Refuge

Definition

Refuge names the interior's protective function: the room as the place of withdrawal from an outside constituted as chaos, exposure or demand. The wiki's sources give the concept a double register that is its constitutive structure. The refuge as promise: Benjamin's interior is "the place of refuge of Art," "a place of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms of experience" (via Rice's 1939 exposé); Woolf's room is "a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land,' whilst the outside is dark and watery, the site of psychological and physical chaos" (via C. Ruth Miller); Wharton's ordered plan forms "a projection of the idealized self, a retreat, a series of protective enclosures"; Taylor condenses the tradition — the interior as "a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere" (editors' headnote). The refuge as prison: the same structure inverts — "this refuge, this fortress protecting from the confusion without, may also be 'a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions,' that we return to with predictability" (Miller via Taylor); Gilman's rest-cure room is the refuge imposed as therapy that becomes the apparatus of madness; Benjamin's collected interior can be misread, Taylor suggests, because "he confuse[s] enclosure with interior."

The concept's sharpest formulation is Taylor's conditional: interiorness itself is indexed to the refuge's mode of occupation — "Might our sense of 'interiorness,' our interpretation of the interior depend on whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord, have encounters we initiate, and the manner in which we re-live memories and are moved by them?" (2001/2006, p. 342). The refuge is thus not a property of rooms but of the relation between an occupant and an enclosure: the same room is refuge, prison, or haunted pointlessness depending on whether the confinement is chosen, what encounters it permits, and what memories it returns. The concept also has a political edge: when the outside becomes as ordered as the inside ("renaissance planning and the interior became re-described from the city"), "there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same" — the refuge requires a genuine outside to be refuge at all.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Taylor — the concept's theorist of its double valence (2001/2006): the interior as "a physical and psychological refuge" (headnote); Woolf's dry land against the dark and watery; the refuge-prison dialectic ("a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions"); the voluntary-confinement condition of "interiorness"; the renaissance-planning warning.
• Walter Benjamin — the refuge-tradition's chief theorist: "The interior was the place of refuge of Art. The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior" (Charles Baudelaire, quoted by Taylor, p. 340); the 1939 exposé's interior "separated from sites of work" as "a place of refuge from the city" (via Rice).
• Virginia Woolf — the refuge's literary form (see log): the room as "a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land,'" against "the dark and watery" outside, "the site of psychological and physical chaos"; the "deep waters of depression" and "the dark places of psychology" (via C. Ruth Miller's Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life).
• Edith Wharton — the refuge's planned form (see log): "a projection of the idealized self, a retreat, a series of protective enclosures" (The Decoration of Houses); The Mount's "patterns of stillness"; the refuge's dark twin in Lily Bart's "downward path… through a series of actual houses."
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman — the refuge's carceral limit (see log): the Yellow Wallpaper's confinement — "confusion and pointlessness… brought within the prison or place of confinement, generating madness."
• Charles Rice — the refuge-formation's historiographer: the bourgeois interior's emergence as dated event, its refuge-function as historically specific rather than essential (2004/2006).
• Beverly Gordon — the refuge's gendered ambivalence: Wharton's rooms that took "possession" of their women, "tantamount to self-annihilation" to leave — the protective enclosure as the enclosure that possesses (1996/2006).

