Autoethnography

Smith's (1987: 182–3) researching of the everyday world by 'constructing a view into the workings of social relations from the standpoint of particular women' understands people's activities as co-ordinated in temporally concerted sequences or courses of action:

Rather than an account of the division of labour as a fixed allocation of functions ... the concept of social relations analyses it as an ongoing concerting of courses of action in which what people do is already organized, as it takes up from what precedes, and projects its organization onto what follows.

Marriage and 'married life' obviously have institutionally organized parameters, but, in practice, courses of action are choreographed to produce a sufficient area of congruence between partners (which may necessitate the suppression by one or both of areas of difference). Behind a façade of unity, there is inevitably a 'his' marriage and a 'her' marriage (Barnard, 1972). When a marriage breaks down, what has been 'taken up' and what 'projected' is laid bare and becomes subject to competing claims of 'how it was'. Here, contested claims of ownership of items belonging to collections, made while 'dividing the spoils', render the organization of social, cultural and aesthetic relations more visible. This is a 'herstory' of the making, and keeping, of three collections.

It is also a story about how 'home' is constituted and represented. Domestic display is part of a growing literature bringing together the meanings of home, material culture, consumption (Hurdley, 2006), and identity (Ramji, 2006). Pink (2006) highlights the sensory nature of female domestic practices, while Gregson and Crewe (2003) refer to constituting domestic interiors through spatialized performances that regulate the gaze of others. For de Certeau et al., objects in the home are constitutive of a 'life narrative' that 'confesses' a great deal to an observer 'before the master of the house has said the slightest word'. They refer to practices through which dwellers reappropriate a space organized by 'techniques of sociocultural production' (1998: xi). The informed glance recognizes 'fragments from the "family saga", the trace of a production destined to give a certain image of the dweller, but also the involuntary confession of a more intimate way of living and dreaming' (1998: 145–6).

Among the techniques of sociocultural production historically informing the glance have been the marketing of models of the 'ideal home', for example through images prescribed by the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the realization by speculative builders of the dreams thus created (Chapman and Hockey, 1999). The new inhabitants of 1930s semi-detached suburbia in Britain wanted to show their family, neighbours and friends that they had 'arrived' in a new social world, through the conspicuous display of their affluence. As Veblen (1934: 30–31)

notes: 'Those neighbours in the community who fall short of [a] somewhat indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the esteem of their fellow men, and consequently ... in their own esteem' (quoted in Coser, 1977: 268). Nowadays, driven by a succession of TV 'property' and 'makeover' programmes that reinforce 'culture on display' (Dicks, 2003), the interiors as well exteriors of properties have become subject to the judgements of a 'generalized other' (Allan and Crow, 1989). Such judgements are likely to be internalized particularly by women, since gendered domestic practices in the majority of conventional heterosexual households have proved themselves to be remarkably 'culturally resilient' (Chapman, 2004: 5). Nevertheless, women's domestic production may remain invisible or undervalued. Miller observes how, within the sociology of consumption, efforts by male workers to increase income have been characterized as heroic opposition to employers, while women's practices as consumers in 'saving the household the same few pounds a week by the development of the requisite abilities' have been trivialized (1997b: xiii). A similar point has been made in relation to Bourdieu. Bourdieu (1999) remarks that women have precedence in matters of taste (and men in politics), because of their inherited cultural capital, and that within the home, the symbolic work that transforms the obligation to love, into a 'loving disposition', falls more particularly to women. But the Bourdieusian framework sees women as 'capital-bearing objects' that have value to the primary groups to which they belong, rather than as 'capital-accumulating subjects' with strategies of their own (Lovell, 2000). For Silva too, this flaw in the framework is connected not only to a disregard for the capital investment strategies of women, but also to 'a neglect of the emotional dimension in accounts of the "habitus"' (2000: 4). Drawing on feminist perspectives on the ethics of care, Silva comments that 'learning to care is not very different from learning to appreciate and display particular objects of art, sensations and words about artistic performances. The key difference is that care is a deeply devalued social activity' (2000: 5). In so far as women's collection and display of objects in the home is a way of 'doing home', in addition to other of its associated practices, I would contend that it is itself a form of caring. This is something of an antidote to the temptation to attend only to the communicative properties of items. As Warde argues, a practice approach 'does not give "culture" more than its due – the embodied, socially structured institutions which provide the parameters of the domains of action, and the location of social groups in social space, keep the social and the cultural in the frame together' (2005: 147).

