Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 38

If debates about the modern metropolis as a problematic kind of home shed light on WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s novel, then this is in part because LondonLondon has been a central reference point in such discussions since at least the period of the EnlightenmentEnlightenment. Raymond WilliamsWilliams, Raymond, for instance, points out that Enlightenment thinkers like VoltaireVoltaire and Adam SmithSmith, Adam disagreed fundamentally with regard to both the nature and the ethical value of the citycity as a site of home:

VoltaireVoltaire saw the pursuit of industry and urbane pleasurepleasure as the marks of the citycity and thence of civilisation itself. The golden age and the Garden of EdenEden, Garden of, lacking industry and pleasure, were not virtuous but ignorant; the city, and especially LondonLondon, was the symbolsymbol of progressprogress and enlightenment, its social mobilitymobility the schoolschool of civilisation and libertyliberty […]. Adam SmithSmith, Adam, rather differently, saw the city as securing the industry of the country: a centre of freedomfreedom and order but in its very dependencedependence as a market and manufacturing centre liable to breed a volatile and insecure people. (144)

At a time when the modern industrial cities were only beginning to emerge, LondonLondon was thus already envisaged as both an ideal home and a potentially dangerous space: the cradle of freedomfreedom and civilized order, but also a breeding ground for “volatile” urban masses.

In the late nineteenth century, similar arguments were waged in the field of sociology, though by now the metaphoric terms of the debate had shifted from the EnlightenmentEnlightenment contrast between unruliness and order to an opposition – better suited to industrializedindustrialization society – between organicorganicism and mechanicalmechanical and mechanization ways of life. In his Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Society, 1887), Ferdinand TönniesTönnies, Ferdinand suggested that the supposedly organicorganicism ruralrural communities of the past were increasingly being replaced by a rationalized urban societyurban society dominated by merely mechanicalmechanical and mechanization relations of exchange (Delanty 32–33). Only sixteen years later, however, Émile DurkheimDurkheim, Émile provocatively reversed TönniesTönnies, Ferdinand’s thesis in De la division du travail social (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893) – an argument that Phil Hubbard has summarized succinctly:

For DurkheimDurkheim, Émile […], traditional, ruralrural life offered a form of mechanicalmechanical and mechanization solidaritysolidarity with social bonds based on common beliefs, custom, ritualritual, routines, and symbols. Social cohesioncohesion was thus based upon the likeness and similarities among individuals in a society. DurkheimDurkheim, Émile argued that the emergence of citycity-state [sic] signalled a shift from mechanicalmechanical and mechanization to organicorganicism solidarity, with social bonds becoming based on specialisation and interdependence. […I]n contrast to feudal and rural social orders, urban societyurban society was one which allowed for the coexistence of social differences, with a complex division of labour (where many different people specialise in many different occupations) creating greater freedomfreedom and choice for individuals. (15–16; original emphasis)

Whereas in TönniesTönnies, Ferdinand’s view ruralrural society was organicorganicism because it was based on ‘natural’ kinship relations, DurkheimDurkheim, Émile, by contrast, regarded such kinship relations as automatic or ‘mechanicalmechanical and mechanization’ because they lacked any element of freedomfreedom and individual choice (Delanty 38). In short, while TönniesTönnies, Ferdinand idealizedidealization life in the country, DurkheimDurkheim, Émile – much like VoltaireVoltaire a century before him – viewed rural existence as narrow-minded and stifling when compared with the exhilarating freedom of the citycity.

Such debates over the relative value of ruralrural and urban homes arguably had a particularly strong resonance in BritainBritain due to the very common cultural association of rural life with ‘true EnglishnessEnglishness.’134 As David GervaisGervais, David has shown, it was in the course of the nineteenth century, when the new, industrial cities emerged, that writers increasingly located true Englishness in the rural existence of a rapidly disappearing yeoman classclass (4). An example for this trend is the influential Garden City movement, which attempted to reintroduce some of the supposedly redemptive qualities of rural life into the citycity (GiffordGifford, Terry 37; Hubbard 61). Even for city-dwellers, the English domestic ideal thus became associated with images of country mansionsmansions and rural cottagescottages:

LondonLondon’s residential neighborhoods exhibited a paradoxical symbiosis of the ruralrural and the urban: paradoxical because, despite their identification as rural and even antiurban, those suburbansuburbia villas were also specifically and indelibly metropolitan, just as the song “Home, Sweet Home” (1823) invoked a prelapsarian village abode but was written for a melodrama set and performed in London. (Sharon MarcusMarcus, Sharon 98–99)

A literary example of the privileged cultural position of the English countryside are the novels of Jane AustenAusten, Jane, where narrative complications tend to occur in more urban areas, such as seaside towns or LondonLondon itself, while the happy resolution takes the heroine to a (stately) home in the countryside (MorettiMoretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel 17–19).

Such ruralist ideals of EnglishnessEnglishness continued to gain in importance during the Edwardian period, and by the 1920s constituted one of the most prominent features in national selfself-definitions (Howkins 63). The overwhelming majority of writers between 1910 and 1940 thus regarded as the most representative part of the nation a “favoured enclave of the English countryside, usually presented in pastoralpastoral terms as a tranquil idyllidylls” (Baldick 305). In these pastoral visions of Englishness, the citycity tended to be construed as stimulating yet chaotic, filled with dirtdirt, criminals, and other ‘alien’ elements; indeed, “the discourses of urban investigation that developed in the 1840s argued that especially in LondonLondon, the city had overtaken and destroyed the home” (Sharon MarcusMarcus, Sharon 101). The metropolis, in short, was seen as undermining domestic ideals, while the country promised the timeless stabilitystability of a truly English home.135

Mrs. Dalloway, however, questions such ruralist prejudices from the outset by challenging the idea that ruralrural life is stable and idyllicidylls. WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s novel famously opens with Clarissa Dalloway stepping out of her LondonLondon home in Bond Street to go and buy flowers for a party that she intends to give in the evening. The scene she encounters immediately reminds Clarissa of a more rural past at Bourton, the stately country home of her youth:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen […]. (3)

On the one hand, Clarissa immediately associates the freshness of the morning air in the citycity with life in the country, though the air there had been “stiller than this of course.” However, the ruralrural stillness at Bourton is not an unequivocally positive feature for Clarissa; it seems like the “kiss of a wave” and yet somehow solemn, as if “something awful was about to happen.” Moreover, later in the novel, we learn that Clarissa’s rural past is indeed associated with a very personal tragedytragedy, as her only sister was killed in the woods near Bourton by a falling tree (85). In contrast to common celebrations of rural EnglandEngland, there is thus, from the beginning, little sense in Mrs. Dalloway that homes in the country are necessarily more idyllicidylls or carefree than city abodes.