SOURCE: “Aestheticizing the Home: Textual Strategies of Taste, Self-Identity, and Bourgeois Hegemony in America's ‘Gilded Age,’” in Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 1-20.

A vital function of texts, if viewed in relation to their performers, is to define, or more importantly, to perform the self. American “new historicists” such as Gillian Brown, Alan Trachtenberg, John Kasson, Joy Kasson, and Jackson Lears have explored the degree to which literature, sculpture, and other aesthetic texts function as sites in which cultural conceptions of self are negotiated and performed.¹ These scholars observe that, particularly during the late nineteenth century, Americans engaged metonymic strategies of identity construction through performative engagement with texts. The tendency of the period was to define, to enact, or to perform the self through identification with the perceived coherence and stability aesthetic texts provided. New historicism has cleared the way for questions central to performance studies in particular and communication studies in general: namely, in specific historical periods, how do people perform self through engagement with aesthetic texts?

In historical periods of dramatic transformation, aesthetic phenomena provide a sense of comfort and stability both by offering escape from the turmoil of everyday life and by re-presenting or redefining the conditions of life (Lears 98). Especially during periods of crisis, aesthetic texts acquire greater significance precisely because they provide the illusion of stability perceived to be lacking in society. Yet, the metonymic stability of aesthetic texts contains residues of the very conflicts, contradictions, and instabilities they seek to transcend. The late nineteenth century provides a vital context in which to understand the process of self performance through aesthetic texts. Two substantial justifications for this focus come to mind. First, the process of modernization and its reaction, antimodernism, provide a context in which to view not only the nineteenth century but the present as well: “Antimodernism was a complex blend of accommodation and protest which tells us a great deal about the beginnings of present-day values and attitudes” (Lears xv). Second, the transformation of American social life by industrialization and the emergent power of the corporation produced enormous instability and anxiety: “Economic incorporation wrenched American society from its moorings of familiar values … [and] the process proceeded by contradiction and conflict” (Trachtenberg 7).

Within this historical context, the home was a perceived source of stability, especially after the realization of its aesthetic potential at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. As Mary E. W. Sherwood pointed out in Harper's in 1882, “nothing can be more orderly, more harmonious, than a modern New York house which has blossomed out in this fine summer of perfected art [at the Exposition]” (681). For Sherwood and her contemporaries, the home provided the sense of order and harmony in a society increasingly fragmented, disorderly, and unharmonious. In fact, if modernization threatened societal or cultural anomie, the home would provide the last bulwark of protection. Sherwood continues: “The present achievement of American art, promising and full of interest as it is, is remote from that which should properly signalize the decay of a great nation. … If we are advancing toward decay, we are certainly barricading our fort against its insidious footsteps with many a strong mahogany plank, and much ‘heart of oak’” (690). Offering shelter from cultural and societal turbulence, the renaissance of home decoration in the late nineteenth century should be viewed as a textual strategy to which Americans turned to provide coherent and stable representations of self. Decorating texts functioned as sites for performing and authenticating the Victorian bourgeois self. Yet, the relationship between interior decoration and the homeowner was not a passive one. Rather, self performance through decoration implicates the self in an immediately constitutive, interactive (even transformative) process. Hence when Sherwood proclaims that “there are, perhaps, no two words more frequently on the lips of the present generation than these two: internal decoration” (680), she is, perhaps unconsciously, calling attention to the performative value of decoration.

By uncovering the relationships between interior decoration and self construction, we can begin to see how aesthetic texts function as sites of struggle and contestation over individual and social identity. Furthermore, we can begin to understand how texts such as interior decoration function as strategies for encompassing cultural crises. Interior decorating texts attempted to counteract social instability through the practice of cultural hegemony. But, although Victorian decorating texts functioned to maintain the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, the image of stability they provided was illusory. The strategy of performing self through the metonymy of texts ultimately reproduced, rather than ameliorated, the emptiness and alienation brought about by modernization. In order to reach a fuller understanding of the complex relationship between interior decoration as a textual strategy and cultural hegemony, I shall first consider the role of the Victorian aesthetic as a strategy of self performance through authentication; second, examine the role of decorating texts in shaping bourgeois hegemony; third, explore decorating texts as transformative strategies of self construction; and, finally, clarify the implications of display in the home as self performance.

THE GILDED AGE AND THE SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY

Mark Twain and C. D. Warner term late nineteenth-century America the “Gilded Age” in their satirical novel of the same name. While Twain and Warner's story survives as an insightful critique of their historical period, their greatest insight lies precisely in the term in which they encapsulate the times. Gilding connotes many things. For Twain and Warner, the term evokes a dazzling age of individualism, economic prosperity, and technological revolution. More importantly, gilding meant an overlay, making something appear better than it is. Hence, the term “Gilded Age” suggests a social function for art and aesthetic texts in Victorian America: they provide a lustre which covers up or overlays deeper social and cultural anxiety.

As historian John Kasson notes, maintaining the proper appearances was vital to Victorians (6). Victorian culture required people, particularly the bourgeoisie, to put on the appearances of stability and refinement. The Victorian emphasis on appearances functioned as a way of obviating or encompassing deeper cultural and social anxieties brought about by rapid economic, technological, and aesthetic transformation. Aesthetic texts in general, and decorating texts in particular, then, are best conceived as strategies; for the appearance of order and harmony that they provide functions metonymically to offset perceived crisis in other aspects of social life.² The function of decorating texts as strategies for performing or authenticating self is best understood as a response to the growing sense of emptiness and alienation that characterize the Victorian era.

