The Unnatural ‘Daughters of England’: Emma Donogue’s The Sealed Letter

The last day of August, and the sky is the colour of hot ash. Something rancid wafts on the air from Smithfield Market; the air glitters with stone dust. She swept down Farringdon Street in the slipstream of bowlers, top hats, baskets on porters’ heads. A hand lights on her arm, a small, ungloved hand; the brown silk of her sleeve is caught between plump pink fingertips. She staggers, clamps her pocketbook to her ribs, but even as she’s jerking away, she can’t help recognizing the hand.

So begins The Sealed Letter Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, an atmospheric romp through sexuality, marriage, and the law in mid-nineteenth century London. It is a simple paragraph that hints at what is to come. As a readers travel through the novel, they see and feel the grand city of the past, just as they can all but taste the dust of Smithfield Market here. Readers learn more about the relationship between the two women about to be introduced, though some things remain as mysterious as they are in these first few sentences. This moment, here, we eventually learn, is a turning point in the lives of these two characters, and yet it is presented simply, flippantly, its weight provided with a light touch.

 

A Historical Perspective on the “Definition” of Marriage

One of the many things that really interests me in the history of human civilization is how our values change over time, how those values are spoken about, and how they shape the structures of society. Values are also one of the the messiest things in the study of history, but that’s half of why I love studying them so much. It is both really, really difficult and vital to study the values of the past. Studying values that are different from our own can be extremely different, if not impossible. In doing so we often have to face that our own values are tied to a certain time and place in history, to a certain culture, to a certain upbringing. They’re not inalienable. We think that claiming values are subjective makes them weaker – but it doesn’t. Being tied to circumstances, shaped by all that came before, malleable and sometimes difficult to articulate doesn’t make them any less our values or any less true.

And that’s why understanding the values of the past is so central to understanding anything about history. Values different from our own were as real to the people of the past as ours are to us. It’s profoundly humbling, but it’s also enlightening. In order to understand our present value system, in order to give it importance and power, we must show that values do change. They are malleable. They brought us where we are today.

And with that somewhat longwinded prologue, I give you a thesis that has been rolling around in my mind lately. It is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek thesis, one that simplifies a lot of complicated issues. This thesis might even be characterized as a Crackpot Theory. But I think it sheds light on the source of our contemporary values and demonstrates how closely our values are tired to assumptions that have not always existed.

 

“Second Person History” at Philip Foster Farm

My plan for today was to do an overview of some historical fiction I’ve read recently, but that has been completely derailed by a trip I took out to Philip Foster Farm, a living history farm and historic site near Estacada, Oregon, about forty-five minutes outside of Portland. For you see, Philip Foster Farm may just be my new favorite historic site in the area, at least from an educator standpoint.

Philip Foster Farm sits on the site of the Foster family property, a family that settled in the area near the end of the nineteenth century. Using nineteenth century crafts, clothing, farming, and a number of original buildings, they interpret the history of the pioneers that settled the Willamette Valley in the second half of the century, setting themselves smack-dab in the middle of what, from a historical perspective, the state is most known for. Remember that Oregon Trail computer game? The Philip Foster farm tells the story of what happened after those virtual pioneers made it to Oregon.

 

Talk about ‘adventures in history’

Andrew Carroll, amateur historian, is traveling across the United States, looking for forgotten places where history happened.

Andrew Carroll officially has the coolest job in the world. Clearly I, like him, need to find a way to get National Geographic to sponsor a crazy history-related tour for me.

 

The Great Debate

I got into an argument this weekend that I’ve had many times. It was really two arguments, both the argument it seemed to be and the argument (or at least the assumption) behind it. It’s the argument/assumption behind it that I’m interested in, for that one relates to a much bigger argument, one about the value of one sort of knowledge over the other. It also relates directly to a problem that faces many museums, especially museums in the West. But first, some context.

On Saturday I hung out with a group of friends, most of whom were former science students and current/aspiring engineers. I love them all dearly, but it’s easy for a little history museum professional to feel a little on the defensive when the conversation turned to academics. Specifically, we started talking about the value of degrees from liberal arts institutions (which all of us had attended). The conclusion of those gathered there seemed to be that a school like the one we went to watered down the usefulness of any science degree, with the underlying assumption that non-science degrees were inherently useless.

 

A Few Good Links

Here’s a roundup of a number of interesting blogs and websites that I’ve discovered or rediscovered recently. They all have something interesting to say about museums and history, something that resonates with my own thoughts on all public history can do and mean. I’ve linked all three of these in the sidebar.

And the Pursuit of Happiness: At the end of each month, Maria Kalman – author, journalist, and artist – posts a beautiful entry that deals in some way with American democracy and history. She explores our government and our founding fathers, what we believe and why we believe it. She pokes and prods at the discomforting parts of our history and our society, but she does it with an open mind and a full heart. Overall, a wonderful, thoughtful, history-rooted look at what it means to be an American.

Hark! A Vagrent!: Kate Beaton’s wonderfully clever comic is the sort of thing that you stumble upon when you think you’ve seen it all. But you never thought someone could make a successful web comic about Admiral Nelson’ death, did you? Or the love life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Or the Declaration of the Irish Republic. And even if you had thought it, you might not have imagined it to be as entertaining and spot on as this one is.

In case you haven’t figure it out yet, this is my favorite comic on the internet. If high school history classes were like this, more people would like history.

Museum 2.0: Nina Simon runs a museum consulting business that focues on “participatory museum experiences.” In her blog she ruminates on the way museum today can newly integrate their visitors using technology and user-generated content. She also discusses the museum and nonprofit world more broadly. She’s worked with a wide variety of museums and she has a lot of great stuff to say.

