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PARLOR PONDS
The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970
By JUDITH HAMERA
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2012
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-05166-3
Chapter One
PROMISCUOUS VISION: THE VISUAL AFFINITIES OF THE HOME AQUARIUM The wonders of the ocean floor do not reveal themselves to vulgar eyes.
—H. NOEL HUMPHREYS, Ocean Gardens
H. Noel Humphreys assured his English and American readers that, to engage the full potential of the aquarium, "it is the seeing that is everything." But when it came to the home tank, seeing was not simple. As the preceding epigraph attests, this was not a matter for "vulgar eyes." It was not enough to merely look. The allure of spectacle might sustain the public tank, but to maximize the benefits of this rational amusement in the parlor, one had to pay attention; one had to observe. Thus, seventy-five years after Humphreys's admonition against vulgar eyes, William Innes, one of the pillars of the American hobby, used an editorial in his journal, the Aquarium, to reiterate the importance of the perceptual and cognitive synthesis intrinsic to properly observing the home tank.
This little editorial is a plea for the overlooked possibilities, particularly in very simple and sparsely stocked aquaria, where the field at first sight seems quite limited. Has the owner really seen all that can be seen, learned all there is to know? Hardly.
These are not foolish questions. They have direct scientific bearing, but most of all, they are intended to bring out the fact that observation needs to be systematized, so that it can be increased and made more valuable.
It is pleasant to believe one's self a person with the power of seeing everything at a glance, but in aquarium study (and I suspect elsewhere) "there ain't no such animal."
If this exhortation seems excessively disciplinary for a leisure activity, Innes assures his readers that "perpetual progress" as an aquarium observer "becomes permanent pleasure."
Innes's mid-twentieth-century supplement to Humphreys's mid-nineteenth-century assertion of the visual pleasures of the aquarium and their inaccessibility to vulgar eyes underscores a key feature of the tank as an exemplary rational amusement. Its enthusiasts' emphases on systematic observation as key to intellectual profit and progress link the hobby to the core operation of American modernity: the ability to pay attention. Humphreys's and Innes's assertions reinforce the aquarium's place in the ongoing construction, management, and domestication of modern attention, which, as Jonathan Crary observes, is the operation central to the functioning of a capitalist consumer economy. What, in its British antecedents, begins as an appeal to a cultivated aesthetic and theological vision, one mark of distinction against the merely vulgar, morphs over time into surveillance as leisure. The inculcation of systematic discipline as crucial to the hobby transports the hobbyist from an earlier romantic ethos, one in which the refined soul sees in the tank a solidarity with lyric poets, to an entrepreneurial, managerial one ever on the alert to overlooked possibilities for increasing value.
Yet the aquarium was not only an activity to which attention must be paid. It was also a distraction, a site of seeming respite from the need to pay attention, as J. E. Taylor argued.
Invalids, or people of sedentary habits, who are much confined within doors, might find comfort and enjoyment from keeping an aquarium. The antics of its little inhabitants, and the little care required to keep this miniature world in a healthy condition, will draw off their attention from many an hour of suffering or care, and unconsciously develop a love for God's creatures.
The aquarium did not just demand the heightened vigilance and cultivated engagement required of the modern subject; it was also the antidote to them. Whether as a task to be effectively managed or a refuge from such tasks, the home tank was part of a Foucauldian "network of permanent observation," one in which concentrated attention, its refinement and recalibration, increasingly colonized leisure time. How did the home aquarium so easily accommodate these two seemingly incommensurable visual operations—focused attention and respite—within a larger construction of attentiveness?
This chapter examines the perceptual dynamics of the home aquarium through its visual affinities. The aquarium's uncanny ability to draw on a wide range of such affinities and their operations is crucial to understanding its social work and its enduring popularity. These affinities inserted the tank, its residents, and its viewers into preexisting logics of perception and consumption, along with their embedded narrative logics, organizing what and how to see, as well as why. These visual and textual logics worked together to establish and enhance the appeal of the hobby. Chapters 2 and 3 focus specifically on the rhetoric of home aquarium texts, which relied heavily, if seemingly unconsciously, on the tropes and templates discussed here. Thus, aquarium texts were much more than "foils" for the tank's visual affinities, more than "rival modes of representation." On the contrary, the garden, the window, panorama and the theater, the sightseeing vacation, and the ideological utility of the domestic landscape itself undergird these texts. Over the course of the hobby, visual and textual elements engaged in an ongoing process of mutual redefinition. This chapter focuses on mid-nineteenth-century landscapes and technologies that coincided with and contributed to the emerging popularity of the hobby, but one obvious example is contemporary. The rise of the nature documentary, especially its easy availability on that other domestic leisure box, the television, coupled with the increasing circulation of ecological rhetoric in the public sphere, contributed enormously to the popularity of the reef tank, discussed in this book's conclusion.
