Consuming the City: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Film Criticism
While through her life and works Levy represents New Women making their claims to a wider public sphere embodied by the city and streets, the unaccompanied public walking by particularly the middle-class women in the 1880s is, as the previous chapter indicates, still strongly disapproved in both the real and fictional worlds.Delighting in unchaperoned streetwalking in spite of a Mrs. Grundy’s reprimand, Levy and her female characters pioneer in breaking from the social code requiring that women going out need the company of a gentleman or an older female relative, a practice strictly observed by the middle-class throughout most of the nineteenth century. Female visibility in the public space, however, becomes more and more acceptable and desirable when women of the fin de siècle are increasingly encouraged to enter public space as workers, shoppers, diners, and pleasure-seekers. In her 1900 article entitled “The Decay of the Chaperon,” the social observer Mary Jeune notices that women of her days have started to assert their presence in public without the supervision of guardians:
English society and life have been adapting themselves to the
independence, which modern thought and education must inevitably have on women . . . the intimacy which women and men now occupy in regard to each other, seems almost another safeguard to the new relations, as the naturally chivalrous feeling of men towards women is not weakened, but rather strengthened, by the confidence which such a position creates, and which must prevent a man of honour taking advantage of it, added to
which, though a girl may in reality know less of the dark side of life, than in a time of more supervision, the self-reliance which is the result of her independence, must enable her to better stand alone, or as one may put it, take care of herself.59
Writing about late-Victorian London, Dorothy Richardson portrays a female rambler enjoying such greater freedom of walking on the open streets of fin de siècle London in Pilgrimage, a grand sequence of thirteen novels. It is notable that
Richardson invests her novels exclusively with the mind of Miriam Henderson, the heroine who works as a dental secretary in London and is the very picture of Richardson herself. In especially the middle volumes of the novels, Richardson has detailed descriptions of a wide spectrum of women entering fin de siècle London’s public spaces. For her portrayals of the city life in Pilgrimage, Richardson is praised and dubbed “a Wordsworth of the city of London” (Powys 19-21), the female
counterpart to the famous Romantic poet eulogizing nevertheless the scenery of the countryside. Richardson’s fictional representation of women’s public walking and using of public spaces corresponds to the actual enlargement of women’s sphere during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. A contemporary writer and friend of Richardson’s, Winifred Bryher recommends for people abroad to read Pilgrimage if they would know England as it really was like between 1890 and 1914 (168).
59 Mary Jeune, “The Decay of the Chaperon,” Fortnightly review 74 (1900) 629-38 qtd in Emma Liggins, George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 149. An 1889 article entitled “Chaperones” from Woman’s Penny Paper also proclaimed: “Our social life has changed. One could hardly walk a quarter of a mile in any street of London without seeing instances of it, particularly in [the] dress and manner of women, in the things they do, in the words they say.” See
“Chaperones,” WPP, 2 March 1889, excerpted in E. S. Riemer and John Fout, eds., European Women:
A Documentary History (New York: Schocken, 1980) 37 qtd. in Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 68.
Bryher’s recommendation is of particularly historical significance regarding Richardson’s representation of Englishwomen at the fin de siècle as increasingly disrupting the spatial demarcations of the public and private spheres. Yet aside from previous studies of Richardson’s Pilgrimage as emblematic of modernist,
feminine/feminist writing, there has been little scholarship studying female urbanism in her work. It is not until recent years that studies of the city, space and gender rekindle interests in re-reading Richardson’s novels, which represent women’s streetwalking and visibility in fin de siècle London’s public spaces.
In The Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson has her heroine Miriam Henderson, a flâneuse exploring fin de siècle London, engage in a new mode of observing the city.
The mode of observation employed by Richardson and passed on to her heroine breaks from the often male-dominated, realistic observations coming into dominance since the later half of the nineteenth century in British novels. In her foreword to the 1938 edition of The Pilgrimage, Richardson states that she has tried to produce a
“feminine realism” in writing her grand novel sequences. Indicating that the tradition of realism has been established by male practitioners such as Honeré de Balzac and Arnold Bennett, Richardson says:
Since all these novelists happened to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism. Choosing the latter alternative, she presently set aside . . . . (1938: 9)
In her rather evasive rendition of “the feminine equivalent of masculine realism,”
Richardson associates it with literary experiments by the French novelist Marcel Proust, who produced “an unprecedentedly profound and opulent reconstruction of experience focused from within the mind of a single individual,” with newly-invented terms such as “the stream of consciousness,” “interior monologue,” and “slow-motion photography,” and ultimately with “feminine prose,” which is “unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions,” in The Pilgrimage as well as in the novels by Charles Dickens and James Joyce (1938: 10-12).
Richardson’s employment of a new mode of observation in The Pilgrimage has been explicated by Mary Sinclair, a contemporary British novelist and literary critic.
