A Library of One's Own

Abstract

The title of Sheila Liming's important and far-reaching monograph, What a Library Means to a Woman, evokes Edith Wharton's autobiographical account of her father's library at their home on West Twenty-third Street in New York, which the author claimed “had the leading share in [her] growth” (Wharton, Backward 64). What does a library mean to a woman called Edith Wharton? In Liming's words, it “crucially informed her understandings of herself and played a vital role in shaping the narrative of self-development that emerged in concert with her identity as an author” (2).The title is also purposefully misleading. What a Library Means to a Woman is “not just a study of one woman and her library collection. It is a book about networked systems of social and cultural disparity” based on “a specific woman's initiation into a world of varied and unequal rules” (10). Wharton's depiction of her growth as a reader and writer says quite a lot about the world around her. Even “at a young age,” Liming explains, “Wharton's attachments to her books . . . foretell a set of synecdochal relations between her personal library and her understandings of inhabited space, or home” (5). Liming relies on Henri Lefebvre's pathbreaking idea that space is not a neutral container but actively “produces [social] relationships and hierarchies through practices of admission, exclusion, replication, and separation” (42). Wharton's father's library seems like a space of intellectual freedom, but the superimposition of economic and gender hierarchies threatened to siphon Wharton's interest in books and push her to value other domestic spaces. Wharton did not even inherit her father's library—her brothers did—and thus it took “the passing of years and a succession of deaths” for it to be “brought . . . back to [her]” (Wharton, Backward 65).By forming “a little library of [her] own” (70–71), Wharton charted a path away from what, to others (many of her characters, in fact), might have felt like fate. As she attained international success as a novelist, Wharton amassed a collection of around five thousand books. “[R]oughly half” were destroyed while in storage during the London Blitz a few years after her death—a tragic irony for a collection that had “offered a kind of solid, material ballast that helped to offset the ephemeral and fleeting qualities of a life lived among a shifting assortment of spaces” (Liming 2, 4).The innovation of What a Library Means to a Woman is that Liming “reads” Wharton's library as an ever-evolving social text. Our author is even part of its story; or, rather, it is part of hers. In 2006, after almost a decade of negotiations, collector George Ramsden sold Wharton's extant library to the trustees of Wharton's Berkshires estate, the Mount—a tale that Liming tells with a short story writer's pacing and precision in her conclusion. Liming helped digitize the catalogue and, in the process, became acquainted with the extensive physical collection, most of which are in the property's attic. Between its growth, near demise, series of inheritances and sales (all to men, notably), and final(?) resting place at both the center and margins of the mansion she designed, Wharton's library “[has] embod[ied] some of the most compelling contradictions regarding the fate of art under the auspices of modernity, inviting contemplations on the topics of inheritance, transmission, worth, value, and canonicity, to name only a few. At the same time, it permits one to access a kind of anachronistic display that feels distinctly nonmodern, to a space that operates like an oasis of antiquity located at the very core of modernity's swirling machinations” (204).If Wharton is Liming's avatar for exploring the collector's place in modern life, then Walter Benjamin is the collector's theoretical shadow-companion. Wharton (1862–1937) and Benjamin (1892–1940) have a “shared status as members of a disappearing class of devoted collectors” who “dwell among and through their books, viewing their library collections not only as extensions of their selves but as ambulatory homes or vessels for the housing of the self” (66). Paradoxically, then, they are contemporaneously anachronistic. Liming utilizes this “unconventional” (60) pairing to draw on the dialectic of order and disorder in Benjamin's essays on the collector. There are different ways this tension can play out, leading to “a whole host of compulsive or pathologically situated modern behaviors and tendencies, including hoarding” (7). Alongside her analysis of Wharton's library as a productive site for self-making, Liming performs illuminating close readings of representations of libraries (public and private) and collectors of all stripes (from the connoisseur to the hoarder) in Wharton's fiction, focusing on the opportunities they open and foreclose for women in particular.In chapter 1, Liming reads the tragic fate of Charity Royall in Summer (1917) as both a personal and a social failure to inhabit public libraries correctly. The novella begins with Charity reading a trashy novel at the front desk of the dark, decrepit, and dank Hatchard Memorial Library in the Berkshires, where she is a librarian. Liming contends that this fictional library reflects the exterior, but not the interior, of the Lenox Public Library, where Wharton was a member