Does America ever acknowledge its own cultural patrimony? Or is America always willing to concede that its cultural heritage could be sold to the highest bidder? By examining two art world cases, the proposed relocation of the suburban Barnes Foundation to downtown Philadelphia, and the sale of Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, 1875, by Thomas Jefferson University, it is evident that a city’s interest in its regional patrimony, or regional cultural heritage, can illicit media attention and rallies of civic pride. On what grounds can a region stake an ownership claim on a body or piece of artwork, especially in America, where the market economy rules? In explaining the concept of cultural heritage scholar David Lowenthal contends:
Heritage denotes everything we suppose has been handed down to us from the past. Although not all heritage is uniformly desirable, it is widely viewed as a precious and irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective identity and necessary for self-respect. Hence we go to great lengths, often at huge expense, to protect and celebrate the heritage we possess, to find and enhance what we feel we need, and to restore and recoup what we have lost.[1]
In applying Lowenthal’s definition of heritage to America, it is essential to highlight the concept of collective identity, as well as a need to preserve a historic legacy. These two characteristics provide nations with a strong cultural heritage, although some may argue that America lacks a collective identity, and has done little to preserve a historic legacy. According to cultural property legal specialist John Henry Merryman, the public often takes an interest in cultural patrimony for reasons such as survival, memory, pathos, identity and community.[2] With an extensive number of museums and monuments occupying a wide range of America’s cities and towns, it is obvious that there is human interest in cultural property. Yet questions remain as to why cultural property is hotly contested in America and what sources of interest drive the country’s citizens to rally behind specific cases of cultural patrimony and not others. Merryman addresses these questions broadly by detailing the key sources of human interest in cultural property. Merryman’s first category of cultural patrimony sources is ‘Expressive Value’ under which ‘truth and certainty, morality, memory, survival, pathos, identity, and community’ reside.[3] His second category is ‘Utility’ which encompasses knowledge of the past, wealth, economic value, and pleasure.[4] When combined, these sources form the basis for cultural patrimony, the preservation of cultural property and, ultimately, a large portion of a nation’s (America’s) history and national identity.
Like Lowenthal, Merryman argues that cultural objects can give individuals a sense of both significance and community while fostering cultural memory and a feeling of ‘nostalgia for the people, events, and cultures that produced them’.[5] Moreover, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisations’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Mission, cultural heritage is defined as a continuum from past to present. UNESCO’s website explains that, ‘heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on the future generations. Our cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration’.[6] In further defining cultural patrimony, it is essential to note that heritage is not made up merely of paintings or buildings; rather, a historic legacy can include ‘movable cultural objects (archaeological resources, works of art), immovable cultural objects (buildings, monuments and sites), expressive activities (language, and the performing arts such as music, dance and drama) and the intangible cultural heritage (skills, folklore, rituals, religious beliefs, intellectual traditions)’.[7] Merryman also contends that ‘cultural objects are human artifacts’ and therefore a study of cultural patrimony includes a study of humanity.[8] Even though America may lack a collective identity, there is no doubt that the country has intangible, immovable, expressive and historic cultural property.
As a case study, Philadelphia is a prime example of America’s regional interest in preserving a heritage of cultural property. Rich in history and civic sentiment, Philadelphia could be considered culturally self-conscious. Home to over 1.5 million people, Philadelphia also houses the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rodin Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, and nearby the Barnes Foundation. Among America’s largest cities, there are few that can boast of the progressive medical and scientific communities embedded in Philadelphia’s history, or its emphasis on education. Additionally, the city’s architecture and landmarks reinforce an ingrained cultural heritage among residents, institutions, and even the wayward traveler. If Merryman is correct in arguing that ‘the cultural object is an approach to the study of humanity, of ourselves’ then the Barnes Foundation and Eakins sagas could be reflections of Philadelphia’s million-plus population itself, or even a broader view of America’s public.[9] Ultimately, Philadelphia can serve as the testing ground for labeling artwork ‘regionally significant’, and for fostering unity among its citizens to publicly defend and/or save a piece of cultural property controlled by an institution.
The Barnes saga, a Philadelphia story of artwork, education and lawsuits, is a microcosm of America’s cultural patrimony issues, both in terms of a city defining its own cultural property and the country’s inability to acknowledge a difference between an object’s national or regional significance. Further, the Barnes saga is a tale of all seven of Merryman’s ‘Expressive Value’ sources of interest in cultural property, which include community, identity, pathos, survival, memory, morality, truth and certainty. In turn, the Barnes drama is also tied to politics, wealth and tourism, primary signs of the ‘Utility’ of cultural property.
The Barnes story begins with Albert Coombe Barnes, a self-made businessman and avid art collector, born in 1872 Philadelphia to working-class parents. Although trained as a doctor, Barnes made a fortune promoting and selling Argyrol, a silver nitrate solution used to cure eye infections. After establishing financial security Barnes began collecting artwork, and was reputed to have bragged, ‘I just robbed everybody. Particularly during the Depression, my specialty was robbing the suckers who had invested all their money in flimsy securities and then had to sell their priceless paintings to keep a roof over their heads’.[10] After countless buying trips to Europe, Barnes had amassed a collection of modern European works that is widely viewed as one of the most significant modern collections in America.
Plans to create a foundation dedicated to Barnes’s art collection and his educational ideas, which closely followed the philosophical works of John Dewey, came to fruition in 1922 when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted Barnes a charter for an educational institution known as the Barnes Foundation, to be located in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia. Additionally, an indenture of trust was established which, according to Black’s Law Dictionary is ‘a document containing the terms and conditions governing a trustee’s conduct and the trust beneficiaries’ rights’.[11] Barnes’s indenture of trust provided the foundation with an endowment of six million dollars. The Barnes Foundation was governed by a set of specific rules and goals that were enforced by the doctor himself.[12] This included a mission statement that explained the foundation’s purpose, not as a museum, but as an institution which promoted the ‘advancement of education and appreciation of the fine arts; and for this purpose to erect, found and maintain…an art gallery and other necessary buildings for the exhibition of ancient and modern art; and the maintenance in connection therewith of an arboretum’.[13] Only allowing visitors into the gallery two days a week, the admissions policy was strict, and entrance was granted on a case-by-case basis. In his indenture of trust, Barnes stipulated that no artwork was to be sold or added to the collection after his death.[14] Moreover, the doctor installed his private art collection, consisting of roughly eight thousand pieces of artwork including one hundred and eighty-one Renoirs, sixty-nine Cézannes, forty-four Picassos, sixty works by Matisse, eighteen by Rousseau, and fourteen by Modigliani, in the foundation’s building according to his personal beliefs in art display and education. There is no doubt that the Barnes Foundation housed a wealth of cultural patrimony personally selected by Albert Barnes, although the foundation’s identity and sense of community with the Philadelphia suburb of Merion was marred by the doctor’s attempts to push his opinions and educational ideals on others, particularly universities.
Albert Barnes tried to form educational partnerships, on multiple occasions, with his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A partnership between the university, museum and foundation never materialized, and after the partnership with Penn was formally dissolved in 1926, Barnes was pegged as the ‘only man who had ever expelled an entire university’.[15]
After severing ties between the university and his foundation, Barnes released a statement regarding the failed partnership noting, ‘thus ends a melancholy record of inertia, lethargy, disorder, blindness and futility on the part of Penn officials…By their torpor, the authorities have forfeited for the second, and last, time one of the most valuable gifts, educational and material, ever offered to a university’.[16] Once allowed to nominate individuals to the boards of trustees and directors, Penn was relieved of its duties on 20 October 1950 when Barnes amended the foundation’s bylaws. Barnes was interested in leaving the foundation to a university or museum close to Merion, yet when Barnes amended the bylaws to remove Penn, he also excluded Temple University, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Haverford, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Barnes believed that most of the educational institutions surrounding the foundation had ties to Penn or to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and therefore should be banned from interaction with his art collection. After an additional attempt to establish a connection with Sarah Lawrence College failed, Barnes settled on Lincoln University, a distinguished African American college located within short driving distance from the foundation. Once Barnes had formally decided to enlist Lincoln University as heir to the foundation’s throne, Barnes amended the bylaws once again, specifying that Lincoln would be allowed to nominate trustees after his death.
Dr. Albert C. Barnes died in July of 1951 at the age of seventy-nine. The estimated value of Barnes’s entire collection of American, European, African, and additional artwork, the nearby farmhouse, as well as the foundation and adjoining arboretum, was estimated in 2003 at over six billion dollars. The identity of the Barnes Foundation was dictated by Dr. Barnes and his educational ideals during his lifetime, yet, upon Albert Barnes’ death, the Foundation became an institution without a strong leader, and continued to alienate the surrounding community. The Barnes Foundation remained in operation in accordance with Dr. Barnes’s indenture of trust, bylaws, and will after his death, yet constant staff changes, multiple directors, dozens of board members, and countless lawsuits continued to disrupt the foundation.
In the late 1980s, with Lincoln University in control of the board of trustees, and Richard Glanton, a Philadelphia lawyer and the university’s general counsel, in the president’s chair by 1990, the foundation began to unravel. Glanton proposed a sale of redundant works from the collection, otherwise known as an effort to mass deaccession. According to the board of trustees, the profits from the sale would be used for facilities maintenance. Howard Greenfeld, a Barnes biographer states:
Though it was customary for American museums to sell works in their collections in order to purchase other works, sales made in order to maintain operating expenses or make repairs to an existing structure were morally, if not legally, forbidden. Furthermore, the Barnes was not a museum but an educational institution, and to alter it in any way would destroy its character as such.[17]
Backlash from the public, as well as various art institutions including the Smithsonian, eventually led to the dissolution of Glanton’s proposal, as selling cultural property, such as artwork, to fund building repairs goes against best practices for museum and educational sites. Another plan concocted by the Barnes’s board of trustees to raise money for the foundation was approved in 1993, subsequently sending a large part of the collection on a two-year international tour to such places as Paris, Munich, Toronto, Texas, Washington, D.C., Tokyo and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Both the proposed deaccessioning and international tour violated Barnes’s original indenture of trust. The roughly twelve million dollars earned from the tour was used to improve the foundation’s main building.[18]
Recalling Merryman’s sources of human interest in cultural patrimony, it should be noted that selling artwork, as in Richard Glanton’s proposed project of the early 1990s, would have stripped the Barnes collection of its original identity and separated a large number of objects from their community, both in a physical sense, and in an emotional sense, as the objects would be forced to function as a fractured part of a larger, distant whole. Glanton failed to recognise the regional significance of the Barnes Foundation, as well as its strong identity, and instead focused on the economic value of the art collection.