At any given moment, in the contemporary Western world around a quarter to a third of adults are willing to identify themselves as collectors (Pearce, 1998). In the UK, specialist publications and television programmes have raised the profile of this trade, contributed to continuing expansion in the range of goods constituting 'collectables', and encouraged increased levels of trading – although the

participation represented in these publications remains almost exclusively white. My mother was a collector, although in common with many female collectors, she never described herself as such. The dominant template for qualifying as a collector has long rested on gendered definitions. The 'connoisseur' model of collecting (Goode, 2002) portrays it as an elite activity engaged in primarily by or on behalf of rich and powerful men, with an emphasis on the knowledge, expertise and taste demonstrated in the acquisition (Blom, 2002). The relationship between the collector and the objects collected is seen as evidence of the collector's status. The implicit demonstration of wealth and power may be glossed over by a portrayal of performing an altruistic duty on behalf of the nation, by creating and preserving its heritage for future generations. A classificatory system of some kind, which removes objects from use and brings them into a special relationship with each other as components of a pre-conceived whole has also been seen as crucial. For Durost (1932), the way in which each object is selected in relation to others is paramount. Belk (1995) also offers a definition in which objects (or experiences) must constitute a set, systematically and passionately acquired according to predetermined conceptual or perceptual boundaries. Objects must be removed from ordinary use, and the relationship between the collector and objects is seen as an intimate and irrational one.

Recently, definitions of more democratized contemporary forms of collecting have appeared, that categorize it as a special form of consumption in which acquisition is seen as the key process, although Belk (1995) and McCracken (1988) also refer to post-purchase 'possession rituals' (examining, holding, admiring, displaying), as the owner transforms purchases into part of the collection. Dant's (1999) definition echoes much of this. As with Belk et al.'s (1990) introduction of a temporal aspect, he identifies a 'completionist' model, by suggesting that the collection will at some point be finished, requiring no further acquisitions.

While most of these writers stress the relationship between the objects themselves, Pearce (1997) favours a broader definition, which includes an accumulation of objects whose sequence is largely a subjective creation of the collector. This marks a trend of the late 1980s, namely a focus on the essentially subjective element in collecting, reflected in Aristides' reference to the collector's desires: 'The pure collector's interest is not bounded by the intrinsic worth of the objects of his [sic] desire; whatever they cost, he must have them' (1998: 330). Again, a focus on completion, and on untrammeled acquisitioning may not encompass women's collecting. Analyses need to recognize that the acquisitioning may not form a continuous trajectory. In relation to paid work, for example, a linear, uninterrupted model of career which progresses in a systematic way towards a pre-conceived end has functioned to 'count women out'. Applying a 'gender lens' to collecting suggests that women's collecting, constrained as it can be by access both to uninterrupted periods of time and to disposable income, may follow a more interrupted path than men's, and may therefore be 'discounted' even by women themselves (Goode, 2002). So although aspects of her acquisitioning would qualify her as a collector, my mother never claimed the title.

She grew up in Derby, the site of a famous British porcelain factory. Her own parents had been in service, and had acquired an odd assortment of 'every-day' pieces of 'Royal Crown Derby' from their 'masters' (tablewares that were the same shape as highly decorative pieces, but which were plain white). These passed to my mother, and in line with her own aspirations for 'betterment', she began adding to them by 'collecting' more highly decorated examples, buying a piece at a time until she had a full tea-service. This was not used, but displayed in the china cabinet, along with cheap 'ornaments' my sisters and I bought her as gifts when we were children. She told us there would be a 'half tea-service' (six cups, saucers and plates, teapot, sugar basin and cream jug) for each of us when she died, and she built up her collection accordingly. It complied with many of the required elements described earlier: being systematically acquired over time; being removed from use; the elements having a special relationship with each other as parts of a 'set'; her having an intimate relationship with them; and there coming a point when the collections were complete. For other women, what ends up as a collection often starts as a serendipitous acquisition of two similar objects which have some kind of symbolic meaning for them, and then grows, as they happen upon another 'piece', and as friends and relatives see an ideal solution to the 'problem' of gift-giving. It is not uncommon for acquisitions via gifting to continue long after the 'collector' has lost interest in them, or has moved on to collecting something else – on occasion prompting relegation to a cupboard of 'hideous' additions to the collection, only to be displayed when the giver visits (Goode, 2002).

