Girls' Bedrooms as a Commonplace

Initially, I was going to make the argument that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and not so long ago, MySpace (and who remembers Friendster??) are examples of current commonplaces, but after giving it more thought, I think girls’ bedrooms also serve as commonplaces – and they’re more dynamic.

I remember that during my childhood the bedrooms of my friends and female cousins were always areas of mystique and fascination.  And as I remember, while adult bedrooms tended to be uniform and institutional, the bedrooms of my female peers were like windows to their souls: almost always, their walls were adorned with photographs, cut-outs from magazines and newspapers, posters, letters, bulletin boards, and other odds and ends that illustrated their identity.  I remember entering the bedroom of my teenage cousin and noticing that she had different words cut out from magazines and newspapers covering the wall above her bed.  I assume (now) that she chose words that described her, although I can’t remember any of them now.  As a child, whenever I made a new friend, one of the first things we wanted to do was see each other’s rooms.

In addition to the walls, the bedrooms of girls establish their inhabitant’s identity by their collections of clothing, music, books and magazines.  I was never interested in clothes, but the books in the bedrooms of my friends provided me with endless amusement.  (Even today, I think among the most revealing glances into a person’s inner world is a look at their bookshelf.) In addition, girls’ musical selections usually reveal a hybrid of, and sometimes a struggle between, personal taste and societal expectation.  

In popular culture, I remember two particular examples of girl bedrooms from my childhood: the Judy Blume novel Just As Long As We’re Together, which featured a protagonist with eighteen or twenty different posters covering her walls and ceiling; and the television show Clarissa Explains It All -- Clarissa’s bedroom, to my seven-year-old mind, represented the epitome of what it meant to be a teenage girl.  I coveted a bedroom like that!  My fascination quickly dissipated when I watched the Canadian teen soap opera Fifteen (anyone remember that one?):  the bedroom of one of the female characters was decidedly more grown-up and feminine than Clarissa’s – the paradigm had shifted!

A girl’s bedroom represents one of her first exercises in building an identity.  From what I remember from my days as a babysitter, I think girls put more of themselves into their rooms than boys, and maybe this is because boys do not have the same pressures as girls to create (or conform to) an identity.  Similarly, my early observation of the seeming sterility of “grown-up” bedrooms illustrates that adults have already established an identity in the actual world, and have no need to do additional identity-building in the bedroom.  (Ok, that didn’t come out right … but you get it!)

Another important aspect of the girl’s bedroom is its capacity for evolution.  As the inhabitant matures, and her identity shifts, so do the contents of her bedroom and the adornments on her wall.  Initially, most girls’ bedrooms are influenced exclusively by Mom and/or Dad, then slowly, more and more of its contents and shape are formed by the girl herself, as she navigates her identity. 

It would be interesting to investigate how social media (and the digitalization of society in general) have shifted the commonplace of the girl bedroom.  I don’t feel like I can really speak to this (most of my knowledge of girls’ bedrooms is drawn from an era when cassette tapes were still relevant), but does anyone with a daughter care to extrapolate on the subject?

Hayley