The apotheosis of home: the house museum

The house museum is a prime example of how constructions of home intersect with/reflect/affirm national sentiment. Four case studies historicise the circumstances of each house’s translation into a museum, and demonstrate the artifice of the event and its contemporary meanings: Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk; the Frick Collection, New York city; The Homewood, Esher, Surry; Thoreau’s birthplace, Concord, and Cabin Replica, Walden, Massachusetts. The evidence disrupts familiar expectations of each place, exposing the myths into which much of the repertoire of ‘heritage’ plays. It is an opinionated claim, for these analyses do not appear in the public presentation of the sites. They are interpretations illuminated by contrasting theories of home and museum: the house as uniquely intimate human topography, intelligible as such to the visitor; the museum as a device enabling comprehension of material things presented for the visitor to view; and the exhibitionary mode of presentation that literally primes both the scene and the visitors for their parts in a spectacle. Exhibiting a house as a museum brings together conventional expectations of the discernment of innermost personal identity, in the frame of using the public museum to consolidate truths guaranteed by physical proof, via the display interface.