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“A Policy of Procrastination”: The Attention and Distraction of the Business Girl in Fiction by Henry James and Dorothy Richardson

By Jessica Gray.

Business Girls all round ought to be happy … Telegraph, post-office, telephone, typewriting, and the ordinary business clerks may all be called drudges, if you will, as they go through hour and hour of the same often deadly monotonous routine. Yet if it suits them, what could be better than this life? (“Business Girls” 57)

In late-nineteenth century Britain, office jobs such as typewriting and telegraph clerking were increasingly feminized, populated by young women. 1 As my headnote from an article in an 1896 issue of The Typist’s Gazette indicates, these jobs were regarded as providers of independence and opportunity, though they also entailed a fair amount of monotony. This type of office work was suitable for a somewhat educated middle-class or lower-middle-class girl. “Shorthand and Typewriting Clerks,” a November 1901 article in The Girl’s Own Paper, informed its young readers that the job was the “best and easiest to enter” for many: it was skilled in that it required some specialized education, but also rudimentary as it needed only six months training (136).

At the turn of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the business girl became a popular literary figure, featured in a number of stories and novels as well as periodical articles. Lyn Pykett has claimed the New Woman is “a construct, a condensed symbol,” a formulation that can apply as well to the notion of the business girl.  She is, however, an atypical version of the New Woman since the “often deadly monotonous routine” (“Business Girls 57) meant tensions between ambition and the relative independence a wage could bring, and frustration with the mundane, repetitive nature of the work itself.  As Meta Zimmeck has discussed, wages were often poor for women in these jobs and certainly unequal to those of men performing similar jobs given the assumption that a woman would continue to live with the family and so was simply earning “pin money” (163).  More recently, Katherine Mullin has analyzed the office girl – along with shop girls and barmaids – as a version of the New Woman, dubbing her a “working girl.” Mullin distinguishes the two in terms of social class and notes that the New Woman aspired to education or loftier professions than did the working girl, suggesting that the latter “personified a more palatable, accessible, and compelling vision of emancipation” (5). For many young women of the period, the aspirations of the typical New Woman were unrealizable. The business girl’s more quotidian work, and its predominance in the cultural imagination, produced literary attempts to portray the daily experience in the minutiae of tedious work. As such, the office girl forces us to contemplate the more everyday aspects of the New Woman’s experience of modernity and the ways those conflict with her rebellious, ambitious nature. Often, the business girl is depicted as distracted from her work: unwilling to concentrate, or simply performing her function through automatic action, her mind wanders or indulges in escapist fantasy.

I contend that analyzing scenes of boredom, manifested in distracted attention and daydream, is a new way of understanding this particular aspect of the New Woman’s rebellion. I argue that the office girl’s feminized boredom expresses deep political and societal problems connected to a lack of opportunities for women. While entry into the world of work in New Woman texts is typically perceived to be exciting and progressive, the business girl’s performance of her work is dull and limiting.  However, distraction and daydream can be subversive, allowing a woman’s escape from work while keeping her still physically present to earn her wages.  In the period’s literary portrayals, freedom of mind permits an outlet for the business girl’s creativity without jeopardizing her economic security.

Understanding the way attention was regarded during this period is key to thinking through these concepts of distraction and dispersed attention as subversive.  In our contemporary moment, we worry over attention and its collapse into distraction. Popular science books, cognitive science studies, and a stream of articles warn us that technologies are over-stimulating our brains and rendering us unable to sustain attention. 2  The computer that we work with in the office connects us also to the internet, continually providing a ready source of distraction. Laments about the loss of our capacity to concentrate often concern the diversity of media available through technology. Yet such anxieties about loss of attention are hardly unique to the twenty-first century. In the late-nineteenth century, similar sentiments abounded regarding the supposed loss of ability to attend to work, or to whatever else one must be compelled to attend. The weakened nature of attention, as in our own time, was blamed upon the specific conditions of the period: technology, industrialization, and the organization of work in a post-industrialized world. Technologies such as the telegraph, or equipment like the typewriter, could be operated in a way that connoted the automatic, a manner that sometimes even was applauded. The Typist’s Gazette, for instance, in an 1897 article entitled “Automatic Action in Typewriting,”recommended memorizing the keyboard and as such “lessening mental strain, and so producing an approximation to automatism” (148).

