Curtains, 'curtain twitchers' and conceptions of privacy

Antique magazine illustration (public domain)

Late last year, when I visited a friend in Aarhus in Denmark, I was struck by the fact that no one seemed to draw the curtains in their living rooms after it got dark. Across the city, you could peer inside houses and watch people going about their lives: eating dinner, watching telly, chatting with family, etc.

It reminded me of what London is like in early November, just after the UK has gone off daylight savings. Because dusk happens an hour earlier, there’s a brief period in which people have not yet started compensating for the time change, so you get a rare glimpse inside people’s houses before everyone goes back to diligently closing their blinds and shutters when daylight recedes. However, in Denmark, and neighbouring countries like the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, this appears to be a year-round phenomenon—much to my delight.¹ The contrast to the UK was so stark that it got me thinking about window coverings and privacy.

Although curtains are one of those items that most of us don’t give a second thought to (except when we have to purchase new ones and are gobsmacked by the price), what makes them anthropologically interesting is that they operate on both a functional level and a symbolic one. As Aimee Grant observes, curtains ‘have significant power in that they shape spaces architecturally by forming boundaries and influence the behaviour of those within and outside these spaces’.

While curtains can be purely decorative, they are clearly associated with privacy. Obviously, norms around privacy differ cross-culturally, although the anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest argues that a longing for some kind of privacy is universal. However, what this looks like differs dramatically from culture to culture, and living conditions also play a role.

According to van der Geest, in contexts where conditions aren’t conducive to physical privacy, ‘rules of proper behaviour and keeping social distance create an imaginary wall that protects mutual privacy’. An example familiar to readers will be the civil inattention people exhibit in lifts and on public transit, which is basically ‘a display of disinterestedness without disregard’.

Visual signs are employed as well. In some cases, these might be literal signs, like the ones you can stick on your hotel room door requesting privacy from overattentive cleaning staff. In other cases they might be purely symbolic, like the ‘sock on the doorknob’ trick purportedly² employed in American college dorm rooms to signify that sex is happening within and the roommate should please make themselves scarce.

While curtains clearly do preserve a degree of privacy—visually, at least—they simultaneously operate as symbols in much the same way as the sock on the door, a phenomenon especially evident in hospital wards. For example, Aimee Grant reports that in one ethnographic study, closed curtains on maternity wards were seen as a sign of a desire for privacy, while partially open curtains were a sign that patients were seeking information or support. This suggests that curtains operate as a cultural code of sorts, something clearly borne out by the differences between English and Danish, Dutch and Norwegian attitudes to curtains.

In Watching the English, the anthropologist Kate Fox argues that the English are obsessed with privacy, something particularly evident in their homes, which she suggests follow the moat-and-drawbridge rule: basically, a desire to make them as difficult to find³ and private as possible. Fox doesn’t have much to say about curtains specifically, except as a marker of class. (Basically, if your curtains coordinate with your lounge, you’re middle class; if you have net curtains in your front room, you’re working class.⁴) However, she does hint at their cultural significance in her reference to ‘curtain twitchers’.

‘Curtain twitchers’ is the English expression for people overly interested in their neighbours’ lives. Although often treated as synonymous with ‘nosy parker’ and ‘busybody’, the terms are siblings rather than twins.⁵ The latter expressions refer more generally to people overly interested in the business of others (as opposed to neighbours per se) and who are obvious in displaying this interest. Curtain twitchers, on the other hand, are characterised by the surreptitiousness of their nosiness.

That there are multiple pejorative terms for those who violate privacy rules suggests its significance as a cultural value. More literally, and perhaps less obviously as a result, the term also implies that curtains are closed as a norm. After all, you can’t twitch curtains that are already open.⁶

The British design historian Judy Attfield highlights at length the cultural relationship between curtains and privacy in Bringing Modernity Home, which explores changes in home design in the UK in the post-war period. As I have discussed previously in the context of washing machines in kitchens, open plan living was not embraced in the same way in the UK as in countries like the USA and Australia. Using the planned community of New Harlow as an example, Attfield discusses the conflict that soon developed between the modernist architects who designed the post-war homes in the town and the tenants who lived in them.