Related Concepts

• Bourgeois Interior — the refuge's historical formation: the interior separated from work as "a place of refuge from the city" — the concept Taylor interrogates ("does he confuse enclosure with interior?").
• Privacy — the refuge's social condition: withdrawal from "the chaos of 'out there'" as the private sphere's function; the voluntariness of confinement as the privacy-register's inner criterion.
• Enclosure — the refuge's material condition: the demarcation that makes withdrawal possible — and, in its imposed forms, the prison.
• The Madwoman — the refuge's failure case: the room that confines without refuge (Gilman), the covering of surfaces as "a cry and an attempt to escape this imposed order."
• The prison-inversion register — "a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions" — is carried by the wiki's confinement apparatuses (the rest-cure room, the garret, the men's room: the-madwoman, mens-room, enclosure) rather than a dedicated page.
• Interiority — the refuge's psychic correlate: Taylor's "interiorness" indexed to voluntary confinement — innerness as what self-chosen shelter produces.
• Domestic Interior — the refuge's typical site: the home as "haven for withdrawal from society" (Lawrence) — with the credential-function (status-display) as the refuge's internal rival.
• Dwelling — the refuge's durational form: the place "we return to with predictability."
• Glass House — the refuge's transparency limit-case: protection without concealment, where "one can never feel truly at home."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the concept's synthesizing source: the editors' headnote naming the interior "a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere" (p. 339); Benjamin's "The interior was the place of refuge of Art" quoted and interrogated ("Or does he confuse enclosure with interior?", p. 340); Woolf's room as "a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land,' whilst the outside is dark and watery, the site of psychological and physical chaos" (p. 341); "a place of reflection and withdrawal from the chaos of 'out there?'" and the renaissance warning ("there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same," p. 342); the refuge-prison dialectic ("a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions"; the Yellow Wallpaper's madness; p. 342); and the voluntariness condition — "whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord" (p. 342).
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the refuge's historical formation: the interior "separated from sites of work and productive labour" as "a place of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms of experience" (p. 285) — the refuge dated to the bourgeois nineteenth century, against its transhistorical generalization.
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the refuge's possessive face: Wharton's rooms that took "possession" of their women, departure "tantamount to self-annihilation" (p. 128) — the protective enclosure as the structure that owns its occupant.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the refuge's carceral limit in the domestic sphere: the rest-cure room, the "paraphernalia of confinement" — the domestic refuge inverted into the medical prison (pp. 122–124).
• Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror (Ries 2002) — the refuge's temporal extension: "Surely the everyday is a refuge from history, even from time itself" — refuge as the everyday's relation to power and history rather than a building's function; with the grotto registers (source-notes/garofalo-khan-2018-sensorial-interior-landscapes) supplying the refuge across material scales: the found grotto's thermal shelter, the "refuge for sensorial delights," terror-war's destruction of "the rhythms and small securities of everyday practice."
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the refuge's childhood and night-side forms, at the scale of the house's peripheries: the parallel world "of refuge and passage, quiet places in which to nest and dream, dark places in which to hide or from which to flee" (p. 357) — refuge and escape-route as one space's two charges, the pair Taylor's dialectic holds at room-scale here distributed across the house's hidden rooms; "These curious places become the refuge of the half-realized" (p. 357) — the refuge of wishes, dreams, fears and desires rather than of persons; and the refuge's costs named with the day-side's: the same house that shelters also "symbolically tests" the "identity and security of domestic life" in its night side (p. 356), and "There is danger in the house" (p. 356) — the refuge-claim ("the promise of home") held co-present with the Poe house it contains. Where the page's other sources make the refuge a room's function, Troutman makes it the house's second geography — and prices its failure. See hidden-spaces, fear, childhood-spaces.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the refuge-prison dialectic's Deleuzian resolution, the concept's separation from the enclosure it was built on: the home/the home split ("crucial that we separate the ideas of home and the home, home and house, home and domus. The latter terms… are proper, normative, and may have little to do with comfort," p. 395) splits the refuge-structure itself — the home (proper enclosure) may be "a space of violence and pain; home then becomes the process of coping, comforting, stabilizing oneself, in other words: resistance" (p. 395) — the refuge as what the process makes, not what the room is; and the gender-political stake of the dialectic named: "articulating women to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free" as the reproduction the de-origined home refuses (p. 395) — Taylor's refuge-prison pair given its social form and its disarticulation-programme. But the register's limit is equally stated: "home can also mean a process of rationalization or submission, a break with the reality of the situation, self-delusion, or falling under the delusions of others. Home is not authentic or inauthentic" (p. 395) — the coping-process with no guarantee against the prison's interiorization. Where the page's other sources make the refuge a room's function, Wise makes the refuge a verb: the shelter as what coping does, "a becoming within an always already territorialized space" (p. 395). See home, fear, enclosure.

Open Questions

• Taylor's conditional makes interiorness depend on voluntary confinement ("confined of our own accord"). Can the wiki's registers be sorted by this criterion — the Glass House (watched, involuntary exposure), the rest-cure room (imposed), the collected bourgeois interior (self-chosen)? Where does the "prison constructed of conventions and illusions" begin — and can it be designed against?
• "Does he confuse enclosure with interior?" (Taylor on Benjamin): if the refuge-formation is enclosure mistaken for interior, is the wiki's Benjamin-derived refuge register (bourgeois-interior, the-collector) built on the confusion — or does Rice's historicization (the refuge as dated formation) already answer the charge?
• The renaissance warning: "if 'out there' becomes ordered and controlled… there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same." Do contemporary conditions (the quantified, surveilled, media-saturated outside) reproduce the renaissance condition — and if so, is the refuge now impossible, or must it migrate (the non-place's "experiences of psychological interiority," Teston)?
• Woolf's dry land requires the dark and watery outside. Is the refuge therefore constitutively gendered and classed (who gets a room, who is the chaos) — and does Treadwell's oceanic interiority (the sea inside) dissolve the dry-land/watery distinction the refuge needs?