Facies de la Formación Santa Victoria (Fsv) en su

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Victorian images on present-day beliefs about the “ideal home”. Rapid social and economic changes since the close of the nineteenth century have done little to change the Victorian belief in the home as a private retreat within which a personal life can be enjoyed in peace and security. The term “Victorian” is, of course, derived from the name of Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to 1902 over what was once an extensive British Empire. But, like the empire she once ruled, “Victo-rian” has come to refer to a series of attitudes and values whose influence goes well beyond the shores of Britain and the boundaries of the nineteenth century. As Grier has noted in her study of culture and comfort in the middle-class North American drawing room or “parlor”, the concept of Victorian can be defined in more global terms as the

“Anglo-American, transatlantic, bourgeois culture of industrialising western civilisa-tion”.¹

Grier’s definition suggests that, seen as a global feature of industrializing western civili-zation, Victorian culture is dauntingly complex. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to draw attention to only a single yet nevertheless highly significant strand in Victorian thought, namely the contribution that images of the ideal Victorian home have made to the distinctive features of the idea of home in western society. Images, both visual (photographs, paintings, book illustrations etc.) and verbal (novels, poems, biographies, autobiographies, histories etc.), are closely connected with expressions of the ideal because they often give shape to the hopes and fears of people living during a specific historical period. Mundane everyday life can be seen as a constant struggle to give meaning to life in terms of contemporary cultural ideals. As an image, the “ideal home” is an expression of value: the kind of private life that individuals hope to achieve. As conceived by the Victorians, the image of the ideal home is an essential link between the public and the private domestic world, at once a coveted symbol of success in both these spheres, and of the effort to achieve normality and respectability by its residents.

It is not stretching the argument too far to say that the image of home dominated the Victorian collective vision of a stable and harmonious social environment in the private and public spheres and also in this world and the next. In his study of the roles of hymns and hymn singing in Victorian everyday life, I. Bradley noted that a constantly recurring image in “the depiction of heaven in Victorian hymns is that of the happy home, with work over for the day, the table spread and the family gathered together”.²If the home in its ideal expression was analogous to heaven, it was also, as Jalland observed, the place where many people hoped to die.³Certainly for the middle and upper classes, the family home was the appropriate place to confront and come to terms with the harsh realities of painful terminal illness and death; an essential link between the secular and the sacred. In these social circles “death bed scenes were private affairs which were usually limited to a relatively small number of members of the immediate family, together with a nurse or a servant, and occasionally a doctor”.⁴The home, then, was described not only as a retreat from the not infrequently harsh realities of the Victorian world but also as a secluded place to struggle with those realities such as illness and death which succeeded in breaching the walls.

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Two important features of the ideal home as a retreat were particularly significant. The first was the constructed façade – the physical structure of stone, bricks and mortar which helped to conceal the residents from public view – and the second has been neatly described by Marshall and Willox as the “home within”.⁵The home within was the social organiza-tion of private life inside the private spaces such as bedrooms, studies and the various forms of specific social interaction that were possible in these rooms. Because the external struc-ture of the houses built during the building booms of the Victorian period were often uniform in external appearance, as is the case today, it was the home within which gave these homes their individual character and which encouraged an increasing fascination of outsiders (newspaper reporters, novelists, gossips) with the lives of those inside.

While the hedges, fences and walls surrounding residents guaranteed some kind of protection against the world outside, it is important to remember that private spaces of the home were not always sacrosanct and were often open to the scrutiny of other members of the family, especially the “head of the household” and servants. For this reason, as Bailin has indicated, the sickroom was often especially valued as “a haven of comfort”, order and “natural affection”.⁶Because behavior and expressions of emotions normally repressed in polite society were permissible when someone became ill, the sick-room was the one place within the home where an individual could retreat from the demands of family life and be himself/herself. One of the consolations of illness, as Flor-ence Nightingale discovered during the later part of her life, was that the conventions surrounding the sickroom made it possible for the ill person to abandon the highly disci-plined rigors and rituals of respectable conduct and to “express feelings and essential truths about the undisfigured self”.⁷

It is important to recognize that the Victorian home was not simply a place for a relaxed presentation of a “real” self away from the prying eyes of the world but a complex arrangement of spaces for the presentation of a miniaturized array of variable domestic selves. There is therefore an evident tension here between the idealized image of the home as a private haven for the self and the practical everyday activities of family life and relationships. For those who lived in polite society, the home was as much a display cabinet of social virtues as it was a haven for an army of would-be social reclusives. Stan-dards had to be maintained both within and without its confines and the ideal Victorian home is therefore more accurately defined as a kind of battleground: a place of constant struggle to maintain privacy, security and respectability in a dangerous world.

