Rethinking Histories of the Interior

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

Charles Rice

Architectural historian Charles Rice examines the relationship between an image of the domestic interior (media) and the domestic environment (setting) through the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior. To expose a problematic between the spatial and imagistic sense of the interior, Rice notes that for both Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire this doubled experience is held within material and immaterial registers, producing de-realised experiences. The specificity of the interior view and specific spatial practices of inhabitation are used to criticise interior histories that pronounce an essentialised view of the domestic interior. This criticism is generated in light of the established texts by Mario Praz, Peter Thornton and Charlotte Gere.

The word 'interior' has undergone several shifts in meaning. It had come into use in English from the late fifteenth century to mean basic divisions between inside and outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the soul. From the early eighteenth century, interiority was used to designate inner character and a sense of individual subjectivity, and from the middle of the eighteenth century the interior came to designate the domestic affairs of a state, as well as the interior sense of territory that belongs to a country or region. It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior came to designate what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records as: 'The inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room. Also, in a theatre, a "set" consisting of the inside of a building or room.'

The first use of the word in this domestic sense is dated 1829 from a publication entitled Companion To Theatres: 'A few interiors, two or three streets, and about the same number of country views, would last as stock scenery for several seasons.' An entry from George Eliot's diary of 1858 has a use in the sense of a genre of representation: 'The two interiors of Westminster Abbey by Ainmueller admirable.' The OED entry for interior decoration suggests a usage for interior which is more specifically domestic: 'The planned co-ordination for artistic effect of colours and furniture, etc., in a room or building.'¹ The first use given is Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, the title of Thomas

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Hope's 1807 publication, which, along with Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieurs of 1801, marked the newly emergent interior as a site of professional struggle between architects and upholsterers. Through the nineteenth century, interior decoration began to articulate itself separately from architecture.²

In this way, the interior emerges with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity. It is not simply architectural, but it borrows on the enclosure provided by architecture to be articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell.' In this sense the interior is also not simply spatial, but is equally an image-based phenomenon.

There are further doubled conditions of the interior that consolidate the significance of its historical emergence. A sense of doubled experience, the way in which an inhabitation of the interior is caught between material and immaterial registers, is captured in 'The Twofold Room,' a prose poem of 1862 by Charles Baudelaire. It begins with a description of 'A room just like a daydream, a truly spiritual room, in which the air is tinged with rosiness and blue.'

The furniture takes on elongated shapes, prostate and languorous. Each piece seems to be dreaming, as if living in a state of trance, like vegetable and mineral things. The draperies speak an unvoiced language, like flowers and skies and setting suns.³

In a similar vein to this poetic evocation, Walter Benjamin's 1939 exposé of the bourgeois domestic interior describes it as a material space which produces de-realised experiences.⁴ For the bourgeoisie, the interior emerges as a space separated from sites of work and productive labour, and becomes a place of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms of experience. In the interior, subjects confront themselves in psychologically charged ways through the medium of objects and furnishings. Benjamin writes of the private individual inhabiting the interior by 'taking possession' of things in divesting them of their character as commodities: 'The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior.' By bestowing a 'connoisseur's value,' rather than a 'use value' on objects, the collector 'delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.'⁵ These things become what Benjamin calls the traces of inhabitation.

Yet Baudelaire's interior is sealed off from the everyday world only in reverie. The internal coherence of his animate, nature-like room changes with the intrusion of reality into the room and its interiorised world. This intrusion comes with 'a terrible, heavy thump' on the door, at which point he remembers:

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Yes, this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom, is indeed my own. Look, there are the fatuous bits of junk, my dusty and chipped furniture; the fireless hearth with not even a glowing ember in the grate all fouled with spit; the dingy windows down which the rain has scrawled runnels in the grime; the manuscripts riddled with cross-outs or left half done; the calendar on which the evil days of reckoning are underlined in pencil.⁶

A space of immaterial, de-realised experience, Baudelaire's interior is also the space of his work, and of his relation to the productive cycle. His plight figures the way in which the increased awareness of the bourgeois interior as a space removed from the everyday world also produced a measure for assessing the living conditions of the working classes, those for whom the domestic and the productive spheres were not necessarily separated.⁷ More broadly, this relation between reverie and the reality of the onward march of time gives a context for understanding the bourgeoisie's relation to the world of objects as commodities, to the industrialising city, and to their social and political identity through the nineteenth century.

Baudelaire and Benjamin's immaterial experience occurs in relation to a space for and of the psyche, a space that borrows on the material attributes of the everyday domestic interior – its furnishings – and imbues them with a transformed, psychological significance. In his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis from the beginning of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud delineates a further doubled condition of the interior when he describes a suite of rooms to explain the structure of the unconscious:

Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall is a separate, narrower, room – a kind of drawing-room – in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him.⁸

Historically, Freud was a collector of antique statuary which adorned and, in Benjamin's terms, made his consulting rooms, which were attached to his apartment in Vienna, into a domestic interior.⁹ This interior provided the setting for the scene of transference taking place between Freud and his patients. And much of the force of the Oedipus Complex as a model for how Freud delineated the complex of attachments between subjects comes from the consolidated, and in some ways overdetermined place of the family in bourgeois life from the nineteenth century.¹⁰

The bourgeois domestic interior emerges historically in the nineteenth century through an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings. At one level, we can

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understand these aspects of its historical emergence as intrinsic to the bourgeoisie's experience of domesticity in the nineteenth century. But what does the doubleness of the interior, and the idea that the interior is historically emergent in this way, mean for how we might write a history of this domestic experience? In other words, how can we gain access to and evaluate an historical experience which is complicated by a condition of doubleness?

