ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Marcel Proust, Samuel Bourgeois, and Louise Beckett use the idea of confined spaces as retreats for remembering and reflecting upon everyday childhood life. It turns to how such spaces are not always comfortable places for reminiscence. Childhood spaces are often sites of obsession, compulsion and unresolved tension: from painful memories to anxiety about art's relationship to the outside world. The chapter argues that their depictions of childhood in particular offer ways of imagining the space inside the own minds as people experience art or literature. When Proust's narrator tastes his madeleine, involuntary memory brings back previously forgotten experiences of everyday childhood life. As in Bourgeois's Red Rooms, but much more explicitly, Proust's troubling eruptions of a different way of seeing are flashbacks to scenes of childhood as a powerful obsession. Beckett, in his late text Company, is unlike Proust in refusing to develop the relationship between past and present.
