Robbie Moore’s Hotel Modernity addressesgrand hotels as corporate spaces—distinctive architectural andorganisational forms—arising out of the formation of joint-stockcompanies enabled by key mid-nineteenth century legislation andnecessitated by that capital-intensive mode of transport, therailroad. The book deals with the period from 1870 to 1939. Mooreis concerned with the new forms of subjectivity arising incorporate space, pointing out that while department stores andbanks were both also transformed in this era,
[o]nly in hotels […] did the individuallive within corporate space: sleeping in its beds, being fed andtidied by its functionaries, borrowing its books, lounging in itsparlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with theimpersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode ofexperience.[1]
Moore has positioned his work uniquely in theliterature. He discusses the trans-Atlantic evolution of hotelmodernity, which distinguishes his book from influential historiesof the hotel, which address America only and which cover differenttimeframes, from A. K. Sandoval-Strauz’s Hotel: An AmericanHistory (2007)[2] to Molly W.Berger’s Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology and Urban Ambition inAmerica 1829-1929 (2011).[3]Unlike Monika Elbert’s and Susanne Schmid’s Anglo-AmericanTravelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Writing:Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing (2018),[4] Moore’s book encompasses thetwentieth century. Hotel Modernity is also different fromits nearest comparator in the analysis of Anglophone[5] literature inspired by thehotel—Emma Short’s Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature:Passing Through (2019)[6]—whichfocusses specifically on British and Irish literature.
In no way does Moore’s book reproduce Short’s.Short thematizes mobility and proposes a construct she describes asthe “hotel narrative,” so she explores the way the affordances ofthe hotel structure narrative form.[7] Moore attends to the relationshipbetween space and subjectivity. He analyses key works by HenryJames (early and late), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, HenryGreen, and Arnold Bennett, selected because “hotels provoked thesewriters to rethink the conventions and functions of fictionalcharacters” (3). Indeed, as Moore says, “[t]he broadnarrative of the book charts the warping and decentring of thecategory of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural,informatic and technological networks which come to define hotelspace in this period” (3).
Short confines herself to literature, and isconcerned with expanding Modernism to encompass the middlebrow, aswell as the highbrow. Moore adopts a similarly expansive notion ofthe Modernism, but also extends his analysis beyond literature, toinclude that emblematically modern representational technology,cinema. Moore and Short touch bases on some texts—notably ElizabethBowen’s The Hotel (1927), Arnold Bennett’s The GrandBabylon Hotel (1902), and Henry Green’s Party Going(1939)—but their contributions are complementary rather thanoverlapping. Short is concerned with gender, and particularly withfemininity. She reads Bowen’s hotel lobby as a place of comings andgoings, eroticised anticipation, interminable waiting, and ultimatedisappointment, especially for women guests.[8] Moore, by contrast, drawsattention to the cinematic qualities of Bowen’s The Hotel.Where Short discusses Hotel Babylon proprietor Theodore Racksole interms of detective fiction, Moore discusses the hotelier’s growingomniscience in the textual fabric of the hotel. Where Shortdescribes “frustrated mobility” in Party Going,[9] Moore describes the panopticpower of the hotel manager and how his guests relate to it.
