Wallpaper, Lancashire, c. 1853, Potters of Darwen, E.558-1980, V&A © 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum

Assuming all collections to comprise of beautiful things and exemplars would be a falsehood; design historians will be familiar with the infamous ‘chamber of horrors’, the Victorian museological experiment conducted by Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and other design educators involved with the early development of the V&A.  The chamber was a gallery exhibiting a carefully curated collection, an assemblage of 87 objects intended to orient the visitor upon their arrival at the Museum of Ornamental Manufactures at Marlborough House (the first incarnation of the V&A).  Designing their route through the museum, Cole and company hoped to inculcate within the visitor the Government School of Design’s definitions of good and bad taste.  This method of visual instruction only lasted 10 months before the chamber was closed in June 1853.

This collection of objects is now dispersed throughout the various departments of the museum; a few are still in possession of their original labels and numbers, fragments that act as a reminder of their past history, like this sample of wallpaper on the right.  Revisiting the chamber and the horror within, let us explore some connecting ideas of horror, design and taste.  Read on if you dare…

Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is a very useful theoretical text that elucidates our fascination with horror.  It explores the concept of abjection – the psychological force of rejection we experience when confronted with objects of horror, that which shocks, disgusts and frightens – things that unmake us.  For Kristeva, anything that disturbs identity, system and order, that disrespects borders and rules can induce this revulsion.  She locates it within the boundary state that exists between the object and the subject, namely the surface.  Her short-hand example of this is the skin that forms upon milk – when she experiences this surface via touch, it prompts a violent physical reaction in her body.  Abjection is such a powerful disturbance that it breaks down barriers and borders, resulting in trauma for the subject.

The surface is therefore a busy site of interaction where we connect with the object.  In many fictional tales of horror and the supernatural, the cause of fear is located in things; a writer who exploited the potential of objects in evoking these feelings of unease was M.R. James (1862-1936).  A distinguished academic at Cambridge University, he held the post of Director at the Fitzwilliam Museum 1894-1908; his engagement with objects in this capacity accounts for the success he enjoys as undisputed master of the genre.  These classic spooky short-stories originated as a form of entertainment for his fellow scholars, usually read in the evenings by candlelight.  Informed by a personal passion for old tracts and books, many of his characters are academics, antiquarians and collectors (and all male).   Usually conducting research in an archive somewhere or making a purchase at an auction, the subject comes into contact with a material object that unleashes the horror of the tale. Collected together, the things used to create abjection include a diary, mezzotint, doll’s house, scrapbook, and perhaps best known, an ancient whistle in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.

However, when thinking about surface, wallpaper is the obvious choice; The Diary of Mr. Poynter tells the story of a collector, Mr Denton, who finds a piece of patterned fabric in an old diary recently purchased.  A design of vertical bands that ripple like hair, the pattern is copied and adapted to make a wallpaper and curtains for his bedrooms; after imagining a figure peeping from behind the pattern, he awakes in horror as a real figure attacks him, emerged from the wall-paper and crawling on its belly towards him, a creature covered in hair. 1

Fragment of 'Thorn Damask' wallpaper, c. 1837, by Jeffrey, E.1351-1963, V&A © 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum

A favourite horror story of Design Historians remains The Yellow Wall-Paper, published in 1890 by the American authoress Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935).   Contemporary with James’ tale, it was inspired by the circumstances of her own mental health.  The narrator, confined to a room by her husband to cure her hysteria, is provided with the only stimulus that a yellow wallpaper provides.  Similarly to Mr Denton, the narrator begins to perceive another woman lurking behind the wallpaper, who gradually escapes and the two women merge.

Horror has the ability to fascinate and repel us simultaneously, transfixing us; this the experience of the narrator, describing a ‘vortex’ that summons and repels her – this is Kristeva’s definition of abjection. As the barrier of the wall-paper disintegrates, the force of abjection pushes the woman into insanity.

The potential of pattern to induce madness was recognised some years before this story; Mrs Beeton in her Housewife’s Treasury of Domestic Information (1865) stresses the importance of exercising care when choosing bedroom wallpaper, in order ‘to avoid any outre forms which the eyes of a restless invalid, condemned to weary hours of solitude, could torture into the form or face of demon or grotesque horror.’2

Gilman spelled wallpaper as wall-paper throughout the story to emphasise these two distinct elements; two forms of barrier, the wall the prison bars of the other woman, the paper the patterned surface.  The narrator identifies the horror of the wall-paper lying in its choice of colour (a repellant, sickly sulphur yellow), and in the offensiveness of the pattern, characterised as ‘sprawling’ and ‘flamboyant’, defying her attempts to bring it to order:  ‘I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alteration, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.’3  Gilman as an artist trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1879, and she may have picked up these ‘principles’ there; the laws she describes correlate with those propounded by the Government School of Design in London, and the artistic crimes that the yellow wall-paper commits are similar to criticisms expressed in the catalogue that accompanied the chamber of horrors.

Wallpaper marked 'False Principles 35', England, c.1853, unknown maker, E.561-1980, V&A © 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum

The objects chosen were intended to challenge the visitor to the gallery, and hopefully induce the process of abjection within them; thus repelled, there was the possibility of the visitor engaging with the design reform movement being promulgated by the Museum and the School.  The experience was exaggerated to comic effect in a satirical piece published in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words, in which a Mr Crumpet of Brixton lives in a ‘House Full of Horrors’; the abject confronts him in the gallery as he recognises his own trousers hanging there, to the tea-cup he drinks his tea from.  Similar to Kristeva’s experience of the milk-skin, Mr Crumpet becomes physically affected, reduced to a ‘gibbering wreck’.4

The controversy surrounding the exhibition led to its closure, as manufacturers whose products featured complained of their inclusion within such a display; taste is a contentious issue, but it is certainly a method by which we can stimulate debate around design, in itself not a bad thing.  Of course the V&A has a different set of criteria when collecting for its collections today, not collecting and defining ‘bad’ design, but when taste is such a personal thing it will always influence the nature of a collection; retaining a stance of impartiality is very difficult for the collector and curator when purchasing and researching objects.

What the survivors of the chamber of horrors (the objects that is, not the visitors) demonstrate is the ability of objects to change status, in response to changing attitudes and time.

Roller-printed cotton for furnishing, Lancashire, c.1850, unknown manufacturer, T.6-1933, V&A © 2011 Victoria and Albert Museum

This cotton chintz was included as number 16 in the chamber, its crime to directly imitate ribbons and roses and lack a sense of  symmetry; 160 years later it has been fully rehabilitated.  Now a design chosen to star upon the V&A Shop carrier-bag, it has become an mobile ambassador for the museum, representing the V&A brand wherever the it goes.  One wonders what Cole and company would have thought –  reminding us that today’s tat is tomorrow’s collectible.

References

1. M.R.James, ‘The Diary of Mr. Poynter’ in Collected Ghost Stories (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), p.224.

2. quoted in Gill Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration (London: V&A Publishing, 2002), p.131.

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, first published 1890), p.9.

4. see Christopher Frayling, Henry Cole and the Chamber of Horrors: the curious origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), pp.30-31

Recommended Reading

Frayling, Christopher, Henry Cole and the Chamber of Horrors: the curious origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2010)

James, M.R., Collected Ghost Stories (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007)

Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection (1980)

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Saunders, Gill, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration (London: V&A Publishing, 2002)

Yasuko, Suga, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of  Ornamental Art, 1852-53‘, Design Issues, Vol.20, No.4 (Autumn), pp. 43-56

© 2011 Helen Cresswell, All Rights Reserved