In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism
  • Rupert Richard Arrowsmith
Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism. Ruth Hoberman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. xxvi + 236. $39.50 (cloth).

Reflecting upon the cultural milieu of Edwardian London in The Pisan Cantos, Ezra Pound was moved to describe the entire period as a "British Museum era."1 It is a statement that points up the importance of London's free museums and galleries as crucial nexuses of intellectual activity at a time when the city's earliest examples of modernist literature and art were beginning to appear. Ruth Hoberman's new book sets out to look at the ways in which the design, layout, and contents of these new public spaces reflected concurrent debate on aesthetics, education, and politics; and also to consider their symbolic implications in the minds of contemporary authors.

Hoberman begins by examining the historical circumstances behind the huge expansion of, and increasing public accessibility to, museums and galleries that characterized the latter part of the nineteenth century. Hand in hand with the rise of the museums went the rise of the curator, ostensibly a disinterested and professional figure, but also one "whose passion for his objects is dangerously possessive" (43). Hoberman is keen to explore this bipolar nature of museum professionals such as the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, a man of "dual identities as avuncular keeper and piratical thief" (45), who was renowned in equal measure for his astute scholarship and for his dubious methods of acquisition in North Africa. Her close readings of various novels and short stories in pursuit of situations and characters connected with popular perceptions of museums and curators are both insightful and enlightening, and the whole is delivered in a clear and engaging style that is refreshingly free of critical jargon.

Of course the general interest in the occult that characterized fin de siècle culture in Europe meant that Egyptian artifacts cropped up with particular persistence in popular fiction of the time. Some of Hoberman's most memorable reflections are on mummies, which she thinks mirror the museum's own project of collection and preservation by "hoarding within their sarcophagi an array of artifacts: jewelry, amulets, carved figures" (103). She explores the significance of these most evocative and controversial of museum exhibits via less well known pieces of writing such as Guy Boothby's 1899 genre novel Pharos the Egyptian, which describes the terrorist activities of an animated mummy who intends to spread a deadly plague around Europe. "Your father stole from me the land of my birth," the baleful revenant of the title informs one Londoner, "but beware, for retribution is pursuing you" (104).

Hoberman interprets such supernatural revenge as symbolic of "the fear that colonized peoples might infiltrate and take revenge on the metropole" (104). Despite its emphasis upon the internationally acquisitive nature of museums and curators, though, the book never convincingly engages either with the idea of the museum as an ideological weapon for justifying the European colonialist onslaught, or with its sunnier, unintended alter-ego—that of a vibrant intercultural nexus with cosmopolitan sympathies. With regard to the latter interpretation, one of the most interesting things to say about museums with regard to early twentieth-century culture is that they brought Western authors into direct, dynamic contact with alternative civilizations whose aesthetic and technical values subsequently shaped the character of modernism. Hoberman does not, however, get into this at all beyond a few tentative observations during her final paragraphs.

Museum Trouble should be taken on its strengths, however, and these are several. Hoberman returns to the trope of the mummy as she considers the changing position of women in fin de siècle society as reflected in contemporary narratives based on archaeological exhibits. Once again, where her analyses really shine is in their inclusion of material by largely forgotten genre novelists alongside excerpts from more familiar literary texts. Such popular works include H. [End Page 202] D. Everett's 1896 Iras, about a female mummy who awakes to become the very model of the Victorian housewife, instinctively addressing the male Egyptologist who discovers her as "my Lord." Bram Stoker's...

pdf

Share