After the art collection returned to the foundation in Merion from its world tour, the board of trustees were given an increased amount of freedom by the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas on 21 September 1995 to invest the foundation’s endowment. Moreover, the board was granted the right to hold fundraising events, and open the foundation to visitors three-and-a-half days per week. With the increased public availability of the collection came heightened anger and irritation amongst the surrounding community. Noise complaints, as well as traffic concerns, together with Glanton’s charges of racism against the foundation’s non-supporters plagued what could have been a positive outcome from the international tour and building update. Eight years after accepting the position as president, the trustees declined to re-elect Glanton on 9 February 1998. As maintained by Greenfeld, Glanton’s tenure was ‘marked by bitter and costly controversies. According to Internal Revenue Service filings, from 1992 to 1998 the Foundation, in spite of its financial problems, spent close to six million dollars on litigation’.[19]
Richard Glanton’s successor was Kimberly Camp, an artist, art historian, and arts director who decreased the museum’s $3.3 million deficit, expanded research and publication efforts, and created a membership programme to stabilize the collection, maintain a strong sense of identity, and retain interest in the foundation’s cultural patrimony. Yet, by 2002 Barnes’s original six million dollar endowment was gone, spent by the board of trustees on a car park and additional efforts to preserve the foundation’s buildings. Citing financial woes and continued clashes with neighbors in the surrounding Merion area, the foundation’s board of trustees suggested a break of Albert Barnes’s indenture of trust in September of 2002, with a planned relocation of the foundation to Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia. The foundation’s potential site would be close to the Rodin Museum, as well as Barnes’s longtime nemesis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The proposed move would therefore alter Barnes’s intentions for the care and display of his overwhelming art collection, which stated that the foundation was to remain in Merion.
In response to the proposed move of the Barnes Foundation, Greenfeld notes that ‘three powerful Philadelphia-based organisations—the Pew Charitable Trust and the Lenfest and Annenberg Foundations—agreed to pay the Barnes’s legal costs as well as help with at least two years of operating funds, on the condition that the Barnes relocate its paintings’.[20] Moreover, he notes, the foundation would not have been able to raise enough money through the ‘sale of its non-gallery assets to keep the collection in Merion, and [maintain] financial stability’.[21] Yet, why would the move from Merion to Philadelphia be considered advantageous by the Pew Trust, Lenfest, or Annenberg Foundations? Additionally, could the identity, community, and pathos of the Barnes Foundation’s art collection be retained once it is stripped from its original location in Merion and relocated to an urban space in Philadelphia?
It is possible that the Pew Trust as well as the Lenfest and Annenberg Foundations are concerned for the welfare of Barnes’s art collection and the increased viability of the collection in a location such as downtown Philadelphia. It is significant to note, however, that the cable television magnate H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest is the chairman of the board of trustees at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, while Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg is a board member, and Marguerite Lenfest is on the board at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There is little doubt that the relocation of the Barnes would additionally benefit these charitable trusts/foundations, as they would be closer together in the downtown Philadelphia core. Moreover, the Barnes Foundation’s trustees sought to expand the board from five to fifteen individuals with the Pew and Lenfest Foundations approving nominations of board members.[22] Ultimately the Lenfest Foundation and Pew Trust’s investments in the Barnes were not based merely upon altruism. Their interest in relocation raises questions about control, power and increased assets, both cultural and monetary. Besides the charitable trusts’ involvement in the Barnes’s relocation, both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fines Arts became connected to the Barnes through their board members’ outside interests in foundations and charitable institutions. Although a move by the Barnes would potentially attract more visitors to the city center, equaling greater exposure and increased revenue for each of the museums lined up along the parkway, the art world was generally against tearing the Barnes away from its suburban home or disrupting the culturally significant Merion site, preferring to keep the Barnes intact as a piece of regional cultural property.
In autumn 2004, the Philadelphia Inquirer printed articles describing the obstacles the Barnes Foundation faced, with headlines such as Art World Opposes Move. It was estimated that one hundred and fifty million dollars would have to be raised in order to relocate the foundation. The trustees of the foundation decided that apart from the foundation’s financial problems, the Barnes collection was to be kept intact and to remain available and accessible to the public as a working educational museum. The Lower Merion Township community agreed with the foundation staff that ‘it is more important that the Barnes survive, than it survive in our township’.[23] After many lawsuits, the Barnes Foundation won the right to move the museum to Philadelphia in 2004, and by 2006 it had acquired the one hundred and fifty million dollars needed to move the art collection, subsequently raising its financial goal to two hundred million dollars. Bernard C. Watson, president of the Barnes board of trustees, explained to the Philadelphia Business Journal in May 2006 that, ‘the tremendous outpouring of support we have received within our community has encouraged us to carry forward the momentum’.[24] Further, Rebecca W. Rimel, the president and CEO of the Pew Charitable Trust, which donated twenty million dollars to the Barnes cause, explained in regard to the foundation’s attainment of their financial goal that, ‘Philadelphians have proven to the world that we are a city that values the arts and shares Dr. Barnes’ vision that these works of art should be seen by everyone’.[25]
While the Barnes Foundation continued to raise eyebrows in the art world for its plan to relocate from the suburbs to downtown Philadelphia, Kimberly Camp announced her resignation, effective 1 January 2006. Camp’s successor, Derek Gillman, who took control in August 2006, announced upon accepting the Barnes directorship that:
In moving to The Barnes Foundation, I greatly look forward to working with Dr. Bernard Watson and other members of the Board to realize the dream of Albert Barnes and John Dewey of establishing an educational institution that contributes to the whole nation. Thanks to the massive generosity of a number of benefactors, The Barnes Foundation is ready to re-engage vigorously with that vision—of using one of the world’s great collections of modern art to serve the goal of a more inclusive and democratic society for all Americans.[26]
A fact that would have met with Dr. Barnes’s disapproval, Gillman was previously the director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In need of a supportive director who could weather the storm of moving the foundation out of Merion, the Barnes board explained that ‘it was only “happenstantial” that Mr. Gillman led a Philadelphia institution (prior to accepting the directorship of the Barnes)’.[27] When asked if the Barnes Foundation’s artwork would eventually be integrated into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gillman answered ‘no,’ declaring, ‘The Barnes is moving to become fully self-sustaining. That’s the whole purpose. It will be the master of its own fate’.[28]
Despite a new leader and the Barnes board’s attempts to become self-sustaining, the foundation remained deeply entangled in courtroom battles. The dramatic saga continued with an attempt by Montgomery County to keep the foundation in Merion. Montgomery County, where the Barnes is located, offered to buy the foundation’s buildings and land for fifty million dollars in June of 2007.[29] Tax-exempt bonds would be used for the purchase, with money made off of interest to build an endowment.[30] Eight days after the proposal was made, the Barnes board of trustees rejected the offer, no doubt in response to Montgomery County’s previous disinterest in the Barnes case.[31]
As 2007 continued, turmoil ensued and Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony became a hotly contested topic. Lawyers were hired and fired on all sides of the case and countless trips to court were made. The Barnes Foundation staff pushed forward with their plans to relocate, soliciting designs for the new Benjamin Franklin Parkway building. From a group of six finalists, including architects from New York, Los Angeles, Spain and Japan, the New York husband and wife team of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams were chosen. Again, amid controversy, the foundation did not release preliminary sketches for the building. The downtown site, home to a juvenile detention center known as the Youth Study Center, is located between 21st and 22nd Streets. The new building will be three times larger than the foundation’s current home. The site, under a 99-year lease to the Barnes Foundation, awaits groundbreaking, as the move was again stalled in September and October of 2007 by the Friends of the Barnes, a group of individuals dedicated to keeping the foundation in Merion.
The Friends, founded in 2004 after the original ruling to move the Barnes Foundation, claim that the ‘proposed relocation of the Foundation would do irreparable harm, and that its present financial difficulties can be solved, its integrity preserved, and the public interest served, by available alternatives’.[32] In September of 2007 the Friends filed a petition in Montgomery County to have the relocation ruling of 2004 re-examined. According to Susan Greenspon of Main Line Times, the court was unaware of the one hundred and seven million dollars in tax payer money set aside by the state to aid in the foundation’s relocation, which essentially made clear the fact that the Pennsylvania public was paying to uproot their own cultural property.[33] The court asked the Friends to file a brief within thirty days of the 19 October 2007 hearing and the foundation to file a brief in response to the Friends’ petition, thirty days after the first brief was filed. Yet, two weeks before the Friends’ brief was due, they fired their lawyer in an argument over the brief he had prepared, in addition to a dispute over fees.[34] In response to the change in legal counsel, the Friends were given an extra sixty days to file, which ultimately occurred on 29 February 2008, and was countered the same day with a brief by Montgomery County. Nearly one month later, on 20 March 2008, the Friends replied, once again, to Montgomery County. With lawyers on all sides of the case fighting for the right to dictate the future of Philadelphia’s cultural property, one wonders if the relocation plan would irrevocably alter the Barnes Foundation, which is a site and ensemble of artwork that cannot fully be removed from Merion. Even though relocation may increase tourism in downtown Philadelphia, an effort to ‘save’ the foundation might ultimately destroy it.[35]
While the Merion soap opera played out in the Philadelphia press, Albert Barnes’s longtime enemies, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, found themselves entangled in another web of cultural patrimony controversy. On 10 November 2006 the board of Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, voted to sell The Gross Clinic, 1875, a painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins. Owned for the last one hundred and thirty years by the university, which bought the work in 1878 for two hundred dollars, Eakins’s painting depicts a leg operation performed by Dr. Samuel D. Gross.[36] Sold jointly to the soon-to-be-opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., the painting’s price tag was sixty-eight million dollars. Crystal Bridges, founded by Alice L. Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress purported to be worth over sixteen billion dollars, is scheduled to open in the near future, with the possibility of opening its doors to the public in 2010.[37]
Following Walton’s purchase of Asher B. Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits, 1849, from the New York Public Library in 2005 for thirty-five million dollars at a sealed bid auction, the Philadelphia community was faced with another impending loss of a cultural relic.[38] The university was said to be ‘aware of what a masterpiece (they had in their possession)’, yet claimed their mission was to ‘educate doctors and health professionals’, explaining that, ‘we simply felt the money would be more useful if it went toward developing our campus’.[39] Even though the New York Public Library was willing to part with a piece of cultural property, they (at least) acknowledged the significance of the sale.
Like Durand’s Kindred Spirits, The Gross Clinic embodies a distinct historical legacy. Depicting Dr. Samuel Gross wielding a scalpel in front of a large audience while removing dead bone from the leg of a patient in a Jefferson Medical School amphitheater, The Gross Clinic is no doubt entwined in the history of both the university and the career of the artist. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is considered to be the city’s prodigal son. A rebel within the art academy system, Eakins was forced to resign as an art professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for removing the clothing of a male model in an 1886 co-ed classroom. According to the art historian Henry Adams, The Gross Clinic heightened Eakins’s rebel persona, as the painting was ‘rejected from several exhibitions and has always played a central part in his mystique as an unjustly persecuted figure’.[40] Yet, the painting was revolutionary for the American nineteenth century as it was not only controversial, but also paralleled Eakins’s career, which ran from cold to hot to cold again. As Henry Adams explains,
Today Eakins is widely regarded as the greatest nineteenth-century American painter, while his large, dark, grim canvas of surgery, The Gross Clinic, which was greeted with distaste in the artist’s lifetime, has been elevated to the stature of “the greatest American painting”. In Philadelphia Eakins has been transformed from a pariah to a local hero. Jefferson Medical Center now houses an “Eakins Room” where the artist’s medical paintings are enshrined in a dark chapel-like interior where spotlights pick out each portrait; the Philadelphia Museum of Art devotes a room to his work; and the prominent traffic circle in front of the museum carries the name Eakins Circle in his memory.[41]
The Gross Clinic represents Eakins’s interests as an artist and his ability to create multiple portraits within one canvas, as well as Philadelphia’s medical and cultural history. The sale of the painting to Crystal Bridges and the National Gallery would strip away the cultural context and rich medical history surrounding Eakins’s work. Much like the debate over the relocation of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia was forced to rethink its regional cultural patrimony. Should The Gross Clinic remain in Philadelphia and the Barnes be removed from Merion? Should Philadelphia centralise its cultural patrimony to boost the economics of a museum row?
