Journal of Design History Advance Access originally published online on August 18, 2006
Journal of Design History 2006 19(3):185-196; doi:10.1093/jdh/epl018
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‘A Place of Refuge, Seduction or Danger?: The Representation of the Ivy Summer-House in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa’
Kingston University
By the mid-eighteenth century, English novelists began to pay increased attention to the domestic interiors of their fictional characters. This development is worth investigating as it is related to concurrent changes in interior design and the cultural perception and use of domestic space. A novel that provides a useful commentary on the contribution these changes made to fictional representations of interiors is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748–49). In the first two volumes of Clarissa, for instance, Richardson draws not only on the relationship between private and social space in eighteenth-century houses and gardens but also on the role of artefacts in social practices to articulate the novel's key themes: a woman's lack of control over domestic space, and the dangerous consequences of acquisitiveness. The broad aims of this article are, therefore, to use recent work on eighteenth-century interior and garden design, as well as eighteenth-century landscape and architectural manuals, to investigate the relationship Richardson establishes between domestic space, garden buildings and gender, in the first two volumes of Clarissa. This investigation will also reveal how an awareness of the relationship between ‘real’ and fictional spaces can expand a design historian's understanding of eighteenth-century concepts of domestic space and domesticity.
Key Words: domestic space • eighteenth century • identity • the novel • summer-houses • women