Museums, libraries, and the woman writer: Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, and Nella Larsen

For Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, and Nella Larsen, their learning and work experiences in museums and libraries raised questions about the exclusionary character of classification systems and what such exclusion meant for them. They recognized that their own writings were being classified---through gender, race, and class biases---by contemporary cultural critics who attacked museums and libraries through similar prejudices, calling the institutions genteel and anti-intellectual spaces. Rather than reject these criticisms outright---which might mean replacing one classification system with another or abandoning the museums and libraries they admired---they resisted the critiques by creating new ideas about learning and the organization of knowledge.; Inspired by their museum and library related experiences, which informed and transformed their writing processes, the works of Wharton, Moore and Larsen are aesthetic meditations on how social problems become institutionalized through the very structures that seem to have the greatest potential to help solve them. Their works describe real and imagined institutional spaces, examine how knowledge is created within the spaces, and consider what other kinds of institutions could be created that might do more. By questioning the modernization and organization of cultural institutions in the 1920s, Wharton, Moore, and Larsen came to understand that writing provided them with the kind of contemplative space that they had earlier believed could only be found in museums and libraries---a space in which to reflect in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways on history, memory, and art.