Homesick Blues

In 1688, Swiss scholar Johannes Hofer described the case of a migrant to Basel from Berne. Away from his native town, the immigrant became depressed and physically ill. His doctors believed that only a return to Berne could save him. As soon as his return trip started, the symptoms began to abate; by the time he reached his hometown, the patient was cured. Hofer viewed yearning for home as a medical condition and coined a new word to describe it—nostalgia, from the Greek words for homecoming and pain. For Americans, argues Susan J. Matt in this original study, homesickness was almost a constant.

The "official" ideology of America as the Land of Opportunity depended not only on social but geographical mobility. But, Matt shows, time and again constant movement came at a cost. Her comprehensive study touches on an extraordinarily wide range of topics. Not just such obvious ones as women in the West pining for settled New England villages, or small-town migrants to cities and college students longing for home, but also California gold miners, Indians removed to Indian Territory, Okies in California, and Japanese Americans in internment camps.

Homesickness, as Matt understands, comprises a variety of states and emotions. In American culture it took many different forms: a physical disease that could lead to serious illness or even death, a vague sense of being out of place—or anything in between. Homesickness was all but universal.

For many European settlers, homesickness began almost as soon as they set foot on the western side of the Atlantic. In some early settlements, such as Jamestown, most saw their sojourn in the New World as temporary. But those with little or no chance to return, such as indentured servants or slaves, often longed for their homes across the Atlantic. However, Europeans in this era lived in a culture, Matt argues, where pain and loss were regarded as the natural state of human affairs; and while many had fond, lingering memories of their homeland, it was not a cause of complaint. With the Enlightenment came the rise of individualism, and private concerns gained more legitimacy. It became acceptable to show one's emotions and to express personal longings such as homesickness.

The yearning for home that wartime soldiers felt is a central theme in Matt's book, and the American Revolution provides her with ample evidence. For most colonists, home was not the new nation, or even the state, but the village or local neighborhood. Many enlistees were stunned by the sense of deracination they felt in the Continental Army. Benjamin Rush noted the prevalence of nostalgia among soldiers, particularly those from New England. It was a common view in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that New Englanders were especially prone to homesickness, which Matt attributes to the belief that many men in other states had migrated from New England and hence were better cushioned against the shock of the unfamiliar. Generally, the officers had little patience with such men. Homesickness was viewed, at best, as weakness and, at worst, lack of commitment to the Patriot cause.

The Market Revolution, with its increasing emphasis on individual success as the worth of a man, produced growing geographical mobility and a concomitant growth in homesickness. Whether on the Western frontier, in a factory job in the city, or in boarding school or college, both men and women missed their native abodes. "I would think of being at home . . . talking with Grand Father and Mother and then to be over to the store talking with Uncle Sidney. . . . The tears come down so fast that I can hardly write," Sidney Robey lamented from his boarding school in Western New York in 1843 (p. 48). Homesickness was widely regarded as inevitable, even, to a degree, laudable. Should not sons and daughters miss their parents, siblings, and hometowns? But it was becoming accepted that young adults would have to leave home to make their way in the world. Constant motion exemplified the nineteenth century: Irish...