Chapter 5 takes the idea of "ease" which we first associated with the "easy chair" and applies it to the entire house. We expect our houses to be places of relaxation, apart from the hustle and bustle of urban life and economics. Rybczynski tracks that idea to the English, particularly the English gentry . . . who maintained a town house for conducting business and affairs of court and a country house to which they could withdraw from political affairs and amuse themselves, their friends, and families. (Remember the fairy tale about the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse). Americans expect suburban houses to function similarly, and orient them to the landscape much the same way English gentlemen oriented country houses and grounds to the working agricultural estates around them. We'll see how that relationship works itself out.
Internet Study Exercises.
Visit and compare English and American Country Estates. For English examples you can visit Duncombe Park and Harewood House. For a comparative American Example, visit Drayton Hall. While the buildings may be visually different from each other, a comparison of how they function will show their intellectual relationship The pictures below are linked to different areas of the websites of the houses. Click on them, too.
The Gore Place in Waltham Mass. Click the image to see more images.
Remember your Reflective Essay is due today
Read, in Home, Short History of an Idea,
Chapter Six, Light and air pp. 144 - 177
This chapter and the one I've scheduled for Friday will bring us to the 20th Century In Chapter Six, Light and Air, we consider some of the machinery which makes a house function... and, once again, we'll see that even such "essentials" as bathtubs and flush toilets were available for adoption long before they became popular. Once again, culture predominates, and what we need to reconsider what we consider as absolutely necessary for comfort. Note how advertising works to create a sense of need where none existed previously.
Men were perhaps more concerned with improvements in the "systems" of the house, plumbing and heating, for example. Solid fuel burning furnaces were a great innovation, either those which allowed for the circulation of heated air or radiators circulating steam. Click on the illustrations for more information
There were great advances in plumbing as well, which led to the invention of a new room. Victorian squeamishness led Americans to call this room the "bathroom" though bathing was not the chief activity which occurred in it. The English had their own set of euphemisms, probably the chief of which was the W.C., (the abbreviation for "Water Closet". Click on the illustration to the left to visit a "venerable" firm, still making the product for which it was famous in the late 19th century. The name of the owner was probably coincidental, but it became another euphemism for the room in which a certain bodily function took place.
Internet Exercise
Though it took awhile for Americans to change their houses to make them more modern (perhaps because they were afraid of losing "Stimmung" The new Catalog Companies, like Montgomery Ward tried to bring them up to date. Click on either image above to visit a catalog, and shop for the bathroom fixtures you'd choose if you were living back then. Some you might even like now. Do any of these look like your W. C. at home? When you've found your choices, copy cut and paste to a document and add it to your resource Folder.
Chapter 7 looks at innovations in the "woman's sphere" and most particularly at the revolutionizing of the American Home through the introduction of electricity. To prepare you for discussing this, I'd like to have you (A) guess how many electrical appliances your have in your home, and then (B) mentally survey your own homes and list all the electric appliances in them, by room. How close to right were you? Bring the list with you to class.
Appliances of all types were introduced into the woman's domain. The Home Washer promised "that if used with that intelligence and good sense with which you use other household utensils, it will be a "well-spring of joy" in every family that owns it.
A look at the dress worn by the operator gives a clue to who was expected to use this machine. Simultaneously the husband's incompetence around the house was "celebrated (?) in advertisements like the one to the left. Note the prominence of the idea of "home" in each. While styles have changed, the ancestry of today's appliances can be seen in their ancestors pictured below. Click on each to learn more.
Read, in Home, Short History of an Idea,
Chapter Seven, Efficiency, pp. 144 - 177
Two pictures of the stove at the Lizzie Borden House, Courtesy of a former student, Kelsey Harrington.