Such automatic attention, however, is far from the ideals of diligent concentration. Anxieties concerning loss of attention led to attempts to understand attention. As Jonathan Crary has argued, in this period “attentive norms and practices” were theorized in the organization of labor (2). Analysis of productivity and efficiency in work became formalized through the scientific management of labor, as seen, for instance, in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 The Principle of Scientific Management. Medical literature on attention, as well as manuals which focused on training one’s mind to attend better to one’s work, proliferated in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Psychological experimentation demonstrated the natural limitations to attention’s capacity, and yet there was still hope that individuals could be trained to improve their concentration. Works by William James in 1890, by E. E. Constance Jones in 1898, and by E. B. Titchner in 1908 aimed to understand attention, its workings and its capacity. As understandings of attention developed and changed in this period, literary portrayals reflected and developed the preoccupation with how attention functioned and the influence modernity’s condition had on it.

In this article, I will argue for the importance of reading these late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century concerns about loss of attention alongside representations of women working in the office. Critical works have maintained, as do I, that we must historicize our understanding of attention. 3 While medical texts from this period indicate a developing understanding of the limitations of attention’s capacity, they also betray anxieties about possible signs of degeneration.  For example, Kuelpe’s 1902 essay in The Monist and W. B. Pillsbury’s 1908 book Attention both display concerns that urban modernity is disrupting individual’s abilities to concentrate. However, in William James’s 1890 psychological work on habit and automatic behaviour we can see an earlier and less pessimistic approach to understanding the limits of attention. Indeed, William James begins to offer an understanding of the beneficial and even exciting possibilities in attention and distraction which do not require thinking and deliberate effort. I will then turn to William’s brother, analyzing Henry James’s 1898 novella In the Cage, in which an unnamed daydreaming telegraph girl creates a narrative about her customers to distract her from her work, a narrative that forms most of the story. Finally, I move to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the thirteen volumes of which were published between 1915 and 1967, and that, in portraying the everyday work life of its heroine, Miriam, replicates distraction, fantasizing, and a woman’s wandering mind in its prose form. I will analyze the ways these authors play with notions of attention and distraction to explore distraction and daydream as alternative, pleasurable forms of work that provide an escape from everyday labors.

Jonathan Crary explains that attention indicates the selection of something on which to concentrate or to give consideration.  It implies intention, even if competing objects for attention challenge that intention. Often, attention suggests acting in a metaphorically linear manner: attention flows from the subject to the object. But, as Natalie Phillips has pointed out in her work on eighteenth-century distraction, this conceptualization, which was linked to a unifocal model of attention, gradually gave way as a multifocal model of attention became more widely accepted by medical practitioners towards the nineteenth century. This multifocal model suggested that attention was “inherently multiple,” involving a range of brain processes (Phillips 4-5).  Since the model of multifocal attention suggests that attention is more complex and less easy to control, it went some way to untangling an association between attention and virtue. Yet, as those like Raja Parasuraman or Michael Posner have discussed, nineteenth-century psychologists still strained to link the two, attempting to reassert – in spite of their own findings – the agency a person has over his or her own attention.  Reluctant to concede that someone cannot simply will him- or herself to be attentive, experts in the field still argued that attention was something to be controlled.  
“Distraction,” then, suggests that one is morally compelled to concentrate upon a particular occupation, but is not doing so. It implies disobedience. But, as Crary has suggested, it is more useful to envision attention and distraction as existing on a continuum, with attention as a “dynamic process, intensifying and diminishing, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing” (47). Attention is a spectrum, then, with distraction not being the absence of attention, but, rather, a dispersed, misdirected attention. Distraction could even be a spur to creativity (Phillips 5), as well as a demonstration of an inventiveness or intelligence in characters who are frustrated by, and wanting to distance themselves from their contemporary situation, as I will examine further in the context of the distracted office worker.

Literary representations of the woman in the office often lead to an exploration of ideas of attention and distraction. This preoccupation with the emblem of the distracted woman is suggestive. The distracted woman’s figure can be used to mock the female mind’s weakness, but also to indicate something subversive about the feminine mind in a woman’s ability to handle work and more leisurely thoughts simultaneously. The stereotype of women’s ability to multitask underlies notions of female attentiveness, and this multitasking capacity is particularly appropriate for an office worker. Jill Galvan has argued that in the nineteenth century, women office workers were regarded as especially appropriate mediators of communication:  they were mentally pliant; they would act simply as conduits (12-13). The multitasking, flexible mentality, I would argue, that makes the female office worker the exemplary conduit for the passage of information, also reinforces an understanding of a subtler form of New Woman rebellion since daydream and distraction from everyday work tasks subvert the routine of the business girl’s job. Office work is particularly suitable to explore ideas of attention and distraction as it was subject to disciplinary practices of scientific management that emphasized ideals of efficiency.  Moreover, although the typewriter or the telegraph do not themselves provide a venue for procrastination as our computers do now, the repetitive labor of tapping on the typewriter or the sounder – that is, the telegraph machine that required a controlled manner similar to touch-typing – led to working automatically and a dispersal of attention to seek out more engaging stimuli.

