Fun House

As a historian of family and age relations and a fan of Jill Lepore’s Bancroft Prize–winning first book, The Name of War (1998), I looked forward to reading The Mansion of Happiness. It turns out not to be what I expected, even though the inside flap calls it “a history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.” It is such a history, but one should not expect a chronicle or analysis of either mainstream notions or multicultural variations. Rather, Lepore explores ideas about life and death by describing the often-distorted views provided by an alternately amusing and scary collection of American fads, thinkers, and popularizers. The result is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking read, but not what one would call a contribution to scholarship. I should have read Lepore’s “Last Words” first, where she acknowledges that “most of the chapters in this book started out as essays in the New Yorker” (p. 190). The work should be read and enjoyed as such.

In her introduction, Lepore explores changing ideas about the journey of life as expressed through different board games, starting with and coming back to the history of Milton Bradley and his game of Life. While describing Bradley family history and the evolution of “square board race games” (p. xvii) from ancient southeast Asia to Hasbro’s recent Game of Life: Twists and Turns, she connects the evolving moralities of the games to the shift in authority from religion to science in the larger culture. In the end, she suggests that both systems of authority were themselves like games. The outcome depends on the rules; the answers to life’s big questions do too.

Chapter one begins, as advertised, before birth, with the story of Lennart Nilsson’s famous Life magazine photo-essay of 1965, documenting the stages of growth of the human embryo. It became the best-selling book, A Child is Born (1965). As she does elsewhere, Lepore points out the odd in the familiar in order to startle: in fact, these were pictures of the dead. Duly shaken, we are ready for the history of the Western inquiry into life’s beginnings. Lepore stresses William Harvey’s early seventeenth-century discovery that humans begin as eggs, before she races through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century hunt for embryos, from mice to men. She ends her account of men’s search for the origins of life by associating ideas about ectogenesis with a fantasy of reproduction without women (with stops along the way at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Roe v. Wade).

Chapter two, “Baby Food,” offers a short history of breast milk and breast feeding, ending with a disquisition on breast pumps and the ridiculousness of the current regulatory environment for human lactation. Here, as elsewhere, Lepore is telling the history of some of the conundrums of life in the twenty-first century. “The Children’s Room,” chapter three, is longer and more involved. It circles around the relationship between ideas about childhood and children’s literature, by exploring the careers of rival twentieth-century children’s librarians and book editors, one of whom tried to block the publication of E. B. White’s Stuart Little (1945). Lepore uses these people and their battles as an opportunity to relate how ideas of what is appropriate reading for children have changed over time.

How much really has changed is a question raised by chapter four, “All about Erections,” which is actually all about the history of sex manuals for young people. It begins with a hilarious anecdote wherein the young Lepore, having just read an exclamation “ejaculated” by a character in Sherlock Holmes, called out to her newspaper-reading father: “’Hey Dad . . . What does ejaculate mean?’” At which, “He put down the newspaper. He sighed” (p. 61). This is a perfect beginning for Lepore’s history, focusing as it does on Sylvester Graham, who advocated an...