I Could Never Hope for Anything More Rewarding”

Pleasure, Selfhood, and Emotional Practices in the Forming of the Highland Folk Museum in the 1930s

Bibliographic Data

ID10064807
AuthorsKate Hill (0000-0002-2080-0262, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume62
Issue1
Pages49-76
Publication date2022-12-06
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/jbr.2022.172
OpenAlexW4311633856
LanguageEN
References cited9

The actions of Dr. Isabel Grant in creating the Highland Folk Museum in Scotland in the 1930s reflect how pleasure interacted with gendered identities to form modern feminine selves in the mid-twentieth century. In examining the subjectivity of Grant and her associates through material, textual, and visual sources from the museum, I interrogate both emotional and representational aspects of her development of living history. I suggest that, along with a sense of care and duty in such museums, women such as Grant were attracted by the opportunities of imaginative play and that they formed identities that were not reducible to either traditional or modern women's roles; instead, they were drawn to a form of historical engagement that allowed them to work outside such labels, sometimes as eccentrics. Their play was more serious and nonironic than were many other forms of interwar modern culture, and living history initiatives since then have built on this modern-but-not-modern appeal

Aesthetics · Appeal · Art · Duty · Epistemology · Pleasure · Political science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · History of Emotions Research · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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