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

Conclusion

Ruth Benedict’s Poetry 175 tant recent shift in this“anthropological method”is the recognition that what builds a person’s behavior and beliefs is the “expected sequences and sanctioned ways of seeing the universe” that individuals do not even realize they have absorbed from within their culture. This system is so powerful that it can lead an individual to act in certain ways and believe certain things without revealing any of its power. To uncover something that an individual may not even recognize as an influence, the anthropologist needs sharpened analytical skills, an openness to learning, and a heightened awareness of the creative process. Benedict saw that both the new anthropology and the new poetry provided crucial ways to examine culture, and she looked for new methods to illustrate the ethnographer’s (and,by relation,any narrator’s) necessary recognition of her own limitations in telling a story.63 One of the techniques she found to use was the self-consciously aware narrator of much of modernist fiction. As with the other women writers chronicled in this book, Benedict ’s recognition of and use of modernist techniques is often overlooked amid debate over whether her ideas and processes of thinking were modernist . Like the other authors as well, her poetry relied on her developing intellectual awareness of ways she could free herself from nineteenth-century cultural institutions and their professional realities. In fact, her very definition of poetry as providing—through its formal elements, its lyricism, and its uneasy separation from her career aspirations—a place that could protect her from cultural realities was thoroughly reflective of the concerns of the modern age.64 Benedict intellectually embraced literary modernism as these narrative experiments buttressed her new approach to ethnography and her excitement about the creative process. Despite these interests, the subject of Benedict ’s modernism is almost always introduced tentatively and with multiple defensive positions by her critics. Benedict was a modernist because anthropology came of age at a particular historical moment.65 Or, Benedict’s openness and skepticism are testimony to her modern spirit even though she also seemed to have an ideological foot in the nineteenth century.66 Or, Benedict ’s poetry seems old-fashioned, but she was influenced by the lyricists, a group of modern poets embracing older formal elements often for subversive reasons.67 Or, Benedict’s interest in the self and modes of expressing the self is a modernist “hallmark.”68 Her overarching project—which could be summed up as a personal and professional effort to undo the biases that enabled Westerners to view their existence as unique—grew from her critiques of her own and her mother’s professionalization processes.69 She finds in this long-term study the kernel of her own writing process and resulting poems, 176 Chapter 5 and she discovers in her genuine curiosity of this process of navigating the modernist poetry market an ethnography of modernism and firsthand evidence that her anthropological ideas and her poetic efforts are necessary to one another. Benedict emphasizes these views throughout Patterns of Culture and in her essays that follow. While the unpublished, autobiographical “The Story of My Life . . .”(1935) and her professional publication“Introduction to Zuni Mythology” (1935) might seem to have little in common other than their date of publication, in fact the two works share the same critical outlook. While she criticizes the late nineteenth-century library in the first essay, she criticizes its 1920s descendants—anthropologists still reading poorly in the library—in the second. Both essays, despite their seemingly unrelated subject matter, make the same argument: an individual can discover methods for becoming aware by first acknowledging ways they relate to the cultural world they inhabit.This argument underlines the enormous role the“cultural process”plays in the development of patterns of language, attitudes, and behavior .70 In“Introduction to Zuni Mythology”the focus seems to be on folklore , but the argument is actually about reading and writing:“Even more serious misunderstanding of folklore is introduced by the outsider’s inability to appreciate the fixed limits within which the narrator works. The artist works within definite traditional limits as truly in folklore as in music. The first requisite in understanding any folk literature is to recognize the boundaries in which it operates.”71 Benedict’s observations on ethnography are not only reinforced by her critiques of the library and reading in general but also by her contemporary reading experiences. She recognizes that the ability “to appreciate the...