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.