Coming soon: Ruminations on the struggle between the tree huggers and the history buffs, reviews of some recently released historical fiction, and a far-fetched theory about a certain public debate that many people around the US are probably thinking about this month.

 

The Cathlapotle Plankhouse and the Need for Historical Narrative

The Cathlapotle Plankhouse lies nestled in the lush Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, about a half an hour from the city of Portland, just across the Oregon-Washington Border. The day I visited was beautiful, if quiet – the sun was somewhat muted by clouds and the visitors muted with it, but the threat of rain did not disturb the life bursting out of this lovely protected area. The lush green of plants, trees, mosses, creeping blackberry vines covered every available surface, while the river slowly snaking its way through the background teamed with wildly splashing fish. Despite the clouds, it had been the sort of spring weekend that tempts residents of the Pacific Northwest out of the winter caves, and the parking lot was surprisingly full for such a small, out-of-the-way place.

Opened in March of 2005, the Cathlapotle Plankhouse is a reconstruction of a Chinook cedar plankhouse, the sort of which were common when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled through the region. At that time 40,000 people lived in the area, and Cathlapotle was one of the largest Chinook villages that Lewis and Clark encountered. The reproduction, like many Native American interpretive reproductions, is not meant to freeze native culture at any certain point in history, but to reflect history, tradition, and contemporary art and craftsmanship of local native tribes.

 

Museums at Night in the UK

I’ve gotten a little skeptical about European public history in the last couple years. Museums in Europe tend to be much more focused on preservation and collections, less interested in integrating multimedia and using other innovative educational methods. It’s not always true. I’ve seen some great stuff in Britain especially. The exhibits at the Museum of London are fantastic and there are a number of great house museums as well. One of the most subtlety effective things I’ve ever seen a museum do was at the Handel House Museum. It was more or less your basic house museum, laid out as it had been when George Frederich Handel lived there, but they had a working Baroque harpsichord in the music room and they rented out the room to young local musicians for practice space during the hours the museum was open. The effect? As visitors walked through the museum, they heard singers, harpsichordists, and other Baroque and classical-style musicians practicing in the room in which Handel had once written his music and practiced with his musicians.

Nevertheless, I tend to think that museums in Britain and on the Continent focus too much on collections and preservation and too little on education and bringing history to life. But the Museums at Night event happening at museums all across the UK in May is absolutely brilliant and I wish one of the museum organizations this country would do something like it. It’s such a simple thing, museums at night. But it forces museums to look at their programming differently, to do something new and interesting, and it gives visitors a completely different perspective and the feeling that they are seeing something special, something “behind the scenes.” Museums and history presentations at night are startling, visceral, real. And to look at the list of special program and exhibits that are coinciding with this Museums at Night event, so many participants are fully embracing that.

 

A fly in amber

Here’s one of the oddities of being a young adult in the modern world: my high school history teacher is a friend of mine on facebook. And this isn’t just any high school teacher – this is the teacher, the one who changed my life and really impacted the way I think about education and history in a way no one had before. Cliche, cliche, cliche, etc. etc. And now we know random details of our lives via the powers of facebook. Odd world, this one.

In any case, the teacher in question is doing a grad program in religious studies and art history right now, and he posted a piece of a paper he’s writing on his facebook page that was about historic preservation and destruction and how they messily combine. Here, let me quote from it:

“Within the individual histories of the churches themselves there has always been an implicit right to destroy existing buildings in order erect newer, better ones, given the opportunity. Most of the California missions began as wooden huts, only to be replaced by adobe, with an ultimate goal for many of them to ultimately be replaced with stone. A great many of the great cathedrals of Europe underwent a similar process of destruction and re-erection (such as is the case with St. Peter’s in Rome). Not surprisingly, however, the Victorianizations of several of the missions in the 1870’s and 1880’s (which were, at the time, modernizations) have been roundly condemned by art historians and by mission boosters. This attitude is even present in some of the literature developed for fourth graders studying the missions, developed in conjunction with the Los Angeles Catholic Diocese: “Worse than all the disasters of nature that came to Mission San Buenaventura was the ‘disaster’ caused by a well-meaning priest, Fr. Cyprian Rubio, in 1893. He modernized the interior of the church!” (Boulé 15)

 

Local history and the trouble with sources

One of the most valuable things I learned about historical research in college was the fine line that exists between primary sources and secondary sources. It should be pretty straightforward, right? Primary sources are historical sources actually written in the period a person is researching, secondary sources are written about the period after the fact. Theoretically, a secondary source is an unbiased analysis, while a primary source is the pure, biased, messy “data” of history. But find a secondary source old enough, and it’s probably really easy to see that it is also a reflection of the period it was written in – it’s a primary source as well. Memoirs and autobiographies are also clearly biased, reflections of writer as well as whatever or whoever the writer is talking about. And then there’s edited collections of primary sources, which can get especially messy if the editing was done by an amateur historian or a family member, or even just a long time in the past.

It’s one of the fascinating challenges I’ve run into when working with the First State Heritage Park. So much of the information the Heritage Park has about the local area comes from family accounts and histories, or a few people who kept letters in boxes somewhere along the way, or the local historical society’s traditions. In some ways it’s brilliant. Local history is alive, it’s woven into place names and family genealogies. It’s good to know that it matters to someone, even if that someone is a bit of a stereotypical bluestocking. But so much of this information is steeped in older narratives of history that it’s hard to strip away the biases. Local leaders become larger than life, ancestors become heroes when maybe they don’t deserve to be. It’s hard to make history relevant to the people who don’t want to hear about Rich Dead White Guys when the Bluestocking Brigade wants to keep their history just like it’s always been.