It was also, of course, a gendered place. While historians such as Tosh⁸have shown how men became increasingly drawn to the rewards of a domesticated life during the Victorian period, the key role for respectably active women was, as George Elgar Hicks’s series of three paintings entitled Woman’s Mission (1863) graphically asserted, the domestic caregiver. Casteras has recorded that The Times newspaper described the trilogy as depicting:

“woman in three phases of her duties as ministering angel”, … Hicks himself believed that woman fulfilled a sacrosanct function as wife and mother and wrote, “I presume no woman will make up her mind to remain single, it is contrary to nature”.⁹[…]

Respectability and social deviance: the ideal home as fortress

[…] During the early nineteenth century the gradual separation of paid employment from the domestic sphere helped create a new concept of a realm ruled over by women, Privacy, security and respectability 151

bringing with it what some social analysts controversially regard as a form of empower-ment in the private sphere.¹⁰The central contrast between the home and the outside world placed the onus on women to carry out the emotional and moral labor necessary to create and maintain the ideal home: in other words to transform the image into reality.

According to Halttunen it was the main responsibility of women to create a world free from the dissimulations, manipulations and heartlessness of the outside world.¹¹“By defi-nition”, she writes, “the domestic sphere was closed off, hermetically sealed from the poisonous air of the world outside”.¹²

According to this analysis of middle-class domestic culture in America, 1830–1870, the location of a staged meeting point between the external potentially threatening world of strangers and the internal domestic sphere of intimates was the parlor.

“Geographically”, Halttunen observes, the parlor

lay between the urban street where strangers freely mingled and the back regions of the house where only family members were permitted to enter uninvited. According to the cult of domesticity, the parlor provided the woman of the house with a

“cultural podium” from which she was to exert her moral influence.¹³

Within this private sphere clear distinctions were made between deviance and respect-ability. The parlor was the acme of the latter: a purified social arena subject to constant surveillance dictated by the proliferating rules of etiquette. The private world was estab-lished as a respectable social space in constant contrast to the dangers and deviations located in the competitive battlefield of the male-dominated public world where the money was made to furnish the “soft furnishings” of the home.

As the stage on which respectable domestic social performances took place, the parlor was suitably dressed and embellished. Furnishings and decorations were designed and marketed according to complex rules of moral consumption which it was essential for the successful housewife to command as she moved through her prescribed life course from newly married woman to matron:

The right furniture was thought to ease social intercourse by helping visitors to look their best, and, when correctly arranged, by encouraging circulation. Similarly, the hostess who tastefully arranged potted shrubs, plants, and flowers throughout the room helped “brighten” and “enliven” the company by placing them in “almost a fairy-like scene”. In addition she selected and displayed the “curiosities, handsome books, photographs, engravings, stereoscopes, medallions, any works of art you may own”, which were the stage properties of polite social intercourse. Such conversation pieces, according to one etiquette manual, were the good hostess’s “armor against stupidity”. The polite Victorian hostess was not simply an actress in the genteel performance; she was also the stage manager, who exercised great responsibility for the performances of everyone who entered her parlor.¹⁴

A key feature of these genteel performances was the careful maintenance of the privacy of the back regions of the house. Household manuals advised that the “internal machinery of a household” should be carefully concealed from public view.¹⁵In these segregated areas could be found members of the family who had not yet been civilized (infants in the nursery) or whose social status was changed in respect of debilitating illnesses, mental or physical (the sickroom) or the decrements of old age (seated before the kitchen fire).

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The housewife was entrusted with the discipline of maintaining the decoration of the home and the smooth running of the material mechanisms of family life and also with the maintenance of the healthy physical bodies of members of her family and the support staff.

Above all, the Victorian middle-class home was a privatized arena where comfort and etiquette softened the deviant “angles” and “defects” of human character.¹⁶As we noted above, the Victorian home was not only a haven from deviance but also a place where it was possible for deviance to occur and which must therefore be an arena for constant vigi-lance. In her study of the culture of comfort, Grier, like Halttunen, focuses on the parlor as one of the places “intended to serve as the setting for important social events and to present the civilized façades of its occupants”.¹⁷The intention was to convey domesticity through

“comfort” and cosmopolitanism through “culture”. The term “comfort” “designates the presence of the more family-centered, even religious values associated with ‘home,’ values emphasizing perfect sincerity and moderation in all things. Social commentators claimed comfort to be a distinctively middle-class state of mind”.¹⁸

Hearth and home

As an example of the processes which Grier and Halttunen regard as central to the construction of the middle-class home, it is useful to refer to McNair Wright’s The Complete Home: An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs (1881): “Between the Home set up in Eden, and the Home before us in Eternity, stand the Homes of Earth in a long succession … Every home has its influence, for good or evil, upon humanity at large”.¹⁹The home of Earth thus takes on a mediating function between the secular and the sacred function. The home and home making were dignified as institutions endowed by God as his ideal of human life and (as noted previously) heaven was conceptualized as an ideal home.