As mentioned above, Walton’s Kindred Spirits acquisition was met with general disdain by the art world, and therefore, to avoid angering Philadelphia’s cultural institutions, and possibly because she recognised the cultural importance of the painting, she gave the city forty-five days to match the sixty-eight million dollar price tag and keep Eakins’s work in Pennsylvania. One week after the proposed sale was made public the Fund for Eakins’ Masterpiece was established in a joint effort between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anne d’Harnoncourt, then director of the Philadelphia Museum, acknowledged that the museum’s acquisition budget was too small to buy the painting therefore, ‘this is a citywide effort (to keep Eakins’s work in its hometown)’.[42] By 30 November 2006, roughly twelve days after the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art embarked on a campaign to keep the painting in its home location, twenty-three million dollars had been raised. Reiterating her earlier sentiments about the Eakins Fund being a citywide effort, d’Harnoncourt declared that ‘it’s a community effort,’ while deeming The Gross Clinic ‘an icon for this city, a masterpiece that sums up all of Philadelphia’s strengths then and now’.[43]
As the countdown continued, the number of donations increased. On 15 December 2006 D’Harnoncourt declared that ‘1,600 gifts from 30 states had been received’ noting that ‘this is a wild moment…this is about saving a Philadelphia icon’.[44] Although not all Philadelphians agreed that the sale of The Gross Clinic was worth media attention or the fund-raising effort, there is no question that the issue struck a regional patrimony chord. Like Albert Barnes, Eakins was a native son, and his artistic vision, whether liked or disliked, was a product of Pennsylvania. Individuals less concerned with the Eakins sale argued that both the artist and the painting’s subject, Dr. Samuel Gross, were ‘great Americans, not just great Philadelphians’.[45] But where can the line be drawn between a city’s or state’s patrimony and a country’s patrimony? Without a Pennsylvania state law in place to guard the region’s ‘icons’ or ‘relics,’ as in the cases of the Barnes and The Gross Clinic, the city must work continuously to avoid potential loss, possibly by buying and saving the regional patrimony that becomes available on the art market.
By the end of January ownership of The Gross Clinic was passed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; a piece of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony saved. Only one-half of the sixty-eight million dollar purchase price proposed by Walton and the National Gallery was matched by Philadelphia’s institutions at the time of ownership transfer. Major donations from such arbiters of regional patrimony as The Annenberg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest, and Barnes Foundation board member Joseph Neubauer intensified the link between the Barnes and Philadelphia’s art institutions while entangling the interests of the charitable foundations, trusts, and individuals connected with the city’s art circle. Even though large donations were made to the Eakins cause, ‘bridge financing at the settlement was provided by Wachovia and PNC banks, with each art institution assuming responsibility for half the debt’, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.[46] In other words, each institution assumed fifteen million dollars in debt to pay for a piece of regional cultural property.
Besides the debt incurred to save the Eakins painting, Philadelphia was shocked to hear how the Pennsylvania Academy quickly increased its acquisition budget. Two days after the 30 January 2007 Gross Clinic transfer of ownership, the Academy made public its sale of Eakins’s The Cello Player, 1896, to a private collector, a painting that had been on view since 1897. The Academy board vice chairman explained that the sale of The Cello Player, which depicts cellist Rudolf Henning playing his instrument, was given ‘long and careful and agonizing consideration…our board did not undertake this lightly’.[47] One question raised in discussions of the Academy’s sale (which was also raised throughout the Barnes drama) is whether or not deaccessioning could be justified within the larger scope of regional patrimony. Elizabeth Johns, an Eakins scholar, noted a link to the city’s quest for regional patrimony when she stated, ‘The Cello Player had a charisma and was most definitely tied to the rich cultural history of Philadelphia’.[48] In this case, is the act of selling one Eakins to save another, or trading one piece of cultural patrimony for another, justifiable? In reply to the outcry, Academy officials released a statement contending that the sale would greatly reduce the large amount of debt assumed with the purchase of The Gross Clinic, while Thomas Jefferson University described how profits from The Gross Clinic sale would be used to create an Eakins Legacy Fund for scholarships, professorships, programmes and renovations, a statement that, although truthful, did little to explain the effort to save one piece of cultural patrimony while giving up another.[49]
When the news of the Academy’s sale of Eakins’s The Cello Player was made public, attention was turned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Would the art museum also sell paintings to offset Gross Clinic debt? When asked in mid-December of 2006 if the museum would consider selling works of art from its collection to reduce its debt, d’Harnoncourt had no comment, but by the beginning of February 2007 she stated that the museum would likely sell artwork to lessen the burden of debt the institution had assumed, noting, ‘we are looking very seriously at deaccessioning’.[50]
Continuing the trend to cash in artwork to provide current income, Thomas Jefferson University made public its interest in selling additional Eakins paintings just three months after The Gross Clinic entered the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand, 1874, was sold just four weeks later in April 2007 to Alice Walton, the heiress behind the original sixty-eight million dollar Gross Clinic deal. Estimated at twenty million dollars, both Philadelphia institutions were made aware of the sale in advance, but neither had the funds to save the painting from a move to Arkansas.[51] The portrait, a representation of Doctor Rand sitting at his desk, is now bound for Crystal Bridges with a temporary stop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
On 24 April 2008, one year after the sales of Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand and TheGross Clinic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced the sale of Eakins’s painting Cowboy Singing, 1892, and two 1887 oil sketches for Cowboys in the Badlands, to the Denver Art Museum and the Denver-based, private Anschutz collection. The estimated total for the three works is said to be between eight and ten million dollars, a price tag that offsets remaining Gross Clinic debt.[52] Commenting on the museum’s decision to deaccession artwork, d’Harnoncourt said, ‘we’re heaving a deep sigh. This is it. Now we can celebrate’.[53] Yet, is there a reason to celebrate? In terms of cultural patrimony, the The Gross Clinic’s Philadelphia identity and sense of community were saved, yet five works of art, also considered to be pieces of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony, were sold to ‘save’ The Gross Clinic, further splitting public opinion on the topic of regional cultural property while entangling the interests of collectors, museums, board members and foundations.
In the Barnes Foundation and The Gross Clinic sagas, two Philadelphia cases of cultural patrimony, the city and the country are divided. Many believe the relocation of the Barnes would be a blatant disregard of Albert Barnes’s interests while showing disrespect for the unique history of a local cultural icon. On the other hand, many believe that creating a museum row in Philadelphia will strengthen the region’s grip on its cultural holdings while increasing tourism and fostering a sense of unity amongst the city’s art circle. In the case of The Gross Clinic, sentiments were less wide ranging. The general consensus was that Eakins’s TheGross Clinic should be kept in its hometown, although the sale of one Eakins to keep another caused many to wonder if Philadelphia was truly concerned about regional patrimony. As a city willing to critically consider its cultural history, Philadelphia has relied most heavily upon four of Merryman’s proposed sources of public interest in cultural heritage to navigate the media storm surrounding the Barnes Foundation and The Gross Clinic: memory, community, identity and pathos. These sources of interest in cultural patrimony continue to be relevant as the Barnes Foundation prepares to relocate. Ultimately, there is no doubt that Philadelphia is a touchstone for a possible cultural heritage reverberation across America, yet what pieces of cultural patrimony Philadelphia will pass down to future generations remains to be seen.
University of Washington, Seattle
Notes
[1] David Lowenthal, ‘Natural and Cultural Heritage’ The Nature of Cultural Heritage and the Culture of Natural Heritage: Northern Perspectives on a Contested Patrimony, ed. by Kenneth R. Olwig and David Lowenthal, (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 79.
[2] John Henry Merryman, ‘The Public Interest in Cultural Property’, California Law Review 77: 2 (March 1989), pp. 347-349.
[6] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisations, ‘About World Heritage’, [online posting] accessed 23 February 2008; available from http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/.
[7] Lyndel V. Prott and P. J. O’Keefe, ‘Discovery and Excavation’, Law and the Cultural Heritage, 5 vols (Abingdon, Oxon: Professional Books Limited, 1984), I, p. 7.
[8] Merryman, ‘The Public Interest in Cultural Property’, p.342
[10] John Anderson, Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), p. 3.
[11] ‘Trust, Indenture’, Black’s Law Dictionary (St. Paul: Thomson/West, 2005), p. 638.
[12] Chris Abbinante, ‘Protecting “Donor Intent” in Charitable Foundations: Wayward Trusteeship and the Barnes Foundation’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 145: 3 (January 1997), p. 669. ‘A foundation may be defined as a nongovernmental, nonprofit organisation having a principal fund of its own, managed by its own trustees or directors, and established to maintain or aid social, educational, charitable, religious, or other activities serving the common welfare’, pp. 678-679.
[13] David Zucchino, ‘Great Art Framed by Turmoil’, The Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2002, p. 2.
[18] Abbinante, p. 674. See Kyle York Spencer, ‘Reopening a Struggle for Barnes’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 November 1995, p. B1. Spencer notes that the $12 million in renovations included a high-tech security system, improved lighting, access for the disabled, fire protection and climate control.
[23] Bernard C. Watson, ‘The Barnes Foundation: There’s More to the Story’, The Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education at West Chester University, 24 October 2004, 3. Available from <http://www.barnesfoundation.org.h_main.html>.
[24] Peter Van Allen, ‘Barnes Foundation Raises Fund Raising Bar’, Philadelphia Business Journal, 16 May 2006.
[25] Peter Van Allen, ‘Barnes Foundation Achieves Fundraising Goal’, Philadelphia Business Journal, 15 May 2006.
[26] ‘The Barnes Foundation Announces Appointment of Derek Gillman as Executive Director and President’, The Barnes Foundation, press release, 7 August 2006; available from http://www.barnesfoundation.org/v_pr_080706.html.
[27] Carol Vogel, ‘The Barnes Stays Local in Selecting Its Leader’, The New York Times, 8 August 2006.
[28] Ibid. See Jim McCaffrey, ‘Barnes Friends: Foundation Move is Part of Conspiracy’, The Bulletin, 28 August 2007, for a detailed account of the possible conflicts of interests between the members of the Barnes board of trustees and their business ventures. Additionally McCaffrey details suggestions that the Barnes may be incorporated into the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
[29] Jim McCaffrey, ‘Montco’s Barnes Offer Stuns’, The Bulletin, 13 June 2007.
