Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival by Joy M. Giguere (review)

In the 1840 painting The Architect’s Dream, artist Thomas Cole portrayed American architect Ithiel Town looking out onto an imagined landscape of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Gothic buildings. This architect’s dream was, in fact, reality for nineteenth-century America. With no new architectural vocabulary (that would come later in the twentieth century), American architects revived previous styles or created hybrid concoctions. Their challenge was to use forms from civilizations past to construct an identity for a new nation.

While the neoclassical and medieval architectural revivals have received much attention, Joy Giguere turns her focus in this book to the understudied Egyptian revival in America and its role in the construction of American identity. She explores the period from 1790 through 1939—a period of both popular “Egyptomania” and scholarly study spurred by the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt (1798–1801)—when Egyptian-style obelisks, sphinxes, and tombs became so commonplace in the American landscape as to become “characteristically American.” Such Egyptian forms were most often employed in funerary and memorial architecture, as Egyptian culture was strongly associated with the care and memory of the dead. In discrete chapters, Giguere tells the story of Egyptian-style private monuments in the American rural cemetery movement; the public obelisks at Bunker Hill and Groton Heights to commemorate the Revolutionary War; a sphinx to memorialize the Civil War, which was embroiled in racial politics of the time; and the long, fraught construction of the Washington Monument obelisk, the most famous example of the Egyptian revival in America.

Egyptian architecture held connotations that America was eager to assume. Egypt, “the most ancient of all Western civilizations” (p. 6), was seen as “the point of genesis for all significant human social and cultural development” (p. 27). In building in Egyptian and also Greek and Roman styles, the United States crafted a visible “national lineage” that countered “European critics’ charges that the United States was a country without history while implying that the nation itself embodied all of the most superior qualities of the civilizations that preceded it” (p. 8). Egyptian architecture specifically conveyed permanence, great wealth, and “technological genius” (p. 48)—identities the young nation actively sought to co-opt. Giguere explores how Americans changed the meanings of Egyptian forms for their own purposes. For war memorials, for example, obelisks celebrated martial valor and heroism as they did in ancient Egypt, but also “morality, science, progress and Christianity” in a specifically American and modern-day sense (p. 115). This substitution of a Christian association for the original pagan meaning is one of the most persuasive arguments for how the Egyptian revival became something truly American.

As a historian, Giguere pays particular attention to the writings and speeches that were key to crafting the meaning of the Egyptian revival. “Because the intended meaning of the Egyptian revival was often opaque to many Americans,” she writes, “this kind of literary and verbal reinforcement was even more critical to legitimizing the stylistic choices of the men in charge of these designs” (p. 11). Interesting here is just how unstable the constructed meanings of these Egyptian monuments were. Dr. Jacob Bigelow conceived of the Sphinx statue at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts with the head of a white woman and the body of a lion to invoke Africa and the newly freed blacks. To Bigelow, this fusion symbolized racial cooperation following the Civil War, even as it perpetuated racial inequality. Despite Bigelow’s writings on the statue’s meaning, over time this meaning became lost and the sphinx became enigmatic, just like its Egyptian predecessor.

Giguere’s contribution in this book is to answer in a new way the oft-asked question of what is American about American architecture, particularly in the age of eclecticism. Sadly, she does not apply her analysis of the Egyptian revival to buildings outside memorial architecture, such as “The Tombs” prison in New York City, Yale...