 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Fig. 7. Jewelry box (1829). Photo by author. Courtesy of the Winterthur Museum.
Preserved Feeling
While Rip Van Winkle's playful life in the Catskills offers him an escape from domesticity, Watson's retreat from the masculine labor of founding countries into playful contemplation of the past relies on the miniaturized domestic space of the box for protection from change and decay. This connection between history as child's play and the home as a space that encloses emotional relationships and separates women from wage labor helps to explain why Watson's box most resembles contemporary sewing and jewelry boxes, protective cases that are strongly associated with sentiment and domesticity (fig. 7). The jewelry box in this image has paw-shaped feet very similar to those of Watson's box. Its gilt, stencil decorations of cornucopias, eagles' heads, and foliage go much further in exemplifying the exuberant colors and patterns typical of the fancy style. Like Watson's box, the jewelry box is labeled. On the back panel, a painted inscription reads, "M. A. Torris. / Oh years have flown since first we met, / And sorrows have been mine. / I've felt when to thy bosom pressed, / That greater bliss was mine. / New York January 1st 1829." These conventional verses indicate that this box is almost certainly a New Year's gift marking either a friendship or a romantic relationship. Watson's relic box takes this idea of making an ornamental box symbolize a private, emotional relationship with a contemporary and turns it into a medium for cementing and protecting a relationship with dead forefathers and dead ways of daily life. The similarity between Watson's box and this contemporary jewelry box appropriates sentimental domesticity for the work of preservation. The relics of the past can be protected and preserved—"to thy bosom pressed"—to create emotional ties that transcend time and space just as the jewelry box symbolically encloses and preserves the feeling between giver and receiver. But relics, relic boxes, and jewelry boxes are also objects that can be bought and sold. The feelings that they represent are, to some extent, the result of having these new kinds of fancy goods to exchange in order to consume preserved feelings.