[30] Randy Kennedy, ‘New Bid to Prevent Barnes Move’, Arts Briefly, The New York Times, 15 June 2007.
[31] Jim McCaffrey, ‘Barnes Rebuffs Montco Offer’, The Bulletin, 21 June 2007.
[33] Susan Greenspon, ‘Barnes Experience Can Not Be Duplicated’, Main Line Times, 19 September 2007. See Cheryl Allison, ‘It’s Not Over Yet’, The Main Line Times, 25 October 2007, and Diane Mastrull, ‘A Barnes Hearing With Fireworks on the Side’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 October 2007.
[34] Diane Mastrull, ‘New Lawyer Means Delay in Barnes Suit’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 December 2007. See Jim McCaffrey, ‘Friends of Barnes Fires Its Attorney’, The Bulletin, 18 December 2007.
[35] In fall of 2009 two important events took place in relation to the Barnes Foundation saga. The Art of the Steal, a documentary recounting the history of the Barnes Foundation, directed by Don Argott, was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on September 12, 2009. Following the screening and release of Argott’s film, architects of the new Benjamin Franklin Parkway Barnes building released their design plans. According to Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic Inga Saffron, in her column dated October 6, 2009, the new urban Barnes building and location will retain some of its eccentricity, noting, ‘formally, the building can be seen as three planes, sliding against one another, in an eternal quest for architectural nirvana.’ She explains that ‘rather than embalm the replicated Merion building in the center of the larger structure, the architects place the long container front and center, facing the parkway as a free-standing structure…visitors will have to wend their way through the gardens, designed by Philadelphia’s Laurie C. Olin, to enter through a second, L-shaped structure that houses the museum extras the Barnes has always craved: special exhibition galleries, offices, a conservation laboratory, café.’
[36] Diane Mastrull, ‘New Lawyer Means Delay in Barnes Suit’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 December 2007.
[37] Lee Rosenbaum, ‘The Walton Effect: Art World Is Roiled By Wal-Mart Heiress’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 October 2007.
[38] Carol Vogel, ‘Eakins Masterwork Is to Be Sold to Museums’, The New York Times, 11 November 2006.
[40] Dinitia Smith, ‘Eakins the Tormented? A Biographer’s Dark View Ruffles the Field’, The New York Times, 21 May 2005.
[41] Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p.25. See also Amy Werbel, Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); John Wilmerding, ‘Philadelphia. Thomas Eakins’, The Burlington Magazine, 124: 954, (September 1982), p. 583.
[42] Vogel, ‘Eakins Masterwork Is to Be Sold to Museums’, The New York Times, 11 November 2006. In Vogel’s article, Christie’s auction house asked to broker the sale of The Gross Clinic declared its sensitivity to the regional patrimony debate, by noting that the painting is a ‘civic treasure that is so entwined in the history of Jefferson’.
[43] Ben Sisario, ‘Campaigning to Keep an Eakins Painting in Philadelphia’, The New York Times, 18 November 2006.
[44] Carol Vogel, ‘A Countdown For Eakins Painting’, The New York Times, Arts, Briefly, 30 November 2006.
[45] Carol Vogel, ‘A Fight to Keep an Eakins Is Waged on Two Fronts: Money and Civic Pride’, The New York Times, 15 December 2006.
In his work Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson discusses E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and argues that:
This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past… If there is any “realism” left here, it is a “realism” … of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself forever remains out of reach.[1]
This passage lays out starkly one of the central quandaries of the historical novel in the postmodern era: how to represent history truly when historical truth is something forever out of reach and our vision of it veiled or muddied by images accumulated over a lifetime from varied sources, ranging from films and novels to school history lessons and the toys we played with as children. If there is no historical truth available, should we despair of the whole project of the historical novel and accept that all of E.L. Doctorow’s works, with their continued focus on American history, are doomed to fail from the start? Do they have any possible purpose other than to entertain the reader?
Whether or not Jameson is correct in his assertion that the historical novel can no longer represent the historical past, in his reference to seeking History by way of our own pop images and simulacra, he effectively sums up Doctorow’s novelistic approach. There are scenes in Doctorow’s bestselling novel, Ragtime, such as Jung and Freud’s journey together through the tunnel of love, or the extended and oily massage Stanford White’s mistress Evelyn Nesbitt receives from the anarchist Emma Goldman, that may have delighted his readers by quirkily and outrageously mixing fact, fiction and an erotically-charged imagination, but these scenes are not there for titillation; rather, they are part of an ongoing novelistic project that uses pop images and simulacra to suggest that perceived truths about history, and particularly American history, may be constructs with no objective value, with no divine right to be privileged above fiction. In fact, I would argue that when Doctorow states in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, ‘What’s real and what isn’t? I used to know but I’ve forgotten. … Ragtime is a mingling of fact and invention—a novelist’s revenge on an age that celebrates non-fiction’, he is not being blasé about historical accuracy. Instead, he is responding as a writer of the Left to a historical situation where imagination and not dry historical accounts may be the best way to interrogate both history and the contemporary, postmodern world.[2] In doing so, he is attempting to raise a dissenting voice above the prevalent discourse that credulously ‘celebrates non-fiction’ without questioning the bias it may bring to bear on its own representation of history.
This project of historical dissent starts in Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow’s first published novel. As with any writer of Doctorow’s stature, there is a certain mythology about his writing career, which Doctorow has himself added to through various interviews and essays. The mythology of the composition of Welcome to Hard Times is that Doctorow was working as a reader at Columbia Pictures, a job for which he had to read a novel a day and write a report on its suitability or otherwise for adaptation, and that he became so frustrated with reading trashy westerns in particular that he decided he could write one himself. There is essentially a Damascene moment where he realised that he ‘could lie better than the screenwriters’ he was reading.[3] The Doctorow archive suggests that this may be a slight over simplification of matters. There is at least one archive box of material he was working on before Welcome to Hard Times, marked juvenilia and strictly off limits to researchers at present, but enough sheets of that juvenilia have found their way into the folders for Welcome to Hard Times for us to know that he spent some time working on a campus novel in which at least one of the characters is determined to write the great American novel, one which would mimic Conrad and Melville by staging ‘a moral crisis under the sky’.[4]
Set on the Dakota plains and peopled by characters that cannot remember the last time they saw a tree, Welcome to Hard Times would certainly lay claim to being a ‘moral crisis under the sky’. It may also be Doctorow’s ambitious attempt to write the great American novel at his first try, for it is surely not only the accident of his day job that encouraged him to adapt a genre which is quintessentially, if not exclusively, American, the western. Narrated by Blue, whose ability to write has seen him appointed mayor of the town without a vote, the novel tells the story of the destruction, rebuilding and re-destruction of the frontier town Hard Times.
At the beginning of the novel, Clay Turner, otherwise known as the Bad Man from Bodie, arrives in town and begins to wreak havoc. ‘Bad Men from Bodie weren’t ordinary scoundrels’, Blue tells us, ‘they came with the land’.[5] They are manifestations of the vicious nature of life on the frontier, symbols of a land that resists the creep of civilisation. Within the space of 18 pages, Turner, whose name suggests a gravedigger, manages to rape and murder a prostitute, kill several townsfolk who attempt to stop him, and drive everyone else away before he sets fire to the whole town, thereby razing it to the ground. The survivors can do nothing except stand on the Dakota plain and watch their homes being destroyed. In all this time, Turner does no’t speak a single word, limited instead to communicating by grinning, (3 does this mean on three occasions?) snoring (7), hooting, and hollering (10), yelling, and whooping (10), and laughing.[6] He refuses to enter into the supposedly civilised discourse of the town, delighting in his own more visceral exclamations of emotion instead. Turner is an ironic embodiment of the creative destruction that Philip Fisher identifies as one of the cornerstones of American culture: Turner’s creativity lies in the inventiveness with which he destroys the town and its people, not in any vision he has for its replacement.[7]
The civilisation whose vestiges Turner destroys is shown in that first chapter to be inherently weak. Its inhabitants’ main focus appears to be protecting their investments from Turner. The innkeeper Avery is clearly more concerned by the fate of his store of liquor than that of his prostitutes, and Hausenfeld the undertaker complains that Fee, the first man to die, reneged on a contract to build coffins for him. Rather than brave frontier fighters, the men are eager to hide behind the women, with Avery trying to get the prostitute Molly to stab Turner, and Blue responding to a call for help by pointing out that he was never actually elected mayor. The implication is that the town Hard Times, symbol of the settlement of the West, is morally bankrupt: its ‘every man for himself’ attitude fails to save anyone.
Were the illustration of this moral bankruptcy Doctorow’s sole aim in writing this western, he could easily have stopped here. Indeed, archive material shows Doctorow’s initial intention was to leave this western as a short story entitled ‘The Bad Man from Bodie’.[8] The story follows the first chapter of the eventual novel almost word for word, and forms a coherent and well-fashioned story that bears few hallmarks of the first-time writer. What then, made Doctorow decide to go beyond the initial short story and develop it into a full novel?
It seems clear, both from the eventual novel and from archive material, that Doctorow found the scenario of rebuilding from the destroyed town perfect for staging his moral crisis under the sky. It is, in effect, a blank canvas, a stage on which he can place his characters as he slowly constructs a metaphor of the building of the American nation and examines capital’s role within it.
Following Turner’s destruction and abandonment of the town, only four of the original inhabitants resist the temptation to join the other survivors in their flight across the plain. Blue, the self-appointed mayor and narrator of the novel, adopts Jimmy Fee, the orphaned son of the town’s original founder, and they come to form an uneasy family unit with Molly, an Irish prostitute who was badly burnt in the fire and whose manipulation of the men in her determination to have revenge on the Bad Man makes her the opposite of Molly, the innocent-natured heroine of Wister’s The Virginian.
They spend their first night in the ruins of the town with John Bear, an Indian who lurks on the edges of the town. Bear is the one character who appears to understand the land which they inhabit. The first mention of him in the novel is when the Bad Man raids his garden and eats one of the onions he is growing (the Indian’s garden is the only place in Hard Times where organic life grows–everything else is brought in from elsewhere and traded), and Bear also acts as the town’s unofficial doctor. Significantly, however, John Bear is also deaf and dumb and therefore unable to communicate with the settlers–if he is representative of the land, there is a chasm of understanding between him and the settlers, and he is unable either to transmit his wisdom or to enter into the town’s discourse, just as the Bad Man, the other character who appears natural and connected to the land, does not communicate fully. As Harter and Thompson suggest in their monograph on Doctorow, these characters’ ‘silence connotes a profound mistrust of civilisation and a refusal to communicate with it’.[9]
These four characters are soon joined by Zar, a Russian brothel owner, and his four prostitutes, one of whom is Chinese, a German storekeeper, an itinerant hunter, and a Swede searching for other Swedish settlers in the hope that his wife might regain her sanity. This multinational mix is clearly a symbol of the melting pot of American immigration, and Doctorow originally planned to make it even more diverse: a synopsis, sent to publishers after only the first three chapters had been written, promises to include: Moldati, an Italian barber; railroad workers; a hostile tribe of ghost dancing Indians on the outskirts of town who refuse to retire to their reservation; a cavalry troop sent to deal with them; and a group of ‘Mormon offshoots’ who provoke ill will amongst the townspeople.[10] Even in their brief mention in the synopsis, these characters gain some form of life for the reader because, to think back to Jameson for a moment, they correspond to the pop figures and simulacra of the West that we are so familiar with through film and other representations of history.
