The saintly women shown in the pictures on display, fervently scrubbing the stone floors of merchants’ houses, are taking part in a moral economy in which religiosity, hygiene, and morality are bound up together at every turn. I wondered whether the women of Dutch painting are scrubbing those floors to remove dirt, or whether the dirt appears to keep them scrubbing. Probably both; dirt maintains proper places – the woman in the house, keeping busy – as much as it transgresses them. Tips and tricks for the dutiful housewife are contained in manuals of oeconomia , which are on prominent display in the exhibition.The term goes back to ancient Greece, when oeconomia referred to the management of the home. For Aristotle, oceconomia cannot be a science. It is instead stories of ethical examples and small sets of rules suited to particular contexts: a sort of Practical Housekeeping magazine with overtly moral overtones.There is a fantastic demonstration of the convergence of the moral and the practical in a devotional illustration from 1600 by the Flemish engraver Anthonie Wierix: four cherubim angels are intently scrubbing the believer’s heart with mops, while Christ is cleaning out the demons. 2 Economics and morality gradually appear to part company over the next four hundred years.The former is transformed from the study of the management of the home to the study of resource allocation.The economy is no longer a moral one. For even if the most fervent capitalists see a free market as the best way for humans to realise happiness on earth, each individual act – buying a car, trading on the futures market – no longer holds the same explicit promise of a moral balm that was offered to the housewives of Delft, who scrubbed stone floors as if their hearts depended on it. Necessity replaced morality as a justification in economics. Something similar happened to the way we deal with dirt. Over the last three hundred years, an injunction replaced the explicitly moral imperative to be clean. As dirt became linked with disease, cleanliness became about medical necessity, established as objective scientific fact.
This is not to say morality is scrubbed out. Dirt, as a transgression, always creates outrage. But as cleanliness becomes divorced from moral codes, and is instead justified by the apparent obviousness of scientific truth, the moral economy of dirt becomes as hidden as Anthony van Leewenhoek’s ‘little animals’ – the microbes and bacteria that first became visible under the Dutchman’s seventeenth century microscope. The American kitchen, which surely deserved a room at the exhibition, is a picture postcard of suppressed moralism.Today, as mops are replaced by disposable floor-cleaners, not only is the dirt made to disappear, but even the device that removes the dirt is discarded. From the compulsive teeth cleaning of American adolescents, to plastic surgery and the soul-saving appeal of detergent commercials, everything conspires to promise you a world in which dirt and blemishes are forever banished from your soul. I think I prefer the dour Dutch Calvinists, with whom at least one could argue about the relationship between the moral and the sanitary: an argument that today in America is swept away by claims of scientific truth. 3 As I left the exhibition’s first room, full of thoughts about economies, moral and otherwise, I had high hopes for the rest of the exhibition; I imagined rooms of toothbrushes, the advertising of cleaning products through the ages, and photographs of the actual cleaners at the Wellcome Collection, paid a pittance to remove the dust from around antique seventeenth century Dutch brooms. It was not to be.The second room contains the well-known story of the triumph over cholera in Victorian London, and the defeat of miasmatic notions of disease transmission. In the exhibition’s display of John Snow’s beautiful ghost map of cholera, the moral economy vanishes, to be replaced by the triumphant march of medicine and hygiene, arm in arm, winning battle after battle in our forever war against death. The visitor then comes to a room describing the reconstruction of Victorian London, and, perhaps, the exhibition’s greatest claim to contemporary relevance. In the press release, it is written that,‘We live in unmistakably filthy times. For the
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Charts showing the temperature and mortality of London for every week of 11 years (1840 - 1850). Report on the mortality of cholera in England. Great Britain: General Register Office, 1852
Wellcome Library, London L0049743
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