I recently asked about what it was to hide within one’s own bareness. Now, I find that James Agee has brought me back to this question. Agee senses that the sharecropper’s house conceals itself, or rather evades him, precisely in its being exceedingly laid bare. I realize, now, why I feel such dis-ease with the forceful and uncensored disclosures of others. It seems that such unconditional laying bare is to want to be everybody’s friend and nobody’s friend at the same time. You are against secrets; I might be acquainted with the details of your life but I cannot be acquainted with you. You obscure yourself with your revelations. Agee discerned this about the bareness of space, the counterpart of the dark bedroom. It resists not the home but the ideal of the home, of the privative spirit of privacy, the “middle-class American worship of sterility and worship-fear of its own excrement.”[iii] Whether the bareness of space gives confidence to the illusion of transparency or the illusion of opacity I cannot tell, for it is the lack of even the possibility of secrets, in contrast to the dark bedroom, that makes this space so elusive, so impossible to represent, to capture. There is, as you would expect, a difficulty with regards to intimacy, here.

But first let me suggest – first let me ask, if the house is an archive, what is its function, what is its potential if one cannot, in fact, speak of entering or leaving this house? The house, I want to suggest, is a site of potential narrative only to the extent that its archives are accessible. The earlier interest in the integrity of the general structure of the house was precisely along the lines of this accessibility. It seems that Agee wants to secure the house, in its degeneration and asymmetry, once more as an archive, but as merely an archive, for even in his knowledge of those hidden places he has opened,[iv] he never truly enters the house. Rather, he speaks from the porch, about the porch. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is not a text about the house, nor is it about the household; it is a text about the margins of the house(hold). This is the case not because of the uninhabitability of this house, alone, but because such a structure is just one more aspect of that eternal space[v] in which Agee is already subsumed. And this is how I understand the “identical wound and scab.”[vi] Sharecropping country is the id of America, as the dark bedroom is the id of America’s marketplace, “the tender desolations of profoundest night.”[vii]

I keep coming back to the dark bedroom, the basis, it seems, of consciousness. I am drawn to this room, I believe, because our own house had no doors; we could not enter and we could not leave. We are still inside of it, just as Hyacinth Robinson was perpetually within his mother’s prison. Now, we can’t even look at each other. We have disbanded, scattered ourselves across America so that we will not have to glimpse each other’s captivity nor, therefore, concede to our own. To regard each other is to discern the trace left upon our faces of this poor place that still possesses us, “this identical wound and scab.”[viii]

Walter Benjamin wants to build glass houses. He, to my surprise, would, like Riis, eliminate household pockets, that is, its clandestine and underground corners. He believes that objects “made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.”[ix] (734). Of course there is something to be said for trying to fully dispose of the ideal of possession, to remove the house from the marketplace. Even in its poverty, the sharecropper’s house is riddled with the trinkets that are meant to establish him as, too, a consumer. These objects notwithstanding, the sharecropper’s house is so bare, in fact, that the traces of its construction, the fact of its production, are glaring. It announces itself as an object, as a commodity. But I wonder if, in the obtrusive outlines of its having been constructed, and the “slight failures”[x] of its making, it might resist its alienation. The glass house, conversely, wipes out the fact of its production. The glass house thus lies to me. And with its “rooms in which it is hard to leave traces,” argues Benjamin, “the new glass-milieu will transform humanity utterly.”[xi] But I do not want to be transformed thus; the glass house is without wounds. It is without wounds!