Distraction, boredom, and the everyday have often been gendered female: in 1968 Henri Lefebvre famously declared, “Everyday life weighs heaviest on women” (73). Reinhard Kuhn, in his 1976 study of boredom, genders a specific, banal, and every-day type of boredom as feminine and concentrates on ennui, an apparently “higher” type. Kuhn dismisses the lower, more routine form of boredom, uninterested in what he claims  the shallow life of the suburban housewife illustrates (7). Kuhn’s analysis demonstrates the gendered hierarchy and gendered stereotypes functioning within how we understand boredom. But feminized boredom can be expressive of deeper political and societal problems than Kuhn seems willing to acknowledge. In this vein, Allison Pease and Patrice Petro have both argued for the bored woman as a feminist trope, expressive of frustration with and a rebellion (even if not an active one) against the political situation of women (Pease x; Petro 272). The repetition of the office girl’s work, and her frustration with it, leads to this more distinct experience of boredom. This experience of tedium is represented in literature through a desire for an escape; distraction, often in the form of fantasizing or daydreaming, becomes a way for authors to depict such frustrations and to show the pleasurable and often creative activity that takes place alongside work. 4

Distraction, then, can be a mode of rebellion. Discussing the practices of everyday life in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau asks his readers to envision a secretary writing a love letter on company time (25). This activity, he asserts, is an instance of la perruque, a situation when the employee conducts her own private tasks under the guise of working for her employer. It is a tactic for evading the disciplinary structures that oversee our lives, for diverting resources away from producing profit for one’s employer, and, instead, deploying these resources for one’s own and independently selected activities (de Certeau 25-26). For de Certeau, distraction is a form of subversion, and the secretary deftly splits her attention between her work and her love letter. Consequently, “the dividing line no longer falls between work and leisure” (29) as the multi-tasking mentality brings the two together, and the secretary succeeds in conducting enough work to avoid being disciplined while indulging in romantic imaginings to help her workday pass. The ability to attend to both her work and her romantic life is of value: freedom of mind enables female creativity to enter everyday work life.

Turn-of-the-century medical theories of attention had deployed the image of the distracted woman worker. In 1908 W. B. Pillsbury described a woman knitting while she listens to a conversation, and he asserts that she “will suddenly stop as she becomes interested in what is being said” (21). Knitting is done with an automatic attention, but here Pillsbury uses the distracted woman to illustrate what he sees as the limits of automatic attention. William James in Principles of Psychology (1890), eighteen years before Pillsbury’s text, used the same analogy to assert the opposite point of view: acting automatically, the woman can knit as she talks or reads (119). Distraction, James argues, can take place alongside such “mechanical occupations” that are “being automatically carried on” (404).

James thus perceives the productive possibilities of automatic actions. His investigations on habit posit that the brain has a plasticity – that is, that the brain can develop and change even in adulthood – which allows for new habits to evolve. Habit, he notes, can simplify the movements required to achieve a result which makes those results more accurate and diminishes fatigue (112). So too “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed” (114). Habit can be highly useful, therefore, as he says:

we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can … The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work (122).

For James, making some of our daily routine an automatic habit does not dull or deaden our senses. Acting automatically in some situations, as with Pillsbury’s knitting woman, allows us some extra freedom; it gives more space to think and to be creative. Rita Felski’s 1999 study on the everyday argues for the potentially affirmative force in habit. She acknowledges the tension inherent in habit: it can be dull, of course, but it can also orient us in the world. Thus, habit is not merely restrictive routine, but also strength and comfort, a fundamental element of being-in-the-world (Felski 28). Felski mentions, briefly, that we often carry out habit  in a “semi-automatic, distracted, or involuntary manner” (26). Repetition and routine can be the unexciting features of daily life, yet they are both necessary – we cannot concentrate all the time – and they permit us to navigate everyday life with greater ease. In the case of the girl in the office, repetition and routine enable both the passing of the day and the freedom of mind that distraction permits without impeding a woman’s automatic work.

