Controlling passion: The turn-of-the-century wallpaper dilemma

Winterthur Portfolio

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 243-264

  Jennings, Jan ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55649090841     PISSN: 00840416     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/496695     Document Type: Article

References (136)

1. Wallpaper is an old and well-tested decoration, with its roots in eighteenth-century France and England. Appearing solely in wealthy homes at first, it eventually became an everyday treatment. Judging by articles that appeared in American builders' journals, such as "The Selection of Wall-Paper," Manufacturer and Builder 1, no. 3 (March 1869): 71;
2. "The Plates," Carpentry and Building 10 (December 1888): 248;
3. "Bad Effects in Wall Paper," Carpentry and Building 10 (December 1888): 263;
4. "The Plates," Carpentry and Building 11 (September 1889): 172.
5. French and English sources remained the authority on wallpaper taste for domestic architects and builders. Harper's Bazar is cited in Angel Kwolek-Folland, "The Useful What-not and the Ideal of 'Domestic Decoration,'" Helicon Nine 8 (May 1983): 78.
6. As quoted in Henry T. Williams and Mrs. C. S. Jones, Beautiful Homes; or, Hints in House Furnishing (New York: Henry T. Williams, 1878), p. 3.
7. Pattern-book architect Oliver Smith states that "inanimate walls" shaped the "minds and morals" (Oliver Smith, The Domestic Architect [Buffalo: By the author, 1852], p. iv).
8. Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 24;
9. Ellen H. Richards, The Cost of Living as Modified by Sanitary Science (3d ed., New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1915), p. 25.
10. "Selection of Wall-Paper," p. 71;
11. "The Use of Paper for Ceiling Decorations," Carpentry and Building 3 (November 1881): 208.
12. Aesthetic is defined as "the set of guiding constructs for appreciating the world perceived by the senses, rather than the criticism of taste" (Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 [Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum, 1988], p. 136).
13. On the aesthetic of refinement, see Grier, Culture and Comfort, p. 132.
14. In a study of American railroad architecture between 1815 and 1914, Caroll L. V. Meeks argues that "nineteenth-century art and architecture combined a formal vocabulary of 'picturesqueness' with selective restatement of the ornamental vocabulary of past historical styles." The formal qualities of the "special mode of vision" that he christened "picturesque eclecticism" were variations in silhouette and surface treatment, a sense of movement in masses and outline (which often took the form of asymmetry), visual intricacy, and roughness (or emphatic texture) (cited in Grier, Culture and Comfort, p. 154).
15. Van Rensselaer is quoted in Helen Binkerd Young, "Household Decoration," Cornell Reading Courses 1, no. 5 (December 1, 1911): 43.
16. For further discussion of wallpaper designs and the aesthetic systems in everyday houses, see Jan Jennings and Herbert Gottfried, American Vernacular Interior Architecture, 1870-1940 (1988; reprint, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993), pp. 86-93, 244-67.
17. Sears, Roebuck pointed out that wallpaper's "cleanliness, durability, variety, and beauty are beyond question. There is no method of treating the walls that pleases so constantly, providing care be used in selecting the papers" (Sears, Roebuck, and Company, Wall Paper Samples [Chicago, 1901], n.p.).
18. Wallpapers at the turn of the century gleamed with iridescence - gold, gold bronze, bronze, and silver and green bronze papers were common. Sears's special 7-cent paper had "a cream background with beautiful scrolls in two shades of green, with gold outline" (Sears, Roebuck, and Company, 1902 Catalogue [Chicago, 1902], p. 906).
19. The precedent of hanging pictures on top of tapestry can be seen in W. H. Pyne's watercolors (David Watkin, The Royal Interiors of Regency England from Watercolours First Published by W. H. Pyne in 1817-1820 [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1984], p. 18).
20. Clarence Cook raised the possibility of individual motifs as figures of art in his nineteenth-century guide, What Shall We Do with Our Walls? (New York: Warren Fuller, 1881), p. 109, suggesting that wallpaper had two prospects: to retreat as a background for pictures and objects or to present itself as ornament.
