The Cultural Construction of Domestic Space in France and Great Britain

Author(s): Sophie Chevalier

Source: Signs , Vol. 27, No. 3 (Spring 2002), pp. 847-856
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/337929

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 Sophie Chevalier

The Cultural Construction of Domestic Space in France and

Great Britain

A s a social anthropologist, I study how people express their individual

and social identities through their domestic universes. Here I propose
to investigate how domestic space is embodied and gendered in spe-
cific households in two capitalist mass-consumption societies, France and
Great Britain. I am interested in relationships between subjects and objects
in households belonging to the so-called lower middle class. This social
class, which is often taken to epitomize mindless consumption, offers a
powerful challenge to the thesis that a capitalist economy removes cultural
differences, as some French sociologists of consumption have thought.1
I carried out fieldwork in an estate of council-owned tower blocks called
“Les Fontenelles,” situated in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where I in-
vestigated sixty households, and in an estate called “Jersey Farm,” near
St. Albans, north of London, where the houses are of different types
(terraces, semidetached houses, etc.).2 There I met the members of thirty
households. My study of households is concerned with the dialectical
opposition between the individual and the collective that I take to be
fundamental to economics and culture. Domestic practices allow us to
integrate and resolve the dilemmas implied by these different dimensions
of social life. The elaboration of private universes through consumption
practices can thus be seen as the subjective interpretations of individuals
based on their experiences of social and economic reality and their wish
both to express individual identity and to signify belonging to a group,
a process whereby individual choice may be seen to operate within social
constraints.

1
See, e.g., Baudrillard 1968.
2
My fieldwork included interviews with people and observations made during repeated
visits over a long period (two years in France, 1987–89, and fourteen months in Britain,
1994–95).

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 27, no. 3]
䉷 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2002/2703-0015$10.00

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848 ❙ Chevalier

Two different domestic spaces

In my research, I focused on the lounge, where the public and private
domains of the household meet.3 Here, not only is the self presented
through objects, but family relationships are also objectified for the pur-
pose of presenting an idealized family home to the outside world. It is
important to point out from the beginning that public and private do not
have the same meaning in France and Britain.4
In themselves, the objects found in French and British households are
“nothing special” because they are mass produced. It is the relationships
among the elements that create the specificities of every room and express
the identity of its owners despite the fact that some features are common
to every household. In reporting on the characteristics of these lounges,
one generally observes a systematic whole with the same basic elements.
The basic elements found in any French lounge, irrespective of the size
of the room, are the following clusters: (1) dining table/chairs/sideboard
and (2) sofa/(armchairs)/coffee table plus television.5 What people say
about these objects confirms this observation: they consider these items
the necessary elements of a lounge. Slight differences appear according
to the age group, with the households of young people stressing the
second cluster. For them, the dining table and chairs disappear, and only
the sideboard or one of the more modern models of this piece of furniture
remains.
The basic furniture in the English case, different both in form and style
from the French, is the three-piece suite (Morley 1990). This group is
composed of a sofa and two armchairs, traditionally placed near the fire-
place (and/or television). If, as is often the case, modern houses have no
fireplace, an artificial fire is installed (electricity or gas). Those who do
not wish to go to such expense put in its stead a sideboard-cum-book-
shelves, which is called a unit. This piece of furniture, like the mantelpiece,
is used to display decorative objects and photographs. People strongly
stress the importance of having a focal point in a room. The fireplace is
an ideal focus and so is the television. In fact, the television competes
with the fireplace for the dominance of the room: people recognize that
the television is important but often find this less than desirable. A dining

3
I prefer to use the term lounge rather than living room, following the usage of most
of my English informants. The French term is séjour.
4
I explore this difference in my book Construire son propre univers: Intérieurs domestiques
comme expressions des identités: Une comparaison franco-anglaise (in press). See the work of
Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000), which provided the framework for Chevalier and Privat (in
press).
5
As confirmed by my study and general observation (Chevalier 1992, 1995).

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 S I G N S Spring 2002 ❙ 849

table and chairs, which may often be folded away in a corner, do not
belong to this basic pattern; they are never central to the organization of
lounge space, which occasionally includes a sideboard or Welsh dresser.
The decor of the interior, both furniture and decoration, makes up an
entity, and the formal approach to lounge decor in both countries shows
that there is a recognizable system, those pieces of furniture considered
necessary and essential, but the systems are different for the French and
English. The basic pieces of furniture characterize the room and embody
the home. This home is framed by culture: objects more or less formally
similar are displayed differently in order to satisfy cultural requirements
regarding the organization of space. There are thus two different formal
ways of embodying what it takes for a place to be a home.
This elaboration of domestic space can be viewed as a process that
transforms mass-consumption items, many in themselves similar, into in-
alienable objects. Through the use of these objects, people build and
express collective and individual identities, a process I describe as appro-
priation (Miller 1987, 158–77). People personalize their material envi-
ronment, rather than succumbing to a world of objects that are resistant
to their influence.

