Volume 31, Number 6 · April 12, 1984
Darn that Darning
By Diane Johnson
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America 1830–1870
by Karen Halttunen
Yale University Press, 262 pp., $19.95
The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America
by Harvey Green
Pantheon, 205 pp., $18.95
Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America
by Mary Kelley
Oxford University Press, 409 pp., $24.95
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
by Phyllis Rose
Knopf, 318 pp., $16.95
'In the vast literature on personal conduct published in America after 1830, middle-class concerns about the problem of hypocrisy assumed the form of an extended attack on two archetypal hypocrites, the confidence man and the painted woman.' Thus Karen Halttunen in Confidence Men and Painted Women. Her apocalyptic view encourages skepticism: 'these archetypal hypocrites threatened ultimately, by undermining social confidence among men and women, to reduce the American republic to social chaos,' and 'the life of fashion, in destroying personal sincerity, threatened to reduce middle-class 'society,' and by implication American society, to complete chaos.'
Review, 3877 words
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