The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces

James Brown took a doctorate at Oxford in 1992, teaches literature, film and political theory, and is honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent published essays address whistleblowing, divorce in British film, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She was awarded her PhD at Birkbeck in 2020, and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies. Her recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch and André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy. Her next book, Replacement, will be published by Brill in 2024.

Acknowledgments


List of Figures


Notes on Contributors


Introduction


Part 1

Room of One’s Own: Bags, Pockets and Boxes

1 Pen and Pin Two Travel Journals and a Box, 6th January 1829

  Miriam Al Jamil



2 The Hidden Container What Lies within the Bags of Female Characters in Children’s and Young-Adult Literature

  Felicia Boyages



3 ‘This Sack So Full’ Enslaved Women’s Use of Sacks in Antebellum America

  Kathleen B. Casey



4 Pockets of Affect/Containers of Feeling

  Ellen Sampson



Part 2

Pockets and Transgression

5 The Shoplifter’s Pockets Unlawful Compartments in Womenswear, 1880–1920

  Silvia Bombardini



6 ‘Catch Me If You Can’ A Study of the Power Politics of Indian Women’s Secret Pockets

  Rituparna Das



7 Erotic Pockets Fashion and the Fetishisation of Breastfeeding in Georgian Graphic Satire

  Katie Snow



Part 3

Hidden Spaces, Magical and Supernatural

8 ‘A Mystery Whose Deepest Folds Were Gathered around the Dark Oak Cabinet’ Uncovering the Secrets of Phantastes

  Francesca Arnavas



9 Conjuring Clothing Gendered Pockets and Ephemeral Afterlives in Victorian Performance Magic

  Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott



10 Glove Magic

  Anne Green



11 An Exploration of Ghost Doors and Ghost Spaces in Haunted-House Literature

  Cristiana Pugliese



Part 4

Systems of Identity

12 Foundling Tokens The Necessity of Secrecy and Exposure

  Janette Bright



13 Inside the Drawers of the Ellis Island Immigration Station

  Marija Dalbello



14 The Secreted Self Modern Selfhood and the Pocket Schema in Contemporary Design

  Samuel Talcott



Part 5

Artefacts: the Production of Hidden Space

15 Buried Memoirs and Hidden Holographs in James Hogg and Margaret Atwood

  Victoria Reid



16 ‘Buried in Drawers, Sealed Bags, Boxes’ Pierre Loti’s Testimonies of a Doubtful Life

  Gaultier Roux



17 From Kernel to Shell Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs

  Lynn M. Somers



Part 6

Hidden Space as Literary Trope

18 What Secrets Hide inside Maupassant’s Drawers? Nostalgia, Necrophilia and Suicide

  Céline Brossillon



19 Pejorative Pockets from Shakespeare to Austen


20 What Jean Échenoz Knew Pockets and Postcritique in 1980s France

  Alexandru Matei



Part 7

Appendix

21 ‘Thinking in Metal, Thinking in Wood’ Regimes and Technologies of Secrecy

  Carolyn Sargentson



Index