In his provocative 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” German critical theorist Walter Benjamin observes that by the late nineteenth century art had lost its “aura” or its “authenticity” when industrial technology made art reproducible (221). Traditionally, Benjamin argues, art was assessed by its cult value, that is, the degree to which art conveyed deeply sensual, as well as intellectual and emotional impressions. Traditional aesthetic experiences were profoundly moving, truly religious in nature. Art's value of authenticity, its “aura,” came from its embeddedness in tradition; aesthetic experiences were deeply contextualized, thus stable and extremely powerful. However, claims Benjamin, “the technique of [technological] reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced” (221). When emergent technology made art reproducible and capable of mass-distribution, exchange value and exhibition value replaced religious or ritual value. Art became, in the Gilded Age, a commodity to be possessed and displayed. Without the anchor of traditions, art became a “weightless,” that is, decontextualized, expression whose value came from suitability for exhibition and its status as a possession. The weightlessness of art in the Gilded Age, the age of mechanical reproduction, is well-illustrated in Mark Twain's declaration that Leonardo's “Last Supper” had become “the picture from which all engravings and all copies have been made for three centuries” (John Kasson 213).

The importance of Benjamin's argument goes beyond its explanation of the transformation of art in the Gilded Age. Not only had art lost its authenticity in the late nineteenth century; so did the Victorian sense of self. Mechanical reproduction had uprooted American culture from its traditions and hence its stability. However, the sources of anxiety about the self were varied and highly complex. For my purposes, two important elements of social transformation merit discussion. First, advanced technology and the dominance of the Enlightenment values of rationality and science began to undermine the traditional institutions upon which stable self-identity rested. As Lears argues, nineteenth-century culture had become increasingly rationalized, due to the declining authority of traditional institutions, religion for example, and the emergent hegemony of technological and scientific thinking. With the declining authority of cultural traditions came a growing sense that life in the Gilded Age had become empty and alienating, that is, inauthentic. As Lears explains, the inauthenticity of Victorian bourgeois life took its form in the feeling of weightlessness of individual identity: “For many, individual identities began to seem fragmented, diffuse, perhaps even unreal. A weightless culture of material comfort and spiritual blandness was breeding weightless persons who longed for intense experience to give some definition, some distinct outline and substance to their vaporous lives” (32).

Second, when shaken from its traditional moorings, Victorian art was transformed into a textual rather than a sensual experience. Art had become, by the turn of the century, a matter of “taste” requiring disciplined spectatorship (Joy Kasson 24-25). Since the value of art in the Gilded Age came from its exhibitional qualities, taste emerged as a practice of spectatorship—the practice of disciplining and training one to view and appreciate art “properly.” At one level, the specialized knowledge of art and the inculcated sense of appreciation that comprised taste were attempts to restore art's authenticity by reviving, at least textually, its traditions. If the actual context in which art was properly to be experienced had vanished, taste provided a textual reconstruction of art's cult value. However, at another level, the textual reconstruction of art's aura further distanced the viewer from the art object precisely because art became a discrete object of appreciation, a text. In an age where traditional sources of self-identity were withering away, taste provided the illusion of restoration of authenticity, albeit only in textual form.

The emergence of taste as a textual strategy of authentication has substantial implications for understanding the performative value of aesthetic texts. Taste, particularly in the nineteenth century, was intimately tied to social class because it required “cultural capital,” that is, the means to “understand” as well as to own art (Bourdieu 164). Taste constructs self-identity in part through class identification. The disciplined spectatorship or “pure gaze” that defines artistic taste in the nineteenth century, observes Pierre Bourdieu, “implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a social break” (175). Exercising artistic taste establishes the self as a member of an elite class; it affiliates, that is, socially links, the individual with an exclusive class. Bourdieu elaborates: “The naive exhibitionism of ‘conspicuous consumption,’ which seeks distinction in the crude display of ill-mastered luxury, is nothing compared to the unique capacity of the pure gaze, a quasi-creative power which sets the aesthete [apart] from the common herd by a radical difference which seems to be inscribed in ‘persons’” (175). In the anxiety over the loss of authenticity in art, taste emerged as a powerful strategy of textual reconstruction, and, in the process, redefined artistic experience and appreciation along class lines. Taste provided the illusion of stable identity through the exclusions of disciplined spectatorship. In essence, taste transformed self-identity by investing it with social distinction.

As a consequence, taste constructs bourgeois class identity as transcendent: taste was the ability to transcend the common, brutal experience of the body. For this reason, textual reconstruction reappropriated the aesthetic: it removed aesthetic experience from the sensual domain and located it in the textual. The human body became inscribed with class identity. Bourdieu notes that “rejecting the ‘human’ clearly means rejecting what is generic, i.e. common, ‘easy’, and immediately accessible, starting with everything that reduces the aesthetic animal to pure and simple animality, to palpable pleasure or sensual desire” (175-176). The refinement of artistic taste, while operating as a strategy to provide a stable identity for the bourgeois subject, functioned simultaneously as a form of social control. Contained in the disciplining of the pure gaze was the fear of class conflict; at stake in bourgeois individual and class identity was the very legitimacy of bourgeois class positions. In a period of social instability, as the Gilded Age was, points of opposition pose major threats to the dominant order, not to mention the dominant class (Lears 28-31). Implicitly, taste was a strategy of containment for the bourgeoisie: disciplining the body, particularly that of the working classes, was crucial in maintaining the dominance of the ruling class.

The body, argues John Fiske, is a site of class opposition. Bodily expressions undermine the authority of class distinction because they make social status appear relative and arbitrary, that is, something arbitrarily imposed on that which is common to all. The body as source of expression threatens the social order: “The pleasures of the individual body constituted a threat to the body politic. Such a threat becomes particularly terrifying when the pleasures are indulged in to excess, that is, when they exceed the norms proposed as proper and natural by those with social control, when they escape social discipline, and, thus, when allied with class interests, acquire a radical or subversive potential” (75). The Victorian bourgeoisie were concerned with the textualization of art not only because it created social distinction but also because it enforced the social order. As Fiske concludes, “excessive pleasures always threaten social control, but when these pleasures are those of subordinated groups (whether the subordination is by class, gender, race, or whatever) the threat is particularly stark, and disciplinary, if not repressive, action is almost inevitable” (75). Textualization, or separation of art from bodily experience, enabled control of disorder. Taste functioned not only to erect class boundaries but also to control opposition to the dominant social order.

