Editors: Jennifer Gray, Anne Nellis Richter, and Helen McCormack
Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781526176929
Reassembling the social interior: historical spaces from contemporary viewpoints reveals the richly layered works of artists, designers, craftspeople, landscape gardeners and architects, and their contributions to the construction of interiors, and interrelated exteriors, of the past. Surveying a range of historical periods, the book explores collective meanings embedded within the furnishings and fittings of houses and homes, public and private buildings. The book considers how these spaces have powerful significance for contemporary audiences, particularly in ways that are relatable to shared experiences of work, leisure, family, community, power and politics. In Reassembling the social interior, the authors describe the communicative and interpretative qualities of works that connect with the present-day, by reflecting on, remaking and reimagining places, spaces and objects that once populated people’s lives. Palatial to austere, Reassembling the social interior foregrounds human relationships in the plan, design and creation of homes, interiors and sites of the past.
by Madeleine Pelling
This chapter examines how these productions were filmed across existing heritage sites as well as newly built environments. In doing so, they present a meaningful historiographical intervention both on- and off-screen. In Miss Potter, the Potters’ London townhouse and Hill Top Farm in the Lake District, a National Trust prop
erty since 1943, are identified as key sites useful in examining the material and economic consequences of externalising imagined worlds within the strictures of upper middle-class Victorian England. Drawing on extant curatorial work as well as Potter’s own expansive interest in, and collecting of, eighteenth-century furniture and fabrics, the film engages interior spaces as the means to explore questions of female autonomy and the manifestation of what it projects as Potter’s creative destiny. Likewise, To Walk Invisible creates new cinematic spaces by entirely recreating the Brontës’ globally recognisable parsonage at Haworth in West Yorkshire, built nearby as a to-scale replica complete with ‘one-to-one’ interiors, alongside its exteriors, surrounding streets, garden and graveyard. This allowed actors to occupy and interact with the familiar house and its contents, all imbued with complex layers of iconographic meaning since the nineteenth century and now recalibrated in an alternate, on-screen dimension. It also facilitated an expansion of the traditional focus on the three Brontë sisters to include their father Patrick and brother Branwell, literally making new rooms for them and even playing with the uncanniness of the replication itself to queer Branwell’s character.
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