The rise of the individual is a common phenomenon in all complex societies, but it reaches its peak in the West. Turning to Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, the author shows the rise of the individual and the consequent increased demand for privacy in three sociocultural spheres.
House and family space
In Medieval Europe, a manor house was basically just a large undivided room or hall. All the activities take place here, just like all the activities take place in the market. The difference between indoor and outdoor is minimal. In winter, when people go indoors, they just feel sheltered from the wind and rain. In fact, the house is drafty, and even though there is a fire, it is not really warm. For this, they do not take off their capes and caps; There were no stools to sit on, so they had to stand.
Some stand and talk about business and politics, some stretch their legs or dance, and some eat or try to sleep in a corner. The music the musicians played was hardly noticed, for the children were running and barking, and the dogs were chasing and barking. Indoors is just as hectic as outdoors, and privacy is nowhere to be found, and certainly not needed.
The first real change was the addition of rooms on either side of the hall. One place that ended up being avoided was the bedroom; The other became the kitchen.
Over time, domestic space became increasingly divided, especially among the upper classes of Europe, which reached its peak during the Victorian period.
In addition to the bedroom and kitchen, there was a drawing room, dining-room, sitting-room, music room, nursery, lady's boudoir, smoking-room, gentleman's study, and downstairs the servants' quarters. What used to be a hall, of course, became a narrow passageway, and people still stood, just like their medieval predecessors, only now they took off their coats and hats.
The ideal of privacy was maximized in a Victorian house. The children have their own rooms, and the babysitters have their own places. The host and hostess usually sleep in separate rooms. Women can paint and change their mood in the boudoir, while men can smoke a cigar and smoke rings in the study.
The need for privacy led to a desire for an inner life, and it took about 300 years for a greater sense of self to spread.
By the middle of the 16th century, public benches were replaced by single chairs, and later by cushioned chairs. The advantage of cushion chairs is that people can be immersed in their own world, relaxed. Wall-mirrors were popular until the end of the 17th century, suggesting that people liked to see themselves from top to bottom. By the 18th century, libraries were frequented by upper class and aristocratic families. Men can go there alone to relax, learn, reflect, and enter the world and times of others.
Will books fill the shelves and be deemed too private to be exposed to the public? Whatever the reason, there was a time when they were hidden behind glass panels and curtains. When the owner found that the books showed his good taste, he removed the cover-up. Thus, the desire for social approval is in conflict with the need to develop the inner self.
Eating and table manners
The story of eating and table manners has something in common with the story of the interior of the home and its furnishings: both depend on compartmentalization and specialization.
In the Middle Ages, quantity was more important than quality. Rich people eat more, poor people eat less: the real difference is not whether the food tastes good, but in quantity.
Neither of the two foods commonly eaten by the rich is suitable for modern tastes. One is roasted mixed with a variety of very stale meats and vegetables (and even flowers). The other is the whole animal -- wild boar, domestic pig or deer. Advances in cooking techniques have allowed people to use fewer ingredients and appreciate flavours more, such as separating meat so it is served straight rather than mixed; Cut vegetables and meat to avoid whole animals or chunks of meat on the table.
Advances in table manners are seen as another sign of a growing sense of self and personal dignity, as well as a sign of one's isolation from animals.
In the Middle Ages, even high-born Europeans ate with their hands. By the 16th century, elegant diners used three fingers to pick up food from communal plates.
The fork was first used in Italy, followed by Germany and England. Queen Elizabeth I's novelty of offering diners a fork at the table was seen by critics as pretentious.
After that, the number of table utensils continued to increase. After 1800, an elaborate table would have fruit knives and forks, as well as fish knives and spoons, coated with silver because direct contact with steel was believed to affect the taste of food.
In the late 17th century, guests could only use one glass, even if several wines were served. By the end of the 19th century, more than half a dozen glasses were used to serve wines such as sherry, bordeaux, Burgundy, Moselle, Hungarian wine, port and Madeira.
As guests enter the restaurant, an array of sparkling crystal and silver-plated cutlery comes into view. By the time the first course arrives, the table is covered with high culture utensils.
As noted, medieval halls were sparsely furnished. During the meal, the table is set and the bench is brought in. A bench is the most common seat. People share a stool while eating as if they have no right to claim to be separate individuals.
Chairs for important people. Only they are individuals-with authority, and "authority" means the ability to be a promoter or agent.
In my own experience, because my classmates and I were students at Oxford University, we were instructed to sit on benches in the hall when we ate, and it was clear that we were not being treated as adults. At the VIP table, the mentors sit in chairs and have their own space, each as an individual. I dream of one day sitting at the top table, or even being a chair professor, with speaking authority.
