In The Pilgrimage, Miriam’s visits to an ABC,68 one of the chain cafés emerging in fin de siècle London, register female transgression of the largely male-dominated eating establishments. Coming off work, Miriam walks along the Strand, where “most of the shops were still open” and there were theatres “linking it up with the West End,” and finds the district “more like the City with its many sudden restaurants” (II, 75). Driven by hunger, Miriam manages to look for one out of those
“many sudden restaurants,” which her humble earnings could afford. She finds ultimately “an A. B. C. appeared suddenly at her side, its panes misty in the cold air”:
She went confidently in. It seemed nearly full of men. Never mind, City men; with a wisdom of their own which kept them going and did not affect anything, all alike and thinking the same thoughts; far away from anything she thought or knew. She walked confidently down the centre, her plaid-lined golf-cape thrown back, her small brown boat-shaped felt hat suddenly hot on her head in the warmth. (II, 75-76)
The place Miriam puts her foot in is a chain café, one of fin de siècle London’s public dining spaces, cheap and respectable, and growing rapidly to meet the increased demands of the swarming urban habitués. Entering the café after “the strange, rich,
68 The Aerated Bread Company (known as A. B. C.) was founded in the 1880s and expanded at a phenomenal rate thereafter.
difficult day” working at the dentist’s, Miriam feels “her untouched self here, free, unseen, and strong” (II, 76). The café, in its “dark lit wilderness,” is perceived by Miriam as providing the same freedom and anonymity as the streets, which
accommodate the “strong free untouched people, going about the streets looking at nothing, thinking about no special person or thing” (II, 76). Not intimidated by a swarm of male diners, Miriam sits down as if “she were the guest of the City men”
and eats her boiled egg and roll and butter “in that spirit” (II, 76).
As with many other public spaces Miriam explores in The Pilgrimage, the male-dominated café manifests manifold cultural significances regarding the gendered formation of fin de siècle London’s public space. Located near the City, the hub of the world’s finance, the café Miriam visits is frequented mostly by the businessmen, who are largely male professionals or semi-professionals aspiring upward mobility. The appearance of those businessmen in the public dining space highlights the male dominance over the fields of professional work, which has until the early twentieth century generally excluded women. Such dominance, as the quoted passage indicates above, reinforces the long-held male privileged access to eating houses like pubs, coffee houses, and here the emerging chain cafés.
However, a female intrusion like Miriam’s into a dining place that used to be male-dominated marks a significant destabilization happening by the turn of the century to the conventionally gendered demarcation of public spaces. The ABCs Miriam frequents were one of the new chains of cheap but respectable cafés and restaurants that sprang up to serve fin de siècle London’s new customers, catering for especially female shoppers, workers, and pleasure-seekers emerging in central
London. In a city well-known for its unsanitary and poor-quality food and the
masculine culture of its pubs and eating houses, these new teashops were designed to appeal to unaccompanied women like Miriam.69 That Miriam and her girl friends often use chain cafés like ABCs or Lyons as places for refreshment, relaxation, and private talk reveals that women as white-collar workers, shoppers, and
pleasure-seekers in the fin de siècle period have started to push at the boundary of spaces traditionally occupied by men.
The sense of emancipation felt by Miriam, who finds the café a place of comfort, is endorsed by her approving attitude toward women’s participation in popular pleasure and public space. Miriam’s approval of female pleasure is
particularly manifested by an episode on the night trip to a café made by Miriam and her roommate, Miss Holland, who initially shows a “horrified resistance” against the idea of “going out in search of coffee” at late hours (III, 426). In their visit to
Donizetti’s, Miriam, who “sat back upon her red velvet sofa evidently enjoying the adventure,” has a sympathetic look at those who find also shelter and happiness in that space:
The place was not crowded. Every one there was distinctly visible—the lonely intent women in gaudy finery, the old men fêting bored, laughing girls who glanced about; the habitués, solitary figures in elderly bondage to the resources of the place. (III, 427)
Identifying with her fellow pleasure-seekers, Miriam feels at home in her “little haunt” and makes interesting observations on “all sorts of queer people” around her
69 See Scott McCracken, “From Performance to Public Sphere: The Production of Modernist Masculinities,” Textual Practice 15.1 (2001): 47-65
(III, 427). On the contrary, her accompanist Miss Holland, who could “never expand to the atmosphere,” would always sit “upright and insulated,” “making formal conversation,” and “decorously busy with the small meal” (III, 427). Unlike Miriam, who gives a favorable view of her surroundings, Miss Holland sees “only material for pity and disgust” and sees “only morally” (III, 427). Miss Holland’s is largely an edifying perspective on women’s transgression of space and unchecked pursuit of pleasure, as she refers to her imagined horror of being seen “sitting [there]” and “at such an hour” (III, 427).
