Gentility – American Environments to 1893

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

“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.

Richard L. Bushman’s The Refinement of America offers a very thorough and diverse analysis of the various manners in which American culture blossomed into more of a “gentilian” based society borrowed from Europe. As Bushman describes in his work, starting in the early 17^th century, American people, specifically in the South, began to covet the “high society” lifestyle and culture that existed with numerous European countries. One such way that Americans began to acculturate themselves to this style of life was through “conduct books.” As Bushman describes, these pieces “codified polite society” by giving discrete steps on how to portray respect, bodily restraint, and correct emotional expression (38). Generally reserved for those of the upper echelon of society, these books targeted those who would never appear in a European Court, but dreamed of the life style (38). Through the lessons of these books, the status quo of the gentile based hierarchy was reaffirmed, as individuals were taught to heed way to their superiors, continuing the dynamic through the generations (41).

Honestly, when reading about these books I had to laugh a little bit, because they seemed so unnecessary and ridiculous. Through my laughter and perception of our cultural superiority compared to 17^th-19^th century America, I came to the conclusion that my humor was actually in vain, as our own society institutes similar works. Though not as direct, the “X for Dummies” series of books is a perfect example of “how to manuals” that we ascribe to when we need to learn how to act in a certain environment. These works may not be as corrective in terms of our everyday life as the conduct books, but they are indicative of our continued reliance on this genre of literature to guide us in our daily ventures.

Though this book extremely diverse, portraying aspects of gentility from discussions on artwork to the addition of gardens to one’s house for visual perception, there was minimal analysis of humanity’s interaction with the environment. One of the only instances that nature played a significant role in Bushman’s argument on the gentrification of American Society was in relation to the West. Surprisingly, it was believed that the West was a threat to gentility, as it promoted the primitive lifestyle vs. the cultured one of the East (383). One would think that as Western expansion was a prime directive of the United States that it would fit within the upper echelons views on expanding their culture. However, as many believed that gentility was actually a threat to republican ideals, promoting a class based society instead of an egalitarian; it makes more sense why this goal of the United States threatened those who perceived themselves as the aristocracy. Bushman acknowledges this tension in the closing remarks of his piece, noting the culture of gentility was not and never would be strong enough to overcome that of republican idealism (447).

As no one has posted yet this week, I thought it would be a good idea to tie in last week’s reading of Nature’s Metropolis to Bushman’s piece. As we discussed in class this week, many Anglo Americans believed that Native Americans were below humanity, which made their removal that much easier in terms of morality. This perception that Cronon expresses offers a possible explanation for the West’s threat to gentility that Bushman acknowledges in The Refinement of America. The West was where the Native Americans prominently resided during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, which would be considered a primitive environment if these people were so inferior to humans. This “primitive” society resided within close proximity to the more genitilian orientated Eastern half of the United States which created an understandable tension. As more people pushed West during the 18^th and 19^th centuries into these unknown lands, resorting to extreme measures to survive, it was not clear if the gentility of the East would follow them or be overrun by the believed less sophisticated cultures of the West.

Tag: Gentility

Nature as a Stage

America: Stepping Up in the World