What became my own first collection, of watercolour paintings, began as an outcome of a friendship with the artist, Howard Morgan. As an undergraduate, I shared a house with Fine Arts students. I particularly liked Howard's work, and he gave me the odd drawing I'd admired, as well as a pastel drawing of the interior of Newcastle upon Tyne's cathedral (which I subsequently framed and hung, in our first marital home). Shortly after I married, my husband bought me two of Howard's watercolours: one of Trieste, whence he had written to me while travelling, and one of Newcastle, picturing the city's famous yellow buses. I treasured all of these pictures, not only for their style and composition, but for the memories they evoked, of a time, of place, and of valued friendship.

On my mother's death, I duly inherited my half tea-service, and displayed it on my kitchen shelves rather than in a cabinet. The delicate floral porcelain did not 'fit' with the 'style' we were seeking to create in the early years of our marriage/home-making, epitomized in our own minds by our red Habitat teapot. Nevertheless, for me, a different but equally important aesthetic was at play in relation to the porcelain: it was to do with the traditional class and gender relations that formed part of my own biography, rather than the 'democratization of style' represented by Habitat's 'affordable design'.

The 'story' of my mother's porcelain was never referred to explicitly in class terms, but it certainly embodied some of the formulations Skeggs (2004) identifies as academic re-workings of class, namely issues of mobility and gender. In inheriting it, I was also inheriting a 'classed' identity. For my mother, the origins of her mother's acquisition of the porcelain signalled a class identity which 'knew its place'; collecting and owning more of it in her own right, and bequeathing it to the next generation of women, signalled her ability to 'rise above' that place. For some years, my sister used her half tea-service, performing 'gentility' by demonstrating the ability to use expensive wares without concern for potential breakages. Along with other women we knew, she and I also maintained that tea actually tasted better drunk from china cups (as opposed to mugs). I think my displaying my tea-service, not in a 'dedicated' china cabinet but on kitchen shelves, was an act aimed at recognizing its inherited class values but making redundant its power to 'place' me. Rather than continuing her collection of porcelain, therefore, I began my own collection of ceramics and studio pottery, which acted for me as 'markers' of distinction, of which more later.

There was very little else for my mother to bequeath, apart from an insurance policy on my life, to which she had contributed for years. It had 'matured' and I 'inherited' £300. I wanted to spend this on some thing that I could keep, look at, and think of as her gift to me. I visited Howard in his London studio, where he was now making a living as a 'society' portrait painter, with a sideline in landscapes. The amount I had afforded me three large pictures from a cabinet of watercolours. I chose scenes of farm buildings in his native Wales, the Thames at Chiswick and a road in Brittany on the basis of their 'painterly' qualities, and their subjects, which once again held symbolic meaning for me – partly to do with him, and partly to do with the kind of 'lifestyle' they made reference to, to which I aspired at that time. We had been friends for years, but to some extent he remained a puzzle to me. The paintings gave clues. His roots in Wales were captured in the dark colours of the farming landscape; the Chiswick painting appealed for the wonderful way the water was portrayed, but also because it represented, for me, the metropolitan life he was now living, which I glimpsed on the couple of occasions he treated me to lunch at the Chelsea Arts club; and the French scene was so 'authentic' that a French visitor who came to stay recognized it immediately as Brittany. It also spoke to me of the lifestyle my husband and I were now living, which, in common with most of our friends at that time, included holidaying in France.

