© 2003 by Design History Society
‘Decorators May be Compared to Doctors’: An Analysis of Rhoda and Agnes Garrett’s Suggestion for House Decoration in Painting,Woodwork and Furniture (1876)
Kingston University
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Abstract |
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Domestic advice manuals are, like any other texts, constructed discourses that cannot be used as conventional historial evidence. They need to be understood both as historial documentsthat engage with contemporary notions of design and taste, and as a genre of Victorian narrative they need to be placed us a context of other narratives, both historical and literary,and explored using both historical methodologies and literary theories. Of the twelve volumes that comprise the ‘Art at Home’ senes published by Macmillan(1876-83), four deal wxclusively withinterior design and decoration Written by ‘Lady Experts’, these texts seem to the Victorian ideology of the proper sphere of womanhood and to the cult of the ‘House Beautiful’. This paper considers perhaps the best known of these texts, Suggestions for House Decoration, written by Rhoda and Agnes Garrett Ostensibly a text defending the ‘Queen Anne’ style and offering advice on the design and decoration of the home. When read analytically, it can also be understood as a resistance to patnarchy and a subversion of Victorian domestic ideology through its demonstration of the hard-u'on knowledge and skills gained by England's first professional female interior decorates.
Key Words: domestic advice manuals • female employment • Garrett Rhoda and Agnes • gender politics • interior decoration • women designers