“The Trouble Goes Back to Your Grandfather’s Time”: Masculinity and Domestic Spaces in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay reads evolving cultures of white American middle-class masculinity in tandem with ekphrastic symbolisms of domestic architecture in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread. It interprets the text as a subversive narrative where if hegemonic gender norms oppress women and children, they also often confine men primarily to the role of a provider and alienate them from their own shelters. Accordingly, by focusing on the profound connection between masculinity and domestic architecture in A Spool of Blue Thread, this essay argues that Tyler’s postmillennial novel systematically debunks several conventions associated with both gender norms and domestic spaces. In sum, this essay—with the help of masculinity studies and space theories—suggests that by establishing how preservation, husbandry, and care over cold rationality and calculated aggression are elemental to constructions of both ideal masculinity and ideal homes in the current millennium, A Spool of Blue Thread necessitates conversations on changeovers that create felicitous domestic spaces for both men and women.