The world of drama
"All the world's a stage," wrote William Shakespeare, the English playwright and poet. In this way, he wanted to express the idea that this stage represents the world, not just a model of the world, but a mirror of the world.
Unlike literary or architectural achievements, theater reflects the world in two ways -- plot and layout -- that reinforce each other.
In short, the history of drama is from the universe to the land, from the square to the drawing room, from participation to spectation, from public rituals that focus on sin and salvation -- through tragicomedy reflecting social interaction -- to the inability to communicate, the loneliness of the self, and the despair of the self.
Modern drama has its roots in the rituals of medieval churches. In the 12th century, there was the first major shift to secular theater: the movement of rituals outside churches into ordinary public Spaces; Actors were used more often than clergy in plays that directly reflected Christian teachings and rituals; Separate the actors from the audience; If we think of the audience as the congregation, this act represents a progressive separation of ordinary people from the clergy, of everyday life from the sacred ritual.
From 1300 to 1600, corpus Christi plays were popular, and they represented certain areas of time and space and the religious characteristics of theatrical performances during that period. Drama covers everything in space, world, and time, from the fall of man to the day of Judgment.
Obviously, no stage setting for a play can nearly encompass the whole of time and space. But there are individual props, such as Noah's ark workbench, a painted Red Sea painting, and a tree stump with a cross. When the actors finish using one prop, they move on to another.
Later, religious plays gradually gave way to ethics plays, which, although still themed on the Bible, contained secular elements and were presented in humorous and even indecent forms. The clergy are no longer fully involved. The actors are almost professional performers.
By the time of Elizabeth I, drama was no longer just about allegorical characters, but also about everyday and real people. Ethics plays have become a form of popular entertainment, but their didacticism remains. And while the plot no longer runs from the fall to the final judgment, it still covers the globe: Shakespeare's amphitheatre is the Globe (built in 1599) because his plays are a mix of big and small characters, of kingdom and market, of garden and nature -- a universe, a world, not just a landscape, not a private home space.
As a result, Shakespeare's plays could only be performed on a nearly empty stage. This kind of stage setting appeared in the 18th century, when theater themes tended to shift from politics and war to personal life. In the second half of the 19th century, the theatrical family conflicts in the drawing-room marked the culmination of this tendency.
As the theme of the play shifts to personal life, the spacing and boundaries of the layout of the theater space become clearer and clearer.
In ethics plays, actors and audience mix freely, in part because there is no clear demarcation between the stage and the auditorium. Even with established boundaries, with the advent of stage entrances in the 18th century, privileged audiences would still sit on or close to the stage while watching plays.
It was not until the 19th century, with the use of curtains, the dimming of halls and the increasing privacy of plays, that the audience and the actors were forcibly separated.
The audience themselves behaved more formally. In the middle Ages, audiences stood up, walked around, chattered, and only occasionally watched performances.
In Shakespeare's time, the audience sat not because they were interested in what was being done on the stage, but because they had paid for seats, and those who did not want to pay had to stand and watch. Bench or chair, depending on the status of the audience. In the end, everyone in the audience is given dignity and can sit on chairs. It is crowded, but the audience has their own space.
At the same time, in the late 19th century, it became fashionable to have a dark theater atmosphere where audiences could think they were the only ones watching. What to watch? Not heaven and earth, not kingdoms and principalities, but private homes and private lives. In Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play a Doll's House, Nora leaves her husband and children to find her true self. In Ibsen's 1876 play Peer Gynt, Peer is driven to find himself, no matter what the cost. At the end of his journey, he is horrified to find that the onion has no heart -- the ego has no core. In Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov's 1896 play "The Seagull," Tribolev asks sadly: "Who am I? Who am I?"
It was not until the 19th century that the West began to feel that individualism was too much, that people felt lonely and anxious, and that all material possessions could not compensate for the lack of passion for each other. How can one make one's life more meaningful? Terms such as "community" and "neighbourhood" have been favoured by social reformers and planners in their deliberations because they evoke a pre-modern sense of belonging and co-operation. Today these and other warm words stand in contrast to "society, civilization and individualism" and all the other words that suggest loneliness, indifference and objectivity.
Is spatial reintegration the final answer? Planners and architects seem to think so, as the architectural trend after the second half of the 20th century was to combine living and dining rooms into one and to keep the kitchen and dining areas of the home to a minimum.
In theaters, it has become fashionable to remove the stage mouth and curtain, so that the front of the stage becomes the auditorium, and the audience and the actors can be in one world. Social reformers fed their nostalgia by romanticizing pre-modern communities.
Finally, the word "individualism" is no longer an expression of individual potential (including intelligence and excellence), but of pure self-interest. Hundreds of years of historical progress have allowed humans to become more authentic selves, but people see that as negative. Modern international cities, in particular, are often seen as places of complete release of self-consciousness, hindering public connection.
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