and donor. Wharton understood that libraries need lots of natural light and comfortable spaces to read, but also to congregate, and she helped design the Lenox Library's interior in a way that would have saved her character: “if Charity had only been granted access to . . . a space designed to accommodate social discourse in addition to reading and individual contemplation,” or had read works such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (which her story echoes), “things might have turned out differently for her” (59). Such counterfactual readings are not entirely effective, but Charity's story is meant to showcase how libraries “can become spaces of social transformation and ‘self-making’ for women, but only if they are designed with these potentialities in mind” (59–60). The first chapter comes with readings of other architectural models for Wharton's fictional libraries as well. Her aunt's neighbor's estate in the Hudson River Valley, Liming convincingly argues, is the likely inspiration for the Willows in Hudson River Bracketed (1929); its dark, knickknack-heavy library, however, violates the aesthetic credos Wharton set down in The Decoration of Houses (1897) and demonstrated in her own library at the Mount. The most thrilling part of this chapter centers on a Vogue photoshoot at the Mount in 2012 that used actors, writers, and models (often dubiously cast) to portray Wharton, Henry James, Morton Fullerton, and others socializing, and hence using the space correctly, in the restored library.In chapter 2, Liming compares one of Wharton's most well-known novels, The House of Mirth (1905), to a largely forgotten Danish novel by Louis Couperus, Eline Vere (1889). Though the connections between these works are novel and illuminating, the comparison might have been saved for an article insofar as it waylays the book's interpretive momentum around Wharton's work. When it comes to Mirth, Liming is interested in the details of Lily Bart's suitors' personal libraries and how they relate to her status as a commodity on the marriage market. Lawrence Selden's elaborately bound edition of a rare work in his modest but pretentious library shows “that if [Lily] wants to be ‘purchased’ by Selden, [she] needs to convey both quality (a ‘good edition’) and a dignified resemblance to other, vetted forms of investment (a ‘classic’)” (94). Her first suitor among elite New Yorkers, who compulsively builds on an inherited collection of Americana, dismisses Lily for the reason he would a collectible: she is “used, and, thereby, devalued” (92). These men, along with Lily, are trapped in a world of saleable objects that will never provide the happiness eluding them.Chapter 3 shifts gears to focus on “the socially networked act of self-definition through education, or reading” (133). Liming accomplishes two things in this chapter. First, she uses graphs and maps to visualize the transnational social and object network that led to the acquisition of the books in Wharton's library. Surprisingly, 92 percent came not through inheritance but “through connections and associations that she forged for herself en route to becoming an author” (114). In terms of their places or languages of origin, Wharton “reject[s] the rigidity of nationalism in favor of reading across a broadly European, cosmopolitan (though consummately white) canon” (120). Liming explains her Eurocentrism as “a process of rewriting and thus reclaiming some of the history that she had been previously denied access to or inclusion in” as a woman (124), which is interesting but also a missed opportunity to use Wharton's collection to address her sometimes-nativist views.The second component of this chapter is a reading of networked self-definition in The Gods Arrive (1932), the sequel to Hudson River Bracketed. In Hudson, the uncultured Vance Weston is given access to the Western canon by the young caretaker of the Willows library, Halo Tarrant. Vance, like Wharton, uses that self-education to become a successful author. “The gendered specificity of Wharton's education,” however, is routed through Halo's narrative (130). In Gods, Halo and Vance are a couple, but she “performs a number of managerial and administrative duties” as they navigate complex, overlapping social networks in Europe (130). That Halo “translat[es] and speak[s] for Vance” (132) shows the value of her own self-education in world literature while also underscoring her arbitrary diminishment next to Vance's brand of self-made authorship, even if she had a “head start” in life economically (134).The final chapter, aside from the conclusion, centers on the ways in which a collection is also a tomb. A library may be “a space that enacts the life of the collector” (142), but for the curators of such collections it can lead to a kind of death-in-life. This is the fate of Paulina Anson in an early short story, “The Angel at the Grave” (1901). Along with her aunts, Paulina keeps up the home of a bygone Concord transcendentalist named Orestes Anson. There is an entire history of “American self-madeness” (144) baked into the choice to make this fictional author a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Liming convincingly argues. Paulina is installed as the resident historian of the house-museum because she is considered to have inherited Anson's intellect; added to this dash