Category: personal

Undocumented but Not Alien

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting1 Comment
Cherries. The Itinerant Traders of London in their Ordinary Costume, from Modern London; being the history and present state of the British Metropolis. Illustrated with numerous copper plates - British Library
Cherries. The Itinerant Traders of London in their Ordinary Costume, from Modern London; being the history and present state of the British Metropolis. Illustrated with numerous copper plates – British Library

Sometimes it’s hard to know how a riot gets started; other times, the cause is pretty clear. I’ve started one or two myself. The latest stems from Our Girl History’s musings on the Massacre.

There’s a lot to unpack, and it’s been happening online and in private conversations. Yes, children, Aunt Kitty pays attention, even if she’s silent. This is a tough topic: how can modern feminists represent historical women in a patriarchal culture without losing their minds? How can events better reflect the actual past? The population has, historically, always been about 50-50 male-female. We understand why there aren’t women on battlefields. We get that traditional events (by which I mean the ritualized commemorations of battles) have ridiculously gender-segregated and inauthentic roles. We get that it’s hard to adapt to new ideas, even free, documented ones.

The irritation and anxiety I feel as I expand the kinds of events I attend is actually reassuring: that’s how I know I’m learning. The frustration we feel means we’re banging up against a wall that we can break down with research.

Paul Sandby, London Cries: Black Heart cherries... ca. 1759. YCBA, B1975.3.206
Paul Sandby, London Cries: Black Heart cherries… ca. 1759. YCBA, B1975.3.206

It’s not easy research: women not married to or otherwise affiliated with prominent men are poorly documented. We may never know their names– or we may have a name from a census, newspaper ad, or city directory, and nothing more. But we can fill in the gaps with interpretation. (As it happens, I’ll be talking about this very idea in just a few weeks. Come taunt me in person.)

There’s a lot to think about in recreating the past, in particular at this event. The organizers have done a phenomenal amount of research, gathered the details, sorted them out, assigned roles, scripted and timed an event, and recruited a chorus of characters that reflects the texture of a tense city in 1770.

Building an event, even one that recreates an actual moment in the past, is as much as work of theatre or fiction as it is of fact: character development, motivations, costuming, setting, all of those combine with the documented words to create a scene that conveys an interpretive point for the public. It’s similar to a museum exhibition– it’s interpreted.

Traditionally, living history has interpreted the past with a bias to men’s roles (that’s the nature of our society, folks) and with a tendency to assign roles and activities by gender (again, the nature of our society for centuries). Our task in breaking that pattern is not to right the injustices of the past, for we cannot, but to interpret them.

Playing the game at quadrille : from an original painting in Vauxhall Gardens. London : Robert Sayer, ca. 1750. Lewis Walpole Library, 750.00.00.14
What about the people in the background? Playing the game at quadrille : from an original painting in Vauxhall Gardens. London : Robert Sayer, ca. 1750. Lewis Walpole Library, 750.00.00.14

One way to do that is to bring the undocumented, or poorly documented, people of the past to light. I tried to do that in exploring Bridget Connor. I’ve tried to do that by interpreting a late 18th/early 19th century servant. It’s a long and frustrating process, reading letters and diaries for scraps of information, usually casual references to servants and cooks.  But in the frustration lies the promise: we will find the people on the margins, and bring them in to clearer focus.

Objectification

On By kittycalashIn History, Museums, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting3 Comments
Corner chair. Mahogany with fabric-covered slip seat. John Goddard, 1763. RIHS 1990.36.1 RHix5136
Corner chair. Mahogany with fabric-covered slip seat. John Goddard, 1763. RIHS 1990.36.1 RHix5136

I’ve had more alone time than usual at work, which is to say, I’ve been the only living creature in 16,000 SF for multiple consecutive days, which allows me both time to get lots of work done but also permits my mind to wander more than it might otherwise. One of the ideas I continually return to is about the objectification of objects. That’s a terrible phrase, isn’t it? What is the essential thingness of any given thing?

Let’s take chairs: I really like chairs, which is to say that I have, at last, succumbed to the seductive qualities of chairs.[i] But what makes a chair a chair?

Most simply, a chair is to be sat upon. Keeps your rump off the cold, cold ground. Supports your legs and back. Sometimes a chair is for lolling. Sometimes it’s for working. Sometimes it’s for projecting power. But essential, a chair is for sitting.

If use– specifically human use[ii]– is what chairs are for, what happens when a chair is removed from use, and placed on display in a museum?[iii] And what difference does it make whether that chair is on a white plinth in an art museum, or in a historic house, or in the historic house where it was used? When is a chair most a chair, other than the times you are sitting in one?

As I said: a lot of alone time.

servant mannequin in 18th century room
That’s no ghost, that’s my kid. Corner chair just in front of the ghost.

Within a historic house, it seems that the ideal situation is the chair in the room in the house.

That would seem to maximize the “realness” of the thing, right? But we don’t always have the chair, and even when we do, we may not know which room it was used in most often.

The way a chair is displayed and understood in an art museum: Object of Beauty is very different from the way a chair is displayed and understood in a history: Who Sat Here? It’s a conundrum though, because just as the chair become Beautiful Thing in an art museum, it can become Story from the Past in a history museum. Neither presentation/interpretation really gets at Chairness, which is really best experienced by sitting in the chair yourself.

Did I mention I spend a lot of time alone with objects?

