Woman as Decoration

Definition

Woman as decoration names the formula — codified in the industrial age's advice literature and painting — in which the woman is not the interior's decorator but the interior's decoration: an element of the furnishing scheme, an ornament among ornaments, fitted to the room as the room is dressed to display her. Beverly Gordon's archive states it in three registers. The prescriptive register: Jacob Von Falke's Art in the House (1878) requires the lady to be in harmony with her surroundings — "she should be … the noblest ornament of her ornamented dwelling"; Emily Burbank's Woman as Decoration (1920) completes the program: "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" (Gordon, p. 128). The pictorial register: Childe Hassam's Tanagra (1918) — "the woman literally blends into and almost becomes a part of the décor," the table mirroring her dress as its extension, the Japanese screen behind her doing the same — carries the convention from Whistler's The White Girl through the "Ten American Painters" back to Vermeer's women in interiors, where "the women all appeared part of their surroundings" (pp. 128–129). The systemic register: the formula is the visible face of the house-body equation's cultural conflation — the woman as the embodiment of the home — and of the ownership economy beneath it: both the woman's body and the dwelling "were adorned to testify to [the man's] success" (p. 131). The concept is thus the point where the decorative touches the body: the woman as the applied, ornamental, display element of the domestic interior's fashion system.

Key Thinkers

• Beverly Gordon — the concept's historian: the source that names the formula, assembles its advice-literature archive (Von Falke, Burbank, Warner), and reads its painting convention (Hassam, the Ten American Painters, Vermeer) as evidence of the women/interiors conflation (1996/2006).
• Emily Burbank — the formula's titular author: Woman as Decoration (1920), written "on both costume and interiors," the woman as "an actual piece" of the room (not yet paged — see log).
• Jacob Von Falke — the formula's nineteenth-century codifier: Art in the House (1878), the lady as "the noblest ornament of her ornamented dwelling" (not yet paged — see log).
• Childe Hassam & the "Ten American Painters" — the convention's painters: women merged into draperies, tables, screens, windows and mirrors, against the Vermeer lineage (not yet paged — see log).
• Jacques Soulillou — the formula's anthropological ground: the woman as the ground plan's transversal registrant — ornament that "appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order" (p. 316); the bound feet of "the woman of ancient China" as the cruel inscription's limit case, equivalent to the Warhol-print owner and the eighteenth-century Western man as registrations in order; and the ornamental division of women itself (Cicero's "woman without affectation" vs "the 'woman with make-up' and all her accessories," pp. 318–319) — the decorated woman endlessly re-divided by the decorative's logic (2002/2006).