The textualization of art also functioned to displace social anxieties. Stephen Greenblatt speculates that social conflicts “circulate” through aesthetic forms (8). By his view, aesthetic texts are never autonomous spheres outside of society; rather, they function as sites where social conflicts are defined and negotiated. Social anxieties, consequently, emerge in aesthetic texts in different forms, usually to be resolved by the texts themselves. Social anxieties are displaced into aesthetic texts precisely because such texts appeared to be strategies of resolution. It is a popular myth, for example, that Victorians were repressed, stuffy people, displaying, as Peter Gay puts it, a “lust to conceal” (440). However, the anxieties Victorians so readily concealed from daily practice circulated somewhat freely in the scientific and aesthetic texts of the time (Foucault 4). According to Gay, anxieties, particularly the loss of sensual experience, were displaced into furniture design:

Furniture and furnishings provided sensual cues and combined to cater to all the senses at once. They caressed the eye with polished wood and the intricate traceries of Turkish rugs; the ear with yearning melodies sounded on the piano or by companionable voices; the palate with melting candy and succulent grapes; the sense of smell with flowers and sachets and the aroma of food; the touch—always touch—with the surfaces of objects skillfully carved, woven, knitted. To sink into the embrace of a well-upholstered chair was to pamper one's musculature, to regress in the service of the body. (439)

As Gay's discussion suggests, furniture design was a vital textual strategy; for it attempted to authenticate the self by providing an illusory amelioration of the tensions between textual and sensual experiences. It becomes evident in this passage that a significant source of alienation in the Gilded Age was the very strategy intended to reconcile it. Textual reconstruction of aesthetic experience had alienated the bourgeoisie from sensual experience, thus contributing to their feeling of “weightlessness.”

The “Gilded Age” suggests an overlay, a term that explains the social function of Victorian aesthetic texts. In many respects, aesthetic texts responded to the anxiety of weightlessness in social life through displacement, providing the illusion of reconciliation. As the rest of the essay will illustrate, the underlying problem of the Victorian aesthetic is that it ultimately reproduced the anxieties which it sought to redress. Aesthetic texts in general, and most significantly decorating texts, sought to redress the general loss of authenticity by covering it up.

INTERIOR DECORATION AS A HEGEMONIC STRATEGY

Decoration's significance stemmed primarily from its function as a representation of self, an image of self through which the bourgeoisie expressed and performed self to the public. George Sheldon, in his monumental treatise on the well-decorated home, Artistic Houses, published in 1883, declared that “the interior of the house of a professional man of scholarly pursuits, cultivated tastes, and wealth sufficient to gratify both, is at least the proximate expression of his experience and convictions” (87). Moreover, Victorians believed that “the house was also the environment that taught the young and sustained them in later years …” (Lewis, Turner and McQuillin 18). Of all sources of aesthetic experience, the home was most prevalent. Harriet Spofford in Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 1878, wrote: “Its study is as important, in some respects, as the study of politics; for the private home is at the foundation of the public state, subtle and unimagined influences moulding the men who mould the state” (Lewis et al. 18). Decoration's performative function, as these passages suggest, lies in its exhibition value, its ability not only as a representation to display the self, but also as a representation to inculcate the dominant culture's important values. Specifically, decorating texts of the Gilded Age attempted to restore a sense of authenticity to the bourgeois conception of self by constructing class “affiliations” and legitimating, in the process, the exploitative and oppressive ideology and practice of colonialism. Hence, the function of decorating texts as strategies of identity construction can only be understood by positioning them historically in colonialism, a highly complex practice that constructs class identity by constructing and demonizing the Other.

“Affiliations,” as Edward Said defines the term in The World, the Text, and the Critic, are those ties formed “by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation” (25). Affiliations construct self-identity by linking it with a social class. Because they establish boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around social ties, affiliations are political: affiliations hold social classes together and give them their power. The ability to set boundaries of taste is a source of substantial political power. Said carefully elaborates taste's political function:

[c]ulture is a system of discriminations and evaluations—perhaps mainly aesthetic, as Lionel Trilling has said, but no less tyrannical for that—for a particular class in the State able to identify with it; and it also means that culture is a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste, and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions. (The World 11)

Taste is a specific social practice through which class distinction and domination are maintained. However, class domination does not necessarily operate through force. More subtly, affiliations maintain class dominance, or, as Antonio Gramsci defines the process, class “hegemony” through “intellectual and moral leadership” (Hoare and Smith 57). If this leadership of the dominant class is effective, its hegemony is maintained without resorting to force, making taste vital politically; for taste can provide legitimacy for the dominance of the ruling class through ideology, that is, representations of reality in which the dominant social order appears “natural.” Given the strategic importance of the home in Victorian culture, decoration's role in the process of defining and maintaining affiliations was central.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, decorating texts of all kinds circulated among all levels of American society. Perhaps the most significant of these texts was George Sheldon's Artistic Houses Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States because it documented in careful detail the contents of America's most “tasteful” homes and defined the parameters of tasteful decoration. Nearly all of the homeowners featured were prominent business, social, and government leaders—America's most elite. Throughout Sheldon's book are declarations of the class status one must enjoy in order to decorate tastefully, frequently equating such homes with those of European monarchs. As Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin point out, Sheldon's book served a vital purpose in an age where social status was becoming increasingly more important: “In the 1880s, both outside observers of the wealthy and those who saw themselves as inside guardians of ‘society’ began to be more systematic and explicit in their defining of categories, producing extensive lists of families and individuals. The lists, among their other functions, help define Sheldon's homeowners” (6). Artistic Houses defined class affiliations of the time because it made decorating taste the encompassing term for class identity. William H. Vanderbilt's house is a poignant illustration. Upon the completion of his two-million-dollar mansion in 1883 (a phenomenal amount for a house at that time), he commissioned a four-volume study to provide a detailed photojournalistic tour of his house and its belongings. That same year, Artistic Houses was released, devoting more photographs and descriptive space to Vanderbilt's house than to any other. It is no coincidence that Vanderbilt was admitted to the Social Register shortly after these two prominent publications featured his house (Lewis et al. 10). So vital to his social status was the presentation of his home that Vanderbilt hired a “taste consultant” whose sole task was to collect valuable decorative items, arrange them tastefully, and instruct Vanderbilt on these decorative objects (Lewis et al. 18). Vanderbilt's obsession with the appearance of his home demonstrates the vital function of decoration in strengthening class affiliations.

