgrimage fell into oblivion from the late 1940s and remains a difficult text to obtain (much less teach), the last complete edition being published by Virago in 1979. A project to publish the first scholarly edition of the novel is only now underway through Oxford University Press. Helen Levitt, undoubtedly one of the most original and gifted street photographers of the twentieth century, has been referred to as ‘one of the most celebrated but least known’ photographers of her time.11 Her work is still little-known as compared to the luminaries with whose photography In a conversation with her close friend Bettina McNulty, who was the editor of House and Garden, Miller stated that cooking was ‘pure therapy’, quoted in Burke, Lee Miller, 340. 10 See Burke, Lee Miller, Ch. 17. 11 David Levi Strauss, ‘Helen Levitt: International Centre for Photography’, Artforum International 36, no. 2 (1997): 97. 9

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hers is often compared and aligned, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. Dorothea Lange, whose photography is often disparaged as sentimental (read: feminine), has assumed a marginal position in the history of American documentary photography when compared to younger male photographers such as Walker Evans and Ben Shahn whom she in fact influenced.12 While working collaboratively with several of the key figures of the European avant-garde – Man Ray, Picasso, Jean Cocteau – Lee Miller’s photography and journalism only came back into the public eye in the 1980s through the establishment of the Lee Miller Archive by her son, Antony Penrose. Penrose’s wife discovered Miller’s ‘lost archive’ in the attic at Farley Farm shortly after Miller’s death in 1971.13 Such patterns of public and critical reception, availability, and circulation speak more broadly to the processes by which particular cultural representations and histories of the ordinary and everyday in literature and art have predominated and persisted through time. Continuing the critical-biographical approach I have begun here, this final chapter explores the intersections between women, work and the everyday through a discussion of the life and photography of Margaret Monck (1911–94). Monck was a non-professional street photographer who worked predominantly in London’s East End and docklands during the 1930s. She stopped taking photographs during the Second World War due to family responsibilities and, like Miller, a nervous breakdown precipitated by the war. Her record of street life in London in the 1930s has escaped total oblivion thanks to the recuperative efforts of the photographic critic and historian Val Williams, the photography archive at the Museum of London and the Mary Evans Picture Library.14 This final chapter seeks to add to that recuperative effort, and to reflect more broadly on the complex relationships between modern(ist) women and their ordinary labours.

Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 28. See Whiston Spirn for a discussion of ‘Lange’s erasure’ from critical accounts of the history and development of American documentary photography, an erasure she dates from the 1970s; Daring to Look, 50–5. Several feminist critics have interrogated a critical tendency to dismiss or undervalue Lange’s work as sentimental and feminine, what Sally Stein calls ‘a gendered discourse of thermal effects’; ‘Peculiar Grace’, 63. See also Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look, 55–6. 13 Suzanna and Antony Penrose discovered 60,000 photographs and negatives and 20,000 items of memorabilia left by Miller in boxes in the attic; Burke, Lee Miller, 371. 14 Monck’s family also played a fundamental role as it was Monck’s husband, John Monck, who donated several boxes of Monck’s negatives and prints to the Photography Collection at the Museum of London following Monck’s death in 1994. The Mary Evans Picture Library manages the copyright for Monck’s work and holds copies of most of the images held at the Museum of London, in addition to several family photograph albums. 12

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Margaret Monck: ‘the light was very bright, it made me cry’ Monck’s life bears a fascinating relationship to early-twentieth-century British and colonial modernity as well as modernism. Born in Kensington, London, on 7 May 1911, Monck spent the first ten years of her life in the colonies.15 Her father, Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 1st Viscount of Chelmsford, came from a long lineage of men who worked in official government and political posts.16 He served as Governor of Queensland (1905–09) and later Governor of New South Wales (1909–13) in Australia, before taking up the position of Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921.17 On Margaret’s account, her father was a liberal man in his attitudes and politics and led the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms which, she recalls, made him unpopular with the British government.18 Thus, Monck spent the first few years of her life in Australia – of which she had no recollections – and then lived from the age of approximately four and a half to ten and a half in India, predominantly in Shimla, situated in the Northern Himalayan province of Himachal Pradesh, and living some of the time in Delhi. In spite of her family’s wealth and position, Monck describes her life in Shimla as ‘very simple’ and casual: riding her pony, climbing tents and trees, singing with her nanny, and taking her lessons.19 Like Virginia Woolf suggests in her memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Monck believes that ‘what Unless stated otherwise, all biographical details about Monck’s life were obtained from her interview with Val Williams which was conducted in January 1991 when Monck was almost eighty years old; Margaret Monck, interview with Val Williams, 22–23 January, 1991, ‘Oral History of British Photography’, Sound Archive, British Library. The interview runs across four cassettes, index numbers F1312–F1315, shelf mark C459/8/1–4. In subsequent references to this interview I will cite information by cassette number (1–4). There is no transcript of the interview, only the recording. 16 In her interview with Williams, Monck states that men on her father’s side held official posts (governmental, political and legal) as far back as she can remember, the first of these being ‘Lord Chelmsford’; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. She would be referring here to her father’s grandfather, Frederick Thesiger, 1st Baron of Chelmsford (1794–1878); see Darryl Lundy, ‘Frederick Thesiger, 1st Baron of Chelmsford’, The Peerage; http://www. thepeerage.com/p3787.htm#i37870 (accessed 8 May 2015). 17 ‘Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford’, Encyclopaedia Britannica; http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/108490/Frederic-John-Napier-Thesiger-1stViscount-Chelmsford (accessed 6 April 2015). 18 Monck suggests that the reforms were unpopular with the British government and commented that her ‘father worked himself to death in order to be reviled’; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 2. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms argued for dual government in India. While these reforms sought to increase Indian representation in government, Chelmsford provoked opposition due to his severe measures against Indian nationalism. See ‘Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford’. 19 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. 15

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happens to a child’ in the early years of their life, what they ‘see’, and where they live has an important ‘influence’.20 Like Woolf’s highly sensory first memories in the nursery and garden at Talland House, as recalled in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Monck’s first recollections of India were that ‘the light was very bright’, so bright that it made her ‘cry’, and looking out of her nursery window to the snow-peaked Himalayas.21 Indeed, Monck’s childhood recollections reflect her attunement to, and subsequent love of, the light and colour of India. This early shock of intense light and colour perhaps influenced – or anticipates – her later interest in photography and the visual arts more broadly. Monck’s mother, Frances Charlotte Guest, was a watercolour artist.22 Monck studied painting as a young woman, but, like Levitt, felt that she wasn’t good enough as a painter and later discovered photography as her creative medium.23 Monck – who comes across in her interview with Williams as witty, intelligent, self-effacing and somewhat irreverent – loved the freedom and natural beauty of life in colonial India and upon her return to London was struck, even as a child of ten, by the comparative strictness and reserve of life in Kensington.24 In addition, Monck recalls upon her return to London how much she missed the ‘mountains’, ‘smell’, and ‘fantastic colour’ of India, a place that clearly had a profound impact on her aesthetic sensibility. She ‘missed India so much’ upon her return to London that ‘[she] could hardly bear it’.25 It is perhaps her experience as a child of the vitality, comparative informality and rawness of life in India that attracted Monck as a photographer to the Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. There are some other striking consonances between Woolf’s comments in her memoir about childhood, personal development and memory and those made by Monck in the Williams’ interview. For example, both women talk about the child’s unique perception (of scale, for instance) and also the inexplicability of what one remembers from childhood and what one forgets. Monck recalls that when her father was away on official duties he would write to her every day but she had no recollection of what he wrote about only that he used a pencil that was ‘red one end and blue the other’; ‘totally silly, unimportant things which one remembers’; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. See Woolf’s comparable comments in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 70 (on what one remembers from childhood), and 78 (on the child’s unique perception). 21 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. She refers to first encountering the bright light when they arrived in Bombay. On Woolf’s first memories see ‘A Sketch’, 64–7. 22 Monck’s mother came from an influential, aristocratic family line that made their money in ironworks and the railways; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. Her mother’s paternal grandmother was Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Guest, a leading figure in Welsh literature and translator of The Mabinogion. Lady Guest’s first husband was the Welsh ironmaster Josiah John Guest; see ‘Guest (Schreiber), Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie (1812–1895)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography; http://yba.llgc.org.uk/en/s-GUES-ELI-1812.html (accessed 6 April 2015). 23 As a young woman Monck attended Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea for a time; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 24 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 1. 25 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 2. 20

