by Terry Castle
Yet while satisfying to the censorious, such judgmentalism in another way begs the question. Even the most embarrassing or guilt-inducing features of daily life, Freud famously argued, have their “psychopathology” and can be plumbed for truths about the human condition. One could as easily argue, it seems to me, that house porn, like the billion-dollar business of home improvement itself, is symptomatic of a peculiar disquiet now haunting ordinary American life. However callow it may seem to point it out, being middle-class these days means feeling freaky a lot of the time. The heebie-jeebies are definitely a problem. The issues here are deep ones. Home—no less than the cherished “homeland” of dismal fame—seems in desperate need of securing. The precariousness of All We Hold Dear is dinned into our heads daily. It’s hardly feckless to feel scared or neurasthenic at times.
Might paging through a shelter mag be seen—in an analytic spirit and with a certain Freudian forbearance—as a middle-class coping mechanism? As a way of calming the spirit in bizarre and parlous times? House porn, I’m beginning to think, could best be understood as a postmodern equivalent of traditional consolation literature—Boethius meets Mitchell Gold. Though shamelessly of this world—and nowhere more so than in the glutted and prodigal United States of America—it’s as spiritually fraught, one could argue, as the breviaries of old.
Which isn’t to say that certain people aren’t, for complex reasons, particularly susceptible to the shelter-mag jones. Décor-fixated individuals (and you know who you are), according to Praz, are usually “neurotic, refined, sad people,” prone to “secret melancholy” and “hypersensitive nerves.” Quaint language aside (he enlists the “mad, lonely spirit” of Ludwig II of Bavaria as a historical example of the syndrome), the claim is weirdly compelling. Readers with the obsessive-compulsive gene—the twenty-first-century version, perhaps, of “hypersensitive nerves”—will be familiar with the low-level yet troublesome anxiety produced when something in a room seems misplaced, askew, or somehow “wrong.” I won’t be surprised when brain scientists discover the odd little fold in the cerebral cortex that makes one agitate over slipcovers or jump up and rearrange the furniture.
But along with whatever innate disposition may exist, the typical interiors fanatic almost always has some aesthetic trauma looming up out of the past—a decorative primal scene, so to speak—exacerbating the underlying syndrome. For the legendary American designer Elsie de Wolfe (1865–1950), the so-called First Lady of Interior Decoration, just such a shock awaited her, she recalled in her memoirs, when she returned home one day from school to find that her parents (pious Scottish-Canadian immigrants otherwise deficient in fantasy) had repapered the sitting room of their New York City brownstone in a lurid “[William] Morris design of gray palm-leaves and splotches of bright green and red on a background of dull tan.” Something “that cut like a knife came up inside her,” de Wolfe recollected. The young Elsie, she writes, “threw herself on the floor, kicking with stiffened legs as she beat her legs on the carpet.” The novelette-ish third person is a nice dramatic touch: Freud’s Dora had nothing on Elsie in the girlish-hysteria department.
And indeed, there’s just such a primal scene in my own childhood: the day my mother, faced with replacing our bedraggled old tweed sofa, decided in a fit of desperate-divorcée economy to spray-paint it instead. (When I succumb to rectal cancer, it will no doubt be the result of having sat on this unwholesome piece of furniture throughout my adolescence.) In a single sunny late-sixties San Diego afternoon—I can still hear the clack-clack of aerosol cans being shaken—our couch went from its normal faded-beige color to a lethal-looking southern California turquoise. That wasn’t the end, though: overcome by a sort of decorative frenzy, she then sprayed the flimsy shelf unit separating the “kitchenette” from the living room in our tiny pink-and-green motel-style apartment, and after that, two discarded toys of mine, a hapless pair of plastic palomino ponies. Resplendent in turquoise from forelock to hoof, Trigger and Buttermilk were subsequently elevated to the unlikely role of room-divider ornaments. No doubt my adult hankering after Zuber papiers peints, Omega Workshop textiles, and Andre Arbus escritoires germinated at just this moment.
