Rachel Cusk’ın Arlington Park (2006) isimli romanında ev kadınlarının gündelik hayatının ve direnişinin analizi

Abstract

Sociologists of everyday life have regenerated the notion of everyday with creative potential, especially after the 1970s. The ability to make the familiar unfamiliar has posited everyday life studies with multifaceted realities which can embrace the human situation of emancipation and oppression. The mundane reality of everyday life practices is freighted with power and resistance. Therefore, everyday life practices have to be scrutinized as they have become a site upon which agency is situated. In this sense, the sphere of everyday life can be regarded as a space of exploitation and liberation at the same time. The power relations in everyday life practices conceptualize the notion in a contested manner; thus, resistance. The present paper will analyze the everyday life practices of housewives in the suburb of London to discover the resistance and the possibility of emancipation narrated in the novel Arlington Park (2006) written by Rachel Cusk. The analysis here is based on Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the notion in a dialectical manner, suggesting that it can be both oppressive and liberative. Discovering the potential everyday holds for the housewives accentuates the value of domestic labor in transforming the female actors. In this sense, Michel de Certeau’s celebration of everyday as a sphere of resistance will be taken into account in analyzing the resistant activities of the housewives in the abovementioned novel. This paper proposes the possibility of emancipation for the housewives who carry out their everyday practices by situating the notion of everyday as a mediator space.