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MUSEUM MANNERS: THE SENSORY LIFE OF THE EARLY MUSEUM
| By Constance Classen |
Concordia University |
| In The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum H.M. Bateman depicts the story of a boy who is arrested for breathing on one of the display cases in the British Museum.1 While purely fictional, this picture book highlights the popular notion of the museum as inviolable and untouchable, a site of pristine preservation where even a breath might have damaging effects. Many contemporary museums are challenging the traditional 'hands off' ethos of the museum with innovative, interactive exhibitions. (A recent example is the 'Touch Me' exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.)2 Yet such exhibitions are still exceptions to the rule of sensory restraint which is generally expected to govern the behavior of museum visitors. Artefacts for the most part are only to be seen, not felt, smelt, sounded and certainly not tasted. How intrinsic, however, is this rule of sensory restraint to the museum? How did visitors to the first museums behave? What were their sensory expectations and experiences?3 |
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One of the most difficult subjects for an historian to investigate is that of the corporeal practices of earlier eras. Ways of walking, eating, smelling and touching, while laden with social significance, are often so taken for granted that they are little commented on by their practitioners. It takes a very thorough observer to record the ordinary bodily motions of daily life. Often it is in the descriptions of travellers, who find local customs foreign and therefore worthy of note, that one comes across the best descriptions of the corporeal customs of past times. Thus from a Frenchman's account of his eighteenth-century visit to England we learn that in the House of Commons at that time the customary practice was for orators to stand "with their legs straddling, one knee somewhat bent, and one arm extended, as if they were going to fence."4 Another potential source of information is the reminiscences of individuals who have lived long enough to have seen the customs of their youth pass away and therefore make note of them as curiosities. From the recollections of the long-lived Mary Berry, for example, we learn that Horace Walpole walked on tiptoe according to the custom of elegant eighteenth-century gentlemen. Another source of information, and one which was richly mined by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process, is the etiquette guide. Such guides reveal both contemporary ideals of proper behavior among the classes to which they are addressed and certain common practices which were deemed to require correction. For example, the frequency with which readers of medieval instructions are advised to clean their hands before dipping them into the communal pot indicates that people frequently ate with unwashed hands.5 |
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Just as it is often difficult to know what people of past eras did with their bodies, it is difficult to know what they did with the things around them. One cannot assume that the function of an object is evident in its design. For example, a chair is evidently designed for sitting on but this mere fact tells us nothing about the social and symbolic function of chairs or about the other acts people may have performed with them. Simply looking at a nineteenth-century chair, for example, cannot tell us that a dutiful daughter in the eighteen-hundreds might curtsy to her father seated in that chair, and even to the empty chair when her father was absent.6 Similarly, in future centuries, no one would be able to tell by looking at a dinner table from our own era that, rather than being primarily used for dining, it was customarily employed as a place for storage and work.7 |
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