I don’t know what to do with the clothing that I wore during those four days in the room in which we waited while you were dying. They smell distinctively of your dying, of the yellow, sour disintegration of your body combined with the soft humid subtropical air and sweet subtropical flora of this island. You are a fact in your materiality as you lie there jaundiced and distended, more flesh now than being as the gurgling in your throat gets thicker and gets louder. My own body hurts just to imagine your body, painful in its bursting, in its wanting to burst. “ . . . for your face, which was swollen and damp with sleep and skimmed with lint, felt fouled, secretly and dirtily bitten and drawn of blood, insulted.”[xii]

I want to return to the bareness of space and its elusiveness. I want to say that, here, the house conceals itself within its own nakedness because to have no secrets is also to have no place (see “The dark bedroom, postscript via LeFebvre”). Benjamin, with his glass-milieu, does not take into account the aura that accompanies the total lack of even the potential for secrets to exist. I am thinking of the aura, for example, of an inaccessible archive, an archive that is merely a fact but not a resource. It is not, in other words, “usable.” Indeed, “at the end of a wandering and seeking,”[xiii] the home which our hero apprehends and in which he sits at rest is such a poor place.

The labor of building is always already prefaced with the latter’s collapse. Its crumbling, in fact, is fundamental to and precedes its being constructed. Christ in Concrete must, therefore, in simple terms, begin with the collapse of a building and the ripping open and apart of the laborers of Job (in this case because the padrone would not have the underpinnings of the construction project made safe). Di Donato does not ascertain labor in the figure of the tradesman who demonstrates mastery over the object upon which he works, though not for lack of skill, but rather in the figure of the tradesman who distrusts and feels disquietude toward the very object he is made to bring into being. And so we are compelled to ascertain labor in terms of its inexorable collapse, which is to say, in terms of its forever collapsing, in terms of the collapse that is written into the very structure it yields from that structure’s inception.

(What’s more, the novel begins with the event of defacement, in which the face is bodiless and headless; and with, as it were, double-facement – the bodiless and headless face drops and is “fitted to the side of his [Geremio’s] face.”[iv] With the abstraction of that mastery that is the fiction of the worker befalls disfigurement. [After Luigi’s legs are crushed by a stone while he is excavating the foundation for a new building, he dreams of its amplification and its “stony face” rolling over him.[v] Here, again, is the double-facement that seems to designate the sense of having betrayed one’s family, incapable of sustaining them and indeed one’s needing to be sustained, instead. One leg is infected; it must be removed.] “From where come these Christians to dismember me and do they know I am Luigi . . .?”[vi] . . . Luigi, Luigi, I am Luigi.)

“And that which wore swaddling, that scampered in olive grove, that bore him on boat to America, that braced back arm and heart into pick and shovel, that footed Job, that would have pressed rude joy between sweet-sweet thighs, and that knelt him to God. . . . Was expressed down to the basement, hastily wrapped in old newspapers, soaked in kerosene, and dumped into the incinerator.”[vii]

It becomes apparent that there is a powerful dependence of narrative upon the wholeness of the body. The leg, or the limbs, is the site from which a narrative might unfurl, the very same narrative, with its hero, its bildung, that has been made impossible with dismemberment. That is to say, at the moment the novel attempts to unfurl itself, it makes itself impossible, unattainable; it must now circumvent itself. Likewise, Christ in Concrete begins with Job. Here, the laborers battle against and are vanquished by the collective nature of labor that “requires the actual loss of all awareness of individuality and identity.”[viii] And this loss is epitomized in the disintegration of the building, of building and bildung. This precondition of narrative to circumvent itself from the outset is but another respect in which collapse is made to precede building, is given primacy over it, even as it shadows it.

