Woman's Domestic Body

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Beverly Gordon

Looking at women's history through a material culture lens, Beverly Gordon investigates both physical and psychological associations between a woman's body and domestic interiors in the industrial age. This gendered reading of women's roles, home, fashion and decorative arts, discusses structural metaphoric relations between house and body and the impact of female character on a room. Home and body are shown to be inscribed upon each other so that space becomes an extension of the female inhabitant and an embodiment of home.

In her 1879 guide entitled The Complete Home, Julia McNair Wright told the story of a sickly, disabled girl named Margaret. As a form of therapy, the wise Aunt Sophronia had given her tasks related to fixing up the house, such as making wall pockets for display and decorating a room with plants. On surveying the results of her handiwork, Margaret 'lean[ed] back with a sigh of satisfaction,' saying, 'Don't I look nice! … Why I feel almost well.'¹ Margaret identified completely with the room she had worked on – she literally became one with it. By 'fixing' her house, she had fixed herself.

Wright's moralistic story epitomizes the conceptual conflation between women's bodies and domestic interiors that was prevalent in the industrial age. Body and interior space were often seen and treated as if they were the same thing, so much so that they became almost interchangeable; symbolically, one could stand for the other. The following essay explores this conceptual overlay. It examines how the identification between self and interior became particularly linked with women and how far-reaching and pervasive it was. While the phenomenon was international in scope – it certainly was associated with bourgeois gender roles in Europe as well as North America – this discussion focuses for the sake of space primarily on American sources and images. Its close look at the interpenetration of the house and body brings together information and ideas that are typically treated separately, offering new insights about gender and women's roles and about the treatment of the house, fashion, and the decorative arts. It proposes a new theoretical framework from which to look at and understand their intersecting histories.

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Vestiges of this conflationary metaphoric relationship remain today. Women are still primarily identified in our culture with the arrangement and outfitting of both the interior and the body. Tellingly, the 'women's pages' of daily newspapers, now typically packaged as the 'living' section, remain predominantly focused on home and fashion. Fashion itself is generally thought of almost exclusively in relation to women's clothes. Fashion shows and magazines draw predominantly female audiences, and, even in the academy, the study of fashion or dress is largely still a woman's endeavor. A similar situation prevails in relation to interiors. While males dominate the architectural profession and many men are interested in the exterior shell of the house, the domain still shifts to women once the attention is focused on the inside. The interior design profession is overwhelmingly female, and women form the primary audience for exhibits, advice literature, and even discussion of interior decoration. Sociological studies also indicate that the home is still primarily perceived as a female place, and we maintain practices that acknowledge this as our cultural norm. When newly married couples register for silverware, for example, it is the wives' initials that are typically imprinted, even though the silver is jointly owned.²

The modern gender conventions, however, pale in comparison with the conceptual conflation I am exploring. Roughly between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries, and most strongly between about 1875 and 1925, the connection between women and their houses in Western middle-class culture was so strong that it helped shape the perception of both. In this period it seemed that a simile – women and interiors were like one another – was transformed into a synonym. The woman was seen as the embodiment of the home, and in turn the home was seen as an extension other – an extension of both her corporeal and spiritual self. The conflation functioned as what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call a structural, or conventional metaphor, that is, a device for understanding or even experiencing one kind of thing as another. Such metaphors are not just a matter of language, Lakoff and Johnson maintain, but are part of our conceptual systems and thought processes. Metaphors are thus fully 'real,' because they help us define, make sense of, and even create reality. This structural metaphoric relationship between house and body was expressed in popular language and imagery throughout the industrial age and can be traced in everything from fiction to advice literature. As Harriet Beecher Stowe put it in her novel, We and Our Neighbors (1875), a married woman's character was made manifest in her home: '[Her] self begins to melt away into something higher … The home becomes [her] center and to her home passes the charm that once was thrown around her person … Her home is the new impersonation of herself.' Impersonation is a significant word in this context: the home did not just represent the woman, but became her, almost like another body. It was what the 'skilled corps of authorities' who contributed to the book How to Make a Home Happy: A Housekeeper's Hand Book (1884) termed 'part and parcel of one great whole.' They viewed the relationship of women and rooms as reciprocal: 'It is not we that make

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our surroundings merely, but our surroundings in turn make us … The very act of fashioning beautiful forms forms us into beautiful fashion.³

Many writers emphasized the impact of female character on a room; over time, the space became more and more an extension of her. 'Have we not often remarked of a house or a room that it looks "just like her,"' asked Charles Warner in his 1911 treatise, Home Decoration, which proudly described a progressive public school project where principles of design were taught through such decoration. The boys built an actual house, while the girls designed its interior. The remark was included in a chapter directed to girls that focused specifically on dress and house decoration. Similar sentiments were expressed by others. Popular writer Helen Hunt Jackson remarked that rooms, like faces, have their own expressions, or 'countenances.' 'At the end of a few years of [living in a room] it is sure to be a pretty good reflection of our own,' she told her readers in Making Home Life Attractive.⁴

