The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London - Book Review

Criticism, Wntr, 2003 by Claire Nicolay

by Jane Rendell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 248. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The British Regency inhabits both historical, linear time and a specific cultural space. London was the locus of this era, and upper-class men were its primary players. Despite such dynamic contemporary trends as increasingly rapid industrialization, the continuing rise of the middle class, the (temporarily) increased freedom of women, and the increasing acceptance of Catholics and Jews, the Regency period is still often read as the story of privileged men--headed by the Prince Regent himself--gamboling in pleasure during the last days before Victorian reform.

Jane Rendell's The Pursuit of Pleasure takes aim at this privileged enjoyment and examines the ways that gender segregation worked in Regency London's exclusive enclaves. She uses two divergent works--Luce Irigaray's 1978 essay "Women on the Market" (in This Sex Which Is Not One) and Pierce Egan's Life in London (1820-21)--to anchor her study of the ways in which space in Regency London was gendered. For Rendell, these texts are "places of methodological struggle--dialectical sites where questions of spatial and historical knowledge were raised, where I was offered alternating and tantalizing glimpses of the relation between theory and history, between my desirous self and the city, the object of my desire" (3). The Pursuit of Pleasure deploys Ingaray's thesis that society is built upon the exchange of women to explore "the ways in which particular texts, in this case the ramble, represent male spatial practices and operate ideologically to define male and female mobility and visuality in public space" (24). Rendell theorizes the ramble as akin to Parisian flanerie: "a gendered urban movement" that "allows an elaboration of the dialectical relation between architectural history and critical theory from a feminist perspective" (27). Although the ramble can be read as "a representation of gendered space where men's need to present themselves as the only moving and looking subjects in the city results in a positioning of women as the loci and foci of male desire," Irigaray's theory also offers Rendell the option of focusing on "women's agency, their ability to move and to choose how to be looked at, as cyprians [slang term for prostitutes] or stimuli to male desire" (62).

Life in London, Rendell's primary literary text for this study, is a rambling novel cum travelogue indebted to Sterne, Fielding, and other eighteenth-century sources. It describes the racy adventures of friends Corinthian Tom, Jerry Hawthorne, and Bob Logic as they search for pleasure, novelty, and amusement through a variety of well-known London locations: the Docks, Vauxhall, the Royal Academy, Newgate Prison, the Royal Cock-Pit, Hyde Park, a debtors' prison, the three locations examined in The Pursuit of Pleasure, and many others. Despite this novel's great contemporary popularity and the myriad imitations it spawned, Life in London was a late example of an expiring genre. So fast was the cultural climate changing that in his 1828 sequel, The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic in their Pursuits through Life in and out of London, Egan felt compelled to defend the morality of its precursor and to include more edifying content, including the reform of a fallen woman, the deaths of Tom and Logic, the cautionary decline and death of the once-glittering courtesan Corinthian Jane, and the concluding marriage of Jerry to genteel Mary Rosebud.

In searching for the ways in which men's and women's relationships to property and space were created and perpetuated in the Regency, Rendell wants to transcend traditional Marxist architectural history and think about the gendering of space in a dynamic, rather than static way. Thus, her historical analysis combines architectural, cultural, and feminist perspectives to examine how patriarchal exclusion operated in three architectural bastions of Regency London--the clubs in St. James's Street, Almack's Assembly Rooms, and the Italian Opera House, all of which she connects to the ramble. Rendell argues that Brook's, White's, Boodle's, and other exclusive men's clubs in St. James's Street functioned as distinctly male, public space that also encompassed what is traditionally considered the female, private home, thus successfully excluding women from both public and private space. The Italian Opera House was a primary site for men to see and be seen, for the exchange of women's bodies to be enacted: from alleys to the green room, women of various status displayed themselves and looked for customers/admirers.

Although the men's clubs in St. James's are clearly sites of gender exclusion and the Italian Opera House is one in which women were marketed as commodities, Almack's is somewhat harder to categorize. This most exclusive venue was founded and controlled by women who created an elite Regency institution in the vast, impersonal building called Almack's Assembly Rooms. However, Rendell barely mentions the "Patronesses" or other female patrons whose tyrannical snobbery was ironically counterpoised by colorful pasts and contemporary scandals. Although most infamous as a site of display and marital bargaining, Almack's was also a site for political strategizing and machinations. Indeed, Lady Jersey, the most powerful Patroness, was dubbed "queen of London, of fashion, and of the Tory party" by Disraeli. In his roman a clef, Endymion, she plays insider politics at Almack's. However, this kind of power doesn't fit into Irigaray's mother-virgin-whore scheme. By reducing Almack's society to its "Marriage Mart" reputation, Rendell can suggest that the Patronesses functioned primarily as bawds, "managing the exchange of women between men for their own benefit" (95).