I'm in ur country house, seeing something nasty
Idly wafting through Twitter feed, came across this in a last year's article about ongoing foofarraw in the National Trust about the application of actual historical analysis to their properties as opposed to lovely myths: Country houses are easily mythologised as Britain’s soul, places in which tradition and inheritance stand firm against the anonymising tides of modernity. They are places of fantasy, which help us imagine a rooted relationship to the land that feels safe and secure. As Wright pointed out, this makes the project of preserving them necessarily defensive, and one that doesn’t sit well with the practice of actual historical research - which contextualises, explains and asks uncomfortable questions.
Which recalled to me a rant I did on A Bad Literary Take about The English Novel by someone who had (I fear) never actually read a word of the cited novelists but maybe seen a pretty televisualisation of one or other of their works (not, I think, Raven's, ahem): How one would love some modern-day Waugh or Mitford or Raven to write a novel in which the fount of all moral goodness flows from a country house in Gloucestershire and the lower orders are portrayed as shiftless and venal.
I think of the Radlett daughters regarding the sleazy paedo advances of 'Boy' Dugdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, as something of a fascinating break in the overwhelming tedium of their non-hunting days...
And then I thought of that longstanding if not exactly high literary genre, The Country House Murder Mystery.
Is this, we ask ourselves, the return of the repressed? the dark side emerging? the history of death and violence manifesting as a body in the library or even the drawing-room?
Is there, in fact, a rather strong counter-narrative suggesting the instability of the apparent rootedness and tradition of the country house?
(I will concede that the 'limited cast in enclosed space' also imposes formal generic constraints and can and has been reworked in other milieux.)
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