The Modern Interior

References
Introduction
1 In his book The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London
and New York, 2007), p. 2, Charles Rice discusses the idea of the ‘double interior’, borrowed
from Walter Benjamin. He describes it as being ‘both as a physical, three-dimensional
space, as well as an image’.
2 Marshall Berman’s account of modernity, expressed in his book All That is Solid Melts
into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983), is described by Bernhard Rieger as
‘a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal that left no stone unturned’, in
‘Envisioning the Future: British and German Reactions to the Paris World Fair in 1900’,
in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War ii, ed. M. Daunton
and B. Rieger (Oxford and New York, 2001), p. 145. David Frisby explains that for Max
Weber modernity was a result of ‘modern western rationalism’, in ‘Analysing Modernity’,
Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, ed. Mari
Hvattum and Christian Hermansen (London and New York, 2004), p. 11. Yet another
approach to the concept of modernity is provided by Don Slater: ‘consumer culture is
bound up with the idea of modernity, of modern experience, and of modern social subjects’,
in Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), p. 9.
3 M. Nava, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’, in The
Shopping Experience, ed. P. Falk and C. Campbell (London, 1997), p. 57.
4 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma
and London, 2004), p. 8.
5 See J. Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, in The
Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. A. Benjamin (London and New York,
1989), pp. 141–56, and E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London, 1991).
6 Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen explain in their introduction to Tracing
Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City (London and New
York, 2004), that ‘modernity is embedded in the very fabric of society’, p. xi.
7 David Frisby, for example, pointed out that Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconfiguration
of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century could be seen as a redefinition of the city as an
‘interior’ space, dedicated to the bourgeoisie, which sought to exclude the working classes
from its centre. ‘The flâneur in Social Theory’, in K. Tester, The flâneur (London and New
York, 1994), pp. 81–110.
8 See L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class,
1780–1850 (London, 1987) for an account of the separate spheres.
9 Although the reality of middle-class men and women inhabiting separate spheres has been
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