This chapter examines perceptual foundations for the home aquarium. It begins by briefly outlining familiar domestic landscapes that accustomed viewers to the type of world and associated benefits the aquarium offered: the garden and the collection. Like the aquarium, both operate within a larger iconological economy of the domestic(atible) landscape. The aquarium benefits from this economy and troubles it in its continual reminders that the underwater world is both inaccessible and very strange. The chapter then turns to more-extensive discussions of the diverse architectural and entertainment technologies that acclimated consumers to specific forms of modern spectatorship and prepared them for the landscapes in the tank.
DOMESTIC(ATED) LANDSCAPES
The aquarium entered the public and private spheres as versions of the landscape. W. J. T. Mitchell's "theses for landscape" could just as easily serve as a poststructuralist definition of the home tank—a piece of the sea removed to the parlor, both a real ecosystem and a highly artificial ornament, a framed portion of aquascape gesturing toward an unframable whole. Mitchell writes,
Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.
In mid-nineteenth-century America, the liminal both-and aspect of the landscape provided a particularly potent tool for imagining national unity and constructing a seemingly stable, comprehensible, and harmonious nature while minimizing the unpredictability of both. Angela Miller calls this "the formula of the middle landscape" in visual art of the period. The aquarium was both a logical extension of this representational strategy and an exception to it. Collecting and containing specimens from rivers, streams, and the ocean itself was certainly one way of making national patrimony visible. It paralleled American landscape painters' representations of geological forces on canvas. Like these paintings, the aquarium attempted to contain the ultimately uncontainable, making it reassuringly available for display and thereby intelligible. Yet, while a bucolic pond might be easily recognized as a site of restorative repose or a nostalgic marker for rural scenes now lost to urbanization, even here the conventional landscape schema only skims the iconological surface.
At the birth of the aquarium in the United States in the late 1850s, water worlds could not yet be fully enclosed by the conceptual and material frames of capital. They were simultaneously essential for yet resistant to national and later global annexation and exploitation. These were sources of raw materials and modes of transporting them, but their depths, expanses, and flows could not be easily tamed by entrepreneurs, painters, scientists, or tourists. Unlike the geological wonders painted by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and other members of the Hudson River school, underwater landscapes were wholly inaccessible, even by the most intrepid adventurer. The seas and mighty rivers so crucial to the nation's self-fashioning were vehicles for progress yet also threatening, impenetrable, seemingly inexhaustible—howling wilderness not yet completely transformed into restful, restorative nature nor fully subsumed into the productive networks of culture. Indeed, water worlds were as much reminders of the limits of human progress as vehicles for it. Melville's Moby Dick is only one obvious example, as is the prevalence of imagery of wrecked boats in American luminist painting of the middle to late nineteenth century. The sea and the great rivers of the interior were also cast as sources of primeval national vitality and routes to the elemental sublime. Paintings could easily organize the picturesque aspects of water worlds for viewers, but the materiality of the aquarium's actual water—sloshing, spilling, evaporating, leaking—was a constant reminder that the tank held only "fast-fish," even as it gestured toward incalculable conceptual and material "loose-fish." As Melville observed in Moby Dick, "A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it." Fast-fish were enlightening and reassuring diversions. Loose-fish seemed inexhaustible and eternal.
The home aquarium reassured the viewer of the power of technology and the individual to miniaturize water worlds for private consumption, even as its very artifice served as a reminder of the highly circumscribed nature of that power. Perhaps it was this ambivalence—reassuring through technologically enhanced frames while pointing to the unframable—that kept the "picture frame aquarium" at the margins of the hobby. Despite occasional references to the aquarium as a living picture, water's three-dimensional materiality and symbolic potency strained the conventions of the two-dimensional landscape. Literal and ideological maintenance were problems. Water in picture frame aquariums, like that in actual ponds, rivers, and seas, didn't always do what technicians and consumers wanted it to, and when it stubbornly went its own way, it swamped the entire frame, exposing it as always already inadequate. Perhaps this accounted for a metaphoric slide to other, less ambivalent, more obviously domesticated three-dimensional landscapes to normalize the aquarium.
