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Laboring to Play
Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850â"1920
By Melanie Dawson The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8733-4
CHAPTER 1
Labor, Leisure, and the Scope of Ungenteel Play
"What is the key-note to good breeding? B natural." a conundrum Parlor Entertainments, or Evening Party Entertainments (1885)
Repeatably, performatively, mid-nineteenth-century home entertainment texts and the practices they outlined defined themselves against the excesses of genteel living. Play's votaries were asked to push aside the social ideal of politeness, and along with it, parlor furniture, breakables, carpets, and draperies as they engaged in various forms of competitive entertainment. By focusing on what lay beyond genteel postures, these activities, with their collective attention to the facade of polite interaction, exposed the labor-intensive realities of middling (and, on occasion, working-class) life, privileging competition, inventiveness, and visible work—operatives that were often concealed beneath etiquette's social niceties.
Because of the unique behavioral licenses surrounding play time, the tensions between the immediate goals of entertainment and the larger project of genteel acculturation were magnified during leisurely play. In responding critically to pretentious gentility, entertainment texts present two types of activities that countered perceived elitism and sought to inculcate a common-sense spirit of social behavior. Worker games, which mimic scenarios of labor, showcased and celebrated what were primarily manual forms of work; theatricals that mock gentility, a second type of play, directly confronted mannered pretension and sought to expose its contradictions, arguing its unfittedness to middling family life. Both types of leisure pursuits countered expectations that home entertainment games were, like mannered behavior, imitative and elitist.
As seen through the lens of entertainment texts and through games such as "The Genteel Lady," social individuals could be exposed as ridiculous figures—beaked, horned, and befeathered creatures who cawed forth predictably materialistic drivel. While exemplifying the middling privileges of leisure moments and expendable incomes, such activities heralded a dissonance within a middling social sphere where genteel status was a ubiquitous goal, but one fraught with overly stylized, pretentious, and materialistic interests. Although a game such as "The Genteel Lady" purports to uphold something labeled "gentility," it aggressively questions the fittedness of genteel ambitions to the game's participants, most of whom will in fact lose the title "Genteel Lady" and will become "Horned Ladies" instead. To earn the right to be called "genteel," players must perfectly repeat a complicated text generated by the game: "Good morning, Genteel Lady, always genteel: I, a genteel lady, always genteel, come from that genteel lady, always genteel (pointing to player on left), to tell you that she owns an eagle with a golden beak." Subsequent players add descriptive phrases such as "silver claws" and "lace skin," "diamond eyes," and "purple feathers" when describing the "ladies'" possessions. When players fail to repeat the text exactly or to incorporate all the necessary cues, they receive paper horns, which resemble "a lamplighter or a curl paper."
Mocking gentility, even while retaining genteel status as the best players' reward, the game never entirely overturns gentility's value. Emphasizing skills such as the retention and repetition of an exact and lengthy text, as well as the quick integration of visual cues (for each player must be identified by changing the number of horns in her hair, which indicate her progress in the game), the activity exposes many "genteel" players as horned players, or as young women physically bearing the remnants of their toilettes. Along with the game's warning that one cannot presume to attain a secure social status without sufficient preparation, it also voices the larger question of how to inhabit gentility, mimicking genteel conversation with a simpering repetition of "Good morning, Genteel Lady," while the lady's accoutrements (gold, silver, lace, diamonds, and feathers) are cast as outrageously elaborate trappings. Stressing the "gossipy" nature of mannered behavior, the game also contains a basic untruth, for the "genteel lady" is not "always" genteel, just as a three-horned lady is not "always" three-horned; the game in fact revolves around the importance of charting fluctuations in social standing.
Yet by heightening gentility's rarity, games such as "The Genteel Lady" reveal their dual alliances. Although positioned as the object of critique, gentility nevertheless remains the game's ultimate reward, even as genteel status is exposed as fragile and hard-won. Here, gentility appears as the product of great effort, a reward for the best and most practiced workers, or those with the most visible skills in manipulating the game's complicated text. At such moments of duality, home entertainments' ambivalence toward middling social ambitions becomes visible. Although retained as a value, polite sociability inspires criticism as well as doubt, hence the game's efforts to recraft gentility so as to make the category more representative of the modest, everyday lifestyles claimed by many participants in leisure entertainments.