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streets and communities of the East End during the 1930s. For example, when asked by Williams why she worked predominantly in the East End Monck replies that in addition to a feeling of ‘rapport’ with the people and a strong interest in the diverse cultures and communities represented there, she felt that life for people in the East End ‘was more real than anything I’d met’, and – as I discuss further below – ‘reality’ in both life and photography is something that Monck valued very highly.26 Upon her return to London around 1921, Monck went through the usual pattern of education and socialization common to girls of her social class: a governess, day school (at Queensgate), boarding school (in Suffolk), being ‘finished’ in Paris, and then ‘coming out’ into society – a social tradition which she describes as ‘a very elaborate charade’.27 While her three sisters (all much older than Margaret) and her mother had chosen to marry men in government positions and live a society life, such a life held no appeal to Monck. She found the social mores of upper-class society ‘boring’ and the idea of marrying a peer and living ‘at the end of a big drive’ akin to living in ‘a lunatic asylum’ – ‘not a kind of life that I could accept’.28 By the time Monck was a young woman she was yearning to ‘go off on [her] own’ and make her own friends, and her parents were progressive enough to give her the freedom to do so. She secured a job at the Lefevre Gallery in St James, which was established in 1926 and exhibited the work of Impressionist and modern painters including Picasso, Seurat, Matisse and Cezanne.29 Monck worked there for two years selling art and this job marked the beginning of her encounter with various figures in British, European and American modernism. It is worth noting that in spite of being introduced to some of the key figures in modernism, Monck was impressed by few of them, and with the exception of certain people involved in documentary film and photography, in her interview she distances herself from the various coteries she encountered. For example, Monck was introduced by the Lefevre Gallery manager, Duncan McDonald, to Duncan Grant and the ‘Bloomsbury lot’ whom she met (and it seems had dinner with) and ‘very boring [she] found them’.30 Indeed, ‘boring’ seems to be the harshest criticism that Monck metes out. On being introduced to Gertrude Stein in Paris sometime in the 1930s she commented that she ‘went once and didn’t go again’31 viewing Stein as ‘too much [of] a celebrity’ for her taste.32 While having

Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 4, side 1. Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 1, side 2. 28 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 29 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 30 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 31 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 32 ‘[I] didn’t feel that Gertrude Stein was my sort of person and not a person I could talk to. 26 27

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been given ‘on several occasions … introductions to … the cream of the cream of the intellectuals’ of her day, Monck claims she ‘never made the slightest use of’ them.33 She was, she states, ‘not an intellectual’ and was more interested in the art work itself than ‘what people were saying about it’. On her own account she was not a ‘good commentator’.34 But she must have been fairly good at such commentary as she worked at the Lefevre Gallery for two years and acknowledges that she ‘took in’ a lot from her time there.35 This act of distancing herself from some of the key artistic and intellectual figures of her day reflects Monck’s very down-toearth attitude, her modesty and also, perhaps, her spirit of independence. Following her time at the gallery Monck tried her hand at various other jobs but comments that until she came upon photography in the 1930s she ‘lacked’ a ‘centre’ in her life.36 She reflects: ‘the pleasure of finding something which I could do and liked doing was a most tremendous liberation. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever settled down to try and do something’.37 Monck’s unofficial career in photography began in 1934 when she was given a Leica as a wedding present by her husband, the film editor and director John Monck.38 From that time until the early years of the Second World War, Monck took to the streets of London exploring and experimenting with her new tool. Monck had met John around 1929 (when she was eighteen) and by the time they were married John had studied avant-garde cinema in Moscow and had worked with Robert Flaherty, co-filming and editing the 1934 documentary film Man of Aran. Monck became close friends with Robert and his wife, Frances, who was also a photographer. Impressed and influenced by Robert Flaherty’s work

She was too much of a celebrity and I never got on with celebrities’; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. 33 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 34 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 35 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 36 In addition to her time at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, she worked for a time as a reader for a publisher, a model and also did administrative work at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs); Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 37 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 38 Born John Goldman Monck Goldman, in 1938 John Goldman changed his surname by deed-poll to his second name, Monck. It appears this was because his father had various real estate and business interests which he required fronts for and the name Goldman was problematic because it was a Jewish name; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 1. For a discussion of John Monck’s film career and subsequent career in farming (from 1939) see Rodney Giesler, ‘Obituary: John Monck’, The Independent, 7 July 1999; http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-john-monck-1104750.html (accessed 14 April 2015). Despite Monck’s expressed desire not to marry a peer, it seems John was technically part of the British peerage; see Darryl Lundy, ‘John Goldman Monck’, The Peerage; http:// thepeerage.com/p21564.htm (accessed 23 April 2015).

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(she specifically mentions in the interview his use of a long-focus lens), Monck likens Flaherty’s significance and position in film to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson in photography.39 She also admired Frances Flaherty’s photographs, particularly her photographs of people, commending their ‘reality’ and lack of artificiality.40 While largely self-taught as a photographer, Monck knew Edith Tudor Hart (the sister of Wolfgang Suschitzky), and spent a brief period under the tutelage of Hart honing her skills in enlarging, developing and printing.41 However, Monck’s brief career in photography was largely self-taught and self-directed – ‘a spontaneous voyage of discovery’.42 While initially ‘purely experimental’, Monck found that she quickly became so interested in photography that she ‘wanted to do something definite’ through the medium.43 Exactly what that ‘definite’ project was remains unarticulated in the interview. I turn now to a discussion of some of her photographs in the hope that this will initiate a wider critical appraisal of what that project, or projects, might have been.

Monck’s photography: modernity and everyday life Like the modern flâneuse Miriam Henderson in Pilgrimage, Monck loved exploring the streets of London. She wanted to ‘get out of Belgravia’, where she and John were living at the time, and preferred to explore London by foot rather than by bus: ‘on your feet you can just go. Then you see something down an alley and that attracts you and you go down and have a look’. Monck wanted to ‘look ordinary’ – unremarkable – so her working clothes consisted of a green jacket, green skirt, beret and pair

Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. 41 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. Wolfgang Suschitzky and his sister Edith were Viennese Jews who emigrated to London in the mid-1930s to escape political persecution. Edith was arrested in 1933 while working as an agent for the Communist Party of Austria only escaping long-term imprisonment by marrying an English doctor, Alexander Tudor Hart in 1934. Both Suschitzky’s and Tudor Hart’s photography reflects their political concerns and sympathies, for example, with working-class poverty, unemployment, welfare and progressive social reform. Like Monck, both photographers worked extensively in London, particularly the East End, in the 1930s and 1940s. For a discussion of Tudor Hart’s photography see Val Williams, Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present (London: Virago, 1986), 50–61. 42 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 43 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. 39 40

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of low-heeled shoes.44 Also, like Miriam, Monck viewed herself as a part of London: ‘if you were a Londoner, you were part of London’.45 Like Helen Levitt, the street was Monck’s terrain and as for Dorothea Lange her subject matter was ordinary life, particularly the ways in which modernity shapes and alters the everyday. As reflected in the archive held at the Museum of London, which is comprised of photographs taken in London during the second half of the 1930s, Monck predominantly photographed in the East End and other working-class districts, for example, Bethnal Green, Poplar, Limehouse, Shadwell, Portland Town, Saffron Hill, the docks and Brixton. Monck was drawn to these areas because she found their cultural and ethnic diversity interesting,46 felt – in spite of her very different class background – a rapport with the people of the East End, and because these areas presented a rich field for one of her favourite subjects: work and trade. Other series that focus on affluent parts of London such as the West End or Regent’s Park are comparatively small in scale. Like many British street photographers of the 1930s, the overarching theme underpinning Monck’s oeuvre is the daily lives of the working classes: street scenes of children at play and neighbours socializing; people at work in industrial, commercial, artisan, and domestic settings; the landscapes of working-class urban and industrial modernity; and shopping and goods (from working-class markets and produce to glamorous storefronts in the West End). Only a few of the series in the Monck archive at the Museum of London focus on events – King George VI’s coronation and the 1936 May Day celebrations – and these are very small in scale compared to other series in the collection.47 In my analysis I will focus on two, often related, topics in her photography: work and the landscapes of industrial and urban modernity.

Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 1. Monck states that they were living at Adelphi Terrace – presumably from the time they were married in 1934. The Adelphi was subsequently demolished in 1936 at which time the Moncks moved to a house in St John’s Wood; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 1. Monck took a number of pictures of the demolition of the Adelphi which are held at the Museum of London. 45 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 4, side 1. 46 For example, Monck took a series of photographs of Italian plasterers at work in Saffron Hill, spent time in Chinese restaurants learning about their cuisine and cooking techniques (this body of work has not survived), and had a general interest in the different ethnic and cultural communities of London; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2. 47 For example, the May Day collection is comprised of just four images (IN15196–15199) while the collection titled ‘Docks’ contains thirty-six images (including some duplicates; IN14929–14965). 44

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FIGURE 32 Margaret Monck, J. Bunyan Greengrocer’s Shop, 55 Henry Street, Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.48

Many of Monck’s photographs focus on people at work or surrounded by the signs and tools of their trade. This focus reflects Monck’s respect for, and interest in, the working classes, their trades and skills; her own search for a sense of purpose and vocation in her life which she found for a time in photography; and her belief in the importance of work to identity. As a woman from an upper-class background, Monck was of course not expected to have a vocation much less a career and, as I discuss further in the final section of this chapter, while she shared a long and happy marriage with a like-minded husband, Monck never thought of herself as a serious photographer and the demands of the domestic ultimately trumped her work in photography. Monck’s emphasis on work in the poorer neighbourhoods of London could also be understood to counter long-standing cultural myths that the poor were lazy (a common view in the nineteenth century) or victims paralyzed by circumstance (a common

There are no official titles for Monck’s images. The descriptive titles provided here are my own.

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view in the early decades of the twentieth century). Monck produced different series dedicated to scenes of work: street vendors selling produce at a market in Brixton; heavy industry and the transport of goods around the docklands south of the Thames; merchants and shop-owners in Poplar, Portland Town and other parts of the East End; and Italian plasterers working in ‘Little Italy’ in Saffron Hill.49 Other series that focused on trades have been lost.50 The variety of forms of work and trade that Monck records is extensive: from women selling fish fillets and cauliflowers at markets, to barbers, milkmen, artisan plasterers, a street artist, demolition workers, cooks, shopkeepers, and merchants transporting goods by horse and cart. The general view that these images convey is a sense of pride in work or the businesses and trades individuals have built, some of which are threatened by urban clearances or other forms of modernity (see Figure 32) – a topic to which I return below. Monck also records the labour of the domestic everyday but only as it is evidenced in the public sphere.51 For example, one image shows two women with a child outside a tenement hanging out a rug to air, while several others feature mothers caring for children.52 One of Monck’s recurring urban scenes features rows of gleaming (and sometimes threadbare) white washing hanging out to dry – the stark contrast of whites against greys and blacks suggesting small urban miracles achieved in otherwise extremely grimy and congested urban environments (see Figure 33). In addition to a sense of rapport, Monck expressed deep respect for the people – in particular the women – of the East End, and their capacity to look after their children and run efficient homes in what were, for many, extremely challenging material circumstances. When asked by Val Williams if she witnessed terrible deprivation in the East End (which she obviously would have), Monck replies: ‘[I] felt that the women of the family were absolutely heroic because they saw that their children went out with warm clothes and you never felt that they’d gone without a meal; but you knew perfectly well that somebody had to go short and one knew that it was the mother.’ On Monck’s reckoning, ‘everybody kept the highest standard In the Monck archive at the Museum of London most of these comprise individual folders: ‘Street Markets’ (IN14916–14928), ‘Docks’ (IN14929–14965), ‘Saffron Hill’ (IN15129– 15144), ‘East End’ (IN15095–15128), ‘People’ (IN15072–15094). 50 For example, a series on Chinese restaurants and shops that specialized in ballet clothes; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. 51 Unlike other photographers who worked in the poorer neighbourhoods of London in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Edith Tudor Hart and Cyril Arapoff, Monck did not enter or photograph inside people’s homes, even if she was given the opportunity to do so. She felt it was an imposition (‘I didn’t want to intrude on their privacy’) and also, probably because of this, she never learnt how to use a flashlight; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. Like Levitt, Monck limits her focus to people on the streets or on stoops/shopfronts. 52 The index numbers for these images are, respectively, IN15075.2 and IN15133.1. 49

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FIGURE 33 Margaret Monck, Washing day, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

they possibly could whatever the circumstances’.53 Monck’s photographs of people from the East End reflect this sentiment. Contemporaneous photographers such as Cyril Arapoff and Edith Tudor Hart emphasized social issues (social inequality, slum housing conditions, social reform), and often as a consequence portrayed the poor and working classes as remaindered victims, which some of course were.54 By contrast, Monck, like Dorothea Lange, presents a different point of view: how people managed and maintained the best standards and quality of life for their family that they could in often very difficult circumstances. To defer again to Monck’s own words, she was interested in ‘life’ – ‘I liked the way it came’55 – but she did not, like Edith Tudor Hart, want her work to be a platform for her own political views or messages: ‘my photographs show that I was never prepared to say I am a Communist and let me show you this … I wanted Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. Several of the photographs of East End residences by Cyril Arapoff held at the Photography Collection at the Museum of London (and his notes and captions) serve as representative examples here. 55 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 4, side 1. 53 54

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to show things as I’d seen them but I didn’t want to rub the things in’.56 Like Levitt, Monck refused to typecast the working classes and urban poor as victims sentenced to everyday lives bereft of happiness or value. Thus, one of the distinctive features of Monck’s photography of workingclass London in the 1930s is its open-endedness. While focused on social realities – life as ‘it came’ – it does not perform the kind of propagandist work that socially concerned photographers of the day were pursuing. To this extent Monck explores the everyday lives of the working classes as ‘it came’ her way, not through the filter of a concerned middle-class, socialist or upper-class conscience. Val Williams similarly characterizes Monck’s work as ‘enigmatic’ and ‘non-conformist’ and suggests that Monck was the only British woman street photographer to adopt the ‘candid’ stance.57 If Monck does explore some of the pressures and constraints of daily life in working-class London, I would suggest that she does this through her representations of the landscapes of urban and industrial modernity and, more specifically, the position of the human within those spaces. Monck was interested in urban landscapes, but unlike many of the modernist city-photographers of the 1930s who focused on the aesthetics of industrial forms and modern architecture, Monck seems to have been particularly interested in the relationship of the human figure to its broader urban and/or industrial surrounds. This is evident in her photographs of residential urban landscapes and industrial ones (e.g. around the docks and the Thames). While a good portion of Monck’s street photography emphasizes, like Levitt’s, the sociality and community of the street (see Figure 34), other images focus on the street as a depopulated and sometimes spectral scene. Others suggest, through composition rather than symbolism or allusion, the ways in which the human form is dominated and dwarfed by the vast structures of urban and industrial modernity that surround and contain it. One photograph, which has the words ‘Erith going home’ written on the reverse side in Monck’s handwriting, is representative of these themes (Figure 35). A solitary figure walks home along an empty street and appears almost contained by the structures that surround him: a board fence to the left and a uniform line of tenements on the right. The sense of containment is accentuated by the heavy shadows cast by the buildings, leaving only a thin band of sunlight. Like Eugène Atget’s images of old Paris at the turn of the century, this photograph has a haunting and melancholy quality: the street is empty except for this one man and a few bits of newspaper which lie aimlessly in the foreground. Monck sought to capture the scale of London’s industrial-urban landscape and to this

Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. Williams, Women Photographers, 70, 71.

