Literary Destinations
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LITERARY DESTINATIONS: MARK TWAIN’S HOUSES AND LITERARY TOURISM by C2009 Hilary Iris Lowe Submitted to the graduate degree program in American studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________________________________ Dr. Cheryl Lester _________________________________________ Dr. Susan K. Harris _________________________________________ Dr. Ann Schofield _________________________________________ Dr. John Pultz _________________________________________ Dr. Susan Earle Date Defended 11/30/2009 2 The Dissertation Committee for Hilary Iris Lowe certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Literary Destinations: Mark Twain’s Houses and Literary Tourism Committee: ____________________________________ Dr. Cheryl Lester, Chairperson Accepted 11/30/2009 3 Literary Destinations Americans are obsessed with houses—their own and everyone else’s. ~Dell Upton (1998) There is a trick about an American house that is like the deep-lying untranslatable idioms of a foreign language— a trick uncatchable by the stranger, a trick incommunicable and indescribable; and that elusive trick, that intangible something, whatever it is, is the something that gives the home look and the home feeling to an American house and makes it the most satisfying refuge yet invented by men—and women, mainly by women. ~Mark Twain (1892) 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 ABSTRACT 7 PREFACE 8 INTRODUCTION: 16 Literary Homes in the United States CHAPTER ONE: 41 Mark Twain’s Birthplace Cabins: Humble Beginnings and Questions of Authenticity CHAPTER TWO: 95 Mark Twain’s and Tom Sawyer’s Hometown: The Stories Started Here CHAPTER THREE: 144 The Right Stuff: Mark Twain, Material Culture, and the Gilded Age Museum CHAPTER FOUR: 204 A House with Devoted Pilgrims: Scholarship as Tourism EPILOGUE 231 IMAGES 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I began this dissertation I had no idea how many thoughtful, kind, and helpful people I would meet—people who spend their lives studying and preserving Mark Twain. In uncovering the histories of these four houses, I found their preservation had much to do with these same people and the personal reasons why we chose to read, remember, and celebrate Sam Clemens. Many Mark Twain experts have contributed to this study through their scholarship, but nearly two dozen of them contributed directly to the project by talking with me about their own involvement in the histories of these houses. Among them Susan K. Harris, Alan Gribben, Michael Kiskis, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin were especially gracious. Ralph Gregory, John Huffman, Stan Fast, Regina Faden, Henry Sweets, Wilson Faude, Patti Philippon, Mark Woodhouse, Gretchen Sharlow, and Barbara Snedecor were generous with their time, institutional knowledge, and collections. John Cunning, Bryan Reddick, Karen Ernhout, Gayle Earley, Tim Morgan, Jeff Mainville, Terrell Dempsey, and Jay Rounds all consented to formal interviews or long detailed conversations from which I drew much knowledge. Irene Langdon was not only charitable with conversation and lunch, but twice invited me to attend services with her at Park Church. Kerry Driscoll, Susan Pennybacker, Tom Registad, Mike Briggs, Scott R. Nelson, Bruce Michelson, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Brock Clarke, Anne Trubek, Mary Jenkins, and Laurence Buell all shared their insights on my study in its earliest stages. Bryant Simon kindly made sure I had library access and employment at Temple University. Heather Rudy, Cultural Resource Preservationist for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources helped me wade my way through the records at the MDNR Archives in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Elizabeth Giard, Collections Manager at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, pointed me to Katharine Seymour Day’s early correspondence about saving the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut. Many other libraries tried to meet my ever-increasing need for ephemera on the celebration of Mark Twain and literary tourism. Among them the Missouri Valley Collections of the Kansas City Public Library; the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri, Kansas City; the State Historical Society of Missouri; the Gannett-Tripp Library at Elmira College; the New York Historical Society; the Special Collections of the Philadelphia Free Public Library; and the Rosenbach Museum and Library were especially helpful. I am especially grateful for my time in Elmira, thanks to a Quarry Farm Fellowship at the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, and a research fellowship from the Office of Graduate Studies at University of Kansas allowed me to travel to Hartford to complete my primary research. 