While through seeing morally Miss Holland might represent a reserved attitude toward mass pleasure that the café embodies and especially toward women’s taking part in it, there are nevertheless other people, like Miriam, considering the café to be an essential venue for urban distraction. In her visit to Ruscino’s, a café providing
“continental food and wine” and “the solid, filmy, thrilling music,” Miriam reflects:
She could understand a life that spent all its leisure in a café; every day ending in warm brilliance, forgetfulness amongst strangers near and intimate, sharing the freedom and forgetfulness of the everlasting
unchanging café, all together in a common life. It was like a sort of dance, everyone coming and going poised and buoyant, separate and free, united in the freedom. It was a heaven, a man’s heaven, most of the women were there with men, somehow watchful and dependent, but even they were forced to be free from troublings and fussings whilst they were there . . . the wicked cease from the troubling and the weary are at rest . . . (II, 394).
Accompanied by her Jewish friend Mr. Mendizabal, “a habitué” to cafés, Miriam finds herself among a group of “wicked happy people” seeking pleasure after the day’s tiring work (II, 394). The café is, as Miriam observes, a space catering for the emerging consuming masses constituted significantly, though not exclusively, by the urban working people needing to have pastimes to fend off daily tiredness and boredom. Women are recognized there by Miriam as happily taking a rest from their everyday routines. Yet despite its apparently hetero-sexual ambience, the café, as Miriam perceives, is nevertheless a male-dominated space, since it was “a man’s heaven” and “most of the women were there with men,” without whom the female patrons might not always find themselves welcomed when visiting alone or in pairs.
For women exploring the city unchaperoned in fin de siècle London, female clubs booming in the West End might provide an alternative venue. Women’s clubs prospering in big cities such as London since the 1880s and 1890s have made possible the middle-class women’s accesses to social and intellectual lives which have long been the male privilege in previous decades. Before the 1880s, the club life was almost known only to the gentlemen who found the club a venue of entertainment, society, and intellectual discussion.70 The prosperity of women’s clubs and many clubs allowing both ladies and gentlemen in the 1890s West End has greatly re-mapped the boundary of the male-dominated public space. The development of
70 In her study of the nineteenth-century street as a spatial representation of gendered identities, Jane Rendell indicates that since the early nineteenth century the West End had been predominantly a site of male fashion, with its thoroughfares playing an integral part in producing a public display of
heterosexual, upper-class masculinity. As Rendell writes, along with theaters, coffee houses, operas, hotels, Bond Street, St. James’s Street, Pall Mall and Piccadilly, and many of the minor streets in the West End were lined with exclusive clubs or bachelor chambers catering for only single men of the nobility and gentry. See Jane Rendell, “Displaying Sexuality: Gendered Identity and the Early Nineteenth-Century Street,” Images of the Street: Planning, Identity, and Control in Public Space (London: Routledge, 1998) 79-81.
London’s female clubs in the later half of the nineteenth century has since its beginning had subtle liaison with the burgeoning consumer capitalism. From the establishment of the first women’s club, the Berners Club, in Langham Place in the 1860s to the mushrooming of female clubs in fin de siècle West End’s high streets, one of the main purposes of such an institution has been to make possible women’s access to a larger public sphere. Through offering women a legitimate and
comfortable place to rest, dine, and socialize, fin de siècle feminists and entrepreneurs are thus apparently united in their pursuit of a larger female public, though the latter attempt to do so mostly out of the mercenary consideration.
The early women’s clubs are founded by feminists, with a view to providing the upper- and middle-class women with a place to stay in during their visit to the city, when most of the eating places cater for men exclusively and the services open to women are limited and poorly provided. In her 1871 article urging for the building of women’s clubs, Frances Power Cobbe, a feminist journalist and co-founder of the Berners Club, complained about the lack of decent amenities for women
perambulating, shopping, or sight-seeing in the city. According to her, women who come to the city for business or pleasure were perpetually driven to seek rest and refreshment in “those miserable refuges of feminine distress, the confectioner’s shops” or to “a greasy pastry cooker’s counter.”71 Believing that inexpensive
accommodations would help bring women into the public sphere, Cobbe called for the establishment of female clubs that both served “the wants of [women’s] body” and
71 See Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 88
provided “facilities for improving their minds.”72
Comments as such were echoed by later feminists who were not obviously against fin de siècle consumerism and were inclined to believe that in creating a consumer’s space, the clubs would broaden women’s access to the public sphere.