Implicit in decorating texts was the concern, particularly among the American bourgeoisie, that traditional sources of class identity had lost their authority.³ The rationalization of American culture in the nineteenth century meant that traditional definitions of class identity—namely the claim that class distinctions were ordained by God—no longer held authority; yet the need to define self-identity through class remained strong. Decorating texts were important strategies through which Victorians could recapture the authority of class distinctions. For example, decorating texts tended to refer to the well-appointed homes of the wealthy as “palaces,” a term that connotes the homes of royalty (Sherwood 686). Similarly, describing the home of the department store magnate Marshall Field, Artistic Houses referred to its owner as “the most widely known of Chicago's merchant princes …” (43). The terms used to describe the wealthy and their homes indicate that decorating texts subtly reconstructed class boundaries by shifting the sources of elite status onto secular practices such as success in business and government.

More importantly, since simple strategic use of vocabulary could not, by itself, lend authority to Victorian class distinctions, decorating texts constructed an ideology in which the source of social status was taste rather than traditional family ties. Through a textual reconstruction of traditions, decorating texts very subtly reconfigured the source of class identity as the ability to display art objects and appreciate them “properly.” In many ways, these texts reappropriated historical traditions in secular terms, thus providing authority for class distinctions. By doing so, decorating texts established affiliations consistent with the needs of the Gilded Age's dominant class. Witness, for example, Mary E. W. Sherwood's careful alignments between contemporary and traditional styles, as well as her redefining of class as an issue of taste: “Then came the great Philadelphia Exposition, with its pretty Eastlake house from England, with its stuffs of all nations, with its orderly cataloguing of the good things of past and present, picking out for us what had been worthy in the reign of the tasteful Stuarts, whatever was magnificent in the day of stately Elizabeth, whatever of good (and there was much) in the reign of Queen Anne, also what could be curiously sifted from the luxury of Louis XIV and XV” (681). By implication, Sherwood's account of the Exposition suggests that the fundamental terms of class had not changed; rather, rationalization re-articulated the source of its authority as the possession of taste. Hence, decorating texts functioned strategically to define class identity and its attendant power relations on secular terms when religious justifications had lost their authority. Decorating texts could maintain class affiliations under the illusion of democratic equality; for when the law recognized, on the surface, no class boundaries, making boundaries themselves appear elusive, decorating texts marked a shift in class affiliations away from direct expressions, such as the law, and into the more subtle arena of “culture.” The shift of domination into the realm of culture does not diffuse its power. On the contrary, as suggested earlier, taste's subtlety is its power because it constructs an ideology in which social distinctions are legitimated rather than forced. The power of decorating texts, then, lay in their illusion of intellectual and moral leadership, that is, the extent to which they maintained the hegemony of the ruling class.

The hegemonic function of decorating texts is further elaborated when viewed in the light of the ideological practice of colonialism. Though affiliations can explain how culture in the Gilded Age consolidated the power of the ruling class, we need to look further to understand how affiliations were strategies of self performance. In an age characterized as “weightless,” texts could function as sources of stability, especially when they constructed clear conceptions of self. Abdul JanMohamed explains: “The dominant pattern of relations that controls the text within the colonialist context is determined by economic and political imperatives and changes, such as the development of slavery, that are external to the discursive field itself. … a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object” (63). As a strategy of self performance, colonialism enacts self by constructing Otherness as inferior: the clearer the opposition between self and Other becomes, the more stable self-identity becomes (Burke 138-139). Victorian taste in general, and decorating texts in particular, attempted to stabilize self-identity precisely through the field of oppositions colonialist ideology provided. As JanMohamed's passage suggests, colonialism is ideological to the degree that it is articulated in discursive practice. That is, texts are the crucial sites where distinction is negotiated and acted upon. Consequently, we cannot understand colonizing texts as purely exploitative; rather, they are part of a complex cultural practice of identity construction.

Victorian decorating texts incorporated colonizing themes on several levels for different purposes. Initially, these themes attempted to stablize self-identity by counterposing it to the exotic Other, a strategy that was subtly articulated. Sherwood in 1882, for example, noted that the rage was “exotic” decoration motifs (681). Artistic Houses catalogued numerous rooms of Middle-Eastern or Far-Eastern influence. Charles Eastlake, in Hints on Household Taste, confessed a certain affection for “Oriental” carpets (108). The appeal of exotic objects lay in their ability as representations to make the exotic Other appear to be present, at least metonymically. By completing the self-Other, superior-inferior dialectic, decorating texts provided the illusion of stable self-identity. The bourgeoisie could exhibit their “superiority” by “tastefully” representing the objects of Other cultures as part of their own cultural capital. Colonialist ideology consolidated political power along with a stable sense of self because these texts defined the Other as inferior: the Other “lacked” taste as well as the economic means to satisfy it. As an illustration, Artistic Houses featured a description of a reception room decorated in a Chinese motif. The homeowner could not translate the “curious inscriptions in Chinese” because of “the prevailing ignorance of the great majority of our imported Chinamen. … unlike his neighbors, John Chinaman in America is seldom acquainted with the letters of his own language, to say nothing of interpreting them to foreigners” (27). In the process of completing the self-Other dialectic, decorating texts such as Artistic Houses commodified the colonized Other, thus inscribing in the colonized the status of inferiority by denying them their own subjectivity. The conscious and unconscious racism in these texts was a vital source of their strategic power; for they could confirm a stable self-identity by counterposing it to the “racially inferior” Other they constructed.

Much of colonialism's ideological power was derived from other discourses circulating in late nineteenth-century America. Most significant among these discourses was social Darwinism because it provided a “rational” or scientific justification for the social inequalities underlying colonialism. Rhetorically, social Darwinism was a secular counterpart to traditional notions of class identity, thus providing great appeal in an age marked by secular thought. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century many social theorists, anthropologists, and scientists claimed that the upper classes were “naturally” more fit to lead because society, like nature, was predicated on evolution. As historian Richard Hofstadter points out, scientific and social discourses naturalized social inequality by resting it on the assumption that “nature would provide that the best competitors in a competitive situation would win, and that this process would lead to continuing improvement” (6). Social Darwinists judged society from an evolutionary perspective that held social inequalities as evidence of different stages in social evolution. Decorating texts became vital markers of “advanced” civilization; for social Darwinism constructed taste as the highest stage of human development.

