McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
I was very excited and somewhat saddened to find this book. Excited, because it seems to be in the vein of thought that I am searching for; and saddened because, original contribution being a thing to strive for, I thought my project might not need further examination given the existence of this 870 page manifesto.
Actually, its focus is narrow in time and place, but will serve to connect me with many ideas and themes that I can research further. Only some parts of it will be useful to my study at this time. Given it’s size and intensely academic prose, it certainly leaves room in the world for a Humanities researcher interested in writing for a blended audience or general readership. I will examine a different part of the book each week, alongside other works.
Generally speaking, the author looks at a transhistorical evolution (or devolution) of the idea of a public sphere and a private sphere, and how the idea of domesticity arises as a kind of private experience –in the context of “the early modern interplay between distinction and separation.” The author calls this “the transformation of traditional into modern attitudes” and is an “attempt to balance on all fronts what has been gained against what has been lost” in the study of modernity. The majority of the texts studied are British– with some French, Italian, and American material added–during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The trick for me will be to not over-apply the author’s premises and conclusions (i.e. abstractions and concretizations) to times and places where they do not belong. I will focus on these chapters/sections:
- From Tacit to Explicit
- Polis and Oikos
- Absolute Private Property
- Print, Property, and the Public Interest
- Knowledge and Secrecy
- Chapter 3: From State as Family to Family as State
- Domestication as Hermeneutics
- Domestication as Pedagogy
- Scientific/Civic/Aesthetic Disinterestedness
- Effeminacy and the Public Wife
- From Female Duplicity to Female Interiority
Now if that won’t get me started, I don’t know what will.
Rybczynski, Wybold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. 2nd edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
Essentially, this is the kind of writing/publishing I would like to do: scholarly in its researched themes, ideas, and scope, but written with the widest possible audience in mind. A pleasurable reading experience in both content and form.
The author defines domesticity as “a set of felt emotions” having to do with “family, intimacy, and a devotion to the home, as well as with a sense of the house as embodying– not only harboring– these sentiments.” This is a fine definition to begin working from, I think.
The second chapter, titled “Intimacy and Privacy,” begins with an analysis of a Albrecht Dürer’s St. Jerome in His Study. This engraving leads the author to the functionality of comfort. He surmises that if one were to ask Dürer what is comfortable, he would likely be confused. “Comfortable did not originally refer to enjoyment or contentment. Its Latin root was confortare– to strengthen or console– and this remained its meaning for centuries. We use it this way when we say, ‘he was a comfort to his mother in her old age.” Detailing the terms Christian usage and its legal usage, the author goes on to say, “this idea of support was eventually broadened to include people and things that afforded a measure of satisfaction, and “comfortable” came to mean tolerable or sufficient– one spoke of a bed of comfortable width, but not yet of a comfortable bed.”
At first blush, Rybczynski’s train of thought here is one that I am happy to go along with. He goes on to speak of why language is important: “Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe, it is a reflection of how we think. We use words to not only describe objects but also to express ideas, and the introduction of ideas into consciousness.” And I agree with the author on this account. He states that, “the first use of ‘comfort’ to signify a level of domestic amenity is not documented until the eighteenth century. How to explain this tardy arrival?”
My explanation is not one that is proposed by the author. Just because we cannot conceive of comfort as having existed before cushions and plush, well-appointed interiors does not mean the concept of a comfortable or comforting space and place of home did not exist in the psyche of the human mind.
In tribal civilizations, rites of passage would call the elders and the younger initiates out into the wilderness for days at a time. On their return to the village and their living quarters within it, I could not believe there was no conception of comfort in the home– that your bed was made of stone was of no consequence. Home was not wilderness– there is the distinction.
And what of insights from the Homeric depictions of the Trojan War? Were the Acheaen soldiers unaware of the comfort they had not felt for ten years on the rough shores outside of Illium? And what of Odysseus’s description of his bed that he had carefully crafted in the Odyssey? Penelope could not be sure that he was actually himself until this exact moment of the narrative, because no other person, beyond the closest attendants, could possibly describe that bed.
Right there, in literature stemming from circa 1200 B.C., we very clearly see the idea of home (and of homecoming, which is somewhat different), of comfort and or luxury, and of privacy- a concept both authors encountered so far believe does not exist until much, much, later in European or English culture–the “Bourgeois Age.”
While I conduct this research, I will have to avoid the temptation to think because a given construct seems not to exist now in this place, it hasn’t existed yet– and can be seen arising here. That leads to sheer falsehood, quickly. But this examination has gotten me closer to my hypotheses. The idea I’m chasing is this: Could it be that, as our physical comfort in the home has increased, that our psychological comfort in the home has decreased? If so, why? What secondary constructs built off the first?
Rybczynski gives many more insights, and my copy is not dog-eared, flagged, and inked. I will be a hard-sell on the stated origination of many of these ideas– next on the block the idea of self-hood or, as Rybczynski states, the “appearance of the internal world of the individual.”
Tags: comfort, division of knowledge, language, private, public, self-hood