The ‘artist of the domestic interior’: modernity and gender infin-de-siécle interior design

Over the course of the nineteenth century in France, the

bourgeois home changed its meaning several times. In mid-century,

it was still regarded, as Lisa Tiersten puts it, as ‘a showplace

of male class’; by the 1880s, however, it had acquired the

attributes of a place of sanctuary, into which the ever-

encroaching tentacles of Haussmannian modernity could not reach.1

As Deborah L Silverman writes, it was construed as providing a

refuge from ‘urban invasiveness’.2 Then, in the last two

decades, a new representation of the home appeared in

contemporary discourse, in which it was constituted as nothing

less than the embodiment of the essence of France. Furthermore, a

new role within the home was constructed for women, the role, in

Tiersten’s words, of ‘the artist of the domestic interior’.3

Indeed, this new feminine paragon was located at the epicentre of

an entirely new aesthetic. Thus the latest paradigm entailed a

1 Tiersten, Lisa ‘The Chic Interior and the Feminine Home: Home Decorating as High Art in Turn-of-the Century Paris’ inChristopher Reed (Ed) Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture Thames and Hudson, London 1996, p182 Silverman, Debora L Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France University of California Press, Los Angeles 1989 p173Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p18

kind of apotheosis of the somewhat improbable figure of the

bourgeois housewife, whose artistic output was seen to consist in

her chic, or stylish, home.

In this essay, drawing in particular on the work of Leora

Auslander and Rosalind H Williams in addition to that of Tiersten

and Silverman, I will explore the political, economic and social

factors, which are to a great extent inter-connected, that

informed the new representation of the home.4 In part, this

representation can be related to the construction of bourgeois

identity, which I will treat as a political issue since the

bourgeoisie was in effect the governing class. Interior

decoration also figured in political discourse in connection with

the issue of a national style, which formed part of the

government’s programme regarding the nation’s economic and

spiritual regeneration (the question of a national style,

however, was a divisive one and was the subject of various

conflicting discourses, all of which came together in the chic

interior). Another aspect of the concept connected with politics

4 Auslander, Leora Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France University of California Press, Los Angeles 1996; Williams, Rosalind H Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth – Century France University of California Press, Los Angeles 1982

was the elevation of craft to the level of art, which had partly

political origins, as well as being a function of modernist

discourses including the decorative arts movement. The concept is

also closely related to the construction of feminine identity. I

will argue that it evolved in some degree as a response to the

rise of the women’s movement, simultaneously empowering and

containing a newly, albeit partially, emancipated womanhood.

Finally, I will show that the concept embodied the drives of

capitalism.

The concept of the chic interior could not have arisen had it not

been for the presence in France of an affluent bourgeoisie, for this

was the class that represented the furniture-buying public.5

Tiersten cites two facets of the bourgeoisie, other than its

spending power, that explain why this was so. In the first place,

bourgeois families, unlike the aristocracy, did not in general

inherit their furniture; they were obliged to purchase their own.

Secondly, they tended to move home frequently, with each ‘step

up’, as Auslander puts it, and consequently had to refurnish, and

5 Citing the studies made in 1898 and 1910 by Lucien March, Auslander notes that it was not the case that French societyas a whole was better off, but that more people had a substantial disposable income (Auslander, 1996 p256)

redecorate, on a regular basis.6 The chic interior, then, was a

uniquely bourgeois concern.

Tiersten dates the first appearance of the new domestic paradigm,

and the gendered role that it encoded, to the mid 1880s, when

decorating manuals started to proliferate.7 The trend continued

in the following decade. Edouard Bajot published his ‘classic’ Du

choix et de la disposition des ameublements de style in 1898.8 The target

audience of this literature was the bourgeois housewife, as was

evident from such articles as those by Emile Bayard, who

expounded at length on the virtues of the interior as a vehicle

for feminine self-expression.9 Writers like Victor José, writing

in La Plume, and Octave Uzanne, whose La Femme à Paris was published in

1894, extolled the virtues of the feminine interior arts and

advocated their revival. Uzanne invoked a new and exemplary

specimen of fin-de-siècle French womanhood, adorning her home

with the concretized imprints of her sensibility and creating a

‘truly new style’.10 Interior decoration began to be constructed 6 Auslander, 1996 p2907 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p218 Auslander, 1996 p3899 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996. Decorating books of the period ‘addressed a feminine audience’, as Auslander writes (1996 p389)10 Le Paravent, quoted in Silverman, 1989 p71