In their different ways, the paintings represented the 'self' I wanted to see myself as, or as becoming – living in suburbia, perhaps, but with a 'sophisticated' reason to visit the metropolis; counting an increasingly 'famous' artist among my friends; lunching at the Chelsea Arts club and pretending not to be excited about it; holidaying with our children in French gites. Admittedly, it was a 'self' my mother, the 'bestower' of the 'gifts' that demonstrated this lifestyle, would have found alien, worried as she had been as soon as I left for university, that she would 'lose' me, (this was the catch-22 of her aspirational self – she wanted her

children to do well – but not too well). But I still felt pleasure when I thought of them as gifts from her, partly perhaps because I was conscious of my collecting serving the same function as hers had for her, as an embodiment of aspiration, and as a representation not so much of the ‘respectability’ traditionally so important to working class families (Walker et al., 2001), but of the ‘distinction’ and ‘taste’ of the middle classes to which I had gained membership.

I also enjoyed, as a by-product, the admiration the pictures attracted from visitors. They were ‘conversation pieces’ as many collected items are. Although this was not their primary purpose, displaying them allowed me to display my self, as well, as ‘the kind of person’ who knew the artist. I guess I hoped some of Howard’s ‘cachet’ would rub off on me. Later still, I took a friend who had admired the paintings to his studio, and we each bought a watercolour, still at a special rate for friends. I chose a sketch for a bigger painting in oils I had seen in one of his exhibitions (‘See – I am the sort of person who gets invitations to private viewings!’), entitled Alexander’s Ball. He and I had unknowingly chosen the same name for our first-born sons; I had had a conversation with his wife shortly afterwards, about the overwhelming tide of love we had each experienced, as new mothers, towards our babies. This charming picture of their garden, with parasol and brightly-coloured ball left on the grass, was a symbol of that for me.

The paintings I had acquired, then, were all invested with a hefty cargo of symbolic meanings, over and above their aesthetic qualities. As it turned out, the sketch for Alexander’s Ball completed my ‘collection’ of Howard’s paintings, since shortly afterwards his work was priced out of my range completely. In later years when I got invitations to his exhibitions, and mingled with ‘VIPs’, he was being compared to John Singer Sargent, had undertaken royal commissions, and had several works in the National Portrait Gallery. In the early 1990s, the exhibition price for watercolours for which I had paid £100, was £5–6000 each.

As my children grew up, I gradually reclaimed ‘personal’ time. When the younger one started school, I went from part-time to full-time working. With more disposable income I started another, more affordable collection, of inkwells. I think this choice was to do with imbuing them with an almost talismanic power to enable me to write. I had started going to auctions as an undergraduate, in order to furnish my room in the shared house, and now I began to frequent them again. At the same time, my sister and I began going to antiques fairs. As well as being an enjoyable hobby in its own right (the outing, the deployment of growing expertise, the bargain-hunting, the tea-and-cake), there was a temporal aspect (Fairhurst, 2000): it became a way of spending time at weekends, ameliorating a situation in which it was becoming increasingly difficult for my husband and I to spend time together comfortably. For his part, he spent more time at the gym, and began to amass a collection of his own, of CDs.

Eventually, my sister and I dabbled in trading. We bought items we thought might appeal to people like us – people looking to furnish their homes, at a modest price, with interesting functional and/or decorative objects – sourcing our ‘stock’ at ‘car-boot’ (‘garage’/‘bricolage’) sales, auctions, village-hall fairs, and charity shops. Some of our buyers were no doubt those identified by Samuel, part of the surge of interest in ‘retrochie’ in 1960s Britain, which, in its flea-market and car-boot aspects ‘helped to form Britain into a nation of collectors’ (1994: xxxvii). We moved from home-based sales to trading at antiques fairs. But we both had demanding full-time jobs, and as our energy ran out, we reverted to being consumers. At the same time, my older son began taking an interest in ‘things’ for a place of his own. I’d bought him one or two items from a ‘retro’ shop he frequented (a Bush radio, a robot, coloured glassware), and he went on to buy several pieces of ‘Whitefriars’ glass on eBay, as well as returning the compliment by buying me a Susie Cooper ‘trio’ (matching cup, saucer and tea plate). This went on display at home too.

