Adams, Annmarie

English

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through Oz constitutes a dream-state ideal for psychoanalytic interpretation. Thus he recounts in detail several Freudian articles that have analyzed Dorothy's psychosexual maturation as it is played out in the symbolic landscape of the film. And finally we are given a Jungian interpretation that most universalizes The Wizard's story and links Dorothy's quest to the great American collective unconscious. The second half of the book works to uncover the connection between Dorothy's adventures in Oz and their appeal to the national psyche. Jungian analysis has revealed that The Wizard is about "growing up," which is specifically associated with "going home." Nathanson ar-gues that the film supports Americans' beliefs about their own landscape and their develop-ment within it. America has moved from a per-ceived garden paradise to an urban industrial nation and The Wizard plays out the collective feeling that "for Americans to 'grow up' as a nation (to realize their ultimate destiny as a gar-den paradise) they must also 'go home' (recap-ture their innocence in the original garden paradise)" (p. 173). Nathanson relates this American belief in "growing up" and "going home" to universal religious patterns. He associates the American ANNMARIE ADAMS Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (eds.). American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social His-tory of Spaces and Services. Knoxville: Uni-versity of Tennessee Press, 1992. 256 pp., ill. Cloth $34.95, ISBN 0-87049-759-6. The study of the American middle-class home has been central to the development of mate-rial culture studies. This is evident both by the sheer number of scholarly articles devoted to the history of home life and by the inclusion of middle-class domestic topics in the field's growing list of texts. American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Ser-vices, edited by Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. pastoral ideal with mythical and religious con-ceptions of Eden-like states, with the film as a modernized appeal to timeless, universal beliefs of both social and personal development. The Wizard thus acts as a secular myth reflecting and defining a collective dream with the power of a religious doctrine. In an era where popular culture is often criticized for secularizing reli-gion, Nathanson goes a great distance to show the other side of the coin. He carefully explains how a film like The Wizard can be read as a sacred text of a secular society. Nations are as much quasi-religions as they are political con-structs, and like a religion they need their own myths to unite the masses. Throughout Over the Rainbow one is aware that this landmark film is being used as a con-duit to American culture itself. Along the way Nathanson contributes an in-depth study of the interrelation of popular film, religion and cultural myths. His reliance on recapitulating the work of previous scholars may prove daunt-ing to the reader, but the end result is an exhaus-tively detailed consideration of The Wizard as a powerful reflection of fundamental American values and beliefs. Nathanson's interdisci-plinary approach is an admirable model for fur-ther work in film and cultural studies. Schlereth, makes a substantial contribution to this well-established subfield, while at the same time suggesting new avenues for future research. American Home Life is a collection of 11 papers by scholars from a range of fields in the humanities, presented in 1989 at a Texas confer-ence entitled "Life at Home, 1880-1930." Col-lectively, the authors attempt to explain why and how the late Victorian, middle-class house-hold became a more rationalized, modern site over the course of five tumultuous decades. This question has been addressed by other schol-ars, such as Gwendolyn Wright in Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (eds.), American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services Material History Review 39 (Spring 1994) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 39 (printemps 1994) 87 Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1980). The novelty of American Home Life, however, is that 11 au-thors address the same question using differ-ent bodies of evidence. This feature, in itself, will make the book a fundamental text for interdisciplinary or cultural approaches to the history of the home. American Home Life augments several in-creasingly popular fields of inquiry in the his-tory of American, middle-class private life: gender issues, the impact of technology and spa-tial transformations inside the house. The com-plex interrelationship of these three research areas is highlighted in the book, giving evi-dence of the continuing need for interdisci-plinary approaches to the home and for a broadened definition of what may have con-stituted living spaces in the past. American Home Life is organized in three parts, neatly labelled "Room Life," "Home Life" and "Keeping House." In the introduction, Schlereth explains how the essays compris-ing these three sections are representative of a broader "social history" approach to the American house, developed during the last two decades, in which the home has been understood as "a complicated environment of social behavior" (p. 5). The pioneers of this approach locate the ordinary inhabitants of houses in the "foreground" of their accounts, as compared to the two earlier schools cited by Schlereth, whose authors saw famous owners and later the designers of houses as the prin-cipal directors of life within the middle-class home. Many of the contributors to American Home Life are well known in various fields for longer, book-length studies. Rather than simply re-present the results of their previous research, however, most of the authors have taken the opportunity to extend their prior studies of the late nineteenth-century home into the pre-sent century or to make comparisons with other socio-economic groups to explain the age-old historical question of change over time. Char-acteristic of this re-examination of previous research are Katherine Grier's investigation of the disappearance of the middle-class parlour - a more common approach is to focus on the "appearance" of a room - and Ruth Schwartz Cowan's comparative essay on attitudes toward housework in middle-class and working-class households. Time-honoured research, in both instances, is presented in the context of fresh ideas. All the authors agree that the home of 1930 was radically different than 50 years earlier. However, the contributors to American Home Life disagree on what constitutes the catalyst for change: aesthetic trends, methods of