Highlighting Gentility's Contradictions
During the mid-century decades, Americans purchased record numbers of etiquette books, which codified their social interactions into elaborate rituals characterizing mourning, introductions, and social calls. At the same time that this array of guide books directed readers to submit to behavioral, financial, and sexual codes of conduct, a rising category of entertainment texts detailed the "rules" for play time. Entertainment texts clearly furthered the cultural pursuits characterizing the middling home, but they also created a unique market niche by exploiting their perceived differences from etiquette.
Although clearly comparable to other didactic texts marketed to middling consumers (etiquette guides among them), guides to home entertainment display an unusual hybridity in their message to readers. They upheld the possibilities of gentrification, dispensing advice that would help families and hostesses create admirable leisure spectacles. Simultaneously, they countered the ideal of a behavioral and bodily facade by promising to expose labor and celebrate unsocial attitudes, implicitly promising that reacting against gentility's boundaries constituted a pleasurable response to the laborious process of becoming affluent.
Yet it is clear that more than the pursuit of pleasure was at stake. As book buyers and purchasers of instruction, consumers were treated as individuals who invested in the textual representation of social ideals, that is, as readers possessed of a willingness to envision themselves as representatives of a social tier in the process of determining its boundaries. Yet as participants in play, they were invited to act out against the conventions that would ordinarily mark their status. Hence, the progression from reading idealizing texts to transforming them into a practice marked a richly suggestive moment—at least on the level of individual experience. More broadly, based on the popularity of entertainment practices, this moment—when the activities that marked a class-based ideology collided with leisure activities that mocked markers of status—was a moment signaling a deep ambivalence with the ways that genteel living was realized.
The whole category of genteel social life was problematized by entertainment texts, as they exaggerated the perceived inauthenticity of genteel interaction. The tensions surrounding gentility's enactment in mid-century social life permeate texts such as Emerson's The Conduct of Life (1860), which attempts to theorize etiquette, advancing ideals of mannered interaction that were frequently cited in popular guides to manners. Although in the chapter entitled "Behavior" he seeks to invest social forms with meaning, he nevertheless reveals a deep and, ultimately, unresolved conflict surrounding gentility as Emerson struggles to reconcile formulaic behavior inherited from Europe with the nature of the American middle class. Emerson declares that
manners are the happy way of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love,—now repeated and hardened in usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.
Situated near the opening of the essay, such a passage stresses a contrast between "natural" and learned behaviors. Emerson asserts that each mannered act was, at one point, "a stroke of genius" or a spontaneous and "natural" act, which then "hardened" into an accepted "routine." Indeed, the notion of manners as convention alone appears distasteful to Emerson as he stresses the "genius" of gentility rather than its continuance, treating good manners as products of spontaneous reinvention.
As a philosopher of behavior, Emerson is most interested in the usefulness of manners to the self-made man, examining the work involved in attaining a secure social status. At the same time that Emerson values genteel traditions, his message to middle-class hopefuls remains conflicted, for Emerson values both spontaneous acts of naturally generous persons and, simultaneously, signs of a "centuries' long" tradition. Stressing the uplifting goal of becoming genteel, Emerson examines the accumulation of manners by the "natural" individual who has managed both to retain individual identity and to absorb the intricacies of mannered behavior. This idealistic marriage of individual nature and codified manners is nonetheless accompanied by obvious tension, as revealed by Emerson's statement that
the power of manners is incessant,—an element as inconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy than in a kingdom. No man can resist their influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society, of that force, that if a person have them, he or she must be considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or genius. Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
Emerson highlights the larger question as to whether or not manners innately define the upper classes or function as ambassadors for democracy. Although the passage argues for manners as a democratic tool among the ambitious individuals who cultivate them, the language of the passage also recognizes the historical "nobility" of manners. Mannered behavior thus appears as a "hieroglyph," one of Emerson's favorite terms for a complex (and often, internally conflicted) idea. Manners are not only signs of status, but they also serve as a means of acquiring and claiming distinction.
Further complicating the legibility of mannered behavior is Emerson's assertion that aristocratic "nobility" seems "naturally" mannered, having seemingly absorbed conventions of conduct into their blood. In the terms of the dual invocations of "nature" operating here, the "natural" manners of the aristocracy run counter to the "natural" abilities of untutored but generous persons. According to Emerson, genteel social interaction represents two different and competing classes. To further illustrate this complexity, Emerson contends that manners can be conquered (or acquired) if there is a "capacity for culture in the blood," harkening to inheritance, while also claiming that "the basis of all good manners is self-reliance," presenting a more democratic interest.
