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Julia Prewitt Brown, The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. xiv+ 188 pp. $30.00.
At several points in this study Julia Prewitt Brown refers to her husband, Howard Eiland, as a critic and co-translator, with Kevin McLaughlin, of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 1999), the great work left unfinished at Benjamin's death in 1940. The Arcades Project, as an attempt to render the very texture of Paris in the time of Baudelaire, is in many ways the inspiration for this book, and especially the brilliant aphoristic essays that Benjamin wrote under the title "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935). This exposé, as it was called, was revised four years later, and both versions appear in the current translation, but readers of Benjamin will be more familiar with its earlier version, included in Charles Baudefoire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (Verso 1973), and they will remember how it opposes a series of images, montage-like, against each other: "Fourier, or the Arcades" versus "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," "Grandville, or the World Exhibitions" versus "Louis Philippe, or the Interior," "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris" versus "Haussmann, or the Barricades." These oppositional images are vital for reading citylife, the most relevant being the passage on the interior, where there is discussion of the private dwelling, which, in the nineteenth century, is for the first time opposed to the place of work and made the complement of the office. Commercial considerations are excluded and there arise "the phantasmagorias of the interior" (Arcades 9). The person who dwells most happily in the interior is the collector, that crucial figure for Benjamin (and a figure of himself)· And "the interior is...