Privacy and Its Discontents: Illiberalism at Home

Abstract

What does a liberal home bring to mind? For the art historian Judith Neiswander, the answer lies in a strain of Victorian upper-middle-class domestic interiors fashioned under the influence of decorative advice literature. While she notes that the authors of these advice books were not necessarily politically informed, nor even especially active as voters, they embraced liberal values of self-expression against the dead weight of normative style.1 Neiswander acknowledges that her history of the liberal home must sidestep some of the key figures in Victorian architecture and design: men like Ruskin and Morris, who deplored the self-absorption of the bourgeois interior and the laissez-faire capitalism that funded it.2 She turns instead to John Stuart Mill, and in particular to sections of On Liberty (1859) devoted to the struggles around the cultivation of individuality in the private realm. Where the emergence of individuality had once been subject to the state imposing its will, Mill observed a new and greater threat from pressure to conform to the dictates of public opinion, a law of a different but no less forceful kind.3 In the face of such constraints, Mill urged the private development of defensive eccentricity: “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”4 Neiswander finds just this argument reflected in the design literature’s attack on oppressive conformity and its subsequent promotion of defensive variety and self-expression. While she suggests that Victorian advice authors gave Millian liberalism domestic form, she overlooks lib-eral ambivalence about the home such as that documented in Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism. Hadley traces a liberal migration away from an increasingly fraught and intemperate public sphere and toward the private realm, but not, significantly, in its wonted domestic form. From midcentury the home was associated with the demanding moral order of wives and mothers and ceased to satisfy liberal requirements of disinterestedness. Instead—and this is Hadley’s key observation—liberalism effectively decamps toward the profoundly private realm of cognition, an individuated, yet impersonal space devoted to the propagation of political ideas. For liberals the home, as Hadley describes it, was subject to “impulse, influence, and reflexive attachments to one’s personal self, to one’s spouse, to one’s children, and to other sorts of detail” that inhibited free thought.5 The resulting move into realms of purer thinking was prompted by the failure of the home to defend against such intrusion and to secure the kind of superlative privacy needed to foster liberal thought. This essay takes up what might be considered the fraying midpoint between the apparently fully realized material cultures of liberalism identified by Neiswander and the imminent liberal flight from domesticity described by Hadley, a point where men tested practical means of actualizing liberty in a context of encroaching domestic scrutiny. Theirs was a wary, mobile, and vernacular liberalism, increasingly deformed by inhibitory domestic pressures and narrowly fixated on privacy and the self-expression it enabled.