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The Popular Concept of “Home” in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Maxine Van De Wetering
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Extract

Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , April 1984 , pp. 5 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

Maxine Van de Wetering is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812. She wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington D.C. and the Grants Committee of the University of Montana for their support of the research for this article.

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28 Between roughly 1845 and 1890, the advancing romantic sensibility in America expressed itself architecturally as the Gothic Picturesque, a style that stressed not only the rooted, fixed forms of the countryside, especially the forest, but also represented a return to the perceived solidity and unity of the medieval church. See Hitchcock, Henry Russell, American Architectural Books (3rd rev. edn., Minneapolis, 1946)Google Scholar, preface, passim; Downing, Andrew Jackson, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York, 1851), pp. 251–53Google Scholar; Vaux, Calvert, “Hints for Country House Builders,” Harpers, 11 (1851)Google Scholar. See also Lovejoy, Arthur O., “The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature,” Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1955), pp. 136–55Google Scholar; Wright, Gwendolyn, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York, 1981), pp. 86–9Google Scholar; Handlin, David, American Home, pp. 62–73Google Scholar.

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33 Demos, John emphasized the contrast between colonial and nineteenth-century family life in A Little Commonwealth (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, and “Images of the American Family, Then and Now,” in Tufte, Virginia and Myerhoff, Barbara (eds.), Changing Images of the Family (New Haven, 1979), p. 51Google Scholar. See also Handlin, American Home, Chapter 1, and John F. W. Ware, Home Life, passim.

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36 A typical composite picture of this tension between domestic traditionalism and “outside” commerce-oriented heathenism may be found in the widespread prescriptive literature of the mid-nineteenth century. See, for example, the works of Sedgwick, Catherine, Home (New York, 1835)Google Scholar and New England Tales (New York, 1837)Google Scholar; Hale, Sarah Josepha, Sketches of American Character (Boston, 1831)Google Scholar; Beecher, Henry Ward, Norwood; Or Village Life in New England (New York, 1868), especially pp. 6–13, 28–30, 61–77, 107–110Google Scholar; Savery, Lillie, Home Comforts (New York, 1855)Google Scholar.

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