MUSEUMS

Most of the major museums in the United States were founded at the end of the nineteenth century. The Smithsonian Institution (1846), the American Museum of Natural History (1869), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870), Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (1870), the Chicago Art Institute (1879), and the Field Museum (1893) fostered original research, the results of which were more available to the public than they would have been at universities. The growth and popularity of American museums was spurred by a complex combination of sociopolitical forces at a time when rapid industrialization was transforming the American pastoral landscape into a series of major urban centers. Providing access to knowledge was the primary purpose of these institutions; the acquisition of new materials was essential for the advancement of that knowledge; and the appeal of novelty was the key to attracting the public to that knowledge housed within the museum walls.

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT

American museums, as "public repositories of culture" (Steffensen-Bruce, p. 46), are connected to the City Beautiful movement and also to modern notions about the function of art and knowledge in the civic life of urban dwellers. The City Beautiful movement stemmed from the belief that a beautiful landscape would inspire a city's inhabitants to moral and civic virtue. A beautiful city would eliminate social ills, bring American cities up to the level of European ones, and attract economic investment from the wealthy classes. The museum, then, and especially the art museum, was seen as an antidote to urban moral and social decay. The belief was that the art museum, as a repository of beautiful objects to be contemplated, would bring a visitor nearer to God. These ideas were developed and institutionalized by a powerful social elite: "As an institution, [the art museum] embodied the kind of high cultural aspirations that the urban cultural elite sought to incorporate in their vision of the twentieth century American city" (Steffensen-Bruce, p. 104). Therefore, museums were founded with the goal of making knowledge accessible to as many citizens as possible for the advancement of moral values and spiritual improvement. Some would see this as a contradictory function—museums were both an "elite temple of the arts, and . . . a utilitarian instrument for democratic education"—since after all, they became the site where "bodies, constantly under surveillance, were to be rendered docile" (Bennett, p. 89).

No longer were museums solely the "treasure houses" of the wealthy elite, whose collections were designed primarily to excite the visitor's wonder at the exotic in the Renaissance tradition of the Wunderkammern (cabinets of wonders). Now they were also "sites of intellectual and cultural debates" where knowledge was in the hands of a few who had the power to create meaning and order for public consumption (Conn, p. 15). By the end of the nineteenth century, the American museum served the needs of scientists by funding expeditions and acquiring collections in the name of research. They also made themselves appealing to the general public, whose knowledge was shaped in the interest of progress and democratic civic duty. Museums, therefore, wielded enormous power over the masses; shaping public knowledge meant shaping notions of beauty, of proper behavior and morality, and of cultural dominance. Abstract concepts of beauty, morality, and culture could be displayed: "Museums have always featured displays of power: great men, great wealth, or great deeds. The emphasis could be on the spoils of war, victors in the marketplace, or man as the crown of creation. In all these instances, museums have ratified claims of superiority" (Dubin, p. 3). Stephen Greenblatt argues that there are two models for the exhibition of works of art: resonance and wonder. Resonance is "the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand" (p. 42). Wonder is "the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention" (p. 42). Greenblatt argues, furthermore, that the museum "intensifies both access and exclusion."

Complementing the influence of the art museum was the growth of the natural history museum, closely tied to several academic disciplines. These museums were the only institutions at the time that had enough resources to fund large-scale expeditions (Conn, p. 53). Although the motivations behind the 1846 bequest from an heirless British citizen, James Smithson, to the United States remain a mystery, his desire that his money be used "to contribute to the increase and diffusion of knowledge" was taken seriously by the members of Congress. How best to carry out these wishes was not an easy question to answer. It was suggested several times that the money be invested in a college or university, but John Quincy Adams "reminded his colleagues that the purpose of a college was not to increase knowledge but to diffuse that which already existed" (Conn, p. 54). Thus, in the 1880s, the Smithsonian Institution was opened to the public.

