The temple and the forum: The American museum and cultural authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman)

The history of nineteenth-century American culture, and museum culture in particular, is marked by a conflict between competing conceptions of the cultural arena: the temple, an elitist, aristocratic configuration of culture, and the forum, its populist, marketplace counterpart. In The Temple and the Forum, I foreground this conflict in the turbulent history of three explicitly “American” museums: Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum (1785–1843), P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City (1841–1868), and the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.(1879–present). Chapter I chronicles the development of the American museum from its enlightenment origins as a republican temple in Philadelphia, through its configuration as a populist forum in commercial New York, to its institutional consolidation in Washington D.C. in the years following the Civil War.; Focusing on Hawthorne's interrogation of cultural authority in antebellum Boston, Chapter II examines the author's persistent display of American cultural artifacts in buildings associated with failed cultural and political institutions in “Legends of the Province House” (1838), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1850). Chapter III locates Melville in a New York City facing the rise of a turbulent, populist cultural order exemplified by Barnum's American museum. Initially attracted to Barnum's representational strategies, Melville's early enthusiasm was tempered by the time of Moby-Dick (1851) where the movement from temple to forum is figured as an “interregnum.” In Chapter IV, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) is re-envisioned through the lens of the novel's unauthorized dramatic adaptations staged at Barnum's American Museum and Purdy's National Theatre. These adaptations enter into a dialogue with both Stowe's text and with each other in a cultural contest that amplifies the novel's contradictory impulses. Following the poet from antebellum New York to postwar Washington D.C., Chapter V examines Whitman's attraction to new governmental institutions in both his poetry and in his late work Specimen Days (1882) as the destruction of the antebellum forum which informed the early works of all four authors leads to the use of new cultural forms as a means addressing the disruptive energies of Gilded Age America.