Corinne May Botz: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
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Corinne May Botz stumbled on Frances Glessner Lee’s 18 miniature re-creations, now housed in Baltimore, while working on a video about women who collect dollhouses. Lee would have recoiled in horror to hear that term applied to her projects, which were intended not to acclimate girls to a comfortable domestic life but to train policemen in the nascent field of “legal medicine.” Captivated, Botz recognized in these tableaux the loving attention paid equally to stockings and food containers, blood spatters and slit throats. Fourteen of Botz’s photographs of the “Nutshell Studies” are now on view at the Glessner House Museum.
Lee saw the double edge of the word “domestic” at a time when most others did not. Though the term can stir up images of cozy fires and warm lamplight, it’s now often associated with violence. One hundred years ago most women of Lee’s intelligence and ambition would still have seen the home as a place of comfort but also as a site of claustrophobia and suffocation. As Lee would come to realize later, she conformed to what was expected of a dutiful daughter. She was educated at home by tutors, went on a tour of Europe, came out in Chicago society after her return, got engaged to Blewett Lee and married him a year later. Her parents built Frances and her brother and their families houses a block from the Glessner residence. But Frances’s marriage didn’t last: separating for good in 1906, she and Blewett were divorced in 1916.
