The Interior Space in a Period Piece

If you’ve spent any time around historical reenactors, you know there can be hilarious attention to the material world of the past.   Among snarky living historians, you are likely to hear things like:

“Nice leggings, but not period, dude.”
“Comfy camp furniture, but you wouldn’t see that on campaign.”
“So you decided to go with the scarlet wool, even though you’re not a royal regiment, heah?”

Although it’s very distant, the material world leaves physical traces of itself behind and you can hold up museum pieces as your guide to settle arguments, even though there is no real defense against snarkophiles.   Years ago, one wardrobe “expert” assured us, for example, that men’s frock coats in the 18th century would never feature cloth-covered buttons.  Not three days later, one of our source books fell open to literally pages and pages of period frock coats with cloth covered buttons.

My own take on this is that the material world certainly must be documented, but it’s only one of the spheres that needs charting when you do a period piece.   The more important reality is what I would call the heart and soul of the age, its interior space, its spiritual village commons.

The AMC series Mad Men is an interesting study on this front.   Yes, it’s kind of fun to know when Etch-a-Sketch came on the scene, or when Volkswagen ran the “Lemon” campaign, but that really falls into the vibrant art direction dimension of the story.   By far, the more interesting truths are the ones the culture just assumes about behavior and status and faith and modesty.     What range of behavior does the age allow?  What beliefs are considered forbidden?   Which prejudices are endulged and which are scolded?   In the advertising culture of 1964 New York, for example, it was almost expected you would be working some of the time partially inebriated, since the four martini lunch wasn’t a scandal, and every executive seemed to have some sort of hard spirits bar right behind his desk.    A woman who ventured out of the secretarial pool, in pursuit of copy-writing, was pushing the edge of normalcy and the executive who attempted liberties with female colleagues was, well, squarely within that normalcy;  if we’re to believe their version of that world, it was an ugly time for women in the urban workplace. 

Accurate or not, praiseworthy or not, the producers are defining the walls of the common interior space, outside of which a fictional character would either find himself in prison or a total outcast.

Trying to understand these assumed cultural landscapes is a huge part of telling any period story, and it can be much more dificult than getting the wardrobe and the props right.   A 21st century leading man — let’s face it — is bound to have a different set of expectations about what is “proper” with respect to the behavior of women, if, indeed, the word “proper” ever even occurs to him, but it isn’t as simple as just putting on Victorian or Georgian eye shades.  Each age is slightly different.   The topic takes in issues as small as whether you went outside with a hat on your head, or work in the fields bare-chested,  to ideas as large as bravery and cowardice and honor and shame.  In the Seinfeld era of American manhood, there’s a metrosexual end of the spectrum that doesn’t really feel too much shame about physical cowardice.   It even mocks the “macho” or the “Rambo” impulse.   It would be difficult to imagine that detached an attitude on display in American men of the 1770s.

We would be wrong, likewise, to assume too many similarities between the Victorians and the Georgian whigs of the American Revolution.    Here’s what a Presbyterian divinity student had to say  about women’s fashion in 1774:

the late importation of Stays (18th century corsets) which are said to be now most fashionable in London, are produced upwards so high that we can have scarce any view at all of the Ladies Snowy Bosoms..

..This from a fellow who considered himself too pious to dance!

We would likewise be wrong to see the founder’s generation associating piety with temperance.   Even though John Adams lamented the proliferation of taverns and public houses, he enjoyed New England hard cider, and rum was considered something like the aspirin of the 18th century.   You couldn’t move the army without it.  Even church meeting houses were raised with a barrel of hard spirits on hand.

At the same time, sermons were the popular literature of the era, printed and sold on the streets of the great capitals, and then shared home to home, followed by lively debate over theology and politics.  And the sermons were political without apology, sometimes addressing what we might consider today the procedural minutia of policy wonks.   It was, after all, an age that allowed corporal punishment for those who blasphemed the Bible.    The Harvard trained intellectual titans of the day framed their debate with both Biblical and classical allusions, and there was no great battle raging between those who followed material science and those who studied the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Indeed, men of science were men of God and men of God were men of science.

This is a small aside, but I noticed something formal in the way Matthew Patten refers to the women in his township.   Unlike his male neighbors, he rarely uses their first name, even with women he must have known for years.  He doesn’t even use a salutation.  It is never Mrs. Smith or Miss Fairfax, but Smith’s wife or Jeremy Fairfax’s daughter.    Is this a general convention, or something particular to Patten?    Does it speak to how business must be transacted — through the men in their lives?  Does it imply an emotional reserve?  As usual, a single detail fathers a thousand questions.

The world was different — the interior world, and it’s a challenge to decipher. 

It’s much further back, after all, than 1964.