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No Place Like Home

The critical tendency to associate modernism with the public spaces of the city is one that continues to be rethought. At the forefront of this work is Victoria Rosner, whose 2005 book, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, repositioned the home at the centre of debates concerning the spatiality and topography of modernist literature. In this her new book, Rosner builds upon her previous work to present a compelling account of the ways in which modernism can be understood as a response to early twentieth-century innovations in domestic design. In a comprehensive introduction, she details how early twentieth-century developments in domestic architecture, organization, and design were driven by theories concerning the ‘Rational Household’ in the 1920s and 1930s. This was a concept that took inspiration from technological and industrial advances, and the principles of mass production, and which ‘stood for planning and efficiency, for modernization and mechanization, and for the professionalization of housework as performed by the woman of the house’ (5). Precisely how women were impacted by the rise of the rational household is one of the key considerations underpinning Rosner’s thoughtful discussions throughout much of this book. Rosner establishes clear and persuasive connections between these developments in domestic architecture and design and many of the key formal and stylistic characteristics of modernist literature. In Chapter Two, for example, she suggests that the bare, stripped down style of writers such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford can be linked to the shift towards a similar functional and ‘minimum’ aesthetic emerging in the design of the early twentiethcentury home, a move away from the Victorian fashion for ornament. The trend towards minimalistic layout and design in the home, with clean lines and smooth surfaces, was inextricably linked to the emergence of germ theory, the impact of which on modernist literature Rosner traces in Chapter Three. The emphasis on ‘visual clarity in representation’ in the work of writers such as William Carlos Williams partially derives, she Victoria Rosner, Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, Oxford University Press, 2020, £30 hardback, 9780198845195