Gender, craft and canon: elite women's engagements with material culture in Britain, 1750-1830
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Date
25/06/2016Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
31/12/2100Author
Gowrley, Freya Louise
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Abstract
This thesis investigates elite and genteel women’s production and consumption of
material objects in Britain during the period 1750-1830. Each of its four chapters
identifies a central process that characterised these engagements with material
culture, focusing on ‘Migration,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Translation,’ and ‘Exchange’ in turn.
The Introduction examines each of these with regard to the historiography of
eighteenth-century material culture and its relationship with gender, social relations,
domesticity, and materiality. It argues that by viewing material culture through the
lenses of microhistory and the case study, we might gain a sense not only of how
individual women acquired, used, and conceived of objects, but also how this related
to the broader processes by which material culture functioned during this period.
Chapter 1 identifies the importance of needlework in the construction of
prescribed feminine identities, and focuses on representations of needlework in
portraiture, genre prints, and conduct literature. The chapter argues that such
objects created a ‘grammar’ of respectable domestic femininity that migrated through
visual, literary, and material genres, reflecting the permeability of cultural forms
during this period. Chapter 2 examines the role of description in the journals and
correspondence of the travel writer Caroline Lybbe Powys, concentrating on her
1756 tour of Norfolk. Following the work of the cultural anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, the chapter argues that the ‘thick description’ that characterises
Lybbe Powys’s accounts of domestic visiting and tourism locates both the homes of
her hosts and her own epistolary practices within an interpretative framework of
hospitality, sociability, and materiality in which description was central. Chapter 3
considers the interior decoration of A la Ronde, the home of the cousins Jane and
Mary Parminter, located in Exmouth in Devon. The chapter argues that the
processes of translation that characterised the Parminters’ acquisition and display of
their collection of souvenirs transformed these objects both physically and
semantically, allowing the cousins to co-opt them into personal narratives, redolent of
travel, the home, and the family. Chapter 4 focuses on Plas Newydd, the home of
Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. It examines how the gift exchange
enacted at the house facilitated the creation of ‘gift relationships,’ which both
reflected and constituted the connections between Butler and Ponsonby, their
numerous friends and visitors to their home, between Plas Newydd and the
surrounding landscape, and between material culture, experience, and sentiment,
more broadly.
Together, the constituent chapters of the thesis demonstrate that there was no
simple connection between gender and material culture. However, by interrogating
the key cultural processes in which this relationship operated, the thesis hopes to
demonstrate the complexity and fluidity of its manifestations.