Henry James’s In the Cage plays with automatic work and distraction and the freedom of mind both produce. In this story, an unnamed telegraph girl observes from her telegraph “cage” the comings and goings of the rich customers in a Mayfair store called Cocker’s. Her work, tapping on the telegraph machine, can be conducted automatically, and James shows how this affects states of her attention. The work’s mechanical nature allows the girl to disperse her attention, and she becomes concerned with the cryptic, coded messages of two particular customers, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen, and begins to imagine the story behind their messages. At the same time, the girl hopes to defer moving to the North London district of Chalk Farm, an area distinct from the bustling Mayfair, a move encouraged by her grocer fiancé Mr. Mudge who wants her closer to him and his business. Near the beginning of the story, the narrator notes

it was that by the time [the month of] May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost put forward for a policy of procrastination (James 317).

This “policy of procrastination” is a strategy to put off a seemingly inevitable fate: marriage to a man whom she does not love but who can provide security. James highlights the precariousness of the girl’s position throughout In the Cage; the cage itself, at least initially, enacts the boundary between the central character and the upper classes whose messages she takes and taps out on the sounder. The girl’s own position in the world, as well as her reasons for marrying Mudge, are explained early in the story when the narrator notes that she, her sister, and mother had nearly succumbed to “absolute want” (315), following, although this is never fully explained, the death of her father. It is not only the automatic nature of her work that makes her a fit subject for analyzing ideas about attention, then. The seeming inevitability of her fate, coupled with the boredom stemming from her everyday tasks, lead the girl to distract herself by creating stories about her customers.

The girl’s fantasies become a kind of escapism; her attention’s dispersal allows her to dream beyond the limitations life as a telegraph girl impose on her. Many stories from this turn-of-the-century period about young working women, especially those in employments that involve some kind of mechanical writing, conclude with the women becoming creative writers and publishing their own texts. Grant Allen’s 1897 novel The Type-writer Girl, which he published under the pseudonym Olive Pratt Rayner, sees its heroine compose short stories on her typewriter which are then successfully placed in literary magazines. In Ivy Low’s 1914 The Questing Beast, the protagonist is able to leave her mundane typing work following the publication of her first novel. James is less typical in that he does not go that far, and he restricts the girl only to daydream and fantasy, alternative but more limited and temporary forms of escape from everyday life.

The emphasis James places on the telegraph girl’s role shows how the story is preoccupied with ideas of communication and knowledge. The telegraph girl is a mediator of communication between others: as noted, women were considered as particularly appropriate in that regard, perceived as having a manipulability that suited their role as channels for communication (Galvan 12-13). Yet, the story also demonstrates anxiety about the transfer of knowledge via an unknown conduit: as the girl uncovers what seems an affair between Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard, she realizes that she occupies a potential position of power. She envisions herself acting the “bad girl” and threatening Everard by declaring “buy me!,” in a “scene better than many in her ha’penny novels” — but, she thinks to herself, she would not want money, so the whole matter remains rather “vague” in her mind, especially as she is not in fact, she assures herself, a bad girl (James 339). With these thoughts, James highlights not only the girl’s fears about knowing others’ private matters, but also about her own sexuality.

One year before publication of In the Cage,James himself had been made more aware of the mediating presence of the young communication worker when he started dictating his works to a typist in 1897. He complained in a letter to his brother William in 1898, commenting that “The young typists are mainly barbarians, and the civilized here are not typists” (qtd. in Thurschwell, “Henry James,” 6). It seems the typist’s presence was more invasive than James would have liked. The idea of intrusive communication workers could cause real anxiety, and critics have suggested parallels between In the Cage and the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, in which several telegraph boys – those who delivered telegrams to private homes – were discovered to  be prostitutes, with a number of aristocrats as their customers. 5 The boys’ part in the delivery of private messages provoked fears of blackmail, an insecurity James’s novella portrays in its heroine’s sense of power.  After all, the girl brags to her friend Mrs. Jordan, she knows the “little games and secrets and vices” of her rich customers (330). The girl and her customers become, as Kate Thomas has described in her book on the Post Office, “intimate strangers,” especially since the girl is necessary for the familiarity between Lady Bradeen and Everard (1; 218). In addition, the story alludes to the girl potentially prostituting herself to Everard.  She notes, when contemplating the possibility of an affair with Everard, that “people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter – didn’t count as infidelity, counted only as something else” (James 347). Everard begins to slip her extra money when he pays for telegrams, but the girl assumes this gesture is simply a test of her character and returns the money to him. Consequently, In the Cage explores various fears about the potentially invasive, potentially dangerous possibilities brought about by new modes of communication and the employees who work with them.