6 I was lucky enough to spend my second trip to Hannibal, Missouri with Susan K. Harris and the graduate students in her Mark Twain class. Her insights into Mark Twain’s world, enthusiasm for the project, and kindness have been a great support. Ann Schofield kept my eyes focused on women’s history and material culture and made me laugh with her own stories of literary tourism. John Pultz and Susan Earle have been the best kind of friends and advisors throughout my entire graduate experience, providing support, friendship, as well as their scholarly expertise. Cheryl Lester has provided exceptional mentorship as I moved further and further away from her company and advice. She tracked me down and held fast when it mattered most. Friends and family reminded me there was much outside the sometimes-confining walls of Twain’s houses. Anne Dotter, Lucy Folwer Glasson, Kate Hargis Hass, Jenny Heller, and Noel Rasor have been supportive readers, editors, and friends. My parents Marilyn and Kevin Watley first introduced me to the literary landscape by encouraging that I read about the place we lived and the places we visited. Moreover, my mother’s love for houses no doubt inspired my own love and obsession with them. I took my first trip to a Mark Twain house with my favorite literary tourist, Seth C. Bruggeman, and I can never thank him enough for his companionship and support throughout the long travels of this study and life. 7 ABSTRACT Mark Twain has been commemorated for more than eighty-five years at his various houses. His birthplace in Florida, Missouri, his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, his adult home in Hartford, Connecticut, and his summer retreat at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York have all come to celebrate very different versions of the most iconic of American writers. This study examines the history of these four houses to illustrate how our memory of Twain has been shaped by sites of literary tourism. At each house, museum staffs have struggled to balance Samuel Clemens’s biography with his literature and mythic persona. Though these literary house museums provide access to the famous homes that are associated with Clemens, they are mediated objects. The houses cannot display Clemens’s domestic life without managerial interpretation. Clemens’s birthplace, for example, has long been the subject of disputed authenticity. His boyhood home has, until very recently, substituted Hannibal’s past for Tom Sawyer’s story. His adult home is a Gilded Age museum that so perfectly recreated the “Mark Twain period,” it sometimes overlooked Twain’s literary contributions. Quarry Farm is a Twain scholar’s paradise that actually allows visitors to write and live where Clemens did. Mark Twain’s houses are places where local people have contributed to his popular canonization through preservation efforts and tourism. Clemens’s place in the American canon was uncertain at the founding of three of these four sites. These house museums, in the end, may have done as much for Clemens as he did for them. However, to remain viable, literary houses have to explain compellingly how they are central to understanding a writer’s literary creativity. They have to articulate a connection to a literary text, to a specific writerly space, or to an atmosphere that was particular to the writer’s literary production. They mediate a relationship between author, text, and tourists. This study contributes to literary studies and Mark Twain studies by explaining how visitation to and preservation of literary places influence the way we remember Mark Twain. 8 Preface I began this dissertation with very different questions than those I ended up answering. I hoped that in my study of literary house museums, I might discover exactly why people go to them. I thought there might be a simple answer, or at least a set of answers that explained what visitors—in all their varieties—were seeking when they went to a literary house museum. After thinking about these questions for several years, watching tourists, and reading scholarly accounts of tourists and their motives, I fear I have less of a sense of why people go to these literary museums now than when I started. But, in the meantime, I have become fascinated with how and why these literary places came to exist in the first place, and how they came to tell the stories that they do about American literature. My decision to focus on Sam Clemens’s houses was a practical and a fortuitous one. Sam Clemens may still be the most famous American writer.1 If you are going to study American literary sites, it makes sense to study the sites associated with an iconic American. These are places where the experience of American literary tourism is heightened and where layers of interpretation are the richest because so many people have a stake in Twain. William Faulkner asserted that “Mark Twain was the first 1 See the many volumes of work on Mark Twain and Celebrity including George William Sanderlin, Mark Twain: As Others Saw Him (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978), Louis J. Budd, Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), Alan Gribben, “The Importance of Mark Twain,” American Quarterly 37.1 (1985), Justin Kaplan, Mr.