Bodies and Mirrors: The Childhood Interiors of Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson

Author: Ann C Colley Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original publication 1999) Source type: chapter (excerpt pp. 68–75 of Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley 2006; originally published in Inga Bryden & Janet Floyd (eds.), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Manchester University Press, 1999)

Raw file: raw/chapters/colley_2006-bodies-and-mirrors.md

Summary

Ann C. Colley — an English-literature scholar of nineteenth-century British culture — examines how John Ruskin (Praeterita, 1885), Walter Pater ("The Child in the House," 1878) and Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885), "years after they had left their childhood behind them," described the rooms of their childhood homes. Her central claim is that these writers "did not simply re-present the contours and things" of those interiors: "Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do." From the three autobiographical texts she distils three distinct models of how bodily being illuminates the interiors of home — the invisible body (Ruskin), the aesthetic body (Pater) and the ubiquitous body (Stevenson) — and in doing so supplies interior-design theory with a literary prehistory of embodiment, interiority and the inside/outside exchange. (The chapter was first published in 1999; the date field follows the wiki's reprint-volume rule for Intimus selections. The raw file's header reads "Intumus: Interior Design Reader" — an OCR corruption of "Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader.")

Key Claims

The body, not the object, defines the interior. In recalling their childhood rooms, Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson "considered how their physical being had related to the walls and windows of childhood"; they "let their memories resuscitate the dialogue their bodies had once had with these interiors," understanding "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" (p. 68).
Three models of the body–interior relation: "Ruskin's text speaks of the invisible body, Pater's of the aesthetic body and Stevenson's of the ubiquitous body" (p. 68). Each is a distinct way that "the consciousness of one's physical being illuminates the interiors of home."
The invisible body (Ruskin): in Praeterita Ruskin occupies the comfortable recesses of home "as an almost invisible entity"; "the eyes replace the physical body by standing in for it" — a substitution he treats with synecdoche ("metaphor replaced by synecdoche"). His is a spectator's body: "protective invisibility that allowed him to observe without being engaged by anything other than himself. He existed as the spectator, not as the observed." His adult nostalgia is "to return to the monastic invisibility that allowed him the privacy of his visual ecstasy" (p. 69).
The aesthetic body (Pater): Pater's child (Florian Deleal in "The Child in the House," echoed in "Emerald Uthwart" and Marius the Epicurean) has a body of "sensuous presence": 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." "Here the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body" (pp. 69–70). The receptive body "risks being wounded by the tyranny of the senses and the surrendering of its boundaries – something the sheltered Ruskin could not expose himself to" — the sting of the wasp (vs Ruskin, who only watched a wasp at his window) as the emblem of the difference (p. 70).
Interiors as bodies — the inside/outside exchange: in Pater's interiors "these interiors, as if they were bodies themselves, extend and incorporate what is beyond them… 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." Interiors and exteriors "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" (p. 71).
The ubiquitous body (Stevenson): "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's childhood illness (fevers, bronchial infections, haemorrhaging from age two) confines him to the night nursery of 17 Heriot Row, and the poems of A Child's Garden of Verses are shaped by confinement: "In a sense, each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself" (p. 71).
Interior objects as vessels of escape: "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" (p. 72).
The ubiquitous body as collective: the sick 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"; all children "belong to an unseen, unconscious, yet animated intertextuality of being that is theirs"; the "potentially lonely and isolated 'I' of the poems' interiors frequently joins the more inclusive 'We'" (p. 72).
Interiority defined by desire, not self-containment: "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" (p. 73).
A literary anticipation of Merleau-Ponty: Colley's first footnote states that Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson "anticipate 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'" (The Primacy of Perception, 1964, p. 5) — and that they "look 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" (Body, Memory and Architecture, 1977, p. 57). She adds that this sensitivity "might, in some way, reflect the emphasis placed upon the child's body in nineteenth-century guides on raising a child" (C. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 1995) (note 1, p. 73).
The principle of the reaching interior is referred to Tafuri: note 21 directs the reader, "For a discussion of this principle" (that the interior exists "for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere"), to M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth (p. 75).
A methodological register for interior theory: the essay proceeds entirely through literary autobiography — memory-narratives of three Victorian writers — demonstrating that the interior's theory can be built from accounts of inhabitation rather than from buildings; the editors frame it as an examination showing "that the interior is not simply defined by the objects within it, but by our movement and inhabitation around and among them" (p. 68).

