Bodies and Mirrors

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Ann C Colley

In this essay, Ann Colley discusses the correlation between physical bodies and their surroundings, particularly the space of nostalgia and recollection contained in Victorian literature. Working from the role memory plays in recalling our relationship to known environments, the particularities of the selected autobiographic accounts discuss the spaces of childhood through the invisible, aesthetic and ubiquitous body. This critical examination from an English literature academic proposes that the interior is not simply defined by the objects within it, but by our movement and inhabitation around and among them.

Years after they had left their childhood behind them, John Ruskin, Walter Horatio Pater and Robert Louis Stevenson continued to reflect upon the homes in which they had passed their early lives. In particular they thought about the rooms of their childhood. When they described these spaces, they did not simply re-present the contours and things that had composed the drawing-room of 28 Herne Hill in London, the interiors of the house in Enfield or the day nursery and bedrooms of 17 Heriot Row in Edinburgh. Instead, they considered how their physical being had related to the walls and windows of childhood.¹ Conscious of how this relationship defines the sense of one's surroundings, they let their memories resuscitate the dialogue their bodies had once had with these interiors. They understood that it is the child's being that shapes and illuminates the interiors of home. Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do.

Although Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson are all sensitive to the defining function of the body, each, not surprisingly, experiences the phenomenon in a different way. The result is that their autobiographical texts (Praeterita, 1885; 'The Child in the House,' 1878; A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885) offer three distinct models of how the consciousness of one's physical being illuminates the interiors of home. Ruskin's text speaks of the invisible body, Pater's of the aesthetic body and Stevenson's of the ubiquitous body.

The first model is Ruskin's. In his often grumbling, yet graceful, autobiography Ruskin describes the houses of his childhood: he writes briefly about 54 Hunter Street (London)

and more extensively about the house at Herne Hill (four miles south of London). With a keen immediacy he describes the commanding views from their garret windows, the front and back gardens and the setting of the Herne Hill residence. But with their emphasis on 'prospect,' these passages do not represent Ruskin's experience of the interiors of home, for they belong more to the public Ruskin, the figure whose carefully selected words guided the British around Venice and directed readers' eyes to a more 'truthful' view of the Alps. Instead, the sections in Praeterita that reveal more intimate moments are those in which he once more steps inside his childhood surroundings and considers his relationship to them. No longer preoccupied by how a shadow falls on a cathedral's tracery or by the continuity of a building's structural lines, he dwells upon a few intimate moments of home and recalls how he had passed his days 'contentedly' inside rooms, comparing the colours in the carpet or gazing at the patterns in the bed covers. He remembers how he had once stood by the windows watching a wasp on the window-pane or repeatedly looking at the iron post out of which the water carts were filled.²

Paradoxically, in all these intimate spaces of home the presence of the body is virtually absent. In Praeterita Ruskin makes it clear that he had not occupied these comfortable recesses and corners with the fullness of his physical being but rather as an almost invisible entity. As if replacing metaphor with synecdoche, Ruskin describes his younger self by focusing exclusively upon his eyes that reach out as far as they can and leave the rest of his body behind, unobserved and unmolested. Throughout his work, the eyes replace the physical body by standing in for it.³ To observe was enough. Ruskin moved through the rooms and interiors of home as inside a frame supporting a glass that hides the body in its dimness while allowing the eyes to peer through its dusk. When he sat observing, his eyes wandered into the patterns of the floors and walls; he travelled within the portchaise and stared out of its window; setting out on holidays, he took his position on a 'little box' between his mother and father and enjoyed the prospect appearing piece by piece before him.⁴ Disappearing into the supporting brackets, his body released his eyes and gave him the freedom to stare, unnoticed, in 'rapturous and riveted' attention.⁵ This granted him a protective invisibility that allowed him to observe without being engaged by anything other than himself. He existed as the spectator, not as the observed. Later in life he was always to value those moments when he could take note of his surroundings away from people's sight and consciousness. For instance, in 1842, alone in Champagnole, Ruskin recalls that his 'entire delight was in observing' without himself being 'noticed.'⁶ Part of Ruskin's nostalgia for his childhood is to return to the monastic invisibility that allowed him the privacy of his visual ecstasy.