Yet, the story is laden with ambiguity, which means it is not simply about acquiring knowledge and the threat of blackmail.  James never makes quite clear what exactly the girl knows about Everard and Lady Bradeen, and where the girl’s knowledge ends and her wild imaginings about these customers begin. When the girl becomes preoccupied with the couple, she seems able to anticipate what they wish to express in their coded telegrams. At one point she corrects a key word about a meeting point in a telegram for Lady Bradeen, leading Lady Bradeen to blush and say, “Oh, you know———?,” and the girl to simply respond, “Yes, I know!,” the dashes leaving out that which apparently is known (343). The two customers seem to be having an affair, but when the story later alludes to Everard’s financial debts, the narration suggests that there is something more to the story which is never fully articulated. The proliferation of names with which Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard sign their telegrams exacerbates this ambiguity: Lady Bradeen refers to herself as “Cissy” and “Mary”; and Everard with the more impressive and extensive, “Philip,” “Phil,” “the Count,” “Captain,” “William,” “the Pink ’Un,” and at one point even, with some cruel irony, the girl’s fiancé’s name, “Mudge” (319). This abundance of names highlights the girl’s namelessness.  The latter suggests a lack of autonomous identity as the girl is forced by circumstance to make life decisions such as working in a telegraph office, or marrying Mudge. By contrast, Everard’s many names indicate privilege in eluding a fixed and single identity, an entitlement as well as in the many stories surrounding him, all of which contribute to his unknowable, ambiguous characterization and also his power.  

Interpretation plays a key role in this ambiguity and in the girl’s distraction from her work.  James repeats “margin” several times throughout the story.  I would suggest the word  does not necessarily carry the negative connotations of being marginalized, but is, instead, James’s metaphor, one connected to notions of space, openness, and freedom. 6  Indeed, as the story progresses, James emphasizes the girl’s vulnerability and precarious position less, so that  her place in a social margin suggests her ability to occupy a liminal space in which she interacts with the upper classes and enjoys her much-valued “play of mind” ( 317). The notion is underlined further by suggestions that her family was previously well off and experienced an economic and social fall. Her distaste for Mudge’s accent with its “too present h’s” (315) – which hints at his attempt to overcompensate for the cockney accent’s traditional dropping of the letter – indicates the girl does not quite belong, or feels that she does not belong, to the lower classes. However, the girl wishes Mudge to think her simply silly rather than to suspect her motivations, because “that [misperception] gave her the margin” she would require to stay at her Mayfair job for a while longer (334). Margins, therefore, symbolize space and freedom, especially since there is a “want of margin in the cage,” which, when Everard is in the shop, “wholly ceased to be appreciable” (337).

In addition, “margin” brings to mind the textual form that the story focuses on:  the telegram. The telegram lent itself to ambiguity or misinterpretation, a point made clear by the way other contemporary stories demonstrate the important consequences of such potential miscommunications. For instance, in the first issue of The Telegraphist in 1883, in an article called “Love-Making by Telegraph,” the anonymous writer questions, “Will you believe it possible for Cupid to do his work effectually BY WIRE, and without his two most powerful allies—Vision and Touch?” (4). This is intimacy without physical proximity. The telegram leads to miscommunication: the writer tells a story of two telegraph clerks, Miss Dash and Mr. Lanky, who fall in love after corresponding via telegram when they are unoccupied with customers. Mr. Lanky proposes, but when they finally meet, he finds that Miss Dash looks nothing like what he had interpreted from her brief description. Happily, this (admittedly deliberate) miscommunication ends in marriage. The telegram, whittled down to the minimal number of words, is a “distilled” form: that is, this form of communication’s condensed nature can make it ambiguous, and “Love-Making by Telegraph” demonstrates the potential power in its limitations.

Throughout In the Cage,“distilled” is how the girl chooses to describe her conversations with Everard, which are similarly condensed and ambiguous, and provide the possibility for misinterpretation (James 337). Everard’s telegrams are also particularly “distilled,” a fact that James emphasizes when juxtaposing Everard’s communications with the telegrams of other rich customers.  The girl is shocked that these customers contravene the conventions of the telegram by turning it into a form for “extravagant chatter,” full of meaningless phrases, “compliments and wonderments” (324). Everard’s telegrams, by contrast, are succinct and mysterious, to the extent that eventually his “words were mere numbers” (320). This textual condensation leaves plenty of space in the margins for the girl to read into and to expand upon in her mind, allowing her to distract herself from her typical, everyday tasks.