as the source of a vibrant means of self-expression, the path, in

Auslander’s words, to a woman’s ‘self realization’.11 A woman’s

chic, or sense of style, evident from the items she chose with

which to decorate and furnish her home, was ‘the equivalent of

the artist’s signature’, as the actress and opera star Marguerite

Carré put it.12 The home constituted the ideal showcase for her

natural ‘inventiveness and taste’.13 In this way, home decorating

attained the attributes of what Tiersten calls an ‘artistic

ritual’, and it must have seemed that an enticing new role was on

offer for the bourgeois woman, tailored to her own unique gifts

as much as to the demands of up to the moment modernity.14

Thus the newly constructed figure of the artist of the domestic

interior emerged in contemporary discourse, a figure both

bourgeois, and female. I turn now to a consideration of the

complex factors that called her into being.

11 Auslander, 1996 p29212 Quoted in Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p24. Similarly, Walter Benjamin writes that ‘ornament was to such a house what the signature is to a painting (‘Louis-Philippe or The Interior,’ from Paris-The Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935) in The Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) Bellknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge 2002)’ 13 Auslander, 1996 p22714 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p30

*

Let us begin with the political considerations. The first of

these is the construction of bourgeois identity, which I am

including under the rubric of politics because, as Tamar Garb

writes, the bourgeoisie was closely identified with the

government; after the downfall of the Second Empire in 1870, it

had come to constitute the ‘newly empowered’ ruling class.15

Traditionally associated, as Tiersten indicates, with ‘bad

taste’, however, the bourgeoisie had little cultural authority.16

Tiersten argues that it is therefore possible to understand the

construction of the bourgeois home in the character of an art

form as compensating for a perceived aesthetic inferiority.

Denoting itself by means of the signifier of the chic interior

can be seen as one of the ways in which the bourgeoisie assumed

an aura of cultural significance, which was added to its

15 Garb, Tamar Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siécle France Thames and Hudson, London 1998, p87. Auslander states that ‘the dominant social group behind and within the regime was the bourgeoisie (1996 p256)’16 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed) p18

political and economic power and became ‘a fundamental aspect of

modernity’.17

Lack of aesthetic credentials is nevertheless unlikely to have

been seen as the most pressing problem facing the Third Republic,

for the country was in a decidedly parlous condition. National

self-respect had been at a nadir ever since The Franco-Prussian

War of 1870 – 71, which had ended in ignominious French defeat,

and the loss of the territory of Alsace-Lorraine. The regime’s

power base, furthermore, which owed its origins to the

exceptional circumstances of wartime, was under attack. Although

the Paris Commune had been swiftly, and bloodily, despatched, the

socialist threat had never been comprehensively vanquished, and

by 1893, 48 socialists had been elected to the Chamber of

deputies.18 Syndicalism had become an established presence. Nor

was France immune to the anarchism that was becoming widespread

in Europe; in 1893, an anarchist bomb was detonated in the

17 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed) p30. T J Clark has explored the ways in which the bourgeoisie constructed its identity through representation, showing that social orders are established through systems of signs; for ‘economic life is a realm of representations (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers Princeton University Press, 1984 p6)’18 Williams, 1982 p158

Chamber of Deputies, although nobody was killed.19 Economic

problems added to the government’s burdens. In the decade after

1885, French heavy industry ceased to expand, as Paul Jobling and

David Crowley indicate.20 By 1896, France had descended from the

second to the fourth most powerful industrial power, resulting in

a loss of international competitiveness.21 Economic rivalry with

Germany, naturally enough, was felt particularly keenly; indeed,

it seemed as though the war that had ostensibly concluded in 1871

was being prolonged by other means, and this perception was not

unfounded. ‘We defeated France on the battlefields’, said Prince

Wilhelm (the future Kaiser) in 1881 in a remark that appeared to

vindicate French suspicions. ‘Now we want to defeat her in

commerce and industry’.22

19 Williams, 1982 p15520 Jobling, Paul and Crowley, David Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation since 1800 Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1996 p8521 Silverman, 1989 p52. In the 1880s France was in a ‘serious economic depression’, as Leila Kinney notes (‘Fashion and Figuration in Modern Life Painting’, in Fausch, Deborah et al (Eds) Architecture: In Fashion Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1994)22 Quoted in Jobling and Crowley, 1996 p86, also in Troy, Nancy J Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier Yale University Press, 1991 p23

