The role of the bedroom in the invention of privacy in the Wet

Lisa Hilton reviews (Lauren Elkin's English translation of) Michelle Perrot, The Bedroom in TLS.

“Before the bedroom there was the room, before that almost nothing”, Perrot announces. She chooses to leapfrog over much medieval history and begin with a description of the king’s bedroom at Versailles under Louis XIV – an account for which she relies heavily on the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon, who spoke to the Sun King twice. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is more thorough as an interpreter of the stultifying etiquette of the Versailles system, and Nancy Mitford much funnier; there is no fresh research or information in Perrot’s summary, which is at best indecisive as to the significance of the royal bedroom: “the king’s chamber guards its mysteries”. That said, we learn that Perrot intends to trace the origin of the desire for a “room of one’s own”, which mark of individualization is apparently less universal than it might appear. The Japanese had no notion of privacy, we are told, which might have come as news to the ukiyo-e artists of the seventeenth century; nonetheless, Perrot is broadly correct in her account of the evolution of private sleeping space as depending on the movement from curtained or boxed beds to separate chambers during the same period in Europe. This is about as far as the tracing of origins goes – Perrot then makes a brief detour into the communal apartments of Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism (though anyone interested in the psychological consequences of this would do better to read Orlando Figes), before announcing confidently that the conjugal bedroom became customary for the middle classes in the West after 1840, in imitation of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who married that year.

H/t 3QD.