Cultural Ideals of Home

The Social Dynamics of Domestic Space

Deborah Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351793643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture.

Questions about meanings of 'home' and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about 'home': the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural history and cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; 'media home' imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of 'homes of tomorrow' and digital smart homes.

A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies.

1

Heritage homes

Introduction

Across the world, the past homes of aristocratic, famous and wealthy people have been transformed into museum sites that influence and also raise questions about the idealisation of present-day homes. The explosion of interest in ‘stately homes’ has been inspired by films and British TV period dramas such as Downton Abbey. This chapter examines home as a site of history. The grand country houses built in Britain’s countryside between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries have become potent cultural symbols. They play a central role within discourses of ‘heritage’ as part of national and regional attempts to forge a sense of common identity. As a timely intervention, the English country house offers a lens through which to explore the formation of elite homes as icons of public commemoration.

The public appeal of the English country house accelerated following the decline of the great estates before and after World War I. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, photographs and news about the country house season figured in lifestyle magazines and newspapers’ society pages. These pages offered the middle classes filtered access to home interiors that displayed the luxury homes and lifestyles of the upper classes (Davidoff 1986). The growth in British heritage films in the 1980s, adaptations of Jane Austen novels in the 1990s, followed by films such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and murder mystery films such as Gosford Park (2002) have provided a cinematic focal point for the country house, elevating these grand homes to the status of a national icon. Likewise, historical popular television dramas such as Brideshead Revisited (1981), Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and documentary TV programmes such as BBC1’s The Edwardian Country House (2002), Channel 4’s Country House Rescue (2008) and Julian Fellowes’s Great Houses on ITV (2013) fuel our fascination with homes of the past.

These popular narratives function as a vital source of inspiration on tastes and styles of contemporary home furnishing. But their impact also extends much further than this. They perform as phantasmagorias of ‘home’. Historic homes work to generate and sustain powerful ideas about how ideal homes are to be imagined, presented and experienced today. As a key setting for popular dramas, the contemporary cultural appeal of the grand country house is carefully nurtured by leading cultural agents including heritage institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage. The aim of these cultural intermediaries is to ensure that the grand houses, their art works and landscapes are celebrated as ‘heritage homes’ to unite and define the nation. They do so by venerating refinement, connoisseurship and civility associated with the domestic living of past and present titled and wealthy families in ways that feed into popular beliefs about ‘ideal’ homes today.

Critical explorations of today’s country houses are rare. However, a global popular fascination with the ‘period’ country house situates ‘home’ at the centre of debates about heritage, nation and empire. An analytical reflection on the country house as ‘heritage’ provides pointers about how certain collective memories of ‘home’ are constituted, based on contrived home precarities. By re-evaluating traditional interpretations of country houses and how they circumscribe social attitudes to ‘home’, this chapter uncovers cogent values about home as time and place, conveyed through heritage, memory, nation, class and race by re-evaluating traditional interpretations of country houses and how they circumscribe social attitudes to ‘home’. It traces the roles played by major heritage institutions and cultural practices in generating collective memories which shape and come to underpin idealisations of the contemporary middle-class home as a ‘staging of authenticity’ (West 2016). To understand how heritage homes have become sites of desire, the chapter explains that historical institutions and popular dramas are mediators engaged in monumentalising home. It draws on a body of research on slavery and the British country house conducted as part of the commemorations of the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade which prompts a reassessment of the legacy of slavery within the material-discursive practices of heritage home imaginaries. Marked by questions of power and representation as a furtive part of this process of home ‘monumentalisation’, these elite homes veil social hierarchy and enslavement, involving social inequalities and racial oppression, that underpin and politicise home ideals.

The ‘Downton effect’

The popular period drama, Downton Abbey was first aired in Britain on ITV in September 2010, and then four months later in the United States on PBS. The series conveys the growing popularity of heritage television for contemporary audiences. Winning a string of prestigious awards, this big-budget costume drama attracted millions of faithful viewers globally. An upsurge in visitors to English country houses, with a year-by-year rise in numbers, was so noticeable that this renewed interest was named the ‘Downton Effect’ in press releases by Visit England.¹ Nearly a third of tourists to the UK visit a historic house or castle,² with eight of the top ten National Trust paid-for locations being country houses and parklands (National Trust 2013: 72), and 13 million people visit the Historical Houses Association’s privately-owned houses, involving around five hundred properties (Historic Houses Association, 2014). As Oliver Cox points out, ‘The “Downton Effect” has also been linked to a surging demand for Savile Row suits, bowler hats, butlers, afternoon tea, riding side-saddle, tiaras, vintage lingerie, luxury wallpaper and interior design, and country houses themselves’ (Cox 2015: 114). This trend has, of course, been welcomed with open arms by the heritage industry. The transatlantic appeal of the English country house of past centuries is further indicated by a series of exhibitions launched in 2014 in the United States, in Wilmington, Delaware and Houston, Texas.