As a result of my foray into trading, I discovered that a neighbour was a collector. He was delighted to find someone who shared this interest/activity, and would knock on our door to show me his latest purchase. I had lost interest in acquiring more inkwells, and had moved on to ceramics. Despite the fact that he knew far more than me about ceramics, my neighbour would want to know whether I approved his latest ‘find’, whether I liked it, would have bought it myself, thought he had paid a reasonable price/got a bargain etc. We each constructed for and reflected in the other not only an ‘aesthetic’ self, but a canny ‘business’ self. He was also the only man I’d ever met who confessed to ‘smuggling’ purchases into the house and hiding them, to bring them out later and claim to his spouse that he’d bought them ‘ages ago’, and couldn’t remember how much he had paid, but certainly not much.

He introduced me to ceramics by Ruskin and Keith Murray, to Royal Lancastrian ware, early Poole and studio pottery, Arts and Crafts furniture and Murrle Bennett jewellery. He taught me informally about the designers and producers of these wares, their histories, production methods, different glazes, occasionally lending me books on these subjects. These items harked back to a different set of values from the Derby porcelain, a different aesthetic – one of craft, design, lustrous colours. As for many collectors, the learning was as much a source of pleasure as the acquisitioning and the ‘looking at.’ Knowledge of producers and production methods enhanced my appreciation of the objects as artefacts. Looking for examples of what I was learning about began to structure my visits to antiques fairs. Gregson and Crewe (2003) suggest that defining an initial ‘find’ as the beginning of a collection is a means of regulating purchases in second-hand arenas, a basis for a ritual of participation. This can be hard work, involving what Willis describes as ‘physical and symbolic mobility, and the myriad uncertainties of selection’ as well as the ‘appropriation of provided symbolic meanings for the development of personal meanings in everyday life, by creatively combining and recombining different items to produce an altered code for expressing meanings to oneself and others’ (1998: 66–7). In second-hand arenas,

it also involves negotiating the 'right' price. I found and acquired a number of pieces I thought beautiful in form and colour, tactile pieces, with bulbous shapes that compel cupping your hands around them. But after using the 'profits' from my earlier trading (false profit, if I costed in sourcing, travelling, setting up/packing away) to acquire several vases, I realized that I could not possibly afford to build up a 'collection' of any of them.

My marriage was still in decline, and I remembered a story a collector had told me (Goode, forthcoming) about having to sell his precious collection of Japanese swords to pay divorce lawyers' bills. I began to see my latest acquisitions, few as they were, as a potential investment for my own 'rainy day'. I wanted to display and enjoy them, but they got secreted away, and I confined myself to the more affordable (and therefore 'displayable') examples of Poole pottery. Still 'keeping up appearances', my husband and I continued to buy birthday and Christmas gifts for each other, and my embryonic 'public' collection of Poole meant that he could easily fulfil the continuing gift-giving obligations we imposed on ourselves. His gifts were all from the brightly-coloured 'Delphis' range from the 1960s and 1970s.

By the time divorce proceedings started, quite a collection of this pottery was on display around the house. In relation to the pieces I had bought, I could have explained why I had chosen each one – for colour, shape, era, relationship

to existing items, etc. I could remember where I had bought them, the cost, the fun of negotiating a price. And I enjoyed combining them with other items, both old and new, to create a distinctive 'look', rearranging them when new items were added, or just to stimulate anew my 'looking at them', their material qualities giving me lasting pleasure. And my husband now had a substantial collection of CDs.

Divorce rates in England and Wales have been growing since the post-war period, due to an increase in female relative wages, the changing marriage rate, the introduction of legal aid, and the move to no-fault divorce (Binnner and Dnes, 2001). Office for National Statistics figures show that UK rates have been among the highest in Europe since the 1970s, peaking in 2002, before falling by 8 percent in 2005. In the majority of cases (69%) women were petitioners. In 2005, rates fell in every age group apart from women aged 60 and over, where they rose by 2 percent. Divorce for the 60-plus age group has been on the increase since 1998.

