Iconoclasm As Child's Play by Moshenska Joe;

Author:Moshenska, Joe; [Moshenska, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

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PLAY

ABOVE THE MAIN STAIRCASE of Audley End House, near Saffron Walden in Essex, hang imposing portraits of its former owners, projecting the image of smooth and glorious ancestral continuity that is de rigueur in English stately homes. Toward the back of the house, however, a humbler staircase contains a much less straightforward history. Not currently open to the public, and seemingly trodden fairly seldom by the staff or current occupants, its whitewashed walls are punctuated by a series of wooden figures around eighteen inches high (see, e.g., fig. 7), whose details are hard to discern in the dim light. There is nothing in situ to identify what these figures are or how they ended up in their unprepossessing location. The 1836 History of Audley End, written by its then occupant, Richard Lord Braybrooke, explains that one Dr. Gretton, vicar of Saffron Walden and nearby Littlebury at the end of the eighteenth century, placed a cedar altarpiece in the parish church in the latter village: “He also placed there several figures of apostles and saints, rudely carved in oak, which had belonged to Walden church; but the archdeacon of the diocese objecting to them, as savouring of idolatry, they were again removed, and converted into dolls by the children at Littlebury. Shortly after, Mr. Samuel Fiske obtaining possession of some of them, they were given by him to the author of these pages, and placed on the staircase at Audley End.”1

These actions took place some two centuries after the instances of iconoclasm as child’s play that I have previously discussed, suggesting a longue durée for this practice, even if the other instances that I have found were clustered in the sixteenth century. In the last chapter I cited parallels from different cultural contexts, including South American headhunting, but other later instances can be found: Anthony Ossa-Richardson observes that, following the debates that raged in the eighteenth century around the Holy Tear of Vendôme, once one of the most sacred relics in France, it was “shorn of its accoutrements . . . taken to the district office and kept by a bureaucrat named Morin, where his children had it for a plaything.”2 As with the shrunken heads given to children once the victory ritual was complete in South America, it is possible that this vignette suggests the genuine loss of the Holy Tear’s power, though of course we cannot know what Morin and his children made of this once-great relic lying about the place or whether it added a sense of transgressive thrill to their play. With the statues at Audley End the case is still less clear. The reason for the statues’ removal—“savouring of idolatry”—suggests that this dispute self-consciously continued the debates around the status of images that had flared up during the Reformation, though it is interesting to note Lord Braybrooke’s claim that they were “converted into dolls by the children at Littlebury.” The agency here is displaced onto the children themselves, which is quite different from the compulsion to

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