Overview

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.

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9781584657736

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In this wide-ranging and nuanced cultural history of the honeymoon in the 19th-century US, Penner examines letters and diaries alongside a variety of textual and visual representations of traveling newlyweds to explain why such tours became so popular, as well as what role the practice played in a constellation of topics, from nationalism to the interconnection between sentiment and commerce . . .. Penner argues that the honeymoon experience did not just reflect the growing importance of sentimentalism, domesticity, and romantic love, but actually played a pivotal role in promoting those social values, at the same time provoking debate about the proper way to express such private values in public view. Recommended. --Choice

In this wide-ranging and nuanced cultural history of the honeymoon in the 19th-century US, Penner examines letters and diaries alongside a variety of textual and visual representations of traveling newlyweds to explain why such tours became so popular, as well as what role the practice played in a constellation of topics, from nationalism to the interconnection between sentiment and commerce . . . Penner argues that the honeymoon experience did not just reflect the growing importance of sentimentalism, domesticity, and romantic love, but actually played a pivotal role in promoting those social values, at the same time provoking debate about the proper way to express such private values in public view. Recommended. --Choice

The strength of this theoretically sound book lies in its ability to successfully examine a hitherto underexplored topic by resorting to a wide-ranging group of academic disciplines. . . . This is a fresh and wonderfully informative book that opens new avenues of research in American studies. --Journal of American Studies

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

Author Information

BARBARA PENNER is 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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