Almost two decades after Cobbe arguing for establishing clubs as facilities catering for women navigating the city, Amy Levy in her 1888 article “Women and Club Life”
was able to celebrate fin de siècle West End as terrain of female clubs and their wholesome effects on women playing active roles in an enlarged public sphere. For Levy, female clubs prospering around the turn of the century meet the increased desire for “a corporate life, a wider human fellowship, and a richer social opportunity”
shared by women of various classes, who in class-room and lecture-theatre, office and art school, college and club-house alike, are “waking up to a sense of the hundred and one possibilities of social intercourse” (Levy 213). The clubs, as Levy maintains, are sober and business-like haunts enough, “to which no dutiful wife or serious-minded maiden need feel shamed of belonging” (217). As well as those providing
middle-class women with “the dignity of a club-house,” high quality accommodation, and lavishly decorated rooms, there are clubs for working women offering “a small but daintily-furnished set of rooms” and “simple meals at moderate charges” (Levy 216). Thus, the suburban high-school mistress, in town for a day’s shopping or picture-seeing, might exchange here “the discomfort of the pastrycook’s or the costliness of the restaurant for the comforts of a quiet meal and a quiet read or chat in the cosy club precincts” (Levy 217). The busy woman journalist could also rest here
72 Ibid.
“from her labors of ‘private viewing,’ strengthening herself with tea and newspapers before setting out for fresh lands to conquer” (Levy 217). There are also clubs for women from all classes of society, which aim at “combining the usual advantages of the club proper with those of the class or college” through organizing debates, lectures, and social evenings for the benefits of their members (Levy 217).
In spite of the subtle differences regarding their appeals to women members, these clubs in fin de siècle London, Levy argues, constitute for especially the
middle-class women “a haven of refuge,” where they can write their letters and read the news, “undisturbed by the importunities of a family circle, who can never bring itself to regard feminine leisure and feminine solitude as things to be respected” (Levy 215). These female clubs are also a venue of leisure or social intercourse, where
“ladies can entertain their friends of both sexes, make appointments, or merely pass the time pleasantly in the perusal of periodical literature” at the comfortable
reading-room or library (Levy 215). Last but not least, female clubs, as Levy stresses, through providing “a level platform of intercourse” offer the most substantial
advantages to the greatly increasing professional women, who need to compete with a guild of craftsmen all more or less known to one another, bound together by
innumerable social links (218).
In The Pilgrimage, the first mention of a women’s club is made by Miriam when walking alone one night from the old Bond Street to Piccadilly. The
black-coated, elderly men passing by draw attention of Miriam, who identifies these men in their evening dress as “wrapped in their world” and “going home to the small encirclement of clubs and chambers” (III, 273). Knowing that it is the terrain of the
male clubland she traverses, Miriam, tired of walking, cannot but think: “Why hadn’t she a club down [there]; a neutral territory where she could finish her thoughts undisturbed?” (III, 274). Narratives as such might appear to confirm the male clubber’s long-held dominance over the city’s social and entertaining space, if we follow the conventional mapping of streets of Bond and St. James, Piccadilly, and Pall Mall as terrains for clubs catering for exclusively the upper- and middle-class men.
Yet Miriam’s is more likely a complaint about her failure to choose as her own one of the female clubs booming in this area, when we follow the revisionist cartography of fin de siècle West End’s public spaces made by recent feminist scholars.73
Miriam indeed has a club of her own. Her visit to the Belmont club is made on one Saturday afternoon, when tired of the weekday’s work and the stifling domesticity of her lodging place, she finds that to go out for tea offers the advantages of being
“refreshed” and temporarily “cut off from fixed circumstances,” and “[sitting] at leisure in an undisturbed world” (III, 416). The Belmont club is where Miriam, accompanied by her roommate Miss Holland, seeks “laughter and relaxation” (III, 416). Entering the club, Miriam finds it a place catering exclusively for the pleasure of its women users. In the large drawing-room, she observes, women are “half hidden in the depths of easy chairs,” engaging in “the low murmuring of conversation” (III, 418). Taking her seat, Miriam finds herself surrounded by “a roomful of independent strangers,” who, like her, feel “in company, enriched” in the freedom of a “neutral territory” (III, 418). The club is represented unmistakably as a feminine space, which
73 See Lynne Walker, “Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London,” The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (Cambridge: MIT P, 2001) 296-311.
middle-class women use for refreshment, private talk, and socialization.
As is indicated above, the streets of the late-nineteenth-century London which Miriam perambulates have seen teashops or cafés catering for both men and women, yet not all of them open their doors to women navigating the city unchaperoned or in pairs.74 In this sense, the female club like the Belmont’s provides an alternative resting place for the female explorer of the city, who may not always find herself welcomed in the male-dominated dining spaces. Seen in this light, the rise of female clubs, along with many women-managed tea shops and eating places emerging in the fin de siècle period,75 could be interpreted as an effort by women to actively construct a female-friendly public space and thus to negotiate the city’s gendered spaces. The proximity of these centrally located female clubs to the shopping streets of Oxford, Bond, and Regent and other entertaining facilities like cinemas mushrooming in the turn-of-century West End further proves that women have become the major patrons of mass commodities and enjoyed themselves in the city as not only ramblers but also consumers and pleasure-seekers.