Book Review: Dorothy Richardson’s art of memory: space, identity, text

There are insufficient superlatives to do justice to this book, which should either stimulate cultural geographers to emulate Bronfen’s immaculate scholarship or to give up the unequal struggle. Its subject is the use of space in Richardson’s four-volume opus Pilgrimage, set and written between the two world wars. The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was first coined in relation to Richardson’s work, though she was to receive less acclaim and to slip from fashion sooner than other ‘stream of consciousness’ writers such as Joyce. Richardson’s minor status is perhaps because Miriam, the ‘dull’ spinster protagonist of her novel cycle, was to become such an unappealing stereotype in the 1940s and 1950s, when feminism was eclipsed by a supposedly patriotic new femininity. Bronfen’s work impels one back to Richardson and to marvel at her project, which was to explore the developing awareness of a feminine self through a sequencing in space rather than time. Few cultural geographers today would accept Richardson’s view that the world and its people have essential and eternal characteristics which can be revealed by trying to strip away the notion of becoming, inherent in the conventional, time-sequenced narrative. However, the view that one achieves from this extraordinary position is breathtaking. In Richardson we find the precursor of Cixous’s écriture féminine, the desire to write the emotions without content and to find the person without structure. Indeed many of the devices we so readily associate with Cixous, such as the preoccupation with walls, with light, with the movement through and identification with space, are consciously employed by Richardson. Bronfen does not attempt to summarize the novels or deal with them consecutively, for Richardson herself claims that the whole work can be begun at any point and read in any order, in the same way as a person talking about herself draws upon incidents from different times. However, we must distinguish between Richardson and Bronfen. Bronfen’s work is far from being unstructured, self-centred or essentialist. It is academic in the best sense of the word, drawing upon a wealth of European philosophy and literary theory to amplify Richardson’s position. The book moves from a material to an increasingly abstracted conception of space. Part I is concerned with Richardson’s use of descriptions of place to represent episodes in the life of Miriam and demonstrates the ways in which, throughout the novel cycle. Richardson returns to particular places with a slightly altered perception of space to represent changes of mood or circumstance. So material places are symbols which shift. In Part II, which deals with Book reviews 489