The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality, and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls

by Karen Dubinsky

1998 Albert B. Corey Prize from the Canadian Historical Association

When Oscar Wilde visited Niagara Falls in 1882, he declared that the Falls must be the “earliest if not the keenest disappointment in American married life.”  Wilde was neither the first nor the last to notice the peculiar relationship between heterosexuality, the honeymoon, and Niagara Falls. The Second Greatest Disappointment charts the growth of Niagara as a tourist destination from the 1850s to the present, and shows how it acquired its reputation as the “Honeymoon Capital of the World.” Tourist industry records, as well as interviews with people employed Niagara’s hotels and attractions, provide an insider’s perspective on the marketing of this cultural landmark.   Karen Dubinsky also traces the history of the honeymoon, placing in context of changes in the public culture of heterosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So when Cary Grant declared to Grace Kelly in the 1955 film To Catch a Thief, “What you need is ten minutes with a good man at Niagara Falls,” everyone knew he was not referring to sight-seeing.

The Second Greatest Disappointment uses travelers’ drawings, advertisements, and guidebook photographs to tell an engaging story about an old North American landmark.  

Genres: History, Gender and Sexuality, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1999

About the author

Karen Dubinsky teaches in the departments of Global Development Studies and History at Queen's University. She has published and edited books on a wide variety of topics, including the history of gender and sexuality in Canada (Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 and The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls; the global 1960s (New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; adoption and child migration in Canada, Cuba and Guatemala (Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas); the politics of music in Cuba (My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela). She has co-edited two recent anthologies about Canada and the world (Within and Without the Nation: Transnational Canadian History and Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories). Her most recent book is Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Building on the concept of "imagined geographies" and the "tourist gaze", gender historian Karen Dubinsky uses the city of Niagara Falls to explore how physical geography, industry, and ideas around gender and sexuality converge to turn Niagara Falls into one of Canada's number one tourist and honeymoon destinations. Tracing tourism in Niagara Falls from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Dubinsky provides a complicated history of the city and how its geographical features (the fall themselves) lend in ideas around nature, sex, and romance and how this association help build the tourist/honeymoon industry. The strength in this book lies in Dubinsky's tracing of honeymoon customs as they moved from a semi-exclusive but public practice, towards being middle-class and private, to, eventually, widely accessible and public. In the tracing the structures of the honeymoon, Dubinsky also outlines the ways our ideas around sex, heterosexuality, and marriage have shifted throughout the century, and how that, in turn, also plays into the honeymoon tourist market.

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Central to Dubsiky's analysis of the falls is the concept of "imagined geographies," in which landscapes take on cultural meanings, and in the case of the falls, Dubinsky highlights the gendered and sexual imagery associated with falls. She also traces the history of the honeymoon and tourism in Canada and how these developments impacted Niagara as a mass tourist spot. Dubsinky leaves off on the question as to whether the Falls will adapt once more and embrace it's "camp" aesthetic and become a queer spot, a clear deviation from its heterosexual past.

[Chuck]

It's like oil and vinegar trying to tie in heterosexuality into tourism at Niagara Falls; it's not good unless it's shaken up a bit.