Out of House and Home;: Two New Perspectives on the American Family

ourOF HOUSE AND HOME; TWONEW PERSPECTIVES ON THEAMERICAN FAMILY CliffordEdward Clark, Jr. The American Family Home,1800-1960. Chapel Hill: The University of NorthCarolina Press, 1986. xvi + 281 pp. Illus. ColleenMcDannell. The Christian Home in Victorian America,1840-1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.xvii + 193pp. Illus. Barbara Todd The family, we are told, "makes a house a home." Each of these books shows how ideals of the American family shaped the homes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and though each author treats themes that have been discussed elsewhere, each achieves new insights by adopting an original perspective and providing new lines of evidence. In The American Family Home Clifford Clark sets out first to "study the American middle-class family ideal by tracing the influence of certain popular house types" (xii). His further purpose is to explain the pervasiveness and persistence of the American dream of home ownership, a dream of a single-family dwelling on its own lot, and to explore why it is that the American home has become such an important focus for self-expression, the object of endless hours, money, and energy spent in remodeling and redecorating. His subject is the ordinary home, built from the mass-produced patterns of the plan books by local builders and mass-market developers, rather than the one-off products of the drawing boards of famous architects or the still-born programs of the feminist theorists and social planners. Clark buttresses his text with copious illustrations; some are familiar from overuse , but many come from his own photographic documentation of the housing stock of the United States. Occasionally the connection between text and illustration is obscure (eg., pp. 155-6, fig. 5. 16), and many of the captions irritatingly spell out what is already manifest in the illustration itself. 162 BarbaraTodd Clark is least successful in linking family ideals with the design of homes.He offers onone hand a competent history of domestic architecture, and on theother a survey of changing notions about the nature of the family. Yet despitequoted assertions to the effect that the ~hild ''breathes in the atmosphere of the house," and the like, he has little success in correlating the ideals with actual housesand their contents. If he is successful anywhere, it is in the case of the mid-Victorian house. He shows the effect of the rise and decline of the doctrine of the separate spheres in designs that segregate male and female parts of the house-the husband's library, the wife's bedroom, the nursery-and the effect of the emphasis on the sanctity of the home in the development of the public entryhall, and the presentation of homes as set apart in spacious grounds. But the linkage is strained at times. One wonders, for instance, if indeed the fact that the "Gent's 1 easy chair" and the woman's rocker were the same size in furniture setsofthe ' 1890sreally shows that "the family was coming to be seen as a less hierarchical unit" (125). Further, his point is clear largely because the mid-Victorian exampleshe uses are large houses, designed for the wealthy upper-middle-class family, who could afford separate bedrooms, libraries, sumptuous entry halls complete with "masculine" fireplaces, and the like. In the small cramped houses builtfor lower-middle-class clerks and artisans, which Clark illustrates but does not discuss in this context, such notions of separate spaces were relevant, if at all, only as a distant ideal to be honoured mostly in the breach. Still, Clark is very convincing, if not entirely innovative, in showing how the ideal of home ownership was marketed to these lower-middle-class families. Clark's chapter on the home as an object for artistic expression is valuable,not only in showing how a woman's time was occupied, but also because it givesan insight intothe origins of the middle-class fixation with remodeling and redecorating . It also shows, if only with illustrations, that the ideology of the home asan arena for self-expression, like the ideology of home ownership itself, affected even artisan families living in the cramped spaces of the working-man's home. It is perhaps because he...