Barbara Penner

On her book Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America

Cover Interview of September 27, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“The honeymoon helped to consummate the romance of consumption.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“I came to see the bridal tour as a kind of two-way frame: the honeymoon framed narratives for newlywed consumption; and newlyweds on tour, either physically or in the media, become a frame through which others consumed these narratives.”

On the second:

“It seems important to me that we hang on to the messiness of nineteenth-century honeymoon practice and that we don’t try to tidy it up too much – that is, impose an ideological coherence onto it that the practice itself never had.”

history / america / sexuality / ideology / gender / 19th century / everyday existence / architecture / reproduction / homosexuality /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009