Reading Blog -- Sept. 24th

Reading blog

Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America

Kenneth L. Ames /Journal of Interdisciplinary History, ix:i (Summer I978), i9-46.

The goal of this research is to examine artifacts and the things in the hall in Victorian America. By doing research on the hall furnishings we can understand the past better than through verbal approaches. Like other object researches, the goal is to gain the insights on understanding the objects and its relation to the surroundings.

       

Within this research, the study of hall furniture needs to start with understanding about the hall. The function and the relation of the hall in a house can explain the furniture deeper and wider.

In this reading, Kenneth L. Ames said that the trade catalog is the most valuable resource for pictorial records of individual objects. It’s almost impossible to find the records for my object. But since the owner wore that top hat in his wedding, It should be able to find some record in the St. Mary’s P.E. Church because church will record every wedding and funeral taking place in the church. Maybe there won’t be any photo in the record but I should find a more detailed record in the church archive.

Through the reading I found out that in nineteenth-century hats and coats were very important objects for daily appearance. It’s interesting to know that “The peak of popularity for the hallstand coincides with that of the top hat, which in its most extreme form became the "stove-pipe" hat of Lincoln and his generation. Laver has argued that the top hat was what we would call macho today, an assertion of masculinity most extreme at the time of greatest role differentiation between the sexes. Its gradual decline he associated with that of male-dominated society.”

Reading Blog

Sheumaker, Helen. Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Print.

Hairwork does not only mean wig but also means those jewels made with hair (doesn’t need to be human hair. ex. woven hair). And those pearls or jewels are called “a hairwork device”. Portrait miniatures are small pieces of metal which the portrait of a person is in the front and was backed by hair. This shows the personal bond between individuals. In other words, compared to an only portrait miniature, the one backed by hair means stronger connections between the two people. All in all, through chapter one, hair is something that presents a person’s care about someone. Sometimes it’s just a way to express him or her selves and sometimes hair can enforce the connections between two friends (ex. Hair in album). Because a gift is not just something that you give to others, it’s something meaningful for the person. A hairwork is sometimes hard to turn into something that is meaningful “to the person who receives it”. As a result, hairwork normally is a gift only for someone is close. Both hairwork and photograph are popular but at the time, hair work was still a better thing to represent the person’s feeling because (p.49 line 21) hairwork was a product of hands and emotions, and therefore understood as a truer representation of one’s self. What people want is something that contains emotions as a gift. Not something contains only reality (ex. photo).

The trend of making fancywork (which is making something useless into something that is useful and impressive) resulted in making hairwork at home. These fancyworks can also represent a woman’s obedience and other characters. Women basically made similar shapes and models as the real professional. Making hairworks at home allows people to express a stronger feeling through the hairwork, because it was home made. The gift(hairwork, most likely is a watch fob) from female to male is the “reminder” of the “other world”, whether the emotion and the relationship is familial or romantic.

What we can see in this reading is that hairwork is not just a normal everyday object. It is something that contains personal feelings. This means there is something cultural in the object. Looking into my object, man’s top hat. I hope I can find something in this level since I have already known this object had been worn in owner’s weding.