Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920 (review)

Melanie Dawson examines Victorian- and Progressive-era home entertainment as more than idle amusements. In this cultural study of American leisure, she analyzes a wide range of entertainment practices, from parlor games and amateur theatrics to recitations and elaborate tableaux, resulting in a "narrative of how a set of shifting, eccentric, and often spectacularly weird social practices represented the goals and tensions infusing the rise of a middling American culture" (6). Dawson argues that home entertainment served as a self-reflexive agent for the rising middle class; it was not only a vehicle of social striving, but also an ambivalent critique of striving and the ideals of gentility that propelled it. Dawson organizes her analysis in three phases of home entertainment and middle-class developments.

The first three chapters focus on the mid-nineteenth century, when acquisition of social skills, adherence to rules of etiquette, and cultivation of gentility all played an essential role in the creation of a middle class. Text-based home theatrics, such as Sarah Annie Frost's Refinement, were often sentimentally cloaked indoctrinations of social ideals. In comparison, parlor games operated on a somewhat more complex level, facilitating social-skills development while simultaneously rewarding typically forbidden social behaviors. Adult play of children's games such as Blind Man's Bluff offered young Victorian adults the opportunity for socially sanctioned sexual play; kissing games also proved popular. Victorian play also reflected a fascination with the grotesque body, a transgressive response to increasing demands for gentility. Dawson's book is illustrated with images from entertainment guides and magazines showing how to create dwarfs, giants, and freaks through costume. Grotesque play often required elaborate preparation for a stunning visual payoff; staged tableaux of severed heads, singly or a Bluebeard-sized collection, were especially voguish. Instructions for "The Blue Beard Tableau" capture the spirit of grotesque play within Victorian life. The illustrations include a sketch of several young women's severed heads, complete with expressions of horror and ghastly makeup, which hang by the hair from a rope in front of a curtain. A second, "how-to" sketch viewed from behind reveals the proper young women in Victorian dress as they poke their heads through holes in the curtain.

Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to literary analysis of home-entertainment scenes in novels as representations of class warfare and personal transformation. In the fictional accounts of home entertainments, which range from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in mid-century to Henry James's The Tragic Muse and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth at the turn of the century, female characters' social fates either rise or fall based on their performance in parlor games, charades, tableaux, and home theatrics. Dawson interprets these scenes as evidence of the changing role of home entertainment in the evolution of the middle class. Early novels (1840s to 1860s) include heroines whose skills substitute for privilege, thus serving as a mechanism for social ascent. In contrast, novels from the Gilded Age (1870s to 1890s) showcase characters that fail socially through participation in home entertainments. Dawson views this evolutionary development as a reflection of the successful formation of an affluent new social class; striving, which had been a means of social elevation, had become painfully obvious and ineffectual several decades later, marking the striver as an outsider.

Dawson concludes with two chapters on trends and developments in home entertainment between the 1880s and the 1920s, when the middle class was firmly established and enjoying its affluence. Home entertainment came to be viewed as old-fashioned and a cultural relic of bygone days; the younger generation resisted participation. Nevertheless, one of the most popular entertainments—for adults—was child recitations, which Dawson terms "ventriloquized nostalgia" (178). These recitations centered on adult stories about past events, thus presenting nostalgic memories of adults for adults through the medium of the child performer...