Pater's rendering of his childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical portrait 'The Child in the House' is naturally different from Ruskin's. Although Pater's interiors, like Ruskin's, radiate an almost monastic aura, they by no means resemble Ruskin's, for the

body that inhabits and forms them has a distinctly different effect. It is a sensuous presence. And although for Pater the visual experiences are just as essential as they are for Ruskin, these visual moments are not detached or bodiless. They emerge from and return to a body through which images move along the nerves and bring vitality to his being. In Pater's interiors, therefore, the child's body is just as significant as it is in Ruskin's, but not because of its inquisitive invisibility; it is conspicuous because of its willingness to be affected by what lies outside of it. Here the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body.

When Pater portrays Florian Deleal, the young boy in 'The Child in the House,' he dwells upon the boy's willing, though sometimes unconscious, acceptance of the visible, the tangible and the audible encircling him. Within, the winds from outside the house play on him and through the open windows the coming and going of travellers, the shadows of evening, the brightness of day, the perfumes from the neighbouring garden and the scent of the lime tree blossoms awaken his senses. The sensitive boy looks at the fallen acorn and the black crow's feathers that his sister has brought in from 'some distant forest' and discovers intimations of places beyond – these 'treasures' speak the 'rumour of its [the wood's] breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant and the branches lifted in them.'⁷

The outside and the inside come together in his body that risks being wounded by the tyranny of the senses and the surrendering of its boundaries – something the sheltered Ruskin could not expose himself to. From over the high garden wall, sentiments of beauty and pain float into Florian's consciousness and penetrate what Pater calls the 'actual body;'⁸ the cry of his aunt on the stair when she announces his father's death strikes and quickens him; the wasp in the basket of yellow crab-apples stings him (Ruskin, recall, only watched the wasp at his window). The receptive Florian listens to the voices of people below speaking of the sick woman who 'had seen one of the dead sitting beside her' and then brings the ghostly figure into his own space so that the revenant sits 'beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep.'⁹ Similarly he goes outside so that he may bring what is there inside. He passes through the garden gate, fills his arms with red hawthorn blossoms (the scent of which has already reached him) and returns to arrange these brilliant flowers in 'old blue china pots along the chimney piece.'¹⁰

Later, in two other imaginary and semi-autobiographical portraits, 'Emerald Uthwart'¹¹ and Marius the Epicurean,¹² Pater echoes many of the details describing Florian's experiences within his home. In these texts the children breathe, feel, touch, move and see with their bodies as Florian does. No eye, as in Ruskin's case, leaves the body to reside in the half-concealed recesses of a drawing room. The young and solitary Emerald is a child who, within the context of home, responds to the sights and sounds surrounding him – to the 'rippling note of the birds' and to the flowers in the garden that yield a sweetness when the 'loosening wind' unsettles them.¹³ When flung open, the windows in the attic

where he sleeps admit the scent of roses, and the faint sea-salt air envelops him as he sleeps under 'the fine old blankets.'¹⁴ Similarly, the child Marius in the solitude of his early dwelling feels the sea wind that blows from the distant harbour, inhales the scent of the new-mown hay that the sea air sweeps into his room and takes pleasure in the view of the purple heath.

The affect of these children's sensuous bodies and consciousness is complemented by the interiors of home. Like Florian, who sees and touches what is outside the boundaries of his body, these interiors, as if they were bodies themselves, extend and incorporate what is beyond them – what is outside the windows or the enclosing walls. These interiors do not shut themselves off; they resist exclusiveness. Like a shuttle in a loom they move continuously inside and out of each other. In Florian's childhood home, for instance, the staircase moves the reader from floor to floor and up to a broad window, out to the swallow's nest that hangs beneath the sill and then back down into the house and out again on to the open, flat space of a roof that offers a view of the neighbouring steeples. Interiors and exteriors mingle. They pass through the intermediary spaces – the windows and gates left ajar – to meet and lie over and press against each other. In this manner the child's body and the rooms of home engage in an exchange. In a sense, each passes into the condition of the other.

