On Marie Antoinette's pretending to be a peasant or the costs of recreation

A Map of the Gardens at Versailles - link

 

Louis XVI built a Marie Antoinette a summer house at Versailles called Petit Trianon.  She surround the exquisite house with gardens int he fashionable "English " style, planted to resemble the natural landscape.  She made twice-yearly "trips" to her retreat, in the spring and summer, to get away from the public life of the palace.  

Witold Rybczynski, In Waiting for the Weekend, describes the Queen's "play acting" at being a peasant.  

Seeking something more natural -- or, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught, seeking "to return to nature" -- the queen had built nearby a mock-Norma village of romantic thatched cottages, [including] a mill, a dairy, and a dovecote.  Despite their names, these buildingds had purely recreation functions -- they were for informal dining, billiards, backgammon, and dancing.

 Then, Rybczynski says that there are plenty of modern parallels to this kind of make-believe.

It's easy to make fun of a queen who pretends to be a country lass, eating ice cream off marble tables in the 'dairy," picking flowers in the garden, or standing with a fishing pole at the edge of an artificial pond.  But were her affectations really so different from what many modern city dwellers do on weekends: stock-brokers wearing old clothes and driving tractors, office workers in checked shirts chopping wood at the cottage, bus drivers putting on camouflage gear and going hunting, or pharmacists in sou'westers messing about in boats?  Marie Antoinette's hamlet was a make-believe world, but so are all country retreats. (175)

So what?  Maybe it's just because work life is so dull that we need to create for ourselves alternate lives.  Later in the book, referencing Swedish sociologist Staffan Linder, he suggests that "in a prosperous consumer society there was a conflict between the market's promotion of luxury goods and the individual's leisure time."  Instead of "purchasing" more leisure with increased wealth, people bought more stuff.

People were earning more because they were working more.  A large percentage of free time was being converted into what he called "consumption time," and mirrored a shift from "time-intensive" to "goods-intensive" leisure.  According to U.S. News & World Report, Americans spend more than $13 Billion annually on sports equipment; put another way, about 1.3 billion hours of potential leisure time are exchanged for leisure wear -- for increasingly elaborate running shoes, certified hiking shorts, and monogrammed warm-up suits.  (219)

 There's a difference between recreation and leisure.  Recreation often has costs -- actual dollars for shirts and shoes -- and opportunity costs.   

"Leisure" is the most misunderstood word in our vocabulary. We often use the words "recreation" and "Leisure" interchangeably -- recreation room, rest and recreation, leisure suit, leisure industry -- but they really embody two different ideas.  Recreation carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose.  However pleasurable this antidote to work may be, it's a form of active employment, engaged in with a specific end in mind -- a refreshment of the spirit, or the body, or both.  Implicit in this idea of renewal -- usually organized renewal -- is the notion that recreation is both a consequence of work adn a preparation for more of it. (224)

Thoreau also wrote a lot about how our increased reliance on new technology costs people freedom.  One of my favorite children's books is D.B. Johnson's Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, which relates a tale with a similar moral:

Henry Hikes To Fitchburg is about two friends who have very different approaches to life. When the two agree to meet one evening in Fitchburg, which is thirty miles away, Henry decides to walk while his friend plans to work all day to earn the fare for a train ticket. Both friends are curious to see who will be the first to arrive in Fitchburg. Although Henry's friend arrives first, Henry has enjoyed the sights and nature during his walk to Fitchburg, has splashed in a river and eaten blackberries. (Wikipedia)