Compiled by AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior
Version 1.1
'Under Louis-Philippe the private citizen enters the stage of history …..
For the private person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of work. The former is constituted by the interior; the office is its complement. The private person who squares his accounts with reality in his office demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions. This need is all the more pressing since he has no intention of extending his commercial considerations into social ones. In shaping his private environment he represses both. From this spring the phantasmagorias of the interior. For the private individual environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and past. His drawing room is a box in the world theater.'
In this extract from an essay that investigated the character of the early-nineteenth-century French bourgeois interior, the German cultural philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin drew a distinction between domestic space and other forms of public space. The distinction was extremely influential and has been conceptualised under the term 'separate spheres', as investigated in the historical study by Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850. Subsequent historical interpretation has questioned whether there ever was such a clearly defined distinction between public and private as suggested by Benjamin but the concept remains a useful conceptual framework for thinking about the domestic interior.
Boundaries and Thresholds
Room Disposition and Function
Idea
Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850, London: Hutchinson, 1987.
‘Louis-Philippe, or the Interior’
Benjamin, Walter (author); Demetz, Peter (editor); Jephcott, Edmund (translator) 1955, 1979
Book, JA1001
Compiled by AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior
Version 1.1