21. Martha Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home," Cornell Reading-Course for Farmers' Wives 1, no. 2 (December 1902): 28, 29.
22. She suggested pictures of rural life for the walls of farmhouses. Sears and city art stores made framed reproduction art available to many Americans. In 1902 Sears offered an engraving of horse heads, studies in flowers and fruits, three "handsome" colored photographs, and "our special $1.95 facsimile of a genuine water color" (Sears, 1902 Catalogue, p. 768). They also sold sentimental and historic scenes: a watercolor of a pastoral landscape with farmhouse, an artograph of an agrarian scene with a farm couple and oxen, and a mother and child in peasant dress gathering sheaves of wheat.
23. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1878), pl. 40.
24. According to a 1907 study by Caroline Frear Burk, the tendency to collect and arrange objects begins in girlhood. Burk studied the psychological instinct for collecting in 1,214 children and adolescents from Santa Barbara and Santa Rosa, Calif. Of the sample, girls collected photographs, pictures, and Kodak prints more than boys did. Some collections were exclusively gender oriented; only girls collected calling cards, invitations, tintypes, and posters. Although girls and boys did not classify their collections by variety or kind, the collected objects were "kept together" in some form - in a drawer, on a shelf, or fastened on cloth, paper, or ribbons (Caroline Frear Burk, "The Collecting Instinct," in G. Stanley Hall, ed., Aspects of Child Life and Education [Boston: Ginn, 1907], pp. 207, 212, 216).
25. A shrine had its model in the middle-class parlor. Occupants created complete "shrines into which is placed all that is most precious" in the realm of education, high culture, sentiment, and domesticity (Grier, Culture and Comfort, p. 59).
26. "The Plates," (1888), p. 248.
27. "Use of Mouldings in Decoration," Carpentry and Building 19 (September 1906): 686-89;
28. "Modern Picture Friezes," American Carpenter and Builder (October 1906): 818-21.
29. May Haggenbotham, "The House Beautiful," in Lucy Langdon Williams Wilson, ed., Handbook of Domestic Science and Household Arts for Use in Elementary Schools: A Manual for Teachers (New York: Macmillan Co., 1900), p. 21.
30. Sears, Roebuck, and Company, Wall Paper (Chicago, 1908), cover.
31. Sears, Roebuck, and Company, Wall Paper (Chicago, 1909), cover.
32. Montgomery Ward, Wall Paper at Wholesale Prices: Newest Styles for 1910 (Chicago, 1910), pp. 1-7.
33. Kate Sanborn leads us to believe that hanging wallpaper in the home was historically a family affair. She tells the story that George Washington, Lafayette, and Lafayette's aide-de-camp hung paper at Mount Vernon when Martha lamented she would not have it up in time for an important ball (Kate Sanborn, Old Time Wallpapers [Greenwich, Conn.: Literary Collector Press, 1905], p. 63).
34. In a 1903 advertisement for Wall Papers and Wall Coverings: How to Select and Hang Them, Arthur Seymour Jennings acknowledged that paper was selected and hung by "decorators, paper-hangers, architects, builders, and house-owners" (Carpentry and Building 16 [July 1903]: xiii).
35. "Alfred Peats 1898 Prize Wall Paper," Ladies' World 19, no. 3 (March 1898): 23;
36. "Alfred Peats Prize Wall Papers," Ladies' Home Journal 13, no. 3 (February 1896): 28.
37. Becker, Smith, and Page, 1913 (Philadelphia, 1913), pp. 1-28.
38. Becker, Smith, and Page, 1913, pp. 1-28.
39. Modern Wall Papers: 1915 Idea Book (Ithaca, N.Y.: F. H. Warner, 1915) comprises 14 vignettes of bedrooms, living rooms, and dining rooms. Each design has a trade name (the Loring, the Pastelle, the Symphony), but the brand of paper, stock numbers, and prices are unidentified.
40. The Rexall Store in West Union, Iowa, offered a hand-size paperback idea book, Interiors (Chicago: Fairthorn Co., n.d), which contains 7 color plates of interiors with an equal amount of text explaining the positive attributes of wallpaper as well as Rexall's expertise in helping customers make selections.
