A History of Bedrooms

Nowhere is the bedroom more political than at court. Perrot returns often to the royal bedchamber, where the most intimate act — lying down to sleep — was staged as public ritual. At Versailles, the king's rising and retiring, the lever and coucher, were ceremonies attended by ranks of courtiers, each fighting for the honor of handing over a shirt or holding a candle. The bed was a throne in another posture. To be admitted to the chamber was to hold power; to be shut out was to be nobody. Privacy, here, was inverted: the most private space was the least private, precisely because it belonged to the sovereign.

At the other end of the social scale, the bedroom becomes the cell. Perrot, who wrote extensively on prisons, sees the two spaces as siblings. The convict's cell, the boarding-school dormitory, the barracks, the hospital ward — all are bedrooms reorganized around the eye of an institution. The point was to watch. Sleep, that most defenseless state, could be supervised, counted, disciplined. What the bourgeois bedroom offered as refuge, the institution offered as its opposite: a bed you could not leave, in a room where you were never truly alone.

Once the door could close, something new became possible: a private inner life with a place to happen. Perrot treats the bedroom as the workshop where the modern individual was assembled. Behind the closed door one could read alone, write letters and diaries, pray without an audience, or simply think unobserved. The habit of introspection — of keeping a journal, of examining one's own conscience — needs a room, and the spread of that room and the spread of the examined self go together in her telling.

She pays particular attention to women, whose relationship to the bedroom was double-edged. On one hand, the nineteenth-century wife was in some sense confined to the domestic interior, her horizon narrowed to the household. On the other, the bedroom and the small writing table within it gave many women the only space that was genuinely theirs — a place to correspond, to read novels, to keep the diaries that historians like Perrot would later read. The room that limited was also the room that permitted. Virginia Woolf's demand for a room of one's own has a long, uneven prehistory here.

Step back from the particular rooms and Perrot's larger argument comes into focus: being able to be alone is not the natural condition of humanity but a historical achievement, and an unevenly distributed one. For most of the past, solitude was rare, feared, or imposed as punishment. The idea that a person is entitled to withdraw, to shut a door and answer to no one for an hour, had to be invented, and it was invented alongside walls, corridors, locks, and the money to pay for them. The bedroom is the physical form of that idea.

And because it costs something, it has always been a privilege. Perrot never lets the reader forget who did not have it. The servant on the back stairs, the family of six in a single tenement room, the migrant in a shared dormitory, the convict, the soldier, the patient in the ward — for them the private bedroom was a luxury glimpsed in other people's houses. To have a room of one's own is to hold a small piece of freedom that the crowded and the confined do not. Intimacy, in her account, is not a right evenly held but a resource, and resources are distributed by class.

Perrot set out to write the history of a room and ended up writing the history of a claim: that a person deserves somewhere to be alone. She traced it from the shared beds of the Middle Ages through the corridors and locks of the bourgeois house, through the royal chamber and the prison cell, to the writing table where a woman kept the diary no one else would read. Along the way the bedroom stops being furniture and becomes what it was for her all along — a document, written in walls, of how intimacy was slowly carved out of a world that had none.