The Sense of an Interior

by Diana Fuss

The Sense of an Interior is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. The book looks at four famous figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust, and examines the relationship between their work and the spaces where they wrote.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2004

About the author

Diana Fuss, Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, has taught at Princeton since 1988, after receiving her PhD from Brown University in English and Semiotics. She has taught undergraduate courses on a range of topics in the areas of criticism and theory, 19th and 20th century American and British literature, narrative and poetry, and film and media. And she has taught more specialized graduate offerings on such subjects as Body Parts, Architectural Interiors, The Senses, Contemporary Theory, Freud’s Toolbox, American Elegy, Modern Death, Modern Love, and Keywords. She has also conducted the graduate pedagogy and dissertation seminars. In 2001 Fuss received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and she currently holds the University’s Cotsen Fellowship for Distinguished Research and Teaching.

Reviews

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this fascinating study, Fuss examines the connections between individual psychological interiority, architectural space, and literary production in writer's domestic-creative spaces. The author has a particular interest in sensory experience of material space. Specific chapters focus on Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust. The Dickinson chapter was my favorite. Fuss explores the way Dickinson used sight as a spacial tool in both her life and architectural affect in her poetry. In doing so, Fuss gives Dickinson agency over the ways she made use of her domestic space to stage her interactions with other people and craft her literary persona. Fuss then looks at the arrangement of Freud's office as an exhibition space. Helen Keller's home is discussed as a tactile representation of industrialization and the place of touch in the cultural hierarchy of the senses. Lastly, Proust's bedroom as a space that dissolved the boundaries between literature and life.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read that does something different from everything else I've read. As she says in the book's coda, Diana Fuss's remit in THE SENSE OF AN INTERIOR is to combine three distinct genres: the architectural study, the biography, and the study of cultural theory, into a satisfying and very well written whole. Beginning with an introduction that ably sets out this book's spatial premise, we then move into detailed analysis of the homes of four different writers. The first is Emily Dickinson, and this is by far the best chapter, Fuss expertly analysing Dickinson's texts in relation to her living arrangements. The follow-up chapters look at Freud's office and how it related to his patient-doctor work; how Helen Keller's home uniquely reflected its occupant's disabilities; and finally, how Proust transformed his bedroom into a study in a way both unique and thoroughly bizarre. This short volume is well-paced, nicely illustrated, and creatively written throughout.

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fuss insinuates a lot and tries to back up these insinuations by using many quotes from other authors. You get dragged into her train of thought and risk losing your own. Of course, writing about the past is always difficult because you only have at hand what has been left to you, but for me it was often too unsubstantiated.

[Douglas Meeker · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Mary East · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting examination of interiority as both a physical and mental space!

[Daphna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caveat: I read only the introduction, the Dickinson chapter, and the conclusion.

An established scholar who can, at this point, do pretty much whatever the hell she wants, Fuss describes this slim book in the acknowledgments as "pure wish fulfillment," a "guilty pleasure." Initially, I picked it up thinking it would be just that—an indulgent, hagiographic work that plays to our voyeuristic desires to know what the stars are really like but that contains little substance.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see not only a substantive argument here but a fascinating and generative one. Fuss defines “interior” capaciously, arguing that “interiors shape imagination” and showing how the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of the home as a private instead of a public space facilitated the emergence of the interior subject. Using the human sensorium as the “bridge between the architectural and the psychological interior,” she investigates authors’ relationships to the spaces in which they wrote. She looks, for instance, at the views from Dickinson’s windows and the doors she stepped through, at what she saw and heard and what she withdrew from, and argues that Dickinsons’ relationship to the Homestead was not phobic but poetic.

If sometimes the argument is too neat--e.g., her repeated use of antimetabole; her ending affirmation of the centrality of the Homestead that states that Dickinson's occupation was listed on her death certificate as "At home" but that declines, even in a note, to explain that this was the pervasive descriptor for unemployed women of the leisure class--it is also impressively artful and impeccably articulated. The verbal gymnastics and the intellectual leaps they allow for--Fuss goes from interiors to interiority, visual technology to conceptions of vision--are seductive and thrilling to follow even if they sometimes privilege provocation and spectacle over believability.

[Kris Frantz]

Incredible, thoughtful work by Fuss. Her sound research proves compelling but her intriguing theory and flawless prose captivates and transcends.