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Conclusion: Of Babies and Bathwater—Birthplace “Shrines” and the Future of the Historic House Museum
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P 259 CONCLUSION Of Babies and Bathwater—Birthplace “Shrines” and the Future of the Historic House Museum PATRICIA WEST I write the concluding essay of this volume at a time when the viability of the historic house museum is in doubt. So it is with great concern that I approach the question of what the nature of the birthplace site can tell us about the meaning and future of the house museum. Seth Bruggeman has challenged us to ask “how can institutions that interpret birthplace monuments remain vital even as museum professionals openly debate whether house museums are still a worthwhile enterprise?” Our generation’s struggle to locate a current, culturally vital role for the house museum has been the subject of numerous anxious conference panels and professional conversations in recent years. Addressing what Gerald George called the “historic house malaise,” a 2004 article inquired, “Does America Need Another House Museum?” The authors stated flatly that “the noble objective of interpretation for the public good may in fact be ill served when a building becomes a museum.” Compounding generic troubles such as aging boards, maintenance backlogs, funding deficiencies, and problems with collections care, we have been asking ourselves why house museum visitation has dropped despite the apparent popularity of history. Standards for ethically closing house museums have been produced, and a recent book outlines several practical methods for de-museumizing historic houses as a means to assure their long-term preservation.1 Various explanations have been posited for this decline, among them the lure of electronic entertainment and the diminution of leisure time. But maybe the house museum is just entering a period of retooling and there is the possibility that it will evolve from earlier purposes that are no longer useful or engaging. If we want to reformulate the house museum to meet current needs, we might begin by recalling its roots as a “social instrument.”2 The American house museum was established in response to political and social issues of urgent concern. Although the goals and rhetoric from the house museum’s early years 260 p PATRICIA WEST may seem to us to range somewhere between quaint and offensive, this history helps us to realize that any house museum, even the seemingly inviolable birthplace “shrine,” must be useful or risk becoming moribund. Questions before us as we contemplate the meaning of the birthplace in the new century include: what meaningful purpose can it serve? What content can underpin an interpretive approach that will raise salient questions and provide historical perspective for our time? As we learned from the research of Thelen and Rosenzweig, history is most alive to people when they can find a personal connection to it, and people trust the history they learn at historic sites more than from any other institutional source.3 Therefore our responsibility is a substantial one. If history has the power to shape culture, inform decisions, and inspire or inhibit social action, then the civic role of the house museum is clear. But this becomes trickier as we acknowledge the more problematical dimensions of the house museum in general and the birthplace in particular, or, as the introduction to this volume so cogently asks, “Will we always, as Henry James suggested over a century ago, be duped by commemorative hyperbole, or is there an opportunity in birthplace commemoration to do serious history?” But if we police against popular “commemorative hyperbole” in our efforts to do “serious history” at birthplaces, do we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Bruggeman refers above to the 1903 Henry James story “The Birthplace,” in which Morris Gedge and his wife are hired as caretakers for a thinly disguised Stratford-upon-Avon birthplace “shrine.” Although Mrs. Gedge embraces their genteel though remunerated task of giving tours of the birthplace of “Him,” a crisis slowly brews as Mr. Gedge realizes that the entire tour is based on almost no evidence. The story follows his struggle with the problem of what this essay calls “the bathwater ,” the fact that birthplaces often have substantial dimensions that are pretty much fabricated. Morris Gedge, like Seth Bruggeman, dares to raise the plot-thickening question “what if he wasn’t born here?”4 The story is more than just a parody of birthplace “shrines.” Gedge’s dilemma, in particular its denouement, highlights the Pragmatism of Henry’s famous brother. William James would propose that truth can be a matter of utility; the “cash value” of ideas needs to be assessed...