Queering the National Trust
Michael Hall reflects on the queer history of the National Trust.
John Singer Sargent, Octavia Hill, 1898. National Portrait Gallery, London.
A few years ago, I casually remarked to a senior curator at the National Trust that it was a misconception that the people who handed over their houses to the organisation were all indigent aristocrats, since just as many were aesthete bachelors who wanted to secure the long-term preservation of the interiors and collections they had created. My comments coincided with preparations for a nationwide programme of events, ‘Prejudice and Pride’, staged by the Trust to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. This led to the suggestion that I might write a ‘queer history’ of the National Trust, which is scheduled for publication next year.
The idea of a ‘queer history’ might seem odd to some, especially as ‘queer’ still has resonances as a term of abuse. Queer studies as understood today go back to the 1980s, with the emergence of queer theory from poststructuralism and in particular the arguments of Michel Foucault that gender and sexuality are social constructs. The best-known aspect of this critique is that it makes no sense to refer to a homosexual identity before the idea of homosexuality as innate sexual orientation was articulated, which occurred primarily in scientific and medical discourse at the end of the 19th century.
Less clearly understood is the consequence that the concept of heterosexuality is just as much socially constructed, and therefore the insistence on heterosexuality as a norm – so called ‘heteronormativity’ – needs to be challenged. That in essence is what queer theory does when it seeks to queer its subject: it focuses on people and behaviour that do not conform to normative ideas of gender and sexuality in order to destabilise those norms. Queer theory holds that sexuality is fluid and fragmented and that it may vary at different points in an individual’s life. It has been primarily associated with lesbian, gay and bisexual subjects, but its analytic framework includes, for example, cross-dressing, intersex bodies and identities, gender ambiguity and gender-confirmation surgery.
Queer theory originated in literary critical studies, but the concept of ‘queer’ was quickly taken up as an analytical tool by art historians, resulting in such books as James Saslow’s Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (1988). As far as architectural history was concerned, analysis based on queer theory has focused on the creation and use of space, as in Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (1997), and there is now a substantial bibliography of queer studies of domestic interiors – a volume of essays by Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (2014), is a good introduction to this theme. The relationship been queer patrons and architectural design has also been explored, for example in studies of the early Gothic revival. Matthew Reeve’s book on the subject, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole, is published this month.
Lord Snowdon, Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, 1961. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Applying a queer perspective to historical research seeks to bring queer subjects within our understanding of the past in a way that destabilises heteronormative paradigms. This is most easily explained in actual examples. One reason why the National Trust is a rewarding subject for a queer analysis is that it presents such an overwhelmingly heteronormative face, thanks to its emphasis on the preservation of a legacy based on family inheritance. Yet one of its founders, Octavia Hill, never married and lived in a loving relationship with a woman, Harriot Yorke. This opens up a different way of looking at the origins of the National Trust, since Hill’s life with Yorke embodies the values of a social network that encompassed many radical strands of thinking in British life at the end of the 19th century, one that challenged conventional ideas about the role of women in public life, relationships between the sexes and homosexuality. Hill worked, for example, with C.R. Ashbee, who hoped that the buildings acquired by the National Trust would form a setting for Arts and Crafts guild life, an important aspect of which was an idealistic vision of relationships between men that crossed class barriers. Taking a queer approach to the origins of the National Trust reveals that it was to an important extent the creation of people who, however privileged in terms of wealth or class, were also marginalised by their sexual orientation or chosen marital status.
That leads to questions about the easy assumption that the National Trust embodies uninflected heteronormativity. One way to dissolve that model is taken by curators when they focus on the issue of the stories they choose to tell about houses (and other properties – there is a queer history of gardens and landscapes, too) in order that no visitors to them need feel excluded. Some of these stories are well known: the fitting out of the interiors at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, on orders from William Bankes when he was in exile in Venice because of a homosexual offence, for example, or the creation of Sissinghurst, Kent, by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. I think it may be possible to go further. Queer studies have a lot to offer any analysis of the concept of ‘heritage’ and as I’ve worked on the subject, I have been led in unexpected directions. In particular, might it be possible to argue that an organisation that takes houses away from families and dissolves the ties of inheritance is in essence exploiting the appearance of heteronormativity to do something challengingly queer?
Michael Hall is the editor of The Burlington Magazine. In 2015 he was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for his book George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America (Yale University Press).
Further reading
Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory (1996) is a good introduction, although the subject has developed a lot in a quarter of a century, as Queer Theory Now by Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan (2019) reveals.
The National Trust’s 2017 ‘Prejudice and Pride’ programme produced an excellent published guide by Alison Oram and Matt Cook and good online resources at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/prejudice-and-pride-exploring-lgbtq-history
Similar programmes have been initiated by English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces.
For an example of the queer stories that National Trust houses can tell, see Nino Strachey’s Rooms of their Own (2018) on Eddie Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.
For a historically based study of the subject that first drew me to a queer analysis of the National Trust, I recommend Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, by John Potvin (2014), which has a good bibliography.
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