The social and interpretive margins permitted to the girl allow her the freedom to distract herself from her work and to defer her marriage to Mudge by preoccupying herself through creating stories to explicate ambiguities. Consequently, during the course of James’s story the girl becomes a model for exploring different conceptions of attention. The technological aspect of her job can be conducted in the mode of automatic habit; this mode of attention, lets her mind be free to observe and to elaborate. The girl’s job is dully repetitive; she takes messages from outside the cage in a mechanical manner that means her “forearm ached with rubbing” (314). Nonetheless, James explores the association between attention and virtue, as well as between distraction and subversion, in the girl’s active distraction from her duties. James also complicates linear conceptions of attention through the girl’s dispersal of attention between different tasks. The narrator notes that the girl is aware “that her imaginative life was the life in which she spent most of her time” (316), and this self-awareness reassures her that she is different from others and misunderstood by her close companions. Early in the story we hear that

(S)he had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful awakenings and followings, odd caprices of curiosity. (316)

Her “retentive brain” (323), which helps her remember elements of Everard and Lady Bradeen’s story, along with her “wonderful” nerves, mind, and sympathetic abilities, all underline her natural skills that are rarely exercised in the expected tasks of her dull job at the telegraph office. It is these abilities that suggest she has an imaginative energy that leads to her story-creating about her customers, allowing her to rise above her regular work.

While her wild imagination could make her the subject of mockery – and the narrator at some points takes on this perspective – the narrator’s sympathy for the girl overwhelms such mockery and, instead, her story-creating becomes for the reader admirable and authorial. The mechanical nature of her paid employment, coupled with her “play of mind” (317), recalls William James’s theories that the benefits of automatic work permitted a freedom for the higher powers of thought. While Henry often read his brother’s work, it is not quite clear how thoroughly he read Principles of Psychology.  Ironically, Henry seemed unable to concentrate upon this text, confessing to William in a letter that “I blush to say that I haven’t the freedom of mind or cerebral freshness … to tackle–more than dipping in just here and there—your mighty and magnificent book” (qtd. in Edel 330). Nonetheless, In the Cage invokes similar ideas about mechanical attention, habit, and freedom of mind. The girl’s imaginative story-telling ability is a different, more enjoyable form of work for the girl, resembling Michel de Certeau’s envisioning of la perruque, the situation previously mentioned when an employee conducts her own personal tasks (writing love letters) under the guise of working for her employer. Whereas the girl of In the Cage had previously covertly read novels in the office, novels that are “very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks” (316), the story of Everard and Lady Bradeen that she invents and with which she then distracts herself is one, she thinks to herself, that “beat every novel in the shop” (340). She seems like the ideal, efficient worker but she diverts her energy to her own pleasurable, imaginative work.

At the end of In the Cage, the girl is asked by Everard to recover a telegram he had previously sent in order to check its contents.  After doing so, the girl learns – in another conversation with her friend Mrs Jordan, which is threaded through with ambiguity – that Lady Bradeen and Everard are to be married, and that her recovery of the telegram has played a part in a resolution seemingly unwanted by the girl and perhaps also Everard. She concludes she will marry Mudge, and plans to move to Chalk Farm the following week. The girl’s perverse desire to avoid the end of her own, conventional narrative, which has been outlined from the beginning, is muted. Distraction can be gratifying, as we have seen with the girl’s enjoyment of her storytelling. Yet, James portrays limitations to this pleasurable work and particularly for the working and lower-class woman. The girl may have felt that her creative imaginings concerning her customers “made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of [her employer] Mr. Buckton and the importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily, deadly, flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge” (317). Her creative distraction may have been a strategy that enables her to cope with her job, yet, in the end, her material reality remains the same. She resigns herself to the fact that life, for someone in her position, must be “ugliness and obscurity” and could never be “the escape, the rise” (379). The pleasure in procrastination is that it defers closure and finality, gives the sense that possibilities and potentialities remain open, but the girl’s tale necessarily comes to a close which reaffirms class and social constructions. In James’s novella, the telegraph girl is at once a symbol for progress – intelligence, creativity, relative independence, a world of her own – but also of stasis, as her fate remains unchanged and her fantastical, dream-like story, which had been a form of escapism, must no longer distract her, and comes to its inevitable end.

