Love and the Penny Press

I think Dr. Burt really worked to relate the field of journalism and communication to love and desire. One of the ways in which I thought her lecture connected with our class was how the penny press brought out the underbelly of love and desire. Dr. Burt first told us about the number of articles she found by searching via keys words such as wedding, elopement, etc. She then mentions she found a correlation between love and murder (179 articles) and love and suicide (150 articles) that I thought really tied into our entire theme this semester.  We’ve read books with very tragic endings, and agreed that they were interesting. Dr. Burt’s lecture proves that as Americans we’ve been fascinated with love gone wrong, since the 1830’s.  She gave one example in particular that I found interesting,  a wealthy man killed a young, poor girl and set the house on fire, but he was acquitted because he had expensive lawyers. 

I think that this goes into another aspect of love that we haven’t covered yet—problems that money cause in relationships. Maybe this topic was touched on a little when we went over Bad Girl, but I don’t recall discussing it in class.  The media in the 1830’s combined news stories and fiction regarding love in ways I think are seen less today. Perhaps today there are even less positive stories about love in the newpapers than there were in the 1830’s, because I always see this person is cheating on this person and this couple is getting a divorce. Rarely do I ever see happy stories about love in the media, and like Dr. Burt said, it’s because people don’t want to hear these kinds of stories. The article I mentioned earlier  set the tone for future stories that we see even today.