Moore begins the introduction with a choicefacing Henry James in 1879, between a “musty” inn or the moremodern Marine Hotel, the family-run or the company-ownedestablishment (1). James chose the inn, but Moore’s book focusseson the hotel: it is about “the new forms of […] subjectivitygenerated within corporate space” (2). Moore defines his termsclearly: distinctively modern hotels are owned by corporations andjoint-stock companies; they are grand in scale and standardised;and they commodify goods and services en masse. They featurea rationalised labour force and architectural plan. They alsoparticipate in economies of advertising and spectacle, in the“theatre of consumption” (12), because “despite their rational,departmentalised and cellular design, corporate spaces wereinvested with libidinal energies” (12). Moore’s outline of hisparameters (the period, the hotel type, the authors) and hismethodology illustrates the depth and breadth of his research:
The readings in Hotel Modernitybegin with details: with close readings of novelistic and cinematicdescriptions of space, as well as travel writing, businessdocuments, interior decoration books, architecture periodicals,hotel trade journals, hotel management guidebooks andadvertisem*nts. Incorporating the multidisciplinary insights ofrecent hotel research, the book pays close attention to theinteractions of the human body with space; to furniture, materialsand surfaces, layout and management; taking the hotel not as asingular space but as a compound of functional zones servingdifferent social purposes, and creating different narrativepossibilities. Amassed, these details tell a story about corporatecapitalism and modernity. […] the development of the hotel providesa way of mapping the progress of capitalist modernity. (17)
Like Short, Moore structures his book withreference to the spaces of the hotel: the lobby, the corridor, thedining room, the lounge, the bar, the bedroom, the laundry, and thekitchen. Both Short and Moore consider the gendering of space.Short’s analysis is particularly strong on women, but arguably lessstrong on men. In his first chapter, Moore, on the other hand,offers a compelling reading of the lounging “long legged men” whoexpansively take up space in the enormous modern lobbies andpiazzas of early Henry James, much to the resentment of womenguests who have to tolerate their untidy intrusiveness and theirsmoke—their miasmas. Moore positions these men as outragingVictorian proprieties: collapsing the “genteel ideal of thewell-mannered body [as] self-control[led] and self-possess[ed],”“confound[ing] the margin between self and other, and by meldinginto hotel divans and architectural structures, […] the marginbetween human and stuff” (18). The result is that “hotel lobbiesand hotel bodies are shown to be disruptive agents in Victorianculture with ambivalent social potential” (18).
If the hotel lobbies were “sticky andcontaminative” and belonged to men, the parlours and the readingrooms, frequently allocated to women, were notable for their “stainresistance,” their blankness and barrenness, as Moore describes inhis second chapter (59). Unlike the Victorian home, the hotelparlour resisted signs of prior inhabitation. This means that thesespaces defied the reading habits that dominated the Victorianrealist novel—reading habits trained to “contingence, redundantdetail, friendly familiar untidiness” (65). Instead ofindividuality, Victorian readers found only evidence of thecorporation in hotel parlours (65). This came to carry the freightof broader cultural anxieties about identity and financial fraud(69). If the hotel’s interiors could not be read reliably, norcould the moral content of people’s characters. That thecorporation itself became person-at-law added to these anxieties:“The proliferation of financial instruments and the growth of thecorporate form meant that one could no longer trust surfaceappearances to divine a business’s character and therefore itscreditworthiness” (72). In the corporate hotel spacedémeublé, character, including creditworthiness, becameunstable. As Moore says in analysing James’s “Guest’s Confession”(1872), “the sitting-room is entangled in the language of fraudbecause its own identity is ungrounded” (75).
But there were also opportunities presented bythis corporate blankness. Moore “connects the stain resistance ofhotel public spaces with the amnesiac practices of consumption anddisposal that were carried out [there]” (18). These areemblematised by the book stock of the reading rooms. Reading roomsrarely contained permanent or curated collections, but rathertransient accretions of Tauchnitz editions, books printedespecially for the travelling trade, designed to be picked up in areading room, transported with the traveller when they left thehotel, and abandoned in another reading room or railway stationdown the track. Moore discusses James’s early short fictionincluding The Reverberator (1888), which “sets theseamnesiac spaces […] against […] suffocating permanence [to explore]the emancipatory potential of the hotel’s disposable culture—andthe pleasures of minor, interstitial experience” (18), representedby “a [t]rail of [f]orgotten Tuachnitzes” (80).