The gendering of domestic space

The relationships among family members, especially between the husband
and wife, are materialized in the lounge. The display of furniture in space,
and its transformations, indicate changes in family relations inside the
domestic sphere. In France, traditionally, the emphasis on the dining set
resulted in a closed spatial organization of the furniture: people faced each
other in the dining area and, to a lesser extent, in the sitting area. The
emphasis placed on having the family sit around the dining table brought
male-female role differentiation to the foreground. It also imposed formal
behavioral patterns on members of the household and set up a hierarchy.
This male-female role differentiation also affects gender embodiment
in the lounge space. Take, for example, M. and Mme Probst.6 They are
in their midfifties, married, with two children, one of whom still lives at
home. M. Probst is an office worker in a big company, and Mme Probst
is a housewife. Both are natives of the Paris suburbs. They bought all their
household furniture in 1956, so it is homogeneous in style. Later they
added a nest of tables and two black leather sofas. Decorative objects are
displayed on all flat surfaces. The room is divided into two functional

6
All the names of my informants are pseudonyms.

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850 ❙ Chevalier

spaces, the dining area and the sitting area. The former contains ancient,
delicate objects of value; they are in functional affinity with the use of the
space (plates in the dining room). For example, there is plate that ap-
parently comes from the Elysée service, made in Limoges.7 The objects
on the sideboard were inherited by Mme Probst from her maternal kin.
The other side of the room is modern, with leather sofas and abstract
prints given to M. Probst by his customers. There are photographs on
the bookcase. This represents a gender differentiation of space, with a
female side and a male side, in accordance with traditional roles (Hum-
phrey 1974; Bourdieu 1980, 441–61). The areas are linked by the book-
case, a transitional zone between the female and male sides, where portraits
of their children are exhibited.
In Britain, the fireplace was always the central focus of the room, with
the easy chairs placed around it. Today, central heating and the intro-
duction of the television have changed that, but only to a minor degree
when compared with France. This arrangement provides opportunities
for individuals to engage in separate activities while sharing the same room,
so there is no a priori disposition to a collective focus and even less to
gender hierarchy. In Jersey Farm, the lounge gives material form to the
unity of the couple: I never observed people giving prominence to gender-
specialized roles. This is clearly related to the minor place of the dining
area in the British lounge and to the spatial organization of furniture here.
When the main shared living area is not organized to emphasize eating
together, use of the space is inevitably more individualistic.
Nevertheless, there is a historical transformation taking place in the
French organization of domestic space, which reflects differences in the
way that gender is signaled and in how French people symbolize being
in company (de Singly 1996, 1998). Today, the dominance of television
and the subsequent marginalization of the dining area by young French
couples have resulted in new ways for the family or couple to be together.
This process changes not only the organization of space but results in
more personalized activity when the family is gathered together. Tradi-
tional gender divisions disappear progressively, especially in terms of male-
female-defined duties. There is a strong indication that gender roles are
becoming more egalitarian. Gender differentiation of space inside the

7
The Elysée Palace is the house of the French president. Apparently, every new president
receives a porcelain service made by Limoges, the well-known (and quite expensive) factory
in France. Young bourgeois couples expect to receive services of Limoges porcelain when
they marry.

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 S I G N S Spring 2002 ❙ 851

domestic sphere, visible in the Probsts’ lounge, and gender specialization

of domestic activities are diminishing.
Gender also offers an insight into continuity and change in national
cultural patterns, the implication being that younger French couples are
becoming more like English ones. But change is always relative. When I
carried out my interviews, British couples usually insisted on meeting me
as a couple and on fixing an appointment time convenient for both hus-
band and wife. By contrast, the residents of Les Fontenelles normally
suggested that I speak with the wife, and, if her partner were present, he
stayed silent. These differences in the way that family and couple rela-
tionships are embodied in lounges, and the contrasts between Les Fon-
tenelles and Jersey Farm, can also be analyzed in terms of the links between
the public and private spheres built up through objects.

