Chapter 6 - The parlour of critical theory

Summary

Any writer wishing to describe the densely decorated, bibelot-filled bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century faces a problem: how to go beyond simple inventory to produce substantive commentary. This usually entails finding some sort of meaning behind or beyond what is being depicted literally. Novelists face a special challenge: how to render such a description significant to plot and character development. Nineteenth-century French novelists rise to this challenge by developing what amounts to a social theory of domestic furnishings, a theory which oddly resembles that implicit in discussions of the bourgeois interior by European sociologists and social commentators, the latter echoing the former.

The primary concern of this chapter is ordinary household knick-knacks, not the artifacts and objets d'art of serious collectors and aesthetes. By what epistemology do social theorists and novelists give meaning to the most ordinary knick-knacks, curiosities, and bibelots in the most banal bourgeois domestic space? A commonly used interpretive strategy relies on figurative homology. Descriptions of the nineteenth-century interior tend to be composed such that the physical structures of the house (layout and furnishings) parallel family structures, social structures, and, especially near the turn of the century, psychological structures.

DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS

Before moving on to specific examples, it will be instructive to consider the epistemology of the bibelot from various disciplinary perspectives. Collectors, archaeologists, and museographers extract meaning from ordinary domestic interiors, and, by extension, from the most trivial decorative objects.