child-care, ideas about health and cleanliness, reli-gious reform and many others, which reflect the fields in which the scholars work. Issues of gender are central to most of the authors' interpretations, which perhaps is not surprising given that 9 of the 11 contributing scholars are women. American Home Life not only shows how some women played active, reforming roles in the history of the home, as decorators, housewives and servants, but it also illustrates the settings in which other women received visitors, read novels, prayed, cleaned, played board games, survived preg-nancy, cared for children, planted flowers and used outhouses, among other activities. In this way, American Home Life is representative of much new, feminist scholarship on the home, which accords women a positive place in the domestic realm rather than emphasizing the home's oppressing features. The impact of technology is dealt with explicitly in the final section of the book, "Keep-ing House," and somewhat implicitly through-out the earlier essays. In addition to Cowan's paper, "Keeping House" includes Schlereth's contribution to the book on domestic utilities and Daniel Sutherland's on changes in domes-tic service. Architecture, furniture, automo-biles, book bindings, clothing and movies are just a few of the "technologies" that appear in the work of others. Although all of the contributors to American Home Life are keenly aware of the role of domes-tic architecture in their narratives, surprisingly few discuss the relationship of social life and the arrangements of houses. Elizabeth Cromley's essay on American bedrooms and Grier's on parlours are perhaps the exceptions. Other authors steer clear of a discussion of architec-ture, assuming, for the most part, that the arrangement of spaces drives social transfor-mation, rather than simply reflecting it. In Sutherland's essay on domestic service, for example, he implies that the lack of servant quarters in twentieth-century houses contri-buted to the modernization of household labour, rather than suggesting that the smaller, reformed house may have followed a decrease in domes-tic service. Similarly, Linda Kruger's chapter on home libraries asserts that Frank Lloyd Wright's visit to the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Material History Review 39 (Spring 1994) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 39 (printemps 1994) 88 which included extensive book displays, led to the architect's inclusion oflibraries in his house designs. Kruger then states that Wright's build-ings subsequently influenced generations of architects, implying that architectural ideas spread exponentially without really explaining how. These criticisms of American Home Life are minor, relative to the book's overall significance GERALD L. POCIUS Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1992. 232 pp., 32 illus. Cloth $99.95, ISBN 0-415-06145-8. Paper $37.50, ISBN 0-415-07031-7. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge is part of the growing body of literature from the muse-um community in Great Britain that examines the relationship between material culture re-search and museology. Museum professionals and heritage workers have increasingly attemp-ted to investigate more systematically the theo-ries and practices that have governed their work, looking at how past trends have influenced current methods. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill's book is part of this tradition, focusing on how the concept of the museum has taken different institutional forms over the past 500 years. Hooper-Greenhill argues that, up until now, the histories of museums have largely been simple institutional chronologies that outline the development of particular museums. Her study attempts to examine museums in a more relative way, to understand how particular col-lections of objects that are now often dismissed as trivial and unscientific made cultural sense in their day. Using categories from Foucault on the various stages of the structure of western knowledge, Hooper-Greenhill surveys specific major institutions from each time period as case studies of museum evolution. The Medici Palace serves as the initial focus as possibly the first museum in Europe, Hooper-Greenhill skilfully blends the evolution of to the field of "home history." All collections of essays by different authors from different fields run the risk of overlapping or contra-dictory material and uneven depth. American Home Life will be of great interest to special-ists in a variety of fields, as well as general readers interested in how the so-called "mod-ern" house evolved. this family collection with attitudes toward the material world of the time. As the medieval world gave way to Renaissance ideals, there came a greater emphasis on life in the present. Consequently, objects became signs of wealth and instruments of power, and the newly emer-gent economic classes turned to collecting to foster their status. Artists as a specialized class also began to emerge, able to fill the new domes-tic spaces of the house with objects that indi-cated knowledge and wealth. By the end of the sixteenth century, there was a relative decline in the number of private patrons and collectors. It is from here that Hooper-Greenhill traces the emergence of the notion of the public museum. By this time, collections accessible to the public were com-mon throughout Europe, often falling under the notion of the "cabinet of curiosities." Hooper-Greenhill examines these collections with a view to understanding them not as a jumble of disconnected artifacts (as they have ordinarily been considered), but rather as a reflection of the collectors, their power and their world view. Hooper-Greenhill then moves on to examine the more "scientific" museums that charac-terized the European scene, specifically look-ing at the Repository of the Royal Society in England. Hoping to create a "universal" collec-tion of material things that would be identical to the study of "universal" language, collections were built up to cover all materials in the world, rather than simply to reflect a particular col-lector or curator. With the coming of the French Revolution, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge Material History Review 39 (Spring 1994) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 39 (printemps 1994) 89 

Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (eds.), American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services

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Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (eds.), American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services

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