Because of its traditional sacred associations, the fireplace played a special role in the symbolic representation of the ideal home. During the nineteenth century the fireplace, writes Litman,²⁰was “an all-pervasive symbol”. “Homes lacking fireplaces literally and figuratively lack warmth”.²¹In this sense the hearth, as the place where heat is generated before the invention of central heating, is closely associated with the heart as the organ which gives life and is traditionally regarded as the source of human emotion. To be welcomed at the hearth is to anticipate a closer and more intimate form of human rela-tionship. Images of hearths filled with burning logs at Christmas are only one idealized set of images of hearth and home. The sacred symbolism of the hearth was not confined to the bourgeois drawing room or parlor but was part of the wider Victorian concern with the moral implications of architecture. Litman shows how the Victorian reading of architectural forms corresponded with the physiognomic or close scrutiny of external appearances of human beings for evidence of their inner moral character which exercised such an influence on Victorian painters.²²Mary Cowling has shown how the interpreta-tion of character types by painters of modern Victorian life was influenced by the physiognomic tradition dating principally from the dominant influence in the latter half of the eighteenth century of the Zwinglian minister, Lavater. Victorian audiences were well versed in physiognomic codes deriving from his work and Victorian artists were skilled in drawing on these symbols to comply with the demands of popular taste.

Painters and public subscribed to what Cowling describes as a “shared system of beliefs about human character, and its physiognomic expression” and we should not therefore be surprised that the paintings were “read so easily”.²³

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The widespread belief in the idea that the moral quality of a person, a place or a building could be determined through a close scrutiny of external appearance and struc-ture inevitably included the home. The pervasive influence of the so-called science of physiognomy was such that significant connections were made between architecture and the visual and literary arts.²⁴Thus, as Litman notes, “The great mid-century American architectural theorist, Andrew Jackson Downing, put it succinctly: ‘We believe much of the character of every man may be read in his house.’”²⁵[…]

In this expanding and symbolically complex arena of ideal homes and gardens the role of the woman as the quintessential housewife remained crucial. Modern developments in consumer culture, particularly the department store, reinforced the Victorian ideal of woman as home maker by playing an important part in educating women as modern housewives.²⁶In the department store the housewife learnt both to indulge what were regarded as typical “feminine” whims and fancies, expressed in an “impulsive” fascination with shopping, yet at the same time to temper her desires with a rational eye to the exigen-cies of “good housekeeping”. As Laermans has observed, the department store reinforced the traditional distinction between the home as woman’s realm and work as the male sphere of influence. These developments perpetuated the powerful series of symbolic asso-ciations established between mundane objects and broader social and spiritual values which were essential to the Victorian images of the ideal home. Grier observes that “Sentimental poetry and fiction not only helped to demonstrate the way in which such chains of associa-tion worked in connecassocia-tion to objects such as furniture, but they probably also served to perpetuate conventional associations”.²⁷She quotes the example of the poem “The Old Arm-Chair” by Eliza Cook published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in March 1855. “The Old Arm-Chair” was hallowed because it had belonged to the owner’s deceased mother and reminded her of childhood teachings at her mother’s knee. She cannot bear to be parted from it because it represents in material form the union between their two souls – a union made, it need scarcely be added – within the sanctity of the home.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed what are considered by historians and sociologists to be some of the key characteristics of the ideal Victorian home. It has for the most part been concerned with images, or representations in visual and verbal form, of hopes (and fears) concerning the role of the home in the wider society, a society which was undergoing rapid upheaval and change. The Victorians were, therefore, extremely conscious of the instability of society and the need to establish a basic series of ground-rules for moral conduct – a clear set of boundaries between deviance and respectability. The Victorian home can be seen, in its ideal version, as a controlled private realm within whose walls even more controls had to be established to maintain a desired congruence between appearance and reality. The moral home life not only had to be lived on a daily basis but also had to be seen to be lived. Hence the need to continue to reproduce these images in art, literature and consumer culture. Inevitably these pressures produced conflict and the symbolic richness of the Victorian home, as displayed for example in the increasingly popular collections of Victorian domestic design, must be examined in the context of a continuous struggle to reconcile the demands of the ideal with the exigencies and contin-gencies of everyday living. All the signs are that just as present-day conceptions of family life have been heavily influenced by Victorian ideas so we can continue to learn from their success, and failures, in making the ideal a practical reality.

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Notes