In Chapter 3, Moore moves from Henry James to F.Scott Fitzgerald, saying that “the shift from James’s [New York] toFitzgerald’s city was more than one of generations and fashions.Capitalism had changed gears.” (92). Where the capital of the oldWaldorf was concrete and immovable—it lay in land and bricks andmortar—the capital of the Ritz hotel was liquid and transcendent:it lay in its brand. “The Ritz,” Moore says was “a fiction ofglobal finance: a licensing apparatus for a loose, decentralisedand self-propagating franchise” which extended to everythingimaginable, from hotels to golf courses to cigars (18). The Ritzmodel appealed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was, as Fitz, also abranded entity. Moore discusses “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”(1922), in which a family confronts the problem of a diamond toolarge to sell, “as an allegory for capital’s struggle to escape thephysicality of bricks and mortar” (19). Moore notes the elision andsocial erasure of black labour in both “The Diamond as Big as theRitz,” and in the white, minimal aesthetic of the Ritz hotelitself. This evasiveness about materiality “culminat[es] in theevaporated surfaces of its rooftop gardens” (19) in TheBeautiful and the Damned (1922) and in one of the Plaza’s“translucent indoor-outdoor spaces” in The Great Gatsby(1925) (113). Unlike the old Waldorf, hotels like the Ritz escapetheir imbrication in materiality and survive the wrecking ball,achieving
a kind of vampiric deathlessness beyondmaterial bounds. It was part of the nowhereness of a white spacelike the Ritz that its architectural container was fungible anddisposable, while its “spirit”—the intangible property of itsbrand—lived on. The roof garden was the purest expression of thisevanescent quality of New York hotels: an architectural frame thatwas also an escape from architecture; an anywhere and a nowherewhose white luminescence foretold the dynamite of the demolitioncrew. (15-16)
In Chapter 4, Moore reads Elizabeth Bowen’sThe Hotel as having been influenced by cinema (128). Heasserts that “Bowen understood the blankness of corporate hotelspace as analogous to a studio set” (19). He says that she set outto “refurnish” such spaces (contra Virginia Woolf’s and WillaCather’s efforts to strip the novel bare), so that “rather thanelevating individual consciousness and the play of emotions,Bowen’s characters stand almost on an equal footing with objects.While human faces in her novels often appear flat, void,unreadable, her objects flash with life” (123). Bowen’s TheHotel, then, is about “queerly important” mise-en-scène(132). Further, it matters that Bowen’s The Hotel is set ina corporate space, as opposed to a homier pensione. Thede-individualised nature of furnishings matters, as the corporatehotel becomes the setting for a “novelistic thought experimentabout the relationship between humans and matter in the age ofmechanical reproduction. [This setting] forces the hotel guests tointeract with rented objects that are stubborn and troublemaking”(124). Moore points out how Bowen’s characters, in addition tobeing flat, and too numerous, are strangely and anachronisticallylocated in the hotel mise-en-scène in ways that suggest acontemporary crisis in terms of proprieties of gender and class. Hehighlights the comedic and disruptive potential of hotel corridorsin both Charlie Chaplin’s work and Bowen’s: “Bowen’s cinematichotel, […] with its […] comic doubles and slapstick routines,[collapses] characters’ careful demarcations of territory. Bowen’snovel finds the spatialised class relations of the hotel to be abrittle construct, ripe for collapse” (19). But Moore’s analysis ofThe Hotel in terms of cinema is more profound than that:
Bowen’s roaming camera-eye glides throughThe Hotel, like Murnau[’s Der Letze Mann] with [its]innovative crane- and tracking-shots, down empty corridors andelevator shafts. The hotels of Bowen and Murnau are mechanisticspaces, mechanistically perceived. […] the machinery of the hotelitself seems to direct the action. The genteel guests discoverthemselves to be comic bit-players and dupes in a mercilessarchitectonic engine. In this way, The Hotel reimagines thehierarchical social world of its literary predecessors in apost-war, post-Edwardian context of class anxiety anddéclassem*nt. (123)
In Chapter 5, Moore argues that hotel managersbecame authors/narrators/auteurs in literary and cinematic worksproduced between the 1900s and the 1930s. The chapter begins with adiscussion of a short film trick featuring a magically electricallyenabled hotel, in which all has been automated. The hotel seems tofunction without staff, except for the manager, owner of “thehidden hands” that run a hotel or make cinema (152). In TheAmerican Scene (1907), Henry James reported a similarlytechnologically enabled “master-spirit” (154). Moore locates Jamesat the centre of a giant “telecommunications interchange,” with achorus of voices under the control of the manager conductor(154-5). Further, the manager becomes a textual editor, who“superintend[s] the narrative world of the hotel” (159).
