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  • Conveniently Situated Museums:The House Museum Movement and Modernist Interiority in Willa Cather's The Professor's House
  • Elizabeth Festa (bio)

In her promotional essay of 1916, "Mesa Verde Wonderland," Cather describes at length the remarkable homes of an ancient people. Praising these "strong habitations" for their beauty, their "absence of clutter," and the "settled, ritualistic life" they once fostered, Cather suggests that within their walls a modern visitor might experience a propinquity to "custom, ritual, [and] integrity of tradition" as distinct from "the "bustling business of the world" (qtd. in Rosowski and Slote 84-86). Yet if Cather argues persuasively for the privileged role of domestic space and housekeeping in the transmission of historical and cultural meaning, she also alludes to the violability of these utopian interiors. In a curious statement, she insists that the Mesa Verde is "the story of an early race" and "not, as many people think, an inconveniently situated museum" (85). While Cather surely gestures to the geographic context and setting that made the Mesa Verde a more compelling reliquary of the past than any urban museum representation of the region, her emphasis on securing the home's meaning also suggests a different subtext: the conflation of museum and market that was destabilizing the historical and cultural significance of these domestic interiors.1

In the short tale, "Tom Outland's Story," inspired by her trip, Cather alludes to the compromised integrity of southwestern domesticities that was an effect of such enterprising efforts. By the 1920s, however, her [End Page 73] critique was not limited to the immediate effects of enterprise on the historical sites themselves, or even to southwestern spaces specifically. Directing her attention to her era's broader interest in contextualized interiors, Cather became increasingly concerned with the effects of modeling and marketing iconic Native American as well as colonial domiciles for private use in the more conveniently situated "museums" of the private home.2 In her 1925 novel, The Professor's House, Cather most fully considers the implications of the intersections between institutional and personal collecting practices that accompanied the development of the house museum movement.

The Professor's House was published at the peak of the historic house museum movement and its plot and structure situate the collecting of Native Americana within the encompassing neo-colonial manifestations of the movement. Homes were privileged milieus for culture during this era; historic domesticities made the notion of an idealized past tangible by embedding the social values and aesthetic sensibilities of earlier Americans in the architecture and design of their homes and furnishings. By immersing visitors within the mise-en-scène of the past, such spaces staged intimate encounters with history. After 1900, the movement was propelled by the belief that civic homes could shore up the increasingly tenuous boundaries of national identity and provide idealized pre-modern settings for visitors amid the deracinating effects of an emerging modernity.

The period between the Civil War and the 1930s would witness the restoration of a constellation of civically oriented domestic settings. Many of these early American homes were cultish restorations of the houses of iconic figures such as Mount Vernon, Daniel Webster Birthplace, The Hermitage, and Monticello. While there were twenty historic houses in 1895, this number increased to a hundred by 1910 and over four hundred by the early 1930s (Coleman 18). The movement would also come to include a wide range of paradigmatic interiors such as the colonial kitchens and colonial log cabins that were popularized at the U.S. Sanitary Fairs during the war, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893; the period room displays of art museums such as the Golden Gate Park Museum, Essex Institute, Wadsworth Athenaeum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and open-air museum villages such as Colonial Williamsburg and Ford's Greenfield Village.3 [End Page 74]

The interest in Native American home-life dovetailed with the commitment to restoring the material evidence of uniquely American origins as well as with the form that such settings tended to take. The Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings that Cather visited were but one of many efforts to contextualize historic domiciles. Both professional and popular institutions...

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