The embodiment of objects

I regard relationships between people and their community as being me-
diated by the world of objects. The discourses of my informants can be
seen as performative and often reinforced this mediation, building up links
forged in reality or the imagination. Objects materialize persons, events,
or places, for example. Thus, statements made about the links between
objects and some imagined context, as well as about their use in the
lounge’s decor, recognized how household identity was expressed through
such materializations. Objects are a stimulus to conversation, especially
as aids to recollection, the stuff of memories. If decor as a whole embodies
the “home,” objects that participate in this construction of memory ma-
terialize the specific dimensions of a household’s identity. In this way,
individual choices combine with cultural patterns to generate significant
differences between French and English households.
The generic form of objects does not play an important role in this
process of materialization: two similar items may materialize varied ele-
ments, and two different ones may signify the same things. Constraints
on aesthetic choice derive primarily from the origins of objects in
exchange.8 Inherited objects and gifts are the most constraining: they
present the self through an exhibition of our relationships both to the
living and the dead. By appropriating an inherited item or gift, we rec-
ognize our links to others and agree to maintain them. These inherited

8
I coedited an issue of Ethnologie Française with Anne Monjaret titled “Les cadeaux, à
quel prix?” See the introduction by Chevalier and Monjaret (1998) and “Destins de cadeaux”
(Chevalier 1998).

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852 ❙ Chevalier

objects or gifts materialize their donors and the events or places associated
with the transfers, however various they may be. These include different
stages of the life cycle (in the case of inheritance, links to the death of
ancestors), different persons (kin, friends, or neighbors), and different
places, near or far.
An inherited object or something received as a gift is from the beginning
located inside social relationships. It is charged by the dynamic of ex-
changes among people, and as such it is less flexible than a bought item.
In contrast, bought objects involve an apparent lack of direct social con-
straint because there is no concrete mediation of the kind outlined above.
The purchase is made possible by the use of money in the freedom of the
market: to buy commodities is to be released from social relationships, to
be free of any constraining social links. In the case of a purchase made
impersonally in a department store, the purchaser is free to build up links
between this item and anyone he/she chooses. In domestic interiors, the
origins of objects are various. The articulation of objects from different
origins allows us to express all dimensions of our identity, individual as
well as collective. The domestic spaces considered in my survey were rarely
devoid of inherited items or gifts altogether—constructed only with pur-
chased objects. Sometimes a household was described by an informant as
being detached from social links, an expression of their personal identity
that was deliberately chosen to emphasize independence or isolation. At
the opposite extreme, private universes based only on inherited objects
or gifts do not leave much space for individual expression. Mrs. Devlin
described the home of her childhood: “All my parents’ decorative objects
were gifts, not really their choice. So I decided to buy most of my items
in order to have choice” (interview by author, July 1994). The presence
of others through objects can be overwhelming. The current demand for
individuality may be considered a generational phenomena: the previous
generation often used to live in domestic decors built up by others without
finding it necessary to modify them in the name of expressing self-identity.
The decor of each room articulates individual and collective dimensions.
I am interested first in the content of this collective identity, which is
materialized as objects. Both French and English couples received wedding
gifts for their homes in the form of crockery or crystal glasses, which were
then enclosed in display cabinets. But in Jersey Farm, it was also common
to receive pieces of furniture as gifts. Robby and Janet Moore, who are
in their early thirties, had just moved into the first home that they shared
together. Most of their furniture and household objects were gifts; the
sideboard-bookshelves, an essential item, were a wedding present from
Janet’s mother. From what they said, they clearly considered the sideboard

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 S I G N S Spring 2002 ❙ 853

a “focal point” in their lounge. They displayed lots of knickknacks on it,

such as crystal glasses, a bowl, and engagement presents from their parents.
The photograph on the sideboard was of the local church where their
wedding ceremony took place. It, too, was a wedding present from kin,
as were two other photographs on the wall, one of their engagement and
one of their marriage. This lounge emphasized the couple and the rites
of passage through which it was socially constituted. In general, my Eng-
lish informants more often based their self-presentation on the display of
engagement and wedding presents. In the French households of the same
age group, if engagement ceremonies still occurred (and they were rare),
they were not recalled through objects. Wedding photographs, so nu-
merous in Jersey Farm, were rarely seen in Nanterre. Wedding presents
were also displayed in French lounges, but they were not highlighted as
much as they were by young English couples.9
I reached the same conclusion when I carried out a comparative analysis
of domestic development cycles and residential trajectories (Chevalier
1996). French households often ideally have double residences: one place,
a suburban rented flat, serves as their main residence, and a second home
in the country represents a spatial anchorage for their descendants through
time. They keep a second residence, not necessarily to live in, but as a
family home. In this way their material culture is designed to embody the
principle of lineage continuity. By contrast, English households concen-
trate on the main residence that they own. This home is a common project
of the couple, and there is little concern with materializing the lineage
since children are expected to become wholly independent. Rather, it
embodies the alliance; hence the prominence given to the exhibition of
gifts received when the couple got married. They materialize an event, a
rite of passage that constitutes the formation of a new household. Janet
and Robby’s parents gave them all the things necessary for an English
couple to feel they have “a real home.” If the parents of young French
couples do not help their children to settle in Les Fontenelles’ flats, it is
probably because this accommodation is not their real home. They may
help their children to settle in more luxurious accommodations, but this
is likely to be in a family home located in an area of the countryside
associated with family origins.
Family origins are strongly highlighted in Les Fontenelles’ interiors by