Storeroom, Rhode Island Historical Society. RHix17 399
Storeroom, Rhode Island Historical Society. RHix17 399

The way that I think these questions about Chairness relate to living history is by realizing that just as museums fetishize objects on white pedestals, living history interpreters/reenactors sometimes fetishize objects without contextualizing them. You know: Muskets. Clothes. Spinning Wheels.[iv]

Putting the chair in the room where it was used gives it context, and the visitor a new perspective that wouldn’t be gained from a white pedestal, or from the curb. The same is true of the things that we carry as interpreters. Context matters. It’s how meaning is derived and understood. Like repetition, isolation can rob an object—or a person—of meaning. Not that I’m lonely. I have all those chairs, after all.

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[i] Not to get too weird, though: I won’t rhapsodize (yet) about the sensual curve of a chair leg, or a delicate, finely-turned ankle, as I have heard some (fetishistic?) curators so. Yet: there’s still time.

[ii] Sorry cats: chairs were not actually made for you. Now get down!

[iii] If you know anything about art history and theory, you can probably guess which decade I was in graduate seminars.

[iv] My *favorite* thing to see in a military setting.

Back to Basics

On By kittycalashIn personal, Philosophy5 Comments
Landscape with Rising Sun, December 1, 1828, 8:30 a.m. Artist: Joseph Michael Gandy (British, London 1771–1843 London) Date: 1828 Medium: Watercolor over graphite on white wove paper Dimensions: sheet: 4 3/16 x 6 3/4 in. (10.6 x 17.1 cm) Classification: Drawings Credit Line: Harry G. Sperling Fund, 2005 Accession Number: 2006.46
Landscape with Rising Sun, December 1, 1828, 8:30 a.m. Watercolor by Joseph Michael Gandy. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.46

Despite the assertions of Mr Eliot, I find December to be the cruelest month. In each of the past five years, December has brought me drama if not disaster, usually on a grand scale. After the immediate crises passed, I tried to figure out what I could learn, really, from the things that happened.

Scandinavian tradition puts the start of Jul at the solstice, and here we are: at the moment when it’s traditional to stop the spinning world to consider where we are, where we want to be, and what we really want. (Hint: It’s not a toaster.)

I write a lot about authenticity, and after The Noble Train, I thought about how authenticity isn’t just in what we wear, or carry, or eat, or how a day is run: it’s also in who we are. The way some of us are made, we cannot be other than who we are. It’s akin to the real thing: you know when it’s right, and it matters.

Finding the real and the true isn’t easy– brass ladles, shawls, love, yourself– it takes time to develop a good eye, and honesty often hurts.

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Taking apart the things you’ve made isn’t easy, but sometimes that’s the only way to get them right. Mr Hiwell learned that setting linings and making mittens. Sometimes the things you must take apart aren’t tangible, but are concepts, organizations, or beliefs. That work is much harder than undoing and redoing a sleeve seam or taking apart and recutting a box lid, or frogging a stocking.

If you’re a consistent reader, you know I won’t tell you what to wear, or carry, or eat. I’m much more interested in helping people figure out what questions to ask than I am in giving answers. It’s what we don’t know, and the assumptions we overturn as we learn more, that makes living history– and living– worthwhile to me.

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So while I don’t encourage you to reduce your actual house to stone walls alone, I do encourage you to question your house of assumptions, and the why of the things you do.

Mr Hiwell Chased by a Chihuahua, and Other Minor Disasters

On By kittycalashIn Fail, Living History, personal, Reenacting4 Comments
Of course we can read maps. GPS has not spoilt us at all.
Of course we can read maps. GPS has not spoilt us at all.

Bored over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and possibly jealous of images we might have seen on social media, Mr HiWell, Low Spark, and I concocted a plan. Or perhaps I made a suggestion that seemed like a good idea at the time. Screen caps of message threads indicate that I probably was the root of the evil of getting up early Saturday morning to put on historical clothing and take a multi-mile walk.

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We know it was at least seven miles, and may have been nine…we went off the trail in a couple of places. But the lads are going to Trenton, and need to get in some walking time, and now that it’s shotgun deer season, the number of places we can safely hike are fewer. There’s no blaze orange in broadcloth– yet.

And this wasn't the squeeziest photo op.
And this wasn’t the squeeziest photo op.

The walk began harmlessly enough, through corn fields and brush. We forded a stream the easy way (I suggested fording a la the 40th but the lads opted for the bridge.) The Sakonnet Greenway Trail maintained by the Aquidneck Land Trust is pretty mellow. Flat (unusual here), relatively free of traffic noises, and used by dogwalkers, it seemed safe. Then we met the golfers as the trail skirts the edge of the Newport National Golf Course. We were too nice and said yes, they could have photos with us. Of course, they had clubs and we didn’t.

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We could have ridden in style.

When we went off trail to loop up to East Main Road, we encountered many homeowners and many barking dogs. When we told one woman we were off to a Paul Revere and the Raiders tribute band concert, she noted that “the kicks get harder to come by.” Further on up the road, two boxers charged the fence that enclosed their yard, startling us– but the real danger came from the chihuahua that charged up the road after us, barking madly. The children’s rhyme about “the beggars have come to town” seemed all to relevant.

The Kitty Who Walked Alone
The Kitty Who Walked Alone

By the end of the walk, there were many references to Captain Sobel and Currrahee, though I thought more of Rudyard Kipling’s The Cat That Walked By Himself.

But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.