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FIGURE 34 Margaret Monck, Street scene, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

FIGURE 35 Margaret Monck, ‘Erith going home’, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

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end she took a number of photographs from elevated vantage points, as in Figure 36 which, like the previous one, features figures dwarfed by their surrounding urban landscape. The children, dog, and horse and cart appear tiny and strangely anomalous in a seemingly endless expanse of tenements. In Figure 37 a small clearance in a densely populated part of the East End reveals the fragile presence of play and cleanliness in an urban environment that is conducive to neither. As in many of Monck’s photographs of the East End, the houses appear almost animate, looming over tiny human forms that must jostle and compete for space and legitimacy. Such compositions, which provide meditations on the presence and position of the human form in relation to its wider urban environment, are also evident in Monck’s photographs of the docklands. At the time, access to the docks was restricted as it was a dangerous industrial area. Many of Monck’s images focus on the boundary wall that separated the docks from the neighbouring residential areas (see Figure 39). Anna Sparham, Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, suggests that Monck’s focus on the walled area surrounding the docks is unusual as photographers tended to focus on the nearby working-class neighbourhoods or, for the few who were permitted access (usually male

FIGURE 36 Margaret Monck, Street scene and working-class housing, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

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FIGURE 37 Margaret Monck, Vacant lot and working-class housing, East London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

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photojournalists), the activities inside the docks themselves.58 By contrast, Monck elected to focus on an in-between space, one which coincides with her broader interest in marginality and liminality. For example, as I have been discussing, her oeuvre focuses on socially marginal districts and their residents. But moreover, within those districts Monck tended to focus on in-between and threshold spaces such as the street (which in the East End disrupted the public/private divide), the shop-front, the house-front, the backyard, the window, the dockland wall and the school playground. To some extent this was a product of Monck’s refusal to impose on people’s privacy by entering their homes, or to attempt to seek access to places she knew she ordinarily could not (like the docks), but it is oftentimes a choice which shapes the spatial politics and poetics of her photography.

FIGURE 38 Margaret Monck, Street scene, London Docklands, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck. This was relayed to me in a conversation with Anna Sparham at the Museum of London, 31 March 2015. I am very grateful to Anna for her valuable insights on Monck’s work and 1930s London street photography more broadly.

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Like Figures 35 and 36, many of Monck’s photographs of the docks feature a single human figure or a small group of people located at the margins of an imposing urban or industrial structure or scene.59 Such images suggest through their spatial poetics the pressure and constraint of industrial modernity on the working-class body and subject – both human and non-human animal. For example, in Figure 38 two horses and their heavily loaded cart are dwarfed by a vast warehouse, while a few human figures on the extreme left-hand side of the frame are obscured by the shadow of another tall building. There is something slightly menacing about the building and its small, eyeless windows. In another notably depopulated street scene (Figure 39) a man and his workhorse are dwarfed by the dock wall, tenements and in the further distance cranes, a sense of containment that is, as in Figure 35, enhanced by the angular shadows that fall towards them. Rather than glorify industrial modernity as an abstract ‘wonderland of geometric form’60 – in the manner of Paul Strand and Edward Weston – Monck’s compositions and spatial poetics suggest how the sheer scale and uniformity of industrial modernity exerts pressure on the fragile and particular human body. While many of Monck’s images allude to the ways in which 1930s industrial modernity exerted pressure and had an alienating effect on the working-class body and subject, much of her photography conveys people’s practical and emotional attachment to their homes, neighbourhoods and way of life. This is apparent in her documentation of so-called ‘slum clearances’ and projects of urban renewal. Thus, her street photography explores the complex set of relationships and affects that shape our relationship to the everyday. Monck’s photographs reflect a strong interest in that defining feature of modernity – change – particularly how change was often imposed on the lives of working-class people. Sometime in the second half of the 1930s, Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass Observation, approached Monck about documenting the clearances in Portland Town near St John’s Wood where the Moncks were living at the time. While I have been unable to locate this work in the Mass Observation Archive or in the Architectural Review where some of the images were apparently published, the series comprises a substantial folio in the Monck archive, and urban clearances was a topic of interest to her.61 The series

As indicated on the reverse side of several prints in this collection, a previous curator at the Museum of London (most likely Mike Seaborne) identifies at least some of these pictures to have been taken at St Katherine’s Dock. 60 Prose, Introduction, 8. 61 In her interview with Williams, Monck explains that Madge put her in touch with someone writing an article on the clearances for the Architectural Review. Monck stated that while she found the project ‘technically quite interesting’ she was dissatisfied with the work which she felt lacked ‘human impact’; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 1. Williams disagrees with this assessment, as do I. 59

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FIGURE 39 Margaret Monck, Man and workhorse, London Docklands, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

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includes many portraits of people from the area and photographs of streets, shop-fronts, houses and backyards, as well as the neighbourhood shot from a high vantage point. Several images show shopkeepers standing in front of stores marked for demolition or that have, in some more fortunate cases, been relocated (see Figure 32).62 Other images show the dramatic contrast between the familiar nineteenth-century cottages and tenements and the rationalized architecture of the modern flat.63 One image (Figure 40) shows the sheer chaos caused by displacement and re-contextualizes the avantgarde aesthetics of montage, fragmentation and surrealist juxtaposition. There is an unsettling irony in this image between the passive demeanour of the dog, which Monck has dubbed on the back of the print ‘Any old lion’, and the material and lived chaos that surrounds it. Dwellings likely deemed unfit for human habitation by housing inspectors are figured through Monck’s use of composition and light as almost picturesque, intimate and homely (see Figure 41). The scale of slum clearances in London during the 1930s and 1940s was extensive. For example, a pamphlet published by the London City Council entitled London Housing Statistics, 1938–1939, states that 353 clearance schemes were completed or in process between 1931 and 1939. This involved the clearance of nearly 692 acres of space and resulted in the displacement of almost 146,000 people. Most of the affected areas were working-class districts in East and South London.64 This enforced change was combined with wide-scale damage to the East End and docklands during German aerial bombing campaigns in the Second World War, and further council and government imposed programmes of slum clearance that continued through to the 1970s.65 Thus, due to the ‘class geography of bombing raids’ and council and government instituted projects of urban renewal, people in working-class districts did not always have the level of control over their daily lives, or the means to re-establish them, that

See also prints IN14988.2, IN15017 and IN14978.3 at the Museum of London. See prints IN15016, IN14971.1 and IN15008 at the Museum of London. 64 See Table 2 listing the various clearance schemes in the London Housing Statistics, 1938–1939 pamphlet, published by the London City Council, July 1939, 13–15, viewed at the Mass Observation Archive, Topic Collections, Housing 1938–1948, Box 1: Pre-war and early war material, SxMOA1/2/52/1/A. 65 Amy Helen Bell argues that the bombing raids in London were not experienced universally but entailed a specific ‘class geography’, with bombing campaigns (particularly in the early stages of the Blitz) centring on the East End given the area’s strategic importance in terms of industry and transport; London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 61–9. Bell also points out that in the early stages of the Blitz poorer areas in the East End were less well provisioned to cope with raids. For example, fewer private dwellings in the East End had air-raid shelters as compared to wealthier areas, and public air-raid shelters in the East End had limited facilities as compared to the hotels and clubs in which wealthy bombed-out citizens could find refuge; London Was Ours, 61–2. 62 63

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FIGURE 40 Margaret Monck, Backyard of house in Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

FIGURE 41 Margaret Monck, Tenement backyard in Portland Town, near St. John’s Wood, London, mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library. © Estate of Margaret Monck.

