'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors'

Author: Emma Ferry Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original essay 2003) Source type: chapter Raw file: raw/chapters/ferry-2006-decorators-may-be-compared-to-doctors.md

Summary

Emma Ferry's essay — published in the Journal of Design History (vol. 16, no. 1, 2003, pp. 15–33; excerpt pp. 26–29 reprinted here as Intimus pp. 110–117) — is a feminist recovery of the Garrett cousins, Rhoda and Agnes, recognised by the Intimus editors as "England's first female interior decorators." Ferry reads their Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture (Macmillan, 1876, in the 'Art at Home' series edited by W. J. Loftie) as advice literature that is "both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste." Her central claim is that House Decoration (as she calls it) subverts domestic ideology in two ways: the Garretts invert the gender identities Eastlake created in Hints on Household Taste (1868), and they use the text to demonstrate their professional status as trained 'house decorators' rather than domestic 'home-makers.' While imitative of Eastlake — down to the front-door advice — the book appropriates the dominant discourse, relegates it to the past, and promotes the 'Queen Anne' style as the way forward, all while an Eastlake-style address to the purchaser as 'he' conceals, "between the lines," what Ferry calls "the muted discourse."

Key Claims

The Intimus editors frame Ferry's project: she "champions advice literature as both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste," and "provides a feminist recovery of the Garrett cousins' life and work recognising them as England's first female interior decorators. Critical to this position is their link to women's suffrage and late nineteenth-century feminist activity, paralleling their struggle to train and practise as decorators" (editors' introduction, p. 110).
Ferry's two-fold thesis: "In House Decoration, domestic ideology is subverted in two ways. First, the Garretts invert the gender identities created by Eastlake in Hints on Household Taste. Second, they use the text to demonstrate their professional status as trained 'house decorators' rather than domestic 'home-makers'" (p. 110).
House Decoration is "clearly imitative of Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste, though thankfully less verbose," despite advocating a different style: the front-door prescriptions match nearly word for word (Eastlake's olive-green/chocolate flat tint and cast-iron-knocker complaint; the Garretts' "good uniform shade of green or brown" and the exchange of "the cast-iron knocker and other door furniture" for "brass or wrought iron of simple design") (p. 110).
Eastlake's gendered dismissal — "Ladies are seldom called upon to choose between the merits of wrought and cast-iron for objects of domestic use" — is answered by the historical fact: "clearly the Garretts were more than able to make such judgements" (p. 111).
The Garretts are "one of the few nineteenth-century writer-designers to whom" reference is made to Eastlake: their compliment links him with machine-made Gothic furniture — "a gross libel upon the sketches given by Mr. Eastlake… of a style of furniture which is simple and direct in its outline, and entirely free from those pretentious attempts at ornament" (p. 111).
The muted-discourse reading: "Clearly the Garretts have appropriated the dominant discourse of Eastlake, but by reading between the lines it is possible to discern the muted discourse." The book's aspiring purchaser is "referred to as 'he'" throughout — "a 'he' just as likely to be seduced by fashion as a 'she'" — an ironic inversion of Eastlake's flustered, novelty-driven Materfamilias succumbing to the upholsterer's persuasions (p. 111).
The advice book as counter-expertise: the Garretts' principles "may also enable him to speak with more authority to the upholsterer or the paper-hanger whom he employs, and may save him from being compelled to purchase furniture… not that they suit his rooms or his requirements, but because 'they are very tasty,' or because 'we are selling a great number of them'" (p. 111).
In 'Houses As They Are' (a ten-page room-by-room section on the Hall, Dining Room, Drawing Room and Bedroom) the Garretts "expos[e] the horrors of the interior of an ordinary modern London house, and criticiz[e] many of the 'unprincipled' decorative practices of the period," commenting significantly on the rooms' gendered character (p. 112).
The dining room's masculine coding: "the gloomy appearance of the rest of the room reminds one of the British boast that every Englishman's house is his castle, and that he wishes neither to observe nor to be observed when he retires into the dignified seclusion of this, the especially masculine department of the house-hold" (Garretts, quoted p. 112).
In the Drawing Room they "censure the work of 'some fashionable decorator and upholsterer'" employed by "the anxious ladies of the house," describing with irony "this 'lamentably commonplace apartment'" (p. 112).
'Houses As They Might Be' — "the most important section in House Decoration for appreciating the style the Garretts produced" — advocates "neutral tones, harmonious drapery in soft velvets and simple, well-constructed furniture based on eighteenth century models," returning to the imaginary ordinary London house "to redecorate it, creating a Utopian vision of the 'Queen Anne' – style home." Ferry notes (note 11) that inversion "is a classic technique of Utopian fiction" (p. 112).
