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You Can't Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History
Susan J. Matt
| At the end of Thomas Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home Again, the protagonist, George Webber, realized, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." The idea that it is impossible to return home and to the past is commonplace today and a hallmark of modern consciousness.1 Yet generations of Americans have longed to go home, either to their actual childhood homes or to metaphorical homes located somewhere in the past. This essay examines how Americans have understood, expressed, and managed such yearnings for a lost home and traces how the modern perspective—that return is impossible—gradually emerged. It is a preliminary exploration of the history of homesickness and other emotions that often accompanied it, in particular, nostalgia. |
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Today, homesickness is defined as the longing for a particular home, nostalgia as a longing for a lost time. Nostalgia may carry within it a yearning for home, but it is a home faraway in time rather than space. Both emotions have existed throughout history, albeit under different names. Although some historians maintain that nostalgia, in particular, is a new emotion and an effect of the social, political, and economic changes of the last two or three centuries, such a claim seems questionable.2 Industrial capitalism and liberal democracy provide plentiful occasions for such yearnings, and individuals respond to them in historically specific ways, but there is little evidence that homesickness and nostalgia are wholly new feelings. Instead, those emotions gained new recognition in the modern age and took on new functions. |
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Although the feelings have long been experienced, the words to describe them have changed considerably. From the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the word "nostalgia" denoted homesickness. Only in the last century did "nostalgia" take on its current meaning. This linguistic tangle started in 1688, when Johannes Hofer, a Swiss scholar, created the word "nostalgia," combining the Greek word nostos, "return to the native land," with algos, the word for pain. He used this word to describe a new disease that affected young people far from home. Its symptoms included "continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep ... decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, ... cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, ... stupidity of the mind—attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland." The best remedy was to return sufferers home, for nostalgia could prove fatal.3 |
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Hofer's discussion inspired others to address the problem. For a time doctors believed nostalgia was unique to Switzerland, but eventually cases were identified across Europe and in the Americas. Many observers believed some nations were better adjusted to modernity and that consequently, their citizens did not experience nostalgia. Scholars believed the British were unlikely to contract the illness because they were accustomed to commerce and colonization and therefore to relocation. Yet evidence from the eighteenth century shows otherwise. The word "homesickness" became part of the English language in the 1750s; doctors documented cases of it among Welsh soldiers in the 1780s.4 |
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