Now, I have already mentioned that after Luigi’s legs are crushed by a stone while he is excavating the foundation for a new building, he dreams of its “stony face” engorging him. Job is the struggle between having mastery over and being mastered by matter. That is to say, Job is the struggle between labor and work. To borrow, again, from Arendt, labor leaves no trace; it is concerned with the life process itself, whereas work brings the objective, durable world into being. Yet this struggle, that of the laborer struggling to be a worker, to erect objects and to resist his own objectification, that of titleholders and of matter, itself, struggling to constrain the worker into performing labor, is one for which Arendt failed to account. And yet a field such as working-class studies has failed to account for the distinction between labor and work entirely. Here is a distinction, however, that must be valued, whatever its slippages, if we are to ever fathom the dynamic through which Job both integrates labor and work and induces the contest between them. Job is our protagonist, our anti-hero. Job is a thief. It has purloined the inheritance of narrative from Luigi, from Paul, from Geremio, from Nazone. Dismembered, they are neither heroes nor, even, anti-heroes. Nonetheless, as I have been striving to maintain, Di Donato conceives of labor as possessing both a language of subjectivity and of objectivity, in their unremitting oscillation. When Paul first lays brick, for instance, – “He stepped back. It stood almost as high as he. It was an actual corner. It was real [. . .] it was brickwork, real brickwork such as would harden into solid unity and resist elements . . . such as in building of Job that would pay men to sustain life and home . . . It was real bricks and mortar and stood up without falling! He had worried and strained each brick into place; he had real gritty mortar on his hands and shoes and real red sharp brickdust on his trousers! He had built that”[ix] – before this laid brick can be disclosed, before he can substantiate, by calling on another bricklayer to witness, the reality of his having built something, a truck dumps “its four thousand bricks”[x] upon it.

I am curious if this is what LeFebvre meant by the illusion of opacity, this insistence on real brick, as if the brick corner that Paul lays is more actual than Paul himself, as if the object exists with greater intensity, to greater degree, than the subject. We experience, in this moment, the language of subjectivity as something of a palimpsest insofar as there is another language present that simultaneously demoralizes any attempt to bring the reality of the subject to the foreground. The poetics of Christ in Concrete is a narrative lacuna in that it feeds the subject to the object; the latter does not subsist but swells through its gobbling up of the former, and is thus built upon collapse.

I wish I had written this post a week ago, and I will tell you why – because I am writing about buildings collapsing, because I am writing about body parts as the site of narrative and, by extension, of the wholeness of the body, or its restoration, as the location of latent heroism. David Simpson has argued that the body parts that were recovered from the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11^th “became absolutely precious and were accorded unprecedented levels of respect and attention.”[xi] The rate at which these parts were valued directly correlates to their significance as sites of commemoration, that is, of a national narrative; their signification of a patriotic effort that “merges into and emerges out of a commercial one.”[xii] And so the victims to whom these body parts once belonged were also designated heroes, having given their lives to a national cause. They were, in this manner, accorded a figurative wholeness; the naming of victims as heroes should be understood as an attempt to restore these severed limbs to their possessors – a cohesive fragmentation.

“Most of all, hardly any of them are described as if their jobs and careers were stressful, and many are remembered in terms that barely mention what they did. The collective effort works toward the representation of a common humanity and inevitably plays down the degree to which the World Trade Center was a complex subculture running according to a highly divided system of labor with massively discrepant rewards.”[xiii] (17).

I want, then, to think about the dismemberments in the events of collapse in Christ in Concrete in light of – what should I call it? – let’s say, the vestigial practices of 9/11. Recall: Luigi’s infected leg is “expressed down to the basement, hastily wrapped in old newspapers, soaked in kerosene, and dumped into the incinerator.”[xiv] Simpson similarly contrasts the preciousness, perhaps even the radiance, of the remains of 9/11 to the practice of collecting the bones of civilian soldiers who died at Waterloo, so that they could be exported to England for manure. Thus, the dead soldier becomes a valuable article of commerce along very different lines than the victims of 9/11, who have also, without a doubt, been converted into valuable articles of commerce. Except these soldiers were not represented as heroes or made to play an open part in the narrative of nation. And though the bodies and body parts of the laborers in Christ in Concrete are not so literally collected for manure in the interests of an agricultural economy, they are, all the same, buried alive so that buildings, in fact cities, might spring up from them.

What I recognize in Riis is something resembling the technocratic utopianist that fills Lefebvre with dread. Riis aspires to fashion the “ordered, enclosed, and controlled world,” or, scooping from my previous post on the dark bedroom, he aspires to fashion a space representable to the state; a space devoid of secrets. The secrets of place exist most immediately in spatial practice, and in what Lefebvre refers to as representational spaces, “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life.”[1] The sewers, cellars, back-alleys and other secret-byways – Riis would not simply have them destroyed, he would have the idea of them destroyed, meaning he would have obstructed all routes of flight and passageways of escape.