However, the reverse could also be true: a woman could reflect and even become a part of an interior. Edith Wharton frequently described fictional female characters who came to share physical traits with their houses, or who changed themselves to suit those houses more perfectly. Rooms took 'possession' of these women; a house had an 'almost human power to command.' Once the heroines had been so taken over by those spaces, Wharton implied, leaving them would be 'tantamount to self-annihilation.'⁵

In either case, women had to fit their houses. In 1878 Austrian museum director Jacob Von Falke insisted in Art in the House that a lady must be in harmony with her surroundings – 'she should be … the noblest ornament of her ornamented dwelling.' The idea was echoed more than forty years later by advice-giver Emily Burbank, who wrote on both costume and interiors. In Woman as Decoration (1920) she stressed that 'woman was herself an important factor in the decorating scheme of any setting,' so much a part of the room, in other words, that she was an actual piece of it.⁶

Turn-of-the-century paintings illustrating women in interiors routinely reflected this formulation. In Childe Hassam's 1918 painting, 'Tanagra,' for example, the woman literally blends into and almost becomes a part of the décor. The table so closely mirrors her dress that it functions as an extension of it, as does the Japanese screen behind her. The woman is shown among flowering plants – in contrast to the cityscape glimpsed out the window, she represents naturalness and fecundity – but like her, the plants are tamed, as they are cut or confined to a clay pot. The outside light shines on the woman, but she remains in the interior, completing it with her very presence (significantly, she glances at another female body). Other paintings played on many of the same ideas. Female figures matching and even merging into surrounding draperies were seen as early as the middle of the century in America – a well-known example is James Abbott McNeill Whistler's

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'The White Girl' – but the convention is particularly associated with a group of impressionists that called itself 'Ten American Painters.' Playing on imagery from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Vermeer who also focused on women in interiors, Hassam and his colleagues often portrayed women sitting by windows or in front of mirrors, engaged in contemplative, domestic activities such as holding flowers, sewing, or reading. The women all appeared part of their surroundings.7

How did this conflation between animate woman and inanimate room come about, and why was it so strong in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century? It was largely an outgrowth of women's ideal role in the culture that was created by industrial capitalism. An almost obsessive preoccupation with proper appearance was characteristic of the nineteenth century, a time of rapid and far-reaching social change fostered by unbridled industrialization and urbanization. Although upward social mobility was far from guaranteed, its success was apparently common enough by the middle of the century to support the popular belief that status was no longer ascribed as much as achieved. In a world of urban strangers, appearance became ever-more important as the outward sign of such achievement. This in itself was not new; wealthy individuals since the Renaissance had been very concerned with the impression created by what they wore. However, this preoccupation was now extended to whole new categories of people, comprising the majority of the population. Individuals on nearly every step of the social ladder had to be vigilantly concerned with and conscious of their presentation of self. Dress – the decoration of the body – and interior furnishings – the decoration of the home – together formed what in more contemporary terms has been called the front that projected the desired image to the world at large.8

Middle- and upper-class women bore the greatest burden of the necessary impression management in the nineteenth century. Men's ability to indicate their social status on their bodies was now considerably limited because their dress had became severely conscribed. This was related to changing economic and social patterns. Once men had moved their primary economic activities out of the home into an outside workplace, their clothing became highly codified; the dark and sober three-piece suit worn by every man who did not have to do physical labor has in fact been called the 'uniform of industrial capitalism.' The severe suit completely replaced the lavish clothing that had been worn by prosperous merchants and professional men before the French Revolution; lace, ruffles, embroidered waistcoats, tight-fitting silk breeches, and powdered wigs had all come to be associated with the excesses and irrationalities of the aristocracy and were no longer considered 'manly.' Women had no such restriction about advertising wealth and status; on the contrary, by their very economic idleness and concomitant elaborate dress, they now demonstrated the prosperity that the men they were associated with had achieved. Women thus became the primary consumers of fashion by the mid-nineteenth century, and keeping up with changing silhouettes and developments in woven fabric, lace, and

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Childe Hassam, Tanagra (The Builders, New York). Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.

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embroidery became an almost exclusively female concern. Men's relationship with fashion became primarily a matter of production. The first large-scale fashion business, in fact, was opened in Paris by designer/entrepreneur Charles Frederick Worth in 1858. Interestingly, given the fact that the product was women's dress and the clientele was female, the business was known as the 'House of Worth' (author's emphasis).⁹

A similar situation developed with regard to domestic interiors. A prosperous and fashionable dwelling had long been important, as a social facade, but as middle-class men's sphere of economic activity moved almost completely out of the home, men typically became less and less directly involved with the appearance of the house itself. Again by about midcentury, the functioning and decoration of the house thus became the women's responsibility as well.¹⁰ It is perhaps not surprising that body and dwelling came to be viewed together. Both bore the name, literally and legally, of the man who 'owned' them, and both were adorned to testify to his success. (… p 285)

Notes

1 Julia McNair Wright, The Complete Home: An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs, JC McCurdy (Philadelphia), 1879, pp 167–8.