In the face of threats from abroad and political instability at

home, the Third Republic attempted to achieve a measure of

consolidation by reinforcing a sense of national identity, what

Auslander calls a sense of ‘universalized Frenchness’.23 Emerging

strongly from political discourse was the idea that this

consisted in a commonality of experience; it consisted ‘in being

exposed to the same thing’.24 It was thus with a view to

strengthening France’s faltering sense of self that the

government set about imposing uniformity in schooling, language,

and even handwriting.25 But the sense of nationhood was also

supposed partly to consist in an inimitable, although ineffable,

national ‘style’, and one of the places in which this was seen to

reside, as Tiersten indicates, was the tastefully decorated home,

furbished by a French woman with her innate panache. The national

style was thus construed as a kind of ‘aggregate’ of the unique

style of each individual French housewife, so that, in virtue of

the contribution that it made to the national self-image, self-

expression through interior decoration was constructed as nothing

less than a woman’s patriotic duty.26

23 Auslander, 1996 p42424 Auslander, 1996 p37725 Auslander, 1996 p42426 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p24

The question of the national style was, in Auslander’s words,

‘ubiquitous in contemporary discourse’.27 The elusive je ne sais

quoi was also thought to be evident in domestic objects, well-made

craft products in particular, which were seen as highly eloquent

metonyms of qualities traditionally associated with France as the

‘mecca of taste, fashion, and luxury’, as Silverman writes.28

This fact became crucial to the government’s economic policy,

for, as writers like Marius Vachon, whose Pour La Défense de Nos

Industries d’Art was published in 1898, argued, a niche market could

be created, based on the vaunted splendours of French applied

arts, that was able to withstand economic vicissitudes.29 It was

this that partly informed what Silverman characterizes as

France’s ‘abdication’ of technology in favour of a revitalised

craft industry (itself in decline; since 1873 the export of

French craft products such as jewellery and furniture had been on

the wane, and imports on the rise30).31 Hopes for France’s

economic and spiritual survival converged in the objet bien fait,

27 Auslander, 1996 p38228 Silverman, 1989 p5329 Silverman, 1989 p5530 Jobling and Crowley, 1996 p8631 Silverman, 1989 p52

symbolizing France as an inanimate counterpart to the Marianne of

traditional lore.

Beginning in the 1890s, the government, following the

recommendation of affiliates of the Central Union of the

Decorative Arts such as Roger Marx, ‘actively embraced’ the style

moderne in craft production as consistent with the national

style.32 The forms of the style moderne were highly organic, being

‘patterned after the forms of nature’, as Silverman puts it, and

in this respect were partly informed by the rococo, which, for

largely political reasons, was enjoying something of a

renaissance.33 The rococo had aristocratic connotations, having

originated in the eighteenth century, when court life became

decentralized and aristocrats began to create lavishly furnished

and decorated private spaces in which to entertain.34 To counter

the encroaching socialist threat, the liberal government of the

Third Republic found it expedient to attempt a rapprochement with

its erstwhile enemy, the aristocracy, and this it accomplished,

32 Silverman, 1989 p13333 Silverman, 1989 p17234 Auslander, 1996 pp51-68. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the court moved from Versailles to the Palais-Royal. The rococo is mainly associated with Louis XV (r1715-1774) (ibid)

as Silverman argues, in part through its programme of rococo

revival projects such as the reconstitution of the Bibliothèque

Nationale.35 For it was in this way that the regime, represented

in synecdochical form by national institutions, symbolically

linked itself to the aristocracy. At the same time, however, as

the return of the rococo was initiating a renewed interest in the

forms of nature, two further factors were having the same effect;

firstly, the influx of Japanese craft artefacts, with their

emphatically organic motifs, and secondly the discoveries of

psychologie nouvelle, which indicated that ‘vitalizing organic forms’

might act on the psyche in the manner of a remedy for the

debilitating surmenage of modern life.36 In these several impulses

lay the genesis of the style moderne, which the government began

duly to promote.

