| The boudoir, a space especially invented for women, has been described as the quintessential room of the eighteenth century. Characterized in literary and cultural studies as erotic and as metaphor of a woman's body, the boudoir is generally understood as a site for secret pleasures. Yet little has been written exclusively about the boudoir from an architectural perspective or from a woman's point of view. Combining art, architectural and social histories as well as literary studies, the dissertation presents the multiple meanings and understandings of the boudoir, from its inception in early eighteenth-century France as a space for religious devotion to its transformation as a voluptuous space towards the end of the century. Part one examines three types of private rooms dedicated to a woman: the oratory, the hybrid oratory-boudoir, and the boudoir proper. The second part looks at the development of the boudoir beyond the closed world of the honnetes gens. It focuses on its consolidation into a sexually affective space, through the accounts of late eighteenth century writers, architects and courtesans. In examining the codification of behavioral norms, their relationship to spatial organization and decor, and the affect of the architecture, the dissertation demonstrates the significance of the boudoir as a psychological architecture fostering an interior life. The history of the boudoir in the eighteenth century can thus shed a new light on the way architecture contributed to the development of modern private life. |