The rooms of Stevenson's childhood reveal a third possibility, another way the body's effect converses with and gives shape to its surroundings. This time, though, it is neither Ruskin's curious invisibility nor Pater's receptive body that defines or intermingles with the interior; instead, it is the moat of sickness encircling the child's body that structures the spaces of home and creates the sense of the ubiquitous body.

Stevenson, who began writing his childhood poems during a particularly difficult time with his health, returns to those interior spaces in A Child's Garden of Verses.¹⁵ He re-enters the rooms that recall the fevers, the severe bronchial infections, the earaches and, eventually, the haemorrhaging that from the age of two kept him for long periods in bed. Confined, the young Stevenson periodically missed school and passed his days 'exiled' from the company of other children. As his biographers have pointed out, Stevenson never forgot what he called the 'terrible long nights' through which he lay awake, in his words, 'troubled continuously by a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body.'¹⁶

The interiors described in A Child's Garden of Verses recall the scenes of Stevenson's early confinement. The poems take place in the night nursery; they inhabit the land of the counterpane; they climb the stairs; they go into the walled garden and they look through the broad window of 17 Heriot Row. In a sense, each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself. The poems and the spaces they describe offer release

from the enclosures of the body's frailty. Like the children in one of the verses, who break through a breach in the wall and go down to the mill ('Keepsake Mill'), or like the river that flows 'out past the mill, / Away down the valley, / Away down the hill' ('Where Go the Boats?'), out 'A hundred miles or more' into foreign lands – to Babylon, Malabar, Africa and Providence ('Pirate Story') – and like the swing that takes the child up high so he can look over the garden wall and 'see so wide' ('The Swing'), these poems reach beyond to places afar; they break through their limits and climb the cherry tree to look abroad ('Foreign Lands').¹⁷

In these poems the interiors of home do not isolate the convalescing child. Through his desire to be rid of what threatens to exile him, the ailing child shapes the rooms and enclosed gardens so that they carry him to places beyond. The young Stevenson convincingly substitutes one object for another; he transforms the chair, the stairs, the bedclothes, the windows and the flickering of the coals' embers into vessels of escape. The bedroom chairs stuffed with pillows become ships; a basket in the sun turns into a pirate's boat; the counterpane assumes its own topography of hills, dales and plains and the sheets merge into seas. These interiors liberate the sick body from itself.

Most of all, though, the desire of the sick child to find release from himself creates situations in which the child identifies with other children and, in that way, becomes part of a ubiquitous body so that he can for a while be less alone, excluded and strange. Within these rooms is a larger landscape that collapses the distant into the contiguous and, simultaneously, expands the immediate into the distant. The child senses, although he cannot see them, the presence of other children whose activities are similar to his. These children may live away in the far East or in the West beyond the foam of the Atlantic Sea ('The Sun Travels') and they may eat 'curious' food rather than 'proper meat' ('Foreign Children'); nevertheless, the sick child senses that they share a common physical rhythm: all 'dine at five' ('Foreign Lands'); like him, but in an inverted pattern, they go to bed and at dawn they awake and dress ('The Sun Travels').¹⁸ These parallels form the larger, more inclusive body so that all children, even when confined and alone, belong to an unseen, unconscious, yet animated intertextuality of being that is theirs. Just as the sickly Stevenson once looked out of the nursery window, through the darkness of the night, to see the lit windows where other sick 'little boys' were also waiting for the morning, the child in the verses finds comfort in inclusiveness.¹⁹ He knows there are others ready to receive and understand him, so that, for instance, when he launches his boats, he is aware that children 'A hundred miles or more' away will bring them into shore ('Where Go the Boats?').²⁰

Because of this sense of ubiquitousness, the potentially lonely and isolated 'I' of the poems' interiors frequently joins the more inclusive 'We.' In 'A Good Play,' 'Pirate Story,' 'Farewell to the Farm,' 'Marching Song,' 'Happy Thought,' 'The Sun Travels,' 'The