Dorothy Richardson also explores distraction in her multi-volume novel Pilgrimage. In Richardson’s work distraction is not simply a character trait or a theme, but, rather, a narrative strategy that appears in the literal form of the text’s prose. Richardson wrote and released the thirteen novel-length “chapters” that make up Pilgrimage over many decades, beginning in 1915 and up to 1967, with several appearing posthumously. The novel focuses upon the life of Miriam Henderson, whose story strongly resembles Richardson’s own biography. The length and open-ended nature of Pilgrimage continually defers any kind of closure or formal ending. The prose itself drifts and flows, moving between first and third person and often following Miriam’s state of mind, enacting modernism’s stream-of-consciousness technique. Richardson herself rejected this term, noting it was popular among literary critics “who could persuade themselves of the possibility of comparing consciousness to a stream” (I: 9). 7 Richardson states in her foreword that she wanted to “produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (I: 9); she wants to depict a specifically feminine consciousness. In response to those who applied “stream of consciousness” to her novels, she jokingly suggested that “shroud of consciousness” would be more appropriate, and as Lynette Felber has argued, this reference to something which obscures something else from view indicates the lack of unilateral direction within Richardson’s text (24). The lack of singular direction in the novel Felber points out is not unlike how distraction functions: since distraction is dispersed attention, it denotes a lack of unified, linear attention. As Pilgrimage’s prose describes the distracted drift of Miriam’s mind, it formally enacts the state of distraction. This correspondence between Richardson’s prose style and the distracted state of mind is made especially clear in those volumes, or novel-chapters, in which Miriam works in a dentist’s office in London. Miriam’s distraction, replicated in Richardson’s prose, indicates frustration with the options available to women for work, as well as Miriam’s own distinctly feminine consciousness and her capacity for creativity.

Work is a problem for Miriam as she struggles to find a rewarding form of employment, and she takes on a number of different jobs.  In the Tunnel (1919) describes Miriam's moves to London to work in a dentist’s office. Richardson declared of her own arrival in the city after teaching in Germany, “At last, London, clerical work, ‘freedom’” (Journey to Paradise, 112-13).  Pilgrimage frequently describes living in the city as freeing, and the urban setting gives rise to a liberating distracted state of mind. Yet, so, too, does the more constrained experience of working in the office and the mundanity that comes with the job. In one of In The Tunnel’s first chapters focusing on Miriam’s office work, she glances through some letters she is filing and notes a returned appointment card without a date and time that she had sent. Recognizing what had been her absent-minded mistake gives rise to a bout of distraction, or daydream:

She looked blindly out of the window; hand-painted, softly they are hand-painted, forget-me-nots and gold tendrils softly painted, not shining, on an unusual shape, a merry Christmas. Melly Klismas. In this countree heapee ain, chiney man lun home again, under a red and green paper umbrella in the pouring rain, that was not hand-painted one. (II: 40)

In this passage, just when Miriam is reminded of a previous experience of distraction, she commences another. Although she physically looks away from her work, she does so not to observe something else – she “looked blindly” – but, rather, to turn inward. What follows is a series of free associations between memories: her thoughts move between hand-painted umbrellas, Christmas, a childish greeting of Christmas that gives way to a childish song, and then returns back to the umbrellas. Richardson depicts her heroine’s drift of mind but does not explicitly explain to the reader the significance of these memories. The importance comes, instead, from the formal depiction of the thought process shown through the associative thread that brings together these memories. Richardson depicts the state of distraction through her prose.

While in this example Miriam distracts herself and turns away from her work, at other moments she disperses her attention between work and drifting thought. In a manner similar to the girl’s of In the Cage, Miriam can conduct her work automatically.  For instance, part of her job in the dentist’s office is to clean the dental instruments: it is the “tedium of the long series of small, precise, attention-demanding movements,” exacerbated in its monotony by the recognition that there would soon be a “fresh set of implements already qualifying for another cleansing” (II: 40).  Richardson’s description of the task as “attention-demanding” ensures the reader focuses on the idea of attention, before the statement challenges the notion by showing Miriam’s mind in the act of drifting:

… Were there any sort of people who could do this kind of thing patiently, without minding? … the evolution of dentistry was wonderful […] there must be, everywhere, women doing this work for people who were not nice. They could not do it for work’s sake […] … the blank moment again, of gazing about in vain for an alternative … all work is drudgery. That is not the answer. … Blessed be Drudgery, but that was housekeeping, not someone else’s drudgery….  As she put the things back in the drawers […] (II: 40)

As the final phase makes clear, Miriam is still working at her tasks, but her mind is able to wander. Her thoughts may be associated with her duties, but they take on a more philosophical bent as she begins to consider other women who perform similar work, the purpose of any work, and clichéd phrases that glorify work. Miriam enacts a dispersed attention in that she deliberately tries to distract herself, to find something else to think about, as the phrase “gazing about in vain for an alternative” makes clear. Her work as the dentist’s assistant is frustrating, composed of “drudgery” and tedious, endless tasks. Yet, her distraction affords her some internal liberation, allowing her to think about the notion of work and its meanings beyond any actual routine tasks. As Miriam thinks later, “contemplation is freedom” (II: 282).