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upper-middle-class and upper-class people of the period enjoyed.66 While couched in utopian narratives of modernization and improved standards of living for the poor, such narratives often disguised a desire by councils, governments and city planners to do away with unsightly or what were viewed as morally and socially degenerate urban areas. Clearances resulted in the displacement and often dissolution of extended families and communities, and meant for many the loss of businesses and employment. For those who were rehoused, it was often to new suburban housing estates or flats (often referred to at the time as ‘barracks’) which completely lacked the intimate community life that was such a distinctive feature of the East End.67 Monck’s photography by no means glosses over the hardships, social inequality and constraints of daily life for London’s working classes and

FIGURE 42 Margaret Monck, Children in house across from Charlie Brown’s, Limehouse, East London, 1937. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library and Museum of London. © Estate of Margaret Monck. Bell, London Was Ours, 61. These social effects have been explored recently in the BBC2 series The Secret History of Our Streets (2012), which includes an episode on Portland Road, but they were a matter of debate as early as 1941. In an article in The Spectator in January 1941, John Armitage reflects on the failures of attempts at urban redevelopment and renewal in the East End, citing neither the ‘barrack block [flats] or the little house [in suburbia]’ as an adequate option for those whose neighbourhoods had been destroyed: ‘His domestic isolation may be splendid; it is also very lonely. The suburban housewife is a modern problem; no wonder the slumdweller rehoused on a new estate wants to get back to the friendliness of the East End streets’;

66 67

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poor (see Figure 42), but it also conveys the happiness, pride and deep attachment felt by many in those districts to place, family and community. Her work meditates on the ongoing tussle and negotiation that is played out between ordinary life and modernity’s rapacious appetite for change.

‘I never took it as the only thing in life but now perhaps I think I should have done, more’ Monck photographed regularly from 1934 until the early years of the Second World War (most likely 1940) at which time the family relocated from London to a farm in Sussex. It seems that very little of Monck’s photography was published during the 1930s or 1940s. A few of her images of the clearances in Portland Town were likely sold to the Architectural Review and Figure 42, taken in the district of Limehouse, was published as a postcard by the Housing Office.68 Monck felt that in the 1930s the avenues for photographers to publish their work were few and not easily accessible. She referred to it as a ‘closed world’ – a striking comment given Monck’s many ties to the documentary film and photography milieus of the day.69 From the Williams’ interview one gets the impression that the lack of publication of Monck’s work was also a product of a self-effacement common to many women artists and social observers of the time. She felt that her work was not particularly good and did not view herself as a serious photographer: ‘[I] didn’t have anything that I would regard as particularly good’.70 Nevertheless, amidst the humility and self-effacement the interview reveals a woman who would have liked to have done more work in the field, and to have done more with it. The Moncks’ first child, Robert, was born in November 1938 while they were still living in London. Margaret continued to take photographs after Robert was born as she refers to leaving him with a nanny while she went out to photograph, coming home in the evenings to develop prints.71 Monck John Armitage, ‘The Family House’, The Spectator, no. 5871, 3 January 1941, 10, viewed at the Mass Observation Archive, Topic Collections, Housing 1938–1948, Box 5: Pamphlets, Leaflets, Articles, Cuttings, SxMOA 1/2/1/5. Indeed, reading through this collection reveals how much the issue of urban redevelopment (of slum districts) and new models of modern housing (suburban estates, high-rise flats) was being debated and discussed in the early 1940s. 68 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. 69 She suggested in the interview that the outlets for photographers were few and photographers didn’t know how to deal with the system; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. 70 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 1. 71 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 2, side 2. Robert was born on 1 November 1938,

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comments that photography became more difficult with the onset of the war as film was less readily available. However, it was the family’s relocation to Sussex, and John’s career transition from film to farming that marked the decisive end of Monck’s career in photography.72 About six months into the war, Monck’s father-in-law purchased a farm for them in Sussex near Haywards Heath (for which they repaid him) of approximately a hundred acres. The property, on which they raised cattle, included a house (with no electricity) and workers’ cottages. John continued to work in London, only coming down to the farm for one weekend every two months, so Margaret was largely responsible for managing the farm as well as caring for Robert. It seems that this pattern of John’s extended absences, leaving Margaret in care of the day-to-day running of the farm, continued for many years.73 From that time onwards Monck’s life was entirely focused on farming, motherhood and the domestic, she ‘[n]ever got back to the things that had been before the war’.74 It is clear, too, that motherhood did not come easily to Monck. She comments that she was ‘not a natural mother’ and ‘enjoyed it more in prospect than in fact’.75 Like Miller who, as I discussed earlier, also struggled with the transition to family life in the post-war years, after the war Monck had a nervous breakdown and suffered from depression. She attended a psychiatric facility for a time and the breakdown affected her for several years after the war’s end. But she reflects that ‘ordinary life went on’ and she continued on with the ‘grindstone’ of domestic daily life.76 Her life in the post-war years was characterized by a sense of searching: she went into a religious community for a time and tried her hand at ceramics, but nothing replaced the passion she felt for that prior ‘centre’, photography.77 By the time Val Williams approached Monck in the 1980s as part of the research she was undertaking for the book Women Photographers: The Other Observers, Monck had long forgotten about her photography. The rediscovery of her work ‘astonished’ and ‘amazed’ her: ‘it never occurred to me that it would be a career’.78

their second child, Charles, was born on 7 April 1945; see Darryl Lundy, ‘Margaret St. Clair Sidney Thesiger’, The Peerage; http://www.thepeerage.com/p2865.htm#i28647 (accessed 11 May 2015). 72 In fact, John continued to work sporadically in the film industry until the 1950s, after which time his interests turned exclusively to farming. But the Moncks owned a farm from around 1940 until the end of their lives. 73 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 1. The Moncks subsequently bought a bigger farm in the Downs but Margaret found this too much to cope with so they moved back to a smaller property; Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2. 74 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2. 75 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2. 76 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2. 77 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2. 78 Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 3, side 2.

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Margaret Monck is representative of many women whose creative and professional work – in her case a photographic practice centred on the documentation of working-class London – was subsumed under the labour of the domestic everyday. And while Monck enjoyed her unexpected transition to farming and came to terms with the role of motherhood, she lamented the loss of photography from her life. When asked by Williams at the end of the interview if she had any regrets, Monck replies that she ‘would have done more of the same … I could have done a great deal more I think … one has to seize something fresh’.79 It is thanks to Monck’s family (who bequeathed Margaret’s work to the Museum of London and the Mary Evans Picture Library), and to the recuperative efforts of Val Williams, the Photographs Collection at the Museum of London, and the Mary Evans Picture Library, that Monck’s creative labours in the everyday – and the particular vision of daily life in working-class London that she presents – endures. It is, like the work of Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and many other women writers, artists and social observers of the period, a vision of ordinary life which often works against the grain of dominant discourses and representations of the period, and reasserts its import, positive value and sufficiency. This book has argued that in spite of their evident engagement with the topic, early-twentieth-century photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt, Lee Miller and Margaret Monck, have been overlooked in critical assessments and cultural histories of the everyday. By contrast, the rich contributions of modernist women writers such as Woolf, Richardson and Stein to the subject have started to be acknowledged and discussed in modernist studies, if not yet to a comparable extent in the wider field of everyday life studies. More work remains to be done so that dominant theoretical paradigms and critical and cultural histories of the everyday start to embody the kind of gender balance that reflects women’s lived, aesthetic and intellectual contributions to, and investments in, that sphere. This would entail a significant reappraisal and rewriting of the critical genealogy of modernity and the everyday as currently mapped in the Humanities from one that lies almost exclusively in a male line spanning Baudelaire, Simmel, Breton, Joyce, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Blanchot, de Certeau, and so on, to one that takes stock of the vital contributions of women writers, artists, critics and social observers to the concept of the ordinary as well as its representation. In spite of the struggles that many women have historically faced, and continue to face, between creative/intellectual work and the work of the feminine/domestic everyday, the cultural productions of the women writers and photographers that I have discussed in this book clearly demonstrate that, contra Lefebvre, women have not simply been unreflective victims

Monck, interview with Williams, cassette 4, side 1.

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‘sentenced to everyday life’,80 but long capable of shining a perceptive, original and nuanced critical and artistic light upon it. Just like my grandmother’s fireplace tool set (worn into beautiful particularity by the decades of her quiet labour), which was not saved from the dustbin of obscurity and obsolescence (along with the out-of-print novels, rejected manuscripts, lost letters, and boxes of photographs forgotten in attics) – their ordinary matter matters too.

80

Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, 10.

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INDEX

Abbott, Berenice 50, 131 Changing New York 59, 59 n.44 Adams, Ansel 47 n.22 Agee, James 16, 42, 45 Aldington, Richard 156 Alland, Alexander 50, 50 n.32 alterity see other/otherness Althusser, Louis 18 Arapoff, Cyril 192 n.51, 193, 193 n.54 Arbus, Diane 46 Arendt, Hannah 175 Atget, Eugène 50, 59, 59 n.44, 168, 168 n.56, 168 n.57, 194 Attridge, Derek 102 n.28, 146 Avery, Todd 2, 99 n.15 Bacon, Francis 124 Badiou, Alain 102 n.28 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10 Banfield, Ann 101 n.22 Barnouw, Dagmar 160 n.37, 172 Barthes, Roland 10 Bataille, Georges 10 Baudelaire, Charles 10, 11, 32, 33, 36, 55 n.42, 206 Baudrillard, Jean 10 Becker Ohrn, Karin 14, 126 n.22, 131, 143 n.70 Beckett, Samuel 19 Benjamin, Walter 10, 11, 26, 46, 69, 206 flâneur 32, 33 psychic shock 24, 24 n.11, 33, 38 Bennett, Arnold 115 Bergson, Henri 12 Berman, Jessica 99 n.15 Blanchot, Maurice 10, 13, 27, 206

everyday and anonymity 49, 49 n.31, 98–9 everyday as indeterminate 4, 5, 41 n.4, 49, 62–3, 74, 98 n.14 street 26, 27, 48, 49, 57 Boiffard, Jacques-André 10 Booth, Charles 24, 32 Bourke, Joanna 157 Bourke-White, Margaret 172 You Have Seen Their Faces 141, 142 Bowen, Elizabeth 158 Brandt, Bill 14, 168 Braun, Eva 4, 167, 173, 175, 176, 177 Breton, André 10, 11, 168, 206 Bridgman, Richard 71, 77 British Empiricism 7 n.21, 12, 81 Bronfen, Elisabeth 23, 25, 37 Brown, Bill 67, 68, 69, 70, 83, 84 Buñuel, Luis 42 Caldwell, Erskine 141 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 14, 16, 43, 44, 44 n.16, 62, 184, 189 Cavell, Stanley 10 Chandler, James 97, 145, 146, 147 Churchill, Winston 154, 155, 162 city see street Cocteau, Jean 16, 168, 184 common 7–8, 20 Crangle, Sara 61, 99 n.15, 105 n.50 Cubism 15, 47 n.22, 83 n.82, 131 cummings, e. e. 156 Cunningham, Imogen 46, 131 Dada 10 Debord, Guy 10 De Certeau, Michel 7, 8, 9 n.26, 10,

222 Index

12, 13, 18, 18 n.53, 26, 155, 206 defamiliarization/ostranenie Lange and 131, 133, 150 Miller and 133 modernism 19 in To the Lighthouse 82 De Groot, Gerard 154 DeKoven, Marianne 73, 74 n.40, 79 DeLillo, Don 42 Dewey, John 7 n.21 Dickens, Charles 24, 32 n.29, 48 Dixon, Maynard 125, 130 n.42, 181 documentary photography in America 16, 46–7, 125–6 documentary tradition 14–15, 16–17, 125–6, 129 n.42 Great Depression 129 n.42 social documentary 14, 46, 47, 125, 126 see also Farm Security Administration; Lange, Dorothea; Levitt, Helen; Miller, Lee; Monck, Margaret; street photography domestic passim see also home Eagle, Arnold 50, 50 n.32, 50 n.35 Eliot, George 11, 96 Eliot, T. S. 17, 24, 59, 183 Preludes 24 n.10, 30 Engels, Friedrich 32 n.29 Epstein Nord, Deborah 32 Ernaux, Annie 10 Evans, Walker 14, 16, 43, 46, 122, 127 Lange and 128, 128 n.31, 184 Levitt and 47, 48 everyday and the contemporary humanities 2 elusive or indeterminate 4–5, 61–5 see also Blanchot, Maurice gender/feminist studies and 3, 8–13, 17–18, 181–4, 206–7 modernist studies and 2–3, 12, 18–19 politicization of 3, 17–19, 150–1, 155–6

as residual 5, 12, 63, 154 theories and definitions of 2–13, 17–19 see also ordinary; common f.64 group 47 n.22 face-to-face Lange’s photography and 146–50 Levinas, Emmanuel 98, 98 n.12, 102–5 in Woolf 105, 106, 107–19 Farm Security Administration 47, 47 n.24, 124, 126, 127, 128, 141, 142, 144 Fascism see Nazism Favret, Mary A. 18, 19, 151, 155, 156 Felski, Rita 4, 18, 19, 42, 62, 64, 74, 75, 151 Flaherty, Robert 188, 189 flâneur/flâneuse/flânerie Baudelaire, Charles 32, 33, 36, 36 n.40 Levitt and 39, 65 in Pilgrimage 26–7, 32–7, 39 theories of 26 n.21, 30 n.27, 32–3 see also Benjamin, Walter Foucault, Michel 7, 17, 18, 155 Freud, Sigmund 24 n.11 Friedan, Betty 17 Friedberg, Anne 31 n.27 Fry, Roger 55 n.42, 82 Fussell, Paul: The Great War and Modern Memory 156 Futurism 135 Gallagher, Jean 157 n.21, 159 n.35, 160, 171, 177, 177 n.81 Gardiner, Michael E. 10, 12 Garner, Gretchen 15 n.43, 46 gaze flânerie and 27, 33 Lange’s photography and 133, 143–9 Levitt’s photography and 63, 65 Miller’s photography and 160, 163, 164, 170, 174, 177, 178 sentiment and 97

Index

gesture 3, 6, 20, 41 in Lange’s photography 134, 140, 142 n.66, 143, 145, 148 n.85 in Levitt’s photography 60, 64 Woolf and 91, 95, 96, 112 Giard, Luce 9, 9 n.26, 10 n.28 Gissing, George 24, 59 Great Depression 3, 14, 17, 47 n.24 Lange’s photography and 52, 59 see also Chapter 5 Levitt’s photography and 52, 59 Guest, Frances Charlotte 186 Guest, Josiah John 186 n.22 Guest, Lady Charlotte Elizabeth 186 n.22 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 3 n.5, 12, 183 Asphodel 157 Bid Me to Live 156, 157 habit everyday life theory 3, 3 n.5, 4, 5, 7, 12, 18, 19, 64, 139 Stein and 12 war as 156, 158, 175 Woolf and 69 n.14, 115 Handy, Ellen 52, 52 n.39, 62 Hawkins, Susan 71, 72 Heidegger, Martin 10, 28, 100 Heller, Agnes 10 Highmore, Ben Cityscapes 32 n.29, 39 n.44 everyday and modernity 6 everyday as paradoxical 5 Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction 9–10, 11, 26, 46 n.19 Everyday Life Reader, The 9 methods for studying the everyday 11, 13, 18, 129, 151, 155 Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday 1, 7 n.21, 139 things 69–70, 79, 92 see also intimacy; things Hine, Lewis 14, 49, 122, 126 Hitler, Adolf 4, 163, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 home in everyday life theory 26

223

front and war 156, 157, 157 n.21, 158, 160 in Lange’s photography 133, 135, 136, 137–8, 182 in Miller’s photography 165, 167 in Monck’s photography 199, 201 in Pilgrimage 24, 25, 34, 35 in Tender Buttons 72, 76 humanism 122, 123, 133, 139 n.56 Hume, David 7 n.21, 81 n.75, 97, 97 n.8 Hussey, Mark 101 n.22 Imagism 125 intersubjectivity 17, 20 Levitt’s photography and 61, 98 in Pilgrimage 25, 29, 33, 35, 37, 39 in To the Lighthouse 84 Woolf and 7 see also face-to-face; other/otherness intimacy 17 Highmore, Ben on 139–40 Lange’s photography and 119, 121, 123, 124, 130, 132–3, 139–46, 148, 150 Levitt’s photography and 42, 43, 51, 52, 60 Miller’s photography and 4, 164, 166, 167, 169, 178 in Pilgrimage 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 in Tender Buttons 20, 73, 77, 78, 79 in To the Lighthouse 83, 84, 85, 105 Woolf and 20, 132–3, 139–40 James, Henry 12 n.33, 67, 68 n.6 James, William 7 n.21, 12, 13, 23 n.6 Joyce, James 12 n.33, 19, 41, 43, 68, 99 n.15, 206 Ulysses 22, 24, 42, 183 Julien Levy Gallery 45 n.16 Kafka, Franz 18 Kelly, Mary 9 Knapp, Bettina 72, 73 n.38, 74 n.40 Lackey, Michael 101 n.22

224 Index

Lange, Dorothea An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion 127, 143 career 125–8, 181–2 ‘Documentary Photography’ 123, 128–30 and the documentary tradition 16, 46–7, 125–8, 129 n.42 family life 181–2 Farm Security Administration 124, 126–7, 128, 142, 143 n.70, 144 and modernism/avant-garde 124–5, 131, 135, 137 motor cars 133, 134–7, 143–5 photograph and generic ambiguity 14, 125, 129–30 ‘Photographing the Familiar’/the familiar 7, 119, 128, 131–40, 145, 149, 150 photography and responsibility 20, 123, 126, 127, 132, 146–51 secrecy/reserve 64, 143–5 technological modernity 129, 132, 135 testimony and fieldwork 16, 125, 127–8, 133, 140–3, 148 things as they are 124–5 undervaluing of her photography 184, 184 n.12 see also defamiliarization; face-to-face; gaze; gesture; Great Depression; home; intimacy; other/otherness; Surrealism; things Lawrence, D. H. 101 Lee, Russell 127, 127 n.25 Lefebvre, Henri 10, 12, 13, 26, 129, 139 everyday as elusive 4–5, 41 n.4, 62, 79 everyday and modernity 5–6, 8 everyday as totality 5 and gender 8, 18, 206 Marxist approach 7, 17, 18, 155 Leiris, Michel 10 Levinas, Emmanuel 20, 97 ‘Meaning and Sense’ 104

ordinary and 97–8, 98 n.12, 102–3, 102 n.28 the Other 102–5 totality 99–100 Woolf and 99, 99 n.15, 100–1, 105, 106 see also face-to-face Levitt, Helen A Way of Seeing 45, 48 n.27, 60 Crosstown 51–2, 51 n.37, 59 and the documentary tradition 41–2, 46–8 In the Street 42 In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938–1948 42 n.7 ordinary aesthetics of 39, 41, 43–6 as ambiguous/indeterminate 61–5 children and 50–1, 52–7 extraordinary and 43, 44, 46, 57, 65 and privacy/reserve 42, 64–5, 79–80 politics of class, race and gender 20, 47–8, 49–52, 54–5, 59–61 street photography 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 26, 32 see also Chapter 2 The Quiet One 42 work still little-known 183 see also flâneur/flâneuse; gaze; gesture; Great Depression; intersubjectivity; intimacy; street; Surrealism Light, Alison 83 Livingston, Jane 14, 41, 167, 167 n.55, 179 Loeb, Janice 42 London, Jack 50 n.35 Lukács, Georg 10 McCracken, Scott 22 n.5 Man Ray 16, 59 n.44, 131, 153, 159, 168, 168 n.56, 168 n.57, 184 Mao, Douglas 68, 69, 79, 84 Mass Observation 10, 17, 130, 199

Index

Mayhew, Henry 24, 24 n.10, 32, 32 n.29, 48 Mayor, Freddie 163, 164 Miller, Lee ‘American Army Nurses’ 166, 167 body/embodiment 159 n.35, 160, 162, 166, 167, 179 career 15, 16, 153, 159, 168–9, 179, 181–3, 184 and conventions of war photography 153, 159–61, 162–3, 165, 166, 170, 172–3, 178–9 ethics of seeing 20, 124 see also Chapter 6 Eva Braun’s house 167, 175–7 fashion photography 159, 160 n.35, 161, 162, 166, 169, 182 Germans and Nazi Germany 170–9 Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire 153, 159, 161–8, 175 Hitler’s apartment 173, 175–9 Lee Miller Archive 184 post-war years and domestic life 182–3, 205 reportage for Vogue magazine 16, 168–79 war photography and bearing witness 160, 160 n.37, 177, 178 war photography and moral ambiguity 170, 173 war photography and the ordinary/ domestic everyday 13, 20 see also Chapter 6 see also defamiliarization; gaze; home; intimacy; Surrealism; things Miller, Monica 83 Monck, John (John Goldman Mock Goldman) 184 n.14, 188, 188 n.38 Monck, Margaret biography 184–9, 204–6 and Bloomsbury 187 Charles Madge and Mass Observation 199 docklands 196, 198, 199

225

and the documentary tradition 187, 188, 189, 193–4, 199, 204 domestic life and motherhood 204–6 and Edith Tudor Hart 189 and Frances Flaherty 188–9 meets Gertrude Stein 187, 187 n.32 Lefevre Gallery 187–8 on London’s East End 186–7, 192–4 photographic practice and career 7–8, 14, 16–17, 44, 124, 184, 188–90, 192, 193–4, 198, 204, 205–6 and Robert Flaherty 188–9 urban clearances 199, 201–4 urban/industrial landscapes 194–9 war trauma 184, 205 work and trade 190–2 working classes and urban poor 20, 54, 190–4 see also home; street photography; Surrealism Monson, Tamlyn 99 n.15, 105, 111 Morgan, Michael 95, 102, 103 n.32, 146 Murrow, Edward 161, 161 n.42, 162 Myers, Sidney 42 Nazism 99, 106, 157, 159, 174, 175, 177, 178 Nesci, Catherine 33 objects see things Olson, Liesl 3 n.5, 12, 12 n.33, 19, 44 n.12, 96, 153, 158 ordinary definitions of 4–8 and ethics 3–4, 17–20 see also face-to-face; gesture; intersubjectivity; intimacy; other/otherness; sentiment event and 5, 19, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 154, 169, 190 everyday, relation to 6–8 extraordinary, relation to 5, 43, 44, 46, 57, 61, 65, 168

226 Index

modernism and 2–3, 12, 18–19, 22–3, passim modernity, relation to 3, 5–6, 19–20, 27, passim representation of 41–2, passim site of value 3–4, 17–20, passim see also everyday; common ordinary experience 3, 12, 27, 42, 75, 123, 124, 133, passim other/otherness 20 Lange’s photography and 146–50 Levinas and 102–5 things as 68, 79 Woolf and 20 see also Chapter 4 Parsons, Deborah 23, 24, 25, 33, 34 Partridge, Elizabeth 182 Partridge, Frances 154 A Pacifist’s War 154 n.5, 158 n.25 Penrose, Antony 168, 169, 182, 184, 184 n.13 Penrose, Roland 16, 182 Perec, Georges 10, 11 Phillips, Sandra 46, 52 Photo League 47, 47 n.24, 47 n.25, 50 n.32 Pictorialism 43, 44 n.15, 47 Post-Impressionism 15 Pound, Ezra 124, 125 n.16, 183 Pragmatism 7, 7 n.21, 12 Prose, Francine 48, 50 Proust, Marcel 12 n.33 Radford, Jean 23, 24, 25 Randall, Bryony 3 n.5, 12, 23, 64, 71 n.28, 74, 75, 153, 157 Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front 156 repetition and the everyday 3, 6, 12, 18 Stein and 12, 73, 107 as style 19 Resettlement Administration (RA) 47, 47 n.24, 126 Rhys, Jean 59 Richardson, Dorothy cinema and 15 n.47