Emerson attempts to resolve these contradictions with a short narrative on the history of manners. In this "history," a democratically oriented individual at one point in an amorphous and unhistoricized past acts so thoughtfully that nearby aristocrats imitate the gesture, disseminating it as a sign of genteel civilization, with the behavior eventually "harden[ing]" into the empty shell of custom. Emerson is thus, and somewhat fancifully, able to claim that the middling classes could rightfully reclaim the manners that sprang from their generous hearts, since manners are an expression of innate nobility later co-opted by the elites. The illogic of Emerson's assertion is striking, highlighting the degree to which he, like other writers about polite behavior, struggles to naturalize gentility, resorting to the creation of an absurdly generic tale championing some unnamed and ostensibly ordinary individual. By creating elaborately convoluted logic, along with a flattering portrait of the middling tier, Emerson creates a resolution that rests on a double meaning of "nobility" as both aristocratic and as indicative of the qualities of a democratic heart. Emerson's text was hardly alone in its convoluted attempts to reconcile gentility's goals with everyday, middling lives. This essay, along with the many etiquette books that referenced it, attests to the fact that producing acceptable versions of genteel behavior was a difficult task, given the seriousness associated with manners and with the pursuit of social standing.
Ultimately, the contradictions facing Emerson (and, more generally, the practices of mannered behavior) are more significant than the fanciful resolutions he provides. There is an obvious paradox at work in American etiquette books, as Emerson suggests; genteel ease can only be achieved through great effort, for mannered conventions demanded that individuals appear to be the thing that they were continually working to become. Yet gentility was difficult to explain as "naturally" possessed by persons actively engaged in acquiring it through the acquisition of manners. Ideally, upward strivers were to assume gentility as a mechanism of their ascent to a place where gentility itself was presumed. That is, the act of striving toward a genteel goal could reveal an individual's distance from gentility itself; hence there was virtually no way, via etiquette's logic, to labor in order to become a social being characterized by an absence of visible effort.
Writing of the "unselfconsciousness that is the mark of the so-called 'natural' distinction," Pierre Bourdieu notes that attempting to belong to a group can mark an individual's status as an outsider: "they [the social agents] merely need to be what they are in order to be what they have to be, that is, naturally distinguished from those who are obliged to strive to distinction." In the instance of etiquette, trying to achieve gentility had the curious effect of negating the goal of embodying distinction, for striving to appear genteel would only increase the jarring discontinuities of acquisition within a realm of behavior where the seamless adoption of gracious behavior was valued. In addition, etiquette books present the ideal of "good breeding" as paradoxically denoting mannered behavior rather than an actual bloodline. If, as John Kasson has argued, etiquette books "deflected the pressures and inequities of the society back on the individual," then entertainment forms individualized the social realm even further by granting players the ability to claim competitive skills.
Sarah Annie Frost's parlor play "Refinement" (1866) illustrates some of the problems infusing the social ideals attached to mannered behavior. It also provides insight into the ways that entertainment texts frequently critiqued the pretensions and contradictions they associated with the practice of etiquette. In the play, the recently wed Kate Stanley is constantly criticized by her husband because of what he sees as her social flaws, among them colloquial speech, unceremonious dress, blatant demonstrations of affection, inappropriate discussions of domestic arrangements in the presence of company, and invasive personal questions. Although Kate is said to be kind, cheerful, and loyal, these qualities are not always visible, for her terrible manners (which are demonstrated in detail during the play) all but obscure her positive qualities. At the end of the play's initial scene, Kate's vexed and embarrassed husband describes the potential she possesses, exclaiming, "Was ever a man so annoyed! ... with Kate's kind heart and natural talents, she would be perfect with a good address, but her whole manner is so terribly counterfeited it seems almost impossible to refine it." Hope for Kate lies in her kind heart and generosity, in short, in her "nature" as her husband recognizes the untutored but potentially felicitous "natural" gifts that Kate already possesses. Yet the question of "nature" becomes increasingly problematic as Kate's husband refers to her untutored behavior as "counterfeited," for in his eyes, this behavior runs counter to the socially constructed roles that are widely accepted as natural. Ironically, the husband believes that mannered behavior serves as the most "natural" expression of Kate's personality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Laboring to Play by Melanie Dawson. Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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