The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces

Essays on Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers

Series: 

Volume Editors:
James Brown
,
Anna Jamieson
, and
Naomi Segal
This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book’s focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.
Copyright Year:
2024
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-69472-9
Publication:
13 May 2024
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-52288-6
Publication:
15 May 2024
Cover The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces

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James Brown took a doctorate at Oxford in 1992, teaches literature, film and political theory, and is honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent published essays address whistleblowing, divorce in British film, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She was awarded her PhD at Birkbeck in 2020, and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies. Her recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch and André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy. Her next book, Replacement, will be published by Brill in 2024.
Acknowledgments

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part 1
Room of One’s Own: Bags, Pockets and Boxes
1 Pen and Pin Two Travel Journals and a Box, 6th January 1829
  Miriam Al Jamil

2 The Hidden Container What Lies within the Bags of Female Characters in Children’s and Young-Adult Literature
  Felicia Boyages

3 ‘This Sack So Full’ Enslaved Women’s Use of Sacks in Antebellum America
  Kathleen B. Casey

4 Pockets of Affect/Containers of Feeling
  Ellen Sampson

Part 2
Pockets and Transgression
5 The Shoplifter’s Pockets Unlawful Compartments in Womenswear, 1880–1920
  Silvia Bombardini

6 ‘Catch Me If You Can’ A Study of the Power Politics of Indian Women’s Secret Pockets
  Rituparna Das

7 Erotic Pockets Fashion and the Fetishisation of Breastfeeding in Georgian Graphic Satire
  Katie Snow

Part 3
Hidden Spaces, Magical and Supernatural
8 ‘A Mystery Whose Deepest Folds Were Gathered around the Dark Oak Cabinet’ Uncovering the Secrets of Phantastes
  Francesca Arnavas

9 Conjuring Clothing Gendered Pockets and Ephemeral Afterlives in Victorian Performance Magic
  Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott

10 Glove Magic
  Anne Green

11 An Exploration of Ghost Doors and Ghost Spaces in Haunted-House Literature
  Cristiana Pugliese

Part 4
Systems of Identity
12 Foundling Tokens The Necessity of Secrecy and Exposure
  Janette Bright

13 Inside the Drawers of the Ellis Island Immigration Station
  Marija Dalbello

14 The Secreted Self Modern Selfhood and the Pocket Schema in Contemporary Design
  Samuel Talcott

Part 5
Artefacts: the Production of Hidden Space
15 Buried Memoirs and Hidden Holographs in James Hogg and Margaret Atwood
  Victoria Reid

16 ‘Buried in Drawers, Sealed Bags, Boxes’ Pierre Loti’s Testimonies of a Doubtful Life
  Gaultier Roux

17 From Kernel to Shell Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs
  Lynn M. Somers

Part 6
Hidden Space as Literary Trope
18 What Secrets Hide inside Maupassant’s Drawers? Nostalgia, Necrophilia and Suicide
  Céline Brossillon

19 Pejorative Pockets from Shakespeare to Austen

20 What Jean Échenoz Knew Pockets and Postcritique in 1980s France
  Alexandru Matei

Part 7
Appendix
21 ‘Thinking in Metal, Thinking in Wood’ Regimes and Technologies of Secrecy
  Carolyn Sargentson

Index

Given the international and interdisciplinary nature of the material, the book will appeal to a wide readership of students and researchers in the visual arts, the humanities and the social sciences.
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