Museum Trouble by Hoberman Ruth;

Author:Hoberman, Ruth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2011-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Reverse Epiphanies

The protagonist of Gilbert Cannan’s 1909 novel Peter Homunculus is not poor, but he is provincial, lower-middle-class, and sexually insecure. So, too, was the author when he entered the London literary scene in 1907 as secretary to J. M. Barrie. Initially accepted into Barrie’s literary circle—which included, among others, the popular journalist E. V. Lucas, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry James—Cannan alienated some when, in 1908, he became romantically involved with Barrie’s wife, actress Mary Ansell, whom he married in 1910.20 In Peter Homunculus, Cannan’s hero, Peter Davies, arrives similarly poor and naïve, eager to negotiate the London literary marketplace and establish himself as a writer.21 After a brief attraction to one woman, he falls in love with an actress, Mary Dugdale, who instead of returning his love (as the real-life Mary Ansell did for Cannan), marries an older editor with a striking resemblance to Barrie. Peter wants to love and write with integrity and passion, to make both babies and books that transcend the cynicism, mediocrity, and commodification he sees around him. Ultimately he is defeated by his environment and by his own self-image as a “homunculus,” a shrunken, embryonic man marked by social inferiority and terrified by physical passion. The novel ends with the publication of Peter’s novel, to small sales, and his resigned acceptance that writing is “a trade; and the most celebrated and widely read author in Europe is—Karl Baedeker.”22

Baedekers, of course, guide European tourists to the right sites and museums, turning the appreciation of beauty into a marketable product. Given Peter’s failure to transcend his market-driven environment, it is appropriate that one key moment of inadequacy takes place in a museum, where, instead of losing himself in aesthetic appreciation, he is left feeling more homunculus-like than ever. Cannan uses the museum scene to suggest a tension between the aesthetic and romantic transcendence to which Peter aspires and the extent to which his body is marked by his class origins and physical inadequacy. In the process, Cannan responds to his friend E. V. Lucas’s 1906 A Wanderer in London, in which Lucas describes his own epiphanic experiences in London museums.23

The crucial scene is a meeting at the National Gallery between Peter and his first love, Mattie Scott, in whom he has now lost interest due to his growing passion for Mary Dugdale, the actress. As he waits for, then talks with, Mattie, Peter follows the same path through the National Gallery that E. V. Lucas advised in A Wanderer in London and stops to admire many of the same Italian and Dutch paintings, but without experiencing the same response. Here Peter responds to the “Nativity with Angels Adoring”—presumably Piero della Francesca’s Nativity—in reductively physical terms:

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