The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (review)

Since the 1980s, historians and literary scholars have been inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere¹ for its schematic model outlining the emergence of modern civil society in Britain. His description of the coffeehouse as a quintessential space for bourgeois men to engage in free speech has led, for example, to dozens of works on coffee and its political, economic, and social impact. But perhaps few aspects of Habermas’s work on the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere have proved more tantalizing—and under-explored in The Structural Transformation itself—than his brief, but important remarks on an “intimate sphere.” Here he proposed that members of the bourgeois public sphere could imagine themselves to be more than simply economic and political actors, but also “‘human being[s]’ per se’” (Habermas, 29, in McKeon, 111). Habermas argued that it was in the domestic realm that the bourgeoisie ultimately forged its self-awareness and sympathy, capabilities necessary for effective “rational-critical” debate in the public sphere (Habermas, 51). But how did this particular quality of private life come about?

Literary scholar Michael McKeon offers more than 700 pages of analysis elaborating on the dynamic of separating the intimate from the public spheres and the intertwined development of an interior sense of self in this rich and complex work. McKeon provides a wide-ranging, highly theorized journey charting the seventeenth and eighteenth-century emergence of private, intimate, interior domesticity as registered in print culture, politics, the family, gender relations, sexuality, architecture, the economy, ethics, and more.

McKeon begins with seventeenth-century patriarchal monarchs, Anglo-Protestant critiques of Catholicism, and the rumblings towards the Civil War. He describes the early modern state and family to be “tacitly” (5) separated and to be, at least on a political metaphorical level, understandable as analogies. In the early modern period, both the state and the family operated as conceptual (and actual) spheres that were largely visible, transparent, knowable, and, at least symbolically, interchangeable. A fully developed sense of privacy, as we know it, or even a finely articulated sense of psychological interiority, had not yet emerged, but would by the time we reach Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

McKeon suggests that eighteenth-century subjectivity was forged, far more than Habermas saw, in the domestic as much as the public sphere. McKeon shows how the growing preoccupation with the secret, the private, the interior of the psyche and of physical space was imagined to illuminate an otherwise inscrutable truth about others and the self. In the case of politics, for example, contemporaries found such “secret histories” as the wildly improbable, but widely maintained story that the supposedly illegitimate newborn son of James II was snuck into St. James’s Palace in a “warming pan” in June of 1688 to reveal the “truth” of Stuart political illegitimacy (549–57). In the case of literature, McKeon shows the increasing role of diaries, love letters, closets, and other private locations as facilitating secrets and the revelation of feelings, self insight, and intimate connections. While these and dozens of other discursive examples about private, domestic relations helped to construct a cultural belief in the interiority of the subject, they also, in the case of the roman à clef, operated as political allegory. Here McKeon powerfully suggests how the domestic generated socio-political critique—both as a space in which critics could develop arguments and as a category in itself that was imagined to harbor inner truths. Domesticity thus was as important in facilitating socio-political critiques as “rational-critical” debate associated with the more transparent discussions of the public sphere was. Furthermore, as allegory (rather than analogy), McKeon argues that the split between public and private, the state and the interior became explicit; these abstract divisions arose from and were reified in material, historical changes in domestic architecture, the economy, and even the sciences, such as the move towards private bedrooms...