The gender inversion of the reader-figures: where Eastlake staged the flustered female consumer, "the Garretts present their readers with the Paterfamilias who is resistant to change" — the dining room "no other room in the house where innovations are more grudgingly permitted, and an Englishman would suspect you of every other revolutionary tendency, if you proposed any radical changes" (Garretts, quoted p. 112).
Women's agency thesis: "Women – at least women like the Garretts who have acquired the 'faculty of distinguishing good from bad design in the familiar objects of domestic life' – are now positive agents of change and innovation" (p. 112; Eastlake's phrase quoted from Hints, pp. 8–9).
The dining room is redecorated anyway, the authors "leaving the master of the house to decide whether his digestion will be able to assimilate the novel treatment just proposed" (Garretts, quoted pp. 112–113).
A rights shift in the text: between 'Houses As They Are' ("the ladies of the family are told that it is now their turn to have their tastes consulted") and 'Houses As They Might Be' ("the ladies of the household demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted") — Ferry italicises "demand the right" (p. 113).
The ladies' taste, however, is derivative — Mrs A's "beautiful Drawing Room 'in the dado style'" and Mrs B's flowers painted on door panels "so beautifully done they were exactly like real flowers" — so the Garretts alter the Drawing Room "in accordance with a more cultivated view of the principles of decorative art," transforming it into an affordably 'Queen Anne' style 'shrine' (p. 113).
Against "knowing what you like": like Eastlake, the Garretts argue "that decorative art should be judged by the same standards applied to other forms of art; but, while Eastlake admonishes that 'class of young ladies who are in the habit of anticipating all differences of opinion… by saying that they "know what they like,"' the Garretts advise people who claim to 'know what they like' to take care that their tastes 'are so far cultivated as to make it desirable to display them'" (p. 113).
The draperies chapter contains their only explicit statement on women's role: "the refinement and beauty of a house will, in the main, depend upon the trouble which she is willing to bestow upon small and comparatively insignificant details" (Garretts, quoted p. 113).
Household linen and the home as production: Ferry connects "making and marking household linen" with the Married Women's Property legislation of the period, but observes that "here the Garretts have returned to an idealized historical vision, seeing the home as a site of production rather than consumption" (p. 114).
The political edge of their impatience: "Considering the 'exhausting fight against the stream of prejudice, such as the Garretts had waged for many years,' it is perhaps not surprising that they should express their impatience with the less politicised 'daughters of England' who waste their time in useless rather than 'useful and congenial' pursuits" (p. 114; the prejudice quote from Ethel Smyth's Impressions That Remained, 1919).
Professional positioning through style debate: their Introduction opens by referencing J. J. Stevenson's 1874 paper on "the Queen Anne Style of Architecture," and "By defending and defining the style 'to the study of which the Miss Garretts have devoted their attention,' they place themselves immediately in the context of their professional life" (p. 114), entering one of the architectural world's recent heated debates — 'Queen Anne' versus the Gothic Revival.
The suitability argument for a style: "all we would urge is that for ordinary English houses, the style of house which was built during the eighteenth century, whose walls were of brick, and whose staircases were of wood (the houses, that is, which are now designated 'Queen Anne'), are more suitable than the so-called Gothic house" (Garretts, quoted p. 114). They acknowledge Pugin but reject the Gothic Revival for ordinary housing on the grounds of sham materials — a builder "running up a street of Gothic houses" substitutes stucco for stone, and "It is… unreasonable to blame a pure and beautiful style for requiring a beautiful material" (note 32, quoted p. 116).
National-identity appeal: they hope "The fashionable world of London may one day return and live in the houses which were built in the solid and unpretentious style so much in accordance with the best characteristics of the English people" (Garretts, quoted p. 114).
The profession defined: the Garretts "begin by defining their profession, describing the skills of the consummate 'house decorator'" who "should be able to design and arrange all the internal fittings of a house, the chimney-pieces, grates, and door-heads, as well as the wall-hangings, curtains, carpets, and furniture" — a professional "able to judge both the total effect and the minute details of the decorative scheme, and who aims to create a 'harmonious whole'" (pp. 114–115).
Client-decorator relations "dealt at length… no doubt speaking from experience": "A great [deal] of trouble and vexation would often be saved if people would make up their minds beforehand how much they wish to spend" (Garretts, quoted p. 115).
The anthology context: Mrs Orrinsmith's The Drawing-Room (1877), another 'Art at Home' volume, "opens with a description of a very similar room, which she identifies as the 'ordinary lower middle-class Drawing Room of the Victorian era'" (note 10, p. 115); Girouard's reading of the Queen Anne movement — "As an antidote to the present they recreated the past as an ideal world of pre-industrial simplicity, at once homely and Arcadian" (note 23, quoted p. 115) — explains the Garretts' many appeals to "the days of our grandmothers."