41. For an interpretation about how women came to read architectural drawings and become visually literate consumers, see Jan Jennings, "Drawing on the Vernacular Interior," Winterthur Portfolio 27, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 255-79.
42. For an interpretation of how trade catalogues taught women to rely on pictorial logic to build everyday interiors, see Herbert Gottfried, "Building the Picture," Winterthur Portfolio 27, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 235-53. Both articles discuss the role of university extension programs in design.
43. The card may be from Van Sciver's Furniture Store, 90 State Street, Trenton, N.J. Maxwell trade postcard, postmarked 1910. (Private collection.)
44. Western Wall Paper Co. trade postcard, postmarked 1910. (Private collection.)
45. Frances E. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," Ladies' World 17, no. 5 (May 1896): 20.
46. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," p. 20.
47. In a warning to women, a House Beautiful writer characterized a wallpaper dealer as a "hypocrite" who assures a shopper that "the things you like are stylish or very popular" ("At the Paper Hanger's," House Beautiful 5, no. 1 [December 1898]: 26).
48. Young, "Household Decoration," pp. 48-49.
49. On the popularity of mail-order catalogues, see Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), p. 91.
50. Wallpaper books from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward began with printed text giving practical advice - rules for measuring a room and ways to hang your own wallpaper, make paste, and place an order. The Sears and Montgomery Ward books also showed various moldings as well as supplies and equipment available for purchase. As many new products came on the market, Sears used the front-matter section of sample books to announce goods for sale. By format, though, all sample books consisted of wallpaper designs bound together. Descriptive characteristics, such as the design number and cost per double roll and per single yard, were printed on the back of each sample (Sears, Wall Paper [1908], p. 20);
51. Sears, Roebuck, and Company, High-Grade Wall Papers: Season 1915 (Chicago, 1915), pp. 9-11.
52. Sears, 1902 Catalogue, p. 904. Montgomery Ward, Wall Paper at Wholesale Prices, no. 1610.
53. Sears also mailed their small sample book to women for 2 cents. Their "big book" was mailed to dealers, agents, canvassers, paperhangers, painters, and contractors for 25 cents (Sears, 1902 Catalogue, p. 905).
54. "Wall Papers Free," Ladies' Home Companion 20, no. 21 (November 1, 1893): 7.
55. "Alfred Peats Prize Wall Papers," Ladies' Home Companion 22, no. 7 (April 1, 1895): 19;
56. "Alfred Peats 1898 Prize Wall Paper," p. 23.
57. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," p. 20.
58. Williams and Jones, Beautiful Homes, p. 3;
59. Cook, What Shall We Do With Our Walls?;
60. Candace Wheeler, "Decoration of Walls," The Outlook 52 (November 2, 1895): 706;
61. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," p. 20.
62. Richards, Cost of Living, p. 135;
63. Maria Parloa, Home Economics: A Practical Guide in Every Branch of Housekeeping (New York: Century Company, 1910), p. 21.
64. For a biography of Van Rensselaer and a description of progressive farmhouse design at the turn of the century, see Sally McMurry, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 209-19.
65. Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home." For more on Young, see Flora Rose, A Growing College: Home Economics at Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.: New York State College of Human Ecology and Cornell University, 1969), pp. 48, 215;
66. Deceased Alumni Records, Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Extension bulletins were written eventually by many of the early land-grant colleges, from the State College for Women in Denton, Texas, to the Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan. However, Cornell's series, from 1902 to 1916, was responsible for most of the bulletins about household decoration. Iowa State College made its entry in 1913 with Home Furnishing, in 1914 Ohio State University offered Home Decoration. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 44.
67. During the 1890s, homemaking departments appeared in major colleges and universities; see Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 150-56;
68. Edna Anderson et al., Definitive Themes in Home Economics and Their Impact on Families, 1909-1984 (Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Assoc., 1984), pp. 105-6.
69. Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home," p. 26.
