From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (review)

Focusing on four modernist, American women writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—Karin Roffman's From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries expands cultural literary analysis outside customary critical perspectives. Conventional analytic approaches considering politics, family, gender, and economics appear incidentally in Roffman's discussion of the biographical context for each writer. Roffman's premise asserts that, for these four women, museums and libraries operated as sources of cultural and intellectual influence in a manner comparable to the university's influence on a majority of male writers. Roffman's book opens new analytic possibilities regarding the development and shaping of each writer's perceptions and responses and the subsequent influence on her art. Most important to this study is Roffman's contention that once the categories and organizational patterns were understood, each woman responded critically and subversively in her writing.

Although Roffman's discussion lies outside the usual social and political issues of the era, the informative focus of her opening chapter examines the little known nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development and professionalization of American libraries and museums and the ideological debate over the purpose of cultural places. In each of the subsequent chapters, she supplies ample biographical evidence, including any directly related social and economic concerns, of each author's involvement with museums and libraries; however, questions persist regarding the possibility of other influences. She comprehensively investigates Wharton's personal connection with European and American museums and her belief in the museum's responsibility to provide the American public with a sense of aesthetics, history, and culture. Likewise, she examines Larsen's professional training in Dewey's library classification system and experience as a librarian at New York's 135th Street library, which leads to Larsen's awareness of the problems, limitations, and exclusionary aspects of classification. Roffman also examines Moore's early employment both as Melvil Dewey's secretary and later as an assistant librarian at the New York City Hudson Branch as instrumental in revealing the importance of organizational patterns in defining both purpose and response. Relying on mostly unpublished materials and ample biographical details, Roffman establishes Benedict's frustration with sexist limitations in her struggles for professional recognition as an anthropologist and for attainment of a university position. Roffman intertwines Benedict's professional struggle with her desire for creative opportunities and satisfaction through poetry. Unfortunately, Benedict's critical reception caused her to realize "that the dissemination of those aesthetic ideas was possibly more difficult—at least as controlled and limited—by modern poetic professionalism as by anthropological professionalism" (151).

Roffman continues her examination of the modernist revolt against traditional forms of structure and organization through analysis of each author's work. For example, she employs the controversy surrounding the Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola exhibit and Newland Archer's two visits to it in The Age of Innocence as a significant focus in this chapter. She associates both his discomforted response to the public spectacle of museum displays and his disjointed memory with the failure of modern museums to provide opportunity for individual aesthetic experiences. Although a more substantive textual analysis would better serve Roffman's provocative claim that the museum sections in the novel demonstrate "Wharton's shift in writing style" (63), she briefly discusses the shift in focus to the city and the modern condition as a movement beyond the museum and as a central emphasis in Wharton's subsequent novels, The Mother's Recompense, Twilight Sleep, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive (63-64). Similarly, in an extensive analysis of both Quicksand and Passing, Roffman next argues that Larsen incorporates her own library experience and her search for other means of knowledge and classification. The quests for knowledge to attain intellectual and social fulfillment of Helga Crane (Quicksand) and Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield (Passing) and their awareness of classification systems demonstrate "that the production of knowledge is always also the production...