“When the [Blindman’s Alley] was finally taken in hand by the authorities, and, as a first step toward its reclamation, the entire population was driven out by the police, experience dictated, as one of the first improvements to be made, the putting in of a kind of sewer-grating, so constructed, as the official report patiently puts it, ‘as to prevent the ingress of persons disposed to make a hiding-place’ of the sewer and the cellars into which they opened. The fact was that the big vaulted sewers had long been a runaway for thieves – the Swamp Angels – who through them easily escaped when chased by the police, as well as a storehouse for their plunder. The sewers are there to-day; in fact the two alleys are nothing but the roofs of these enormous tunnels in which a man may walk upright the full distance of the block and into the Cherry Street sewer – if he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. Could their grimy walls speak, the big canals might tell many a startling tale. But they are silent enough, and so are most of those whose secrets they might betray.”[2]

For those living in Blindman’s Alley, the dark bedroom is ubiquitous. This is why Riis would have us filled with dread at the thought and, in fact, the inevitability, of blindness in journeying through the tenements, as Lefebvre would be filled with dread at the rival attempt to obliterate their obscurity. In truth, the dark bedroom can be no more than experienced. That is to say, the dark bedroom can only exist as practice, as representational space. It is, perhaps, pure representational space. And it is as such that the dark bedroom can be said to epitomize the tenements, a birds-eye view of which would be “a matter of bewildering conjecture.”[3] Let’s imagine that the dark bedroom signifies what Lefebvre calls differential space in that it celebrates the particularity of the bodily and experiential.[4] It is the abyss in which no abyss between the mental and the real is possible, that rupture against which Lefebvre disputes foregoing theories of space. Riis thus means to subject the tenements to a program of housekeeping. I have argued that the dark bedroom is the anti-home, but not at all in the Soviet scheme of things. I’d say rather in the anarchistic sense that reconciles order and disorder, escape routes and entrapment. Finally, when we speak of the dark bedroom, we speak of erotic knowledge, and here I feel I must stray from Lefebvre for a moment.

“Lefebvre’s radicalism revels in . . . ‘Dionysiac life.’”[5] Yet, here we are wrestling with true poverty; how can we speak of feasts and festivals? Even still, the dark bedroom is erotic as it embodies the very element of the city, which is also its crux, where “unconscious desires and passions lay dormant, dormant beneath the surface of the real, within the surreal.”[6] (The underground that is above.) I have argued that Riis’ own dormant desire is not simply to authenticate but to be authenticated by – and here I’m trying to approach once more the impact of the bodily and the experiential – the dark bedroom. To borrow again from D.H. Lawrence, the soul of man is a dark vast . . . bedroom. Now to return to Lefebvre: I hesitate to inflict the Dionysiac principle onto the tenements, yet Lefebvre’s ideals, his radicalism, echo the echo of Riis’ chosen title. I am not talking about the programmatic, spatial embodiment of Logos that condenses for us how the other half lives, never. I am talking about the sentiment of admiration, desire, perhaps even regret that I have heard in Riis: “how the other half lives!” Riis’ text is undeniably distinguished by this double bind.

The dark bedroom is the residuum of what Henry James perceived in Europe, the original wilderness of swollen cities, paganism, barbarism, blackness, even. His novels are the registries of the admiration, desire and regret of which I write now, and above all the anathema to technocratic utopia, to the vicious alliance between the domestic sphere and the factory. The question of labor is, to be sure, of the highest consequence when speaking of poverty and space. It is vital, indeed, to the dark bedroom/dark forest nexus. For both somehow elude the “barbed wire enclosure of freedom”[7] and its insistence on slavishness. As I have conjectured before, the dark bedroom might just lie outside of the marketplace by lying within it. The darkness mumbles (I suppose it to mumble), “I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.”[8] This, too, is the voice of James and is the footing for my fascination with him. The dark bedroom/dark forest allows one to evade slavishness precisely by repudiating freedom, by giving the lie to it. It does not want free democracy because it is more than it. This is where one can observe one’s possession by voice, one’s secretion in the twofold sense of that word.