2 Dress is defined in the field as the total outward appearance of the body, including elements such as hairstyle, demeanor, and accessories. See Mary Ellen Roach and Kathleen Ellen Musa, New Perspectives on the History of Western Dress: A Handbook, NutriGuides (New York), 1980, p 11. An overwhelming majority of students in professional organizations related to costume and fashion are women, as are the students in university classes devoted to the subject. My own classes in this area draw only about 5 percent men. On interiors, see Jerome Togndi, 'The Flight from Domestic Space: Men's Roles in the Household', The Family Coordinator, vol 28 no 4, October 1979, pp 599–607; Jerome Togndi and John Ofrias, 'Women's and Men's Response toward the Home in Heterosexual and Same Sex Households: A Case Study', AD Seidel and S Danford (eds), Environmental Design: Theory, Research, and Application, EDRA (Washington, DC), 1979; Joan Kron, Home Psych: Social-Psychology of Home and Decoration, Clarkson Porter (New York), 1983, esp p 123. It is true that there are noted male designers in both fashion and interiors, but this in no way obviates the primary gender identification because the designers are engaged with these endeavors as businessmen. Furthermore, the clientele in both arenas remains female.

3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 1980, pp 6, 147, 153. Stowe cited in Katherine C Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850–1930, Strong Museum (Rochester, NY), 1988, p 6. How to Make a Home Happy: A Housekeeper's Hand Book, John Lovel (New York), 1884, p 117.

4 Charles Franklin Warner, Home Decoration, Doubleday Page for the Children's Library of Work and Play (Garden City, NY), 1911, p 122; Helen Hunt Jackson, Making Home Life Attractive [1879], reprint PF Collier and Son (New York), 1902, pp 47, 52–3. Jackson wrote novels, poetry, and nonfiction and was author of the much-reprinted novel Ramona: A Story, Roberts Brothers (Boston), 1884.

5 Susan Fehrenbacher Koprince, 'The Fictional Houses of Edith Wharton', PhD diss, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 1981, pp 50–2, 99, 119.

6 Jacob Von Falke, Art in the House: Historical, Critical, and Aesthetic Studies on the Decorating and Furnishing of the Dwelling, trans and with notes by Charles C Perkins, L Prang (Boston), 1878, p 333; Emily Burbank, Woman as Decoration, Dodd, Mead (New York), 1920, p xi.

7 Other painters and representative works include: Robert Reid, The Violet Kimono (1910) and The Miniature (1913); Edmund C Tarbell, Girl Crocheting (1904), Three Girls Reading (1907) and

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Across the Room (ca. 1899); Joseph De Camp, The Seamstress (1916) and Roses (1909–10); and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, The Necklace (1907). Hassam’s 1894 painting The Room of Flowers, which depicts Celia Laighton Thaxter in her summer house, is another excellent example of this phenomenon. Mrs Thaxter is so deeply buried in the interior that it is difficult to see her at all. See also Ulrich W Hiesinger, Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters, Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 1991; Theodore E Stebbins, Jr, Carol Troyen, and Trevor J Fairbrother, A New World: Master-pieces of American Painting, 1760–1910, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 1983, esp pp 161, 321–22.

8 See especially Grier, Culture and Comfort; Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture, Temple University Press (Philadelphia), 1992; Karen Lee Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: The Problem of Hypocrisy in Sentimental America, 1830–1870, Yale University Press (New Haven), 1982; John F Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, Hill and Wang (New York), 1990; Beverly Gordon, ‘Meanings in Mid Nineteenth-Century Dress: Images from New England Women’s Writings’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, vol 10 no 3, Spring 1992, p 44–53; Simon J Bronner (ed), Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, WW Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (New York), 1989. The term front comes from the dramaturgical model of human interaction developed in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1959, pp 1, 36, 245. Goffman’s model holds that individuals ‘perform’ ‘on stage’, are part of an audience ‘offstage’, or operate ‘backstage’ or ‘behind the scenes’. More recent theorists discuss much the same idea under the rubric of role theory; see Bruce Biddle, Role Theory: Expectations, Identities, and Behaviors, Academic Press (New York), 1979.

9 Jo Paoletti, ‘Ridicule and Role Models as Factors in American Men’s Fashion Change, 1880–1910’, Costume, vol 19, 1985, p 132; Valerie Steele, ‘Appearance and Identity’, Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (eds), Men and Women: Dressing the Part, Smithsonian Institution Press (Washington, DC), 1989, p 16; Diana De Marly, Worth: The Father of Haute Couture, Elm Tree Books (London), 1980.

10 Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Viking Press (New York), 1986, pp 70–1; Gail Caskey Winkler and Roger W Moss, Victorian Interior Decoration: American Interiors, 1830–1900, Henry Holt (New York), 1986, p 63; Clifford Edward Clark, Jr, The American Family Home, 1800–1960, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill), 1986, p 104.

Beverly Gordon, ‘Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age’, Winterthur Portfolio, vol 31 no 4, 1996, pp 281–301. © 1996 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. (Excerpt pp 281–5)

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