The primary complicating factor is the idea that the interior's spatial and imagistic senses do not map directly onto each other. As we learn from Baudelaire, the imagistic sense of the interior is not simply transparent to its spatial sense. This presents problems for conventional ways in which the evidence of the interior is gathered to reconstruct and interpret historical conditions of domesticity. (… p 278)

It was from the beginning of the nineteenth century that interior views were painted and drawn as ends in themselves, as a specific genre. Charlotte Gere has argued that practices of interior decoration were directly linked to the emergence of this genre: 'That this interest in interior decoration (prompted by the publications from Percier and Fontaine, and Hope) had a direct bearing on the taste for interior views is evidenced by the fact that so many of them show rooms that must just have been decorated and newly arranged.'¹¹ Gere's album of interior water colours provides a history of the decoration of the nineteenth-century interior evidenced through its representation, but this project hides an essentialist view of the interior which betrays the historical specificity of the bourgeois interior doubled between representational and spatial practices. In the following passage, Gere shifts from describing the historical conditions for the emergence of the genre of the interior view, to describing how these representations become evidence for a much broader conception of the history of the interior:

The depiction of rooms for their own sake, rather than as a background to a narrative, anecdotal or portrait painting, germinated, reached its fullest flowering and died within the space of one century. It was not unusual for such interiors to form a group, representing different aspects of several rooms. They were intended to be placed in albums rather than to be framed and hung, and remained an almost secret possession. … When the interior view went out of fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century, their very existence seems to have been forgotten. They were rendered obsolete by the development of a photographic camera capable of focusing on a great depth of field and thus able to do the job of the interior view-painter much more quickly and no less efficiently. Some of these [photographic] albums survive, giving an invaluable picture of decorating taste in the period 1880–1910, before they too were forgotten, like the albums of paintings they had superseded. Mario Praz's rediscovery of this minor but fascinating art barely thirty years ago (his pioneering Illustrated History of Interior Decoration was published in 1964) was a revelation, and the

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historic no less than aesthetic importance of the subject is now recognised by a group of informed collectors.¹²

While Perrot realised the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy, Gere is signalling the shift of visual representations of the interior from being familial possessions to becoming historical, and therefore public, documents. The implications of this shift can be seen most clearly in relation to Mario Praz's seminal work. His Illustrated History of Interior Decoration provides a selection of visual representations of domesticity from ancient Greece through to Art Nouveau, and a commentary upon them.¹³ The introduction to Praz's book muses on the literary and representational evocation of furniture, the home and the interior. Praz sees the house and its interior as a continuum, which is always in need of furnishing. In witnessing the destruction of houses after the second world war, their interiors laid open with 'some still furnished corner, dangling above the rubble, surrounded by ruin,'¹⁴ Praz sees that:

The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there is breath in them. Just as our primitive ancestor built a shapeless chair with hastily-chopped branches, so the last man will save from the rubble a stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit is freed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decorate his room.¹⁵

Such an observation of the timeless qualities of 'human nature' is the platform upon which Praz launches his history of the interior. He writes quite directly of the interior and its furnishing as reflecting the 'character' or 'personality' of the occupant, working from a basic division of human nature between those who 'care about their house, and those who care not at all about it.'¹⁶ Based on his reading of decorative tendencies from visual representations, Praz sees that:

perhaps even more than painting or sculpture, perhaps even more than architecture itself, furniture reveals the spirit of the age. And there is nothing like a retrospective exhibition of furnished rooms in a chronological sequence to declare to us, at first glance, the varying personalities of the rooms' occupants.¹⁷

Praz's book aims to provide the published equivalent of this 'retrospective exhibition,' taking the idea of the inhabiting subject, and the interior and its decoration, as pre-given concepts for the construction of this history, not ones that have emerged out of particular historical conditions. Referring to Benjamin, whose exposé on the interior he cites at length,¹⁸ Praz collects traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior. Yet he generalises this bourgeois condition as one obtaining across all history. He ignores the historical specificity of the genre of the interior view, and how it might relate to specific spatial practices of inhabitation, by rendering the idea of visual representation across

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many genres transparent to spatial conditions of domesticity. What has been tacitly recognised as a particular historical emergence has been used to authorise a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior.

