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3. The Wages of Living History: Rewards and Costs of Emotional Investment
- University of Massachusetts Press
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{ 87 } chapter 3 The Wages of Living History Rewards and Costs of Emotional Investment Oliver: The first year at the Fort was the honeymoon year. I felt like nothing could go wrong; when things did go wrong, I was either naïve enough not to know it or I didn’t care. I was just so grateful to be in a challenging, intellectually stimulating environment—certainly in comparison to retail—and the feedback I got from fellow interpreters and from the public was an amazing ego rush. During the second year, cracks started to appear in the veneer—the politics that come with any job: various staff members continually butting heads, and the limitations of the medium became much more apparent. The honeymoon ended when I realized that no matter how much time I put into preparing to portray a particular character—or to do a particular vignette or demonstration, I was still primarily there to entertain. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but I would feel that I wanted to pass on the knowledge I’d accumulated to every human being who came near me, but there was only so much I could do. First of all, I wasn’t really from the past. Second, the visitors came with so many expectations that no matter how I would try to prepare for what we would be doing, the public would always throw it back in my face. Not that there weren’t wonderful experiences, but I would sometimes feel that my expectations were too high for the public, or for fellow staff interpreters as well. I guess my point is that the most interesting parts of my character’s story never came up unless I rammed it down the public’s throat, because they were not willing to sit there and listen to this character’s thoughts, or life { 88 } chapter 3 story, and it would be perfectly unnatural to do that; that’s another one of the limitations of the medium. What is most satisfying about the job? Positive visitor feedback. It’s as simple as all that. I would not have known this until I started working at the Fort—but I seem to thrive on interaction with friends and strangers, in which I get an opportunity to show off what I can do: to perform, and then to have instantaneous positive feedback, sometimes in the form of something as simple as a smile; sometimes, a knowing wink or a nod from a parent of a child that I’ve just been interpreting to; sometimes just an outright compliment from visitors. Those are things I really enjoy. I don’t get much enjoyment from doing something as simple and as obvious as firing a musket. Bang! There’s a bit of smoke, and the children and everybody else clap their hands for moment. Big deal, right? But when I portray certain characters and I can see a visitor making a connection, those are great moments, and I feel like I’ve really earned my money. There are days where I drag myself in, totally unenthused in the morning, but after the first one or two very positive interactions with visitors I’m flying high for the rest of the day, enough to buoy me up even though I’m physically exhausted by the time I’m ready to go home. In my mind, it justifies a lot of the extra time I put in researching characters or aspects of the nineteenth century.1 Like Oliver, many interpreters I encountered at the Fort were extraordinarily loyal and took seriously the work they performed, often at the expense of their personal lives out of costume. Throughout this chapter, I draw on interviews with Fort workers, and my own experiences as a worker there, in order to understand why and how some interpreters chose to invest emotionally in their place of work, and to understand as well the emotional costs of that investment. Ultimately I argue that interpreters at the Fort got an emotional return on investing in their jobs. However, despite the pleasure they derived from connecting with others through the medium of history, the experience also drained them and challenged them to negotiate their sense of self in the face of the many competing claims of the job.2 [3.94.77.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:07 GMT) { 89 } the wages of living history Hall of Fame/Wall of Shame Thick, diamond-shaped...