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Introduction 7 shifted in those years, resulting in both private and public debates about the purpose of aesthetic ideas, of connoisseurship, of methods for display, and of creating a population of Americans genuinely interested in culture. The extent of Wharton’s knowledge of these debates is a story that has not been told. Wharton’s uncle (and her mother’s only brother), Frederick W. Rhinelander , was one of the founding trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served in a variety of administrative roles for more than thirty years until he was made its third president in 1902. His role in shaping the early development of the Metropolitan was much more than a source of passing family interest to Wharton; it helped to focus her analysis of American museums around the Metropolitan’s specific and complex story of its early struggles and choices. At the center of this chapter is a focus on Newland Archer’s two trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in The Age of Innocence. In these two scenes, which take place in the original Cesnola antiquities exhibit twentysix years apart, Wharton makes her clearest case for how she views the modernizing American museum. The Cesnola objects that Archer and Madame Olenska observe in the late 1870s, and that seem to stand for a lost era, were later proven to be inauthentic amalgams of many different eras. In the initial museum scene Wharton acknowledges that the controversy over the Metropolitan ’s first important purchase was not merely a historical footnote but is personally significant to her characters and to American culture. She is able to illustrate how the museum’s early choices resonate in the larger culture and over time through the novel’s double framing of this scene: Archer eventually looks back at this moment from the vantage of about 1900 (when he returns to visit the Metropolitan), and Wharton looks back fifty years through the long lens she uses to write the novel in 1919.Although Wharton has often been accused of losing touch with America in her later novels, her study of the professionalization of the Metropolitan Museum of Art links her museum novels closely to her New York novels of the 1920s. In these later novels Wharton chronicles modern society as suffering from an absence of memory and particularity, the very maladies that she identifies in these earlier novels as by-products of a combination of poor choices and social pressures within a developing American museum culture. Wharton never went to college or held any official position in a cultural institution, facts representative of the period and class in which she lived.8 Yet Wharton’s deep curiosity about learning not only led to her interest in books and paintings but drove her to study the technical choices that museums and libraries make in exhibiting these objects. Through her close friendships with collectors, curators, and museum directors, Wharton vis- 8 Introduction ited an astonishing number of exhibitions in Europe and America and helped to build up her own private collections of books and art as well. Since she was not allowed to attend a university (a fact that she noted but never lamented ), her curiosity and intellectual passions had to be satisfied through the cultural materials made available to her.Wharton provides a particularly useful introduction into the idea that museums and libraries shaped a generation of modernist women writers since her own creative development can be viewed almost entirely in relation to the detailed story she tells about the simultaneous maturing of American museums and libraries—a transformation that she understood both actually and imaginatively. Wharton’s theoretical ideas about ideal museums and libraries provide a stepping stone to Nella Larsen’s practical ones. In my third chapter I discuss the ways in which Nella Larsen’s novels recall her training as a librarian. The library plays a role in Quicksand (1928) as it also played a role in Larsen’s life during the 1920s when she enrolled in library school, studied the Dewey decimal system, and worked as a librarian at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch. The library facilitates discussion of Larsen’s ideas about the institutionalization of knowledge—ideas that preoccupy her characters Helga Crane, Clare Kendry, and Irene Redfield in her two novels Quicksand and Passing (1929).Larsen’s female characters understand that the production of knowledge is always also the production of new methods or theories of exclusion .One of the reasons...

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