Learning to consume emotional experiences

This chapter focuses on the construction of the holidaymaker as an emotional subject by exploring vacationers’ expectations and experiences and examining how they actively shaped and were shaped by Victorian and Edwardian holiday culture. Drawing on popular stories and poems, vacationers’ accounts, and advice literature, it analyses the reciprocal relations between emotion knowledge, consumption, and subjectivity, emphasizing the various roles individuals played in the emotional economy of holidaymaking: as agents in the negotiation of the value ascribed to emotional experiences, as spectators and performers in the experience, and as co-producers of emotion knowledge. Homing in on moments of disappointment and boredom, the chapter demonstrates that holidaymakers of different genders and classes were aware of the medical view of holidaymaking, even though they did not always experience what was promised. Furthermore, the chapter explores the performative nature of holidaymaking, exposing the ways in which holidaymakers ‘learned how to feel’ by taking a disciplinary view of themselves and others during the holiday experience and by producing and consuming advice and popular literature that provided knowledge on what the emotional experience of holidays was supposed to be like. In contrast to frequent carnivalesque theorizations of holiday tourism, the resorts did not supply only change or contrast; they also provided a sense of normality, security, and familiarity. Tracing the development of the holidaymaker as a self-reflective consumer, the chapter also analyses the affinity between holidaymaking and authenticity.