The Modern Interior

36
attraction, fascination, aura and charm.’ 33 Twentieth-century ‘personality’
broke down the distinction between private and public as the former
became increasingly visible in the latter. 34 Within this transformation it
was clear that the home was sensitive to the changes that occurred within
modernity over the period in question, and that it was responding to
them through the reconfiguration of its interior spaces. Also, as the character
of modernity grew more complex and the imperatives of fashion
more demanding – in addition to the existence, in Britain, of what came
to be called ‘the servant problem’ – the need to simplify one’s interior
spaces grew apace. Thus the early twentieth-century living room emerged as
‘a product, in part, of the post-Victorian revulsion from the riotous mater -
ialism of the late nineteenth-century parlor’. 35 On one level it represented
‘an attempt to control matter out of place’. 36 On another it was simply a
response by female consumers to the changing fashion of the day.
Between 1850 and 1914, in response to the modernizing forces of mass
production and consumption, secularization, urbanization and suburbanization,
the democratization of the fashion system, women’s changing
self-identities and roles, enhanced levels of social aspiration and social
mobility, and the growing importance of the concept of taste, the domestic
interior underwent a number of significant transformations. All those
forces had a dramatic transformative effect upon it in its manifestations
both inside and outside the home. On a number of levels the modern
values that had come to be represented by the domestic interior in that
period – those, that is, that were linked to its relationship with mass
consumption and with commerce; with the modern concept of ‘fashion’
that, to a considerable extent, drove mass consumption; and with the
important role it played in providing an expressive outlet for women and
a means through which they could form their modern identities – were
no longer limited to the private arena of the home. The following four
chapters will focus on the journey that took them from ‘inside out’ and
which, in the process, helped form the modern interior.