Spatiality and materiality: the girl’s bedroom in fin-de-siècle advice literature

Abstract

This essay examines late nineteenth-century advice literature, such as the magazines for young adults, domestic advice manuals, and home decoration books, to determine how guidelines about the spatial and material construction of a girl’s bedroom supported the idea of teen femininity in fin-de-siècle Britain. These primary sources of information, boosted by the rise of household art, offered an effective means of understanding adolescent girls’ relationships to the modern interior. Fin-de-siècle advice literature, a mixture of facts and fancies, frequently illuminated the tasteful design of a room of one’s own as a socially aspirational model to help female adolescents reach the ideal and practical perfection of girlhood. Bedroom décor constituted a type of visual vocabulary that demonstrated a young girl’s sense of spatiality and materiality along the lines of upholstered refinement and artistic display. In a broader sense, the spatial configuration of a bedroom provided scope for a girl’s orientation toward artistic furnishing in keeping with the law-and-order paradigm.