In her 1918 review of the early novel-chapters of The Pilgrimage, Sinclair remarks that Richardson “is not the wise, all-knowing author” and “is not concerned in the way that other novelists are concerned with character” (92). The heroine Miriam is
“an acute observer, but she is very far from seeing the whole of these people [moving through her world]”; “they are presented to us in the same vivid but fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way in which people appear to most of us” (Sinclair 92). Besides, praising Richardson for her breaking from realistic conventions, Sinclair famously refers to Richardson’s representation of the heroine’s fragmented perception as “the stream of consciousness”:
In identifying with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. . . It’s to Miriam’s almost painfully acute senses that we owe
what in any other novelist would be called the “portraits” of Miriam’s mother, of her sister Harriet . . . . (Sinclair 93)
Virginia Woolf is another contemporary critic indicating that Richardson has renovated the way of observing reality in her novels. In her 1919 review of
Richardson’s The Tunnel, the fourth novel-chapter of The Pilgrimage, Woolf remarks that Richardson as novelist aware of “the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in” gets so far as to “achieve a sense of reality far greater than that provided by the ordinary means” (15-16). In her 1923 review of Richardson’s The Revolving Lights, the seventh novel-chapter of The
Pilgrimage, Woolf says “[there] is no one word, such as romance or realism to cover,
even roughly, the works by Miss Dorothy Richardson” and their characteristic is “one for which we still seek a name”(51). Besides, in claiming that Richardson has
invented throughout her works “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender,”
Woolf points to Richardson’s gendered way of approaching reality. The sentence Richardson employs is “of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes”
(51). It is also “a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex” (51).
Both Sinclair’s and Woolf’s evaluations of Richardson and her novels are used by scholars nowadays to prove that the female novelist has anticipated the many literary innovations of modernism. Employing largely an aesthetical perspective, Sinclair and Woolf indicate that Richardson as novelist has come up with a refined,
feminine way of seeing, representing, and knowing the reality, departing from the previous novelists practicing the rather naïve, unsophisticated methods of realism.
However, such a new mode of observation is not exclusively aesthetical or ontological, existing between the observer and the observed per se, as Sinclair and Woolf seem to suggest in their reviews of The Pilgrimage. It is also exercised against the fin de siècle’s London’s public spaces in which the heroine Miriam and her mobility are situated.
In The Pilgrimage, London embodies spaces of freedom and adventure for the heroine Miriam Henderson, who comes to the city to make her own living as a dental assistant. The Pilgrimage does not begin with Miriam’s exploration of London until in the opening chapter of The Tunnel where the heroine, we are told, finds her lodging place at Mrs. Bailey’s in Tansley Street abutting the Bloomsbury square. Driven out of a necessity to support herself by the family’s bankruptcy, Miriam has known the toil of labor since her previous work as governess for a wealthy family in North London.
Moving out from a largely suburban, bourgeois environment characteristic of both her family before the sudden loss of fortune and the household she has worked for,
Miriam during her long residence in London, which lasts for more than one decade, launches into discoveries of a city whose ambience opens vistas she has hardly known before. Unlike life in the suburbs, which Miriam consistently associates with
exclusiveness and domesticity typical of the middle-class, living in central London, or more specifically the West End, means to her opening up to people and space of all kinds, making contacts with the crowd, the streets, and public venues such as cafés, restaurants, shops, theaters, and clubs. Thus, settling down in a city which would
prove to be her love for the subsequent years, Miriam perambulates the street in her nightly walk, feeling emancipated:
Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of
Endsleigh Gardens, Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road, she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying impression and had become part of her home. It was the
borderland of the part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. (II, 29) Throughout the middle volumes of The Pilgrimage, Miriam explores London with such meandering footsteps threading through the streets of the fin de siècle city.
At a time when women’s streetwalking is still not widely accepted, Miriam, who strolls the street unaccompanied even at night, challenges the gendered norm of streetwalking and claims her right to the space conventionally male-dominated. In a mid-night walk across Piccadilly Circle, Miriam glimpses someone of her
acquaintance standing at the island:
There was a solitary man’s figure standing near the kerb, midway on her route across the island to take to the roadway opposite Shaftsbury Avenue;
standing arrested; there was no traffic to prevent his crossing; a watchful habitué; she would pass him in a moment, the last fragment of the West End . . . (III, 277)
Miriam’s is a last look at the male passenger, reversing the hierarchy of the male spectator and the female spectacle perceived in Charles Baudelaire’s poem “À Une
Passante,” which is famously cited by Walter Benjamin as the flâneur’s experience of modernity. Miriam acts out the experience of a female flâneur, who rambles about the city at night-time, feels “epical” when passing by a man, who was “shocked into helpless inactivity” (III, 277). The man is heading for his home in the suburbia, which is “feminized,” while Miriam enjoys streetwalking and navigating the city. Casting a female gaze, Miriam thus embodies the destabilizing power overwhelming the male viewing by the flâneur.
Despite that Miriam is able to look back, the male gaze she encounters
nevertheless represents a viewing that tries to eroticize the female body/spectacle and condemns female public walking for its implications of sexual transgression and questionable respectability. The connection of Miriam walking unaccompanied at night with the prostitute is hinted at by her male acquaintance’s look of surprise.
