Jo March Was Born Here

What does it mean to visit a real place where a fictional event occurred? Do we know Anne Shirley better if we see her Green Gables with our own eyes? Does the building that occupies 221B Baker St. today say anything about the character of Sherlock Holmes? The easy answer: Of course not! If fiction is about imagination, these places are at their most authentic first in the minds of the writers who elevated them and then of readers who keep them alive. The pedestrian gables and attics and apartments themselves—in Prince Edward Island and London, respectively—are just a shell. To think they have any greater meaning is tragically middlebrow.

Click here for a slide-show tour of literary homes [2].

So-called “literary tourism” gets a bad rap among academics. As Randy Malamud put it in an ultimately sympathetic May article in the Chronicle of Higher Education [3], “Literary tourism, an engagement with the text outside the scholar’s realms of influence (the classroom, the archive, the monograph), may threaten the professoriate as market forces infringe on our careful critical deliberations.” In other words, the sometimes-profitable (and not always historically precise) enterprise of luring tourists to view literary sites makes a pleasant vacation of what should be rigorous academic work, and it muddies high cultural analysis with the low muck of selling Jo March dolls [4].

Well, let it get dirty. Most of us can’t help but blend our literary experiences with the physical world anyway: We accept described spaces as authentic, and that’s part of what makes them compelling. Only the truly cold-hearted can’t see any appeal in making a kind of secular pilgrimage to the locations we’ve treasured in print.

This phenomenon is even stronger for the stories we read—or have read to us—as children, the architecture of which can take on almost primal significance. That’s what prompted me last fall to embark on a road trip to visit a number of childhood homes of some of my favorite American literary heroines. The experience was alternatively transportive and underwhelming. When I walked into a restoration of the Wisconsin cabin that Laura Ingalls Wilder immortalized in Little House in the Big Woods [5], for instance, it seemed enchanted but also empty—missing a fire and biscuits and the sounds of Pa’s fiddle. But good news! You can go see Pa’s fiddle in Mansfield, Mo., displayed on a wall in Laura’s last home, which is open for tours year-round. It doesn’t make much music anymore, but there’s something wonderful about just looking at it. And after all, the music is in the books.

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