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£ß Ü¢ T he national adoption of Thanksgiving would not have occurred without the efforts of expatriate New England advocates such as Godey’s editor Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale and all the anonymous Yankees who worked to introduce the holiday in their respective towns and states. Their efforts to “sell the holiday” to the American people were greatly enhanced by the explosion in popular periodicals after 1830. Earlier, the public’s impression of Thanksgiving—what it signified and what was appropriate to its celebration—derived largely from personal experience, hearsay, or a few references in texts or newspapers. The “serious” Thanksgiving publication was still the sermon, and its prominence continued unabated through the Civil War. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, a technological revolution in the publishing industry took place, powered by the rapid improvement in printing technology through steam presses, pulp paper, cloth binding, steel engraving, and cheap lithography. Spurred by cheap printing, writing became a profitable enterprise, whereas once only the independently wealthy or artistically determined could afford to toy with authorship. In very short order, the era of mass production opened up vast new markets, such as “domestic fiction,” for aspiring writers, many of them women: “The leading producers of domestic fiction (castigated as ‘a damned mob of scribbling women’ by an envious Hawthorne) were all making tidy profits. The Atlantic was paying poets fifty dollars a page, as opposed to the two dollars offered by the New England Magazine in 1835; compensation for literary journalism would triple between 1860 and 1880.”1 It was these “scribbling women” and their male counterparts who carried out the literary exposition of Thanksgiving, ensuring that even those unfortunates who had not grown up with the holiday in New England would understand the significance of the day and how it should be observed. 5 Nineteenth-Century Holiday Imagery in Literature and Art Nineteenth-Century Holiday Imagery 79 The social shift toward separate male and female domains (outside the home versus domestic), and the cultural shift toward the perspective of women and children (i.e., toward the domestic “feminine” sentiments described in the previous chapter), were reflected in popular literature of the time, which was dominated by women’s magazines and illustrated weeklies such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated or Harper’s Weekly. Godey’s Lady’s Book, followed by its imitators Graham’s and Peterson’s, far outdistanced all masculine rivals. When Godey’s was in decline in the 1860s, it could still claim 150,000 subscribers as opposed to Harper’s 110,000.”2 The feminine influence also produced a flood of best-selling “domestic novels” depicting the tribulations of pure-hearted but oppressed women struggling to defend home life against the cold, treacherous external world. The moral fortification of the home—under the aegis of the enlightened homemaker—against the rough-and-ready masculine world of business and politics became a dominant middle-class fixation in the antebellum period. As Ann Douglas has demonstrated, the middle-class women involved in this “domestic revolution” found ready allies among the liberal clergymen of the era, who had been deprived of the political and social clout of their established Puritan predecessors. Laying claim to the social conscience of their generation, they instituted a regime of “sentimental” values in place of the old Enlightenment no-nonsense rationality and the tough-minded, aggressive Calvinist theology of the previous era. Obliged to rely on diffused “influence” in place of political or economic power, this intelligent and dedicated alliance effectively manipulated the popular press to promulgate its agenda. Feeling and sensitivity were presented as morally superior replacements for worldly and economic seriousness. As often where women were concerned, sentiment was wanted, not facts. Literally hundreds of nostalgic memoirs were penned in the Civil War period about vanished rural ways, old New England farmsteads, a once-abundant country Thanksgivings presided over by all-capable and generically hospitable housekeepers ; such reminiscences, while valuable as a response to cultural change, hardly give a trustworthy account of it.3 It was through such efforts that women and clerical authors constructed the popular impression of the Victorian Thanksgiving holiday, with all its sentimental associations with domestic virtue. The shift to sentimental values from “rational” or scientific ones had a tremendous influence on how Americans viewed and valued holidays. Holidays in general lost much of their earlier theological and political emphasis and were reworked under the influence of Victorian culture, in which emotionality was encouraged and individual sensibilities were [3.136.18.48] Project...

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