Blog as Literature of Domestic Chaos, Part One: Background

(On Toggling Between an Exam Proposal and a Wedding Registry on Which Appears a Sky-Blue Volvo-Colored Mixer.)

My own particular intervention into mindfulness – that is, into the reconciliation of what one WANTS to do right now with the dictates of master narratives specifying what one OUGHT to be doing – has been to design my doctoral project around food. Thereby enabling me to label things I might do anyway, like knocking off early to drink whiskey and eat cheese while reading the letters of MFK Fisher, as “research.”

Specifically, my doctoral research seeks an overlapping narrative area between culinary practice and affective, sensual, lived national identity.

Although there are probably downsides to this nexus of my interests and my methods, I am not interested in them. Instead, here is a list of upsides:

*Cooking dinner always counts as killing two birds with one stone.

*One may approach home furnishing as a meta-project. When you are “surfing” the nicer design sites (Design Within Reach, say, or even West Elm), you are not only “window shopping” – a “selfish” and “unimportant” occupation – but also you are constructing a sense of the possibilities and limitations of private spheres! You are pursuing context! It’s like doctoral research, filtered through a real live experimental body – mine!

*The purchasing and reading of cookbooks is always permitted.

The flip side of this same coin dictates that I can’t manage to keep the chatty narrative voice (the barometer or Greek chorus concerning WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING, IN THE REAL WORLD) out of my “work.” For example, the current draft of my exam proposal spends a good deal of words on the STRANGE CONJUNCTION that exists for me currently, as I devote time to reading books like THESE TWO by Laura Shapiro, which trace the history of the housekeep and the role of the bride through the 20th century.

For a teeny peep of context: housework began to change in the very early 20th century, with the introduction and gradual spread of labor saving devices like washing machines. EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY, some visionary women invented “home economics,” which turned into a joke and a big old bane of the culture, but started out as a way of giving women access to scientific and technological realms… the “home” was a place as in need of technical expertise as any man’s job. Separate spheres, but this time, EQUAL.

Food, too, became increasingly abstracted away from pleasure and taste and into numbers and technical principles, so many grams of this with so many grams of this, spawning all those Jello-mold salads I still remember from church suppers of my youth. Women could go to school, to cooking school, where they would learn to prepare meals all in a single color, by frosting everything and processing it until it was unrecognizable. (Middle-class) women handled food, but needed to be protected from its actuality as much as possible – via gelatin, “white sauce,” boiling the hell out of it, etc.

Then came war. Women went to work (white women – other women had already been working). Then the men came back and it was the 50s. And during this time, we’re told, the food industry triumphed at removing women from the need to drudge in the kitchen, presenting us with fishsticks, tv dinners, and frozen orange juice. (But failing to turn us onto frozen milk, frozen water, onion-flavored turkey sticks, or lentil sticks.)

But also during this time, proponents emerged culinary elite like James Beard who wanted everything delicious and either regional or French. And then came Betty Friedan and her Mystique, just saying what lots of people already thought.

And lo, it came to pass that that they debated the role of the woman-housewife in a world of many conflicting domains. “They” was the women’s magazines, the home economics departments (in which women were allowed to get the PhDs barred them in many other fields), even the law making bodies, though they didn’t take it all that seriously. And lo, a handful of decades passed in much the same way.

So then we arrive at me, writing my exam proposal about narrating culinary national identity and the national, gender, economic and moral loops around the housewife, a proposal in which I also CHATTILY and NARRATIVELY describe my own meta situation: toggling between my proposal document and my Williams-Sonoma wedding registry, on which I have collected NOT ONLY some lovely enameled pots in light green (“lemongrass”) and bright dark yellow (“Dijon”), BUT ALSO have added the requisite Kitchen-Aid mixer in the most beautiful princess-blue color (“Sky Blue”), the color of the boxy old Volvo I used to covet, and a beautiful, beautiful piece of machinery.

Because get this. I AM, LIKE, A WIFE. And it turns out that even if you elope to Las Vegas, you can’t entirely escape the archaic social system’s, er, family’s desire to sanctify your wife-ness by having opportunity to look at and make fun of what you’ve registered for. So that they can ply you with goods, some useless, the better to feather your nest and your cap and further to weigh you down with things so that you can’t fly away but will instead be available for playing Bingo at Christmas, sending birthday presents to their children, and attending all their own occasions, preferably at a moment’s notice if necessary.

Like I said, it makes things really meta. For instance. It’s tempting to believe that I am (working on inventing myself as) a NEW kind of housewife, with taste and drive! Who serves tasty, classy, healthy organic vegetarian meals to the husband and often enough to friends, decorates in a tasteful modern style, gardens her own fresh herbs, and provides for the comfort of all… and builds up a successful writing career on the side, while also getting a PhD! Who, if any kid should come into the picture BUT PLEASE ONLY AFTER WE HAVE MONEY IN PILES sufficient to buy a jogging stroller and a part time grad student nanny, will raise her/it/them with taste and respect, nurturing their creative and ethical selves and turning them into funny, cosmopolitan, health-conscious citizens who will change the world, and make it better-decorated too!

But. Turns out, housewifes have been thinking this – some of them, it ain’t no monolithic category you know – since the 50s at least!

Yes. I with my sky-blue mixer-lust am a plain-vanilla aspirant to that old chestnut of the chichi white American middle-classes, “Gracious Living.”

And the new housewife, the woman who rejects career climbing not because culture MAKES her but because she WANTS to? Because she loves her home and role? Oh, she’s been around the block already too.

House Beautiful, 1956:

“[We’ve] watched the clear emergence, since the war, of a new attitude among women toward homemaking. They are finding that housekeeping and family management are fascinating, enjoyable pursuits, offering the fullest opportunities to express themselves and their capabilities.”

(via Something from the Oven.)

Organic Style, 2005:

“Not many people have the guts to pull out of successful careers wh they’re in their mid-twenties, but that’s what model Kirsty Hume did in 2001. The face for Gucci, Chanel, and the Gap simply wanted to take time out for what mattered most: being with her husband, musician Donovan Leitch, whom she married in 1997 in her native Scotland, and pursuing creative passions like knitting and painting.”