Midwest Modern Language Association

Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920 by Melanie DawsonReview by: Jeffrey SwensonThe Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp.177-179Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20464170 .

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versation about benevolence and the perils of the thematic essay collection as a form than to the faults of the editors and authors. The collection rais es interesting questions and suggests the need for and promise of further research.

Melissa J. Homestead University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Work Cited

Ryan, Susan. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benev olence. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.

Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920. By Melanie Dawson. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005. x + 257 pp.

Most works of American literary and cultural studies have passed over the subject of Victorian and Gilded Age home life, and those few that have taken it up have tended to treat the home simply as a feminine and domes tic space. Following studies like Karen Halttunen's Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982) and J. Jeffrey Franklin's Serious Play (1999), Melanie Dawson takes a broader view of American home life by critically examin ing home entertainment. Laboring to Play provides an informative look inside the antebellum American parlor, arguing that games and entertain

ments were not simply ways to escape the toil of work but were a forum that allowed the emerging middle class to express anxieties about their growing material comforts and rising social status. Dawson argues that home entertainment books allowed players to use their personal skills to overcome unchangeable social markers, such as money, status, and con nections, while encouraging participants to conform to a homogenized middling-class American identity.

The first half of Dawson's study presents a reading of entertainment guides in the last half of the nineteenth century, investigating how home entertainments allowed players to negotiate the double bind of their quickly changing societal structure. While middling-class people aspired to gentility, Dawson argues, the very conception of gentility defied such aspi rations. One essential quality of Victorian manners was ease-an innate quality rather than an earned one-which presented a challenge to social climbers. Parlor games allowed the middle class to demonstrate the pos session of natural skills in a social context and also to exhibit non-genteel

Jeffrey Swenson 177

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behavior. Dawson relates how many games of the period allowed partici pants to pantomime working-class behavior or subtly mock upper-class pretension, celebrating the value of conventional work without actually taking it up. By participating in childlike games such as "Blind Man's

Bluff," adults were released from the stultifying decorum of courtship, being able instead to engage in frank, if disguised, sexual behavior. The

most colorful entertainments of the period celebrated the grotesque, prompting players to transform themselves by means of costume or arti fice into twisted freaks or decapitated heads. The "Blue Beard Tableau," for example, presented the "transformation of a polite young woman into an object of horror as she combed out her hair, tied it to a suspended hook, stuck her head through a sheet, rolled back her eyes, and slackened her jaw so as to resemble one of Blue Beard's beheaded wives" (75). Dawson argues that grotesque play, beyond providing a social escape like juvenile or working-class games, allowed the middle class to express anxiety at becoming disembodied in the modern world, a fear resulting from the pro gressive division of working tasks and a separation from physical labor.

If Dawson's well-researched and insightful study of entertainment books proves an effective resource for scholars of Victorian America, the second half of Laboring to Play will be of more use to literary critics. There, she reads entertainment trends in tandem with fictional depictions of par lor amusements. In particular, Dawson's analysis of American literary texts in the context of tableaux vivants is nothing short of brilliant. In the

mid-nineteenth century, tableaux vivants were widely popular among the middling classes, often linking aesthetic and inspirational ideals. Dawson argues that portrayals of allegorical figures such as "Hope" or "Faith" were the equivalent of cultural labor and effectively granted performers social agency, an agency demonstrated in Louisa May Alcott's novella "Behind a

Mask" (1866). Alcott presents her heroine, Jean Muir, in a series of tableaux vivant scenes, linking Jean's ability to effectively inhabit the tableaux's characters to her ability to transcend her social sphere. By the turn of the century trends had changed, and tableaux vivants showcased not cultural labor but the ostentatious display of goods. Gilded Age Ameri ca's class elitism was based on economics, not necessarily birth or culture, and thus lavish displays of consumption trumped displays of social ability. In a discussion of House of Mirth (1905) bound to become required reading for Wharton scholars, Dawson shows how Lily Bart's passe tableaux per formance-an unadorned scene apropos of early Victorian sensibilities equates with Lily's errant belief in her own social agency. Lily's plans for social ascent fail because, by the turn of the century, conspicuous display and consumption trump innate ability.

The final chapters of Laboring to Play discuss Gilded Age social trends that shifted entertainments away from the home to the outdoors or to

178 Book Reviews

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larger, communal spaces like halls and clubs. Dawson argues that the turn of-the-century athleticism craze drove people out of what was now seen as the antiquated parlor and also drove them to push their children into pre scribed orations and performances. Children presented recitations that contrasted the modern technological present with a nostalgic, mytholo gized vision of nineteenth-century American life that often valorized the pioneer, performances that she surmises served to incorporate the youths into a more homogenous, white, middle-class aesthetic and culture. Daw son finally ascribes the artistic drive behind Modernism to the stultifying nature of these displays, noting that the Modernist adults who rejected set literary form and structure in their art had been forced as children to "play" in oppressive and inscribed ways. Intriguing as her hypothesis is,

Dawson's literary analyses of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920) and Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) prove less groundbreaking, failing to be as complex as her discussion of Wharton or Alcott.

As with any good book, Laboring to Play leaves its readers wanting more. Dawson carefully retains her focus on the emerging middle class; as a result, her brief discussions of race, nationalism, immigration, and the

working class seem cursory in places. Her narrow scope is justifiable, as parlor games were primarily played by the white middle class, but a dis cussion of American anxiety about the late-nineteenth-century surge in immigration or a more-detailed examination of how entertainments were performed and perceived by the black middle class, for instance, would have provided welcome context. Dawson's work will likely become the foundation upon which further studies in these areas will be built. In any case, Laboring to Play will prove useful-and entertaining-to American studies scholars and literary critics alike.

Jeffrey Swenson University of Iowa

Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. By Angela Sorby. Durham: U of New Hampshire e 2005. xlv + 233 pp.

Angela Sorby's Schoolroom Poets marks a significant transition in the growing study of nineteenth-century American poetry. Ignored by genera tions of scholars-who in a sweeping gesture deplored almost all of it,

with the notable exceptions of Whitman's and Dickinson's work, for what they considered its aesthetic and social conservatism-nineteenth-century

Matthew Giordano 179

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