Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T21:29:08.768Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“TO HELP THE NATION TO SAVE ITS SOUL”: MUSEUM PURPOSES IN JAMES'S THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2010

John Pedro Schwartz
John Pedro Schwartz*
Affiliation:
American University of Beirut
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In a 1927 lecture the Director of the British Museum Sir Frederic Kenyon countered the futurist leader F. T. Marinetti's calls for the destruction of museums by arguing that “in times of upheaval . . . salvation is to be found in adherence to tradition” rather than in “break[ing] loose from” it. Kenyon explained the museum's role in promoting this salvation:

A visit to a museum will not by itself quench a revolution. It would have been useless to invite the pétroleuses of the Commune to an official lecture in the Egyptian Gallery at the Louvre; but if they had been brought up to respect the past, there might have been a revolution without pétroleuses. Every form of instruction or experience which teaches men to link their lives with the past makes for stability and ordered progress. Hence the value of history and hence also the value of those institutions which teach history informally and without tears. (24–25)

This is perhaps the most explicit statement of the British Museum's ideological function in early twentieth-century museum discourse. The museum acts as an ideological state apparatus that calls out to museum-goers to identify with, rather than agitate against, the social order symbolized in the “examples of great men” and the “monuments of the past” (23–24). Though not without critics, much of the new museology since the 1980s draws on this historical record and poststructuralist theory to argue that the modern museum operates as a site for the reflection or reinforcement of existing power relations. Critics have associated the museum, for example, with racism and sexism (Haraway), with classism (Bourdieu and Darbel), with imperialism and colonialism (Barringer and Flynn), with mechanisms of social control (Sherman and Rogoff), and with the consecration of state authority (Duncan and Wallach). Whereas Kenyon's defense of the museum suggests a reactionary position, the cultural destruction he combats amounts to a revolutionary act, whether accomplished by the “gay incendiaries with charred fingers” exhorted by Marinetti in his movement-founding manifesto of 1909 or the communardes accused of torching the French capital during the semaine sanglante in 1871 (43). For cultural destruction is inescapably political, as Antonio Gramsci argued in “Marinetti the Revolutionary” (1916). The Italian theorist and political activist identified the futurist discourse against the museum and the aesthetic tradition it perpetuates with the Marxist task of destroying “spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions” to make way for the creation of a new, proletarian civilization (Gramsci 215).

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 239 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Arata, Stephen D. “Object Lessons: Reading the Museum in The Golden Bowl.” Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Booth, Alison. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 199–229.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Collini, Stefan. London: Cambridge UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Barringer, Tim, and Flynn, Tom, eds. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum. New York: Routledge, 1998.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian.” Selected Writings. Ed. Bullock, Marcus and Jennings, Michael W.. Cambridge: Belknap, 1996. 261–302.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 245–55.Google Scholar
Betensky, Carolyn. “Philanthropy, Desire, and the Politics of Friendship in The Princess Casamassima.” Henry James Review 22 (2001): 147–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Barbara J. On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Darbel, Alain, with Schnapper, Dominique. The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Trans. Beattie, Caroline and Merriman, Nick. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Carbonell, Bettina Messias, ed. Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.Google Scholar
Carey, John. What Good Are the Arts? London: Faber and Faber, 2005.Google Scholar
DeVine, Christine. “Revolution and Democracy in the London Times and The Princess Casamassima.” Henry James Review 23 (2002): 53–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, Carol, and Wallach, Allan. “The Universal Survey Museum.” Art History 3.4 (December 1980): 448–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Middle Years. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962.Google Scholar
Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th ed. (1911). S. v. “Museums of Science” and “Museums of Art.”Google Scholar
Flower, William Henry. Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History. New York: MacMillan, 1898.Google Scholar
Fuseli, Henry. “Present State of the Art.” Lectures on Painting, by the Royal Academicians, Barry, Opie, and Fuseli. Ed. Wornum, Ralph N.. London: H. G. Bohn, 1848.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. “Marinetti the Revolutionary.” Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Ed. Kolcotroni, Vassiliki, Goldman, Jane, and Taxidou, Olga. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 214–15.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Reesa, Ferguson, Bruce W., Nairne, Sandy, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–1985): 20–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. New York: Library of America, 1993.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. Fairfield: Augustus M. Kelley, 1977. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York Edition. New York: Scribners, 1908. Vols. 5 and 6.Google Scholar
Jevons, William Stanley. Methods of Social Reform. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1965.Google Scholar
Kenyon, Frederic. “Museums and National Life.” The Romanes Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre 12 May, 1926. Oxford: Clarendon, 1926.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. True Words for Brave Men. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878.Google Scholar
Marinetti, F. T. Selected Writings. Ed. Flint, R. W.. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.Google Scholar
Mayhew, Henry, and Cruikshank, George. 1851 or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family. London: D. Bogue, 1851.Google Scholar
Morris, William. “At a Picture Show, 1884.” The William Morris Internet Archive: Works. http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/pic_show.htm. Web. 14 March 2006.Google Scholar
Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris. New York: Elibron Classics, 2006.Google Scholar
Morris, William. Hopes and Fears for Art. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882.Google Scholar
Morris, William. “How I Became a Socialist.” The William Morris Internet Archive: Works. http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1894/hibs/hibs.htm. Web. 13 May 2008.Google Scholar
Nochlin, Linda. “Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies.” Museums in Crisis. Ed. O'Doherty, Brian. New York: George Braziller, 1972. 7–41.Google Scholar
Northey, Glenda. “Tarred with the Same Brush? A Review of Library Development in Britain, and its Subsequent Adaptation in America, Australia and New Zealand.” http://www.ak.planet.gen.nz/~gregu/Thesis/chapter1.htm. Web. 25 February 2006.Google Scholar
Peyser, Thomas Galt. “James, Race, and the Imperial Museum.” American Literary History 6.1 (Spring 1994): 48–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruskin, John. The Crown of Wild Olive. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1866.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. Fors Clavigera. 4 vols. New York: Merrill, n. d.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. London: George Allen, 1892.Google Scholar
Scanlan, Margaret. “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess Casamassima.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34.3 (Fall 1992): 380–402.Google Scholar
Seaton, James. “Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima: Revolution and the Preservation of Culture.” The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics. Ed. Edmondson, III, Henry T.. Lanham: Lexington, 2000. 15–25.Google Scholar
Sherman, Daniel J., and Rogoff, Irit, eds. Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Google Scholar
Siegel, Jonah. Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Jonah, ed. The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources. London: Oxford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Stuart, Christopher. “‘Bloom[ing] on a Dog's Allowance’: Hyacinth Robinson and the Redemption of the Working Class in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima.” American Literary Realism 36.1 (Fall 2003): 22–39.Google Scholar
Tintner, Adeline. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1986.Google Scholar
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. London: Secker and Warburg, 1964.Google Scholar
Witcomb, Andrea. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. New York: Routledge, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar