This essay revisits prevailing assumptions about the domestic kitchen. While the status of this space and even its existence as a discrete area within the home have become a maater for discussion, the work of cooking located in the kitchen remains a compelling subject within a range of popular cultural forms. We are accustomed to thinking of the kitchen as a scene of routine and ritual, but here I explore its appearances as an improvisatory and rebellious zone. Such possibilities are not necessarily the outcome of shifting practices associated with the postmodern home and its representation. On the contrary, the kitchen has long been a space, both intimate and socially significant, from which to generate arguments about gender, class and nation.
Early in 1844 Eliza Farnham (1815–64) was appointed to the post of matron at the first purpose-built women's prison, the women's section of Mount Pleasant Prison in New York, the institution popularly known as Sing Sing. Her appointment, which she won through her connection with Horace Greeley and the reforming circles of New York, brought her, at first, a burst of favourable attention and subsequently considerable notoriety. The precise reasons for this reversal are a matter of varying interpretations, but the defining impulse of Farnham's tenure at Sing Sing is not: Farnham's particular interest was in campaigning for phrenology, perhaps the most popular of the new psychologies of the period, as a means to diagnose and cure female prisoners. This psychological science was based on the premise that there was a match between character and the outer shape and protuberances of the head; character could be read by studying the head's surface. During this period, phrenology was often linked with the figure of the criminal, indeed phrenology first evolved in the work of Franz-Joseph Gall and was subsequently frequently explained through descriptions of prisoners and the inhabitants of asylums. Farnham was a pivotal figure in the argument for phrenology's efficacy in treating prisoners in New York in the mid-1840s.
This article addresses the writing of domestic life in colonial emigrant women's texts of the mid-and late nineteenth century, using the example of Anne Langton (1804-93). While acknowledging the importance of the work in colonial discourse analysis and women's history that has drawn domesticity and the domestic space to the centre of considerations of the practices of imperialism, this article looks to uncouple the discussion of domestic description from readings that emphasise domesticity's baleful influence. Anne Langton's writing, inflected as much by emigration discourse as colonialism, suggests ways in which domestic description could express not only the ambivalent status of women in a British colony but also the complex significance of their work.
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