I do not mean to argue that this was, in reality, what the dark bedroom is; it is too many things. To endeavor to depict the dark bedroom in its reality is not only impossible, but it is vicious. I merely argue that all of this is what the dark bedroom allows us to think. A critique of Riis by way of Lefebvre would argue, I believe, that Riis wants only to make space innocent, and that this project is not itself innocent, for it wants to devastate the secret, the power of the tenement dwellers to take place. Lefebvre argues that the fact that (social) space is a (social) product is concealed because of the double illusion of transparency and opacity. Right now, I am first and foremost concerned with transparency: “The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated – and hence dangerous – is antagonistic to transparency, under whose reign everything can be taken in by a single glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates. Comprehension is thus supposed, without meeting any insurmountable obstacles, to conduct what is perceived, i.e. its object, from the shadows into the light; it is supposed to effect this displacement of the object either by piercing it with a ray or by converting it, after certain precautions have been taken, from a murky luminous state.” [9] And so I wind up here because I hope to follow through on this idea of the secret as doing the work of taking place while the disclosure of the secret works to displace such that place can be thought of as always already in consequence of secrets. In other words, I would like to begin to think of the dark bedroom as categorically intangible space, comprised of secrets, and therefore at the same time the essence of place.

What Jacob Riis allegorizes as the dark bedroom begins with the very literal darkness of the tenement, the back rooms of which afford no sunlight, merely sour air. The dark bedroom, then, is the underground that is above. The ban on the dark bedroom, and the attempt to root out the turpitude that is fated in such space, commenced when the city persisted in cutting out windows in order to introduce sunlight into the rooms and hallways of the tenement. Riis conveys that both the landlords and their tenants saw this ban as an “infringement of personal rights” and a “hardship.”[1] I am disinclined, however, to dismiss, as Riis dismisses, these sentiments of the tenement dwellers. There is something more to this reluctance to having to share one’s breathing space with the sunlight. Perhaps it is because to force sunlight onto the dark bedroom is to attempt to make it representable, more specifically, representable to the state. The dark bedroom is what the sovereign cannot see. It is not bare life but, to borrow from Fred Moten, buried life. My own desire to stand within the dark bedroom, to inhabit the uninhabitable, thus corresponds to a desire to become lost within a geography that cannot be mapped, while simultaneously, though inadvertently, bringing to light the self-possession that I do not wish to possess. This is the very same subjecthood the weight of which James’s wealthy American women fail to misplace in their own vicarious slumming. Indeed, even when her way is precisely what she does not wish to know, Milly Theale cannot help but find it out of the “slums” and onto the “pompous roads.”[2] Likewise, the flash of Riis’ camera does violence to the poor, even setting fire to their dark rooms, in his efforts to capture what could not by and large be previously captured for its being unillumined.

Riis wants an answer to the problem of the tenement. He discovers his answer in the domestic sphere. To be sure, I could weigh his irrational faith in the reason of space against the obsession itself with ideologically arranged domestic space in communist Russia. Nevertheless, he is contrary to communist domesticity in his petition to the bourgeoisie to invest in the tenements so that they may conform to his dream of the domestic village, one in which there is elbow room, in which there is above all a private sphere. The dark bedroom is, conversely, the anti-home, auguring the rather deliberate anti-home of communism, which would transform the domestic space of Russia into avant-garde public living in the 1920s. The dark bedroom stands for the end of the home in America, or for its never having existed in America insofar as it was always already underwritten by mobility, for America is a nation of tramps. Riis bemoans the fact that the tenements, formerly “the decorous homes of . . . the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days,”[3] stand for the dislodging of that aristocracy by the multitudes. I understand, now, what is at stake for James in his merciless descriptions of European houses, that is, of the structure itself, and his accounting for the small humanity that inhabits them only as secondary to the structure that will outlive them. What is so fearsome about the dark bedroom is that it epitomizes the social in the Arendtian sense; in its decay, the dark bedroom undermines the ethos of building and the status of the object as world-making. The bedroom is supposed to harbor the most acute intimacy, but with the failure of the object, there is nothing to relate us to and separate us from each other, and so there can be no intimacy here. I believe that for Riis, the dark bedroom, in containing but not sheltering,[4] represents a void in which space cannot be made into a narrative, such as those of James. Rather, we must enter blind and feel our way in the dark along the walls. My first impulse is to admire this as a deconstruction of the home.

