The Modern Interior

28
notwithstanding, those ‘cottages’ were still ‘homes’ – sites, that is, dedicated
to privacy and intimacy as well as to entertainment. 17 In her
descriptions of the opulent interiors of a fictional house called Bellomont
in her novel, The House of Mirth, the American writer Edith Wharton
focused on the importance of domestic luxury for late nineteenth-century
American society. 18 Indeed she equated the social aspiration of the book’s
main protagonist, Lily Bart, with that character’s hatred of ‘dinginess’ and
love of luxury, and she provided detailed descriptions of interiors and
their objects showing how that luxury was manifested materially. In a
passage describing Lily taking breakfast in bed at Bellomont, for example,
the novelist wrote,
Her maid had kindled a little fire on the hearth, and it contended
cheerfully with the sunlight which slanted across the moss-green
carpet and caressed the curved sides of an old marquetry desk.
Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray, with its harmonious
porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in a slender glass,
and the morning paper folded beneath her letters. 19
As, from the late nineteenth century onwards, middle-class women
increasingly entered the public arena in order to consume goods for the
home, they acted as bridges between the private and public spheres. The
clear ideological distinction that had existed a few decades earlier between
the feminine and the masculine spheres was, as a result, significantly eroded.
It was paralleled, and arguably facilitated, by the replication of the
language of domesticity in interiors outside the home. That language
quickly became a signifier of feminine modernity wherever it was located.
On one level, therefore, the strong distinction between the private and
public spheres observed by Benjamin was eroded almost as soon as it was
formed. In inhabiting interior environments outside the home which
were modelled on the domestic interior, the middle classes were, perhaps,
protecting themselves from, and compensating themselves for, the realities
of the world of commerce and production, as well as reinforcing and
disseminating the values of the bourgeois lifestyle in the world at large.
Domestic interiors could increasingly be found in many different semipublic
and public spaces. British theatre foyers of the second half of the
nineteenth century, for example, were ‘public yet determined by private
tastes [which] allowed for continuity of experience between the realm of
home proper and the world of the theatre’. 20 This strategy was employed