Aestheticizing the home: Textual strategies of taste, self‐identity, and bourgeois hegemony in America's “gilded age”

Abstract

Cultural theorist Walter Benjamin observes that the “age of mechanical reproduction” had stripped art of its authenticity. Nowhere is Benjamin's insight more evident than in America's “Gilded Age.” Yet the implications of Benjamin's observation are more far‐reaching than his essay would indicate. For the “Gilded Age” itself was a time of cultural crisis when American self‐identity also seemed to have lost its authenticity. This essay examines interior decoration texts as strategies for authenticating the Victorian bourgeois conception of self. It suggests that while such texts served, on one level, to perpetuate the hegemony of the bourgeoisie by justifying economic and social inequalities, this hegemony proved unstable because the performance of self through decoration and decorating texts reproduced the feeling of weightlessness increasingly evident in nineteenth‐century America. Performing self through the metonymy of decoration functioned to create the illusion of stability, a veneer that masked the inequalities, fragmentation, exploitation, and anxiety produced by the emergence of industrial capitalism.