Now, it’s worth considering to what degree decorative trauma functions as a mental screen for more troubling kinds of distress. Is the interiors mania rooted in deeper childhood travails? Elsie de Wolfe’s Calvinist mother seems to have been gruesome enough: she made de Wolfe wear sack-cloth pinafores and shipped her off at fifteen to a Jane Eyre–style boarding school in Edinburgh. In his notes to the elegant new Rizzoli reprint of de Wolfe’s so-called design bible, The House in Good Taste (1913), Hutton Wilkinson, the president of the Elsie de Wolfe Foundation, suggests that the revolutionary decorating philosophy de Wolfe evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century, one favoring simplicity, creamy-white walls, natural light, informal furniture groupings, bright chintzes, had its psychic roots in juvenile pain and estrangement. (De Wolfe “simply didn’t like Victorian,” Wilkinson writes, because it was “the high style of her sad childhood.”)
Again, no question but that family ructions—notably my parents’ nuclear war–style divorce when I was seven—left me, like de Wolfe, with a bit of a shelter neurosis. As soon as the papers were filed, my British-born mother yanked me and my little sister out of the standard-issue suburban West Coast middle-class home we had occupied for as long as I could remember and took us off to a dreary seaside bungalow in the UK. Returning to San Diego three years later—my mother then in flight from British Inland Revenue—we landed in the aforementioned cheesy apartment, the best she could do on the child support she received from my father. I spent my mopey teenage years there like an exiled monarch, dolefully contemplating the spindly 1950s hibiscus-print bamboo armchairs and roll-up window blinds (courtesy of Buena Vista Apartments management) and lamenting the fate that had befallen us.
The real nightmare, however, was a squalid domicile across town that threatened off and on to become our future home: the “snout house” (a boxy SoCal tract house with garage and driveway dominating the frontage) owned by the man my mother would later marry, a hapless submariner named Turk, whose previous wife had dropped dead there of alcohol poisoning a few months before my mother met him. The place was my private House of Usher: an emblem of the hideous life that awaited us should my mother, out of economic desperation, ever accede to one of Turk’s frequently proffered marriage proposals. And as if to confirm its baleful role in my imaginative life, it was an abode of surpassing ugliness: dank and malodorous, with fake wood paneling and a tattered Snopes-family screen door at the front admitting numerous flies. The only decorative touches were the grimy ashtrays on every surface, a faded Navy photo of the USS Roncador surfacing, and, in one dim corner, a dusty assemblage of bronzed baby shoes, one for each of Turk’s five rowdy-urchin children. Luckily, by the time my mother married him I had already left for college, so I—the female Fauntleroy—never had to live there. Staying overnight was bad enough, though: I have dreams to this day in which the mother who dropped dead emerges from the closet—here, now, in my grown-up bedroom in San Francisco—to enfold me in a noxious and crumbly embrace.
Which brings me back, by a somewhat gothic route, to shelter mags and their allure. One essential part of their appeal, it seems to me, lies precisely in the fact that they proffer—even brazenly tout—an escape from the parental. (The step-parental, too, thank God.) They do this in several ways, perhaps most conspicuously through a glib, repetitious, wonderfully brain-deadening “express the inner you” rhetoric. Now, supposedly no one actually “reads” shelter magazines; you just drivel over the pictures. Patently untrue in my experience: I devour all the writing, too—such as it is—no matter how fatuous and formulaic. I take special pleasure in the “editor’s welcome”—usually a few brief paragraphs (next to a little picture of said editor) about new decorating trends, the need for beauty in one’s life, how to create a private “sanctuary” for yourself, the meaning of �
��home,” etc. It’s always the same stupefying tripe, but soothing nonetheless.
Who is this editor? She (rarely he) might best be described as the Un-Mother. She is typically white, middle-aged yet youthful, apparently straight, and seldom much more ethnic-looking than the Polish-American Martha Stewart. She is often divorced, and may (paradoxically) have grown-up children. But her authority is of an oblique, seemingly nontoxic kind—more that of a benevolent older sister or a peppy, stylish aunt than any in-your-face maternal figure. And the therapeutic wisdom she dispenses—almost always in the cozy second person—is precisely that you don’t have to do what your mother tells you to do. In fact, your ma can buzz off altogether. You can now buy lots of nice things and make “your own space” from which all signs of the past have been expunged. Yay! No more USS Roncador!
