It’s an image etched into our national consciousness as Americans, perhaps from before we even know its context: that of a toddler John F. Kennedy, Jr. saluting his father’s casket. It was November 25th, 1963, making it the little boy’s third birthday, and while standing …
“It disgusted me even to move,” wrote an artist to his younger brother, “and nothing would have been so agreeable to me as never wake up again.” The year was 1889; the place, the Saint-Paul Asylum in Paris; the artist, Vincent van Gogh. We’re accustomed …
In what little spare time I have as a graduate student here at Tufts, I love reading plays. I’ve been hooked on this particular art form since I was ten years old, when my mom — an English major at the same university where I would end up minoring in the subject as an undergrad — introduced her three young daughters to the work of a certain playwright named William Shakespeare. The study in high school English class of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as the chance in a college Shakespeare course to fulfill a childhood dream and perform a soliloquy from Hamlet, cemented my fascination with plays, and ever since I have done my best to read and attend them whenever the chance presents itself.
Most recently, my sister — a devoted modern drama enthusiast — and I have been combing through the works of twentieth-century playwright Eugene O’Neill. Immediately upon finishing his autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I knew I had found a new favorite. It’s rare to read something so heartbreakingly honest, so introspective, so self-aware. When Edmund — the sickly, disillusioned young man representing the playwright — mourns that he “can never belong” and “must always be a little in love with death,” readers and viewers feel profoundly the extent of O’Neill’s mental agony. And as a longtime admirer of anything that deals openly with family dynamics and intergenerational trauma — it’s one of the reasons I love history — I was stunned by the empathy that O’Neill demonstrates in Long Day’s Journey for his immensely troubled and hurting mother, father, and older brother, even as he wove a story of the unspeakable pain all four wielded against each other.
This, I believe, is the true power of plays — of art, of history, of anything that makes the brutally honest revelation of human nature its goal — it helps us to understand ourselves, those we love, and even those we’ve never met. Art connects us to each other, to people who matter to us and to others we’ll never know, helping us to empathize with the dreams, fears, and immense pain of our fellow human beings.
The more I think about it, don’t museums often fulfill this exact same need in us? We visit memorial museums not only to honor those lost to bigotry and violence, but also to learn about their lives and remember the horrific hatred to which they were ultimately subjected — with the goal of never allowing it to happen again. We step foot inside historic houses to get inside the heads of people who lived before us, to see the spaces they called home and existed in day to day, to get just a glimpse of what it was like to live their joys and their hardships. In art museums, we appreciate the beauty, craftsmanship, and meaning that great talents put into their work, and feel each piece stir something in our souls. Museums provide opportunities for human connection, for the learning and practice of empathy and compassion, that we don’t always get outside their walls.
As for Eugene O’Neill himself, he has museums dedicated to his memory and influential work. In New London, Connecticut, visitors can tour the Monte Cristo Cottage, summer home of the O’Neill family throughout Eugene’s boyhood and the setting of Long Day’s Journey. The family’s frequent travel for his father’s work meant this was the only home young O’Neill really knew, and the house now recalls his ties to it with permanent exhibitions, carefully-researched furnishings, and periodic performances of his most famous play.
On the other side of the country, Northern California boasts the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site. This is the house he chose to call home in later years, where he wrote his final plays in the midst of intensifying physical illness and the inevitable emotional pain that accompanied resurrecting his difficult past to create autobiographical art. At the home today, visitors get the chance to explore the house and the beautiful grounds that helped inspire his last works.
If, like me, you’re in Boston but still want to somehow pay tribute to Eugene O’Neill, you are in luck. Make your way to Jamaica Plain’s Forest Hills Cemetery — lauded for being one of the most beautiful “garden cemeteries” in the United States with its trees, rolling hills, and incredible sculptures — where he and his wife are buried. As it turns out, this perpetual wanderer — who, like Edmund, seemed to “never feel at home” anywhere — died in a hotel room in Boston and was buried here. I visited this weekend, and was deeply impacted to find that visitors leave stones, coins, and pens atop the O’Neills’ grave. “Rest In Peace,” the headstone reads simply, beneath the couple’s birth and death dates. After such a difficult life spent producing beautiful art that touches so many to this day, Eugene O’Neill, I believe, certainly deserves that chance.
