"In the Waiting Room" describes its child speaker's descent into all-consuming, overwhelmed existential panic, followed by her sudden emergence into renewed normalcy. A single object carries her through both the onset of her unprecedented dread and her attempts to recover from that dread. That object is an issue of National Geographic magazine, left for patients to peruse in the dentist's waiting room. Inside the magazine, the speaker encounters images that enthrall and terrify her, from a volcano to "A dead man slung on a pole" to bare-breasted women with wires on their necks. The magazine's cover is as important as what the speaker encounters within. Through its familiar yellow margins and the date listed on it, the speaker anchors herself and her mood. Here, we'll discuss the history and the cultural importance of National Geographic, which shaped the way many in the English-speaking world came to understand both nature and unfamiliar cultures.
Founded in 1888, National Geographic was initially a publication of the National Geographic Society. Its circulation rose steadily, reaching a million subscribers by 1926—less than a decade after "In the Waiting Room" is set. The magazine aimed to bring readers in contact with the wider world. It focused on nature, in the form of geography and exploration, and on culture, in the form of ethnography and archaeology. Most of all, it was notable for its rich visual resources. The magazine contained detailed, immersive maps, illustrations, and—most notably of all—photography. These photographs, often published in color well before color photography was the norm in periodicals, gave American readers access to corners of the world they might never have been able to access. Meanwhile, the magazine aimed to expose readers to the world while presenting the world through a generous lens: its editorial credo was “Only what is of a kindly nature is printed about any country or people.”
National Geographic, with its ethos of exploration and close observation, in many ways reflected a broader ethnographic turn in American culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this period, disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology all aimed to understand human culture and behavior through a scientific lens. The rise of these ethnographic methods and areas of study was inextricable from colonialism and imperialism. As the Western world, most prominently Britain, seized control of much of the planet, Europeans were increasingly exposed to and able to insert themselves within the cultures they colonized. The legacy of nineteenth-century anthropology and its related disciplines remains complex to this day, causing later anthropologists to interrogate and question the history of their own discipline. Attempts to scientifically study culture resulted in increased knowledge and cultural appreciation. But it also led to the appropriation of artifacts and art—leading to still-controversial battles over the rightful ownership of these items—and to the flourishing of scientific racism.
National Geographic magazine was a product of America and not Europe, and as such its relationship to anthropological disciplines and to the scientific study of culture had its roots not in the colonial project of European nations but in a specifically American version. At the close of the nineteenth century, America's push westward ended. The U.S. Census Bureau declared "the Closing of the Frontier" in 1890, and with this moment came a jarring shift in American sensibilities, which had long been driven by the concept of manifest destiny and westward exploration. Meanwhile, the country was increasingly involved in conflicts outside of North America, most prominently the Spanish-American war in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Publications like National Geographic played an important role in a society coming to terms with the closing of a frontier even as expansion and manifest destiny remained part of national identity.
Thus, the magazine that the speaker leafs through in "In the Waiting Room" is both a realistic everyday item from the early twentieth-century anglosphere, and an ideal device for expanding the speaker's mental range beyond the everyday. An issue of National Geographic would have been a ubiquitous object in this period, when the circulation of the magazine (and of similar periodicals featuring photography) was high and growing. At the same time, in spite of that ubiquity, the images inside would have depicted parts of the world previously unseen by a child reader, portrayed in unprecedentedly vibrant visuals. Thus, through the ordinary object she encounters in a dentist's office, the poem's speaker is launched into an encounter with the world outside her own experiences.
