Totally irrelevant to the purpose of this blog

This is a short essay I wrote for a class on Victorianism and the law. I couldn't think of anywhere else to put it, even though it has little to do with the general purposes of this blog. Actually, though, looking towards the end of the essay, I begin discussing my general attempts to reclaim laziness. Maybe it's more relevant than I thought. (P.S. I haven't even proofread this, so if it's a bit stumbly, that's why. After I do an edit, I'll repost).

Isabel Archer’s Library and the Foundation of Idleness

“The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down” (Penguin 78).

If I were to follow directly in the footsteps of Gaston Bachelard, I would subject the entirety of Isabel Archer’s grandmother’s house to a close and careful phenomenological analysis as a route to discovering the deeper connection between this “first universe” (Bachelard 4) and Isabel’s eventual fate. Due to the length of this assignment, however, I will restrain myself to just these few words mentioning Isabel’s early days; within these few, brief images of Isabel’s life at her grandmother’s house, we find the roots of Isabel’s character. By referencing Isabel’s moments in her grandmother’s library as foundational, The Portrait of a Lady finds itself in the long heritage of self-loathing novels, which find the true origin of character fault to be found in fiction.

Bachelard argues in his seminal The Poetics of Space that “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (Bachelard 6). He continues, arguing that the various pieces of the house come to represent key locations within our mind; for example, the attic is a place of whimsy and rational imagination. The cellar, on the other hand, is the “dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces” (Bachelard 18). From Jung, Bachelard determines the attic as the representative of the super-ego and the cellar as the poetic image of the id. Thus, when we hear motions in the attic, we want to explore, to comprehend, to understand, yet when we hear rumblings in the basement, we cover our ears and pray that whatever is down there will just disappear.

Thus, the statement that the “foundation” of Isabel’s knowledge was laid in the library is particularly odd. In the first place, foundations are stable and dark, the cement that keeps the house standing, but also the walls of the frightening cellar; the library serves as a support for Isabel’s mind, yet also contains the rooting causes of her actions. A library is a troubling construct as is, when we confront it using Bachelard’s phenomenology. The library is supposedly the store of knowledge for a family, a place where heritage, thought, rationality, and blood are sustained for future generations. Yet, this library is abandoned by the other “inmates” of the house, serving as a mere superficial representation of those previously mentioned qualities. Like the frontispieces of the books that Isabel leafs through, the library pretends to reveal in its very nature what is contained within; yet, just as looking at a frontispiece ultimately reduces the complexity of the novel down to mere stereotype, the image of the library states knowledge, civilization, and class as mere echoes of the true, eidetic nature of such concepts.

Upon closer examination, however, we notice that it is not the library itself that serves as the foundation of Isabel’s knowledge: it is her idleness. Thus, the basement of Isabel’s mind, the location of her basic values, is represented as a cardinal sin. The library, which is supposed to (however hollowly) represent those classic values of knowledge and heritage, in fact contains laziness and self-involvement. Thus, Isabel is instantly attracted to the European elite and their way of life; she ties those values that the library represents in the collective mind with the lazy idles of youth. Of course, Henrietta’s obnoxious American work ethic and demands for self-sacrifice are justified by Isabel’s troubles in Europe. Yet, the negativity implicit in the statement of youthful idles is bound within the Puritanical work ethic that Henrietta views as critical to the American character. However, we, as readers, may want to look to Bachelard, Heidegger, and the other continental philosophers who attempted to reclaim idles as a place of value. Or, as Bachelard says, “Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths” (Bachelard 6).