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“When it came to society, only the polite were created equal” (425). This is my favorite sentence in Richard L. Bushman’s book, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. This quotation illustrates the recurring problem of the contradiction between republican ideals and middle-class aspirations for gentility.
Bushman explores the margins between the people who considered themselves genteel and the people who were not genteel by using the example of the city street. Streets acted as a stage, a space where refined people “had to steer clear of the vulgar population” while acting on the “genteel stage where a performance was required” (368). Just as city streets were a stage, the city itself was also a stage–and a performance. “Cities, like people or houses, could be evaluated for their taste and beauty,” Bushman claims (139).
Bushman employs this idea of performance several times, arguing that “houses and gardens were on view and performing before critical audiences,” too (132). In class on Saturday, Ian talked about the parallel between a bird building a nest and a person building a house as an argument of the naturalness of human-created buildings. I think Bushman’s notion of humans appropriating their houses as symbols of their gentility is consistent with Ian’s comment. It complicates the idea, but I think we can still argue that homes are natural even if people use them to demonstrate their “gentility.”
In country towns, the margin between the genteel and the uncouth “was between the villagers and the farmers, who by common agreement were rude and coarse beyond redemption” (378). This surprised me, and Bushman acknowledges that “the merciless ridicule of this population by people of otherwise broad sympathies stuns a modern reader” (378). I thought Americans have always esteemed farmers: how different this nineteenth-century sentiment was from Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” mind-set. Later, Bushman complicates the disparity between the city and the country. Though in speech, “country” meant plain and “city” meant fashionable, Bushman emphasizes that relationship between city people and country people was “separate but engaged,” and their relationships did not take one the one-dimensionality of their language (400).
Ian wrote that Bushman did not make nature play a significant role in the book. I, too, was surprised by that. In addition to the narrative of the West, I think nature plays the largest roles in the city/country discussion, the formation of cities, and the “geography of refinement.” I think Bushman emphasizes the human action in creating space and appropriating space, with space and nature as passive actors in the performance, contrasting other ideas of nature we have encountered so far in the class.