“Home Charms”: unpacking an Irish immigrant woman’s home through speculative design

ABSTRACT

Maeve Brennan’s 1953 short story “The Bride,” describes the isolation and complicated homesickness of a young Irish woman living as a domestic servant in New York. Taking Brennan’s story as a starting point, this paper uses a designed and made object – a set of digitally modeled and 3D printed Home Charms –as research-creation based methodology to investigate the spatial, material, and performative implications of settlement in a new domestic space, especially for women who lived, worked, and were conceptually identified with the home, its architecture and material culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• design
• performance
• material culture
• Ireland
• diaspora
• immigration
• women

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Rhona Richman Kenneally and Shaney Herrmann (Department of Design and Computation Arts), and the Technology Sandbox (Webster Library) at Concordia University, for sharing their expertise. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for their constructive suggestions, and to the organizers and attendees of the 2018 American Conference for Irish Studies in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for responding with generousity and insight to the original conference presentation, occasioning this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Molly-Claire Gillett http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8064-4273

Notes

1 See: Bourke, Homesick; D’hoker; McWilliams, “No Place is Home”.

2 A lack of economic opportunity, among many other factors, saw unprecedented numbers of young, single men and women migrating from Ireland to the United States during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The number of women emigrants rose continuously during the period from 1871 to 1926, and if Irish men that served in WWI are removed from the equation, women emigrants consistently outnumbered men (Walter, “Migration” 52). See: Diner; Lynch Brennan; Walter.

3 “The Bride” is unusual in the canon of Brennan’s stories for The New Yorker, most of which are variations (albeit slightly subversive) on the “Biddy Story,” or humorous tale of an Irish domestic in an American household. For more about which see: McWilliams “‘No Place is Home”; Palko .

4 Given Ireland’s long history of land disputes and dispossession, home ownership – in rural areas “keeping the name on the land” – remains an ideal in Irish culture and continues to inflect current housing-related concerns.

5 Elke D’hoker has noted that the work of Maeve Brennan and her fellow modern short story writer Elizabeth Bowen often challenges the dominant trope of Irish immigrant as exile, in depicting the domestic space as oppressive and confining to women while at the same time idealized by men (52–53). For more on nostalgia and home in the Irish context, see: Alcobia-Murphy; Arrowsmith; Janssen; Richman Kenneally “Cooking at the Hearth”. For an insightful reflection on the problematic notion of “home,” see: Tuedio.

6 Though not of central importance to this project, it is worth noting that my imagining of Ireland in the years around 1953 is more weighted to the years preceding – both the protagonist of “The Bride” and Maeve Brennan herself had left Ireland much earlier. Angela Bourke notes that Brennan’s conception of home life in Ireland was formed before 1934, when she left for America at the age of 18 (Bourke, “The House That Never Blew Up” 165).

7 See for example: Hollows; Johnson and Lloyd; Richman Kenneally“Cooking at the Hearth”.

8 Dorothea Lange spent most of her visit in County Clare and photographed rural households and small towns and villages. See: Mullins. There is also a lovely slideshow of Lange’s photos with musical accompaniment on YouTube. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVwZwNQW8l0

9 This iteration of Home Charms is part of that “looping” process. After presenting a paper about the project at an American Conference for Irish Studies regional meeting, I was encouraged to further elaborate on themes of performance and performativity in this longer essay.

10 Bronner gives the example of differences in American (performance focused) and European (practice focused) folkloric writing on hunting to illustrate this conceptual gulf: “As performance, American folklorists have analysed the rhetoric of hunting narrative and song more than the custom of hunting […] Studies of hunting as practice involve examinations of its components as symbolic actions, such as standing, driving, stalking, and shooting” (Bronner 32).

11 Butter is another particularly evocative example of the deep cultural meaning to be found in everyday things. As a product primarily made by women, it is associated in folklore with the woman of the house but also with witches, who could steal, sour or hoard it. Because butter could be preserved, it could bring in substantial revenue for a family, leading to financial advancement that might be viewed suspiciously by the community. The tackle and trim of butter-making is varied and expresses family identity – from methods for cleaning butter spades to lucky charms that increase butter yield (Glassie 533). Its resonance is temporal, as in the change in the production of butter is also a history of farm life in the region; geographical or spatial, in that butter acquired different flavors when cows grazed in different fields, and its nuances of secrecy and the potential for private gain come from its hidden place of manufacture; even moral and mythical, as shown in butter’s association with either ideal or tainted (witch-like) womanhood, secrecy, luck, and care for or neglect of neighbors.

12 Louise Krasniewicz criticizes Stewart’s lack of knowledge about the practice of miniature making in a segment of her online manifesto series, “Miniature Manifesto Part 2: Stop Quoting Susan Stewart,” pointing out that when Stewart sees in miniatures a nostalgia for craft, she in fact ignores the evidence of craft skill that the miniature itself exhibits. See: https://thewonderofminiatures.com/2015/06/01/miniature-manifesto-part-2-stop-quoting-susan-stewart/

13 These “penal rosaries” were used during the time of the Penal Laws in Ireland, which were implemented under English rule in the seventeenth century and not fully repealed until the 1920’s.