If taste was the marker of advanced civilization, the home was its proximate expression. Andrew Carnegie, writing in 1889, centrally located the home in social evolution: “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization” (123). Given the vital importance of the home as a symbol of social evolution, Carnegie admonished his readers that “this change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential, for the progress of the race that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor” (123). Decorating taste, from Carnegie's perspective, provided the source of leadership in society, making those with tastefully decorated homes most fit to lead. Decorating texts suggested that taste entitled upper-class Americans to plunder the art objects of Other cultures because such plunder was constructed as in the interests of everybody: plunder allowed the elite to perfect taste (the highest stage in social evolution), as well as to “uplift” the colonized through its leadership. Consequently, we cannot ignore the degree to which decorating texts legitimated colonialist practice and its attendant construction of the colonized Other as “inferior” in order to confirm the class status of the bourgeoisie. The Gilded Age was rife with the consequences of colonialist ideology, suggesting that the search for self-identity and its performance were accomplished at the expense of the colonized.⁴

Decorating texts functioned as strategies of self performance through the practice of cultural hegemony. While they were attempts to provide an authentic sense of self by defining it in the larger context of social class, decorating texts legitimated larger material practices of social inequality. By generating clear, allegedly “natural” sources of social inequality, the bourgeoisie of the Gilded Age could provide clearer conceptions of self. Decorating texts strategically positioned the upper class individual in the highest site of social hierarchy. However, the stability of self-identity contained in these texts was achieved at the expense of the Other they constructed. In the name of taste, these texts consciously and unconsciously transformed both the Other's person and art into commodities for consumption. This transformation functioned to affirm the subjectivity of the bourgeois self by empowering it with the ability to objectify the Other. Thus, decorating texts, as strategies of textual reconstruction, reconfigured social relations in the process. Contained in the illusion of stability provided by affiliations and colonialist ideology, however, was a deeper feeling of weightlessness that decorating texts failed to address. Consequently, while the affiliations decorating texts constructed solidified class stability on one level, the strategies upon which this stability was built ultimately proved to be a symptom of the crisis in self-identity during the Gilded Age. The following discussion elaborates on the failure of decorating texts to restore the feeling of authenticity in Victorian America.

DECORATING TEXTS AND THE CRISIS OF SELF-IDENTITY

While decorating texts functioned to stablize self-identity by constructing class affiliations, they operated, at a different level, as the very source of individual identity. Since the Gilded Age was an era where the traditional sources of self definition had lost their authority, or, in Benjamin's terms, their “aura,” the decoration of one's home, as a practice, could restore, on the surface, an authentic sense of self. Art's transformation from cult value to exhibition value was mirrored in Victorian culture's ideology of self. Like art, individual identity was determined by its exhibition value, the ability to put on the proper appearances. If the self was defined by what it exhibited, then Americans in the Gilded Age literally defined the self through performance. Conceiving the Victorian self as a performance thus provides a poignant illustration of Twain and Warner's term, the “Gilded Age;” for it suggests that one's exhibited or performed identity was an overlay, a covering. However, since the Victorian self was something to be performed, specifically through the specialization and cushioning of private space, the textual strategy of its performance, decorating, contributed to the emptiness and alienation Americans of the time began to experience precisely because it was an overlay.

The nineteenth-century art historian and philosopher John Ruskin proclaimed that in the Gilded Age “taste is not only a part and an index of morality;—it is the only morality. … Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are” (in John Kasson 169). To American Victorians, this statement was not to be taken lightly, for the home was viewed by decorating advisors as the purest expression of one's self-identity. Citing Ruskin, Sheldon in Artistic Houses declared: “I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within and without, and with such differences as might suit and express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history” (43). In many respects, the home stood in a metonymic relationship to the individual. The collections of objects under the broad term “taste” summed up, through representation, an individual's identity. The nineteenth-century tendency to define individuals according to attributes or properties they possessed had profound implications for the conceptualization of the home. Human presence was subordinated to what the home said about it. For example, Clarence Cook, writing in 1881, pointed to the parlor as the representation of the self. Accordingly, this “room ought to represent the culture of the family,—what is their taste, what feeling they have for art, it should represent themselves, and not other people; and the troublesome fact is, that it will and must represent them, whether its owners would let it or not” (48-49).

Given the importance of their homes as representations of the self, Victorians lavished inordinate amounts of effort and money to furnish them. According to John Kasson, rooms were decorated primarily according to two strategies. First, furnishings were highly specialized, including gentlemen's armchairs, ladies' chairs, reception chairs, multitudes of rockers, and various sofas, settees, and lounges (174). Specialization reflected the increased tendency to isolate social functions, such that each item of furniture became connected to a specific social practice (chairs for reading, tables for leaving calling cards, for example). Specialization further fragmented the individual precisely because it splintered one's daily activities into series of practices often linked to specific material objects, resulting in a tendency for self performance and, consequently, self-identity to be inseparable from material possessions. Ultimately, specialization, as a textual strategy designed to provide coherence to the Victorian sense of self, undermined its own strategic value because it splintered the home into a collection of specialized objects designed for specific purposes. To the degree that Victorian self performance was tied to the objects in the home, decorative specialization contributed to the fragmentation it was intended to alleviate, thus surfacing the very anxieties it was intended to cover over.

