The home was recommended to be organized so that each room suggested the kinds of behavior was expected: The first floor was the masculine floor and had a dining room. Living room and/or study; it had easy access to the outside world. The next floor was the feminine floor, with the drawing room, and the women’s bedroom. “A woman’s place was thus situated physically at the heart of the household, metonymically establishing her authority as the central manager of the domestic establishment and implying that one important job of a good home was to extend feminine succor to guests via the public drawing room space” (285). Above that would be children’s room, nurseries and the servants’ places. Servant had a separate stair case. All of this separated servants so there were almost never seen.
The books that taught newly middle class people about the home were highly intertextual, meaning that one needs to read several books to get the whole idea. “Seeming to show a reader how to become middle class, while simultaneously mystifying the single most important but intangible quality of that position, these books ensure their own continued marketability. As readers continue to seek that elusive information, they will buy other similar books, hoping ultimately to be able to envision for themselves how to turn these floor plans and diagrams, room layouts and chair models into a three-dimensional home that will properly signify middle-class respectability…[Also], “these images deny that they undermine the value of naturally occurring middle-class sensibility” (296-7).