| During the nineteenth century in England possessions that reflected the ceaseless getting and spending, superficiality, and economic individuality of the marketplace were viewed within the home as emblems of security, safety, stillness, and occasions of nostalgic remembering. I examine a gendered tension in the Victorian novel between the home as a refuge constituting and maintaining sentimental bonds between members of the family and as a site for the cultivation of individual character and the expression of personality. The interior of the house was understood by the Victorians to have a more nuanced relationship with the idea of authentic selfhood than any reader today would imagine. Diana Fuss has noted a suggestive etymological connection in this regard: "interiority" acquired its present meaning of "inner character or nature" in 1803, and "interior decoration" was coined by Thomas Hope only four years later, in 1807. Objects were viewed as influencing moral character (in an 1861 sermon, the minister Andrew Boyd warns: "[w]e are all moral chameleons; and we take the colour of the objects among which we are placed") and at the same time, offered a distinctive means of representing selfhood (in her Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton informs the reader that her "spirit will be seen through the whole establishment").; My analysis is informed by historical events that influenced the industry of interior decoration, including the expansion of the railway during the 1840s, the Great Exhibition of 1851, debates about female suffrage in the 1860s, and the response to Wilde's trial in 1895; letters and essays by Dickens, Oliphant, Eliot, and Wilde regarding the decoration of their own homes and the cultural role of adornment; and aesthetic manuals that document the prominence of possessions in an understanding of home. Through readings of Dombey and Son, Jane Eyre, Miss Marjoribanks, Middlemarch, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, I contend that the representation of the domestic interior in the Victorian novel provides a visible exhibit of the difficulty of subsuming a sense of self within the house, and is integral to understanding the fate of the individual within the Victorian home. |
