MLA 2015, Vancouver
“Home is Where the Archive is.”
Convened & chaired by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, University of Wyoming
507 Special Session
Saturday 10th January
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., West 113, VCC West
“Horace Walpole and the Disembodied Authorial House’”
Fiona Robertson, St Mary’s University, London
This paper brings together an interpretation of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill – the first
author’s house to be displayed in its constructor’s lifetime as a curiosity and artefact – and
reflections on the ongoing major restoration project, the second phase of which was completed
early in 2014. In Walpole’s lifetime, Strawberry Hill was an assertion of personal taste and
originality but also an anti-authorial, anti-archival house. Walpole’s collection of paintings,
glass, furniture, books, antiquities, china, armorial accoutrements, and miniatures, was open to
(selective) public viewing after the fashion of gentlemen’s houses in the period of the Grand
Tour; as was the cabinet in which these curiosities were set, the house itself. In the first
illustrated guide to any private house, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, at
Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex (1774, 1784), Walpole posited his ‘small
capricious house’ as ‘a paper fabric and an assemblage of curious trifles, made by an
insignificant man’. Representing everything in the house as ‘diminutive’ and idiosyncratic,
Walpole ironised his collection and its authenticity, and also explicitly anticipated its dissolution.
In his will, however, he strove to ensure that it was kept together. My paper will consider the
influence of Walpole’s house and collection on subsequent architectures of authorship, while
emphasising the uniquely ironic, prototypically postmodern, nature of Walpole’s ‘paper house’.
Everything about Strawberry Hill is ‘capricious’; as was its dismantling in the so-called
‘Great Sale’ of 1842, which (like the demolition of Pope’s villa nearby) was an act of wilful
choice, not of necessity. The sale left the house empty; and one of the challenges for the major
restoration project undertaken by the Strawberry Hill Trust is to reassemble and/or to reinvent its
interiors and artefacts. In the process, the restoration uncovers present-day conventions
governing the ways in which authors’ houses are represented, and understood, as distinctively
authorial, and the ways in which they can be claimed as part of a national archive - however
uncannily.
“Locating Sir Walter Scott in American Authors’ Homes”
Paul Westover, Brigham Young University
Pursuing the 2014 MLA theme, this paper recalls the symbolic potency of Sir Walter Scott’s
Abbotsford House, the first author’s home designed specifically as a site of memory—a
destination for literary tourists. Scott’s private residence became a public shrine, not only for
Scots nor even just for Britons, but also for Americans. Recent scholarship has underscored
Scott’s transatlantic reach, establishing not only his popularity in the nineteenth-century United
States, but also his unique portability, defined by the usefulness of his fictions as templates for
nationalist movements and gestures. Americans, it seems, readily claimed Scott as their own.
That Abbotsford served as a site of “homecoming” for Americans is beyond doubt. No
self-respecting American culture tourist in the 1800s would miss it. This paper, however, aims to
explore “coming home” to Scott in a different sense, highlighting the important presence of
Abbotsford in American literary homes. For Americans set out quite deliberately in the
nineteenth century to create their own literary landscape, and they did so in part by cloning
prominent British heritage sites. For example, Washington Irving, having visited Abbotsford in
1817, set out to build his answer to it on the banks of the Hudson. Like Abbotsford, Irving’s
Sunnyside included stepped gables and cluster-columned chimneys in an eclectic architectural
mix, and much as Scott had incorporated building materials from the nearby ruins of Melrose
Abbey in Abbotsford, Irving imported ivy clippings from Melrose to plant on Sunnyside’s roof.
Sunnyside, thus adorned, became a physical sign that an American author had built himself into
the transatlantic canon. Irving had literally transplanted the literary heritage industry as defined
by Walter Scott.
In a similar fashion, Abbotsford influenced the architecture of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Otsego Hall and other notable American landmarks. But Abbotsford also made its way into
American literary interiors. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Cambridge, Massachusetts
home, visitors still encounter an engraving of Thomas Faed’s Walter Scott and His Literary
Friends at Abbotsford on the wall. The same conversation piece also hangs at Irving’s Sunnyside
and in Abbotsford itself. One can almost imagine these pictures as animate portraits from
the Harry Potter books, intercommunicating! Normally, though, Abbotsford-American house
connections are subtler. American authors learned from Scott to use their homes as museums in
which to display literary souvenirs and other symbols of literary affiliation. And then, Scott
could make his way to American writers’ homes by less formal means, merely by the force of his
popularity. Thus, in Longfellow’s house, one finds (along with busts, portraits, and autographs of
prominent writers) a shoebox painted by one of the children, featuring scenes from Scott’s
“Young Lochnivar.” At Emerson’s house in Concord, guides display the sage’s blue morning
robe, which apparently he referred to as his “gaberlunzie.” The guides do not know why, but any
literate person of Emerson’s time would have understood the joke, a reference to Scott’s The
Antiquary. I might list many similar instances. In short, Scott’s incredible cultural saturation of
the U.S. is evident in American authors’ homes, even if today, due to Scott’s dramatic decline in
popularity, most visitors cannot recognize it. A neglected but carefully preserved archive of
transnational author-love remains right before our eyes, literally built into domestic spaces. This
paper aims to make this archive of transatlantic literary culture more legible. In doing so, it will
shed light on the nineteenth-century construction (literal and figurative) of a transnational
Anglophone canon.
