In Conclusion...
What has happened to gentility in our century? Did the attacks on genteel culture at the end of the nineteenth century deal a mortal blow? Has the subsequent onslaught of rival cultural systems in the twentieth century erased gentility from our social consciences? While lords and ladies and country houses have been fading from American social imagination, have we also abandoned genteel habits and values?
The answer, of course, is no. Whatever the particular signs of barbarism in today's world, the more evident fact is that gentility is ingrained into our lives. We assume that house lots will have yards with lawns and shrubbery, that houses will make space for formal entertainment, that everyone will own books, take baths, carry handkerchiefs, eat with knife and fork, forgetting that all this once had to be learned. Gentility is not at the top of the self-improvement agenda, as it was in 1850. But the refinement of America succeeded in making the practices of genteel culture second nature.
Gentility remains with us to this day, with all its pleasures and pains. Our love of beauty, our sensitivity, the kindness and amiability of society are qualities we prize, and these come from the desire to be refined. At the same time, gentility divides us and makes us anxious. Gentility separates us from one another on meretricious grounds: our clothes, our speech, our manners. We suffer embarrassment from the necessity to please, the sense of contrast performance, the fear of scorn. Through it all, we struggle to distinguish true gentility from vanity and superficial fashion.
The failings of refinement do not limit our sacrifices in its behalf. Gentility has commanded our resources ever since Americans first undertook to refine themselves nearly three hundred years ago. Elevation above the drab reality of ordinary life has seemed worth the cost. Here in Republican America, inspired by a distant court's dream of an unattainable beauty, we have suffered gentility's injustices, its expense, and its pains, in the hope of refining and thus exalting our streets, our houses, and ourselves. Richard L. Bushman
Richard L. Bushman, (1993) The Refinement of America–Persons, Houses, Cities. Vintage Books. pp-447
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