New Harlow homes featured open plan living spaces and large front windows, but the tenants hated it. In short order, curtains and temporary walls were put up to separate the front ‘parlour’ where guests were received from the more private spaces in the back of the home. Offended at the lack of appreciation for their designs, the architects complained bitterly about tenants’ unwillingness to embrace open plan living and the fact that the large windows they had carefully designed were being obscured by elaborate drapes, heavy pelmets and—horrors!—net curtains.

Although attitudes towards open plan living have changed in the UK over the past eighty-odd years, what hasn’t changed is the use of window coverings to conceal interiors. As a British woman living in the Netherlands observes in a Reddit thread on Dutch attitudes to curtains,

‘In the UK, people have double curtains, both blinds and light curtains with holes you can look out of but people can’t see in. In addition, most homes aren’t directly on the street like in the Netherlands—there’s almost always a front yard, and most people opt to have plants high enough to obscure a view of their home, because they value their privacy so much’.

In my experience, you rarely get a glimpse into people’s homes from the outside unless you happen to be passing at the same moment they have opened their front door, or it’s the aforementioned golden hour in the week following the end of daylight savings.

From a British perspective, the Northern European embrace of curtainless windows in the evening, when the room is lit up for all to see, is therefore somewhat inexplicable. As the anthropologist Irene Cieraad writes of foreigners’ reactions to the Dutch tendency to leave their curtains open at night, ‘It seems a strange habit of exposing not only one’s interior, but also one’s intimate family life, to the eyes of passersby’.

For those of us used to closing our curtains, the feeling of being in a well-lit room at night with naked windows is one of vulnerability and exposure, because people can see in and you can’t see out.⁷ In this context, the meaning of open curtains is an invitation for others to look—they basically imply exhibitionism. However, the symbolism of open curtains in Northern European countries is rather different.

One of the most interesting anthropological examinations I have found on this topic is a 2011 article by Birgitte Romme Larsen on the cultural significance of curtains in rural Denmark. She observes that the cultural meanings of curtains become most explicit in conflicts between locals and immigrants, illustrating the point via a flareup between her informant Daniel, a Congolese refugee, and his landlady, over his constantly drawn curtains.

For local Danes, this signified that he didn’t want to have anything to do with his neighbours, something Daniel learned after his landlady spelled it out. Despite his bewilderment, Daniel complied, noting,

‘If in Danish culture keeping your curtains drawn means that you are pushing away your surroundings, I did not want my neighbors to think of me like that. So I began drawing back the curtains, although I did not understand. In our culture, the inside of the house is private. You do not want others to see what you are doing’.

Daniel also soon discovered that his closed curtains signified to locals that he had something to hide, after an anonymous phone call was made to the police about potential terrorist activities in his home.

Although higher levels of immigration in Denmark over the past decade have likely broadened familiarity with cross-cultural curtain norms, it suggests that closed curtains have come to take on additional meanings as a marker of ethnic identity. To quote a non-Dutch commenter on the aforementioned Reddit thread, ‘In my opinion, people who fully cover their windows with curtains are either junkies or immigrants :D’. Conversely, for Brits, people who don’t fully cover their windows are likewise either immigrants or exhibitionists (or both).

Still, there is one general exception to the usual rules around curtain coverings in the UK: Christmastime. At Christmas, in houses up and down the country, people generally leave the window coverings in their front room open, if they have a Christmas tree. Usually, however, the room itself is dark, so only the Christmas tree is on display. Clearly, this is one of those exceptions that proves the rule: open curtains in this context are a clear invitation to look and admire.

Arguably, this meaning of open curtains can also be found in the growing tendency to leave lights on and windows bare in wealthy enclaves in countries like the US and Australia. For example, an Italian anthropologist colleague recently observed that when she was visiting Sydney, she noticed when taking the ferry on Sydney Harbour that many of the houses on the waterfront were lit up at night and had their curtains open.

I assured her that this wasn’t typical. While Australians aren’t as obsessed with privacy as the English (is anyone?), people generally close their curtains at night, so I assumed that this was probably due to the fact that these were luxury houses, and their owners wanted to show them off.