“Literary House Museums as International Open-Access Education, circa 1890-1914”
Alison Booth, University of Virginia
Literary studies have been divided by nation, period, and the status of various methods,
disregarding some practical forms of popular reception and the apparatus of literary tourism. A
century ago, both education and scholarship about authors entailed tourism to their settings and
homes, and took the published form of what I call topo-biographical criticism. In the footsteps
of Washington Irving (and his pilgrimage to Scott’s Abbotsford), such writers as Hawthorne,
Stowe, Longfellow, and Twain embarked on tours, established their homes as exhibition space,
and in their writings fostered a sense of literary place. This sense of biographical location was an
open invitation to international visitors even as it claimed a national tradition. By the 1890s,
North American literary pilgrimages in Britain as well as North America were reinforced by
collections of “little journeys” or “pilgrimages” by Elbert Hubbard and Theodore F. Wolfe. The
interior of famous authors’ homes became as familiar as the Oval Office in the White House, and
served somewhat similar symbolic function (not least in democratizing an upper-bourgeois
standard of interior design). Yet literature was then far from a trade secret of one nation or even
one class or race. Focusing on Longfellow’s House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (a private home until the 1970s) and Carlyle’s House in Chelsea, London
(founded as a museum in 1895 by an Anglo-American committee), this talk illustrates these
homes as international collections originally assembled by the resident (souvenirs and gifts from
the authors’ travels and fellow writers) and now maintained by the National Park Service and the
National Trust, respectively. My exhibit relies upon consultations with the current custodians,
illustrations and photographs of the studies, relics, and other aspects of the sites, and brief
citations of homes-and-haunts series as well as contemporary writings by connoisseurs and
professors. I wish to reconstruct the open-access, crowd-sourced construction of biographical
archives in the formative period before World War I, when literary pilgrimage and
representations of the homes of authors were inseparable from literary criticism and
education. Reconsidering such practices might help us find new participatory ways to meet the
current crisis in humanities, without reverting to worship at literary shrines.
“Robert Louis Stevenson's grass hut in Hawaii”
Richard Hill, Chaminade University.
I propose to give a paper on the re-constructed grass hut inhabited by Robert Louis Stevenson
during his stay on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Stevenson and his family had an extended stay
in Honolulu in 1889, and were provided with accommodation in the royal grounds of Ainahau in
modern-day Waikiki. In the decades following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in
1893, Ainahau was sold, destroyed and claimed for modern hotel complexes, and Stevenson's
hut was carefully dismantled and re-constructed in the grounds of the Waioli Tea Rooms close to
the University of Hawaii. A storm in 2003 almost destroyed the hut, but it has since been
faithfully rebuilt to resemble its former self.
The hut, I argue, is symbolic of Stevenson's ambiguous engagement with and distance from
Hawaiian political affairs. Stevenson received guests from Hawaiian royalty, including King
Kalakaua, future Queen Liliuokalani, and the young Princess Kaiulani (whose Scottish father,
Archibald Cleghorn, was born in Edinburgh); he was also popular with the groups who would
overthrow the monarchy in January 1893. Stevenson had strong sympathies with the Hawaiian
people, but as a member of white imperial Britain was courted as a token supporter by both sides
of the potentially violent political debate. Given the amount of time he spent in Hawaii, and
given his political activism in Samoa, it is therefore surprising that he is relatively silent on the
political situation in Hawaii. However, close readings of the two stories he sets in Hawaii, "The
Bottle Imp" and "The Isle of Voices", reveals a concern with the fate of the Hawaiian people,
and a warning to their politically outmatched monarch, Kalakaua. These stories seem to avoid
any obvious political statement that may upset either side of the Hawaiian issue, but concealed
within the narratives lie a series of observations on the political discord and its effects on
Hawaiian culture that Stevenson must have known would soon be repeated in Samoa. By
writing these two stories in the form of modern parables or fables, Stevenson comments on the
contemporary situation while maintaining a personal distance from the primary players
involved.
The success of this technique, I argue, is seen in his present-day status in the Islands. Like his
hut, which has been torn down and reconstructed to produce an authentic version of the original,
Stevenson himself been reconstructed into a curiously a-political figure. He is fondly
remembered and honored in Hawaii as an auspicious visitor, friendly with Hawaiian monarchy
but not as a political presence. His stories about Hawaii, however, reveal an acute appraisal of
the political situation and the potential fallout for the people of the Hawaiian Kingdom. His
relocated and reconstructed hut therefore represents both his physical presence on Oahu, and also
his elusive opinions on the political turmoil he found himself in.