Bourgeois Interior

Definition

The bourgeois interior is the nineteenth-century domestic interior as a historically specific formation: the interior of the home that "emerges with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity," a space "separated from sites of work and productive labour," become "a place of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms of experience" — in which "subjects confront themselves in psychologically charged ways through the medium of objects and furnishings" (Rice, via Benjamin's 1939 exposé). Its defining condition is doubleness: "not simply architectural" (it "borrows on the enclosure provided by architecture to be articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell'"), and "not simply spatial, but… equally an image-based phenomenon" — caught between material and immaterial registers, "producing de-realised experiences." The concept is Rice's historiographic instrument: the interior whose emergence is a dated nineteenth-century event, against the essentialist histories that generalize the bourgeois condition "as one obtaining across all history."

Three features consolidate the formation. Trace-accumulation: "The bourgeois domestic interior emerges historically in the nineteenth century through an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings" — the collector as its resident figure, the things "freed from the drudgery of being useful" as its medium. Separation as measure: the interior "removed from the everyday world" simultaneously "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" (Mayhew's slum research) — the bourgeois interior defines itself by what the workers' dwellings lack. The psyche's plan: Freud's suite-of-rooms unconscious ("a large entrance hall… a kind of drawing-room… a watchman") and the collection-made consulting rooms extend the formation into psychology — the Oedipus complex's force drawing from "the consolidated, and in some ways overdetermined place of the family in bourgeois life from the nineteenth century."

Key Thinkers

• Charles Rice — the concept's historiographer: the interior's emergence dated (etymology, Hope's 1807 title, the interior-view genre), its doubleness read through Baudelaire, Benjamin and Freud, and its essentialist generalization (Praz, Thornton, Gere) diagnosed as "a sleep of historical consciousness" (2004/2006).
• Walter Benjamin — the formation's theorist: the 1939 exposé's separated interior ("the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work"), the collector as "the true resident of the interior," the traces of inhabitation.
• Sigmund Freud — the formation's psychological extension: the unconscious as suite of rooms; the consulting rooms "attached to his apartment in Vienna" made "into a domestic interior" by collection; transference as the formation's clinical scene.
• Walter Benjamin (Baudelaire) — via Charles Baudelaire's "The Twofold Room" (1862): the formation's literary witness, whose daydream room collapses into "this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom" at reality's intrusion — the interior "sealed off from the everyday world only in reverie."
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Mario Praz, Peter Thornton, Charlotte Gere, whose essentialist histories generalize the bourgeois interior transhistorically; Michelle Perrot, Henry Mayhew, Jacques Donzelot, Nikolas Rose.)

