Collectors and Collecting in American Literatures

Chair: Mary Titus, St. Olaf College, titus@stolaf.edu

Elizabeth Festa

Vanderbilt University

elizabeth.a.festa@vanderbilt.edu

Cliff-Dwelling in the Capital City: Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and the National Museum of the American Indian

In 1923, Cather published “Tom Outland’s Story,” a fictional retelling of the discovery and excavation of the cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde Colorado by two cattlemen, and their ill-fated mission to preserve their artifacts at the Smithsonian. Cather would later set this story within a tale of 1920s domestic life to produce The Professor’s House. Suggesting through its narrative disjuncture the enmeshment of the museum enterprise with other venues that marketed the Southwest, including private collecting and the tourist industry, The Professor’s House (1925) exposes the slippage between relic and souvenir, artifact and curio that came about with removal and cultural transfer, and which threatened the preservation of what Cather believed to be national possessions. In this paper I re-examine Cather’s critique in light of the ironic actualization of her protagonist’s efforts to archive the Southwest in Washington, D.C. that came about with the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in September 2004. Critiqued for its eschewal of anthropological scholarship and perspective, and its de-contextualized presentation of artifacts and life groups, we might imagine that the NMAI’s critics--and Cather--might suggest that although it has rejected the historical and cultural impulses that have prompted the archiving of the Native American artifacts in the past, that the new museum nevertheless represents a mere continuation of the marketing of the Indian, with the sole difference being one of proprietorship.

Elise A. Martucci

Fordham University

eamartucci@optonline.net

Sacred Objects: Collecting Gender in The Virgin Suicides

This paper seeks to explore the signification of the items collected in Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 The Virgin Suicides by considering questions of value, exchange, and capitalism and drawing from Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Collecting. The narrative voice of The Virgin Suicides represents the neighborhood boys, now men, who continuously and uselessly examine the items they collected from the Lisbon girls in search of an answer to the question that plagues the novel: why did these girls take their lives? Most of the items they collect belong to an individual sister, but are invested with meaning due to their representation of gender: Lux’s Brassiere, Mary’s old cosmetics.

The boys’ collection calls to mind Baudrillard’s distinction between objects that can be utilized and those that can be possessed. He explains that possessed objects “constitute themselves as a system, on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm.” The purpose of the collection, therefore, is a way to understand or complete oneself. However, the narrator of the novel laments, “in the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name” (246). These “gaps” and “oddly shaped emptiness” allude to the objects’ representation of the female other that the course of the narrative suggests these boys can never know.

Beth Nardella

West Virginia University

bnardella@hsc.wvu.edu

One After the Other:

Moth Collecting in A Girl of the Limberlost

In Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost, Elnora Comstock grows through her habit of collecting. She begins as a fascinated child gathering interesting items while at play. On the first day of her freshman year in high school, she learns that she can make a living from what has become a skill, collecting moths, and her subsequent knowledge of their habits. She pays for her education by selling the insects and artifacts she gathers in the swamp near her home to distant collectors, using the Bird Woman as liaison. One summer while gathering items to sell, Elnora meets Philip Ammon, a rich city boy who is staying in the country with his uncle to recover from an illness. With her work ethic and self-education through nature added to her intrinsic value, she becomes a commodity to him. She possesses the necessary attributes that a cultured, affluent man like Philip is looking for in a woman and by the end of the novel they are married. She has moved from collector to collected.

Although the novel is full of the kinds of stereotypes of womanhood prevalent in the early 1900s and is essentially a romance novel for teenage girls, A Girl of the Limberlost also gives important glimpses into a realm where scientists and educated amateurs engaged jointly in making discoveries, cataloging their finds, and establishing an economy of exchange, both intellectual and financial. The novel addresses the complexity of the collection in a transitional period for America.

Mary Titus

St. Olaf College

titus@stolaf.edu

"JFK and ‘Faux Jackie’ Go Shopping at Sotheby’s: Collecting People/things in the Fiction of Robert Olen Butler"

Beginning with a 1996 short story, “The Auction,” this paper will examine the ways in which collector, author, and collectible author Robert Olen Butler anatomizes collecting in his fiction. From a brain-damaged former president who hopes to reacquire his putter, to a female auctioneer who puts her own self on the block, to short stories originating in postcards collected by the author (each card containing “little bits” of “captured souls”), Butler’s work engages with sexuality, power, and memory through the relations of objects and objectification, possessions and possession, collecting and recollection.