Sets and Sensibility: Tea Service and the Excavation of Ideology and Desire

Summary

In the nineteenth century, the growth of consumer culture altered the ways in which people saw themselves and the intersection of identities constructed through material culture. This paper examines a matching tea cup and saucer recovered from the Spring House, a former commercial farmstead and hotel located in southeastern Monroe County, New York. The tea set is decorated with transferprint depictions of ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity,’ the Three Virtues forming the basis of Christianity, and a popular motif in Victorian America. The cup and saucer show no signs of utensil ware, suggesting that the set was curated and displayed by its owners. The set represents the confluence of overarching social networks and movements and their influence on individual practice. This paper considers how the tea set, recovered from a rural context, was a dynamic social agent that was both a reflection of societal structures and also a discursive, disciplining medium of genteel desire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Revelatory Power of an Artifact in Context   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-14,04