Framed: The Interior Woman Artist-Observer in Modernity.

Abstract

Beginning in fin-de-siécle London and closing with the aged modernism of New York in the 1930s, my project examines the spatial and social possibilities engendered through modernist versions of a pervasive figure in Western literature and visual art: the woman at the window. Using architectural and visual theory in dialogue with cultural history and literary narrative, I examine the window—a classic vantage for both the artist and the domestic woman—as a site/object/image that modernist writers use to negotiate tensions and form creative integrations of the aesthetic and the domestic and to define women’s evolving relationships to private and public spaces. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, with its fixation on spatial interpenetration, provides the theoretical basis for this study, and the literary writers explored include Amy Levy, Edith Wharton, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Nathanael West. I aim to provide a case study in the continual feminist project of reworking traditional roles and spaces and to trouble the street-centrist grounds of value on which many modernist critics think it means to write of modernity and of women’s place and experience in that period.