It was nighttime, around 9, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was about to close. I was walking through a bunch of the decorative arts rooms, which never much interested me before. Now, being here alone, they felt special, and eerie, and some of the only real things in the museum, because they hadn't totally been taken out of their context. I am not an art or otherwise historian at all, but these are my thoughts on this room:
Who lived here? Who was she? To herself? If you've ever read Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen...essentially every classic female writer writes about the suffocation of being consigned to the gendered world high society, where women's duties are not privileges of wealth but tragedies of it. They write about lavish curtains and darkened rooms, of meaningless parties and conversations, of having only one faculty -- to host, and as such, be a doorway, a doormat, a holding place, until they die. Clarissa Dalloway is haunted by the chiming of a clocktower in London, by her own reflection, and the awesome terror of first encountering her own capacity, touching her own subconscious.
The women of these novels, "socialites", are often criticized in the classrooms of liberal academia as classist, or at least that their privilege obscures the validity of their laments. That's valid, but isn't their point that their privilege isn't privilege at all? It is odd to me that these criticism are often presented as "Marxist", a term that is to any entry-level college class what "dude, pass that" is to a lit joint: that is, the last and final word it hears.
Anyways, here is my meager observation about this room. There's a harp, an oddly singular chair, a small cat bed, and a desk. At first, it seems sad and strange enough that the room seems to rotate it's resident from menial activity to activity. That harps music just feels infinitely sad. BUT LOOK. AT. HOW. TINY. THE. DESK. IS.
This isn't a desk meant for anything! Think about it; before you had a computer or typewriter, you'd have to have a massive desk because you'd be writing with all your pages, and all the scrapped ideas, old drafts, notes, etc, sitting next to you. Think about how big Balzac and Proust's desks would have had to be -- no euphemism intended. No, this desk is for writing letters and invitations. This is a desk meant to wag the carrot of determinism and leave you with these dainty-ass legs and this unnecessary decorative bureau -- also too small to hold any weighty books, or a volume of encyclopedias. No, this cabinet just wastes more of the already minuscule surface area.
So I did some research.
1) Built in 1770, by Joseph Baumhauer, French.
2) Dimensions: 75.6cm tall, 175.3cm wide, 99.7 cm deep
How many other tiny desks exist-- built as illusion and for pacification? And when, more than two centuries in the future, am I sitting myself down at a tiny desk? When are you?