Lamplighter,' 'My Bed is a Boat', 'Keepsake Mill' and 'Picture-Books in Winter,' the child attaches his being to others so that 'we' are afloat, 'we' swing upon the gate, 'we' march, 'we should all be as happy as kings,' 'we' play round the sunny gardens, 'we' are very lucky and 'we' see how all things are. It is, of course, this metamorphosis that empowers the child in A Child's Garden of Verses. Like the shadow that follows or jumps ahead of the child, his sick body is almost always a silent, threatening presence among the verses' lines. Yet, within the context of the poems' transfigured interiors, the child is able to reach beyond himself and connect with others and join the ubiquitous body of childhood. Through play and fantasy, the child alters the rooms of home and releases the suffering 'I' from the fragility of itself and thus realises the possibilities of a more encompassing and restorative 'we.' Stevenson's child, in a sense, brings to life one of the most vital experiences of interiority – the understanding that an interior does not exist for its own sake but, instead, for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere. $^{21}$ (… p 46)

Notes

1 Their orientation anticipates those like Maurice Merleau-Ponty who argue that it is not through thought, absented from body, that one knows one's surroundings, but through one's 'bodily situation' – that one is conscious through the body's position in space. See M Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, JM Edie (ed), Northwestern University Press (Evanston, Illinois), 1964, p 5. Their point of view also looks forward to twentieth-century architectural theorists such as Kent Bloomer, Charles Moore and Robert Yudell, who insist that one measures and orders the world from one's own body, that the body is in 'constant dialogue' with the buildings surrounding it. See K Bloomer, C Moore and R Yudell, Body, Memory and Architecture, Yale University Press (New Haven), 1977, p 57. Ruskin's, Pater's and Stevenson's sensitivity to the relationship of their bodies to their surroundings might, in some way, reflect the emphasis placed upon the child's body in nineteenth-century guides on raising a child. See 'Physiological Bodies', C Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995.
2 J Ruskin, Praeterita: The Autobiography of John Ruskin [1885], intro K Clark, Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1989, pp 12, 34, 7.
3 As if conscious of this substitution, Ruskin recalls the time he 'frightened' his mother 'out of her wits' by announcing that his eyes were coming 'out of his head'. See Ruskin, Praeterita, p 38. Many critics, of course, have remarked upon the importance that Ruskin attached to the act of seeing.
4 Ruskin, Praeterita, p 23.
5 Ruskin, Praeterita, p 50.
6 Ruskin, Praeterita, pp 155–6.
7 WH Pater, 'The Child in the House' [1878], WE Buckler (ed), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, New York, University Press (New York), 1986, p 229.
8 Pater, 'The Child in the House', p 232.
9 Pater, 'The Child in the House', p 234.
10 Pater, 'The Child in the House', p 231.
11 WH Pater, 'Emerald Uthwart' [1892], WE Buckler (ed), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, New York University Press (New York), 1986.
12 WH Pater, Marins the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas [1885], I Small (ed), Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1986.
13 Pater, 'Emerald Uthwart', p 344.
14 Pater, 'Emerald Uthwart', p 345.
15 RL Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses [1885], Airmont (New York), 1969.

16 D Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson and His World, Thames and Hudson (London), 1973, p 10. Of all the photographs and paintings of Stevenson, none captures his fragility more than John Singer Sargent's 1885 portrait – painted the year A Child's Garden of Verses appeared – in which Stevenson's lank and almost transparent body moves through the shadows into darkness. His long thin fingers touch his face and his leg as if having to confirm their actuality.

17 Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses, pp 36, 28, 57.

18 Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses, p 29.

19 Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson and His World, pp 10–11.

20 Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses, p 36.

21 For a discussion of this principle, see M Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans P d'Acierno and R Connolly, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

Ann C Colley, 'Bodies and Mirrors: The Childhood Interiors of Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson', from Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-century Interior, by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (eds), Manchester University Press (Manchester), 1999.

(Excerpt pp 40–6)