SOURCE: “Aestheticizing the Home: Textual Strategies of Taste, Self-Identity, and Bourgeois Hegemony in America's ‘Gilded Age,’” in Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Twigg argues that, in the Gilded Age, middle-class Americans sought to express their individuality, while conforming to the aesthetic ideal, through “tasteful” home decoration, which was documented in the various decorating texts popular among all levels of society.

A vital function of texts, if viewed in relation to their performers, is to define, or more importantly, to perform the self. American “new historicists” such as Gillian Brown, Alan Trachtenberg, John Kasson, Joy Kasson, and Jackson Lears have explored the degree to which literature, sculpture, and other aesthetic texts function as sites in which cultural conceptions of self are negotiated and performed.¹ These scholars observe that, particularly during the late nineteenth century, Americans engaged metonymic strategies of identity construction...