This policy entailed the patronage of inventive artists such as

the glass designer Emile Gallé, whose work was characterized by

strikingly organic forms (Fig 1).37

35 Silverman, 1989 p13336 Silverman, 1989 p83. Siegfried Bing opened his Paris Oriental arts boutique in 1875, as Jobling and Crowley mention (1996 p89)37 Silverman, 1989 p172

Fig 1 Emile Gallé Vase (c1900)

The furniture-buying public, however, following the advice of the

ranks of ‘taste professionals’, continued stolidly to favour

mass-produced ‘historicist pastiche’.38 This did not necessarily

involve the literal imitation of the past; it was authentic

‘discursively, not visually’, being based not on individual

pieces but abstracted ideals.39 As well as the rococo, a popular

style was ‘neo-renaissance’, also referred to as ‘Henri II’,

38 Auslander, 1996 p25839 Auslander, 1996 p263

which was thought to evoke its sixteenth century precedent

through the use of dark wood, columns and carved decoration

rather than marquetry. This style was often found in fin-de-

siécle bourgeois dining rooms (Figs 2 and 3).40

Fig 2 Henri-Auguste Fourdinois (1830-1907) Buffet (Neo-Renaissance)

c1867

40 Auslander, 1996 p262

Fig 3 Eugène Atget, ‘Intérieur d’un employé aux magasins du

Louvre’ from

Intérieurs Parisiens, début du XXème siécle: artistiques, pittoresques et bourgeois

(1910) Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Another popular style was Louis XVI. In contrast to the curving

forms of the rococo, this featured classicizing straight lines

and right angles (Figs 4 and 5).41

Fig 4 Maison Krieger, Paris Commode with Ormolu (Louis XVI style),

c1878

41 Auslander, 1996 p68Ormolu is the application of gilding to a bronze object

Fig 5 Atget, ‘Intérieur de Mlle Sorel, de la Comédie Française’

from

Intérieurs Parisiens (1910) (note Louis XVI style cabinet)

What was encouraged above all was eclecticism, the combination of

diverse elements into a co-ordinated ensemble. This, as Tiersten

writes, was considered an expression of the triumph of

individualism over conformity, and was thus, as we will see, in

keeping with other contemporary modernist discourse.42 Indeed,

42 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p20

eclecticism was being constructed, in an alternative discourse to

that espoused by the government, as the true style moderne.

‘Understand well what we mean by modern’, wrote the decorating

expert Henri de Noussane. ‘It signifies a mélange of styles’.43

Auslander cites three factors informing the dual tendency towards

historicism and eclecticism in interior decoration. Firstly,

eclecticism suits the goals of a capitalist society, since

capitalism is best served by diversity, not unity, in production

(evoking the notion that capitalism embodies an impulse towards

the commodification of all aspects of life, Tiersten remarks that

historicism betrays an attitude to the past not unlike that of a

consumer in a department store44). Secondly, the structure of

production in fin-de siécle France was better suited to the

large-scale manufacture of historicist, rather than style moderne,

furniture. Thirdly, the accumulation of the stylistic vestiges of

the past served to naturalize bourgeois ascendancy, for it was

made to seem as if all of French history was the rightful

patrimony of the bourgeoisie.45 In this way, the taste of the

bourgeoisie, both historicist and eclectic, pertained to the

43 Quoted in Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p2544 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed) 1996 p2945 Auslander, 1996 p382, pp306-321, pp 263-264

issue, mentioned earlier, of the construction of its own

identity.

A development without which the existence of such a person as an

artist of the domestic interior would have been inconceivable was

the collapse of the art/craft distinction. This came about partly

through the enshrinement, motivated by the government’s policy of

currying favour with the aristocracy, of luxury craft products in

national cultural institutions, culminating perhaps in the 1901

opening of The Museum of French Furniture in a wing of the

Louvre. A strong tendency in the same direction was to be found

in the decorative arts movement. Williams identifies the 1896

publishing of La réforme de l’art decoratif in the Nouvelle Revue by Camille

Mauclair as amongst the most succinct statements of the goals of

this campaign, chief amongst which was to beautify ordinary

objects of utility; art could be useful, it was felt, that was

also beautiful.46 Above all, the aim was to confer dignity on

objects serving needs that were common to all, and this levelling

impulse was felt by Mauclair (and others) to be democratizing.

The movement attempted to draw attention to new designs that

seemed to be in keeping with their aesthetic, which was a

46 Williams, 1982 p161

combination of ‘modernity, appropriateness, and democracy (a

third discursive candidate for the fugitive style moderne)’. Their

exhortations, however, were largely ignored. As indicated above,

nothing seemed able to impact on the public taste for

historicism. As Williams puts it, the public resolutely favoured

the ‘democratization of luxury’, seen in the eyes of the

decorative arts movement to indicate design that served social

pretension, over the democratization of art.47

The movement’s project to broker the marriage of beauty and

utility nevertheless contributed to the elevation of the status

of the applied arts, as did other modernist discourses, notably

the art form pioneered by Richard Wagner and becoming popular in

Europe around this time, the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total artwork’. As

