The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman (review)

Les Harrison's densely argued and amply illustrated treatment of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and museum culture begins with Duncan Cameron's formulation of the museum's two roles in a democracy: it may serve as a temple, codifying for visitors the values of the powerful, or it may function as a forum, offering the public a "place for 'confrontation, experimentation, and debate'" (xiv). For Harrison, these terms are not prescriptive but descriptive of the competing, complementary visions of what Tony Bennett terms "the exhibitionary complex" (xviii) as it evolved in the U.S. over the course of the nineteenth century. And these terms rest at the heart of his occasionally labored but often ingenious analyses of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman.

After a preface surveying relevant critical terrain, Harrison provides a tasty chapter tracing the development of the exhibitionary complex through three museums. Charles Willson Peale attempted (without success) to secure with his temple, the Philadelphia Museum, a single vision of social order, while P. T. Barnum "refus[ed] to provide customers with stable interpretive authority" in his populist American Museum of New York (29). And the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in D.C., not founded until 1879, employed "surveiling, regulatory technologies" (39) that helped rectify the institution's public space and scientific mission. This chapter establishes the importance of architecture and locale for Harrison, who expertly reads the institutional meaning of physical sites.

Harrison shows in subsequent chapters how each of the four central authors exhibited the cultural tensions manifested in museums—tensions related to the development of national culture and evolution of the U.S. public sphere, which he describes (contra Habermas) as undergoing democratic expansion rather than declension in this period. In his tales and romances, Hawthorne considered the tension between the temple of official history and the forum of fiction. Indeed, argues Harrison, Hawthorne's last novel, The Marble Faun, represents the culmination of a career spent reflecting on "those physical sites and structures where the dramas of cultural authority are enacted" (50). When the commercial success represented by the Barnum-esque forum came to elude Melville, writes Harrison, the author confronted it in Moby-Dick; the whaling novel represents Melville's negotiation of New York culture and his strong discomfort with both the control of the temple and the manipulation of the forum by Ahab-esque showmen. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe secured a sentimental Christian interpretation of the novel's wide-ranging events through a Peale-like narrator, but when the novel was brought in 1853 by playwrights H. J. Conway and George L. Aiken to the stages of Barnum's American Museum and A. H. Purdy's National Theatre, respectively, that narrative control was replaced with ideological instability. Finally, Harrison describes the democratic poet of Leaves of Grass as surprisingly uncomfortable with the representational practices of the popular museum. In the postbellum Specimen Days (1882), Whitman consolidated under a structure reminiscent of the grand iron dome of the U.S. capitol (completed after the war) a stabilizing, Smithsonian-like institutional vision of national union.

With its attention to institutional sites as expressions and arbiters of contested cultural models, The Temple and the Forum joins an American Studies tradition represented by such scholars as Karen Haltunnen, John Kasson, and Lawrence Levine (all of whom Harrison cites). Anyone interested in U.S. literature, performance studies, or theorizations of the public sphere will find much of interest.