While embodying female independence and emancipation, the public, unaccompanied walking by Miriam nevertheless invites also the association of her with the “public woman,” the object of male, eroticized desire. An association as such manifests also the fin de siècle men’s fear of the threatening mobility practiced by female public walking like Miriam’s that tends to blur the boundaries between the gentlewoman and the “public woman,” the public and private spheres consolidating the order of a male-dominated world.
Throughout The Pilgrimage, London as a space is such a metaphor of freedom that Miriam employs to commend the city for its openness and for generating a mobile way of life. Such freedom and pleasure of navigating the city which Miriam and her female contemporaries enjoy in The Pilgrimage is largely made possible by
the improvements in the policing and lighting of central London, the extension of mass transport systems like the bus, the tram, and the underground, which women at the turn of the century had known as part of their everyday life. For Miriam, who enjoys navigating the city, London is “a prairie,” and the consciousness of being Londoners, with whom she identifies unmistakably in terms of her physical and social positions, is “going out happy,” “looking at nothing and feeling everything, like people wandering happily from room to room in a well-known house” (II, 156). Or as Miriam eulogizes, riding through the city on a hansom, one might be momentarily cut off “from all personal difficulties,” lifted out right into “the freedom of a throng of happy people,” and everyone “was invisible and visionless, united in the spectacle . . . in a brilliant embroidery” (II, 155).
This new anonymous dimension characterizes the collective public appearance of ordinary women in fin de siècle London. For women of earlier decades,
unchaperoned public walking on the street is still unusual and subject to criticism by disapproving traditionalists, but with the increasing female public visibility by the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time women walkers are able to benefit from the anonymous qualities offered by the street crowd. This is a new dimension to female streetwalking, since fin de siècle women are appearing en masse on the public streets as workers, shoppers, or ramblers, and forming a sizable crowd themselves.
The representation of the crowd as a wholesome part of the cityscape by Richardson distinguishes her from many late-Victorian writers employing a classical, bourgeois perspective upon the fin de siècle city and its jostling pedestrians.60 Unlike
60 See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987); Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century
the crowd representing a contaminating, threatening presence to the city of order and manageability desired by the middle-class in these often male-authored writings of fin de siècle London, the pedestrians in The Pilgrimage are represented as indigenous to the city space, forming a collectivity integral to the emergent masses’ sphere which Miriam observes and actively takes part in. Employing a plebeian spectatorship, Miriam shows an affinity especially with the proletarian masses, whose experience of the city she finds congenial and manages to represent.
In her letter replying to a friend inquiring about the social position from which the heroine observes her world in The Pilgrimage, Richardson refers to Miriam as being ambivalently situated between the middle-class, whose wealthy, leisured life she lived and loved, and the white-collar working people, whose toiling life she now is forced to live. The Pilgrimage is, as Richardson indicates, composed of books wherein Miriam, a sympathetic onlooker to the bourgeois working-class life, places herself:
My books, in their substance, do belong to “the workers,” the bourgeois working-class into which M. [Miriam] was pitched headlong without training or suitable preparation, & wherewith she is a sympathetic onlooker. She fails to recognize herself as “a worker,” always, though quite unconsciously, assuming that life should be leisure & should be lived in perfect surrounding. (1995: 304)61
France (New haven: Yale UP, 1981); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 1995) 73, 222; Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 43-81.
61 In other places Richardson also clarifies the social position of Miriam as such: “She never completely escapes her earliest house, not the Barnes house represented in the earlier books, but a really spacious habitation, hugely gardened & so high-walled that nothing of the world was visible. She imagined everyone living in this way except servants, & these as known in her house were anything but
This conflict of identities Richardson highlights as unique to Miriam, who has to condescend from her middle-class ambience to survive, though unprepared in every way, as a worker in London is a key to understanding the heroine’s often ambivalent views of the city and its people. The displacement Miriam undergoes as both an insider and outsider to the leisured classes enables her to take on, as Richardson suggests, a more sympathetic view of the working people, their life, and the spaces they need to negotiate with throughout daily activities. The financial embarrassment Miriam constantly feels and learns to deal with as an ill-paid clerk thus enables her to sympathize with “the resourceless crowd of London workers,” including white-collar workers like her and other no less marginalized denizens “who lived in St. Pancras and Bloomsbury and in Seven Dials and all around Soho and in all the slums and back streets everywhere” (II, 266; III, 313).
Viewed in this light, Richardson’s representations of Miriam as a worker, her perspective, and her making use of the city’s spaces depart from Virginia Woolf’s portrayals of the often leisured viewing and ramble performed by the upper
middle-class women throughout her works. A contemporary of Richardson’s, Woolf, as I shall demonstrate in the next chapter, largely represents the wealthy, leisured women’s experience of the city, though she does so with a critical view on the experience itself. While Richardson and Woolf both celebrate the city and its
middle-class women throughout her works. A contemporary of Richardson’s, Woolf, as I shall demonstrate in the next chapter, largely represents the wealthy, leisured women’s experience of the city, though she does so with a critical view on the experience itself. While Richardson and Woolf both celebrate the city and its