THE AMERICAN WOMAN’S HOME SWEET HOME: RECENTERING AND COMMODIFYING THE HEARTH IN NATIONAL IDEOLOGY [2023]
[THRESHOLDS 51: HEAT; DOWNLOAD THE ARTICLE HERE]
Although the phrase “home, sweet home,” dates to an “old tradition” at Winchester College in England, it was John Howard Payne’s 1823 reinterpretation that became a cornerstone of Anglo-American culture. From subsequent popular recordings by John Yorke AtLee, Harry Macdonough, Richard Jose, Alma Gluck, Alice Nielsen, and Elsie Baker to the scores of The Wizard of Oz and The King and I, the song’s sentimental lyrics have recentered the public imagination around American exceptionalism and the American dream during periods of existential crisis and moral panic. Similarly, although the saltbox house dates to English colonization, it was a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretations that became models for the American family home. Be it a functional open fire or a decorative compliment to steam heating, the subtype’s central hearth has reoriented veterans, women, and immigrants around Puritan values during times of political conflict and economic uncertainty. This paper traces, first, how the saltbox house at 14 James Lane, with its seventeenth-century central hearth, became synonymous with John Howard Payne’s Home Sweet Home, and, second, how John Howard Payne’s supposed Home Sweet Home, with the help of twentieth-century club women, became synonymous with the National Better Home. It argues that the capacity for one cottage to advance simultaneously religious and nationalist, collectivist and individualist, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary politics, reveals the dependence of architecture upon active participants to transform a provincial object into an American icon.