If you enter the words “not your mother’s” on Google, you’ll get nearly 400,000 results, a huge number of which point you immediately toward shelter-mag articles. “Not your mother’s [whatever]” turns out to be an established interiors trope, endlessly recycled in titles, pull quotes, advertisements, photo captions, and the like. “Not Your Mother’s Tableware” is a typical heading, meant presumably to assure you that if you acquire the featured cutlery you will also, metaphorically speaking, be giving your mom the finger. (Other online items that are not your mother’s: wallpaper, mobile homes, Chinette, faucet sponges, slow cookers, backyard orchards, and Tupperware parties. Beyond the realm of interior decoration—it’s nice to learn—you can also avoid your mother’s menopause, divorce, Internet, hysterectomy, book club, Mormon music, hula dance, antibacterial soap, deviled eggs, and national security. Thank you, Condi.)
“Your House Is You, So Start Reveling in It” is a virtual creed in Shelter-Mag Land, one derived from the holy books of interior design.
“You will express yourself in your home, whether you want to or not,” proclaimed the prophet Elsie in The House in Good Taste—best to “arrange it so that the person who sees [you] in it will be reassured, not disconcerted.” In The Personality of a House, a rather more florid copycat volume from 1930, Emily Post was no less insistent: “[Your home’s] personality should express your personality, just as every gesture you make—or fail to make—expresses your gay animation or your restraint, your old-fashioned conventions, your perplexing mystery, or your emancipated modernism—whichever characteristics are typically yours.” Narcissism in a go-cup: the ladies say it’s okay.
Now, in 2006, the message is ubiquitous, sloganized, inevitable. “Not Everything in Your Home Is All About You, You, You,” reads an ad for flooring in a recent issue of Elle Decor. “Oh, Wait. Yes, It Is.” Unsurprisingly, it is taken for granted that one’s inner life, externalized in décor, will be an improvement on whatever has gone before. “What do you think you want?” asks Elle Decoration (September 2005). “A bigger house? A better view? Frette bed linen? A matching set of original Saarinen dining chairs?” It seems that “you” have very expensive tastes. But that’s fine too, because shelter literature is all about consumption, luxury goods, and the pipe dreams of upward mobility.
When one has pretensions to taste, such dreams can be hard to resist. Out of necessity my own decorating style has long been fairly down-market and bourgeois: your standard Academic-Shabby-Chic-Wood-Floors-Vaguely-Ethnic-Somewhat-Cluttered-Bohemian-Edith-Sitwell-Crossed-with-Pottery-Barn-Squeaky-Dog-Toys-Everywhere-Eccentric-Anglophile-Lesbian. (The last two elements being signified by various grubby Vita Sackville-West first editions on the shelves. No one else on the Internet seems to want them.) Yet raffishness notwithstanding, the entire visual scheme is as fraught with socioeconomic symbolism as any. Having been plucked out of the (semi-) prosperous middle class as a child, I have spent thirty years or so trying to wiggle my way back in. Indeed, to the degree that such mobility is possible on an academic salary, I’ve sought fairly relentlessly to upgrade to even higher status; 1920s-Artistic-British-Boho-with-Inherited-Income has usually been the target look, as if Augustus John and Virginia Woolf had mated. (The “British” part has no doubt been a way of renegotiating childhood fiascos on my own terms.) Say the words “Bloomsbury” or “Charleston” and I become quite tremulous with longing.
That the “express yourself” ethos of the shelter mag is both illogical and manipulative should go without saying. While encouraging you to find your “personal style,” the Un-Mother also wants to show you how. Even my own fanatically considered décor, I’m forced to admit, may be part of some greedy stranger’s business plan, a version of that nostalgic “vintage” or “Paris flea market” style heavily promoted to urban college-educated women of my generation throughout the United States and Western Europe over the past decade or so. (Other incessantly marketed “looks” now vying for dominance in Shelter-Mag Land: “mid-century modern,” a variety of Baby Boomer Rat Pack retro distinguished by funky space-age design, Case Study houses, pony skins on the floor, and, if you’re lucky, lots of Eames, Mies, and Corbu; and the more minimalist, Asian-inspired W Hotel look, involving wenge wood, stark-white walls, spa bathrooms, dust mite–free bedding, solitary orchids in raku pots, etc. The latter mode, like the frigid minimalism of the British cult architect John Pawson, always strikes me as simply the latest twist on twentieth-century fascist design.) But whether my never-ending quest for antique finials, faded bits of toile de Jouy, old postcards, and other quirky “flea-market finds” is a product of disposition or suggestion, I am, I realize, as much a slave to commodity fetishism as any McMansion-owning reader of Architectural Digest (hideous bible of parvenus from the Hamptons to Malibu).
