Inalienable Interiors : Consumerism and Anthropology, 1890 to 1920

INALIENABLE INTERIORS: CONSUMERISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 1890 TO 1920 By Aaron Wayne McCullough A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of American Studies—Doctor of Philosophy 2016 ABSTRACT INALIENABLE INTERIORS: CONSUMERISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 1890 TO 1920 By Aaron Wayne McCullough In this dissertation, I examine how and why anthropology became a significant discourse through which consumers, taste makers, and authors attempted to understand and navigate the consumer marketplace of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Anthropology, in its focus on “primitive” material cultures, perceived primitive objects as unconscious and unchanging expressions of identities defined by culture, race, or natural physiography. In a marketplace of alienable commodities, of objects circulating not only from producer to consumer, but also within and across the boundaries of identities, anthropology allowed consumers a discourse through which they could understand the objects of others; and through which they could imagine, identify, or idealize objects that expressed their own racial, national, class, or cultural identity. I call the consumer that emerged from this discourse of consumption, borrowing from historian James Clifford, an ethnographic consumer: an anthropologically aware, rational, consumer self, capable of navigating a cosmopolitan marketplace by perceiving and idealizing objects as cultural. I trace this figure, a version of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, through the writings of Arts and Crafts polemicist Irene Sargent, through the pages of The Craftsman magazine she edited, and out into other marketplaces such as the world’s fairs of the early twentieth century. If anthropology was used to evaluate and navigate a marketplace of alienable objects, it was also used to imagine a domestic material culture: in the dreams of fiction and the practice of architectural design, the hut was a locus of withdrawal, an imagined place where the material objects that composed the home could securely express race, culture, class, or nationality. And in both the marketplace and the domestic interior, the idea of a primitive material culture allowed white, middle class consumers to identify their own and other’s inalienable material cultures, while displacing this static version of material culture onto the primitive. This displacement allowed consumers to ultimately claim the mobility and rationality of a modern self. Yet objects posed difficulties for those who would attempt to identify them as expressive of a particular identity. As Will Cather shows in The Song of the Lark, the objects we create circulate across the borders of individual or collective meaning systems and, in their simple material persistence, beyond the life of an individual or collective identity, oppose our attempts to define them. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like most writers of dissertations, I have never written one before and likely never will again; which is to gesture towards the idea that a dissertation is not only a unique and immaterial kind of document but also the result of a unique confluence of opportunities and individuals. This one was written mainly in libraries and quiet rooms at home, but it would not have been possible without the guidance, influence, and aid of others, whose voices were often present when they were not. I would like to thank my committee members, Kenneth Haltman, Ann Larabee, Ellen McCallum, Douglass Noverr, and Stephen Rachman, for leading graduate seminars, for modeling teaching, for familiarizing me with Marxist theories and American Studies, for introducing me to methods for analysis of verbal, material, and visual products of culture, for asking hard questions, for opening new doors. I want to particularly thank my chair, Stephen Rachman, for his determined faith in this project that helped me carry it across the finish line. Many thank their parents, but mine are in these pages more than most, along with my grandparents. I grew up in a family that not only valued education, but foregrounded literature and art, as well as a unique relationship to household objects that has influenced my thinking more than I can tell. My parents’ resistance to reflexive cycles of consumerism confounded me when I was young. Now their attitudes and practices inspire me. I give thanks to my fellow graduate students and colleagues in years teaching at Xavier University, Miami University, and Michigan State University, for providing a community of educators, scholars, artists, and activists. I give thanks to my students who often inspired me with their intellectual openness and energy, and kept me sharp when research was slow. And I iv especially thank “the public,” Kelly Battles, who single-handedly kept intellectual inquiry in my life these last two years and provided proofreading and encouragement when it was needed most. Two institutions provided invaluable material support, allowing for months of research: the Michigan State University Graduate School and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. In particular, at Winterthur, I was not only given access to archival materials but access to a community of material culture scholars and librarians whose knowledge of American material culture of the United States was both daunting and, unfortunately, rare. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES vii Introduction: Ethnography and the Persistent Mobility of Objects 1 Chapter 1: The Ethnographic Consumer and Irene Sargent’s “A Revival of Old Arts and Crafts applied to Wood and Leather” 22 Chapter 2: The Craftsman, the Ethnographic Consumer, and “Phantasmagorias of the Marketplace” 67 Chapter 3: “Dreamers of Refuge”: The Primitive Home in Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Fiction and Consumer Practices 107 Chapter 4: “Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose”: Cliff-Dweller Objects and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark 154 WORKS CITED 182 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Woodblock-Style Print Depicting Three Basket Weavers, The Craftsman, June 1907, p. 268. 67 Figure 2: “Japanese Gardens and Tea-Houses.” The Greatest of Expositions: Completely Illustrated, p. 68. 90 Figure 3: J. H. Troy Landscape Gardener Advertisement, Country Life in America, Sept. 1909. 152 vii Introduction: Ethnography and the Persistent Mobility of Objects A sense of unfitness and unreality will forever pervade and haunt the imitation which, through the lack of spontaneity, has no justification for being; which has no basis of artistic truth, and which represents no dominant thought of the period…. So advancing from instance to instance, we reach the conclusion that any art worthy of the name must strike its roots deep into the life of the people, and must produce as freely and naturally as does the plant in summer. (Anonymous “Style and Its Requisites”) An interior haunts the pages of The Craftsman, Gustav Stickley’s Arts and Crafts’ lifestyle magazine published monthly from 1901 until Stickley’s bankruptcy in 1916. A hybrid mixture of various furnishings suggestive of the past and the foreign, this interior is “a pell-mell of misapprehensions of the historic styles” (Stickley, “Ugliness” 319) or a “meeting place of the products of many ages and countries” (Sargent, “Revival”).1 It creates feelings of “grotesqueness” and “confusion” such that it “resembles nothing so much as a masked costume ball” (Stickley, “Ugliness” 319). Filled with irrational things, “objects of ill-defined use, which must require the entire time of one person to classify and regulate,” its rooms are “twisted into a Labyrinth, which, by day, has its perils in the form of threatening bric-a-brac, and through which, by night, Ariadne must perforce guide Theseus” (Sargent, “Revival”). As suggested by the passages above, this is an interior that produces mimicry and affectation as opposed to purity and authenticity, wealth and waste as opposed to utility or sincerely American, middle-class needs, and irrational consumer desires as opposed to rational, modern, and often Anglo-Saxon taste. It is also an unmanageable, excessive space that crosses the borders of national, racial, and ethnic identities. “[O]ur modern palaces,” William L. Price writes facetiously, if more plainly, “are vapid and unrelated reproductions or modifications of the past, filled with junk, the hall of Italian Renaissance, the reception room blamed on one of the useful Louis, the library Jacobean, the 1 See Hamlin for other objects that express this idea and must be “subject[ed] to structural lines and a certain repose and harmony which suffer when caprice is unrestrained” (142). 1 Breakfast room Georgian (Colonial having now become plebian), the dining room Flemish” (126). Imposed on middle-class Americans by producers, department stores and marketers, professional interior decorators, or more abstractly, the dictates of “fashion,” this interior is a creation of the capitalist marketplace; its “chaos” results from “the division of labor” that produces furnishings which the consumer must then passively “accept”; and the interior’s objects are accused of “offering no more unity than is to be found in the motley throng of the street, each one having, like any individual of the throng, the air of being bent upon its own errand” (Stickley, “From Ugliness” 318). It is an interior that opens outward into the marketplace, and into public space, transgressing the domestic interior. The objects that comprise it, in the Arts and Crafts’ imaginary, not only suggest the alienated individuals of the modern, capitalist city, bent on self-interested business, but they are thus by virtue of suggesting multiple races, cultures, nationalities, or historical periods. The Craftsman was easily the most successful of the early twentieth-century American Arts and Crafts magazines, communicating a wide range of Arts and Crafts ideals to a middle- class, American audience; and it should come as no surprise, given the values implicit in the above descriptions, that the Arts and Crafts movement has been described by its historians as nationalist and Anglo-Saxon-ist, a movement whose members desired the security of a national, white material culture.

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