The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. I am following the example of Arjun Appadurai and using the term “commoditization ”as opposed to “commodi¤cation”to describe the process of an object becoming a commodity. While commodi¤cation suggests that something or someone is absorbed into the world of consumer culture, commoditization implies a more active transition, one in which the object or person is turned into a commodity as part of a process. 2. In The Real Thing, Miles Orvell explains: “As the body accommodated itself to the new demands of the industrial world, the border between human motion and automatic motion became increasingly blurred” (147). In other words, people ran the risk of becoming like things themselves, whether those things were machines or the products they created. 3. See Peter C. Marzio for a discussion of chromolithography, by which copies of original artworks were made possible. This technique was criticized as “pseudo culture ” (1). 4. These trends also suggest efforts to establish an “authentic”version of American identity. 5. An ironic twist on the authenticity of museum objects is the famous Hall of Forgeries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I am indebted to Angela Weisl for this observation. 6. Leach’s Land of Desire is among several recent studies that analyze the connections between museums and department stores, the temples of consumer culture in this period. 7. Schlereth refers to this device as a stereoscope. 8. Kopytoff’s examples are primarily contemporary: the “selling” or trading of athletes, prostitution, and the sale of female eggs (85), but the processes and reactions he describes are the same. 9. Pearce describes this list as “a group of interlinked standard [European] oppositions of thought and feeling around which, in terms of our instinctive reactions, mental and emotional values and judgments are traditionally determined” (On Collecting 286). 10. Henri F. Ellenberger describes this trend as “prevalent in the 1880’s” and evident in the work of Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Freud (273). 11. Examples of such studies include Wyllie’s The Self-Made Man in America; Cawelti ’s Apostles of the Self-Made Man; and Lindberg’s The Con¤dence Man in American Literature. 12. According to Kenneth Womack, Sin¤eld’s entrapment model “functions as a barrier to dissidence, as a means for the ideology in power to sustain its oppressive constructions of class, race, gender, and sexuality” (601). 13. These include the Metropolitan in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (Conn 9). 14. Both also contain important scenes set in museums (Kruse 71). Chapter 2 1. See Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections, for an extended and illuminating explanation of what happens when viewing objects in a museum or other type of collection (219). 2. Natural history in the eighteenth century was a science that included such areas of study as meteorology, geology, botany, zoology, and ethnology (Regis 5). 3. See Ed Folsom’s study of Whitman and photography, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations as well as Folsom’s earlier essay, “‘This Heart’s Geography’s Map’: The Photographs of Walt Whitman.” See also “Specimen Daze: Whitman’s Photobiography” by Sean Meehan; Orvell’s chapter on Whitman in The Real Thing; and Walt Whitman’s America by David Reynolds. 4. See Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, for an overview of the structure of Specimen Days. 5. Museum labeling is an area of interest in its own right, with books such as Andrée Blais’s, Text in the Exhibition Medium and Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach dedicated to this very speci¤c and important element of the museum enterprise. One need only look at the strong responses to two Smithsonian exhibits— “The West as America” in 1991 and “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II” (otherwise known as the Enola Gay exhibit) in 1994—to see the effect labels can have on viewers. In both cases, the Smithsonian was harshly criticized for what critics saw as revisionist history. Criticism of the Enola Gay exhibit was so strong that the exhibit was removed in 1995 (although the Enola Gay itself remained on exhibit for several years). 154 Notes to Pages 13–26 6. This aspect of the period is discussed by several cultural historians, such as Lears in Fables of Abundance and Orvell in The Real Thing. 7. Whitman thus anticipates William...