Sleeping Around: The Bed FromAntiquity to Now

Annie Carlano and Bobbie Sumberg. Seattle, WA:University of Washington Press, 2006.

Sleeping Around is not nearly as titillating as itstitle suggests, the reproduction of the famousfresco in the Casa Del Centario at Pompeii of ayoung woman astride a young man notwithstand-ing. Moreover, this book cannot make up itsrhetorical mind if it is about sleep or beds; theyare intimately related, to be sure, but process andartifact are not the same. This book has its originsin several exhibitions devoted to the bed asfurniture and the textiles of bedding and has thelook and intellectual feel of an exhibition catalogdevoted to the bed as a work of art, high art andfolk art, with, alas, relatively little attention givento the great middle of popular material art andculture, and that, principally, in a chapter onsleeping in the modern world. Joyce Ice’s ‘‘for-ward’’ accurately describes this work as ‘‘Cross-cultural and transnational in scope . . . draw[ing]upon interdisciplinary perspectives ranging fromart history and anthropology to textile studies,decorative arts, and cultural history’’ (vii). Indeed,this book, whose ‘‘chapters are organized aroundtopics that reflect design styles’’ (10), far moreeffectively deals with aesthetic matters than withquestions of the cultural meanings of the bed asthey have changed over time or as they areassociated with a given ‘‘design style.’’

Organizing the work in terms of design ratherthan by chronology, however, does raise a lot ofvery interesting cultural questions. Annie Carlanoand Bobbie Sumberg evenly divide the composingchores, with Carlano writing the Introduction andthe chapters on Sleeping High (off the ground orfloor), Sleeping in the Closet (built into walls),and Sleeping in the Modern World, and withSumberg writing the chapters on Sleeping Low (to

the ground or floor), Sleeping on the Move (tentsand wagons), Sleeping on the Road (beds in boats,trains, buses, and planes), Sleeping Small (babybeds), and Sleeping Forever (bed and sleep infunereal representation). The sumptuous illustra-tions underline these questions, but they do notsquarely address them. This book is very goodlooking and a book most enjoyable to look into.

Beds, as are most of the common elements ofmaterial culture, are devilishly difficult to dealwith, and all of us are better at raising questionsthan addressing them. The emphasis upon styleand aesthetics here, understandably, tends to takethe cultural meanings and the resonances of bedsfor granted. To point out that beds, for example,have associations of the erotic is so, but does notget us very far. We have grown interested, rightlyI think, in many different eroticisms. So too,works that emphasize cultural meanings andresonance, far less understandably, tend to takethe elements of material culture for granted, apractice which also does not get us as far as itshould. We ought to be more interested, forexample, in how beds sign the variety of theerotic. Sleeping Around is a step in that direction,in that its lush pictures invite, even compel us toconsider seriously a common element of materialculture and its meanings.

I have one technical complaint: writers andworks cited in the notes are not indexed. To do soin so short a work would have been a small laborand a considerable service to those who want touse rather than simply luxuriate in this book.

—Dennis HallUniversity of Louisville

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