Victorian privacy: an analysis of bedrooms in American middle-class homes from 1850-1880

Abstract

This thesis is a study of bedrooms within the middle-class home in America from 1850 to 1880. The purpose of the thesis is to analyze how cultural ideologies manifest themselves within private spaces and through objects. In a study of the use of space, attitudes about objects, and the appearance of objects within the bedroom, it is possible to understand how definitions of public and private were constructed within the middle-class home. ☐ This thesis focuses on three central issues: (1) the relationship between privacy and the cultivation of a public individual, (2) how objects were used in the formation of individual, gender and class identities and (3) how privacy and the consumption of objects were interconnected in the Victorian definition of the individual. Analysis of these issues is based on a combination of subjective and objective sources including prescriptive literature, popular fiction, inventories, trade catalogues, and photographs.