Housekeeping

1
Housekeeping

• Looking after the house the home as individual
• Cleanliness
• Ritual, nostalgia keepsake
• Family defined by and through the home

2
Permanence and Transience

• Tragedy intimately tied to family
• Tragedy points to without explaining family
  relationships
• Permanence of the home and kin suggests that
  stability only possible in relation to domestic
  life

3
Coming of Age

• Ruthie and Lucille raised by family
• Family itself impermanent and changing
• Plot of the family largely missing from the
  novel.
• Domestic narrative for women childhood
  courtship marriage children, parenting

4
Family Values

• Most contested social issue in America today
• Family the source of Americas moral strength
• Family perceived to be under attack, to be
  eroding family needs to be protected, to be
  strengthened.
• Women, womans agency at the center of this
  debate.

5
Domestic Ideology Today

• Women best able to do the work of the home
• Work of the home at once undervalued and
  overvalued
• Home is about safety, protection, nurture,
  intimacy of family members.
• Womans abandonment of the home rejection of
  those values, and of the social order they
  sustain.

6
Crazy Aunt Sylvie

• The Fantasy Parent
• Thoughts are Elsewhere
• Unconventional History
• Unconventional Life
• Unconventional Housekeeper

7
The Lucky Children

• Negotiate a world without rules
• Girls grow apart
• Ruthie becomes Sylvie
• Convention asserts itself

8
American Ordinary

• Celebrates the ordinary lives of domestic America
• Places the home in relation to the wilderness,
  and the frontier
• Imagines the role of women outside of the home
• Self-Realization at the Heart of American
  national identity
• Anti-conventionalism of America