Historians and media commentators describe Downton Abbey as a reassuring symbol of an ideal past evoked at a time of economic and social upheaval in Britain and other Anglophone nations. As Katherine Byrne puts it, ‘Downton provides a sanitised, yet seemingly “authentic”, portrait of a period of instability and rapid change, which its writers have identified as having much in common with our own present’ (Byrne 2013). The series embodies the ‘cult of the country house’ within a plot that evolves around an aristocratic family, the Crawleys, whose grand Yorkshire estate is financially threatened. This threat of losing Downton, as an expression of the precarity of home, is symbolised as a threat to both personal identity and English national heritage (Baena and Byker 2015). Since the property has been in the family for several generations, Lord Crawley’s entire identity is rooted in the estate: the place and the desire for the property to be passed on to his heir. This forewarning establishes the country house as a nostalgic symbol. As such, the story is connected to a set of English narratives that represent the country house in a state of decline, involving a sense of loss and nostalgia for an idealised past. Its plot and stylised format are reminiscent of literary adaptations such as the popular series Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984) and Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981). It shares qualities with the British heritage films of the 1980s, such as Another Country (1984), A Passage to India (1985) and A Room with a View (1986), constituting a cycle of films that are essentially conservative and nostalgic in their mode of address (Higson 1993: 110). These narratives come together to form a genre that associates the country house with the English character and sense of identity, ranging from novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End and Darlington Hall in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (Baena and Byker 2015).

Downton Abbey draws on the appeal of the country house as ‘collective remembrance’ and ‘country house fetishism’ (Baucom, 1999: 5) by offering audiences a vision of such an estate within a ritual of re-conceiving and preserving a bygone sense of Englishness. Downton Abbey therefore represents a powerful emotional emblem of nationality and heritage ‘worth sacrificing for and preserving’ (Baena and Byker 2015: 263). The aesthetic splendour of the series is aimed at triggering sentimental longings through a range of visual codes such as clothing, furniture, modes of social etiquette and long shots that describe the landscape’s magnificence. Focusing on the relationships within the Downton household, the plots of each instalment follow life ‘below stairs’ as well as in the grand reception rooms. Two distinct social classes of aristocracy and domestic servants cohabit this grand space to generate ongoing ruptures and social polemics. However, these evolving tensions are set within a wider environment of harmonious co-existence. The lives of the three Crawley daughters are entangled in these two social classes set within two different ways of life: one receding, where women have little power and one ascending where power is anticipated for women. The servants’ roles in the household are scripted as expressing respectful, dignified tasks that uphold the family’s aristocratic bearing, as a quintessential part of the English national heritage. Accepting the unequal relations of the household as part of the natural order, the butler and housekeeper view their work as deeply honourable. As Baena and Byker state, ‘The overall mood of the series is thus one of celebration where at least regular characters seem to know their place and accept it, reinforcing a rather nostalgic view of an English past heritage’ (Baena and Byker 2015: 267).

This traditional representation of a consistent domestic realm where the householders ‘know their place’ creates an idealised vision of the past designed to stir reminiscence for a bygone English identity. The narrative reinstates and justifies aristocratic and elitist behaviour and beliefs, restored by the depiction of benevolent employers in charge of a large household of servants. Television dramas and film settings like Downton Abbey and Brideshead cross from imagined to mediated visions of grandeur (Bawden 2011). These stage sets reflect and amplify class aspirations, class divisions and fantasies of status within stratified societies that function as ‘an idealisation of the higher strata’ (Goffman 1969). The narrative strategy of evoking a ‘lost and longed for earlier period’ serves to endorse a sentimental disavowal of class tension. Indeed, the evocation of nostalgia explains the series’ success and its cultural worth (Hodge 2011). The discourse of reminiscence in Downton Abbey corresponds with wider social concerns associated with national and cultural identities in terms of lineage, belonging and traditional values. The emotional dimensions of the drama uncover and mediate cultural values of nation and nationhood that haunt contemporary society, as values that seem to be precariously dissolving. As Hodge (2011) states, ‘All of this points to the fact that in our flexible modern environment, with all its attending fragmentation, we see an increasing reliance on popular media narratives for negotiating our social and cultural identities.’