Peter Vergo notes, Wagner, who had written about the concept in

his influential Zurich Papers of 1849-51, viewed as ‘harmful’ the

separation of the arts and crafts; all of them, high and low

alike, had their place in the gesamtkunstwerk.48

47 Williams, 1982 pp154-209. The public desired ‘the kind ofluxury objects displayed in museums’, as Troy writes (1991 p9)48 Vergo, Peter The Music of Painting Phaidon, 2010 p111

Politics, as I have shown, informed the concept of the chic

interior in a number of ways. Likewise, politics contributed to

the gendering of the new artist of the domestic interior that was

being constructed. For at the same time as it was directly

invoking its powers in the cause of national self-definition, the

regime was also at pains not to lose its liberal credentials, and

the attempt to influence the spending habits of private

individuals by promoting craft consumption seemed uncomfortably

close to authoritarianism. It was rendered more acceptable, as

Auslander suggests, by government efforts in this area being

directed not at men, but at women.49 This was seen as admissible.

The project to link women with interior decoration in the public

consciousness was thus inaugurated, expressing itself, amongst

other places, in schools, where textbooks began to present, as an

ideal of womanhood and object of aspiration, the bourgeois

housewife, engaged in the creation of tasteful and attractive

interiors.50

Modernist discourse, once again, was simultaneously exercising an

influence in the same direction. For amongst the legacies of an

49 Auslander, 1996 p37950 Auslander, 1996 p388

earlier modernist tendency, Romanticism, was the late nineteenth

century view of subjectivity. According to this discourse, art

was rooted in private experience; beauty, as Tiersten explains,

was ‘attributed to the eye of the beholder’.51 But the same

discourse (Tiersten is thinking of Impressionism) located

aesthetic response in the sensuous, and constructed women as

wholly sensuous beings. In consequence, despite their perceived

lack of a rational faculty, they were deemed uniquely qualified

for the appreciation of art, and it was this that made them such

good interior designers. Most significantly, however, their role

was purely passive; they were consumers, not producers, of art.

The esoteric and exalted realm of creativity was still

exclusively male. Thus modernist discourse both celebrated and

repressed women; although it ‘mobilized feminine subjectivity’ by

privileging the female point of view, it also ensured that the

road that might lead a woman to a truly fulfilling and creative

life remained almost impassably barred.52

The modernist aesthetic debate was emblematic of the issue of

gender that was a preoccupation of nineteenth century France.

51 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p1952 Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p30

This issue can perhaps itself be contextualized as part of a

broader concern, the threat to identity in which modernity was

partly seen to consist. On the one hand, social mobility had

rendered class barriers much less stable, so that social identity

was becoming harder to define. Traditional signifiers of identity

could no longer be relied upon; since the relaxation of the

sumptuary laws, it had not been possible, as Kinney notes, to

deduce a person’s status from their clothing.53 On the other, the

conditions of modern life were producing gender issues, blurring

the well-defined outlines of the respective roles of men and

women, as Elizabeth Wilson has indicated.54 Public spaces had

traditionally been associated with the male-dominated activities

of government and commerce; women, as Griselda Pollock writes,

‘were supposed to occupy the domestic sphere alone’.55 But the

proliferation of new and spectacular sites of modernity and urban

leisure such as parks, theatres, cafés and the Grands Boulevards

brought with it the increasing appearance of the ‘public woman’,

on furlough from her customary domain. Indeed, Garb has shown

53 Kinney, 199454 Wilson, Elizabeth ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review 191 (1992)55 Pollock, Griselda ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London 1988 p68

that the public woman had become economically indispensable,

contributing, in her incarnation as the epitome of modern urban

chic, La Parisienne, to the national reservoir of style as well as

being the principal target for consumer-oriented enterprises such

as the department store (as Janet Wolff writes, the department

store was to some extent a liminal space between the public and

private zone, providing for women a means of ‘legitimate, if

limited’ involvement in the public sphere56).57 The public woman

was a highly ambivalent figure, however, since her impingement

into public life was seen to undermine patriarchal authority. It

was further seen that, in a context of increased casual contact

between the sexes, feminine virtue had become harder to preserve;

the public woman was, in Garb’s words, ‘unchaperoned, and

therefore brazenly available’.58 And since from loss of virtue it

was deemed but a small step into prostitution, the public woman

was identified with the prostitute, the personification of the

‘great fear of the age’.59 Nor was the fear of prostitution

simply informed by sanitary concerns and the terrifying spectre

of syphilis. As Marcus Verhagen writes, the prostitute was seen 56 Wolff, Janet Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture Cambridge 1990, p5857 Garb, 199858 Garb, 1998 p9159 Wilson, 1992