While specialization directly reflected the transformation of social life into specialized tasks, another strategy, “cushioning,” offered protection from the alienation this transformation caused (John Kasson 174). By using a plethora of decorated fabrics, Victorians transformed parlors into “virtual cocoons of gentility” (John Kasson 175). Cushioning provided a displacement of the safety of the womb into the public rooms of the house. More than this, however, cushioning represented a deeper anxiety about the tensions between the public and private self. The inevitable feelings of emptiness in a public sphere governed by appearances could at least be negotiated or compensated in the public spaces of the home. In Artistic Houses, a depiction of a drawing room provides a good example. Every surface, including the wall hangings and the fireplace, is draped in fabric, creating the impression of a soft, warm, enveloping space (Sheldon 60-64). In its extreme, though, the strategy of cushioning had similar effects to gilding in that they both cover up—making objects appear better than they are. The comfort in public spaces such decoration sought to create was itself an illusion, making the room itself as much an appearance as social performance itself. Within the metonymy of decoration, the irony is that it attempted to give meaning to a vacuous self precisely through the strategy that rendered it problematic—putting on appearances. In this case decoration dealt with one displacement through another.

Cushioning and specialization, as strategies of self performance, functioned simultaneously to recapitulate American gender roles. When the specialization of American culture began to stratify social life into separate “spheres,” it simultaneously reappropriated social roles as functions of these spheres. There was, as Gillian Brown notes, a redefining of domestic space, the home, in gendered terms, relegating women to the private sphere: “Domestic ideology with its discourse of personal life proliferates alongside this economic development [the market economy] which removed women from the public realm of production and redirected men to work arenas increasingly subject to market contingencies” (3). The market economy of the nineteenth century recapitulated the public sphere as man's space, and the domestic sphere as woman's. As Brown suggests, the reappropriating of women's roles into the domestic sphere further disempowered women politically. Moreover, representing the home as the cushioned safe-haven from the turbulence of social life suggested that the role of women was to maintain the comfort and emotional stability of men and children in the home. Joy Kasson observes that “increasingly, by the end of the nineteenth century, the family was defined as the proper sphere for women of the genteel classes, and the home had become a bastion of emotional retreat from a competitive, commercial culture” (3). Thus, constructing the home as the comfortable retreat from the anxieties of the market while simultaneously positioning women in the home removed women from the primary sources of political power. However, the removal of women from the public sphere reflected a deeper anxiety—namely the fear of women's empowerment. While decorating texts located women in the home, women were seeking greater representation in the workplace, politics, and public life in general (Joy Kasson 3). Decoration and decorating texts functioned strategically to construct an ideology that defined women's “ideal” place as in the home. Yet the ideology they constructed was itself an overlay: it attempted to cover up the deeper fear of women breaking from traditionally-defined sex roles.

Decorating the home became an important social practice because it was an instantiation of larger social changes. The segregating of space within the home mirrored the ideological division of city space into districts.⁵ The metonymic relationship between home and individual reveals the extent to which Victorians sought authentic expressions of self through both material possessions and the refinement such possessions allegedly cultivated. However, as a representation of self, decoration was just as much an appearance—expressed through art, rather than conduct—as the social roles one assumed in public. For decoration was the process of covering up, making the ornamental interiors of middle class houses provide the illusion of coherent self-identity when social life became fragmented and weightless. In the end, decoration not only could not alleviate the anxieties of modern culture,⁶ it reproduced them through displacements doomed to the same fragmentation they sought to mask.

THE DOMESTIC MUSEUM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Though museums had existed since the late eighteenth century, it was not until the 1860s that they became well-funded public institutions (Lewis et al. 23). As a social practice museums were predicated on the social function of display. Museums were strategies of textual reconstruction in which Americans attempted to restore the authenticity of art, as well as experience, by reconstructing contextualizing traditions. Since, as Benjamin contends, art's aura, authority, and authenticity came from its embeddedness in tradition, museums were attempts to restore these characteristics by careful ordering of objects. Creating from disparate objects of plunder the illusion of order was a vital strategy of self performance—one that functioned through the metonymy of orderly display. The emergent popularity of museums coincided with the transformation of the home into a domestic museum. John Kasson writes that a central function of decoration was to provide “the artful display of objects of cultural attainment and personal association. These objects included a piano or parlor organ, well-stocked bookcases, homemade artworks such as needlepoint and painted china, and personal collections of photographs, engravings, and souvenirs of travel, exhibited on walls, parlor tables, étagères, hanging shelves, mantelpieces, and art corners.” Accordingly, Kasson observes, “the parlor became a kind of ‘memory palace’ of culture, a miniature museum thick with meaning, an artful declaration of its owners' sensibility” (175-6). The parlor was also an important stage for oral performance of speeches and literature (The Art of Conversing 27). In the semi-public performances of the parlor one could perfect his or her public image through such performance, thus assigning a directly performative function for this space. Conceiving of the home as a museum, more than any other decorating practice, was the most visible attempt to perform self through the perceived coherence, tradition, and order of exhibition. Yet, like the other decorating strategies, domesticating the museum was doomed to failure because it performed self through the display of objects. At best, the exhibition of objects functioned to overlay or stand in place of self but it could not address the underlying sources of anxiety. In fact, as this discussion illustrates, the strategic use of the museum reproduced the weightlessness of Victorian culture it was intended to alleviate.

As the domestic museum became a prominent social practice, decorating advisors increasingly demanded that patrons fill their homes with “authentic” art—art that had tradition or that which was original, not copied. Mass produced items were condemned as mere imitations, as Charles Eastlake warned in 1881: “The moment a carved or sculptured surface begins to shine, it loses interest. But machine-made ornament, invested with an artificial lustre, is an artistic enormity which should be universally discouraged” (85). Applied ornament violated these notions of authenticity because it was a covering, a veneer over the real: “Even if it were carved out of solid wood, it would be very objectionable in design; but this trash is only lightly glued to the frame which it is supposed to adorn, and may indeed frequently be removed with infinite advantage to the general effect” (Eastlake 59). When fine finishing materials were in demand, prices went up, forcing many to resort to “faux finishes” or disguising cheaper materials to make them look better—a practice Eastlake, among others, condemned as trickery: “At the present time, when both marble and oak are beyond the reach of ordinary incomes, the usual practice is to cover the walls with a paper stained and varnished in imitation of marble. This is, perhaps, a more excusable sham than others to which I have alluded; but still it is a sham, and ought therefore to be condemned” (52). As Eastlake's declaration reveals, the search for authentic finishes made class distinctions based upon the prices certain materials commanded, suggesting that one's class affiliations were the basis of a truly aesthetic environment.

