Lust And Lutyens Essay Research Paper Lust free essay sample

Lust And Lutyens Essay, Research Paper Lust and LutyensThe Architect and his Wife: A Life of Edwin LutyensJane RidleyChatto and Windus? 25, pp488Jane Ridley does non rather fault the sexual mutual exclusiveness of her great-grandparents, Edwin and Emily Lutyens, for the towerblocks of the sixtiess, but it # 8217 ; s alluring to cut and glue her narrative a small to come up with a reasonably galvanizing new reading of the class of British architecture in the twentieth century.Is a Lutyens house, she asks at one point, # 8216 ; an architecture Born of sexual yearning and letdown # 8217 ; ? # 8216 ; No uncertainty about it # 8217 ; seems to be her reply. After the vernal promise of all those dream houses in Kent, Lutyens gets married and, all of a sudden, starts to travel all fruity and art nouveau in his work. Then the sex dries up and he turns into a classicist. # 8217 ; Something of the exhilaration and sexual energy of that first twelvemonth of their matrimony was transposed into his work at Les Bois des Moutiers, # 8217 ; she says. We will write a custom essay sample on Lust And Lutyens Essay Research Paper Lust or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page But so Emily becomes a theosophist and falls under the enchantment of Krishnamurti. Disgusted at her hubby # 8217 ; s # 8216 ; clumsy and unequal sexual love # 8217 ; , she terminates the physical side of their relationship with a missive that could barely hold been more painful for its recipient. # 8217 ; I have suffered intensely physically during all my married life. I have done my responsibility to you and my state as respects kids and could neer confront another. With that inducement gone, your coming to me has been progressively hard for me to bear. I believe and hold steadfastly that a adult female has the right over her ain organic structure. Where she gives it volitionally, the relationship is beautiful. Where she gives it because she must, it becomes harlotry, in or out of matrimony and is a degradation. # 8217 ; Evicted from the matrimony bed, he quickly becomes a classicist. As Voysey one time said: # 8216 ; If Lutyens had non defected to the classical cantonment, England might hold developed a sound modern architecture of her own. # 8217 ; Or, in other words, the greatest designer of his clip embraces a stylistic dead-end, go forthing the manner unfastened to the modernist savages massed at the gate all because he couldn’t satisfy his wife.Nor does Ridley, whose preoccupation with sex verges on the comic, stop there. ‘The Freudian significance of tunnels in Lutyens’s work is undeniable; and the entrance tunnel at Homewood was like a vagina; opening on to a womb-like house,’ she remarks at one point. Even when Lutyens finds solace in the arms of Lady Sackville, he is quickly reduced to architectural sublimation once again when she commissions him to design a house. All this is pretty tough on Lutyens, who was an extraordinarily gifted architect. He built magnificent, complex, subtle houses.Great-granddaughter or not, Ridley is a professional biographer and biographers need sex, almost as much as they need metaphors. The book is full of both and they have a sadly diminishing effect on Lutyens’s achievements. ‘A Lutyens house and a Jekyll garden became an Edwardian status symbol. Perhaps it was also a metaphor for Edwardi an marriage,’ she hazards. The massive four-poster bed that Lutyens designed for himself is another. She conjures them reading a contemporary sex manual together. ‘It became a metaphor for their marriage, hard, uncomfortable unyielding. Not so much a marriage bed as an architectural monument, it was cold and painful.’Poor Lutyens is even revealed as having suffered an inflated scrotum ‘which somehow seems to symbolise the failure of his sex life’. Nothing symbolic about that, one might think.Ridley is perhaps more enlightening on money, class and racism than she is on sex. Lutyens’s father-in-law was the Viceroy of India, a connection that didn’t hurt when Lutyens came to design New Delhi. While he was affable enough with his servants in Delhi, Lutyens was shockingly racist about the country to which he owed so much. ‘The very low intellect of the natives spoils much. I do not think it possible for Indians and whites to mix freely ; mixed marriage is filthy and beastly and they ought to get the sanitary office to interfere.’ This last, of course, may have as much to do with his marital difficulties as anything.