Doctorow’s original plan, outlined in this synopsis, is for the Bad Man to return ‘with three others of his breed. They go into Zar’s saloon and begin to cut up. …The saloon becomes the stage for a wild gun battle in which the Bad Man and his buddies take on anyone and everyone’.[11]
Although elements of this nihilistic ending survive in the eventual novel, the dilution of the original cast shifts the focus of the novel from what may originally have been intended to highlight the inherent savagery of the west to something more subtle and in line with one of Doctorow’s consistent preoccupations throughout his subsequent writing career, namely the role of capital in the forging of American identity. This is a preoccupation that can be traced through Ragtime, Loon Lake, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks, and it starts here with the arrival of Zar.
Zar arrives in town mistakenly, believing that there’s a road leading directly up to the mines above it. His first act is to barter some coffee and beef in exchange for some water from the well that Blue has commandeered after the death of its owner. As Fisher argues, ‘Bargaining reveals that a market exists’, and this initial exchange economy is soon superseded by one based on money when miners come to town on Saturday night and pay him for his drink and prostitutes.[12] Commerce has arrived. Zar’s plans to leave that day are immediately put on hold, and from this moment, everything in Hard Times becomes infused, or tainted, with the idea of money. The miners’ songs as they let off steam in Zar’s tent are of dreams of mountains of gold, and Blue becomes further implicated in this new economy when a miner entrusts him with letters and two dollars’ worth of silver in readiness for the next arrival of the stagecoach. This simple act of commerce inadvertently leads to the rebuilding of Hard Times:
He [Zar] pointed to the boy’s letter which I had put in my shirt pocket: ‘And town is gone but use for town may not be gone. Am I right?’
‘You’re right.’
…
‘Frand,’ he said taking a deep breath, ‘what do you smell? … You smell the coffee? You smell the horse? You smell the burn in the air?’
I nodded. ‘Ah, you have not the merchant’s nose. You know what I smell? The money!’[13] (pp54-5)
Zar is the novel’s arch-capitalist, believing that true wealth lies not in the manufacture of goods or the harvesting of the land, but in trade. He tells Blue he abandoned farming because ‘only people who sell farmers their land, their fence, their seed, their tools … only these people are rich … not miners have gold but salesmen of burros and picks and pans … not cowboys have money but saloons who sell to them their drinks, … not those who look for money but those who supply those to look’.[14] (64)
These words assume a prophetic meaning when, after a harsh winter during which the natural world threatens to wipe the town from the map, Hard Times becomes a relatively thriving centre of commerce. In addition to the saloon Zar builds, Isaac Maple, a German immigrant, sets up a store, and a brisk trade develops with the miners from the lodes above the town and other men who come to the town in search of work.
This influx of people to the town is fuelled by the false belief that the mining company has found a rich seam of gold and that a railroad will soon be built to connect the town to a stamping mill nearby. As de facto mayor, Blue finds himself the agent for various claims on the land, with plots being bought for ten-dollar pieces, thus symbolising the appropriation of the west by capital. The stagecoach company gives Blue ledgers in which to record orders, and it is in these that he eventually writes the story of the town, claiming there is enough paper to write the Bible. This act of recording is highlighted by Doctorow’s decision to divide the novel not into three books, but into three ledgers. Thus with no epigraph, the first words we encounter in the novel are ‘First ledger’, thereby giving a dual meaning to the notion of an account of the West. Capital is implicated even in the telling of it.
Indeed, capital becomes such a pervasive element in this new American town that the one act that Blue inscribes in the ledgers that is connected to neither property nor an order for the stage still has a transaction at its heart. Bert, one of the miners, falls in love with the Chinese prostitute, but Blue can only conduct their marriage ceremony after Bert has bought Zar another prostitute to replace her. In what is perhaps the novel’s only humorous moment, Bert fulfils his part of the bargain by leaving town and returning with an aged, toothless crone to be his wife’s replacement. It seems that nothing from love to land can be inscribed in the ledgers, and therefore the story, without capital and the market somehow being implicated.
However, this initial state of fragile prosperity does not last. An underbelly of violence begins to develop in the town as itinerant workers become restless without the materialisation of the expected employment opportunities, and therefore find themselves excluded from the increasingly money-dominated society. In an attempt to prevent violence between the men, Blue gives several of them paid commissions for errands such as bringing cattle to the town, and temporarily suspends charging people for water from his well until the mine and/or railroad takes on workers. This latter decision enrages Zar, who has been planning to drill his own well and charge for the water–the arch-capitalist simply cannot comprehend the idea of giving away something for free, and he accuses Blue of being sick.[15] (176)
Yet Blue’s magnanimous act is a key moment in the novel’s relation to capital. While Blue has been a keythe driving force behind – repetition. Maybe pivotal? figure in the re-emergence of the town, not above bending the truth to attract first Zar and then Isaac Maple as fellow settlers, his attitude towards the market economy within it has always been more ambiguous. While he doubtlessly prospers from his role as the stagecoach’s agent, his main concern seems not to be the pursuit of profit, but merely the maintenance of the stagecoach’s regular route to Hard Times. As long as these visits continue, the town remains a destination, and ‘Blue’s dream of creating the facsimile of a frontier civilization’ survives.[16] He does not invest money in material comfort, preferring instead to continue in his dugout shelter reminiscent of Thoreau’s in Walden, nor, despite Molly’s pleas, does he aim to use the money to leave Hard Times in search of a better place to live. In fact, Blue hoards money like a miser only to reveal himself as a spendthrift in this final act of magnanimity. Walter Benn Michaels argues that a spendthrift ‘tries to buy his way out of the money economy. If the miser is always exchanging his money for itself, the spendthrift tries to exchange his for nothing and so, by staging the disappearance of money’s purchasing power, to stage the disappearance of money itself’.[17] In his decision to donate money to projects that he knows are based on either wild hopes or outright lies, Blue may be attempting to stage the disappearance of money, hoping to save the town by rejecting the importance that capital has come to have within it. His actions prove, however, as worthless as the projects he invests in. The Bad Man’s return shortly after Blue’s generous act may give the story a neatly circular ending that reflects Doctorow’s interest in history as an embodiment of the Nietzschean idea of eternal return, as well as a chance for Molly’s savage revenge to be acted out, but in actual fact the Bad Man wanders into a town that has already begun rioting and disintegrating.
The catalyst for this riot is the arrival of a letter from the mining company that confirms there is nothing worth excavating from the mine above the town. The sight of the miners abandoning the lodes is enough to throw the town below into chaos, its inhabitants literally wreaking havoc, suggesting that the violence embodied by the Bad Man at the beginning of the novel is in fact inherent in society itself. The mine, always the main raison d’être of Hard Times as a town, is shown to be a literally empty symbol, with the mine’s foreman assuring Blue that the ‘mountain is picked so hollow, why it’s holey as honeycomb’.[18](193) The miners’ failure to find gold ensures the railroad will never come to Hard Times, permanently excluding it from the capitalist discourse of the United States. This disconnection is immediate: when the stagecoach comes and its driver sees the riot in progress, he swiftly turns around and retreats to the safety of the plain. The town is a non-destination, its citizens foreshadowing what Jameson sees as the postmodernist dilemma of trying to locate oneself in the ‘bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital’.[19] With or without the riot and the Bad Man, it is fated to become one of the ghost towns that Fisher argues are an integral ‘part of what might be called the bargain of invention’ because of the failure of the mine.[20]
Through Blue, Doctorow implies that the mine should be seen as a symbol for the empty promises of the West, by which I mean both the American West and the West in general:
Like the West, like my life: The color dazzles us, but when it’s too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim.[21] (183)
The West has already been plundered. It is a world of empty signs that promise meaning but deliver none, like Tomorrowland, Disneyland’s already dated vision of the future that the senile Mindish rides around at the end of Doctorow’s later novel The Book of Daniel. Disneyland is a place where the embittered narrator Daniel presages Baudrillard’s essay on Disneyworld by seeing that ‘what is being offered … is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie’.[22] Yet while Daniel’s final confrontation with the empty simulacra of America may be something of a shock in that novel, in Welcome to Hard Times, this final revelation of the emptiness of the sign of the town’s prosperity should not surprise the reader, because the mine is only the final failed sign in a book filled with signifiers that are either empty, misinterpreted or have their communication disrupted.
When Molly cries out for a crucifix when Blue finds her in the smouldering ruins of the town’s original tavern, it is not because of the religious faith Blue first suspects but because it was a gift from her benefactor and the one thing of any value she has left. The wedding dress she later wears is gained through a misunderstanding, and its symbolic function never realised. Blue later sees Molly and Jimmy laying flowers at Jimmy’s father’s grave, but Blue knows by the order of the headstones that they are tending the wrong grave. Isaac Maple the storekeeper comes to Hard Times in search of his brother, the original storekeeper, and only stays because Blue persuades him that he has more chance of finding his brother, Ezra, if he remains in Hard Times and lets word of his own whereabouts spread. Blue never tells Isaac that the letter he wrote to his brother informing him of his impending arrival arrived on the same stage that brought Isaac, the message delayed and its meaning useless. When the town grows more populous, Blue notes that every newcomer soon learns they can get free credit from Isaac simply by lying about having encountered Ezra out in the west.
This wilful misguiding of Isaac is part of what could be seen as the wider thesis of the book, the implication that the most misleading sign of all is perhaps not capital, which can at least sometimes be exchanged for physical goods or services, but language. Blue is the first of Doctorow’s figures who actively narrate the narration of the book, which he is supposedly writing while dying, but the more he writes, the more he suspects that his words are not to be trusted:
I’m trying to put down what happened but the closer I’ve come in time the less clear I am in my mind. I’m losing my blood to this rag, but more, I have the cold feeling everything I’ve written doesn’t tell how it was, no matter how careful I’ve been to get it all down.[23](199)
Yet this distrust of language, particularly in its relation to history, is ambivalent, because apart from some charred timbers, the one thing that survives of the town after the Bad Man’s second visit is the sign erected at the highpoint of the town’s prosperity:
And on a dazzling morning Swede raised up the sign over the street. From the scaffold of the well it stretched all the way across to the false front of Zar’s saloon: WELCOME TO HARD TIMES.[24] (148)
The story inscribed in the ledgers, told in words/signs that may not transmit the original signified, and the eponymous sign are all that remain of this history, the truth unknowable.