‘Data for a Spanish Publisher’ 32 n.32 literary aesthetics 15, 15 n.47, 16, 43 ordinary/daily and 2, 7, 12 Pilgrimage, Miriam and identityformation 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29–30, 31–2, 33, 34–5, 38 Pilgrimage and the ordinary/daily 22–3, 27 Pilgrimage and the street see also Chapter 1 scholarly attention to 22, 183 and social outsiders 20 see also flâneur/flâneuse; home; intersubjectivity; intimacy; shopping; things Riis, Jacob 14, 49, 50 n.35, 126 Romanticism 12, 46, 55 n.42, 122 Rosenbaum, S. P. 101 n.22 Rosenberg, Beth 106 Ross, Kristin 9 Rothstein, Arthur 127, 127 n.25 Rumbarger, Lee 153 n.3, 157, 160 Sassoon, Siegfried 154 Scherman, David E. 177 Schoenbach, Lisi 3 n.5, 7 n.21, 12, 12 n.33 Schröder, Leena Kore 106, 107, 108, 109 sentiment 96, 97, 97 n.8, 97 n.10, 145, 146, 147 sentimental 52, 87, 96, 146, 184, 184 n.12 Shahn, Ben 47, 128, 128 n.31, 184 Sheringham, Michael 5, 10, 11, 12, 41 n.4, 46 n.19, 49 n.31, 62 shock 19, 24, 24 n.11, 131, 133 shopping/consumption 18, 18 n.53, 31 n.27, 155, 190 in Pilgrimage 29, 30, 68 Simmel, Georg 10, 11, 24, 24 n.11, 26, 27 n.22, 33, 38, 57, 206 Sinclair, May 23 n.6 Situationists International 7 Smith, Adam 97 n.8 Smith, Angela K. 156, 156 n.21

Index

Smith, Dorothy E. 9, 10 Smith, W. Eugene 47 n.24 Sontag, Susan ethics of photography 121, 122–4, 127–8, 131, 142, 153, 158–9, 179 photography and the mundane 14, 121–2 photography of violence/suffering 158–9, 179 Spender, Humphrey 159 Steedman, Carolyn 9 Steichen, Edward 14, 47 n.22, 50, 122, 122 n.7, 140 Stein, Gertrude the daily 2, 7, 11, 12, 19, 206 domestic life 183 identity, concept of 107 lesbian desire/code 73, 73 n.38, 77–8 Long Gay Book, A 70 and modernism/avant-garde 15, 16, 183 Mrs. Reynolds 158 ‘Portraits and Repetition’ 72 n.36, 76 Tender Buttons and affect 70–1, 73, 76, 77 Tender Buttons and the everyday 71–5, 79 Three Lives 74 war and the daily 154, 157, 158 Wars I Have Seen 154 n.5, 158 see also habit; home; intimacy; repetition; things Stein, Sally 142 n.66, 143, 184 n.12 Stevens, Wallace 12 n.33, 19, 44, 46 Stieglitz, Alfred 14 straight photography 44 n.15 Strand, Paul 14, 46, 47 n.22, 50, 122, 131, 199 stream-of-consciousness narration 23, 23 n.6 street cultural/literary histories of 19, 23–7, 30, 32, 43, 48–50, 59–60 everyday life theory and 25–6

227

in Helen Levitt’s photography, 42–3, 48–61 Maurice Blanchot and 26, 27, 48, 49, 57 in Pilgrimage 19 see also Chapter 1 see also flâneur/flâneuse street photography American 14, 49–50, 59–60 British and European 14, 49–50, 59–60, 62 Helen Levitt 13, 16, 19, 26, 32 see also Chapter 2 Margaret Monck 16–17, 26, 184, 188–206 Stryker, Roy 47, 127, 127 n.26, 142 Surrealism 10, 13, 46, 46 n.19, 82, 168 n.56 Lange and 131, 137 Levitt and 16, 17, 44, 44 n.16, 52 Miller and 15, 16, 159, 160 n.35, 161, 167, 167 n.55, 168, 168 n.56, 176, 177, 181 Monck and 201 Suschitzky, Wolfgang 189, 189 n.41 Taylor, Paul 125, 126, 127, 128 n.32, 129 n.42, 143, 181 Thesiger, Frederic John Napier 185, 185 n.17 things everyday and 4, 6, 17, 41 Highmore, Ben 20, 69–70, 79, 92 instrumentalism/capitalism and 67–8 in Lange’s photography 133, 135, 139 in Miller’s photography 160, 166–8, 175, 176, 177, 177 n.81 modernism’s revaluation of 3, 14, 19, 20, 122–3 see also Chapter 3 in modernist photography 14, 46, 122–3 in Pilgrimage 30, 31, 68 in ‘Solid Objects’ 68–9 in Tender Buttons 20, 69, 70–2, 74–80 in To the Lighthouse 69, 73, 80–93 Thomson, John 49

228 Index

Trachtenberg, Alan 48, 48 n.25, 61, 64 Tristan, Flora 33 uncanny (unheimlich) 52, 82, 90, 92, 148, 167, 173, 177 see also defamiliarization Vorticism 24 Walkowitz, Judith 24 n.12, 30 n.27, 32 n.29 Walkowitz, Rebecca 106 war aerial bombing, London 201, 201 n.65 everyday/ordinary and 3, 5, 13, 18, 153–8 modernist literature of 156–8 in To the Lighthouse 90, 92 see also Miller, Lee Weber, Max 9, 67, 68, 76, 80, 81 Weegee (Arthur Fellig) 50, 50 n.32, 59 Wells, H. G. 24 West, Rebecca: Return of the Soldier 157 Westerbeck, Colin 62 Weston, Edward 42, 47 n.22, 131, 199 Whiston Spirn, Anne 125, 127 n.26, 128 n.32, 143 n.70, 144, 146, 148 n.85, 184 n.12 White, Minor 131 Williams, Carlos Williams 71 Williams, Raymond 8 Williams, Val 184, 185 n.15, 192, 194, 205, 206 Withers, Audrey 173, 175, 182 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10 Wong, Yvonne 23 n.8, 28 Woolf, Virginia Between the Acts 93 ‘Character in Fiction’ 95, 97, 110–15, 119, 132–3, 139, 140 character-reading 97, 111

cotton wool of daily life 72 n.34 Diary of Virginia Woolf, The 100–1, 105, 107–10, 154 domestic life 183 ‘Duchess and the Jeweller, The’ 107 n.53 inter-media contexts 15–16 Jacob’s Room 80 n.74, 83, 105 and Jews 106–10, 119 ‘Kew Gardens’ 133 and Levinas 99, 99 n.15, 100–1, 105, 106 ‘Life and the Novelist’ 43 n.9 ‘Modern Fiction’ 23, 43, 123, 124 ‘Modern Novels’ 43 ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ 97, 111 Mrs Dalloway 22, 84, 106, 115–19, 133, 157 ordinary experience 3, 7, 12, 43, 64, 123, 133 and the philosophical tradition 100 n.22, 100–1 Room of One’s Own, A 101 ‘Solid Objects’ 68–9, 79, 80 n.74, 83 ‘Sketch of the Past, A’ 63, 72 n.34, 154 n.5, 185, 186, 186 n.20 ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ 29, 29 n.25 Three Guineas 100 To the Lighthouse 11, 69, 73, 80–93, 96, 99, 100, 101 n.22, 105, 137, 139, 167 war and 90, 92, 154, 157, 158 Waves, The 99, 105 Years, The 107 see also defamiliarization; face-to-face; gesture; habit; intersubjectivity; intimacy; things; other/otherness Wordsworth, William 46, 122 Zox-Weaver, Annalisa 171