The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (review)

The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls. By Karen Dubinsky. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Pp. 290. $52.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).

In her history of tourism and honeymooning at Niagara Falls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Karen Dubinsky takes on the task of deciphering Niagara's "cultural" meanings. She informs us that she intends to "decode the waterfalls' gendered and sexual imagery" (p. 4), and she accomplishes that difficult and complex task in wonderful fashion. Employing an interdisciplinary framework that includes history, geography, and gender and cultural studies, she constructs a narrative that is both coherent and intricate. Using the language of social and cultural studies, which in inept hands can obscure an author's meaning and frustrate a reader, Dubinsky writes with a clarity that this reviewer, a social geographer/historian, finds truly refreshing. Dubinsky guides the reader through several interrelated themes: a history of Niagara Falls, the "sexualization of place through tourism" (p. 12), and the history of sexuality. She also interweaves into the text a story of homosexuality as a subversive activity taking place in the midst of the ultimate heterosexual ritual--the honeymoon.

Chapter 2 conducts the reader through the interconnected historical developments of the honeymoon as the "entry into heterosexual culture" and of Niagara Falls as a resort in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, she notes, the link between honeymoons and Niagara Falls was "not a tourist industry invention. Rather, the early association of Niagara with the honeymoon had something to do with the way in which countless people--visitors, local businesspeople, and writers and readers of travelers' tales--imagined the place" (p. 19). Dubinsky shows how the meanings of places, like the meanings of sexuality, are socially constructed and change across time, and she introduces a method of analysis to which she remains faithful throughout the book--a critique of the gendered nature of the language used to describe the falls. The reasons for people's attraction to Niagara Falls are complex, and Dubinsky exposes both the light and dark sides of the fascination with them. She convincingly argues that "at Niagara, the gendered, sexualized descriptive imagery, fatal attraction of the waters, and tales of death and destruction, as well as invented stories of romance and tragedy, were all of a piece and helped create a romantic, sexual, and frightening image of Niagara Falls." It was just this imagery of "forbidden pleasures" that attracted honeymooners to the area (p. 49).

Chapter 3 begins an important analysis of the social construction of race, staged authenticity, "genuine fakes," and what she refers to as the spectacle of race (p. 55). Dubinsky presents an astute analysis of the paradoxical nature of the relationship between white Euro-Americans and the "savage" other that took place in the living museum of Niagara Falls, when Indians living in the area became part of the "tourist attraction." My only real criticism of the book is that she does not take this analysis far enough. It is relegated to a rather short chapter and left me feeling that there was unfinished business here.

Chapters 4 and 5 change course to discuss attempts to reconcile the development of industrial manufacturing on the "edge" of the falls with the tourist industry's demands for natural beauty. Dubinsky analyzes the changing circumstances of visitors, the impact of middle-class vacations and the automobile on tourist patterns, and the influence of the hotel industry's monopoly on accommodations. She also includes a discussion of the effects of the Depression on the tourist industry and the towns bordering the falls.

Chapter 6 takes up a theme in the history of sexuality: the "identification of Niagara Falls as a 'laboratory' in which the outsider . . . could observe the rituals of honeymooning couples" (p. 154). Chapter 7 links these developments with the growth of the tourist business. Until...