‘Have you anything to declare?’: Portable Selves on Trial

The final chapter of the book directs attention to questions of identity and selfhood. If modernism witnessed the rise of a culture of portability, what did this mean for understandings of literary character, and how did such understandings alter over the course of the interwar period? This chapter documents the development of late modernist suspicion of portable otherness as this is conveyed through interrogative appraisals of portable property. Such a development coincides with the sudden pervasiveness of the literary figure of the customs official from the late 1920s. This is a figure shown to share the psychoanalyst’s eye for the repressed contraband: ‘Have you anything to declare?’ As the chapter shows, this question of self-declaration becomes a critical one in conceptions and re-conceptions of character from modernism to late modernism. The chapter culminates with a reading of Henry Green’s autobiographical Pack My Bag (1940) in conjunction with his fictional Party Going (1939), both published around the outbreak of the Second World War.

‘No one is safe from the beggar’s pack’: Portability and Precarity

Chapter 3 traces the progressive alignment of portability with precarity from the late 1920s to the 1940s against a backdrop of political instability. The unfolding crisis of mass displacement across Europe served to reduce earlier literary fantasies of travelling light to nightmarish visions of involuntary exodus. These changing resonances are perceptible in the pointed obfuscations of tropes of tourism, adventure and dispossession in 1930s literature as well as the noticeable intrusion of the figure of the refugee on the artistic consciousness. If luggage becomes a figurative focal point in the works of political exiles and refugees, it is not in aid of a fantasy of creative renewal but of material, cultural and individual preservation. The chapter ends with an analysis of the fictional and non-fictional work of Elizabeth Bowen, with the inclusion of an extended close reading of The House in Paris as an updated version of Forster’s Howards End in a troubled 1930s context.

‘A purse of her own’: Women and Carriage

Chapter 2 considers the emergence of the woman’s bag as a subversive emblem for female self-sufficiency from the late nineteenth century. It was an emblem taken up by a number of New Woman writers of fiction and non-fiction, from George Egerton to Nellie Bly. Giving an overview of the historical and rhetorical associations of women with baggage in the context of legal understandings of women’s property rights, the chapter also looks at fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century projections (both in literary works and satirical cartoons) of the disturbance caused by these modern women to traditional chivalry and associated fictional conventions. It asks why women’s portable property was often so pivotal in renderings of this disturbance. More specifically, it hones in on the work of one prominent modernist woman writer, Dorothy Richardson, whose use of a portable model in Pilgrimage goes hand in hand with her reinvention of the female subject. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the problems faced by women beyond the domestic paradigm, considering the woman’s bag as an object of modernist conflict in texts by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

Introduction

This introduction gives a critical and historical overview of the links between modernism and portability, situating the book’s concerns in relation to established work on mobility, material culture and modernist exile. It explains the book’s emphasis on the emergence of portable analogues for literary form in the twentieth century and draws a distinction between a modernist metaphorics of portability and a Victorian metaphorics of domesticity. It situates literary representations of a new portable culture in the context of developments both in architectural design and the evolution of transportation technologies and travelling goods. It further provides a detailed description of each of the four book chapters.

‘Living modernly’s living quickly’: Towards Travelling Light

The first chapter charts the emerging influence and impact of a travel light ethos from the Edwardian period to modernism. It pays particular attention to the transitional status of the house in Edwardian writing at a time when it was visibly beginning to lose its lustre. The chapter will begin by tracing the genesis of that now-prolific phrase 'house of fiction' to Henry James's belated 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and will argue that, contrary to popular usage, the 'house of fiction' originally referred to an amorphous structure on the point of abandonment. It will then look at two conflicting responses to the parallel rise of a culture of portability: Max Beerbohm’s ‘Ichabod’ (1900) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). The chapter will finish by turning to modernist delineations of a portable culture which has become well-established by the late 1910s.

Conclusion

The conclusion briefly reviews the chief concerns of the book but also addresses the status of literary portability after World War II. Using Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt (1969) and Marcel Duchamp’s Bôite-en-valise series as key examples, it makes a case for the historical distinctiveness of modernist luggage in its representation of a modern culture of portability in an emergent form, caught between solid and liquid modernities.