ABSTRACT
Working from the premise that the spa resort was a key site of leisure-class identity formation for nineteenth-century Americans, this chapter shows how the national economic growth and the resurgence of leisure travel as a form of conspicuous consumption during the Gilded Age produced shifts in the spatial practices associated with the resort hotel. The chapter focuses on Henry James's The American Scene and T. C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville, two texts that explore the challenges to classed subject formation presented by the luxury hotel's labyrinthine space. Luxury hotels provide a useful lens for understanding how individuals acquire cultural knowledge in order to navigate social spaces. T. C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville explores the spatiality of a temple built to an idea. Through its satirical depiction of John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, this novel, like all of Boyle's 1990s novels, displays the author's interest in the ways that architecture influences human subjects.