The domestic museum, however, was more than an expression of genuine materials: the objects themselves had to be genuine. In most cases, writers on decoration celebrated art objects for their embeddedness in history as the true criterion for authenticity. Artistic Houses praised tradition in a mantel ornament: “Another interesting historic curiosity is the head of the yellow-pine figurehead of General Jackson, which once adorned the bow of the United States frigate Constitution in Boston Harbor, but which, during the intense political excitement of 1835, was sawed off by a zealous young druggist of that city, who had rowed out to the frigate and climbed up her chain-cable during the night of Cimmerian darkness.” Artistic Houses praises its display: “Mr. Dickerson has honored this relic with a place on the mantel of his spacious and well-lighted billiard-room” (85). Describing a guest room, Artistic Houses continues, “even the facing of the fireplace is of old blue Dutch tiles brought over by the colonists; and the corner cupboard extending to the ceiling, with the small glass panes of its doors and the old blue china behind them—how interesting a souvenir of the good old days it is!” (51). The attempts the Victorians made in search of authentic art reflected an obsessive search for lost traditions. Items that have history or tradition have an aura of authenticity. Artistic Houses praises the items of one dining room: “Some exquisite Sèvres porcelains glisten from a wallcabinet close by, and near them are two lofty candelabra once belonging to the first Napoleon, and afterward to the French embassy at Rome” (151). These passages reveal the extent to which historical artifacts are an integral part of the Victorian domicile. They invoke an experience tied to the past conceived as the “good old days.”

Possessing such artifacts was only part of their status; one also had to display them appropriately. For this reason, many collectors built new houses in the latter decades of the nineteenth century to display items properly—a trend reflected in the fact that nearly all Eastern American cities had commissioned new metropolitan museums (Lewis et al. 22-23). One such house, notes Artistic Houses, was constructed as a display case for the art treasures its owner ransacked Europe and Asia collecting (a reminder of the colonizing nature of art collection): “Instead of building for them [art objects] a distinct and lofty gallery, the owner has constructed a series of apartments called cabinets, that not only open into each other, but are integral parts of the house itself” (149). The result blurs the boundaries between house and museum: “He seems to have had no desire to keep his family away from his pictures, and certainly any visitor once inside the building finds himself immediately within sight of the chef-d’oeuvres of the Gibson collection, and would be at a loss to say just where the ‘gallery’ began and just where it ended” (149). During this period, the “proper” artistic home was transformed into a display case for art objects. And, as the passages admit, it is very difficult to determine if people actually lived in such houses. The distance between art object and self was reduced to such a degree that the former could perform for the latter. By breaking down the distance between art and its owner, the domestic museum made it possible for the perceived stability of art's exhibition to stand for, and thus perform the self.

Both the concern for “genuine” artifacts and careful arrangement of them points to the subtle social and psychological dimensions of the domestic museum. In many ways, the domestic museum was an attempt to provide meaning in the form of order and authenticity for a confused and fragmented culture. In his essay, “The Museum's Furnace,” Eugenio Donato argues that collections of artifacts functioned to provide meaning to experience by locating it in a larger, seemingly coherent history (220). Museums functioned to provide stable realities grounded in some sense of tradition. By tying objects to what was perceived as “real” history, Victorians were attempting to verify the authenticity of their own existence—attempting to locate themselves as part of a larger historical space—a space whose coherence and meaning could specifically define and position the self.

Unfortunately, as Donato observes, the coherence the domestic museum provided was illusory. Initially, the arrangement and collection of objects, regardless of the system under which they were organized, were arbitrary arrangements of objects stripped from their historical contexts. As such, the objects themselves were merely fragments of other cultures being appropriated to provide meaning for a culture that itself was fragmented. The problem of the museum, then, was precisely the problem of representation:

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world. (Donato 223)

Victorians transformed their homes into museums in an attempt to provide meaning for the past, which, in some ways, could provide meaning for the present. For historical objects only had value to the extent that they had meaning. Throughout the rhetoric of decorating texts is the search for meaning in objects. As a result, culture, as an umbrella term for knowledge, sensitivity, and a stage in social evolution, suggests a deeper anxiety in Victorian culture: the concern that modernization had alienated the individual from reality. Thus, stripping objects of their meanings in many ways denies their claim to reality. As Donato concludes, “should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but ‘bric-a-brac,’ a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations” (223).

The domestic museum, thus conceived, was a strategy for coping with the anxieties of modern culture. Concerned that the schism between public and private life had created a vacuum for the individual, Victorians turned to domesticating the museum in order to provide through representations a unity that modern life had forever banished from them. As they intersect with gender and race, class distinctions informed aesthetic questions in the Gilded Age. Consequently, the very strategies of aestheticization—particularly strategies of decoration—were attempts to provide a lustre to mask deeper anxieties and concerns that were themselves products of the capitalist economy. The bourgeois aesthetic of the home reproduced the fragmented and hollow nature of the Victorian self precisely because it was a mask—an overlay. Hence the very strategy for alleviating the cultural crisis of the era was itself conducive to the crisis, rendering the hegemony of the Victorian bourgeoisie unstable. The instability of bourgeois hegemony, the crisis to which this study continually refers, was a “crisis of cultural authority” (Lears 5) because the bases upon which class distinctions were built were themselves fictions built upon collections of material possessions. Beneath the gilded mask of decoration was the deeper anxiety over the inauthenticity of Victorian experience, the crisis of cultural authority. Donato provides both an explanation of the failure of the domestic museum as a textual strategy of self performance and the general failure of decorating texts as sources of stability in Victorian culture: “spatially and temporally detached from their origin and function, they [artifacts] signify only by arbitrary and derived associations. The series in which the individual pieces and fragments are displayed is also arbitrary and incapable of investing the particular object with anything but irrelevant fabulations” (224).