The title of Humphreys's book Ocean Gardens points to the domestic landscape most analogous to the home aquarium. Consumers could view the tank as a garden. Garden imagery was common in early aquarium literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Henry D. Butler asked his readers,
Would you desire an aquatic flower-show? The sea and the lake have their gardens, beside which the garish beauty of man's proudest efforts at floriculture pale into sickly impertinence. Behold them, reproduced in the Aquaria!
The prevalence of garden references in early publications was in part a reflection of biology, a recognition of the variety of undersea botanicals and animals, like the anemone, that were frankly flowerlike. Anemones were discussed like plantings, especially in books that emphasized the decorative possibilities of the tank, including Shirley Hibberd's Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, discussed in chapter 2. It was also a function of genealogy, of the widely held view that the aquarium was an outgrowth of the Ward Case, a miniature greenhouse for growing ferns. Both the early incarnation of the aquarium and the garden were literal places of cultivation.
More substantively decorative home gardens offered a well-established model of aesthetic and domestic virtues that the aquarium was poised to share. They simultaneously demonstrated mastery of the earth and independence from it. For the emerging urban middle class, a small garden might supplement the larder, but it was far from subsistence agriculture. In this respect, it paralleled hobbyists' relationship to aquarium fish: having the resources to cultivate them without the economic imperative to eat them. Gardens were reassuringly controllable elements of nature incorporated into the home, where they were appreciated as pedagogical and artistic goods. Moreover, as products of individual or family initiative, they reflected the inner cultivation of their owners—imagination, the coupling of leisure and hard work or the ability to employ others to do it, access to materials and perhaps even to Old World landscapes through travel or publications.
In both aquatic and garden scapes, the pleasing appearance of physical space reflected a mastery of facts, especially, in the case of gardens, a "botanical vernacular" that marked the command of the upper-middle and emerging middle classes over genteel natural history as well as their distance from utilitarian peasant understandings. Like the garden, the home aquarium offered the opportunity to subsume the natural within an expanded notion of the domestic self by inserting it into domestic space. In both cases, the process made nature into a consumable. Further, both the garden and the aquarium relied on and reinforced practices of an emerging managerial ethos within the domestic routine as the leisure-time equivalent of "the language of calculation, system, and diligence into which efficiency engineers poured their new and stricter meanings." These practices included sorting desirable elements from undesirable ones using arbitrary classification schemes ("plants" versus "weeds"), a "good eye" (a putatively democratized version of innate "taste"), discipline and vigilance needed for regular maintenance, and/or the ability to delegate and supervise "lower order" tasks. Beyond this, the garden had utopian affinities from the admittedly ambivalent Garden of Eden to the medieval "bower of bliss." This utopian aspect was an especially potent antidote to increasing urbanization and industrialization. The garden offered the middle-class family a private park as the aquarium offered a parlor sea, a way to view and manage nature as a palliative, a pedagogical tool, and a pleasure.
These shared attributes aligned the home aquarium much more closely with the home garden than with the zoo. Though the tank was certainly a way to stage the domestic self as erudite, handy, and tasteful, it did not partake of the same visual rhetoric of gross power as private menageries. Historically, American public aquariums actually preceded zoos. P. T. Barnum installed tanks in his American Museum in 1856, and Henry Butler and James Cutting opened the Boston Aquarial Gardens in 1859. Though the charter establishing the Zoological Society of Philadelphia was signed that same year, the zoo itself—the first in the United States—did not open to the public until 1874. Add to this the fact that the labor of the home tank, like the labor of the garden, was personal, an extension of domestic space and management. The zoo might have presented the world's fauna, but the tank was its owner's personal world.
The quality of relationships between viewers and residents in zoos also marked a crucial difference between these institutions and home or even public aquariums. This difference was another component of the overall strangeness of water worlds. It was not just the water itself that made these landscapes inaccessible, inconvenient, and unintelligible. It was the nature of the residents themselves. Biologist Todd Newberry describes this difference in contemporary terms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PARLOR PONDS by JUDITH HAMERA Copyright © 2012
by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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