I say admire. Riis’ foremost condemnation of the slums is the unreasonableness of its geography, and how easily one can lose his way (as if he didn’t want to lose his way). This perversity of space stands in direct opposition to the garden, which “does the work of a dozen police clubs” (173). Riis of course understands this form of discipline to be more humane than that of the club. But in transforming “dangerous agitators into a harmless, beer-craving ban of Anarchists,”[5] the garden is indeed violent. No wonder the tenement dwellers oppose the letting of light into their dark bedrooms. Who would want to be made harmless?

I’m curious if we can think of a poetics of vicarious slumming. The Progressive Era seems perched in between the moment of the romanticization of poverty and its criminalization. Not, however, as Riis perceives his own project as perched between these two moments in, for instance, his employ of sentimentalism in order to speak to the real threat of ressentiment among the proliferating proletariat. Not in this sense that understands these two moments as discrete. The Progressive Era is perched, more exactly, as James recognizes it in Princess Casamassima, as the romanticization of the very trepidation of potential anarchy. There is no doubt that the dark bedroom possesses Riis’ prose – one can discern in it his own weariness with reason, even in his efforts to force reason onto the geography of the slum. We are enthralled by, curious about, the things that scare us, namely, unmapped space. And in our curiosity, we try, perhaps unwittingly, to recover, to map, that space.

I have found myself in a quandary. How can we defy Riis’ domestic dream without concomitantly romanticizing the injury of the tenements?

The Durham Coalition for Urban Justice is presently fighting the city to upgrade Old North Durham Park, a public park from which mostly the surrounding low-income black and Latino community benefits. The Durham Coalition is struggling against the efforts of the neighborhood charter school, working with Friends of Old North Durham Park, to “implement a privately-developed and privately-financed plan for the Park” that would “undermine the current use of the Park” by these low-income families. The existence of public parks, playgrounds, and gardens are undeniably a vital component of urban justice, and Riis calls attention to this fact in How the Other Half Lives. Even still, the dark bedroom also exists and, I argue, its poetics must be addressed. Let me return, then, to my earlier articulation of admiration for the dark bedroom as a practice of deconstruction. Riis discusses a philanthropist who undertook to improve the conditions of the tenements that he owned. “He felt that his tenants ought to be grateful for the interest he took in them. They were. They found the boards in the wood-closets fine kindling wood, while the pipes and faucets were as good as cash at the junk shop. In three months the owner had to remove what was left of his improvements. The pipes were cut and the houses running full of water, the stationary tubs were put to all sorts of uses except washing, and of the wood-closets not a trace was left.”[6] I want to distinguish in this practice a resistance not to the home itself but to the ideal of the home, as a dismantling of the light bedroom, as a counter-employment. D.H. Lawrence reminds us, there is, antagonistic to the perfectibility of man, “a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows.”[7] This self, for Lawrence, resides in the dark forest that is the soul of man. (I have not yet clarified this for myself, but the dark forest/dark bedroom nexus might be partially accounted for in I’d rather be a street.) It is possible that the dark bedroom lies both inside and outside of free democracy. From within the tenement, the marketplace on the street below may perhaps look free. Yet the tenement is the street. The dark bedroom, perhaps, lies outside of the marketplace by lying within it, at its heart, in fact, yet out of its reach. Let’s imagine that there is also poetry in the dark bedroom, that it is something, maybe, the poor can be said to have. This is not intended to romanticize the slums, but to say that there is life worth living within the dark bedroom, and how the other half lives indeed. That is to say, I believe in public parks, playgrounds, and gardens; yet I also believe in the strange and fugitive self.

“Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin [Franklin] intended was a neat back garden. And we’ve all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things.”[8]

One might think of this proclivity to expose oneself, to give oneself away,[1] to housekeeping as extraordinarily generous,[2] but this is not a generosity. Wanting oneself to be possessed unconditionally (impossible?), is as selfish as wanting to possess unconditionally (impossible!). There is a sense in which to throw oneself in with the “common” lot in such a way, as James’s Isabel Archer, is to guard oneself against loving others – but not from being loved. Thus, the most ticklish of spinsters,[3] Olive Chancellor, patronizes the streetcars to experience an intimacy that she cannot otherwise bear. The moneyed madam makes poverty a part of her emotional experience because it promises an intimacy indeed – not with another human being, which would necessitate susceptibility, but merely with the human race, or one of its representatives. To return to the question of affinity, we are dealing, here, with an affinity with poverty as such, not with poor people. What, then, about the “dilapidated gentry,”[4] which seems in James at least to lack the sentimentalism necessary to desire to speak for the human race, perhaps to believe in a human race . . . ?

Yet, we are talking about captive space, aren’t we? I wonder, then, if to think of space as such is necessarily to think of captive space. What difference does it make, then, if one makes the conscious decision to enter into this space, that is, to insist upon it, or whether one has no choice but to carry that space of captivity within his very physiology? (Hyacinth Robinson never did leave that prison.)

“There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene . . . they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the parlour-wall . . .” [5]

“ . . . here were wanderers, anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?”[3]

Henry James tells stories about wandering princesses – Isabel Archer, the American heiress of Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Casamassima of the novel by the same name, and for me the most delightful because she is the most strange, Milly Theale of Wings of the Dove. As a wealthy orphan, Milly embodies the masterless. Yet the fundamental nature of this very masterlessness is the anxiety that makes her one of the finest and rarest “cases of American intensity.”[4] And it is precisely this anxiety that is the reason, paradoxically, why she takes flight to Europe. She hungers for somebody whom to obey, the only form of intimacy to be had – all of James’ princesses are poor when it comes to intimacy. To be sure, the “remedial properties”[5] of Europe, “the great American sedative,”[6] for wandering princesses, is the wilderness of poverty. Like the American wilderness, the slums are a space in which necessity and the immediacy of life is sure to be felt. It is along these lines that we can begin to think of the slums as space, meandering from Engels’ account of the slums as an “unplanned wilderness.” Such that the Princess Casamassima, who never visited America as she maintains she would have liked, instead resolves to be consumed by the slums. To employ such a surrogate is to conceive of American space as both underwritten and haunted by the exceptional poverty of Europe.

Then there is the question of inheritance, that of the sovereign female body wandering among the disinherited. In truth, this body cannot recognize disinheritance; it can only hope that it has lost itself within it. The female body has not only inherited capital, but it has inherited the narrative, as well, that of the romance of space. (This in spite of this body’s affinity for poverty, and in the face of the exertions of the bankrupt aristocracy of the Progressive Era to cling to the capital of American royalty.) A theory of wandering is thus at the core of James’s narrative. The practice of wandering does not merely express the desire for non-sovereignty over one’s space so that one may realize her identification with the non-possessing class. Milly Theale anticipates abysses. Her wandering, like that of Merton Densher, is a manifestation of the desire to hide within precariousness, to take cover within expropriation, to go underground, as it were, which is, nevertheless, to tragically stake a claim to possession of this very space.

“You have got to pull the democratic and idealist clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of it underneath.

‘Henceforth be masterless.’

‘Henceforth be mastered.’”[7]