9
A recent study of newly married couples in Les Ardennes (east of France) emphasizes
the presence of objects related to wedding (Alice Boulet, personal communication, April
2001), but this may reflect the stage of a couple’s life together rather than a permanent
arrangement.

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854 ❙ Chevalier

presents that link people not only to their families but also to their places
of birth. M. and Mme Rufin, who are married with two daughters, are
in their late thirties. M. Rufin is a blue-collar worker in the civil service;
Mme Rufin is a housewife. Both are natives of La Creuse, an area in the
center of France where their families live. They have a second home, an
inherited house in La Creuse that they use as a holiday home. In their
Nanterre flat, decorative objects are usually bought in secondhand shops,
such as a statuette of a naked woman in Sevres crystal. This bowl in
Murano glass is a holiday souvenir, as is the Algerian plate on the wall.
Mme Rufin received a clock from her colleagues when she left her job
after the birth of her first child. A photograph of her late father is displayed
on the cupboard. The fish plates from Quimper (Brittany) are wedding
presents, as is the magazine rack. On the walls, the main items are stuffed
birds collected (or sometimes found on the road) by hunters in La Creuse
and given to them. They give these birds to a taxidermist to stuff. The
couple is very keen on tapestry because Aubusson, a well-known tapestry
manufacturing firm, is located in their hometown, and so they have bought
some tapestries to decorate the walls. M. Coderc-Deschamps, a young
man from Ariege, has also hung the head of a wild boar on the wall above
his sofa, a hunting trophy given to him by a kinsman.
By contrast, the English in Jersey Farm often had wall decorations
evoking the area where they lived even though only a third of the house-
holds had a member who came from there. Mrs. Roberts, a native of the
Midlands, said of a print on her wall: “This is our St. Albans’ castle which
we bought when we came here” (interview by author, September 1994).
It appears that the English are prepared to pay a great deal for a succession
of homes that indicate where they have come from and perhaps where
they are going, whereas the French emphasize where they come from.
Lounge decor revealed that the French highlight their origins, lineage,
and native place, while the English are concerned with their existence as
a couple, their friendship networks, and the places where they live and
work. More generally, these contrasts are cultural ways of resolving the
tension between the need for stability and the reality of the movement
that is an inherent dimension of contemporary lives.

Conclusion
My research (Chevalier 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996) provides evidence that,
on the one hand, people construct highly personalized universes using
mass-produced objects and, on the other hand, that important cultural
differences exist. These differences are systematically related to other as-

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 S I G N S Spring 2002 ❙ 855

pects of the society such as kinship structures (noted here in the contrast
between the individual mobility of English couples and the French em-
phasis on lineage).
The English lower middle class does not seek to embody continuity of
lineage and geographical origins in its material culture or in the objects
used in home decoration, but it gives stronger material expression to the
identity of a couple as a couple and to local ties than do French households.
Of course, this discrepancy has its roots in the history of family structures
in the two countries, particularly in France’s relatively late industrialization
when compared with Britain’s. Inevitably, gender relations provide a sen-
sitive measure of contrasts and shifts in the organization of domestic space.
One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from my research is that
gender hierarchy in French homes may be moving toward the more egal-
itarian joint model of English couples. This process has also been observed
and analyzed by other French researchers (see, e.g., de Singly 1996, 1998).
Nevertheless, the most surprising inference from my study does not lie
in the differences between English and French families but in the fact that
these contrasts still survive in social groups widely considered to have
succumbed to cultural standardization under the influence of a system of
mass consumption. Moreover, the lounges of Les Fontenelles and Jersey
Farm display these differences to be “read” by anyone who cares to ob-
serve these domestic spaces.

Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology

University of Franche-Comté (Besançon/France)

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