Exhibit Paper

Ben Kaplow

12-17-2015

Hist. 264

Final Paper

The Looming Spinning Wheel

           The idea of an heirloom is curious. The first thing that comes to one’s mind is that of a device for memory—and this is an idea which is backed by some theory—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for example, discusses how a spoon, “accumulate[s] meaning and value by sheer dint of [its] constancy in life, [becoming]… stimuli for reminiscence”[1]. In other words, as a family item, it constitutes an heirloom as an inherited object of use for facilitating the memory of a past relative. There is one main issue that I take with her argument, that being that she does not touch on the fact than an heirloom seems to constitute more than simply memory; it constitutes identity. A memento, or picture of relative, does not bear the weight of an heirloom—it must be passed down, and as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explained, but never discussed in any detail, it is an object of use. Think of a classic family heirloom—silverware, jewelry, other small objects of use—they rarely attempt to display an individual, a person, a specific memory and they always have a use attached to them. They are, rather, an item of the abstract familial. In fact, the etymology of the word ‘heirloom’ even lends some credibility to this idea—it is derived from the two words ‘heir’ and ‘loom,’ heir historically referring to one who succeeds another in a role or position, more modernly referring specifically to family and heredity. The word ‘loom’ refers to a tool—we can see the modern continuation of this word in the ‘loom’ being a device for weaving.[2] What makes an heirloom, is that it is connected to an ancestral identity, a lineage, and is a tool that helps constitute their lives, holding at leas the potential to do so in ours.[3]

            In fact, what is interesting is that in the later 19^th century an and early 20^th century, we see one object in specific become the symbol of an heirloom, the spinning wheel. It experienced a surge in its representation in homes, and more so, in the image of a home, in how one’s dwelling will be represented. In light of both desiring a more concrete idea of the heirloom and a curiosity in regards to this sudden popularity, my work, both in this paper and in the attached exhibit will be to examine this imagery and its implications. I believe that through this examination I will be able to prove two major points—one, that the heirloom is not an object of memory, but of identity. Secondly, I will postulate why I believe the spinning wheel became popular when it did, that rather than being a harmless family memento, it came to be a domestic representation of nationalism, counter-mechanization, and racial consciousness that permeated America during that era.

            As the second half of the 19^th century progressed, the mechanization of cloth and weaving became more and more prevalent. This increase of products of capitalist production and decrease from those of the home, was not one that occurred only in textiles, but as well as in many other industries. The spinning wheel was still used, and we can presume more likely so in rural communities of the United States, those with a more agrarian way of life without easy access to factory goods. But even then, it would be safe to assume that they, even then, had the character of being an older tool, of something with a vintage character. It was being actively superseded by the behemoth of modern technology. In this situation, the image of the spinning wheel and its cultural signification could take either the role of the pure obsolete, the past that has been transcended, or become vintage and somehow retain signification in its old age.

            I believe that in viewing these images in the exhibition and looking at the spinning wheel in its physical and worldly existence, we can come to something of an idea of its nature as an object and how its nature became what it is. To begin, we should closely examine the one foreign picture from the exhibit, “At the spinning wheel ‘a home scene typical of Old Ireland’, Achill Island”. This photograph from 1903 shows an Irish family outside of what appears to be their rural and traditional house. They wear conservative clothing and are surrounded by the tools of domestic and manual-labor, their roof thatched rather than a more modern material, and have the appearance of being sedentary, of having lived in this house. In fact, the caption defining this half of a stereoscopic image, ‘Old Ireland’ leaves us with the impression that this is a preserved locale, a place the traditional mode of existence still occurs. Although it is not present by only looking at this photograph, a majority of the photographs I have found feature the elderly. This theme of the old, of the elderly, of the vintage, all feature strongly in these exhibit pieces. In regards to this photograph of the Irish family, we can see that as a stereoscopic image, meant for the distribution of the image of ‘traditional Ireland,’ the centerpiece of the spinning was quite intentional. It appears to be a symbol of the homestead, just as much in Ireland as it would have been in either colonial or turn-of-the-century America. It paradoxically seems to exist as a symbol of home, of individual locality a multitude of diverse places across the world. 

