American Behavioral History: An Introduction

5 There’s No Place Like Home: Homesickness and Homemaking in America

5 There’s No Place Like Home Homesickness and Homemaking in America Susan J. Matt Each weekend, across the nation, the parking lots of Home Depot are filled. Furniture stores are doing a booming business, and garden stores and nurseries are thriving—all because modern Americans devote an enormous amount of time and energy to building, buying, furnishing, and refurbishing their houses. A recent issue of Business Week declared housing to be “an American obsession,” and reported that home-building and houseware expenditures accounted for 8.7 percent of the U.S. economy. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Americans have spent more on home furnishings and housewares than on apparel, reversing long-standing spending priorities. The immense popularity of magazines, books, television programs , and Web sites devoted to housing and homemaking testifies to Americans’ preoccupation with home, as does the enormous success of several new home-improvement chain stores.1 Yet despite the large number of Americans who are engaged in efforts to create the perfect home, there are very few explanations of this behavior . Just why are contemporary Americans so devoted to home? The homemaking practices of modern Americans are intimately connected to their emotional lives. While emotions are often difficult to disaggregate and consumer motivations difficult to discern, there are many indications that much consumer spending on household goods and furnishings springs from a desire for rootedness in a mobile and transient society. Many Americans are homesick and are actively trying to re-create a sense of home in a new location.  Homes have become meaningful to Americans because they leave them so frequently. As one architect has noted, home does not exist without a journey.2 And Americans make many journeys. Mobility is the norm in American society, with the average person moving once every five years. While mobility rates have dipped slightly in recent years, Americans of all races, incomes, and education levels still are far more mobile than most other peoples in the world. Between 1995 and 2000, over 120 million people —or roughly 45 percent of the U.S. population over the age of five— changed residences.3 While accepted as a fact of modern American life, such mobility carries with it heavy and often hidden psychological costs. Individuals who move frequently find that their social networks are disrupted if not destroyed, their identities are fragmented, and they are depressed, anxious, and preoccupied with the homes they have left behind. In the face of such changes, they suffer grief and homesickness.4 Yet despite the trauma of moving, few adult Americans openly discuss the emotional pain that accompanies their geographic mobility. Instead, they channel their feelings into consumer spending, trying to create in their new homes associations and atmospheres that connect them to past homes. Many seem particularly intent on making their 20th and 21st century homes into dwellings reminiscent of the 19th century. Perhaps paradoxically, those most enamored of these traditional-looking houses and furnishings are middle-class baby boomers, who, as young adults, decisively rejected tradition. To understand why these modern Americans, notoriously restless and forward looking, spend so much time thinking about home and so much energy trying to capture a sense of the past in their houses, one must understand both the history of home and the history of homesickness, for contemporary homemaking behaviors have roots that lie in earlier centuries. This essay will first examine how the image of home as a cozy, moral, and ideally rural place developed in Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries, for this imagery continues to give shape to modern homemaking behaviors. Contemporary Americans who work on their houses often carry in their heads visions of vine-covered trellises, white fences, and gabled roofs, and these visions of what a home is, passed down from generation to generation for two centuries, guide their homemaking and home-building efforts. The essay then turns to the history of homesickness, a history that runs parallel to the history of home. To understand fully modern homemaking       .    behavior, it is necessary to know not just the visions but the feelings that motivate contemporary Americans. The mental images of home that generations of Americans have harbored have been compelling because so many people so often moved away from their houses and yearned to return to them. Such homesickness has long been a significant if little discussed part of American...