We must ask: what is the impetus behind this sort of essentialised historiography? An answer may be found in another history of the interior, Peter Thornton's Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920. Thornton takes the cue for his investigation from this quotation from Macaulay's 1848 History of England:

Readers who take an interest in the progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts [about the meanness of the lodgings of those taking the waters at Bath, early in the eighteenth century], and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked.¹⁹

In these terms, a history of the interior supplements traditional grand historical narratives, whereby one's supposed innate appreciation of domesticity would colour the background of past events. What is common in all of these histories of privacy, domesticity and the interior is that they attest to a post-nineteenth-century way of seeing. This way of seeing authorises a general historical retrospection which is itself not appreciated within an historical context. This situation approaches what Michel Foucault terms traditional history:

We believe in the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past. But a knowledge of history easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign.²⁰

A 'knowledge of history' relates to what Foucault terms effective history. It is a history of discontinuity, for the sake of breaking tendencies for recognition and 'rediscovery of ourselves'²¹ in acts of constructing narrative-driven traditional histories. In Foucault's terms, the emergence of the interior, in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history, an event that, when perceived as such, enables a 'reversal of a relationship of forces.'²² By returning to Benjamin's exposé of the bourgeois domestic interior, we shall see the importance of understanding the historical emergence of the interior within this schema of effective history. And far from providing an increased consciousness of everyday domesticity within the continuum of history, we shall see that essentialised histories of the interior, privacy and domesticity have produced a sleep of historical consciousness. (… p 282)

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Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed, Clarendon Press (Oxford), 1989.

2 Peter Thornton, Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior, 1620–1920, Viking (New York), 1984, pp 10–12.

3 Charles Baudelaire, 'The Twofold Room', Francis Scarfe ed and trans The Poems in Prose, with La Fanfarlo, Anvil Press (London), 1989, p 37.

4 Walter Benjamin, 'Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century' (exposé of 1939)', in Rolf Tiedemann, (ed), The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1999, pp 19–20.

5 Benjamin, 'Paris', p 19.

6 Baudelaire, 'The Twofold Room', p 39.

7 Important here is the sociological research conducted by Henry Mayhew into slums in London in the middle of the nineteenth century. Against a bourgeois consciousness of domestic comfort, Mayhew's research points to where basic standards of comfort in dwellings are not achieved amongst the working classes. See Henry Mayhew, 'Home is Home, be it Never so Homely', in Viscount Ingestre (ed), Meliora, or Better Times to Come (London), 1851, pp 258–80. See also Martin Hewitt, 'District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century', Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Manchester University Press (Manchester and New York), 1999, pp 121–41, for an account of the surveillance of the working class by the middle classes in Britain.

8 Sigmund Freud 'Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Lecture XIX: Resistance and Repression [1916-1917]', in James Strachey ed and trans The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, The Hogarth Press (London), 1953–1974, vol 16, pp 295–6.

9 See Joel Sanders and Diana Fuss, 'Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office', Joel Sanders (ed), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1996, pp 112–39.

10 See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans Robert Hurley, Hutchinson (London), 1980; Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Free Association Books (London), 1990.

11 Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth Century Interiors: An Album of Watercolours, Thames and Hudson (London), 1992, p 13.

12 Gere, Nineteenth Century, p 14. Peter Thornton puts this argument thus: 'It was fashionable, from about 1815 to about 1840, to draw and paint views of interiors. Grand people instructed a draughtsman to make pictures of their favourite rooms; the less grand did it themselves', Thornton, Authentic Décor, p 217. Gere recognises that there are precedents for interior view-painting in examples from the eighteenth century. She suggests that these earlier examples were either isolated representations that were informational sources in relation to the rooms they depicted (rather than having 'artistic' merit, which would define a genre in Gere's terms), were representations of well-known houses in periodicals and other publications, or were representations produced to accompany visits to well-known buildings. Thornton argues that the practice of allowing visits to well-known houses, and the attendant publications, ceased around 1840, when the interior shifted from being a space for the display of taste and wealth, to being the space of familial privacy and the cultivation of domestic virtues. See Thornton, Authentic Décor, p 210. For an in-depth discussion of one particular eighteenth century drawing type, see Robin Evans, 'The Developed Surface', Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Architectural Association (London), 1997, pp 55–91.

13 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau, trans William Weaver, Thames and Hudson (London), 1964. Alternative edition: An Illustrated History of Interior Furnishing from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, trans William Weaver, George Braziller (New York), 1964. The two editions are identical, and despite the supposed 'Renaissance' beginning of the American edition, it still includes the plates 'from Pompeii.'

14 Praz, Illustrated History, p 17.

15 Praz, Illustrated History, p 18.

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16 Praz, Illustrated History, p 19.

17 Praz, Illustrated History, p 25.

18 Praz, Illustrated History, pp 25–9.

19 TB Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II (London), 1848, vol 1, Ch III. Quoted in Thornton, Authentic Décor, p 8.

20 Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', Paul Rabinow ed and trans The Foucault Reader, Penguin (London), 1984, p 87.

21 Foucault, 'Nietzsche', p 88.

22 Foucault, 'Nietzsche', p 88.

Charles Rice, 'Rethinking Histories of the Interior', The Journal of Architecture, vol 9 no 3, 2004, pp 275–87.

(Excerpts pp 276–82)

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