            Continuing along the path of establishing it as a traditional item, we can see in many of the pictures presented, along with the many of the features of domesticity, the objects of the household, along with a vast majority of women handling the wheels. However, there is only one feature I will concentrate on, that being its location. In the vast majority of photographs, the spinning wheel is in one of two places: the porch—as in either ‘Old Ireland’ or in the two pictures of the Faust family in Tennessee—or in front of the hearth, a location displayed in ‘Olden Times,’ ‘A Puritan Hearthstone’ or many most of the other photographs. I believe there is good reason for putting it on the porch, a place which would have been an active workplace in many of the locales where they were still in use—in the summer it may have provided a cooler place to work as well as a place from which to survey and manage many of the outside domestic tasks. However, in looking at it from a more symbolic and interpretative angle, the porch is situated around the door, the entrance of the house, and so by placing the spinning wheel in front of, it links the wheel to the domesticity and familial nature of the house in its entirety. It acts not as a guardian, but as a signifier of the space’s nature, of what one is entering or viewing. It is linked to the means of survival and a family’s existence.

            As relevant as I believe that imagery is, the image of the hearth is much more prevalent and much more telling. From ancient times, the eternal flame, the home’s hearth has been conceived of the center of a household, of the center of the lineage of individuals who call it home. The hearth holds a certain permanence, a place of identity for the individuals who gather around it. The spinning wheel, by being placed at these points, is not linked with any particular image of domesticity or the home, not with any object, but with the essence of the home, with the family. The spinning wheel’s place at the hearth links it not just as a temporary piece, but as possessing at least some aspect of the fire’s permanence. The spinning wheel must have been conceived of as in some way similar.

            We can see that this permanent character is continued, not just in its linking to the family, but in how the pictures place individuals around the wheel. As suggested earlier, many of the individuals using the spinning wheels are elderly, certainly providing a past connection for the spinning wheel, but even more so is the exceedingly traditional, even colonial style garb. The spinning wheel, as with the hearth, becomes a family place in an atemporal sense of permanence[4]—as an heirloom, we can easily connect this to its theoretical underpinnings and give it a better set of definitions. What defines the importance of the spinning wheel is its existence as a living object that is not tied to any particular individual or generation, regardless of its origination. The spinning wheel is so important because, as an heirloom, it defies a simple idea of memory. A memorial object, as opposed to an heirloom, is something I believe we can clearly link to an idea that Susan Stewart discusses of the souvenir. The souvenir authenticates a past experience, demonstrating something special that has occurred. A picture of a dead relative, although very different in content and emotional value, exists with a similar structure. It helps to reify in the mind something of the past. The heirloom is not what Kirshenblatt-Gimblet would term “synthetic memory,”[5] but is passed down through lineage and is constituted by this movement. Once it has reached a certain point, one does not hold any specific memory of an individual past one’s immediate family. To make this contention of mine clearer, let use think of a spinning wheel that one’s family has owned for five generations. Inheriting it, one might have a memory of one’s mother or grandmother spinning with it, but not past that. The remaining three or four generations do not hold any personal memory, yet I believe that this is where the heirloom is capable of coming into being—it can act almost as a surrogate for memory-based identity, providing instead identity that is constituted through a biography, as Kopytoff might suggest[6].  

            When one looks at an antique object, especially one constituted through vintage, lineage, and active use, one can easily come to view the object as having some sort of life on its own, some sense of agency in its distinct story. What is unique about the family heirloom’s biography is that is intimately tied in with another biography, that of the family it is associated with. Although any object is historical in the social-scientific sense in its relation to human interaction, but it is rare that this object can extract itself from being a sink of human action, a receptacle for it. The heirloom mirrors a human history, in some sense inheriting much of the power, memory, and agency from its human progenitors.

