ABSTRACT
Before he died, Eugene O’Neill struggled upright and cried: “‘I knew it. I knew it! Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!’” (Sheaffer 670).O’Neill was indeed born in a New York hotel room and died in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. He is not unique; hotels accommodate celebrity deaths with a jauntiness that belies their public o ering of refuge. The Ritz in Paris (site of Princess Diana’s last meal) hosted accidental deaths as different as Pamela Churchill Harriman (President Clinton’s ambassador to France) and Coco Chanel, who, tired from her work on the spring collection, went to bed early and su ered a fatal heart attack in 1971. At least she was at home; she had resided there for more than thirty years. Our curiosity about such exits is as much related to the site of death as to the person. Stories connecting hotels and death provide a rich wallpaper of allusion, most repeatedly Oscar Wilde’s alleged comment about the room décor at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris: “‘My wallpaper and I are fi ghting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go’” (Ellman 546). Hotels have been setting to countless notorious deaths. The purchasable anonymity of hotel rooms contributes a frisson of alienation to these expirations; and literary or sensational connections infl ate the reputation of those lodgings. Hotels are theatrical or dramatically engaging destinations: they provide rooms where guests can be private, but they are public spaces where history and reputation add seasoning to their shelter. Thus, “perception, association, memory, and imagination” (Fischer-Lichte 112) overlap. This slippage between the performative and the banausic is one of their distinctive characteristics. “The performative space always also creates an atmospheric space. The bunker, the street car depot, the former grand hotel-from each of these emanates a very specifi c atmosphere” (Fischer-Lichte 114); and most importantly, a link between spectatorship and engagement. The discourse of the hotel, then, is reliant on its synthesis of private and public, o ering, as it does, a fusion of representation and simulation. Consumers may stay in a hostelry for pragmatic purposes (a place to rest and refresh) or may choose a haunt for its accrued value in terms of reputation or luxury.