Connections

Concepts: advice-literature — the genre Ferry champions as evidence and discourse; house-decorator — the professional identity the Garretts claim; queen-anne-style — the style they promote; suitability — fitness-to-use as their style-argument; simplicity — "simple and direct in its outline," "solid and unpretentious"; taste — cultivated taste vs "knowing what they like"; upholsterer — the trade the advice book arms readers against; mutedness — "the muted discourse" between the lines; separate-spheres — the ideology subverted; dining-room — "the especially masculine department"; drawing-room — the censured commonplace apartment made a 'shrine'; gender-and-the-interior — the feminist recovery's frame; gendered-space — the two most obviously gendered rooms; design-reform — the lineage Eastlake founded and the Garretts relegitimise; historiography-of-the-interior — advice literature as historical documentation; fashion — the seduction of the purchaser; domestic-feminism — the Garretts' professional-feminist position; domestic-economy — the home as site of production; domestic-interior — the ordinary London house as both horror and utopian object; stylistic-unity — the "harmonious whole"; neutral-colour-effect — the neutral tones of 'Houses As They Might Be'; right-to-design — "demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted"; utopia — the inversion technique of utopian fiction; interior-design — the profession's female founding genealogy.

Authors: ferry-emma — the essay's author; eastlake-charles-l — the dominant discourse appropriated and relegated to the past; taylor-mark-preston-julieanna — the Intimus editors framing the selection; ardener-shirley — Ardenerian muting as Ferry's reading instrument ("the muted discourse"); de-wolfe-elsie — the later "first female professional interior decorator" claim the Garretts' 1876 precedent complicates; beecher-catharine-e — the domestic-feminist comparator.

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — Position V, the female founding claim; power-and-space — muting and the voice-asymmetry datum (Position C support); ornament-vs-purity — "pretentious attempts at ornament" in the reform idiom.

Related source notes: The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the dominant discourse; Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the later professionalization; A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the domestic-feminism comparator; The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the muting apparatus; Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the reader that canonizes the selection.

Direct Quotes

"In House Decoration, domestic ideology is subverted in two ways. First, the Garretts invert the gender identities created by Eastlake in Hints on Household Taste. Second, they use the text to demonstrate their professional status as trained 'house decorators' rather than domestic 'home-makers.'" (p. 110)

"Clearly the Garretts have appropriated the dominant discourse of Eastlake, but by reading between the lines it is possible to discern the muted discourse. Throughout, the reader of House Decoration, the aspiring purchaser of the services of a decorator or upholsterer is referred to as 'he' – a 'he' just as likely to be seduced by fashion as a 'she'." (p. 111)

"Ladies are seldom called upon to choose between the merits of wrought and cast-iron for objects of domestic use." (Eastlake, quoted, p. 111)

"What is commonly sold as Gothic furniture, with gables and chamferings and gashes here and there to indicate carving, is for the most part a gross libel upon the sketches given by Mr. Eastlake, in his Hints on Household Taste, of a style of furniture which is simple and direct in its outline, and entirely free from those pretentious attempts at ornament with which even the simplest and cheapest furniture is now abundantly disfigured." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 111)

"They may also enable him to speak with more authority to the upholsterer or the paper-hanger whom he employs, and may save him from being compelled to purchase furniture or to hang paper, not that they suit his rooms or his requirements, but because 'they are very tasty,' or because 'we are selling a great number of them.'" (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 111)

"When Materfamilias enters an ordinary upholsterer's warehouse, how can she possibly decide on the pattern of her new carpet, when bale after bale of Brussels is unrolled by the indefatigable youth, who is equal in his praises of every piece in turn?… She is utterly unable to explain why she should, or why she should not like any of them." (Eastlake, quoted, p. 111)

"the gloomy appearance of the rest of the room reminds one of the British boast that every Englishman's house is his castle, and that he wishes neither to observe nor to be observed when he retires into the dignified seclusion of this, the especially masculine department of the house-hold." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 112)

