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

by Melanie Dawson

A compelling analysis of how "middling" Americans entertained themselves and how these entertainments changed over time.

The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in U.S. culture. Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, Laboring to Play interrogates the ways that leisure performances (such as parlor games, charades, home dramas, and tableaux vivants ) encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles.

From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of performing displays of individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction.

Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 27, 2005

Reviews

[Tim]

Laboring at Play takes a fascinating and potentially fun topic, middle-class parlor games between 1850-1920, and with the help of theory and the language of theory turns out some muddled prose and veiled conclusions. I was interested in the book and its subject but by replacing narrative and any specific social or cultural history for a constant flow of theoretical jargon it became tiresome very quickly. I stopped when I reached this small mountain of vagueness: "Adding another layer of complication onto the binaries of individual and collective, mid-century home entertainments challenged the standardized body by producing twisted, distorted forms that challenged the conditions of controlled conformity, yet in doing so, offered a new tradition of bodily alignment. This was, then, the practice that harnessed vestiges of an individualism that was, in the end, more idealized than enacted." These kind of sentences are acceptable in small and measured doses, when they become the norm it is difficult to maintain attention.