In Pilgrimage, while work itself is boring, a woman can find freedom of mind in the attention her labor can bring. At times, Miriam can find freedom in briefly “dashing off notes to friends” in between her work duties, written with “expressive phrases that came without thought” (II: 139).  This private occupation, spontaneous and drifting, reminds us, again, of la perruque, and Bryony Randall, in her study of modernism and daily time, has pointed out the affinity between de Certeau’s concept and Miriam’s experience of the temporality of everyday work life, referring to Miriam’s daydreams as a “liminal and feminised state” (84). Distraction is linked to a specifically gendered situation of Miriam’s work; as in the long passage I just quoted, Richardson explicitly describes Miriam’s consideration of her duties as contemplating “women doing this work” (II: 40), and thus, she roots the frustration that brings about a feminized rebellion through distraction in the limitations for women in society. The attentive states Pilgrimage explores are deeply embedded both in women’s social and political status and Richardson’s portrayal of a specifically feminine consciousness.

Richardson connects Miriam’s distracted state of mind to her desire for authorship and to the wider conceptions of feminine creativity Pilgrimage demonstrates. Early in the series, Miriam frequently recognizes her desire to write creatively.  For instance, Hypo Wilson, a writer character loosely based on H. G. Wells, tells her that “‘you’ve got your freedom; you ought to write’,” suggesting that her work as a dental assistant may even be conducive to writing (II: 129). But she lacks confidence; she has “material, ‘stuff,’ as [Wilson] called it” but she feels not yet ready to write it out (II: 166). Miriam’s prospective authorial ambitions are also troubled by her disdain for the novel form. She struggles with the conventional critical insistence on a linear, progressive narrative as the following passage makes clear:

People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt the book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. (I: 384)

Miriam dislikes that plot and narrative intrigue should be the primary motivation for reading. In moments such as these, Richardson aligns Miriam’s thoughts with her own project: a text in which the plot is not of primary importance. This rejection of traditional novel form is connected to the desire to express female consciousness and to counter what Richardson termed “masculine realism” in her preface to Pilgrimage, and that she associated with writers such as Balzac and Arnold Bennett, and, more generally, with linear narratives. Miriam, like Richardson, wants to create something new; and the author emphatically characterizes her heroine as a New Woman, one who adopts the typical actions of the type, smoking and cycling around London. Pilgrimage’s distracted form fulfils an ambition that both Richardson and her heroine Miriam shared to portray a feminine consciousness and an independent mobile female agency. As Gillian Hanscombe has argued, in order to change and feminize narrative technique, the very structure of the sentence has to be altered (91). If masculine writing is associated with linear narrative progression, the drifting prose that represents Miriam’s dispersed attention pushes against straightforward narrative. Although a distracted state-of-mind can denote frustration and a desire to escape from everyday life through daydream, Richardson’s long novel-series proves it also indicates creativity and the potential powers in a particularly female authorship.

Analyzing texts as Henry James’s In the Cage and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in the context of attention theories contributes a new way to understand the subversive nature in this late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century business girl. She is, after all, a New Woman, albeit one whose typical workday is spent on repetitive, mundane tasks. Although authors may depict her as ambitious and intelligent, they show, too, that her work is invariably limiting.  While it might gain her some financial independence, rarely does it give her absolute fulfilment. In some texts she may defy the odds to become the ideal New Woman figure who finds her vocation, who translates her mechanical office writing into creative writing and who becomes a novelist.  However, even without that total transformation, female creativity manifests itself in escapist daydream. Contemporary ideas around distraction and attention, particularly those of William James, saw the potential freedom of mind that could arise from automatic attention and mental habits. The business girl can conduct her repetitive work automatically while her mind wanders. This escapist fantasizing may not always lead to revolutions in and within the lives of these business girls, but it is always gratifyingly subversive.  The business girls’ dreamt narratives offer liberating moments of creative and pleasurable work amidst the routine habits of everyday office life.

Notes

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