9. Enchantment in Amherst: Why visit an artist’s house?

Helen Hills

Abstract

This essay explores the appeal of visiting the homes of famous people long dead – a common but curious practice too often taken for granted – through the lens of a visit I made in 2014 to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. I suggest that this practice is the secularized counterpart of Catholic pilgrimages to and devotion at saints’ shrines, seeking grace or a miraculous intervention of some kind. And occasionally even now such things do take place.

Keywords: writer’s house, Emily Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Susan Gilbert, Jean-Luc Nancy, portrait, possessions of the dead, National Trust, temporality, haunting, ghost, secular pilgrimage, grace

Full text: OAJ ISSUE 11 FINAL_Article_9

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2024s09

Biographical note

Helen Hills is Professor Emerita of History of Art, University of York.  She has published widely on baroque art and architecture and theory of architecture, particularly on the interplay of architecture, spirituality, gender, and social class in the long 17th century. Horrified by the complicity of art history with art and architecture in the work of marginalizing specific social groups depending on social class, poverty, gender, colour of skin, and geographical location, she has focused principally on women and on southern Italy, including Naples and Sicily. She taught at Queen’s University (Canada), Keele University (UK), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), and the University of Manchester before moving to York, where she was the first ever woman professor of art history. Her most recent publications include: editor of Silver: Transformational Matter (The British Academy & Oxford University Press, 2023); author of ‘Mattia Preti’s credenzas: Trust and betrayal in colonial Naples’ in Capodimonte: Un sito reale e un museo tra locale e globale (Naples, Arte’m, 2023), pp.122–37; ‘Nomadic silver: Refinement, transaction, transformation’, in M. Bol & E. Spary (eds) The Matter of Mimesis: Studies of Mimesis and Materials in Nature, Art and Science (Leiden, Brill, 2023), pp.135–55; ‘All that glitters is not gold’, Art History, vol.45, n.2 (2022), pp.431–39; ‘Those who flee and those who see: Poussin’s drawing and withdrawing’, Textual Practice, vol.37, n.5 (2023), pp.725–53.

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