On House and Home Part 2
There are numerous points of contact between Rybczynski, De Mare and Birdwell-Pheasant, but some themes recur more often than others. The emergence of a modern sense of domesticity, the increasing polarization of the public and private in domestic spaces, and the gradual feminization and rationalization of the home are addressed in this week’s readings.
Rybczynski cites a a move towards smaller homes with fewer inhabitants as being instrumental in establishing a more private homelife, where home became centered around the family with children and child-rearing as central activities of the household. While the lower floor was still considered to be part of the public realm, connected to the street, going upstairs crossed a newly emerging public/private divide, where activities conducted upstairs were considered distinctly separate from the more public activities of the main floor. (Rybczynski, P. 66)
The smaller home meant that fewer servants were needed so the home became increasingly ‘feminized’ since women did more of their own chores than previously. Women became central to the household as they took responsibility for and managed the “…arrangement and disposition of the home.” (Rybczynski, P. 73) This allowed for the development of manners, intimacy and domesticity, with the home embodying these attributes. Birdwell-Pheasant echoes this in her notion that the family and the household are mutually constitutive, with the house (the built environment) as a mediating element. (Birdwell-Pheasant, P. 3) She sees the house as “…a technical and cognitive instrument, a tool for thought, as well as a technology of shelter.” (P. 4) To Birdwell-Pheasant the house has a capacity to convey and generate meaning as a “…mechanism of communication” (P. 3) which regulates social interactions both within the household and between separate households in the community.
The strengthening distinction between public and private realms in the home led the way towards an increasing rationalization of space with the development of rooms specialized for particular tasks. New appliances and areas reserved for particular tasks made the house more efficient and enhanced domestic productivity. Rooms became “…sovereign spaces…” (De Mare, P. 18) where control of the various rooms in the home was clearly delineated. The house, in De Mare’s estimation, became “…a complex metaphor for a new civil status and dignity….” (P. 19)
While Rybczynski posits that this notion of domesticity was emerging in the 17th century, particularly in Holland, De Mare counters with the argument that “…the all-embracing concept of domesticity proves to be a creation not of the 17th century but of the 19th century.” (De Mare, P. 14) De Mare concurs that the 17th century saw the development of a “…spatial separation between the indoor and outdoor world,…[but that] inside the house public codes prevailed…,” and that it wasn’t until the 19th century that the commonly related emotional differences between public and private took hold. (De Mare, P. 20) She suggests that we have projected our more recent emotional feelings regarding domesticity back onto the 17th Dutch domestic interior. We are, according to De Mare, in fact creating a ‘myth’ of 17th century Dutch domesticity. By examining several paintings by 17th century Dutch artists she makes the argument that the Dutch of that period were largely concerned with the physical house and the developing public/private distinction rather than more emotional ideas developed later in the 19th century.
Birdwell-Pheasant continues on in time in her paper and brings up an interesting, fairly post-modern notion, that the house, and all artifacts, have agency. She states that the “…house not only is a product of individual or social agency but embodies the ‘distributed personhood’ of their makers.” (P. 5) In other words, houses exercise an agency of their own! Because houses are typically built by men and “…made into homes by women…” (P. 17) the house and home both express and reproduce gender differences. Also, where the home used to be a place of work, a center for production, this gradually changed to becoming “…a locus of consumption; [with the] domestic environment…commodified.” (P. 20)
The emphasis of the home being something more than a house resonates with other recent thinkers. Bachelard’s notions of the home as the place of freedom for the imagination to develop, Bourdieu’s habitus, Heidegger’s dwelling and De Certeau’s distinction between place and space, are all in sync with and reverberate Birdwell-Pheasant’s notions of the development of home as something beyond the built environment.