as a threatening figure also because she represented social

mobility, and therefore offered a challenge to the social order.60

The upwardly mobile prostitute, with whom the public woman became

rapidly identified, was far from being solely an artistic trope,

as in Émile Zola’s Nana or Manet’s painting of the same name

(1877, Kunsthalle Hamburg) (Fig 6); real prototypes existed in

notorious courtesans of the day like Carolina ‘La Belle’ Otero

and Émilienne d’Alençon (indeed, according to Alan Krell, the

model for Manet’s painting was Henriette Hauser, herself a grande

cocotte known to be the mistress of the Prince of Orange61).62

60 Verhagen, Marcus ‘The Poster in Fin-de-Siécle Paris: “That Mobile and Degenerate Art”, in Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa R (Eds) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life University ofCalifornia Press, Los Angeles 199561 Krell, Alan Manet Thames and Hudson 1996 p17462 Conyers, Claude ‘Courtesans in Dance History: Les Belles de la Belle Époque’ in Dance Chronicle Vol 26 No 2, 2003

Fig 6 Edouard Manet, Nana (1877, Kunsthalle Hamburg)

The issue of gender was made more pressing towards the century’s

end by the rise of the women’s movement. The goals of this

enterprise, as Silverman writes, were surprisingly modest;

mainly, they were to effect changes in the Civil Code that would

allow married women greater control of domestic finances. Above

all, it was sought to release a wife from her bonded role as a

kind of ‘dependent minor’.63 Two developments contributed to the

movement and conditioned the public perception of what came to be

called the femme nouvelle, often conflated with the public woman.

Firstly, women began to achieve enhanced access to education. The

Camille Sée Law of 1880 instituted state funding of secondary and

higher education, from which women would benefit, although the

areas of study, and therefore the subsequent careers, available

to a woman were still highly circumscribed (indeed, they were

mostly oriented towards skills associated with women’s

traditional place in the home, so that what appeared to be a

relaxation of the rules regarding the role of women actually

served to reinforce them64). Then, in 1884, changes to the

divorce laws meant that it became possible, for the first time,

for a wife to instigate divorce proceedings. The commencement of

the movement itself might be dated to the occasion of the first

International Congresses on Women’s Rights and Feminine

Institutions, which took place at the Paris Exhibition in 1889.

Others followed in 1892, 1896 and 1900.65

63 Silverman, 1989 p6564 There was an ‘insistence’ in both the private and public sectors on ‘the feminine arts’ in girls’ education, as Auslander writes (1996, p388)65 Silverman, 1989 p65

It is probably true that the women’s movement represented the

first steps, however tentative, taken in the direction of female

emancipation, and that cracks, small but ominous, were

correspondingly starting to appear in the formidable bulwarks of

the citadel of male power. Yet the movement emphatically did not,

as was mentioned above, reject the traditional role of women; it

was a brand of what Karen Offen has termed ‘familial feminism’.66

Freedom within restraints was all that was being asked for. In

the febrile atmosphere of the time, however, there was an

overreaction, and an attack launched on the movement based on the

misunderstanding that it was precisely an attack on the home and

motherhood, the ‘anchor of bourgeois domesticity’.67 Consequently

the New Woman began to make numerous appearances, in menacing

guise or as an object of ridicule, in contemporary journals

between 1889 and 1898.68 Imagined threats were somewhat

compounded by real concerns regarding the falling French birth

rate, which had been on the wane since 1870.69 And before long,

66 Offen, Karen ‘Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France’, American Historical Review 89 No 3 (1984), p65467 Silverman, 1989 p6368 Silverman, 1989 p6369 Offen, 1984 p652. In the 30 years between 1881 and 1911, the population rose by approximately the same amount as in the 10 years between 1861 and 1871 (Ibid)

the femme nouvelle came to be conflated with the other menace

confronting liberal republicanism, socialism. One constituted an

assault on private property, the other, an assault on the home;

as Silverman indicates, the Third Republic felt itself doubly

imperilled.