Related Concepts

• Domestic Interior — the general category of which the bourgeois interior is the historically specific, nineteenth-century formation: the concept Rice's historiography both dates and defends from transhistorical generalization.
• Doubleness — the formation's constitutive condition: spatial and imagistic, material and immaterial; the interior as "equally an image-based phenomenon."
• De-realisation — the formation's experiential yield: the "de-realised experiences" its material space produces.
• The Collector — the formation's resident figure: the one who divests things "of their character as commodities" and so dwells.
• Trace — the formation's temporal substance: "an accumulation of traces" as the historical mode of its emergence.
• Separate Spheres — the formation's social precondition: interior separated from work ("the domestic and the productive spheres"), whose separation is also the measure applied to working-class dwellings.
• The Interior View — the formation's image-medium: the genre of watercolours that documented the newly decorated rooms, born and dead within the same century as the formation itself.
• Interiority — the formation's psychic correlate: "interior character and a sense of individual subjectivity" (OED, early eighteenth century), predating the architectural interior and fully housed within it only in the bourgeois century.
• Privacy — the formation's organizing theme: the histories Rice critiques organize themselves around "the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity" as transhistorical constants rather than bourgeois formations.
• Psychoanalytic Setting — the formation's clinical completion: the consulting rooms "attached to his apartment" as the domestic interior hosting the scene of transference.
• Spectacle — the formation's image-register: the interior "equally an image-based phenomenon," its de-realised experience the domestic prehistory of the image-economy.
• Historiography of the Interior — the field the concept disciplines: Rice's effective-history programme against the essentialist surveys of Praz, Thornton and Gere.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the bourgeois interior's classic analysis (Part A, ch. I): "The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal; its foundation is the dining-room/bedroom combination"; objects as "household gods"; the mirror and the clock as its "most extraordinary symbolic résumé"; and the modern functional interior as its "impoverishment" — "destructured yet not restructured."
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the concept's defining source: the etymology's time-boundedness; the emergence "with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity"; the "literal covering of the inside of an architectural 'shell'"; the interior "equally an image-based phenomenon"; Baudelaire's twofold room and its collapse; Benjamin's de-realised experiences, the collector, and the traces; the Freud suite-of-rooms and the collection-made consulting rooms; the working-class measure (Mayhew); "an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings"; and the effective-history programme that keeps the formation historical instead of essential.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the 2007 book's position as reported: the interior's conceptual emergence limited to the period of its conceptualization (the nineteenth century); the critique of traditional histories that treat the interior and its "inhabiting subject" as stable categories.
• The dialectics of appropriation (Brooker 2018) — the doubleness claim quoted from The Emergence of the Interior (2007, p. 2) via Baudelaire's "Two-fold Room": the interior emerged "as a physical, three dimensional space, as well as an image… with neither sense being primary" — the formation's constitutive doubling in the book's later formulation.
• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the formation's museal afterlife: the house museum resting on "the modern conception (explored by Walter Benjamin, among others) that the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual" — the bourgeois interior's double (inhabited extension / representation) institutionalized.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the anthology's frame, in which the formation is the historical site where the domestic interior was documented and gendered: the "historical identification of women with the domestic interior" and the woman/interior conflation occurring exactly in the industrial age (Gordon) — the bourgeois interior's gendered constitution.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the formation's internal interrogation: Benjamin's Baudelaire text quoted against the exposé — "The interior was the place of refuge of Art. The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior" (p. 340) — followed by the question the formation must answer: "Does Benjamin… see it as a conscious thing measuring one's knowledge and ability in relation to societies' values? Or does he confuse enclosure with interior?" (p. 340); the refuge reread through Woolf (the room as "a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land'" against "the outside… dark and watery," p. 341) and through the prison-inversion ("a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions," p. 342); and the trace/collection distinction — "Are these really 'collections' or the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors?" (p. 341) — the formation's trace-accumulation distinguished from the collector's conscious possession, with the epochal corollary that the nineteenth-century "practice of covering surfaces" may be "both a cry and an attempt to escape this imposed order" (p. 342). See refuge, the-collector, trace.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the formation's Biedermeier limit-case and its psychology: the mirrored interior — "the principle of mirroring and doubling" (Brunotte, p. 346), windows become mirrors, "the exterior… a total illusion" (p. 346) — as the bourgeois interior's over-protected extreme, in which "this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection" (p. 346); the formation's resident figure doubled (the collector at his traces; Kierkegaard's philosopher "within the bourgeois intérieur," p. 347, "the flâneur who promenades in his room"); and the formation's affective ledger completed — refuge and boredom, protection and "the seeds of boredom" (p. 346), "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). The register dates the formation's psychic cost to the same decades Rice dates its emergence: the Biedermeier interior as the bourgeois interior's own pathology report. See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom, mirror.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the bourgeois interior a class formation or a media formation — defined by who dwells in it (the collector-clerk of Benjamin's exposé) or by the image-regime it institutes (the interior view, the decorated room as picture)? Rice's etymology makes the room and the image co-emerge; do the class and media stories need each other?
• The formation's measure (Mayhew: working-class dwellings judged against bourgeois comfort) makes the bourgeois interior relational from birth. Is the working-class or migrant dwelling (global-constructs) a failed bourgeois interior, an alternative formation, or the interior that exposes the formation's limits?
• Baudelaire's reverie collapses at "a terrible, heavy thump"; Benjamin's collector divests commodities of their character. Is the formation's de-realisation stable (a permanent condition of the image-based interior) or episodic (a reverie that intrusion ends) — and which reading does the wiki's spectacle analysis require?
• Rice's programme keeps the formation historical by casting its emergence as an event. But the formation persists into the twentieth-century analyses this wiki carries (Benjamin via Downey; Cold War interiors). When — and how — does the bourgeois interior stop being an emergent event and become the tradition the event-analysis must itself historicize?
• The Oedipus complex draws "much of [its] force" from the family's "overdetermined place" in bourgeois life. Is psychoanalysis therefore the bourgeois interior's self-theory — and does the psychoanalytic-setting inherit a class-specific room while claiming a universal psyche?