SITES OF MEMORY

The growth of urban museums throughout the nation (more than fifty art museums were built between 1890 and 1930) at the instigation of the country's governing institutions was intricately connected to a burgeoning national identity (Steffensen-Bruce, p. 199). If museums function as sites of memory where curators "artificially organize the past, creating meanings that groups then assimilate in order to cope: with modernity" (Crane, p. 6), it appears that this fairly new nation was busy trying to prevent "the natural erosion of memory" (Crane, p. 9). These sites of memory played an important role in securing the nation's claim of natural cultural superiority. A representative for the "committee of fifty," a group of New York businessmen, financiers, and artists, made a speech to Congress in 1869 claiming that the United States needed museums and that one should be established in New York. The resulting Metropolitan Museum displayed the wealth of the new city: "A history of the Metropolitan could quite justifiably be a chronicle of dazzling acquisitions, purchases, and accumulation, beginning from the earliest days and continuing through the present. The Metropolitan, more than any other museum, stands as the elegant child produced by the union between the vast fortunes of America's robber barons and the refined good taste of its social elite" (Conn, p. 193).

This same concern for building a strong city with a glorious history and a place in the life of the growing nation can be found in Chicago. The Field Museum, which opened in 1893, served to enshrine the glorious days of the Columbian Exposition and developed hand in hand with the emerging field of anthropology. The Art Institute was built to put Chicago on the map of progressive cities, to move beyond its reputation as a meatpacking town. The Chicago Art Institute, founded in 1879, was also an effort to create a Chicago of cultural import: "They were not the Robber Barons trying to show off. They were the civic leaders trying to make culture hum in Chicago, and succeeding" (Burt, p. 181).

MUSEUMS AND LITERATURE

American literature at the turn of the century had undergone a transformation parallel to that of the museum: it secured a position both as a transmitter of "high culture" and as a form of popular culture enjoyed by the middle class. The American literary tradition of romanticism gave way to realism, which pointed out social injustices, uncovered the ills caused by out-of-control industrialization, and exposed the failures of a hypocritical elite. The threat of the urban machine that dehumanized the poor, especially in growing American cities, was demystified by some of the most important writers of the time: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair, among others. The literature of this period also responds to issues important to the museums founded at the turn of the century: the power of wonder at the possibilities of the city and the evils of acquisitiveness in American society.

The advent of publishing, the diffusion of Charles Darwin's theories, the growth of the city, and the demand for better newspapers, magazines, and museums signaled an increased interest on the public's part for objects and ideas previously reserved for the leisure class. Vocational education, universities, and the printed word were the chief instruments by which cultural knowledge was made accessible to the masses. In New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, the book trade prospered thanks to the efforts of the gentrified class, which sought to impose its cultural values on other segments of society: "[The gentry] cared about the traditional high arts and letters—indeed, it located in the domain of the arts the sort of founding or elemental value no longer located in religion" (Columbia Literary History, p. 471). In these terms, the spiritual value to be derived from the museum was equally present in literature. The cultural elite, the wealthy classes in the cities, believed "that concerns for such values was the base of civilization itself, it felt entitled and even obliged to try to impose this sense of value throughout its society: to disseminate culture so conceived throughout the land" (Columbia Literary History, p. 471). Many cultural tensions present at the turn of the century had to do precisely with the increase and wide diffusion of a scientific knowledge that seemed to be at odds with the traditional notions of spirituality and religion. These tensions were reflected not only in how museum collections were acquired and how displays were conceived but also in the problems realist novels addressed.

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the most popular exponent of realism. His work was based on the belief that writers must avoid the heroic and privilege the habitual and the natural. In doing so, they would make a faithful transcription of the world. The world that Howells described in A Modern Instance (1882), for example, depicts all the possibilities that a city could offer—wealth, status, knowledge, as well as the inevitable corruption of a competitive society. The museum in this novel appears as a refuge from the corrupting values of the city. A Modern Instance chronicles the life of newlyweds from the countryside who move to the city seeking their fortune. The museum is one of the places they regularly visit as a couple. At work, the protagonist, Bartley, is mocked for spending so much time with his wife in leisure activities. Bartley's wife sadly reminisces that it was in the museum that "they found a pleasure in the worst things which the best never afterwards gave them" (p. 337). What they find instead of fortune is a life of corruption and vice, as Bartley begins to drink, gamble, and neglect his wife, eventually divorcing her. Once Bartley enters the world of business, and his wife is condemned to domesticity where she watches every penny, their marriage deteriorates. What, then, is civilization and progress? Is this what the city can offer them? What are the spiritual values that the city espouses?

