Domestic Landscapes

Abstract

Domestic Landscapes Paula Marantz Cohen In a Centennial Forum published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Mei-Po Kwan, an important scholar in the field of postmodern geography, notes that a feminist approach to geography is a "hybrid" discipline that involves "writing and speaking across cultures, spaces, and social locations"(759). Kwan's observation seems to have special relevance to this issue of jml. I have titled the issue "Domestic Landscapes" for the reason that all the essays deal with an extended terrain, conventionally mapped or defined, that is re-seen from a more intimate, more imaginative, or more inclusive perspective. That all the authors discussed here are women, who were either marginalized within the modernist movement or, as a result of a legacy of struggle, identified themselves as feminist writers, may account for the ways in which they call into question established and totalizing landscapes of meaning. The most literal evocation of landscape is Richard E. Zeikowitz's account of Marya Zelli's relationship to Paris in Jean Rhys's Quartet. Zeikowitz sees Marya's Paris as a vague, unboundaried, and disorderly space very much at odds with the mapped cityscape of Le Corbusier, whose City of Tomorrow was written during the same period. He argues that Marya's Paris is not an alternative to a mapped city but "a transversal urban text," a temporary disruption associated with the marginalized or imaginative individual. Another re-seeing of landscape—in this case the landscape of consumer culture—is treated in Kathryn Simpson's analysis of Virginia Woolf's story, "Slater's Pins Have No Points." Simpson notes that Woolf was ambivalent about the market economy. She relied on it as a publisher and novelist yet was aware of its tendency to objectify women and exploit female desire. Simpson argues that the two female characters in the story resolve this ambivalence: they humanize consumerism and unfix the power relations associated with patriarchy through the act of gift-giving. Their behavior also "pricks the bubble of [End Page iv] heterosexual romance and open[s] up onto a different way of relating, bonding, of gaining a sense of identity." In a second essay on Woolf, the focus shifts from the material to the metaphysical but remains concerned with the geography of domestic life. Lorraine Sims sees Woolf's writing as an effort to acknowledge the seemingly trivial but precious elements of experience obscured by what Woolf termed the "cotton wool of daily life." Sims attributes to Woolf a kind of domestic Platonism—an ability to see a pattern "that expresses and reveals the nature of ordinary things." The two essays on Bishop are equally concerned with issues of perspective and scale as these affect a traditional terrain of knowledge and meaning. Harold Schweizer argues that Bishop's highly particularized gaze, which invests meaning in the ordinary, corresponds to what Theodor Adorno referred to as "sabbath eyes." Her esthetic, Schweizer argues, embraces the "strange particularity of art" and thereby corrects for the historical tendency to render small things expendable or replaceable. Susan Rosenbaum, in a complementary piece, considers Bishop's relationship to the idea of the museum—the site where art and artistic reputation get institutionalized. She compares Bishop's work to the miniature museum, favored by the Surrealists, which critiqued the monolithic, acquisitive aspect of the museum while supporting the idea of art made accessible to public understanding and appreciation. The two subsequent essays are in different ways domestic in their method as well as their subject-matter, delineating patterns within the circumscribed space of intimate relationship. Heather Clark looks at imagery in the later poetry of Sylvia Plath and traces the influence of Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. Clark concludes that Plath began to forge a poetic voice independent of Hughes in the Ariel poems but succumbed to a sense of dependency and failure in her last poem, "Sheep in Fog," with its image of Phaeton's wrecked chariot, an image derived from Hughes's use of the Phaeton myth in his poetry. In what must be viewed as a similarly pessimistic piece, John F. Kanthak looks at Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, through the...