Notes
184 Conclusion women is in the very institutions they first analyzed and critiqued. Edith Wharton’s former Lenox home—The Mount—has had many lives since she sold it, though it now functions as a refurbished museum, with tours, lectures , and discussions (even weddings) generally dedicated to Wharton’s work and ideas. Nella Larsen did not keep personal papers, yet quite a bit of information about her survives through papers saved by her archive-savvy friend CarlVanVechten (who deposited letters,clippings,and photographs at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and at the New York Public Library) and through records kept by the New York Public Library School and by the 135th Street Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Marianne Moore complained about her rather unkind treatment while working as a library assistant, but she is now the only former librarian mentioned on the NewYork Public Library Hudson Park branch Web site.2 Through her own efforts, her papers and objects from her former living room are on permanent display in Philadelphia as part of the Rosenbach Museum and Library visitor’s tour. Ruth Benedict, who kept records proving that she was always paid less and received fewer promotions than her male colleagues at Columbia,is perhaps still receiving some of the same treatment there: she is mentioned only as a graduate of Franz Boas’s anthropology program , not as a Columbia professor, on Columbia University’s Virtual Tour.3 Wharton, Larsen, Moore, and Benedict were idealists. As idealists, they might argue that this evidence of continued interest in their work by the very institutions where they learned to shape and question that material is a good thing. Nella Larsen might feel some pride that early steps she and her fellow librarians took to turn the 135th Street Library into a central research space for black culture have been realized. Marianne Moore might also enjoy how the Rosenbach Museum and Library has continued to wrestle with methods for organizing her papers and objects, in some ways duplicating her own questions about the relationships among poetry, museums, and libraries as it makes material available to researchers. Wharton, however, might be less thrilled by the ways in which her interests in museums have been interpreted inside the grand and glossy Mount. While she might have enjoyed the gift shop devoted to her work and life, and perhaps have appreciated the attention to detail in her beloved gardens, she might have rejected the choice to use her former home as the site of a rotating decoration of rooms (by local interior designers) as historically inaccurate or misleading. Benedict also might be less than thrilled at the wide variety of uses in which her name has been invoked in the service of Columbia University.Alternately promoted as one of the first female full professors and as a famous student of Franz Boas, Conclusion 185 Benedict maintains a connection to the institution that is neither claimed consistently nor always accurately. Wharton, Larsen, Moore, and Benedict were also moralists. For each of them the moral view was the inquisitive view. In each of their fictional worlds, to neglect to ask a question was a sin, and to challenge an idea or to offer a new perspective was an example of beauty or delight. Each woman tried to mediate her commitments to the social world through writing, and to write morally was a complicated process that involved exercising authority while challenging and questioning the very desire to be an authority. In several of Moore’s poems, for example, the speaker studies a mark left on nature by some individual.This mark exists as a silent testimony to everything that has happened in history up to the moment of its discovery. The speaker is fascinated by what the mark reveals, and she is also repelled by the way the mark has defaced the landscape in order to gain permanence. All of these writers struggled with such contradictory desires—to give permanence to ideas by writing about them and to resist the notion of permanence,which necessarily involved an act of defacement (not just of the landscape, as in this example, but of ideas, of the past, and of the possibility for change in the future). As idealists, they wanted cultural institutions to transcend the inherent conflicts of exercising authority and effacing history.As moralists,Wharton, Larsen, Moore, and Benedict were deeply concerned with interpreting the past accurately, and they understood museums and libraries...
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