Home and Gender
Home and Representation
In 1807, the great visual caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson designed a pair of images, ruminating on men and their place in the home. In the first, `At Home and Abroad´ (1807) a man at home with his unavoidably large and unmistakably ugly wife drinks himself into a stupor. The room is messy, uncomfortable and saggy. The bed curtains are wide open: perhaps to fit the woman´s bottom through, perhaps to signify the age and openness of her body. She, with some effort it seems, is engaged in domestic tasks, stretching to the fire to boil water and warm bed-clothes. There is certainly no warmth or relief between husband and wife: the man seems to have fallen asleep in his chair reading; the book that falls from his left hand is titled `Memoirs of an Amorous Fat Rumped old Tabby´. Sure enough, the mantelpiece displays not fine china or shiny silver, but restoration drops. The man is physically at home, but not really there; he is at home, but away; at home, but abroad.
In the second image, `Abroad and at Home´, the same man is in a very different place (spatially, physically and emotionally). He is away from home, but is `at home´. Written sources show that for some decades, `home´ had been understood not simply as one´s house or dwelling or nation, but as a place of comfort. Here, the man reclines, legs naughtily astride, holding a typical plump Rowlandson beauty who looks adoringly into the man´s eyes. The sofa is firm and comfortable, large enough for two lovers, enveloped by the lush red curtains that have yet to be opened. The mantelpiece shows appropriate objects, and the fire is not blowing smoke, but giving out heat: it is a resting place for a poker, presumably also getting rather hot, and pointing at the woman´s feet. `Home´ is here a rich discourse, conveying ideas about the emotional, physical, moral and spatial.
Home and History
`Home´ has certainly become a key organizing concept for many historical studies, as it has for a number of academic disciplines. A flurry of new journals (for example, AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (Royal college of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Royal Holloway, London), all speak of a deeply embedded interest in things domestic. These developments reflect the convergence of a number of academic disciplines, notably literature, geography, anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and the history of design on `home´. In History, family and household has long been a focus for demographic and social historians, but more recently historians have paid much closer attention to historical meanings of home. It is, in part, this growing emphasis on culture in the academy that has facilitated a wealth of interdisciplinary research on home and domesticity.
Home and Gender
While `home´ has often provoked studies of privacy, and of women, increasingly we are examining the ways in which domesticity might disrupt the gendered language of public and private, how boundaries might be fluid, and also how our historical visions of home might be different if we attend to men as well as women. My own work deals with these questions through studies of the eighteenth century.
Home and Modernity
Eighteenth-century England is for many scholars the time and place where modern domesticity was invented amongst the middling-sort; this was the point at which `home´ became a key concept, sustained by new literary imaginings (for example, in the `domestic novel´ and `conversation piece´) and new social practices (for example, the drinking of tea). Created in the constructions of new domestic architecture, embedded in modern concepts of the self through new forms of narrative, or performed through sociability using new items of material culture, it was here that modern domesticity was invented, before coalescing into the more intense nineteenth-century domestic culture. Only in such cultural conditions – when home had come to mean so much - could Rowlandson draw on such a rich discourse of home for his visual narrative.
`Home life´ encapsulates these multiple interests, signaling the representational and the experiential, the imaginative and the material, alluding to the methodological problems of integrating both meaning and experience into our own accounts of human life in the past.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (1987; 1992).
Michael McKeon, The secret history of domesticity : public, private, and the division of knowledge (2005).
Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 (trans. Allan Cameron; 2002).
John Tosh, A Man´s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999).