Barbara Penner
Newlyweds on Tour
Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple by-product of the privatization of the family, I argue that it was formed at the interstices of and helped articulate a variety of narratives -– patriotic, conjugal, sentimental, and sexual – that were central to modern American national identity.
To track these narratives, I move between primary accounts of newlywed experiences (diaries and letters) and a wide range of textual, visual and architectural representations (maps of matrimonial love, engravings from the popular press, sentimental and sensation novels, wedding night pornography, and palace hotel bridal chambers). This interdisciplinary analysis tracks 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, I am interested in how the honeymoon helped to consummate the romance of consumption. It was the ultimate union of sentiment and commerce, a union that continues to thrive in today’s ways of wedding.
The Famous Bridal Chamber of the Steamer "Drew". From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, September 21, 1878. Collection of the author.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Newlyweds on Tour
Barbara Penner Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America UPNE Press 308 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 1584657736
Available here →September 28, 2009
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Pete Jones
Barbara Penner
Barbara Penner is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her work consists of interdisciplinary investigations of the intersections between public space, architecture and private lives. She is author of Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (UPNE, 2009) and is co-editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Temple University Press, 2009) and Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 2000). Her essays can be found in the Journal of International Women’s Studies (June 2005), Negotiating Domesticity (Routledge, 2005), Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 2004), and Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Berg, 2004).
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The American honeymoon joined sentiment and commerce in a romance of consumption.
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