Hilary Iris Lowe - Mark Twains Homes and Literary Tourism

When I began this study, I hoped that in understanding the history 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 visitorsin all their varietieswere 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. In the meantime, however, I have become fascinated with how and why these literary places come to exist in the first place, and how they come to tell the stories that they do about American literature.

My decision to focus on Samuel Langhorne Clemens's houses was a practical and a fortuitous one. Sam Clemens may still be the most famous American writer. These sites provide a multiplicity of potential interpretations of Clemens, and they provide a way to understand the work of literary house museums seen comparatively through a single literary figure. His houses show how Clemens has been meaningful to vastly different communities over time.

Studying Clemens's houses was also practical because there are four houses today that are devoted to commemorating Clemens, and they provide an excellent sampling of the kinds of literary house museums that exist in the United States. However, it was fortuitous because spending time in Sam Clemens's houses was more rewarding than I could have imagined. Clemens's houses could not be more different. One is barely a cabin, one is a middle-class home, one is so grand that visitors have a hard time imagining Mark Twain living there, and one is so comfortable that no one wants to leave. Aside from their physical differences, these houses present four very different case studies. His birthplace belongs to the State of Missouri; his boyhood home belongs to the City of Hannibal, Missouri, but it could be argued that the boyhood home has always belonged to Tom Sawyer. Clemens's Hartford house is owned and operated by a nonprofit organization devoted to its preservation. Clemens's summer-housereally his sister-in-law's homeQuarry Farm is the property of Elmira College and is part of the Center for Mark Twain Studies. These houses each celebrate the memory of Mark Twain, despite their disparate origins, management, and architecture. At each site, individuals and communities have sought and largely found ways to connect their place with the biography and literary production of Sam Clemens.

During my research on house museums and literary memory, I read a great deal of travel literature describing not just Sam Clemens's houses but literary haunts of all kinds. This study is not a meditation on elite letters and travelogues, but an account of how the people who founded and managed these places over the years have constructed interpretations of Sam Clemens through the places where he lived. Literary tourism and tourists are the subject of this study, but so are the resulting literary destinations. I wanted to understand how these places came to be and how they came to tell the stories that they tell. I wanted insight into their interpretive choices. When I speak of interpretation at these houses, I mean exactly how museums convey their meaning. I wanted to know how the sites and their managers havewith exhibits, signage, restoration, interior decoration, expansion, museum designs, narrative construction, and all the other tiny choices that add up to what visitors see when they arrive at the doorstep of a literary housecrafted a story about literature, writers, and the places where they have lived.such histories have been written. As scholars, myself included, struggle to understand why people go to these places, it is useful to think about why these places exist for them to visit.

What follows, then, are origin stories, and origins matter in the United States. Each of these historic house museums is bound, as Patricia West has argued about other historic house museums, by the particular exigencies of its origin. As Faulkner's statement about Clemens reveals, writers, scholars, historians, tourists, and others have been obsessed with American origins. If all American writers come from Clemensif he is their originthen the sites that celebrate him are important. Perhaps because the United States is such a young country, the origin of American writers, historic figures, and events are particularly important. Understanding Clemens's origins is a way of understanding something larger about the historical narrative of American history and literature. Exploring the origins of house museums devoted to Clemens, then, is a way to understand the need for origins stories and how this need is played out in place and in literaturespecifically at historic sites.

Since beginning this project, I have moved twiceonce across country away from my own place of origin. The changes in my life that have most affected my thinking about house museums have been: becoming a home ownerbeing committed to one placeand volunteering at a house museum that I adorethe Rosenbach Museum and Library. As I have written the last chapters of this study, the thousands of tiny and large changes we are making in our own house have surrounded me. Our house is not a museum; it will never be open to the public. But it, like any house or house museum, is the culmination of decisions. And those decisions have helped remind me that each museum manager and preservationist, no matter his or her interpretive agenda, is working within a practical set of conditions. The question of which to repair first, the roof or the awful exhibit in the visitor's center, is akin to our own everyday decisions about wiring, paint colors, and drywall. I understand the limitations to which any person who works within an existing house is subject.

My time at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia as a volunteer has not only grounded me in my new home city, but it has made me a more thoughtful writer of these histories. The little house museum, where twice a month I volunteer and occasionally give tours, is so full of wonder to me that I have begun to understand tour guides who love the objects of their house so much that their history becomes hagiography. No tour guide knows all the answers to the questions that visitors ask, they often don't understand why the museum is the way that it is, and my tours, like most tour guides', are always biased toward my favorite objects. At the Rosenbach I've overwhelmed people withMarianne Moore's reconstructed living room, Herman Melville's bookcase, and William Blake's watercolorno matter what they might come to the Rosenbach to see. But most of all, I see how each visit to a house museum is a layered performance: volunteer performing guide, visitor performing tourist, and house museum performing a particular version of home.