The Modern Interior

notwithstanding, those ‘cottages’ were still ‘homes’ – sites, that is, dedi-

cated 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 har-

monious 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 erod-

ed. 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 reali-

ties 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 semi-

public 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

28 home proper and the world of the theatre’.^20 This strategy was employed