This brings us back to the Jameson quote with which this essay started, and also to Doctorow’s willingness to mix fact and fiction. The characters in Welcome to Hard Times, from the prostitutes to the sage Indian, are so archetypal and, at times, one-dimensional, that one could be forgiven for thinking that Doctorow had purloined them from the dime novels he was reading. However, to see that as a negative is perhaps to miss the point. Doctorow, as a writer of the American Left, has consistently been mistrustful of received history and the way it is shaped by the ruling classes to the detriment of other discourses, and suggests that this history is little more than a simulacra, a copy of something that never existed.
Rather than trying to give a definitive alternative account of life of the West, he embraces this use of simulacra and pop images of our history, but shows them in a different light and encourages us to view them through an alternative lens. While this may be part of a wider project to show that all history is made up at least partly of received myths, which makes all history, for want of a better word, a lie, Welcome to Hard Times is the first instalment in a novelistic career that suggests that if we can never ascertain the truth about our past, we can, through fiction, at least aim to tell a better lie.
University of Manchester
Notes
[1] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 25.
[2]Publisher’s Weekly 207 (30 June 1975), collected in Christopher D. Morris (ed), Conversations with E.L. Doctorow (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), p. 1.
[4] Loose sheet from draft of unidentified novel; E.L. Doctorow Papers, MSS 2A; Box 23; Folder 002; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
[5] E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times (New York: Plume, 1996), p. 7. Subsequent references to this edition are included within the body of the text.
Over the past thirty years, feminist scholars have continually stressed the importance of revising, re-evaluating and re-printing women’s literature. Too much of it gets ‘lost;’ too much of it falls out of print. And too much of it remains unstudied or banished to the realm of the ‘Women Writers’ course. One of feminism’s most influential works of the past thirty years, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, addresses many feminist concerns, particularly those surrounding the notion of ‘Otherness’ and women’s literature. However, The Madwoman in the Attic was written by white women, primarily about white women, and is not readily applied to the creative works of working-class women and women of colour.
Within the feminist community there are different ethnic and social groups all yearning for their own cultural voice—for a specific literary tradition made up of women from a similar racial or cultural background. This need for a voice ‘of one’s own’ (to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf) is expressed, for example, in the language of African- American author and critic Alice Walker, and the Hispanic writer, Sandra Cisneros. In Sandra Cisneros’ TheHouseonMangoStreet the young Hispanic narrator describes her need to tell the stories of her neighbourhood as an ‘ache’.[1] Whereas Walker, in her collection of essays, In Search of our Mother’s Gardens, articulates a ‘need’ for black, female precursors.[2]
This article will begin by examining the complicated relationship contemporary women writers of colour have with white feminism. In In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens Walker states that she has been influenced by white women writers and black women writers alike.[3] However, she rejects a monolithic notion of a ‘woman’s voice’ arguing that black female women writers need black female precursors.
In the first chapter of In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens Walker says, ‘It should be remembered that, as a black person, one cannot completely identify with a Jane Eyre, or her creator, no matter how much one admires them’. Charlotte Bronte’s nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre (1847) is considered a major predecessor to contemporary feminism. One of the main reasons why Jane Eyre has been so influential within feminist circles, however, is because of the character of the madwoman confined in Rochester’s attic, whom Gilbert and Gubar identified as a metaphor for the social and intellectual incarceration of white women. Hence, when Walker explicitly articulates a need for a role ‘model’ as influential as Bronte, but for black women, she is also implicitly articulating a need for a trope as influential as ‘the madwoman in the attic’, but for black women. In Search of our Mother’s Gardens is a work concerned with finding literary precursors for black women. This article, consequently, is concerned with finding a trope to represent the woman of colour’s unique literary experience.[4]
Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street is a novel that protests against the domestic roles that Hispanic cultures advocate for their women. The House on Mango Street is very much a novel about what Gilbert and Gubar describe as women’s ‘parallel confinements in texts, houses and maternal female bodies’. The confinement of women is as pertinent a theme today as ever; Gilbert and Gubar state that ‘anxieties about space seem to dominate the literature of both nineteenth-century women and their twentieth century descendents’. However Gilbert and Gubar argue that women experience their confinement in ‘houses’, which is not necessarily the case for the contemporary working class woman, who is restricted just as much by poverty as she is by patriarchy.[5]
If The House on Mango Street can be described as a novel that protests against the domestication of women and the creative suppression of women, it can also be described as a novel that protests against white feminist literary criticism. Cisneros calls her novel The House on Mango Street, but then goes on to tell the stories of women who live in three-storey flats and in crowded houses, to illustrate how difficult it can be for a poor, Hispanic woman to relate to Gilbert and Gubar’s world of ‘attics’, ‘houses’ and ancestral halls.
The first section of this article, therefore, entitled ‘The Legacy of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic’, explains one of feminism’s most famous feminist tropes, before examining what aspects of the trope are relevant to the works of contemporary women of colour and what aspects are less relevant. Contemporary women of colour are just as keen as Bronte to break out of what Gilbert and Gubar describe as ‘male houses and male texts’. However, there is the problem of the generic ‘house’ and the generic woman that this implies.
Gilbert and Gubar’s use of terms like ‘houses’, ‘attics’ and ‘all women’ seem to be advocating a monolithic notion of patriarchy, and this provides the basis for the discussion in the following section entitled ‘Ghost Stories’. Here it is revealed how one of Gilbert and Gubar’s arguments fails to consider race as well as class. This particular argument, which is explored in detail, is an example of what Adrienne Rich describes as the ‘white solipsism’ of white feminists, because Gilbert and Gubar do not see a black woman’s race as significant to their argument.[6] The ‘white solipsism’ of white feminism is just one of the factors that contributes to the silencing of women of colour’s voices.
Thus the following section entitled ‘Silences’ looks at how African-American women’s voices in particular have been silenced. Here the article focuses on Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens in which Walker suggests ways to tackle the silencing of one’s foremothers. She emphasises the importance of acknowledging the African-American oral tradition and the survival of black women’s creativity, despite historical oppression. She argues that it is the contemporary black woman’s duty to provide her ancestors with a voice by embracing the oral tradition and by rediscovering forgotten black women writers.
Because Gilbert and Gubar’s trope of ‘the madwoman in the attic’ fails to address the multiple oppressions that affect the woman writer of colour, the next stage of the argument attempts to identify a new trope or figure—a figure that can adequately represent the woman writer of colour’s biggest challenge: building a cultural tradition out of silence. Within the creative works of Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison are characters exhibiting traits of ‘baby-mothers’ or ‘baby-women’. The article argues that these baby-mothers and baby-women are manifestations of the relationship contemporary women writers of colour have with literary silence. Hence, the following section entitled ‘A Baby-Mother is Born’ demonstrates how the figure of the ‘baby-mother’ is applicable to African American women writers like Alice Walker, who are concerned with building a cultural tradition out of silence.
In ‘A Different Kind of Baby-Mother’ the argument moves on from Walker and Hurston to examine how the ‘baby-mother’ trope also applies to Esperanza, the heroine of The House on Mango Street. However, Esperanza is a different kind of ‘baby-mother’ to Walker: she creates a literary tradition not out of forgotten writers, but out of oral stories which have been passed on to her from her mother and the other women on the street. Like Walker, Cisneros is keen to include oral stories within her literary inheritance, but this raises the obvious problem of how to reconcile an oral tradition with the written word. Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye and Sandra Cisneros in The House on Mango Street attempt to overcome this problem by employing child narrators.
The article concludes with a return to Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. It is no coincidence that Walker ends this work by describing her baby daughter as maternal: it is proof that images of ‘baby-mothers’ surface in the creative and critical works of women of colour to resist silence and separation.
The Legacy of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argue that the madwoman who haunts the attic in Bronte’s Jane Eyre is not only a double for the protagonist, but a double for the author, too. They argue that there are two plots in Jane Eyre: the story of Jane and the story of the madwoman. This doubling provides the backbone for other regency and nineteenth century novels by women. Novels, like those by Jane Austen, for example, are often constructed around two plots: the story of the heroine and the story of the ‘Other’ woman. The former may tell the story of a younger woman in pursuit of a husband, while the latter tells the story of a woman who is marginalised by her age, health, marital status or cultural origins. It is this ‘Other’ plot which is important to Gilbert and Gubar; it is here where the nineteenth century woman writer explores her ambivalent feelings towards the pen(is). The figure of ‘the madwoman in the attic’ therefore becomes a feminist trope—a representation of the woman writers’ frustration and anger with being trapped inside what Gilbert and Gubar describe as ‘male texts and male houses’. The madwoman’s inarticulate grunting symbolises the difficulty the nineteenth-century woman writer had with expressing herself through a language with a heavy masculine bias, and within patriarchal ideologies and constructions.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) the depressed protagonist is confined to an attic nursery by her physician husband and is ‘forbidden’ to write. She is kept in an ‘ancestral hall’ and her creativity is repressed.[7] Full-blown madness quickly ensues. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the nineteenth century writer experiences herself as ‘sick’, since a woman’s desire to write is seen as a perversion by her male contemporaries. They go on to argue that ‘to heal herself…the woman-writer must exorcise the sentences which breed her infection in the first place’. She must break out of ‘male houses and male texts’.[8]
Contemporary women writers of colour seem keen to break out of patriarchal constructions and many do not subscribe to boundaries, binaries or standard rules of grammar. The Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, rebels against the western concept of authorship as ownership in her novel Ceremony. As a writer, Silko casts herself in the role of reporter rather than prime mover, informing us that she is telling the story through a medium, what she calls a ‘thought-woman’: ‘I am telling you the story/ she is thinking’.[9] Similarly, Cisneros’s heroine from The House on Mango Street, Esperanza, intertwines her own stories around the other women’s stories by reporting their speech, as opposed to using speech marks. Cisneros’s refusal to separate Esperanza’s voice from the ‘Other’ voices in the text undermines western, patriarchal notions of originality and hierarchical ownership of the narrative.
Nevertheless, the trope of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ lacks relevance in the contemporary, socially and ethnically diverse world of women writers for the following reasons. Firstly, the woman writer of colour does not formulate a secondary plot for ‘Othered’ women: ‘Othered’ women are the central protagonists. Secondly, although the contemporary woman writer of colour is still dealing with houses that belong to men, she is dealing with different kinds of houses (and, by extension, different oppressions). Esperanza’s house in The House on Mango Street may be ‘a Daddy’s’, but it is not an ‘ancestral hall’.[10] The space of the attic may address patriarchal confinement, but it is a middle/upper class space and fails to address the class position of women of colour.
Ghost Stories
Gilbert and Gubar’s generalisation about ‘houses’ is representative of the way they generalise about women, and it is not just the subject of class that they fail to consider. In the chapter entitled ‘Captivity and Consciousness in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Gilbert and Gubar completely erase race from their argument. In it they discuss the character of Cassy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Cassy, a mixed-race concubine gets revenge on her tyrannical owner, Simon Legree, by donning a white sheet and pretending to be the ‘ghost’ of his dead mother. However, despite noting that the chapter they are discussing was entitled ‘An Authentic Ghost Story’ by Stowe, Gilbert and Gubar fail to address why ‘a ghost story’ might be significant within the context of black women’s history. Instead, they find the fact that Cassy is wearing ‘white’ to be of more significance; perhaps because this turns her into another ‘madwoman in the attic’.
