Ironically, stillness was feared by the pragmatic idealism of the nineteenth century, where everything had to have a reason, an explanation, or a function. Victorian interiors, apparently merely ornamental, had a practical purpose: to cover the emptiness left behind by the absence of tradition. Material proliferation was legitimized by the pretended usefulness of things that contained other things - albums, armoires, boxes, glass cases.

The vast production of the late 1800s was geared to protecting, showing, holding - an obsession that accounts for this period's fastidious arrangements, where nothing is out of place and all the different elements participate in an obligatory meaningfulness.

Eventually, nineteenth-century production surpassed the spaces that so generously embraced it, overflowing them to such a degree that they almost drowned under the weight of their own culture. Satiated, this society then turned around and lashed out against its own abundance amidst self-accusations of superfluity and waste. After all, its objects were no longer connected to anything vital, but were the emblems of a cultural death perpetrated by commodification, the remnants of an aura whose brutal disintegration marked the end of an era.