The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (review)

Abstract

In her history of tourism and honeymooning at Niagara Falls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Karen Dubinsky takes on the task of deciphering Niagara's "cultural" meanings. She informs us that she intends to "decode the waterfalls' gendered and sexual imagery" (p. 4), and she accomplishes that difficult and complex task in wonderful fashion. Employing an interdisciplinary framework that includes history, geography, and gender and cultural studies, she constructs a narrative that is both coherent and intricate. Using the language of social and cultural studies, which in inept hands can obscure an author's meaning and frustrate a reader, Dubinsky writes with a clarity that this reviewer, a social geographer/historian, finds truly refreshing. Dubinsky guides the reader through several interrelated themes: a history of Niagara Falls, the "sexualization of place through tourism" (p. 12), and the history of sexuality. She also interweaves into the text a story of homosexuality as a subversive activity taking place in the midst of the ultimate heterosexual ritual--the honeymoon.