“Our Artistic Home”: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girl’s Own Paper

Abstract

By zooming in on the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP), this essay demonstrates how the production and dissemination of shared domestic cultures are directed at adolescent girls through esthetic practices of furnishing and decorating the home. The essay aims to contextualize the role of household art in the relationship between female adolescence and bourgeois domestic interiors in fin de siècle Britain. The relationship reveals three important aspects of domestic cultures: household art, do-it-yourself crafts, and material collecting. First, the GOP advises adolescent girls to read and interpret the language of household art through selection and placing, which, in turn, facilitates the construction of the textuality of interior furnishings. The GOP’s esthetic theory, an integral part of educating and improving girls’ taste, functions to enhance their room-layout skills and also construct their architectural identities. Second, adolescent girls are credited with the active role of young home-makers in the GOP. The practice of amateur upholstery shapes female youth’s artistic self-expression and manifests their autonomous control over the making of home-crafted objects. And thirdly, the act of collecting furniture pieces and decorative items functions to address the various components of a room alongside contemporary social concerns about good taste. The accumulation of artifacts allows girls to achieve a sense of materiality and ownership contained within the domestic sphere. Home decoration in general provides a focal point for understanding how the familial space becomes the site of adolescent girls’ artistic labor and household elegancies.

Keywords:

• Household art
• female adolescence
• domestic interiors
• DIY crafts
• material collecting
• Girl’s Own Paper

NOTES

Notes

1 Recent backlash literature in social art history (Wolff 1988; Wilson 1992; Deepwell 2015) has sought alternative ways for thinking about how public space is gendered by critiquing the limited definitions of the separate sphere ideology, especially in a period when higher education, paid work, and entry into the professions were more openly claimed by women.

2 Although the GOP occasionally made explicit reference to its all-class readerships, the majority of its content was aimed at “middle and lower-middle-class young women between schoolroom and marriage” (Brake and Demoor 2009: 249).

3 But, with its progressive nature, the GOP also aimed to meet the needs of “the New Girl” seeking guidance on how to negotiate the changing social status and identity of women (Doughty 2004: 9).

4 It is difficult to determine what proportion of the GOP each month was devoted to art in the home. Yet the subject matter of art, such as needlework, embroidery, decoration, drawing, and painting, was routinely presented in the GOP when the esthetic appeal of the home was at issue. It was in different forms of advice columns, short stories, reader competitions, and correspondence sections to showcase the home-making aspects of a girl’s life.

5 The term is taken from the title of Eastlake’s first essay on furniture and decoration in Cornhill Magazine in July 1864.

6 “Poetic home,” a nineteenth-century catchphrase, called into question the interior designer’s creation of atmosphere and character. In Stefan Muthesius’s view, the word “poetic,” an epithet tied with art, literature and history, referred to a carefully coordinated interior that was middle-class, comfortable and cozy. Decoration was identified with poetry in the most direct way (Muthesius 2009: 31) because a room’s appearance, including its shapes, textures, colors and lighting, would create a “poetic effect” on the mood of its occupants (Muthesius 2009: 27). See also Mark Taylor (2012) and Gene Bawden (2015) for similar discussions.

7 Beverly Gordon (1996: 288) remarks that “Windows and furniture were, like women, ‘draped’ with fabric and ‘festooned’ with ribbons or cloth. Furnishings and rooms, like women or their clothing, could be ‘pretty,’ ‘elegant,’ or ‘ornate’; in other words, they, like the body, could be dressed.”

8 The tool box is reminiscent of carpentry, an amateur craft practice for women boosted by the rise of interior decoration at the fin de siècle. One article from 1892 stated that wood carving was considered “a lucrative home occupation” for the girls with “artistic taste, originality of conception, and delicacy of touch” (S. F. A. Caulfeild 1892: 230). Another from 1883 confirmed the same belief that wood carving was “a beautiful and elegant art, of the highest value for decorative purposes” (Anon 1883: 179). Artist Signor Bulleti offered day and evening classes at the Royal Albert Hall, South Kensington. Miss Agnes Garrett taught pupils “cabinet making, designing of household furniture and upholstery” (Anon 1883: 180). Another anonymous article revealed that “Two young women in America have taken to carpentry with the greatest success. What is known as ‘inside finishing’ is their special work, and they declare it to be much less irksome and tiring than many phrases of household service.” The two young women “set glass and paint the inside of houses as well as any man, and have more work than they can accomplish” (Anon 1895c: 528). These provide evidence that girls did engage themselves in the task of furniture-making.

9 Woolf was one of the girl readers of the GOP. As revealed in the December 1891 edition of Hyde Park Gate News, a family magazine titled after their childhood home in London, Woolf and her sister Vanessa referred to the GOP as a suitable Christmas gift (2005 [1891]: 11).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shu-Chuan Yan

SHU-CHUAN YAN IS ASSOCIATED WITH DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF KAOHSIUNG, 700 KAOHSIUNG UNIVERSITY ROAD, NANZI DISTRICT, KAOHSIUNG 811, TAIWAN. [email protected]