Resentful, matriphobic, pretentious, gullible: could the shelter-lit addict be any less appealing? Unfortunately, yes, as a brief foray into Shelter-Mag Land’s heart of darkness, its paranoid psychic core, will reveal. Here the real-world rooms on display—static, pristine, and seemingly uninhabited—are key. To be “at home” in the World of Interiors, one rapidly gathers, is to bask in the privacy of your own space, serene and unabashed, while the rest of the world goes kaboom all around you. Not for nothing does the industry term “shelter magazine” play subliminally on “bomb shelter.” Self-fortification is one of the goals here; likewise the psychic eradication of other people.
Some shelter-lit purveyors are tough minded enough to cop to it: that the urge to “project the self” through décor can be deeply allied with misanthropy. “I live inside my head,” the decorator Rose Tarlow declares in The Private House (2001), “often oblivious to the world outside myself. I see only what I wish to see.” In her own home, she acknowledges, other people aren’t really part of the scene:
I know there are times when we plan our houses as much for the pleasure of our friends as for ourselves, because we wish for their enjoyment, and rely on their appreciation and praise—especially their praise. Thankfully that stage of my life has passed!
Having now become “interested in a home only for myself,” she would like nothing better, she says, than to live in a “nun’s cell,” a sort of little medieval crypt world. (“I imagine a bed covered in a creamy, heavy hemp fabric in a tiny room that has rough, whitewashed plaster walls, a small Gothic window, a stone sink; outside a bird sings. Peace prevails.”) The book’s illustrations—chill, austere, and undeniably gorgeous—give form to the tomblike aesthetic: not one of the exquisite rooms shown (all designed by Tarlow) has a human being in it.
Shelter-Mag Land is a place in which other people are edited out, removed from the picture, both literally and metaphorically, so that one is free to project oneself, for ever and a day, into the fantasy spaces on view. In any given interiors piece this “disappearing” of other people is usually a two-part process, beginning retrospectively, as it were, with the ritual exorcism of the last owner before the current one. Former owners invariably have atrocious taste, one discovers, and every trace of them must be removed. When the former owner is also the Mother in Need of Banishment, positively heroic measures are necessary. A 2004 articl
e in the New York Times Magazine has a telling item about how Goldie Hawn’s daughter, the actress Kate Hudson, bought “the Los Angeles house she grew up in” precisely in order to gut the interior and remodel it in “her own image.” No Goldie vestiges will be allowed to remain. “Goldie’s taste is more classic,” notes a male designer assisting Hudson. “Kate wants to turn everything on its ear.” Don’t look now, Private Benjamin—the kid’s just decoratively cleansed you.
But other people need cleansing, too, most urgently the lucky oinkers now in possession. It is common for interiors magazines—higher-end ones like World of Interiors especially—to suppress the names and images of current owners. There are exceptions, of course: Elle Decor, for some reason, likes to run pictures of blissed-out property owners—usually Ralph Lauren–ish white people relaxing on patios, cuddling their French bulldogs, or flourishing salad tongs in a gleaming Corian-countertopped kitchen. In some cases, especially when he’s gay and humpy, the designer responsible for the new décor will be shown lounging about the premises looking highly pleased with himself, like a porn star who’s just delivered big time.
And small children—especially if beautiful, blonde, and under five—sometimes get a pass, though they are liable to appear in curiously fey and stylized ways. For several years now I’ve been keeping tabs on a shelter-mag cliché I call the Blurred Child Picture: a light-filled shot of some airy urban loft, all-stainless kitchen, or quaint Nantucket cottage, in which the child of the house is shown—barefoot, pink, and perfect—either whizzing by in the background or bouncing joyfully on a bed. The face and limbs are often fuzzy, as if to suggest a sort of generic kidness in motion. These hallucinatory urchins usually turn out to bear excruciatingly hip names—Samantha, Cosmo, Zoe, and Miles are current favorites—and seem as branded and objectified as the furnishings around them. The ongoing reproductive anxieties of young, white middle-class American professional women—a crucial segment of the shelter-magazine demographic—would seem to prompt such wish-fulfillment imagery: here’s your new space and a designer child to put in it.