My own experience is in line with these trends, in which women initiate divorce, and increasingly at a later stage in the life course. At the time of our divorce proceedings, our children were grown-up and 'launched'. A new scheme, 'collaborative law', was being piloted in England. An idea imported from the USA, spouses have a solicitor each, and all negotiations are conducted, and decisions made, exclusively in a series of four-way meetings. The scheme potentially offers a less acrimonious and cheaper route to settlement without recourse to the courts. My husband agreed to this route, and after some negotiation, he and I managed reasonably amicably to reach agreement on some of the 'big' decisions, for example selling the marital home, if not on how the equity from it, and our occupational pensions, should be divided. The allocation of most of the house contents was also achieved in a way we felt reasonably fair. But the collections caused trouble.

My husband's starting point was that everything in the house was jointly owned and should therefore be split between us – including my mother's teaset; the paintings bought with her legacy and those given as gifts; all the Poole pottery; and the Susie Cooper trio. He understood, he said, how I felt about these items, but added that he did not 'make the rules'. I doubted that he did understand the complex web of feelings I was experiencing in relation to these objects, their meanings for me, and the knowledge, time, and taste that had gone into their choosing, acquisition and display. I thought the law would see things differently, at least as far as 'inheritance' and gifts were concerned. But my solicitor explained that the law is ambiguous here: we should come to an agreement ourselves, as there was nothing judges hated more than being brought into wrangles over household possessions. If forced to do so, the judge would rule that contested items be sold off and the money divided.

The paintings seemed to be the biggest sticking point. I guessed that my husband thought they were much more valuable in monetary terms than I believed them to be, basing his calculations on their replacement value, which I had sought from Howard some years previously for insurance purposes. I was sure that because they were not much more than 'sketches', and because the artist was still alive and prolific, there would be no 'secondary market' for his work. Nevertheless, I agreed to get them valued by a fine arts auctioneer. He confirmed my assessment, much to my husband's disgust. Once an agreement on the division of the equity in the house had been arrived at, which was more to my husband's satisfaction than mine, he felt able to be 'magnanimous' about my keeping Howard's paintings, my mother's tea-set, the Susie Cooper trio, and most of the Poole. He wanted some Poole bowls and vases so that his house did not 'look too bare' and, most surprisingly, since he had never been wont to buy them, so that he would have 'something to put flowers in'. There was a surfeit of the 'Delphis' range in the Poole collection, and I offered some of these, which he accepted. He also wanted a large plain vase from the 1950s, which I was reluctant to part with since, although I had not paid much for it, I valued it because I had never seen another like it. There was a large glass vase, given me some years before, as a leaving present by work colleagues. While I valued it as their 'thank you' to me, and used it when I bought long-stemmed flowers, it was more replaceable than the 1950s vase. I offered it instead and he accepted.

There were other pictures, of very little monetary value, to be divided – reproductions, book illustrations, pictures from magazines, for which I had bought cheap mounts and frames. On what basis would these be divided? I had chosen them all and still liked them, but they too would be relatively easy to replace, so I offered him first choice. Again, he chose 'the brightly-coloured ones'. Despite the fact that we were engaged in a process that was painful for both of us, I found the different rationales being mobilized fascinating. Collected items moved in and out of categories as we negotiated their ownership. As for the shelves of CDs, my husband was taken aback when I brought these into the equation. Surely I would not want any of them? I would not like most of them, he asserted. It had not occurred to him that I would like them very much if I adopted his approach, and reduced them to their monetary value. Even selling them second-hand at a fraction of their original cost would bring in a sizeable amount. In fact, I had never considered them as anything but his, but now I adopted his 'rules' and traded 'my' share of them for something else.

Jackie Goode has been an academic researcher for the last 15 years, working on a variety of social science projects in: politics (gender issues in the parliamentary selection process for Westminster); sociology (the sociology of food and eating), social policy (the intra-household distribution of income within families in receipt of social security benefits), health (empowerment or dependency in NHS Direct); and higher education (gender issues in higher education, and 'the student experience'). Her research in the area of second-hand goods and collecting is a personal interest which she pursues in her own time. She is currently located in the Institute for Research into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at the University of Nottingham.

Address: University of Nottingham, Dearing Building, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, NG8 1BB.

E-mail: jackie.goode@nottingham.ac.uk