Substantial tourism revenue has been generated by opening English country houses to the public (Cox 2015: 210). However, the challenge for historians and the heritage industry has been to find ways to tap into the popularity of dramas such as Downton Abbey to draw in visitors to the complex cultural backdrops of these ‘stately home’ narratives (Cox 2015). Importantly, this genre of television drama continues to present the country house as a lived-in space. Creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, suggests that his work has made a significant impact on curatorial trends by recounting the daily lives not only of the former upper classes but also the servant community who contributed to the running of the country house (Waterfield and Julian Fellowes 2012: 65). The claim, then, is that Downton Abbey has triggered a desire to promote grand homes by addressing the competing individual experiences of servants and landed families and how the country house contained and shaped these narratives.

Yet certain curators and scholars argue that Downton Abbey has not generated a new curatorial direction as such. Rather, the series has simply consolidated a prevailing approach in the staging and narrativisation of country houses. After all, exhibiting servants’ quarters is not new. Cox (2015) points to Erdigg Hall, obtained by the National Trust in 1973 for its detailed information about the servants who worked there in the past, rather than the grandeur of its architecture or contents (see Waterson 1990). Similarly, the National Trust has invested in the restoration of Victorian kitchens at Dyrham Park near Bath and the domestic service areas at Ickworth in Suffolk. Nevertheless, the presentation of English country houses as a living force to appeal to visitors runs counter to conservation agendas. Cox states that:

Servants’ quarters, which require the least amount of prior knowledge for meaningful interpretation and engagement by the public, tend to enjoy the longest visitor dwelling times. For academic historians, this retreat to the servants’ quarters is symptomatic of the discrepancy between history’s popularity and the inadequate historical literacy of much of the population. (Cox 2015: 116)

This notion of a ‘retreat’ to the servant’s quarters implies visitor ignorance and a disregard of the finer aesthetic features of country houses such as architecture, art and porcelain collections. Conversely, a more recent approach is to regard museum visitors as agents of their own encounters with English country houses, inspired by their own socio-cultural backgrounds, experiences and trajectories. This requires house curators to abandon orthodoxies in order to engage with house museums and open up other possibilities and experiences (Young 2007). Yet while the servants’ quarters of country houses can inspire a sense of involvement among visitors-as-tourists, most custodians and academics are more interested in the décor and artefacts of reception rooms occupied by the rich or noble family.

The strategy tensions facing the heritage industry in the display of country house, between authenticity and popularised visitor immersion, were revealed in 2014. A public uproar was caused by a remark made by Sir Simon Jenkins, then chairman of the National Trust. Addressing techniques of presenting the country house in an interview, Jenkins remarked that ‘There are things we can learn from Disney’ (Cox 2015: 117). This came close to inferring that the English country home might be a ‘simulacrum’. For Baudrillard, a simulacrum is an imitation or simulation of reality (Baudrillard 1983: 1994). In this sense, today’s Disneyland culture can be characterised as a simulational culture. This culture of hyperreality involves a loss of distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘image’. The country house appears to represent, to stand for something imagined and not real. But instead, the country house hides a reality. It prevents us from seeing the real workings of dominant groups in power.

Country houses are not only conserved as ‘heritage homes’ but also preserved as a set of powerful middle-class values about ‘home’, involving the conservation of a class-bound set of cultural values encompassing social ranking, middle-class reverence and an idealisation of elites. Promoted within the dominant discourses of British country houses, these class-bound values are underpinned by the socio-economic power structures of colonialism, slavery and empire on which the country house thrived. The ‘connoisseurship’ and ‘family lineage’ perspectives within academic studies of the collections and genealogies of mainland Britain’s landed elite tend to be masked by the structures of power corresponding with these legacies (Bressey 2013). The ‘Downton effect’ and revelations of the roles played by colonialism, slavery and empire in the histories of country houses prompts the need for a closer look at how homes of the wealthy were preserved and transformed into sites of heritage that stood for the whole nation, and represented the pinnacle of respectable home living. Drawing on Baudrillard, we might say that the symbol of the country house as a prestige home involves a r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: themes and issues
• 1. Heritage homes
• 2. Idealising homes and homemaking
• 3. Domestic modernity in suburbia
• 4. Early media homes
• 5. Property dramas and home makeovers
• 6. Home time in multiscreen homes
• 7. Alternative domesticities
• 8. Home mobilities and migration
• 9. Homes of the future
• 10. Sustainable homes
• Index