Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism by Ruth Hoberman (review)

The field of literary modernism is “a highly complex and hotly contested one, and there is no universal consensus on precisely what constitutes modernism,”¹ as Paul Poplawski reminds us. Its ever-expanding borders shift in meaning according to who uses the term, when, and how. Is anything essential to modernism? What is it that literary modernists do, as writers, as thinkers, that is unusual, unique, different, and specific to the time in which they wrote? Ruth Hoberman has located the emergence of literary modernism—and possibly that of the debate which continues to surround it—in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and, specifically, in the “ongoing conversation about not only aesthetics but also the relation of individuals to institutions that, like the museum, seek to erase their bodily difference.”² In the fascinating and detailed story of the development of the museum as we know it, Hoberman highlights the importance of the control of representation. Her topic is most decidedly the museum: the thinking behind its creation, the people concerned, debates which swirled at the inception, and its reception in the works of the literati. What emerges in the discussion of “the relation of visual and verbal representation,”³ like the “mummies [which] break out of their museum-imposed stasis and silence to articulate their stories”⁴ (in the chapter entitled ‘Museum Gothic’), is the story of the ideas which motivated and disturbed writers such as Henry James and E.M. Forster.

When art moved from the private collection into the public museum, not only the venue changed, but also the context in which it was presented and the way in which it was received. Art participated in the angst of modernity, as its value was questioned but its commodification secured in the halls and glass cases of the British Museum and the Louvre. Newly-minted “experts” collected, controlled, and critiqued. “In the absence of a commonly accepted arbiter of value, there was ‘fashion,’ … [s]hoppers in quest of ordinary objects faced efforts to manipulate their desires through the increasingly sophisticated use of publicity, advertising, and display techniques.”⁵ Sound familiar? Hoberman is describing the transition into the world of today, as we continue to struggle with lack of certainty and myriad pressures.

She situates the museum as the touchstone of these changes. In the new physical layout, the separation of research from display, the act of choosing which art to present and with which narrative to accompany it, the museum donned the mantle of authority, becoming the arbiter of knowledge, taste, and value. Art, she writes, “had become a trade like any other,” sensitive to market glut created by new technology which enables multiplied images. Her criticism becomes more poignant when we realize that the museal discourse of presumed authority over the value and artistry of aesthetic representation is ongoing: the Beinecke Library of Yale University hosts a collection of art by poets, entitled “Art for the Wrong Reason,” about which Emily Kopley writes, “These works of art, though not masterpieces, help to piece together the personalities of masters.”⁶

Hoberman argues that the heart of modernism—and the heart of the paintings created by modernists deemed arbitrarily to be poets rather than painters—is the ability to slip out from under this ‘manufactured consent’ with genuine responses which are visceral and subjective. Clearly, the modernists were struggling against the stultifying, conservative hold-over from a severely defined society. Breaking these bonds involves overlapping genres, blurring boundaries, defying expectations, and repositioning the gaze.

The great irony of the new museum experience at the turn of the century was that it engaged with an increasingly literate and liberated public which responded in unpredictable ways. These ‘failures’ of aesthetic response are dramatized by the modernists in the way in which “the bodies of museumgoers, marked as they are by social class, gender, and sexuality, collide with the museal experience as anticipated by museum administrators.”⁷ In this way, the...