Willa Cather's (1873–1947) Song of the Lark (1932) takes a different view, seeing the city as a place of progress, a place to look to for finer things, for freedom, for the development of youthful dreams. Yet the novel's take on the museum as a place of spiritual enlightenment is similar to Howells's. Thea Krönberg, the heroine of Song of the Lark, discovers the power of her voice when she moves east to New York from a small town in the Midwest. According to Cather, the novel, written in 1915, was named "for a rather second rate French Painting in the Chicago Art Institute; a picture in which a little peasant girl, on her way to work in the fields at early morning, stops and looks up to listen to a lark. The title was meant to suggest a young girl's awakening to something beautiful" (p. xxxi). When Thea stops in Chicago, she finds a booming town unlike the small town she has left behind. She visits the Chicago Art Institute, where she sees the painting that gave the book its title and is moved by it. She briefly returns to her hometown, only to find that her family does not understand her ambition. She then moves back to New York in hopes of becoming an opera singer.

Henry James (1843–1916), by contrast, sees the city as a place whose progress is stultifying to women, and the museum is symbolic of its deadening values. In the story "Julia Bride" (1907), James portrays a woman who, with the museum as the setting for her rendezvous, seems to collect marriage engagements the way museums collect works of art. In the museum she meets with her stepfather, who has recently divorced her mother, to enlist his help with a potential suitor. He has a proposition of his own, however, asking Julia to put in a good word for him with a widow he wants to marry. He tells Julia, "She loves this place—she is awfully keen on art. Like you Julia, if you haven't changed—I remember how you did love art" (p. 773). But it is not art that interests Julia. The museum is simply the place where she entertains potential suitors such as Basil French: "She saw the great shining room, with its mockery of art and 'style' and security, all the things she was vainly after" (p. 774). In this story James critiques the acquisitive power of money displayed in the museum as Julia tries to "collect" an appropriate marriage partner but fails. James is saying in part that, just as art should not be an object of trafficking, marriage as a business in the rapidly industrializing city of New York is doomed to fail (Tintner, p. 184).

Edith Wharton (1862–1937), in The Age of Innocence (1920), similarly critiques social norms regarding the relationship between men and women, norms that were at the time slowly falling into disuse. In that book, Archer Newland is wrestling with the plausibility of having an affair with Ellen, a married woman. He and Ellen meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they look at relics. Ellen says, "It seems cruel that after a while nothing matters any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: Use Unknown" (p. 312). The museum has become a private space for Ellen and Archer's rendezvous, yet this reaction to the relics foreshadows how the conventions they are defying will become useless with the passing of time. Despite their recognition of how quickly these conventions are becoming obsolete, they remain prisoners to them even many years later, when they are free to resume their relationship. Archer at least is unable to act on his feelings for Ellen.

American literature at the turn of the century critiques the intellectual apparatus that give rise to institutions such as the museum. Taken together, the literature of the time reflects many of the issues that drove the evolution of the American museum, including a desire to make knowlege, albeit a carefully controlled subset of knowledge, widely available to the general public. Yet at the same time, this literature questions the morals and archaic customs to which people were subjected.

see alsoArt and Architecture; Chicago; Libraries; New York

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cather, Willa. Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Howells, William Dean. A Modern Instance. In Novels, 1875–1886. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982.

James, Henry. "Julia Bride." In American Novels and Stories of Henry James, edited by F. O. Matthiessen. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Random House, 1920.

Secondary Works

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.

Burt, Nathaniel. Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Crane, Susan, ed. Museums and Memory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Dubin, Stephen C. Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Resonance and Wonder." In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Griffiths, Alison. "Museums and Displays of Knowledge." Odyssey, broadcast on Chicago Public Radio, 30 August 2004.

Steffensen-Bruce, Ingrid A. Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890–1930. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

Tintner, Adeline R. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986.

Liza Ann Acosta