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.

Keywords:

• advice literature
• adolescent girls
• bedroom space
• spatiality
• materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shu-chuan Yan

Shu-chuan Yan received her PhD in English from the University of Manchester. She currently teaches in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her work has appeared in Fashion Theory, Women’s Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Journal of Modern Craft, and Home Cultures. Email: [email protected]