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  • Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism by Hilary Iris Lowe
Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism Hilary Iris Lowe. U of Missouri P, 2012. 246pp. $40.00, cloth.

In recent years, Mark Twain’s domestic life has received long-overdue critical attention, a reexamination that has enriched the way we view the writer and the man. In Hilary Iris Lowe’s Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism, the focus is on four homes that Samuel Clemens lived in, homes that have been preserved and offer a chance for literary tourists to visit them: the birthplace home in Florida, Missouri; the boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri; the Clemens family home in Hartford, Connecticut; and Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York. Lowe examines the history of each site, including connections to Twain, but mainly detailing the often troublesome and sometimes controversial history of their preservation and renovation. She also speculates on the ways these four homes inform us about the meaning and value of literary tourism.

Her introduction, “Literary Homes in the United States,” makes a distinction between historic and literary sites, a distinction between historic and literary interpretation. She argues convincingly that literary homes affect the way we understand authors and their works, and thus deserve serious scholarly study. Her method involves “close readings of these houses and their visitors as if both were texts that might reveal how literary tourism works” (12).

Lowe begins with the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site near Florida, Missouri, an angular 60s-era museum that contains inside it a cabin that may or may not have been the birthplace of Samuel Clemens, and may have been so extensively changed that it should more properly be called a replica. As Lowe points out, the site tells visitors of neither likelihood, just two of the site’s problems. The cabin is near but not on the land in Florida where Clemens was born in 1835; out of a number of supposed birthplace cabins, one with a good but [End Page 139] not totally authenticated claim was restored in the first decades of the twentieth century, then moved to the recently established Mark Twain State Park in 1930, ridden to its new site by “two boys, one dressed as Tom Sawyer and the other dressed as Huck Finn” (45). The state park could have benefitted from federal money spent on the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the New Deal during the Great Depression, but local white residents objected to the establishment of a CCC camp that was composed of young black men. Lowe covers the controversy and its aftermath, a story not clearly told at the museum. “Today,” she writes, “the birthplace presents a simple, generic, and partial story of one pioneer family, which gave birth to Mark Twain” (53). On the banks of the artificial Mark Twain Lake, the 1961 museum building presents a curious view to its visitors, who either stumble on it while visiting the lake, or make a concerted effort to find this out-of-the-way spot, perhaps unaware that the modern-angled roof contains within it a cabin purported to have been Twain’s birthplace. Lowe recommends that the state “make a meaningful interpretive shift . . . and reveal the ‘replica’ status of the cabin, while making a concerted effort to tell the real history of Florida and its demise” (54).

As Lowe turns her attention to nearby Hannibal, she calls “the history of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum . . . perhaps the most important case study in this collection because the boyhood home is one of the literary historic sites where the interpretation of literature has thrived” (57). The Boyhood Home opened to tourists in 1912, two years after Twain’s death. Lowe discusses the way that, from the start and up to the present, the Clemens family home has been mingled with Tom Sawyer’s house, making the two almost interchangeable. The focus in Hannibal has always been the way the town and its sites inspired Twain’s fiction, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and to a lesser extent, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The museum sits several blocks away, with exhibits on Mark Twain and his works, including memorabilia, artifacts, and interpretive information. Lowe chronicles the way the home and museum are unique in their primary focus on the literature rather than the biography, an act, she argues, of literary criticism. She covers the hiring in 1978 of the first professional curator, Henry Sweets, who oversaw extensive renovation of the home and the expansion and professionalization of the museum. Like the birthplace, the Boyhood Home and Museum has seen its share of controversy, most recently in its move, belatedly, to incorporate the history of racism into its presentation. Spurred by Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin and local attorney/Twain scholar Terrell Dempsey, the museum board, despite some dissension, made changes to tell the story of slavery in Twain’s work and [End Page 140] life, as well as in Hannibal. Lowe draws a parallel between literary criticism and historical interpretation, a central argument of her book: “Translating literature onto a historic site requires the same kind of critical intervention and revision” (97). Her chapter on Hannibal covers the intriguing story of the history of the town and its relation to the boyhood home, the evolution of the presentation of the oldest and most-visited Twain site.

The Clemens family home in Hartford graces the very handsome cover of Lowe’s book, a home site, she says, “that has most successfully pulled off the central trick of the historic house museum” (99). It does so by “approximating with hear scientific accuracy what the house would have been like in the 1880s and 1890s, and it does not interpret his literary creations” (99). Rather than focus on the Clemens family’s time in the house from the 1870s to the 1890s, Lowe examines the house as a public sphere: “first a library, then a museum . . . then a striking example of historical restoration” (100). The elaborate and somewhat eccentric house was revised over time, like a literary text, during the time the family lived there and in the years since. The Clemens family radically changed the interior almost as soon as they began to live there, and the house changed after the family left it, saved from destruction in 1929 by Katharine Seymour Day, then fully and historically restored from 1955 to 1974. Today, the Mark Twain House and Museum also contains an elaborate and expensive state-of-the-art museum and visitors’ center, a 1990s addition that plunged the site into serious debt. The house and museum seem to have survived its financial crisis of the past decade, and it is now the second-most-visited historic site in Connecticut. Lowe calls it “the perfect house museum,” important not only for its historic association with Twain, but also for the way it was in the vanguard of historical site interpretation.

Unlike the other Twain sites Lowe covers, Quarry Farm in Elmira is not open to the general public. The former home of Olivia Clemens’s sister, Susan Crane, where the Clemens family spent many summers, and where Twain wrote many of his best works in the octagonal study his sister-in-law built for him, is accessible only to Twain scholars and for special events arranged by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. Unlike any of the other sites, Quarry Farm visitors have full access to the house; indeed, those chosen as Quarry Farm scholars can live in the house, sleeping in rooms where Crane family visitors slept, creating, Lowe says, “a concrete way for visitors to connect with Clemens as a writer at Quarry Farm” (156). With none of the signage or interpretation that one expects at a literary historical site, “the house itself is a text” (159), Lowe argues, continuing the controlling metaphor of her study. [End Page 141] She fully captures the deep and close connection felt by those who have been privileged to visit, live in, and write at Quarry Farm. She leaves open a possible future in which the general public may be admitted.

Lowe’s epilogue reiterates her central argument, that literary sites are texts to be read, revised, mediated, and interpreted: “These houses are vital texts for understanding how people appreciate and yearn to comprehend the origins of literature” (173). Although she is trained as a museum historian rather than a literary scholar, Lowe offers an insightful interpretation of Mark Twain through the lens of these houses. Despite occasional missteps—she twice conflates the two Jim characters from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn into one character, for example—her rich book takes an interesting and novel approach, which will appeal not only to those interested in Twain studies, but also to those interested in tourism studies, museum studies, and material culture. As a person who has visited all these sites, I can attest to the depth Hilary Iris Lowe has added to my understanding of Mark Twain—his life, his work, and his cultural legacy.

John Bird

John Bird is Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor (2007).

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