Serving to unite, albeit by means of a curious series of

ellipses, many of the chief anxieties of the age, the New Woman

was a figure that inspired fear (it is fear of women, Garb

maintains, that informs the tendency to represent them in terms

of a ‘type’70). The government’s political survival and that of

the social hierarchy, the preservation of male authority, the

reproductive future of France, the nation’s very health; all of

these things seemed to be dependent on her containment. In a

thesis endorsed by Auslander, Silverman argues that the

discursive reaffirmation of the aptitude of women for interior

decoration, and the development of the concept of the artist of

the domestic interior, were accordingly informed, at least in

part, by the desire to put the femme nouvelle resolutely back in

her place in the home.71 In this light, the project starts to

70 Garb, 1998 p11371 Silverman, 1989 pp63-74, Auslander, 1996 p292

seem downright cynical. And weight is added to this

interpretation from the way that the discourse often seems to

come from an intention to derogate, delimit and control. ‘Let

woman remain what nature has made her…the mistress of the home’,

declared the author, Victor Jozé.72 There is a powerful sense

also of the relegation of women to a sphere of a markedly

inferior nature. Woman ‘lacks the science of art, but she

guesses,’ wrote the decorating guru Emile Cardon with the utmost

condescension; ‘she doesn’t know, she feels’.73 The most, in

fact, that can perhaps be said of the project to construct a role

for women is that if the domestic interior did indeed provide an

arena for feminine creativity, it was creativity of a greatly

circumscribed kind, amounting to little more than choosing

wallpaper and arranging objects.

In Silverman’s view, then, the discourse concealed an act of

repression. There is, however, an alternative view. For the many

writers influenced by Michel Foucault, including Pollock, the

issue of female repression that Silverman raises would be

problematic, since it assumes the existence of an unchanging,

72 Quoted in Silverman, 1989 p7273 Quoted in Tiersten, in Reed (Ed), 1996 p29

transhistorical feminine identity capable of being ‘repressed’,

whereas, as Pollock puts it, femininity is ‘a historically

variable ideological construction’.74 Lynda Nead has exploited

this idea in her discussion of images depicting the various roles

of women in Victorian England, such as Woman’s Mission: Companion to

Manhood by George Elgar Hicks (1863, Tate) (Fig 7).75

Fig 7 George Elgar Hicks Woman’s Mission: Companion to Manhood (1863,

Tate)

74 Pollock, 1988 p7175 Nead, Lynda Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain Blackwell, Oxford 1988

Whereas some commentators might describe these images as

evocative of the authoritarian impulses of a patriarchal society,

Nead insists that they are evocative instead of sources of

‘pleasures and incentives’ for women.76 They are thus part of a

discourse that creates female roles, and hence female identity.

This is not to deny that Hicks’s images, and likewise the concept

of the chic interior, encode power relations, but to put the case

that these power relations are not repressive, but productive;

indeed, as Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk write, power for

Foucault can never be repressive, only productive.77

Whether or not to characterize the concept of the chic interior

as female oppression in disguise therefore depends, perhaps, on

one’s attitude to Foucault’s view of power. One aspect of the

discourse that is nevertheless hard to ignore and possibly

indicative of a misogyny encoded within it is the tendency

towards objectification, such that women were very often

presented as somehow subsumed into the decorative scheme of their

invention. Thus the novelist Paul Bourget described a character’s

choice of a set of colours designed ‘to harmonize with [her]

76 Nead, 1988 p2477 Hatt, Michael and Klonk, Charlotte Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods Manchester University Press, 2006 p161

brunette complexion’.78 This tendency recalled the way that women

had themselves constituted a central element in rococo design

schemes, so that a woman’s dresses were made from the same

material adorning the walls of her salon, for example.79 There is

perhaps a suggestion of this idea in Seurat’s Young Woman Powdering

Her Nose (1890, Courtauld) (Fig 8), in which the visual rhymes

between figure and ground lessen the sense of a distinction

between the two.

78 Other People’s Luxury, 1900 quoted in Auslander, 1996 p28579 Silverman, 1989 p30

Fig 8 Georges Seurat, Young Woman Powdering her Nose (1890,

Courtauld)