By visiting museums, historic sites, and the places people of the past called home, we have the opportunity to be students of human nature, students of connection with our fellow people, students of empathy. I, for one, am deeply grateful to be emerging in a field that offers this special, unique, and immeasurably important possibility. Perhaps, with more museums making their visitors feel this profound connection with others, there could be far fewer people feeling, like Edmund and his creator Eugene O’Neill, like they “can never belong.”
Content warning: this post includes discussion of vandalism against museums and markers honoring women, Black Americans, and Jewish individuals. On September 26th, 2021, a fire engulfed the back porch of the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester, New York. The fire department was …
I spent the past week with family. On the last day of my youngest sister and my mom’s visit to Boston, we journeyed out to Concord to spend the afternoon at Orchard House — the home where Louisa May Alcott scribbled furiously away at a book …
Emily Dickinson is a figure shrouded in mystery. We have her beautifully exultant poetry to give us clues about who she was — poetry that, curiously, she did not want published during her lifetime. She wrote many letters, but most of them were burned upon her death. She was a writer, but really didn’t leave behind much documentation. She is hard to get to know — making her a special challenge for a museum.
Over the summer, as an assignment for the Revitalizing Historic Houses course, I interviewed Brooke Steinhauser, who is the Program Director at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. Out of a list of potential interviewees — all professionals in the field, all well-acquainted with experiencing the joys and solving the problems involved in historic house museum work — I chose her, having always had an interest in Emily Dickinson.
It was a great decision. Brooke was wonderful, so open and happy to answer all my questions. I really wanted to get at the heart of this issue: how do you teach a figure who was, famously, so private? How do you make her legacy come into focus, and present who she was in a clear, digestible way to visitors?
Brooke’s answers fascinated, surprised, and inspired me. She talked to me about how much Emily Dickinson means to so many people — and not all for the same reasons. Because there is so much we don’t know about her, there are many possible avenues of explanation, potential answers to the question “who was she, really?” This allows each and every visitor who walks into the Emily Dickinson home to come in with a slightly different Emily in their mind and heart.
Different people identify with Dickinson in varying ways. Her decision to become reclusive resonates with many, as it likely can be explained by mental illness. Or perhaps it was a physical illness or disability that led her to become such a private person. Or, as has been posited in more recent times to explain why she chose not to marry, maybe Dickinson was a gay woman. She is a symbol and an icon for numerous different groups of people because of all these possibilities.
There are many Dickinsons. According to Brooke Steinhauser, each is valid. She explained to me that because there are so few concrete answers about who Dickinson was, conversations at the museum can “dwell in Possibility” — which, of course, Dickinson herself espoused in one of her poems. Visitors can approach her with their own perspectives and ideas, and the museum can guide them in understanding why those answers to the questions about this woman make sense, while also presenting other possible answers. It is the job of the museum, Brooke said, to “complicate while celebrating” Dickinson’s legacy, and to hold visitors’ hands to that end, meeting them where they are in their own personal journeys with the poet.
Respecting what the subject of a museum means to each individual visitor is important. In the case of someone like Dickinson — about whom we have so few answers, only her art and the walls in which she lived — questions, uncertainties, and possibilities are okay. Not knowing all the answers is okay. This actually provides a unique and special opportunity to value the visitors’ own ideas and thoughts.
As a training historian, of course, I hold the truth very dear. It does matter, and museums are places where truth should be valued more than almost anywhere else; we have a responsibility to accurately inform the people who visit our sites, ready and expecting to learn. We owe that to them. But we also owe them our respect, our gentleness, our open minds, and the humble assertion that just because we work inside the museum, it doesn’t mean we have all the answers. We never can — not really.
We will probably never have all the answers about Dickinson. The museum’s mission statement promises to “spark the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice,” and by allowing its visitors to “dwell in Possibility,” it certainly fulfills that goal.
Dickinson means a lot to people. If her museum can spark their imaginations with possibilities about who all she may have been — just like her beautiful poetry has for over a century — I think that’s a definite win for the museum world, and something to be admired and aspired to by other institutions.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is closed for a major restoration project until spring of 2022, but their website has incredible resources and ways to explore. Check it out here.