An original, richly illustrated analysis of American honeymooning, 1820-1900, that offers fresh insights into the intersecting histories of tourism, consumerism, sentiment, sexuality, and conjugality
Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon between 1820 and 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple by-product of the privatization of the family, this work argues that it was formed at the interstices between (and helped to articulate) a variety of narratives—patriotic, conjugal, sentimental, and sexual that were central to the modern American national identity. To track these narratives, Barbara Penner moves between primary accounts of newlywed experiences recorded in diaries and letters in addition to entries in a wide range of textual, visual, and architectural representations, matrimonial maps, engravings from the popular press, sensation novels, and palace hotel bridal chambers. Her wide-ranging interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates the specific ways in which newlyweds on tour prompted individual and collective feelings of attachment whether to the ideals of egalitarian marriage, domesticity, nation, or sentiment itself. Above all, she argues that the honeymoon was key to legitimizing the union of sentiment and commerce, a union that continues to thrive today.
Endorsements:
“Newlyweds on Tour places an emphasis on invented tradition and on transformation through ritual that is very interesting and very different from previous scholarship on the topic. Barbara Penner also implicitly tells a chronological story of the development of honeymoons in response to technological and cultural change, especially in the transportation and tourist industries. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the latter from a stunning variety of fields, Penner has truly brought a lot of reading and thinking to bear on what is a definitional ritual of conjugality and modernity—and for Penner, of visual culture.”—Helena Michie, Agnes C. Arnold Chair in Humanities, Professor of English, Rice University, author of Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to The Conjugal
“Newlyweds on Tour offers an elegant and persuasive interpretation of nineteenth-century honeymooning in America. Barbara Penner’s work is intellectually sophisticated yet highly intuitive, bringing social theory to bear on familiar traditions in ways that illuminate both. And her readings of material culture—from lithographs to silverware to furniture to architecture—are unmistakably high-quality, top-drawer stuff.”—A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, University of New Mexico, author of Hotel: An American History
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
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BARBARA PENNER is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London. She is co-editor of Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction.
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Barbara Penner and her book are featured in “Ask an Academic,” an online feature of The New Yorker.
Click here.She was also interviewed for ROROTOKO, “…an online venue for engaging the ideas and elaborations serious books are made of.” To read the interview,
Click here.