Connections

Concepts: embodiment · lived-body · invisible-body · aesthetic-body · ubiquitous-body · interiority · inside-outside-dialectic · memory · domestic-interior · optic-haptic-perception · play · intimate-immensity · uncanny · narrative-space · gender-and-the-interior · dwelling Authors: Ann C. Colley · Merleau-Ponty (anticipated in note 1) · Tafuri (note 21) · Taylor & Preston (editors of the reprint volume) · (discussed, not source authors: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson — see log) Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — the body-defined interior as the strongest pre-disciplinary answer to the object-defined one · truth-and-illusion — Ruskin's invisible spectator as a literary instance of the disembodied eye Related source notes: Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) (the Intimus introduction that names interiority and the body-centred theory of the interior) · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (the anthology's poetic-phenomenological register of the same inside/outside exchange) · Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception (the embodied perception Colley's footnote anticipates) · Burns — A House for Josephine Baker (the domestic interior as "a topography of the individual's own interior life") · Braham — A Wall of Books (the other Ruskin material in the wiki: his colour rule) · Ardener — The Partition of Space (the anthology's anthropological opening)

Direct Quotes

"Articles do not define interiors; bodies that move and feel their way among these objects do." (p. 68)

"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." (p. 68)

"Ruskin's text speaks of the invisible body, Pater's of the aesthetic body and Stevenson's of the ubiquitous body." (p. 68)

"the interior is not simply defined by the objects within it, but by our movement and inhabitation around and among them." (editors' preamble, p. 68)

"Throughout his work, the eyes replace the physical body by standing in for it." (p. 69)

"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." (p. 69)

"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." (p. 69)

"Part of Ruskin's nostalgia for his childhood is to return to the monastic invisibility that allowed him the privacy of his visual ecstasy." (p. 69)

"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." (p. 70)

"Here the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body." (p. 70)

"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." (p. 70)

"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." (p. 71)

"Like a shuttle in a loom they move continuously inside and out of each other." (p. 71)

"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." (p. 71)

"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." (p. 71)

"In a sense, each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself." (p. 71)

"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." (p. 72)

"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." (p. 72)

"all children, even when confined and alone, belong to an unseen, unconscious, yet animated intertextuality of being that is theirs." (p. 72)

"the potentially lonely and isolated 'I' of the poems' interiors frequently joins the more inclusive 'We.'" (p. 72)

"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.'" (p. 73)

"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." (p. 73)

Open Questions

Are the three models (invisible / aesthetic / ubiquitous body) a typology that could be applied beyond childhood memoir — e.g., as three design programmes for how an interior addresses its occupant (the concealed observer, the sensuous recipient, the confined escapist)?
Colley's interiors "extend and incorporate what is beyond them" — is the room itself imagined as a lived body (a second-order body schema at architectural scale), and does that figure survive Bachelard's counter-claim that memory encumbers the poetic image?
Does Stevenson's ubiquitous body — solidarity felt through parallel bodily rhythms ("all 'dine at five'") — describe an aesthetic identification or an embryonic political plurality (cf. Plurality)? The essay leaves the collective body unseen and "unconscious."
Ruskin's "monastic invisibility" grants perfect observation at the price of never being engaged: is the invisible body a condition of aesthetic perception or its pathology — and what interior would refuse it (Pater's answer: the wasp stings)?
If "an interior does not exist for its own sake but… for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" (note 21 → Tafuri), what follows for interiors designed as destinations rather than departure points — the hermetic interiors of Baudrillard's sign-system or Batchelor's white cube?