twenty years at hull house

her stepbrother Harry Haldeman performed an operation to straighten

her spine. After a year of recuperation back in Cedarville, she sailed

for Europe on August 22, 1883, in the company of her stepmother,

two college friends named Mary and "Puss" Ellwood and their aunt,

and Sarah Hostetter, Mrs. Addamss niece. They were abroad for almost two years. A second trip followed in 1887-88, this time in the

company of two friends from the Rockford Seminary, Ellen Starr and

Sarah Anderson. It was during this trip that the plan for Hull-House

was conceived. The women returned home in the fall of 1888, Addams and Ellen Starr moved to Chicago in January, 1889, and they

moved into Hull-House in September.

From this complex and troubled personal history, Addams constructs a spare, skeletal, almost allegorical narrative of moral development and conversion in the first five chapters of Twenty Years at

Hull'House. Unmentioned are the death of her sister, her fathers remarriage, and the traumatic operation on her spine. The physical and

emotional collapses of the early 1880s are passed over with a terse reference at the beginning of chapter 4 to "a state of nervous exhaustion

with which I struggled for years." What replaces the materials of ordinary biography is a series of anecdotal memories, some of them seemingly trivial —a childhood dream, a childrens game, a family trip to

Madison, Wisconsin, a tourist visit to east London—which trace a

spiritual quest for reality, "the desire to live in a really living world," as

she describes it at the end of chapter 3. These first chapters present a

series of steadily ascending moral visions—John Addamss valid but

limited code of "personal integrity," the larger humanitarian vision of

Lincoln, the "rose-colored mist" of idealism at Rockford Seminary

culminating in the conversion experience in the Madrid bullring in

chapter 4. The hullring becomes a microcosmic instrument of selfcondemnation in Addamss retrospective revulsion, the suffering of

the bulls and horses the sufferings of the real world, the romantic associations which shield her from empathic response the paralyzing force

of "culture." Hull-House is created as the anti-type of the bullring, a

feminine space of community and bread-giving rather than the masculine space of competition and slaughter.

What are we to make of these considerable disparities between

Addamss early life and her account of it, between the historical and

the autobiographical views? The conclusion is perhaps obvious: that