Despite Stowe calling the chapter ‘a ghost story’, Gilbert and Gubar argue that Cassy is ‘manipulating a familiar fiction: a madwoman herself, she plans to liberate herself…by exploiting the story of the madwoman in the attic’. Furthermore, they use the term ‘all women’ when arguing that ‘the black woman dressed in white also illustrates the bond between ‘all women’ who are enslaved by what Stowe has depicted as an overwhelmingly patriarchal slave economy’. Not only do Gilbert and Gubar miss the significance of the black woman being a ‘ghost’, in their determined efforts to argue that the story is really about a ‘madwoman in the attic’, they also manage to present a story about a black slave woman as a story about ‘all women’, about white women. The black woman’s ‘ghost story’ is subsequently silenced; her ‘ghosts’ remain.[11]
Cassy’s ghostly existence is highly significant for the contemporary woman of colour, however, because ghosts have recently been identified as metaphors of cultural invisibility.[12] In The House on Mango Street, many of the women have a ghostly existence. Women are confined in flats, staring out of windows or at ceilings, waiting. Their unfulfilled dreams ‘haunt’ Esperanza. In the vignette ‘Edna’s Ruthie’, Esperanza says, ‘I can’t understand why Ruthie is living in Mango Street if she doesn’t have to…but she says she’s just visiting…But the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays’.[13] Marin is similarly ‘waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.’[14] In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the child narrator tells us that ‘the only living thing in the Breedlove’s house was the coal stove’ locating the protagonist, Pecola, and her parents in the land of the living dead (the land of the culturally invisible).[15] Jago Morrison argues in Contemporary Fiction that in Toni Morrison’s Beloved the baby-ghost is ‘a past that will not lie down to sleep, a reminder of a history that no one wants retold’.[16] The strong prevalence of ghosts in the works of women of colour suggests that they are fighting a different battle to the white feminist: patriarchy is not the only ‘ghost’ that needs exorcising.
Silences
The silencing of Cassy’s story is only one example of how black women’s stories are silenced. Many women’s stories never get written in the first place, owing to factors such as lack of time, money and space. Furthermore, a history of illiteracy and slavery has also left a devastating trail of silence, which every African-American woman writer now has to contend with. In In Search of our Mother’s Gardens Walker says that despite a history of illiteracy and oppression the ‘creative spark’ has been kept alive through the generations nevertheless. It is therefore the young black woman’s duty to provide her foremothers with a voice.[17]
According to Walker, a lack of role models can also be a hindrance, adding that one of her stories would never have been written had she not discovered Zora Neale Hurston’s work. In her first chapter, Walker retells a story that was passed down orally to her by her mother. This story was about Walker’s ‘mad aunt’, who was cured by ‘powders and spells’. During her research on voodoo for the story, Walker discovered the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, a precursor who provided the ‘historical underpinning’ needed to authenticate her mother’s story.[18]
When literary works do get written they can still be subsequently sidelined. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, fell out of print before it was ‘rescued’ by Walker. Thus, for Walker, the creation of a black female literary tradition is as dependent on the writing down of our mother’s oral stories as it is on the rediscovery of black women writers.
In In Search of our Mother’s Gardens, what becomes ever more apparent, as we read, is a black woman’s deep-seated longing to be nurtured within a tradition of black women writers and storytellers. The following section, therefore, attempts to find a trope that can define how women like Walker build a literary tradition out of silenced women’s voices.
The Search for an Alternative Figure for Women of Colour
Having established the limitations of the madwoman in the attic trope, it seems necessary to identify an alternative figure—one that can define the woman writer of colour’s literary and historical experience. This figure, or trope, can be found within the creative works of Toni Morrison and Cisneros. Their novels contain characters with a capacity to embody a certain set of characteristics simultaneously, characters who are both baby and woman, baby and mother, or foetus and woman.
In Morrison’s Beloved, for example, the boundary between ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ progressively collapses as the novel develops. Before the baby-ghost Beloved even arrives on the scene, Morrison provides us with an image of a pregnant (maternal) yet crawling (babyish) Sethe, in the passage where she is encouraged by the white girl—Amy—to crawl along beside her. The first time Sethe sees Beloved she is infantilised, ‘the moment she got close enough to see her face, Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity…Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight year old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable’.[19] Seeing her mother and her daughter provokes the same reaction in Sethe: fear. Very early on in Beloved ‘baby’ and ‘mother’ become emotionally entangled. Ironically, in this novel, it is the literal estrangement between mothers and daughters that fiercely intertwine ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ conceptually. The severing of ties between mother and daughter in novels about slavery leads to representations of what I call ‘baby-women’ and ‘baby-mothers’.
Initially, Beloved’s physical appearance blends womanly attributes with baby attributes:
Poorly fed, thought Sethe, and younger than her clothes suggested—good lace and a rich woman’s hat. Her skin was flawless except for three vertical scratches on her forehead so fine and thin they seemed at first like hair, baby hair before it bloomed and roped into the masses of black yarn under her hat.[20]
However, her womanly features by the end of the novel transform into maternal (albeit horrifying) characteristics. Sethe, by contrast, regresses into a childlike state, and as Beloved’s supernatural powers become stronger, the distinction between ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ is lost:
Then it seemed to Denver the thing was done: Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child…It was hard to know what she (Beloved) would do from minute to minute. When the heat got hot, she might walk around naked or wrapped in a sheet, her belly protruding like a winning watermelon.[21]
The earlier image of a pregnant Sethe is replaced with an image of Beloved’s ‘protruding’ belly. This article argues that it is Beloved’s refusal to be silenced that is responsible for the continual switching between mother and child positions. Moreover, Beloved’s refusal to be estranged from her mother results in the ultimate destruction of the mother/ child binary—Beloved and Sethe become ‘baby-mothers’, exhibiting characteristics of babies and mothers at the same time. Vivid images of a ‘baby-mothers’ gradually surface in Beloved to resist silence and separation
The separation of mothers and children during slavery can be compared to Walker’s separation from her black literary foremothers. This is why the figure of the ‘baby-mother’ in Beloved can be read as a manifestation of the contemporary woman writer of colour’s relationship to her silenced and estranged literary foremothers: the creation of a literary tradition from the silenced voices of the past also entails breaking down the boundary between ‘mother’ and ‘baby’. The problem of silenced precursors means that the relationship between foremother and contemporary is not as simple as that of mother to daughter: both precursor and successor can only find their voice by becoming ‘baby-mothers’. In the next section I use the example of Walker’s discovery of Hurston to explain how the figure of the ‘baby-mother’ is able to recover a literary tradition out of silence.
A Baby-Mother is Born
When Walker rediscovered Hurston’s novel Their Eyes were Watching God she was able to establish a black female literary tradition by playing the role of ‘baby-mother’. In order for a silenced work to be reborn (in this case, reprinted), the contemporary woman writer (Walker) must give birth to it (adopt the role of ‘mother’). Yet the moment she gives birth to it she is herself reborn (taking on the characteristics of a baby) into a tradition of black women writers, a tradition that previously did not exist for her. In the same instant, and by the reverse logic, the precursor (Hurston) also becomes a ‘baby-mother:’ when the contemporary (Walker) allows her work to be reborn she must take on the role of ‘baby’. But the moment her work is reborn she is established as one of Walker’s foremothers. This event establishes the precursor and successor as equals within the tradition—reborn in the same moment, and mutually dependent on each other for a communal voice.
Of course, Walker’s tradition also included her mother’s stories. This brings us to Cisneros’s TheHouseonMangoStreet where the heroine’s literary inheritance consists not of silenced women writers but of oral stories, passed on to her by her mother and the women who live with her on the street. Alice Walker describes the ‘creative spark’ as something that is inherited—’handed on’ through the generations.[22] However, Esperanza absorbs it during her encounters with the women in her Hispanic neighbourhood. Her creative inspiration, then, does not come from a past writer but from the women that surround her on Mango Street.
A Different Kind of Baby-Mother
TheHouseonMangoStreet tells the story of a young, poor, Hispanic woman’s struggle to become an artist. The struggle to become an artist in a patriarchal world of ‘male texts and male houses’ is exacerbated by her class and race.
Virginia Woolf argues that we think back through our mothers if we are women, and Jacqueline Doyle argues that ‘for women like Alice Walker and Sandra Cisneros, these mothers include women outside the “tradition” as it is conventionally understood’.[23] For the heroine, Esperanza, this includes her own mother—’a smart cookie’ who ‘could’ve been somebody, you know?’.[24] Doyle argues that, ‘In the extended filiations of her ethnic community Esperanza finds a network of maternal figures. She writes to celebrate all of their unfulfilled talents and dreams and to compensate for their losses’.[25] Ironically, the women’s creative suppression becomes Esperanza’s creative inspiration. In the final vignette she says, ‘I like to tell stories’.[26] Esperanza writes down the ‘Other’ women’s stories as well as her own in an attempt to break the silence and establish a cultural tradition of ‘one’s own’.
Right from the third vignette Esperanza expresses a desire to break the matrilineal tradition of silence in her own family. In ‘My Name’ she discusses her great grandmother who was also named Esperanza and says ‘I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window’. Esperanza’s mother’s creative freedom is jeopardised by a Hispanic society that expects women to fulfil domestic roles, such as that of mother and housekeeper. Esperanza’s mother has four children to take care of, and in the vignette ‘A Smart Cookie’ we are told that ‘She used to draw when she had time’. Esperanza, therefore, protests against the domestication of women saying, ‘I have begun my own private war…I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.[27]
Minerva is a young mother who Esperanza tells us is ‘only a little bit older than me but already she has two kids …Her mother raised her kids alone and it looks like her daughters will go that way too’. Minerva belongs to a matrilineal tradition of single mothers where herself, her sisters and her mother simply do not have the time to devote to creative writing. However, Esperanza stresses that for the women of Mango Street the ‘creative spark’ miraculously survives. In ‘Minerva Writes Poems’ Esperanza says ‘when the kids are asleep after she’s fed them their pancake dinner, she writes poems on little pieces of paper’. Ruthie tells Esperanza that her library books are ‘wonderful, wonderful’ despite the fact that she cannot read them. And ‘Alicia, who inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university’. Esperanza’s own mother never made it to college because she did not have any respectable clothes to wear, ‘No clothes, but I had brains’.[28]
The women of Mango Street also suffer from lack of personal space: Esperanza has to share a room with her sister, and Ruthie, a victim of domestic violence, sleeps ‘on a couch in her mother’s living room’. In the vignette ‘A House of my Own’ (a playful allusion to Woolf) Esperanza describes her frustration with being trapped in what Gilbert and Gubar describe as ‘male texts and male houses’. However, she articulates her remoteness from Gilbert and Gubar’s world of attics and ancestral halls by reminding us that the house on Mango Street is more like a flat than a house. In this vignette Esperanza longs for ‘a house’ as opposed to a ‘flat’, one that is not owned by a man: ‘Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a Daddy’s. A house all my own’. The space of the flat, as opposed to the attic, is a space that renders the heroine doubly confined—by patriarchy and poverty.[29]
However, Esperanza shows her creativity and resourcefulness by taking something restrictive—her lack of ‘room’—and imagining it as a womb. In the vignette ‘Skinny Trees’ Esperanza compares herself to a set of ‘raggedy’ trees ‘planted by the city’ that ‘grew despite concrete’.[30] Esperanza overcomes the problem of lack of space by imagining herself as a foetus with the potential to grow within Mango Street, before breaking away from it. At the end of the novel Esperanza’s house is personified as a maternal figure who allows her to be reborn as an artist. Here, imagination is shown to triumph over literal and textual confinement.
