Abstract
In her exploration of the ways in which the hotel room functions for many female protagonists as a private space away from the demands of the domestic sphere, Short builds on recent criticism regarding the gendered experience of space in modernity. This chapter also explores the cultural connotations of the hotel bedroom concerning illicit sexual activity, and Short argues that these powerful associations position the hotel bedroom as a complex and contradictory space that at once offers characters—and particularly women—the freedom to explore their sexuality and desires, but which also imbues it with a coercive potential. This chapter demonstrates how the hotel bedroom of modernity is figured variously in the literature of this period as a space of respite, refuge, coercion, and threat.
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Notes
- 1.
As Derek Taylor and David Bush note, this ‘explains the difference in [ceiling] height between the lower and upper floors, the difference in size and the small windows the higher up you went’ (1974, p. 12).
- 2.
Temperance hotels emerged in response to the temperance movement, which developed in Britain around 1830. As the majority of accommodation for travellers until the 1830s were inns and public houses, followers of the movement were often unable to find somewhere to stay that did not serve alcohol. The first temperance hotel opened in Preston in 1832, and other establishments quickly followed. However, as Andrew Davison notes, not all of these hotels ‘offered a comfortable experience for their guests’, and indeed many of the hotels established during the early years of the movement ‘were owned and operated by individuals whose primary motivation was the opportunity to make money’. The situation improved somewhat with the establishment of the Temperance Hotels Company Ltd. in 1872, though the purpose-built hotels developed by this company still tended to be ‘aimed at the more cost-conscious traveller, offering accommodation in dormitories rather than in individual rooms’. See: Andrew Davison, “‘Try the alternative’: The Built Heritage of the Temperance Movement”, Brewery History 123 (2006): 92–109 (p. 101).
- 3.
This reference to guests not being able to afford baths seems to suggest that this was a convenience that had to be paid for in the hotel. In a study of Grand Hotels it is noted that, in 1896, ‘the new Palace Hotel at St Moritz […] was only providing one bathroom per floor on the grounds that visitors would not wish to pay the necessary price’. See: Elaine Denby, Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 122.
- 4.
For more on this see: Katherine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1997).
- 5.
Portia is the product of Thomas Quayne’s father’s extramarital affair, and Brutt is an old acquaintance of Anna and her ex-lover, Pidgeon. As such, their inconvenience stems from the embarrassment they cause the Quaynes as unwelcome reminders of a past they would rather forget.
- 6.
This distinction between housework and homemaking forms part of Young’s attempt to demonstrate the creative and fulfilling potential of the domestic space, and to rescue it from the damaging critiques of second-wave feminism.
- 7.
See Chap. 3 for a more in-depth discussion of the opening pages of James’s novel.
- 8.
This is a considerable sum in Edwardian England, equating to over £4000 in 2017. Source: ‘Prices and Inflation Calculator’, This Is Money. Available at: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html (accessed 5 March 2017).
- 9.
George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs Warren’s Profession, was written in 1893, but was censored by the Lord Chamberlain for its discussion of prostitution in England. First performed in London in 1902 at the New Lyric Club—a private, members-only club—it was not publicly performed in London until 1925. Vivie Warren, with whom Ann Veronica here feels such an affinity, is the well-educated daughter of Mrs Warren, and an archetype of the New Woman.
- 10.
That these hotels are themselves located in ‘half-deserted streets, […] that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent’ (Eliot 1961 [1922], p. 11, ll. 6–8) further insinuates the same sense of circularity and entrapment that is, as previously discussed, explored in more depth by Jean Rhys in her novels of the same period. The poem’s epigraph from Dante’s Inferno only serves to reinforce this notion of inescapability.
- 11.
It is also worth noting here that Eliot wrote a significant amount of The Waste Land during a stay at the Albemarle Hotel in Margate, another seaside town that is, like Brighton, popular with Londoners due to its relatively close proximity (77 miles east of London, whereas Brighton is located 47 miles to the south). Eliot stayed at the hotel from 22 October to 12 November 1921 to recuperate following a nervous breakdown, and Elaine Borish notes that he ‘completed a substantial portion of his long poem at the Albemarle, including the “Fire Sermon” section. When he left Margate on 12 November, he attached to the manuscript the hotel bill, which came to £16’ (Borish 1995, p. 80).
- 12.
‘The Hotel Métropole, Brighton’, The Illustrated London News, 26 July 1890, p. 118.
- 13.
Its reputation was not helped by its role in scandalous divorce cases that were heavily publicised in the press, such as that of Captain Samuel Loveridge, who in 1920, two years prior to the publication of The Waste Land, was granted a decree nisi on the grounds of the misconduct of his wife in the Hotel Metropole with a Major Christopher Lowther, M.P. (the son of the then Speaker of the House of Commons, the Right Hon. James Lowther). For further details of this case, see: ‘Society Scandal’, The Western Times, 14 July 1920, p. 4.
- 14.
For further discussion on the way in which Tiresias complicates conceptions of transgender and transsexual identity, as well as of hermaphroditism and bisexuality, see Madden (2008).
- 15.
While the increasing interest in and popularity of sexology and psychoanalysis during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may suggest a consequent loosening of debates surrounding sexuality and sexual behaviour, the reach of these new debates was nevertheless limited. Even the discourse of sexology itself had its limits—the frank discussions found within its texts, and within the sex manuals of writers such as Marie Stopes, were meant for a specific audience. The title of Stopes’s most well-known publication, Married Love (1918) clearly demonstrates this, as the book addresses itself directly and solely to married heterosexual couples. The sexological discourse and marriage manuals of the period failed to acknowledge or accommodate the sexual desires of single (or non-heterosexual) people, instead serving to reinforce heterosexual marriage as the norm from which all other lifestyles could only deviate.
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Short, E. (2019). Space, Movement, and Inhabitation: Transgression in the Hotel Bedroom. In: Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22129-4_5
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