A recent article in The Atlantic discusses the rise of precisely this phenomenon in the US, noting that wealthy New York neighbourhoods like Brooklyn Heights, where unclothed windows are increasingly ‘obligatory’, are an interior lover’s delight. The article presents some startling statistics to illustrate the growing class dimension to unclothed windows in the US, including the US Department of Energy’s 2013 finding that Americans earning more than $150,000 a year were almost twice as likely to leave their windows uncovered as those making between $20,000-$29,000 a year.

In essence, the article suggests that because wealthy people don’t have to worry about heating costs, privacy and security, uncovered windows have become a status symbol.⁸ ‘These curtainless windows have become one of our subtlest statements of privilege’, the author observes.

Ultimately, it’s clear that curtains are far from the mundane objects they appear. Because they are intimately connected with conceptions of privacy, drawn and open curtains send messages to the people around us. Think of it like this: the twitch of a closed curtain, a bare window in a well-lit room and tightly drawn blinds are a language, so it’s best to be sure you’re fluent in the one you’re speaking.

Related posts

Do washing machines belong in kitchens? Many Brits say 'yes'

What's the deal with decorative pillows?

1. Look, I know that sounds creepy and voyeuristic, but I’m anthropologist, so it’s perfectly okay. As the anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest observes, anthropologists, by definition, ‘are invaders of people’s privacy’.

2. I’m not convinced this is actually a thing, primarily because in Australia it would immediately attract a congregation of people taking the piss outside of said door about ‘Petey finally getting a root’. Still, the concept is common enough that Urban Dictionary includes an entry for ‘doorsock’.

3. An example of this is the bizarre number system on our street in London. The numbering is not sequential, so number 1 (our house) is in the middle of the street, while the block of flats at the end of the street is labelled 1A, 1B, 1C, etc., all the way up to F. Every Friday night, the doorbell rings with misplaced food deliveries; mail and packages also frequently go astray. As student dorms set to house 240 students are currently being built opposite the block of flats, once they are completed, I am resigned to never seeing a letter, package or sushi delivery again.

4. For the record, we have shutters, which are firmly in middle-class territory. While I understand intellectually the connection between taste and class, it’s somewhat deflating to realise that one’s own taste is so utterly predictable!

5. As I’ve previously noted in discussing swearwords, culturally specific English terms are rarely direct synonyms of apparent counterparts in other English-speaking countries. For example, the Australian expression ‘stickybeak’ is often treated as synonymous with ‘busybody’, but it’s less pejorative in meaning. While it can be negative, especially when used as a noun, it’s often employed as an innocuous verb—as in ‘Let’s have a stickybeak around the shop’. In this context, it implies a harmless and child-like curiosity. Indeed, the term is often associated with children. When we were growing up, a standard response from my mum to the question ‘What’s for dinner?’ was always ‘Brown paper for stickybeaks’.

6. It has just occurred to me that the Little Matchstick Girl—not coincidentally, a Danish story—could never have been written by a Brit. After all, the little girl starts lighting her matches after she sees families inside their homes tucking into their roast dinners on New Year’s Eve. In the British version, she would have died cold, hungry and depressed, because the revellers would have had their curtains closed. Come to think of it, that sounds like the subplot of a Thomas Hardy novel, so I’m wrong: it could have been written by a Brit, but no one would be calling it a ‘heartwarming’ Christmas tale.

7. This is basically the principle behind the panopticon: the English* philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, later popularised by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The ingeniousness of the panopticon is that prisoners don’t know when they’re being watched, so they have to assume that they’re always being watched. This makes prison guards almost superfluous to the system, although it relies on the threat of their presence, because the prisoners are forced to become self-regulating. Contemporary speed cameras work on much the same principle. Freedom-of-Information requests have revealed that almost half the speed cameras in the UK aren’t in operation. But even in Derbyshire, where only 18% of the speed cameras actually work, their mere presence changes the behaviour of motorists.

*I doubt his nationality is a coincidence, because such an ingeniously devious design requires a very finely honed understanding of privacy in order to strip it so thoroughly.

8. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a subtle Scandinavian influence as well, given the Anglophone obsession with emulating Scandinavian practices like hygge (‘cosiness’) and friluftsliv (‘communing with nature’), which apparently the Danes and Norwegians, respectively, do differently, and apparently just plain better, than everybody else. Any day now, I predict the arrival of a new trend accompanied by a cool Scandinavian term advising that keeping our living room curtains open at night will make us all healthier and happier.