Rethinking the private hypothesis: Epistolary topographies in Carrington’s letters

Abstract

In this paper I look into the letters of Dora Carrington, a British artist who lived and worked in the first half on the 20th century in the UK. I am particularly interested in her life-long interest in decorating private spaces and making delightful illustrations of them in her letters. Carrington's long-life interest in turning lived spaces into works of art went hand in hand with her overall disillusionment with her paintings. The paper discusses the problem of why a young woman artist in the peripheries of the Bloomsbury group had difficulties in devoting herself to her art. This problem I argue has to be considered within what drawing on Foucault I have called the private hypothesis, the long held argument that the private has been socially constructed and experienced as 'a space' for women. My argument is that for Carrington as for many of her contemporaries it was not the access to the public but the negotiation of solitude and privacy that emerges as a problem. Carrington's love and passion for private spaces and her epistolary topographies are expressions of spatial technologies of the female self: an artistic intervention in reclaiming solitude and privacy and in reinventing herself.

Archival research: unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments

“…In reading Carrington's letters and diaries, I followed the range of visual technologies that she deployed to express her love for space in her writings, drawings and paintings. I thus charted a colourful diagram of textual and visual images that carried traces of Carrington's 'lines of flight' through real and imagined spaces, what I called 'epistolary topographies of the self' (Tamboukou, 2011). It was through the visuality of these documents and their intra-actions with her paintings that Carrington's archival narrative emerged and developed, first guiding my research and later shaping my analysis.…”

“…The search of lost space has further emerged as the refrain of my analysis, a kind of a musical repetition that draws circles within the chaos of the correspondence and is soothing both for the researcher and the reader. 7 This refrain of 'the lost space' has helped me find my way while navigating the rough seas of the archive and has been discursively expressed in the form of a monograph and a series of journal articles (see Tamboukou, 2010Tamboukou, , 2011). Carrington's letters and diaries, archival practices, theoretical ideas and methodological strategies, in short matter and meaning, have been entangled in the writing of the research.…”

Feeling narrative in the archive: the question of serendipity

“…'When we hate, it is a man that we hate and not a collection of sense-data', Whitehead writes (45). In the same line of thought, the abstract critique of the classed and gendered character of privacy and its differentiation from 'the private' or 'domesticity' (see Tamboukou, 2011), needs a storyline such as Bouvier's to impress its value and importance on the reader: 'we concentrate by reason of a sense of importance and when we concentrate, we attend to matter of fact', Whitehead has written with clarity about 'importance' as a mode of thought. (1968: 4) In the same way that feelings cannot be abstracted from the subject and data cannot be abstracted from the feelings that feel it (Whitehead, 1985: 231), archival data cannot bear the abstraction from it of every feeling which feels it as such and the feeling cannot bear the abstraction from it of the unifying subject, the reader in the case of the archive.…”

“… 12. Here as elsewhere in my work (Tamboukou, 2011) I have drawn on Mark Augé’s concept of the ‘non-place’ as ‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity’ (1995: 77–8). …”