            This sounds all and well, but better yet, it is quite possible to demonstrate it. The exhibit includes selections from the text The Spinning Wheel, Our Heirloom. A Soliloquy. Addressing the ancestral spinning wheel that the narrator and her daughter have received, she proclaims: “Withal, I do recall ‘pride of ancestry,’ with which you were, and are imbued; a character of which all good Holland Dutch scions are justly proud.”[7] What is interesting to note is that although the narrator is speaking to the spinning wheel, there is much in this quote, and throughout the text as a whole, that can have a quite ambiguous object. The “pride of ancestry” that comes with the spinning wheel is indeed ambiguous in that the ancestry is not of any ‘spinning wheel’ but of humans. The ancestors are people, their “pride of ancestry,” being one of their heritage, not some mechanical feature. The biography of the spinning wheel undergoes the opposite of creating exchange value—the object is valuable not because of its commensurability with the goods of others, not valued as tradable. 

            The value of the heirloom is in its human heritage, the personal family, but although it lacks trade-commensurability and exchange-value relative to its use-value as heirloom, that does not mean that this value is not socially constructed. The heirloom is not simply a piece of family identity, a personal totem, but rather something displayed, something we can see in all of the photographs, in the expository text laying open all the family’s personal experience, its colonial rooting. This might be the best place in our discussion to transition to our other main question of the paper: why did the spinning become popular when it did? Although everything we have thus far discussed can be said of before the later 19^th century, we still need to address what made the increase occur. Using what we have thus far determined about heirlooms in general, and the spinning wheel, I believe it is a simple matter to reach a conclusion. But first we must answer another question which I posed earlier: the paradox the both world-universality of the spinning wheel and the fact that it comes to represent an individual lineage.

            In a certain sense, this paradox is not problematic when ones considers immigration and movements of peoples. When the paradox is moved from the theoretical to the concrete, the problems of this paradox disappear we discover the rather dark reason of its revival. In immigration, one could potentially have multiple groups claiming individuality, yet the physicality of the spinning wheel itself is what solves this problem. It is a large and bulky object that someone moving from another country to another, especially under duress, will unlikely be able to bring with them. In looking at the latter half of the 19^th century, there was an increase in immigration to the United States, especially from Europe, but almost more important than the actual nature of immigration is the rising consciousness of ethnicity and race in America. We can see that at the turn of the century, the imperialist attitude of the United State was in full swing and the science of anthropology as it related to anthropometric and racial characterization and comparison was created as a successful field.

            Alongside the racial and ethnic conscious, the rise in production, of mechanization provided an affront to the old ways of life. The spinning wheel’s function as pure utility was fading in comparison to the weaving machines in factories. The quaint ideal of the old family dynamic seems to be enshrined in response to, at least in part, this mechanical shift. They emphasize an older way of life, free from the cold mechanization and the alien other. A way to characterize this shift in relations is in using Susan Stewart’s concept of the gigantic.[8] As industrialization and urban life became more the status quo, the concept of the giant changed from nature to that of the impersonal, modern city. In relation to this, the idea of humanity, idealized humanity as miniature to the gigantic had to change as well. The spinning wheel, once a symbol of humanity’s physical domination of nature and its physical utility rather than identity-constituting nature, turned to represent humanity in its miniature relation to the impersonal gigantic. The spinning wheel came to represent an alternative way of defining humanity, as an identity, not a relation. Instead of representing domination of nature, it represents a superiority of the individual group, the family or lineage, over an abstract ‘other,’ a world of people and exchange that are not of the group.

            This is a concept very easily connectable to the racial consciousness discussed above. All of these photographs can be read, in their conservative dress, their rustic and old-fashioned houses, that they are appeals to an ideal of colonial lineage, to demonstrating that unlike the immigrant, the other, the family has an authenticity of American familial relics. The more urban immigrant, or even rural immigrant, cannot have a family heirloom of such bulk in the United States—the heirloom’s popularity arose as a result of domestic imperial thought turned to exhibition, to finding a common object that could tie itself as strongly as possible into the American ancestral pride. It symbolizes a scared American home that felt at siege, an attempt to return to solid roots, at least in thought.