Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature by Emma Short

Author:Emma Short
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030221294
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The excitement engendered by the space of the dining room within both Jane and Robert Lucy is made evident here, ‘the great doors’ implying a sense of grandeur not necessarily expected from a rather unassuming seaside hotel. For Jane and Robert, it is precisely the exposed and public nature of the dining room that creates and fuels their expectation, their feeling ‘of pure, unspoiled adventure’ derived from being able to observe freely the actions and behaviours of other guests.

Jane and Robert Lucy are therefore situated very clearly here as observers, as opposed to those who are themselves observed. Or rather, they situate themselves as such—in actual fact, the narration endeavours to undermine their assumed spectatorial role by drawing the reader in through direct address: ‘You could never have guessed how old they were. […] You might have taken them for bride and bridegroom’ (Sinclair 1908, pp. 1–2). Effectively transplanting the reader into the hotel dining room, this narratorial technique works to implicate her/him in a voyeuristic position, almost as one of the crowd of hotel guests closely observing the Lucys’ entrance into this space. Yet while the Lucys are indeed both the subject and object of the gaze in these opening pages, the principal target of such voyeurism within the hotel’s public rooms is Kitty Tailleur herself, who enters the dining room shortly after the Lucys, accompanied by her companion, Miss Keating. The subject of swirling rumours in the hotel regarding her past affairs and sexual promiscuity, Kitty is perhaps best defined, as Suzanne Raitt suggests, as a ‘courtesan’ rather than as a prostitute, and this is a novel which certainly engages with—and complicates—the Victorian figure of the fallen woman. The observation of Kitty by the other hotel guests has a relentless quality, and, as Raitt notes, she ‘is continually stared at as she moves around [the hotel’s] reception rooms’ (2000, p. 105). In the text’s first encounter with Kitty, she enters the dining room ‘slowly, with the irresistible motion of creatures that divide and trouble the medium in which they move. The white, painted wainscot behind her showed her small, eager head, its waving rolls and crowing heights of hair, black as her gown’ (Sinclair 1908, p. 7). The description of her very movement into the room as ‘irresistible’ suggests a magnetic quality to Kitty’s appearance, which is itself magnified and enhanced by the plain background of the white walls. There is thus a contiguity or indeed synthesis between Kitty, who is, Raitt points out, ‘[l]ike an article in a department store’, and the dining room, a space which is inescapably public and in which the gaze of others works to objectify those who enter (Raitt 2000, p. 105).

This objectification of Kitty proves horrifying to Robert Lucy, who perceives ‘the large, white room, half empty at this season’ as giving Kitty ‘up bodily to […] the intolerable impudence of the public gaze’ (Sinclair 1908, p. 8). Robert regards the exposed space of the dining room as threatening to Kitty,

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