Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

(Jacob Rumans) #1

68 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920


In her depiction of Katie’s pitiful rural pastiches of urban activities, Jane
Findlater mounts a dual critique: on the one hand, of the economic and social
order that disenfranchizes, immobilizes and immiserates young women like
Katie; on the other, of the hollowness of modernity’s promise to alleviate the
burdens of the masses, and women in particular. Th e narrative observation that
the ‘country-dweller hungers for stir and amusement; the town-dweller for quiet
and repose’ may seem little more than folk philosophizing about the impossibil-
ity of objectively assessing the nature of the good life, but the lessons of the story
go deeper.^45 As closely as Findlater delineates the frustrations Katie meets on
the road to modernity (via Achinbeg ), she more precisely describes the ways in
which the attractions of modernity have circumscribed and impoverished Katie’s
imagination and intellect. Modernity, then, represents less the high ideals of
democratization, anti-traditionalism, freedom of thought and advances in tech-
nolog y, communication and science, than a vision of a society geared towards
providing a succession of shallow amusements to distract, without nourishing or
challenging, the interest of workers. Although I do not suggest that their thesis
maps unproblematically onto Findlater’s story, there are important resonances
with some ideas concerning the development of early cinema in the interwar
years expressed by Th eodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in ‘Th e Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944). Popular culture, as they
see it, off ers uniform thrills to the masses and, by posing as the sole and highest
form of pleasure and escapism from the dreary routines of work, creates passive
consumers of mass entertainment who collaborate in reproducing the economic
relations which disempower them: ‘Amusement under late capitalism is the pro-
longation of work. It is sought aft er as an escape from the mechanized work
process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again’.^46 Wo r k -
ers do not return from the cinema satisfi ed or dissatisfi ed; mass entertainment
does not encourage workers to refl ect critically on their place in modernity, but
neither does it provide a sense of beauty, catharsis, critique or a nuanced insight
into the organization of the world. Instead, the fi lm stimulates ‘semi-automatic
responses’ to established psychological triggers leading, in the audience, to an
ultimate ‘stunting’ of imaginative capacities:


Th e stunting of the mass-media consumer’s power of imagination and spontaneity
does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe
the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves ... Th ey
are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably
needed to apprehend them all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the
spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the eff ort required for
his response is semi-automatic no scope is left for the imagination.^47
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