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“At Home Too Everything Is Falling Apart”: Waste, Domestic Disorder, and Gender in Alison Lurie's Early Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2017
Abstract
This paper examines the gendered aspects of consumer waste, dirt, and domestic mess in three early novels by Alison Lurie – Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), and The War between the Tates (1974), set in 1969 – which I argue provide an incisive account of the transformation of gender relations over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. By focussing on the signifying potential of material objects in these texts, I seek to demonstrate Lurie's relevance to the “thingly turn” in literary criticism, to reignite interest in an author whose work has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and to instigate a wider discussion of waste in her work as a whole, where it in fact proliferates. In broader terms, I hope to complicate existing scholarship on waste in literature (including my own in this area to date), which remains almost exclusively focussed on male authors.
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References
1 Lurie, Alison, The War between the Tates (London: Abacus, 1989; first published 1974), 22Google Scholar. Hereafter references to this novel will be in the form of parentheses in the text, using the abbreviation WBTT followed by the page number.
2 Costa, Richard Hauer, Alison Lurie (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992)Google Scholar; and Newman, Judie, Alison Lurie: A Critical Study (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2000)Google Scholar.
3 Female writers do feature in waste scholarship, but they are generally given far less prominence than their male counterparts. The following studies feature roughly one woman for every five to ten men: Viney, Will, Waste: A Philosophy of Things (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)Google Scholar, which includes Rosamond Lehemann; Smith, Christopher, The Poetics of Waste (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)Google Scholar, which includes Gertrude Stein; and my book Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)Google Scholar, which only studies Mina Loy in depth. Women writers are entirely absent from Scanlan's, John On Garbage (New York: Reaktion Books, 2005)Google Scholar; and Harrison's, Sarah K. Waste Matters: Urban Margins in Contemporary Literature (London: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar. An exception to this male-centric trend is Morrison's, Susan Signe The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which female writers feature as prominently as men, and her earlier study, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar, which features an entire chapter on “gendered filth” (45–56).
4 While I make reference to these novels, I have chosen to largely omit Imaginary Friends (1967) and Real People (1969) from this analysis due to the far less prominent role that waste plays in these texts, where it serves, to my mind, rather different purposes to the ones examined here. A study of waste in Imaginary Friends might, perhaps, probe the relationship between feminism and madness – but it is beyond the scope of this article to do so.
5 Dini, Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use, 68, 101.
6 I am thinking in particular of Georges Perec's Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), and Barthelme and Beckett's prose across the 1950s and 1960s, which I discuss in Consumerism, Waste and Re-Use, 67–98, 102–12. For an incisive discussion of waste in Burroughs see Alworth, David, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 51–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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25 Statistics from this period indicate this to have been a prevalent trend. Some 80% of wealthy US households owned a vacuum cleaner in 1926; by 1941 this had extended to 47% of all households. Schwartz Cowan, 173, 94.
26 Morrison, The Literature of Waste, 188, notes that this association dates back to at least the Middle Ages: Chaucer inveighs against adultery, equating it with filth, in Canterbury Tales X.848, 850 (86). The use of “dirty” in relation to jokes dates back to 1599, while the term “dirty word” to denote “smuttiness” or obscenity first gained entry into the OED in 1842.
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34 In her delineation of the development of LA's aircraft and related industries, Markusen dates the birth of the military–industrial complex to the mid-1950s, with the beginning of the Cold War. See Markusen, Ann, “Aerospace Capital of the World: Los Angeles Takes Off,” in Markusen, Ann, Hall, Peter, Dietrich, Sabina, and Campbell, Scott, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82–117, 95Google Scholar.
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54 Ibid.
55 See, in particular, de Beauvoir's analysis of housework in The Second Sex, 270–74; Oakley's description of the central contradiction inherent to housewifery: “housework is work, housework is not work,” Oakley, Housewife, 2, 5, 77, 241; and Betty Friedan's questioning of the toll of housework on women's mental health – and cultural ramifications of the “hardening” of the housewife mystique – in The Feminine Mystique (New York: Penguin, 2010; first published 1963), 15, 34Google Scholar.
56 While an in-depth discussion of this is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that in Lurie's much later novel, Foreign Affairs (1985), dwelling in mess has anything but an emancipatory effect, in fact leading to the psychological breakdown of Rosemary Radley.
57 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” (1949), in South Pacific, perf. Mitzi Gaynor, South Pacific (20th Century Fox, 1958).
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62 Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989; first published 1977), 120–27Google Scholar.
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64 Ibid., 123.