Doyle argues that by the end of the novel the house ‘becomes an overtly maternal figure who collaborates in her freedom and creativity’.[31] The fluid nature of the maternal together with the way Cisneros temporarily endows Esperanza with foetal qualities, is enough evidence to suggest that a ‘baby-mother’ tradition is manifesting itself in this novel. It is very clear in the final vignette that Esperanza is enacting her own rebirth. Doyle argues that she is reborn as an ‘artist’. I argue, more specifically, that she is reborn as a ‘baby-mother’: an artist within a tradition of her own making. Furthermore, the way Esperanza reports the women’s stories, rather than isolating their speech within speech marks, suggests that TheHouseonMangoStreet is a book about tradition building: Cisneros seems more concerned with the communal voice as opposed to individual voices.
Cisneros dedicates her work ‘A las Mujeres/ To the women’. This allows us to perceive Esperanza as Cisneros’s ‘baby double’, because, like Cisneros, she too is dedicated to ‘the women’. In the final vignette ‘Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes’ Esperanza expresses her need to write ‘for the ones who cannot out’. Esperanza represents the ‘baby’ in the ‘woman’. Moreover, the boundary between the Cisneros (a woman) and Esperanza (a child/baby) collapses in the vignette ‘The Family of Little Feet’. Here Esperanza and her friends play at being women by ‘tee-tottering’ in high heels. We see an adult author speaking through a child narrator, who wears high heels (like a woman) and totters like a baby. By collapsing the boundary between ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ in this vignette, Cisneros also collapses the boundary between the heroine and the author.[32]
This vignette presents a picture of a ‘baby-woman’ and later presents a picture of a ‘foetal woman‘. The reason we do not find vivid images of ‘baby-mothers’ like those in Beloved is because this novel is primarily concerned with the way domestic roles (like the role of mother) silence Hispanic women, whereas Morrison is primarily concerned with the way slavery has silenced black women’s voices. When Gilbert and Gubar argue that women’s bodies ‘have been imagined as houses’, because they house children, they draw attention to the way patriarchal ideologies make motherhood inseparable from female identity.[33] Cisneros, therefore, avoids making ‘woman’ synonymous with ‘mother’ by emphasising the ‘baby’ in the woman and by personifying Esperanza’s house as maternal.
Although TheHouseonMangoStreet contains women who exemplify the characteristics of ‘baby-women’ as opposed to ‘baby-mothers’, it can still be argued that when Esperanza gives birth to her mother’s story both mother and daughter become ‘baby-mothers’. The same thing happens when Esperanza gives a voice to the other maternal figures on Mango Street. By writing down the ‘Other’ women’s stories Esperanza gives birth to them and assumes the characteristics of a mother. Once reborn that same woman is established as one of Esperanza’ foremothers. As she gives birth to them she too is reborn (characteristics of a baby) into a tradition of Hispanic women’s story telling. The ‘Other’ women of Mango Street lose their ghostly status by becoming ‘baby-mothers’ in the same instant. This event marks a specific moment in history where Esperanza and the women of Mango Street become part of a cultural tradition—a tradition that previously had only a ghostly existence.
Although Esperanza embraces the oral tradition she clearly feels a need for the written word. However, women of colour like Walker and Cisneros are still keen to include oral stories within their literary inheritance.
Reclaiming Infantilised Constructions of the Feminine
The difficulty of reconciling an oral tradition with the written word is only a problem in a world of hierarchical boundaries, however. Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Cisneros employ child narrators as a means deconstructing patriarchal constructions and hierarchical binaries (such as the binary that divides speech from the written word).
Esperanza, for example, with her raw, untainted creativity has no need for speech marks: ‘He never hits me hard. She said her mama rubs lard on all the places where it hurts’.[34] She has no desire to distinguish between voices, or to aspire to originality/ ownership. A lack of speech marks has two effects. Firstly, it collapses the boundary between speech and writing, and secondly, it subverts the boundary between the heroine’s voice and the ‘Other’ voices in the text. This second effect is of the most significance, however, because it gives equal weight and value to all the women’s stories. No story is secondary. No story is sidelined to the realm of ‘Other’. Every voice is precious.
In The Yellow Wallpaper the protagonist’s mental breakdown is the result of her husband’s patriarchal prescription: he confines her to a nursery at the top of the house and forbids her to write. She is patronised, infantilised and creatively repressed. For Gilman, patriarchal notions of the infantilised Victorian woman are partly responsible for the protagonist’s literal and textual confinement. Thus, this nineteenth century story advocates that we move away from infantilised constructions of the feminine and treat women as mature and responsible beings.
However, if a silenced past can be reclaimed then so can Victorian notions of the child-like woman. Cisneros in Mango Street and Morrison in TheBluestEye use child narrators and clearly feel a need to reclaim infantilised constructions of the feminine, seeing the child-like woman as having creative potential.[35] However, they reclaim it on their own terms and use it to deconstruct other patriarchal constructions. For example, Gilbert and Gubar say that ‘women have often been… imagined as houses’, a patriarchal construction that claims a woman’s body’s primary purpose is to ‘house’ children. Furthermore, Gilbert and Gubar say that woman is ‘conditioned to believe that as a house she is herself owned by a man’.[36] However, Cisneros, via her playful child narrator, inverts the ‘woman as house’ construction by giving Esperanza foetal qualities and her house maternal qualities. Rather than imagining woman as ‘house’, she imagines house as ‘woman’. Not womb as house, but house as womb. This is an example of a woman writer of colour using an infantilised construction of the feminine—’woman as foetus’—to deconstruct a patriarchal construction—’woman as house’.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison chooses a child narrator, Claudia, to relate the trauma of the onset of Pecola’s menstruation. She describes it with the grammatical and linguistic inventiveness that only a child could possess: ‘We trooped in, Frieda sobbing quietly, Pecola carrying a white tail, me carrying the little-girl-gone-to–woman pants’.[37] Pecola becomes a literal ‘baby-mother’ by falling pregnant with her father’s baby at a very young age.
In Maryse Condé’s novel, I, Tituba; Black Witch of Salem, Tituba’s mother, Abena, is raped on a slave ship when she is just sixteen years old. The pregnant woman is offered as a gift to a suicidal slave, Yao. When Yao first meets a pregnant Abena he says, ‘It seemed to him that this child’s humiliation symbolized the condition of his entire people: defeated, dispersed and auctioned off’.[38] In I, Tituba and TheBluestEye, therefore, the figure of the ‘baby-mother’ is there, above all, to embody the pain of colonisation and rape. Hence literal ‘baby-mothers’ can pose a problem for any ‘baby-mother’ tradition.
Rebirth and Walker’s Maternal Daughter
Walker was left blind in one eye following an accident during her childhood, and at the end of In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens she describes the time when her little girl held her face ‘maternally between her dimpled little hands’, and told her ‘mommy there’s a world in your eye’.[39] This resulted in Walker running from the room ‘crying and laughing’. The exhilaration Walker experienced here compares to the exhilaration she experienced when she discovered Zora during her research for her mother’s story:
In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt the joy and strength of my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence that I am not alone.[40]
Walker is saying that the process of writing becomes more psychologically rewarding when a writer feels as though she is a part of something bigger than herself—she is a part of a tradition. However, her use of words like ‘joy’ and ‘strength’, together with ‘ancient spirits’, suggests that the discovery of Zora actually made her somewhat euphoric. Walker’s experience resembles, what Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror as ‘jouissance’.[41]
In The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature, Marianne Noble argues that Kristeva’s arguments on the pleasures we derive from horror can be applied to the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century. She says that ‘Representations of horror can produce what Kristeva calls a jouissance, because they invoke the possibilities of reintegration with lost parts of one’s original wholeness, understood as a mother’. Kristeva argues that in order to establish an identity for oneself each child has to undergo a process known as ‘abjection’. This involves separating themselves from all the things that threaten the ego, including the mother. When readers are subjected to horror—something that disturbs the boundary between self and Other—they experience pleasure (jouissance) because they are reminded of a time when they were boundlessly connected to the mother—’the privileged signifier for totality’. Kristeva says that the mother represents the ‘world’ for the infant. Noble argues that ‘the link between horror and an ecstatic expansion of the self’ is as fundamental to horror as it is to sentimentalism, because ‘in identifying with another’s pain, readers experience an expanded sense of self…that resembles the jouissance’. When Walker describes the ecstasy she felt when she rediscovered Zora, she is describing feelings of ‘totality’ and ‘expansion of self’. This ecstasy is possible because she has undergone the painful separation from her foremothers that Kristeva ascribes to abjection.[42]
Walker uses the word ‘maternally’ to describe a moment in which her daughter held her face in her hands. This word acknowledges that the relationship between mother and child is fluid and interchangeable, and the process of rescuing a foremother from silence is also dependent on this fluidity. Although Walker never explicitly identifies herself as a ‘baby-mother’, the emotions aroused in her by Hurston and her daughter are the direct result of experiencing herself as a ‘baby-mother’.
However, we cannot ignore literal baby-mothers like Pecola and Abena. They do not evoke feelings of ‘joy’ or ‘strength’, and because they are such tragic figures it may seem unethical to argue that they are manifestations of anything other than pain. Nevertheless, within the critical and creative works by women of colour, the figure of the ‘baby-mother’ is a manifestation of the contemporary woman writer or critic’s relationship to her forgotten foremothers. The figure of the ‘baby-mother’ takes on many guises, but she ultimately provides us with a means of comprehending how the contemporary woman writer of colour recovers a cultural voice of ‘one’s own’ from silences.
University of East Anglia
Notes
[1] Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 110.
[2] Alice Walker, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens (London: Women’s Press, 1984), p. 83.
[3] As a university lecturer Walker taught Kate Chopin’s The Awakening alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
[5] Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination [1979] (Yale: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 89, 83.
[6] Jacqueline Doyle, ‘More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street’, MELUS, Winter 94, Vol.19, Issue 4, p. 5.
[7] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 3, ed. By Nina Baym et al. (New York: Norton and Company, 2003), pp. 833, 832.
[12] Avery Gorden, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, (University of Minnesota, 1997), P. 17. Gorden argues that ‘to write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities…is to write ghost stories.’
[35] A reviewer from the Los Angeles Times is quoted on the front cover of the Bloomsbury 1991 edition of Mango Street, as saying ‘Cisneros writes from the heart of a child – bluntly an truthfully…Everyone needs this book.’
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