Moore then moves on to the “manager poets” ofArnold Bennett’s Babylon Hotel (1902) and ImperialPalace (1930), observing the hotel manager’s growingomniscience, facilitated by the ubiquity of the managerialapparatus of information technologies such as guest documentation,record keeping, and accounting (161). Despite these unpoeticaldevices, Evelyn Orcham, the manager of the Imperial Palace,perceives himself as a creator who has intellectual property rightsover his hotel, a fantasy that is rudely disrupted by theshareholders (163-4). Bennett worked in the film industry, whichchallenged his own individuated sense of authorial agency (166-7).Moore suggests that Imperial Palace, and the concept of thefilm auteur, may have been reactions to the corporate nature offilm production. Auteurism arose in the 1960s, but Moore claimsthat “we can trace this structure of feeling back to the interwarperiod, to the emergence of atechnical-scientific-commercial-managerial class” represented byOrcham (168). Orcham’s
power of vision underlines the resemblanceof the managing director to a film auteur. He maintains hissovereign subjecthood by standing apart from or above the scene andframing his staff with a directorial eye. If James’s hotels weretelegraphic, the Imperial Palace […] is immanentlycinematic. (169)
Illustrating how individual auteurism dissolvesin the corporate setting, Moore attributes Grand Hotel(1932) to MGM rather than to the director Edmund Goulding. Moorepoints out that the film “lacks a charismatic manager figure”(175). Instead, “the supra-human qualities of the hotel’smanagement are signalled by the [justly famous] overhead shot,” andby the way the mobile camera editorialises, revealing which of thecameo performers are significant (175-6). This, Moore says,represents an evolution of “Orcham’s distancing and abstractinggaze […] working as an advertisem*nt for the corporate apparatus ofMGM and the grand hotel itself” (176).
Moore ends his book with Henry Green’s PartyGoing. The “hotel anxiety” that informs this novel is ofbecoming anonymous, and it can only be allayed by being noticed bythe omniscient gaze of the hotel manager (178). But, finally, Greenresists the manager’s panopticism. Party Going thematizesnetworked relations between characters and rooms, so that “theporous spaces of the hotel become […] a way of imagining the‘physiological intersubjectivity’ of its inhabitants” (181).Party Going also signals the obsolescence of the grand hotelitself (183). In a coda entitled “Hotel Purgatory,” Moore outlinesthe impact of the coming of the automobile and the antecedents tothe motel. He concludes with a discussion of the ways the hotelswith which he has dealt are haunted because this is “a means ofgrappling with the decentring of individual agency in hotel space,”and with “the non-human or supra-human agency that adhered withinthe corporate person […] To live inside a hotel corporation was tolive with this non-human presence, to sense its ‘awfulintelligence’” (185-6).
Now for a final evaluation. It has been apleasure to review this book, and I cannot really do justice toMoore’s fascinating and multifaceted monograph. It is erudite andinsightful. It synthesises a compendious research effort into anarrative that is compellingly argued and cogently theorised. It isengagingly written and immensely readable. It combines lucid andsophisticated analyses of historical documents, literature, andfilms with well-chosen illustrations. It is full of small delights,like the insight that Orcham’s laundresses resemble Busby Berkeleychorines. It interacts with existing hotel literature in a way thatreveals a mature command of the field, but which is also fresh andoriginal. It stands head and shoulders above its competitors.Hotel Modernity makes a major contribution to the scholarlyliterature on hotels and on literary and cinematic modernity, aswell as on the history of the notion of the subject and of“character.” It is extremely rewarding. Buy it now.
