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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Karen Dubinsky. The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 290. Cloth $52.00, paper $22.00.
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Addressing a range of topics from municipal conflicts over liquor licensing to sexual advice literature and the lives of restaurant workers, Karen Dubinsky offers a comprehensive and scholarly, yet also witty and entertaining, account of the honeymoon business at Niagara Falls, Ontario and New York, since the mid-nineteenth century. |
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Despite lack of commercial promotion in the nineteenth century, Dubinsky documents the growth of Niagara's reputation as a resort for upper-class newlyweds. She explains this development as a combination of the undeniable physical impressiveness of the Falls, their proximity to population centers, and cultural constructionhow a variety of people "imagined the place" (p. 19). Tourists and travel writers gendered the Falls as female, a pattern that drew on much longer European traditions of imagining nature and its powerful and destructive forces as female: seductive but treacherous. Projects like the Cave of the Winds and Table Rock tours behind the Falls added physical intensity to the experience as they brought visitors close to the dangers of the Falls. Although tourism and industrial interest in the Falls had actually begun earlier, these associations with romance, sex, and danger helped to create a honeymoon craze from the 1830s on. |
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