"Yet there is no other room in the house where innovations are more grudgingly permitted, and an Englishman would suspect you of every other revolutionary tendency, if you proposed any radical changes in the colour of the walls, or in the forms and arrangements of the furniture." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 112)

"Women – at least women like the Garretts who have acquired the 'faculty of distinguishing good from bad design in the familiar objects of domestic life' – are now positive agents of change and innovation." (Ferry, p. 112)

"having completed their refurbishment, 'leaving the master of the house to decide whether his digestion will be able to assimilate the novel treatment just proposed.'" (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, pp. 112–113)

"in 'Houses As They Might Be,' 'the ladies of the household demand the right of having their particular tastes consulted' [my italics]." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 113)

"the Garretts advise people who claim to 'know what they like' to take care that their tastes 'are so far cultivated as to make it desirable to display them.'" (Ferry, quoting R. & A. Garrett, p. 113)

"We hear a great deal nowadays of women's work and women's sphere. Here at any rate there can be no difference of opinion… everyone will agree that when a woman undertakes to guide a household, all these things should be of interest to her, and that the refinement and beauty of a house will, in the main, depend upon the trouble which she is willing to bestow upon small and comparatively insignificant details." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 113)

"Surely the work of marking, wherein the cleverness of the worker might devise some fresh conceit on each article, would be more interesting than half the busy idleness with which the daughters of England now beguile their time." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 114)

"Although a connection can be made between making and marking household linen and the Married Women's Property legislation of the period, here the Garretts have returned to an idealized historical vision, seeing the home as a site of production rather than consumption." (Ferry, p. 114)

"all we would urge is that for ordinary English houses, the style of house which was built during the eighteenth century, whose walls were of brick, and whose staircases were of wood (the houses, that is, which are now designated 'Queen Anne'), are more suitable than the so-called Gothic house." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 114)

"The fashionable world of London may one day return and live in the houses which were built in the solid and unpretentious style so much in accordance with the best characteristics of the English people." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 114)

"[The 'house decorator'] Should be able to design and arrange all the internal fittings of a house, the chimney-pieces, grates, and door-heads, as well as the wall-hangings, curtains, carpets, and furniture." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, pp. 114–115)

"A great [deal] of trouble and vexation would often be saved if people would make up their minds beforehand how much they wish to spend." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted, p. 115)

"As an antidote to the present they recreated the past as an ideal world of pre-industrial simplicity, at once homely and Arcadian." (M. Girouard, quoted in note 23, p. 115)

"But if a builder is 'running up a street of Gothic houses', what happens? It is out of the question that he should use so costly a material as stone, and stucco therefore takes its place. It is we know, unreasonable to blame a pure and beautiful style for requiring a beautiful material." (R. & A. Garrett, quoted in note 32, p. 116)

Open Questions

The title's comparison — "Decorators May be Compared to Doctors" — quotes the Garretts' own claim for professional standing, but the excerpt does not print the passage it comes from. What exactly did the Garretts argue in making the comparison, and how does the medical analogy (their sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was Britain's pioneering woman doctor) operate in their professional rhetoric?
Ferry reads the 'he' of House Decoration as "the muted discourse" — but is the generic 'he' a subversion (the female authors speaking as the empowered purchaser) or a concession (the audience imagined male for market reasons)? What would confirm which?
The Garretts' "idealized historical vision" of the home as "a site of production rather than consumption" — is their nostalgia a feminist position (production as women's meaningful work) or a conservative one (the spinning grandmother against the politicised daughter's "busy idleness")? Ferry leaves the tension standing.
The Garretts censure "some fashionable decorator and upholsterer" while claiming the decorator's role for themselves — is their professional identity built, like Eastlake's polemic, on discrediting the trade they descend from? (See upholsterer.)
How did the Garretts' professional claim fare in practice — the excerpt notes their Introduction's professional self-placement but prints nothing of the cousins' training, premises or commissions. Ferry's full 2003 article (pp. 15–25, not excerpted) presumably documents this; the wiki needs the full article or a further extract.

Notes

Pagination note: the raw file carries printed Intimus page numbers 110–117; the excerpt corresponds to pp. 26–29 of the original 2003 article. Quotes from Eastlake's and the Garretts' books are quoted within Ferry's text and are cited here to the Intimus pages on which Ferry prints them; their original page numbers are given in Ferry's notes (e.g., the Garretts' Suggestions, Macmillan 1876; Eastlake's Hints, Longmans 1868/1878).
The Intimus editors' introduction (printed at the head of the chapter) is quoted and cited above as the editors', distinguishing it from Ferry's own text.