of fate, Liming helps us see, is her intensive self-education from reading his dense philosophy.Paulina does not fit into the modern world and neither does the museum, where visitors have dropped steadily, nor the author himself, whose biography Paulina triumphantly writes only to be turned away by his old publisher. At the end of the story, a young researcher visits and asks Paulina for an obscure pamphlet that will prove Anson “anticipated . . . Saint Hilaire's theory of the universal type” (Wharton, Roman 130); tomorrow, she promises, “the fire shall be lit for [him]” so he can begin research (133). While critics have read the ending as either positive or negative, depending on the metaphorical significance of the fire, in Liming's deft hands it is both/and: “Paulina's fate might be a dismal one . . . but it is a fate that she herself has had an active role in engineering” (Liming 156). Paulina achieves a balance between fate and self-making consistent with her character: she chooses the fate of joining the collection as an object—like a statue angel adorning a grave—and lets the researcher get on with the business of adapting Anson to meet modern interests.Paulina evokes Benjamin's collector, who “disappear[s] inside” his collection and seals himself up “with books as the building stones . . . as is only fitting” (Benjamin 67). There is another, equally Benjaminian, component to “The Angel at the Grave” that Liming neglects, which is the scene of young Paulina first encountering Anson's work in a textbook: “What could have been more stimulating than to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when ossification sets in, their form was fatally predetermined” (Wharton, Roman 118). That the “form” of Paulina's ideas is “predetermined” before “ossification” speaks to Liming's brilliant reading of the conclusion. If Paulina accepts her fate (objectification), she does so, perhaps, because the researcher's discovery offers a chance to reinhabit the childish thrill of “gathering up the crumbs of meaning” before ossification inevitably takes hold (118). As Benjamin notes, collecting is a form of continual “rebirth” by giving new life to old objects: “This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age” (Benjamin 61). The obscure pamphlet, in new hands, revives the collection—and, with it, Paulina—by momentarily reopening the door to a world of discovery that she enters knowing it will close with her inside, packaged in the published form the research inevitably takes.I offer this brief reading less to dispute Liming's own reading than to introduce the tension between accrual and reification in her wonderful concluding chapter on the late George Ramsden (to whom the work is dedicated). After he bought the remains of Wharton's library on a whim, “he had not been able to stop collecting” (Liming 199), and he searched for further fragments of what was once an enormous collection even after its sale, as if to keep alive the thrill of discovery. Still, his negotiations with the Mount show how this childlike delight in collecting for its own sake clashed with his high valuation of the ostensibly complete product. It was, in many ways, inevitable: “A collection means most to the collector when it is still subject to becoming, still unfinished and in progress. But like all commodities, a collection incurs a pronouncement of value only through the process of exchange; it simply cannot be permitted to sit still forever” (193).There is an undercurrent of metacommentary in What a Library Means to a Woman, whereby our author approximates the figure of the collector (whether named Wharton, Paulina, Ramsden, or Benjamin). For example, Liming states that “writing this book” and maintaining its “sibling venture, the EdithWhartonsLibrary.org database” are “animated by a spirit of preservation” (22). “The Angel at the Grave” shows that preservation requires adaptation to the needs of modern audiences, which can also be a form of revival. This is the clear purpose of the digitization project. There is likewise “a spirit of preservation” in the impressive readability and urgency of a monograph that puts the avowedly anachronistic Wharton in conversation with notoriously difficult thinkers and writers (Karl Marx, Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, etc.), many of whom have been pronounced outdated in the post-critique climate of literary criticism. Liming, to achieve an “expansive and sympathetic” view of her subject, explains in the introduction that she “had to cobble together the pieces of a disparate methodological repertoire” (20), which she catalogs as if she were a collector of such methodologies: “book history and media study . . . , historical materialism, New Formalism, object-oriented ontology (or ‘new materialism’), traditional close-reading strategies, feminist critique, and networked or vaguely ‘distant’ reading practices” (20).In What a Library Means to a Woman, Liming is engaged in an act of authorial self-making by drawing together a robust collection of authors and methodologies that are meant to approximate, but never exhaust, the question of “what a library means to a woman.” That the product of intellectual labor has a price tag and can be bought with a click—well, that is just the inevitable end of a process whose real value is found in the state of becoming.