Articles |
Designing the Reader's Interior
Subjectivity and the Woman's Magazine in Early Twentieth-Century France
University of Birmingham
This article considers the relationship between two sites for the staging of feminine subjectivity in early twentieth-century France: the woman's magazine and the domestic interior. At a time when furniture and interior decoration were said to represent, in some way, a person's individuality, this article asks how the readers of women's magazines were addressed as subjects in a debate about the subjectivity of the interior, from which they had previously been excluded. The luxury magazine Fémina (1901–38) forged a psychological approach to the issue. It developed a range of significant representational strategies to appeal directly, if synthetically, to the reader's sense of self. Moreover, Fémina constructed the interior, like the magazine itself, as a metaphor for the imaginative negotiation and performance of a range of ideal feminine subject positions. These representational mechanisms and models of femininity are analysed as the means to unpack the notions of feminine subjectivity being defined in relation to the interior.
Key Words: feminine modernity—France—interior decoration—magazines—representation—subjectivity