Related Concepts

• House-Body Equation — the concept's deepest form: the woman is the interior; woman-as-decoration is its display-system surface, the equation made visible in décor and painting.
• Gender and the Interior — the conflation of women, dress and interior environment that the formula institutionalizes; the profession-level double of the pictorial formula.
• The Decorative — the concept's ornamental medium: the woman assigned to the decorative pole of the structure/ornament dialectic — not its maker but its ornament.
• Fashion — the display economy the formula serves: keeping up with changing silhouettes as an "almost exclusively female concern," the woman's costume coordinated with the room's scheme (Burbank wrote "on both costume and interiors").
• Interior as Biography — the judgment-system the formula feeds: the woman's body and room read together as a single legible display of the household's (male) success.
• The Gaze — the formula's viewing economy: Hassam's woman "complet[es] [the interior] with her very presence (significantly, she glances at another female body)" — the decorated woman looked at, and looking.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the concept's source: Von Falke's "noblest ornament of her ornamented dwelling" (1878) and Burbank's Woman as Decoration (1920) — "woman was herself an important factor in the decorating scheme of any setting," the woman "an actual piece" of the room (p. 128); Hassam's Tanagra as the painting-formula (the woman blending into décor, the mirrored table, the tamed plants, the glance at another female body, p. 128); the Ten American Painters and Vermeer convention ("The women all appeared part of their surroundings," p. 129); and the systemic ground — both woman and house "adorned to testify to his success" (p. 131).
• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the formula executed by an architect, in built form: Josef Hoffmann "was particularly attuned to fashion and to the Viennese identity of the new style of interior, even designing a dress for Madame Stoclet so that she would not clash with her living room décor" (p. 158) — the woman-as-decoration formula advanced from advice literature and painting to the total-design practice of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where the inhabitant's costume is the interior's final coordinated surface (see gesamtkunstwerk, interior-as-garment). The concept's programmatic form appears in the Biedermeier doctrine Houze quotes: the home "turned… into the charming garment of her intimate life" by a woman whose aesthetic sense derives from contemplating "her own beauty in the mirror" (p. 156) — the woman as the room's aesthetician and its ornament, the editors' "spatial artist" moulded "inadvertently" by a campaign directed "towards the feminine" (p. 156).
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the formula's deepest ground and its cruel limit: "it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order" (p. 316) — the woman-as-decoration formula's anthropological structure stated a century before Burbank: the adorned body as assigned, not self-decorating. The bound feet of "the woman of ancient China" appear as the concept's limit case of beauty-through-registration: "The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order with implicit or explicit laws" (p. 316). And the formula's internal re-division is documented from Cicero: the "woman without affectation" ("simple beauty has no need to enhance itself with pearls, face powder, artificial whites and reds," quoted p. 318) against "the 'woman with make-up' and all her accessories" (p. 319) — the decorative's logic endlessly re-dividing the feminine pole itself, the make-up distinction that Hassam's painting tradition and Burbank's manual will later institutionalize. The source thus grounds Gordon's formula in a political anthropology: woman-as-decoration as the ground plan's transversal axis, inscribed on the body. See ornamental-ground-plan, corporeal-inscription, fashion.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the formula's disciplinary-inversion register: the woman/decoration identification reclaimed as the interior discipline's liberation-argument. Woolf's thesis — "writing by and for women can only be constructed when they write their own history outside patriarchy, epitomised by the need for independent means" — is transposed onto the interior ("perhaps the interior requires liberating from architecture and offered independent means: a room (Raum), or should I say a roam of its own"), with the woman/interior parallel made explicit: "her writing and intellectual position upholds the notion of woman as something discovered rather than built. Perhaps by acknowledging the role of women in relation to the interior, we might parallel this argument; the interior is discovered not built" (p. 340). Where Gordon's and Soulillou's registers document the woman as decoration (assigned, adorned, possessed), Taylor's asks the reverse question: what the identification of women with the interior makes possible when it is claimed — the decorated room as the self-gathered act Woolf's room of one's own warrants, against the theorists who sought "to bring the wild excesses of women, home and decoration under control" (p. 343). The discipline's own feminized coding (Braham) here becomes the ground of its independence claim rather than its shame. See gender-and-the-interior, becoming-interior, interior-design-vs-architecture Position AJ.

Open Questions

• Is woman-as-decoration the conflation's origin or its effect? Gordon derives it from industrial capitalism's impression economy; but the ornamental-woman figure long predates the nineteenth century (the courtesan-as-ornament of court cultures). Is the formula modern capitalism's novelty or its codification of an older structure?
• Burbank's Woman as Decoration was written by a woman. As with de Wolfe and the Garretts, the formula is here claimed by a woman professional — is the woman-as-decoration formula an imposition, a self-marketing genre, or the display-economy's internalized law? See gender-and-the-interior.
• Hassam's women glance at "another female body" — the decorated woman looking at women. Does the pictorial formula contain its own counter-gaze (women surveying the display that displays them), or only mirror the male collector's window?
• The concept meets the ornament debate (Ornament vs. Purity) from a side that debate never theorized: what happens when the ornament is a person? Modernism purged applied ornament from facades — did it also purge the woman-as-ornament, or re-code her (the modern interior's "tamed" plants and stripped surfaces as a new chastity)?
• Wharton's rooms that take "possession" of women are this formula's dark double: if the woman is a piece of the room, leaving the room is "tantamount to self-annihilation." Is the formula's logic inherently possessive — decoration cannot leave its wall?
• Soulillou's version inverts the formula's agency: "it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but… the ornament that appropriates the individual" (p. 316) — the woman-as-decoration not chosen but assigned ("a place in a social or cosmic order"). Does the inversion re-read the formula's women professionals (Burbank writing the manual, the Garretts claiming the trade) as attempts to reverse the appropriation — to decorate rather than be decoration — and is that reversal possible within the ground plan's encoding? See corporeal-inscription, ornamental-ground-plan.