A direct connection was also established between women’s bodies

and style moderne furniture, for the organicized, undulating forms

of the rococo, which it evoked, had always been seen to suggest

the curves of the female body, as Silverman writes.80 There was

little to distinguish, it seemed, between flesh and object. It

seemed, furthermore, that a woman could only express herself

through objects, which therefore became critical to her sense of

identity. Indeed, it was almost as if her sense of self was

entirely dependent on the objects that she bought; as if she

could only achieve, in Auslander’s telling phrase, ‘individuation

through consumption’.81

Whilst women were subject to objectification, objects,

conversely, were subject to a kind of anthropomorphism; they

began to assume an almost animistic quality, becoming closely

identified with a woman’s ‘innermost essence’.82 Thus the writer

Marie de Saverny claimed to be able, on entering an unknown

80 Silverman, 1989 pp27-881 Auslander, 1996 p29282 Auslander, 1996 p273

woman’s house for the first time, to deduce in advance from her

furniture ‘her tastes, her mind, her education…even her face, her

figure and physiognomy’.83 Elsewhere, meanwhile, objects were

discursively personified, even thought to be developing spiritual

attributes, as for example in The Ladies’ Paradise, where Zola

describes a department store window display in which the dummies

were ‘acquiring souls’.84 And the concept of animism provides a

link to the remaining aspect of the chic interior I would like

briefly to discuss, its status as an emblem of capitalism. The

stylish home clearly served capitalist ends; this it had in

common with any concept that promotes consumption, creating the

false consciousness by which capitalism is said to achieve its

goals. Likewise, the attribution to household objects of a

metaphysical dimension connects with one of the foremost drives

of capitalism, commodity fetishism (see Appendix, p31). This is the

manner, according to Marxist discourse, in which commodities are

invested with supernatural traits. The ‘theological capers’ of

commodities provide Walter Benjamin’s theme in his critique of

83 La femme chez elle et dans le monde (1876, quoted in Auslander, 1996 p377)84 Zola, Émile The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) (First Published 1883) Translated by Brian Nelson, Oxford University Press 1995 p16

commodification, ‘Grandville or the World Exhibitions’.85

Benjamin also uses the notion of fetishism in the Freudian sense,

to imply that commodities represent a kind of sublimated sexual

desire. The cult of the commodity, writes Benjamin, enlists ‘the

sex appeal of the inorganic’.

The chic interior, with a female consumer in its midst, was

emblematic of capitalism also because women were identified even

at the time as capitalism’s primary targets, as another passage

from The Ladies’ Paradise makes clear:

Of supreme importance…was the exploitation of women. Everything else led

up to it…It was Woman the shops were competing for so fiercely, it was

Woman they were continually snaring with their bargains, after dazing

her with their displays.86

Zola’s novel is a critique of the way that capitalism replaces

the principle of supply with the principle of seduction, by means

of an appeal to the consumer’s fantasy world. As Williams

85 Benjamin, 1935/2002 86 Zola, 1883/1995 p76. As Rachel Bowlby indicates, selling largely took the form of ‘a masculine appeal to women (Bowlby, Rachel Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and ZolaMethuen, New York 1985 p19)’

indicates, capitalism forms the meeting place of commerce and

fantasy, so that merchandise appears to fulfil the needs of the

imagination.87 And this is perhaps another light in which we can

see the new representation of the home: as a manifestation of

capitalism’s enchanted ‘dream world’ of the consumer.88

Desirable, modern, a source of creative gratification, the chic

interior offered the promise of a better life.

Nothing, perhaps, could be more prosaic than the ordinary home.

Yet as I have shown in this essay, it can serve as a microcosm of

an entire nation. I have argued that the chic interior acted

variously as a representation of both bourgeois and female

identity, an emblem of the elevation of the status of the applied

arts, the battleground of competing discourses regarding the

representation of modernity, and finally a potent symbol of

capitalism, and that behind all of this were some of the most

compelling political, economic and social issues of the day. The

87 Williams, 1982 pp65-688 The ‘reenchantment of the social world’ under capitalism is Benjamin’s central theme in the Arcades Project, as SusanBuck-Morss writes (The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 1989 p253)

product, on a smaller scale, of the same forces as those

engulfing the nation as a whole, the chic interior is an apt

synecdoche of late nineteenth century France.

Appendix: Commodity Fetishism

This is the process, about which Karl Marx writes in Volume I of

Das Kapital (1867), by which an ordinary product, or a service,

becomes ‘something transcendent’.89 Any product of human labour

constitutes a set of values; there is a value attached to the

effort it took to produce, as well as to its usefulness. It also

encodes a set of social values (such as the relation between

worker and capitalist). When, however, the product is placed in

the market place, it becomes a commodity, with the result that

these multiple values are negated and replaced with a single one:

the commodity’s exchange value, that is to say, its value in

relation to other commodities. A commodity therefore represents

the transformation of a set of human values into a value between

things. Furthermore, seeming to have acquired a kind of

89Marx, Karl Das Kapital (First Published 1867) Lawrence and Wishart, London 1971

independent value, it behaves almost as if it has a life of its

own, like the fetishes used in pagan religions, which appear as

‘independent beings’.90

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