Book Review

Canada and the United States

To read Robert Blair St. George's large and complex book is to dwell in the houses of early New England's patriarchs. Four sprawling chapters provide a topical and roughly chronological exploration of a series of critical sites in colonial New England culture. The opening chapter offers an extended analysis of a Connecticut farmstead and its relationship to the "bawn," an enclosed and fortified domestic space with special significance in England's commercial and colonial expansion. Chapter two explores analogies between houses and bodies: in particular, the metaphorical implications of a unitary and hierarchical understanding of the body for the ordering of the "houses" of family and state. Chapter three turns from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, and from rural Connecticut to Boston, to examine the violent collision of houses and bodies in crowd assaults on the mansions of the gentry. Chapter four returns to Connecticut for a close look at the paintings of Ralph Earl, whose portraits of Federalist gentlemen and their houses were allegories for their cultural aspirations, balancing the yearning for an Arcadian past with the tensions of living in a commercial republic. But to describe what the book is "about" fails to capture the rich, dense, learned, ingenious, digressive, often rewarding, and sometimes maddening method by which St. George performs this work of cultural inquiry.

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