The stories we tell: uncanny encounters in Mr Straw’s House

Abstract

During my first visit to Mr Straw’s House, a National Trust Property in the North of England, I was intrigued by the discrepancies between the narrative framework provided by the National Trust – its exclusions, silences and invisibilities – and the far more complex stories the house seemed to tantalisingly hint at. As a scholar I am drawn to certain sites and affectively engage with them and yet I usually keep silent about my investment which informs not only my interest but also how I read these heritage sites. My aim here is not primarily to interrogate my own investment, but to ask how productive it is, what it enables me to see and to describe and where its limits are. This case study explores a particular tourist attraction from the perspective of storytelling and asks what narratives can be constructed around, and generated through, the spatial-emotional dimensions of this heritage site. I am interested in the hold sites have over people, why and how they provoke imaginative and empathic investment that generates a network of stories and triggers processes of unravelling which have the potential to transform silences and unmetabolised affect into empathy and emotional thought.

Keywords:

• Silence
• empathy
• memory
• house museum
• austerity nostalgia
• uncanny heritage
• postcolonial melancholia

Notes

1. I would like to thank Annette Kuhn, Fiona Candlin and Rebecca Dolgoy for their comments on various drafts of this article.

2. The Coalition Government comprised the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and ran from 2010 to 2015. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis the Coalition Government presided over swinging and controversial cuts to public sector budgets in the name of austerity.

3. 'To the despair of specialists and connoisseurs, most visitors to house museums visit, not to appreciate the finer details of Tudor panelling and Georgian portraits, but to engage in creative fantasy […] Following the trend towards seeing museum visitors as active creators of their own visitor experiences, informed by personal history and agendas, they can be viewed as coming to mine the place for the raw materials of imaginative bricolage, and then to share the experience with their family and friends […] These inspirations are to be found below stairs, as much as on the piano nobile, in closets as well as gardens, in frescoed ceilings, and at the same time in mass-produced wallpapers. The challenge is for house curators to let go of received truth as the only vector of understanding.’ (Young 2007, 76).

4. Literary examples include Jo Baker’s novel Longbourn (2013). But how much (and what kind of) difficult histories can the public handle in their heritage sites? This could be compared to the problems National Trust audiences had with the history of slavery in some temporary exhibitions during the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

5. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1776), was allegedly the first to portray the English as a nation of shopkeepers:

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight, appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. (The Wealth of Nations, Glasgow, 1976, Book IV, section vii. c.)

For a more recent example see Sian Ellis ‘It’s All in the Family: The Nation of Shopkeepers’ (2016).

6. The National Trust kindly granted permission to use photographs of Mr Straw’s House.

7. For other examples of Gothic readings see the YouTube clip by ObsoleteOddity entitled ‘Time Capsule House! – House Frozen in Time after 83 years’ (accessed January 10, 2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0trCoIixb20/.

8. This is in fact a difficult balancing act; not least because the house has to be clean for visitors and yet not too clean to simulate a lived-in feeling of a house inhabited by two elderly bachelors.

9. What could also be termed ‘misery nostalgia’ finds its outlet not only in the heritage industry but also in design and fashion, for example the fashion label ‘Workhouse England’ where designs are inspired by Victorian photographs and the clothes worn by workhouse inmates: ‘The materials are raw. The colours are earthy and textured. We have deconstructed then rebuilt in order to instil a sense of history.’ Workhouse England (accessed January 10, 2018). http://www.workhouse-england.co.uk/workhouse-england--ethos.html/.

10. This tale of privilege, homosexuality and treason bears echoes of the Cambridge spies, in particular Guy Burgess, who acted as a double agent during the Cold War period and eventually defected to the Soviet Union.