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Just in time for Christmas, an excerpt from Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums by Andrea Terry. In Family Ties, Andrea Terry considers the appeal and relevance of domesticated representations of Victorian material culture in a contemporary multicultural context. Family Ties connects residential artifacts to performance by examining the Victorian Christmas programs offered annually at three house museums to demonstrate the complex nuances of living history.
The following excerpt is taken from the introduction of Family Ties.
After over two decades of house museum visits, what stands out most prominently in my mind is the time my father took me, at eleven years old, to the Dundurn Castle Christmas Candlelight tour. It marked the start of an annual family tradition. Since 1967, Dundurn Castle has functioned as a living history house museum showcasing the life and times of the last pre-Confederation prime minister (1854–56) and Family Compact leader, Sir Allan Napier MacNab (1798–1862). It was the early 1990s and I recall standing in the drawing room transfixed by the childhood portrait of Sophia, MacNab’s daughter. While the Victorian-era garbed interpreter pointed out the gifts lying underneath the decorated table-top tree in the centre of the room, I stared off to the side at the painted girl, not much younger than myself. I wondered what it would feel like to wear that coral necklace hanging around her neck; to be (as the interpreter described) encased in a corset underneath that beautiful midnight blue off-the-shoulder dress at such a young age; to emerge from that sitting and race throughout the fortyplus rooms of this enormous Italianate-style villa. What would it be like, I pondered, to have servants answer your every beck and call, to grow up in a residence as lavish as this one?
Together, my father and I toured the home, soaking up the sights, sounds, and smells of the Victorian Christmas. We both felt we had been ransported back in time, despite the invasion of obvious time-lapses. For instance, in the dining room, I turned to look out the French doors, gazing at the lights of the highway running alongside Burlington Bay. My father broke with period convention in the kitchen, helping himself to second and third servings of seasonal treats in the kitchen (claiming to me that he skipped dinner to make the tour on time). People smiled at each other, watching others’ faces, others’ children, others’ reactions, oftentimes lamenting, “Why can’t Christmas be like this today?” There were, however, some notable absences. For example, being a first generation Canadian – my mother having immigrated to Canada from Holland as an infant with her parents and two older siblings – I noted the lack of any discussion of Sinterklass (the Dutch Saint Nicholas, whom my uncles dressed up as every year to give out gifts to my sixty-plus cousins in the church basement). If anything, Dundurn reflected how, in the Victorian time period, immigrants from Britain brought with them various traditions, such as decorating evergreen conifers, over to Canada. And so I wondered, how, where, and why do I fit into this legacy? Over time and subsequent visits, I began wondering how or even if this representation might resonate with more recent immigrants. After all, locating oneself within MacNab’s own home – restored though it may be – and touring it encourages one to experience the past so that physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual encounter(s) with a decisively domesticated type of public history stirs up personal memories. House museums have (been) adapted to address present-day values, priorities, and concerns.
They are both sources and suppliers of history. These institutions, over the course of their existence, have functioned as private residences, commemorative monuments, and in some cases, fully-restored state-sanctioned living history museums offering theme-based programs. Strategic choices made in different times and places give rise to their institutionalization. As sources of history, houses routinely undergo museumification based on their architectural merits and the socio-political primacy of the historical figures represented by them. As suppliers of history, house museums re-present the so-called “private” lives of historical figures, their families and servants. While the owner’s political accomplishments routinely recommend a home’s museumification, the original structural purpose determines its interpretive aim – to portray domestic culture. Costumed interpreters guide visitors through restored period rooms identifying particular objects and delivering stories spun around those objects, anecdotes that iterate the household routines and customs prevalent during the time period represented. Given living history practitioners’ keen awareness that “the past in all its detail can never be recovered,” and that they can never know “all the facts,” they routinely use objects and facts available to them to construct a semblance of “narrative coherence.” Drawing on art historical discourse, I treat house museums as objects that act as vehicles designed to foster a collective sense of cultural history.
Family Ties explores how house museums anchor and transmit mythic histories, providing a physical, material, and visual connection with the past. It connects the artifact to the performance of history at three house museums – Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario; the Sir George-Étienne Cartier National Historic Site of Canada in Montreal, Quebec; and the William Lyon Mackenzie House in Toronto, Ontario – which, like so many heritage sites in Canada, taken together deploy “founding nations” mythologies. Both the homes and artifacts located within them, I suggest, function as representational signs – objects that, by virtue of their provenance, conservation, and subsequent institutionalization, authorize each museum’s interpretation. In my view, the credibility of performative house museums relies on the deployment of what I call “artifactual accuracy,” which is to say the calculated deployment of historical objects designed to sanction the site’s period representation. To see how each house’s museological practice connects to its performance of history, I examine the annual “Victorian Christmas” program. These programs are examples of “living history” in action; period rooms are decorated to represent a historical seasonal celebration, interpreters discuss activities associated with the occasion, such as kissing under the mistletoe, and visitors eat festive treats. My study explores the implications of institutionalized interpretations of the past that privilege bi-national mythologies, despite the fact that each site I have chosen is located in the midst of a large urban centre’s ethnically diverse (multicultural) population, and in the case of the Cartier Houses in Montreal, within a constituency informed by contemporary souverainiste issues.
I examine how the character and re-animation of these sites encourage visitors to “live history” as personal – rather than political – experience. At its heart, this book interrogates how house museums in Canada function as hegemonic cultural tools.
Learn more about Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums
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