CONCLUSION

We can begin to see how the various social, economic, and cultural forces began to merge in the discourses on interior decoration. Exploitative social inequality was intimately tied to the consumption of art. Textual reconstruction, social affiliations, colonialism, specialization, cushioning, and domesticating the museum gave the practice of interior decoration and its attendant texts rhetorical and performative power. Through the authority of taste, the wealthy of the Gilded Age were able to solidify their class positions and thereby maintain their exploitative relations of production. Through decorating texts the ideological practice of colonialism, defined and legitimated by social Darwinism and its accompanying discourses, rhetorically masked the interests of the wealthy. For deeper examination reveals that decorating texts simultaneously attempted to provide stable self-identity and justify the enormous exploitation of the colonized as in the interests of society in general. If taste, through its disciplining of the body, failed to keep the colonized and other oppressed classes quiescent, it provided an ideological justification for violent forms of repression. Since taste constructed the colonized as inferior, irrational, or immoral, as decorating texts implicitly did, it provided sanction for repression in the name of preserving order. For these reasons, interior decoration was central to the production of capitalist ideology. Capitalist ideology can operate, as this study indicates, to legitimate the position of the wealthy and therefore maintain oppressive relations of production.

More than this, however, the hegemony of the wealthy was an unstable one. The fragmented nature of the bourgeois individual thus generated a crisis of cultural authority. Anxiety over the growing sense of emptiness in bourgeois social life rendered problematic the leadership ability of the dominant class. For the shifting definitions of “taste” reflected the arbitrariness such distinctions themselves had. In many ways, decoration was a strategy to address the emptiness of the individual—to provide the illusion of wholeness and authenticity to offset, or cover-up, the weightlessness of Victorian self-identity. As a result, decoration and its attendant discourses reproduced the crisis of cultural authority precisely because they operated metonymically, transforming self-identity through its performative interaction with aesthetic objects. As strategies of self performance, decorating texts failed to restore a solid sense of self, for beneath the fictitious unity of decorating texts lay a disparate collection of objects; beneath the fiction of stability, a fragmented, alienated self.

Notes

1. “New historicism” is a contested term of late but is generally used to describe studies that attempt to show how texts in specific historical periods circulate social values and conflicts—how texts attempt to negotiate cultural crises. The term is most readily associated with Stephen Greenblatt. For a discussion of the circulatory functions of texts, see Greenblatt, 1-14. See also Simon During.

2. For the purposes of this study, text and textualization shall be used to designate cultural artifacts transformed into objects of appreciation or exhibition. Textualization is a process by which aesthetic objects are appropriated as objects in relation to an owner. It need be noted that textualization refers to a necessary connection between object and owner (subject), an interaction, an engagement that subtly transforms both object and subject. Though decorating “text” refers to books and articles on decoration, it should be remembered that the relationship between the reader/owner and the texts themselves is textual. That is, readers/owners engage such texts in ways similar to the way they engage aesthetic objects and decoration itself through the auspices of “taste.”

3. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that most attempts to transgress class boundaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected a desire of the bourgeoisie both to erect and transgress class boundaries. However, as they point out, attempts to transgress class boundaries did not change the fundamental terms of class society. Similarly, the present study contends that the secularization of nineteenth-century culture did not change the essential terms of class distinction. Rather, the nineteenth century transformed the justifications for distinctions from religious to secular sources. For a relevant discussion, see Stallybrass & White, esp. chs. 3, 4, 5.

4. Richard Drinnon provides a detailed history of some of the more brutal practices of American colonialism, such as the American seizure of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He points out that a standard practice of American Imperialism of the late nineteenth century was to bring back “natives” to display in museums, circuses, amusement parks, and expositions. After his capture, for example, Geronimo was put on display in full “Indian” garb at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. For a more complete discussion, see Facing West, Ch. 22. Sander Gilman provides a fascinating and frightening discussion of the nineteenth-century practice of putting colonized people “on display” in his article “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”

5. Although the functional separation of public, semipublic, and private spaces was centuries old by the nineteenth century, the ideological separation became more significant as a site of struggle, particularly over the meaning of gender identity. In the nineteenth century, spheres came to connote political segregation so that women and other colonized groups were removed ideologically from the sources of political power. For more comprehensive discussions of this ideological struggle, see Gillian Brown and Joy Kasson.

6. The term “modern culture” best represents the culture of the late nineteenth century because, as Jackson Lears suggests, the modern condition which Americans now inhabit began in the Gilded Age. For an excellent discussion of the roots of our contemporary historical period, as well as reactions against it, see Lears, chs. 1, 3.

Works Cited

The Art of Conversing. Boston, 1845.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-251.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Aristocracy of Culture.” Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader. Eds. Richard Collins et al. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Press, 1986. 164-193.

Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Burke, Kenneth. “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education.” Modern Philosophies and Education. Ed. N. B. Henry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955. 259-303.

Carnegie, Andrew. “The Gospel of Wealth.” Words that Made American History Since the Civil War. Ed. Richard N. Current et al. Vol. 2. 3rd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1962. 123-133.

Cook, Clarence. The House Beautiful. New York, 1878.

Donato, Eugenio. “The Museum's Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pecuchet.” Textual Strategies: in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 213-238.

Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.

During, Simon. “New Historicism.” Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 171-189.

Eastlake, Charles L. Hints on Household Taste. 1881. Introd. John Gloag. New York: Dover, 1969.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud: Education of the Senses. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.

Gilman, Sander. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 204-242.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 1-14.

Hoare, Quinton, and Geoffrey N. Smith, eds. and trans. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 1971.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1959.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59-87.

Kasson, John. Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1990.

Kasson, Joy. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Lears, Jackson. No Place of Grace. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Lewis, Arnold, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin. The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987.

Maass, John. The Victorian Home in America. New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1970.

Mercer, Colin. “A Poverty of Desire: Pleasure and Popular Politics.” Formations of Pleasure. Ed. Formations. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1983. 50-68.

Morgan, H. Wayne, The Gilded Age. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1970.

Mumford, Lewis. Sticks and Stones. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955.

Said, Edward W. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 205-225.

———. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983.

Sheldon, George. Artistic Houses Being a Series of Interior Views of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes in the United States. New York, 1883/1884.

Sherwood, Mary E. W. “Certain New York Houses.” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 65 (1882): 680-690.

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.