Victorian Treasure Houses: The Novel and the Parlor

AbstractThe domestic interior plays a significant role in realistic fiction and in 19th-century bourgeois life. The development of conventions for describing interiors in the novel coincides with the historical appearance of elaborately decorated parlors and with the feminization of domestic space. Both middle-class interiors and realistic fiction are characterized by a proliferation of detail, and their stylistic similarity can be mapped onto the emergence of a commodity culture. The fictive rhetoric of materiality and identity reflects complex relations of gender, property, and signification in the social world. (Cultural criticism; literary criticism; gender studies)