Still(ed) Lives

One early morning in 1840, a group of bewildered villagers stood on the shore of the Merrimack River watching a canal boat from Boston arrive at the Lowell storehouse wharf.¹ Besides the wild menagerie of stuffed lions, tigers, camels, and snakes, the boat "had on board quite a number of passengers, among them Miss Charlotte Temple [and] Miss Eliza Wharton, of Reading. . . . These ladies were not in the flesh, to be sure, but in a very good quality of wax, and although great pains were taken by the boatmen to protect them from the weather by the use of tarpaulins, we children were allowed a good long peep at these extraordinary people" (Contributions 240).² Spying the uncanny objects before their installation in Moses Kimball's Lowell Museum, the children welcomed their favorite fictional celebrities to town. By the time the wax effigies arrived at the Lowell Museum, over one hundred editions of Susanna Rowson's novel Charlotte Temple (1794), forty editions of its sequel, Charlotte's Daughter; or, The Three Orphans (1828),³ and some thirty editions of Hannah Foster's Coquette (1797) had been devoured by a voracious reading public.

1. Entrance

Taken out of her books' contexts and variably placed throughout the young nation, Charlotte Temple was a citation, a recognizable and repeatable form throughout the nineteenth century.⁴ As early as 1819, Charlotte and her seducer Captain Montraville were displayed at George Manypenny's Museum in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Open every day (except Sunday), the museum offered visitors the chance to view the revived protagonist for a mere quarter. The following year, two wax sculptures of Charlotte and Montraville joined three hundred other statues at Jesse Sharpless's Museum of Wax Figures at 2nd and Market Streets in Philadelphia (Scharf and Wescott 951-52). In 1823 and 1867, respectively, Cincinnati's Western Museum and Cheyenne's local museum acquired wax sculptures of Rowson's heroine, which the Wyoming proprietor Jim McDaniels (trained under P. T. Barnum) called "one of his prized exhibits . . . Miss Charlotte Temple, the 'English Giantess.'" Sculptor Hiram Powers attracted even more visitors to Joseph Dorfeuille's Western Museum with his realistic rendering of "Charlotte Temple sitting disconsolately holding an infant in her lap and a letter in her hand" (Writers' Program 138). Life-sized and deceptively animate, the still figure drew crowds.

As fictional referents, her familiar wax iterations rendered Charlotte vulnerable to collection, curation, display, and decay. Elbow to elbow with allegorical figures ("Goddess of Liberty supporting the American standard"), biblical characters (Samson and Delilah), military heroes (Commodores Perry and Decatur), and Christian reformists (Erasmus and Swedenborg), Charlotte's embattled sexual virtue—which ultimately kills her in the novel—transmuted into more enduring civic virtu in the wax memorials (Hadden 38). Much like the conduct novel's moral object lessons, wax effigies were "pedagogical bodies" for an audience well versed in allusion, allegory, and visual analogy (Sandberg 21).⁵ Charlotte Temple, therefore, became a referent, a representative social type. A "visual aide-mémoires to leading a moral and virtuous life," she anticipates the tableaux vivant, or "living pictures," of the Gilded Age,⁶ which froze women in poses exacting domestic decorum, confinement, and suffering (Kornmeier 277).⁷

Such typology characterizes the civilizing function of the modern museum. The first public museums at the turn of the nineteenth century aimed to regulate their uninitiated crowds through what critic Tony Bennett calls "the exhibitionary complex."⁸ Museum objects and visitors were part of the same spectacular tableaux, which combined the disciplined principles of the Panopticon with the museal panorama: the "technology of vision" commanded and arranged things and bodies for public display; visitors internalized the resulting gaze as self-surveillance and regulation (81).⁹ Fifty years before her wax effigy became a spectacle in the Kimball Museum, the fictional Eliza Wharton was a museum spectator at the Columbian Museum in The Coquette (1797).¹⁰ "With Mr. Bowen's Museum, I think you were very much pleased," Lucy Freeman writes. "It is a source of rational and refined amusement. Here the eye is gratified, the imagination charmed, and the understanding improved. It will bear...