Arnold Bennett's Five Towns: “Internal and External Vision”

Abstract

In their search for an understanding of human response to place and landscape geographers need to address the problems of ambiguity and ambivalence, aspects of life to which fiction writers have given much attention. It is appropriate for geographers to turn to literature for insight into ambivalent human response to the environment, and the work of English writer, Arnold Bennett, is particularly suitable for this purpose because it clearly reflects that author's ambivalent attitude to the industrial Potteries District in which he was born and raised. Only after he left home to live in London and Paris did Bennett "discover" The Potteries as a subject suitable for creative literature, immortalizing that district as "The Five Towns" in his best novels and short stories. An examination of Bennett's writings suggests that one source of this ambivalent attitude to the Potteries might be his dual relationship with that area, as a native, an insider, on one hand, and as a visiting artist, an outsider, on the other. This study supports the contention that insiders normally do not perceive the place in which they live as landscape, and that landscape is, in fact, a construct of external vision.