70. On modest walls, see Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45.
71. As late as 1956, the Wallpaper Council flatly stated that "taste declined" following the 1839 invention of the four-color machine that produced as many as 400 rolls a day (Selling Wallpaper: A Study of the Fundamental Knowledge Required for Selling Wallpaper Successfully [New York: Wallpaper Council, 1956], p. 10).
72. Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home," p. 25.
73. Although the middle class is often described as the non-manual sector (downtown businessmen, retailers, owners and superintendents of manufacturing establishments, and clerks), this definition does not always account for class perceptions in small towns and dispersed farm communities of the Midwest and West (Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 310).
74. Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), supp. foll. p. 152. Social scientists even used wallpaper as a measure of middle-class domestic imagery.
75. In The Negro American Family (1909; reprint, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970), pp. 54-80, W. E. B. Du Bois characterizes the interior furnishings of village homes, city homes, and city homes of the "better class."
76. Jane Addams, "Art Work," as cited in Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, eds., Eighty Years at Hull-House (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), pp. 50-52.
77. Kittredge is cited in Lizabeth A. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915," Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 756;
78. Cohen claims that the middle class had an aesthetic that was different from that of the working class. Jean Gordon and Jan McArthur, "Interior Decorating Advice as Popular Culture: Women's Views Concerning Wall and Window Treatments, 1870-1920," in Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne, eds., Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840-1940 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 114.
79. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor," p. 756.
80. For decoration and warmth, log cabins, wooden shacks, and houses of the plains - Nebraska, Kansas, northern Oklahoma, the Dakotas, western Texas, eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana - were often lined with newspaper, blankets, or, after the beginning of the canning industry in the 1890s, with sheets of tin made from flattened cans (Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and Plains [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988], pp. 2-4, 12, 42, 56, 70, 87).
81. Critics prior to the 1890s characterized wallpaper as "the invention of laziness and filth; they conceal dirt and noisomeness of every description" (W. W. Hall, The Guide-Board to Health, Peace, and Competence; or, The Road to Happy Old Age [Springfield, Mass.: D. E. Fisk, 1869], p. 683).
82. However, through the years, wallpaper manufacturers made some inroads in the logic that wallpaper was not so dirty because it was easily replaceable. For an account of "house diseases," see Nancy Tomes, "The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygiene, and the Germ Theory, 1870-1900," Bulletin of History of Mediane 64, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 509-39.
83. George Merk, "Robert C. Kedzie: Michigan's Nineteenth-Century Consumer Activist," Michigan History 73, no. 1 (January/February 1989): 17-18.
84. Robert Clark Kedzie, Shadows from the Walk of Death (Lansing, Mich.: S. George, 1874).
85. On the cleaning of wallpaper, see Isabel Bevier, The House: Its Plan, Decoration, and Care (Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1912), pp. 153-55.
86. Candace Wheeler, ed., Household Art (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893), pp. 7-8.
87. Part of this essay first appeared in The Christian Union; this version was part of the "Exhibit of Women's Work in Literature in the State of New York" for the Columbian Exposition. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," p. 20. "Red and violet produce a bad effect on the flesh color of the skin, in imparting a pale complexion to an individual and should be avoided, as also orange, which, on account of its intensity, causes weariness to the eyes" ("The Selection of Wall-Paper," Manufacturer and Builder [March 1869]: 71).
88. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45.
89. Montgomery Ward, Wallpaper at Wholesale Prices, no. 8088.
90. Frank L. Smith, Suburban Homes; or, Examples of Moderate Cost Houses for Wollaston Park (Boston: Wood, Harmon, 1890), p. 22.
91. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 47.
92. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), p. 130;
93. Sidney Phillips, "Next Season's Wall Papers," American Carpenter and Builder 1, no. 6 (September 1905): 408.
94. Stephens is cited in John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949), pp. 125-26.
95. Young, "Household Decoration," pp. 47-48.
96. Montgomery Ward, Wall Paper at Wholesale Prices, no. 8064.
97. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 48.
98. Cook, What Shall We Do With Our Walls? pp. 17, 18.
99. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45.
100. Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home," p. 26.
101. Wheeler, "Decoration of Walls," p. 706.
102. Young, "Household Decoration," pp. 47, 48.
103. Fryatt, "Selecting a Wall Paper," p. 20.
104. Cook, What Shall We Do With Our Walls? pp. 17, 18.
105. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in 1890 and published in 1892, received the widest critical acclaim of any of the nearly 200 short stories Gilman produced during her lifetime. Born into a family heritage of reformers, Gilman was the great-niece of author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and the great-granddaughter of the influential preacher Lyman Beecher. In 1898 with the publication of Women and Economics, her seminal and most famous work, Gilman quickly achieved an international reputation. Translated into seven languages, the book established her as the authority on the relationship between female sexual oppression and economic dependence on men (Denise D. Knight, ed., "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994], pp. 11, 16, 18, 6, 13).
106. At the age of eighteen, Gilman may have considered herself a designer; she worked part-time teaching drawing, sold hand-painted stationery, and created advertising cards (Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper," p. 11).
107. Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper," p. 8.
108. On page 11, the protagonist states another design concept: "There is lack of sequence."
109. For more on Gilman and her publications, see Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper,"pp. 6, 25.
110. Wheeler, "Decoration of Walls," p. 706.
111. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45;
112. Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper,"p. 10.
113. Gilman's story describes a woman who becomes increasingly exhausted because the yellow wallpaper possessed so much energy. In recommending plain paper over a figured one, Young reasoned that plainness was less tiring (Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper," p. 3);
114. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 53.
115. On patterns, see Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper,"p. 7;
116. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 48.
117. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 130-31.
118. Richards, Cost of Living, p. 135.
119. Possessing good taste also meant restraint rather than freedom; see F. Schuyler Matthews, "Artistic Household," Ladies' Home Journal 10, no. 11 (October 1893): 25.
120. Wheeler defined a woman of good taste as educated and possessing a cultivated power of selection (Candace Wheeler, Prindples of Home Decoration with Practical Examples [New York: Doubleday, 1903], p. 13).
121. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 147, 180.
122. On gender roles, see Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press with Binghamton University Art Museum, 1995), pp. 105-11.
123. Knight, "Yellow Wall-Paper," pp. 16, 3, 6, 7.
124. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903), pp. 144-45.
125. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45.
126. Sears has retained no business records of the number of rolls produced or sold. Cook, What Shall We Do with Our Walls? p. 7,
127. and Young, "Household Decoration," p. 49, counseled that "growing tired of a wall covering is nearly always an admission that it is designed on a wrong principle. If we wish really to be economic we should use wall coverings that will stand the test of satisfaction for a long period of time."
128. For a history of the home economics movements, see Anderson, Definitive Themes, pp. 1-10.
129. Gilman is cited in Polly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 70. Allen analyzes Gilman's case against prevailing household organization and design and proposes 4 types of feminist environments in her fiction.
130. Grier, Culture and Comfort, pp. 62, 68, 69.
131. Not all home economists agreed on the subject of ornamental wallpaper. In 1900 May Haggenbotham recommended "a somewhat rich figured paper" for the hall (Haggenbotham, "House Beautiful," p. 12).
132. In April 1894 Gertrude Vansant kept a diary of her family's 6-week, 550-mile trip in a covered wagon across the high plains of Texas. As matter-of-factly as she could, she recorded the meals eaten, the supplies bought, and the toothache of her sister, Eddie. The exasperating events of the trip read like enumerations. The passions of life and the tensions of relationships received little due; see Gertrude Vansant Redfearn, "Diary of the Trip to Texas: A Journey to the Far West-1894," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 43 (1970): 20-36.
133. Postcard photograph, written September 22, 1913, by Dora Alden and postmarked September 23.
134. Young, "Household Decoration," p. 45.
135. Van Rensselaer, "Decoration in the Farm Home," p. 26.
136. For a modern interpretation of feminine emotions: "What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of my heart" (Terry Tempest Williams, "Earth," Desert Quartet [New York: Pantheon Books, 1995], p. 5).