Modern Domesticity Research Articles

There's No Place like Home: Response to Blair

I would like to begin by saying how much I enjoyed Sara Blair’s essay. The reason I enjoyed it is that it raises many of the questions that currently haunt and structure debate within the field of American studies. Let me start by reinvoking the two that I find most significant. The first concerns the category of the “literary.” Blair follows a brief summary of shifts toward a cultural studies paradigm within the field of the “new” modernist studies by questioning their implications for what she called, in a previous version of her essay, “literature’s deep curiosity and pleasure,” and, what she calls, “the oneiric, sensory, and social dimensions of the ideal of literature as a distinctive site of experience.” If one of the axioms of the “new” cultural studies is that modernist texts can no longer be treated simply as aesthetic objects, then how, Blair asks, are we to avoid a simple inversion that abandons the specificity of the “literary” altogether? The second question concerns the category of the “domestic.” Here, Blair worries about the tendency of recent criticism to treat the “home” merely as a site in and through which bourgeois, imperialist, racialized, and gendered subjects are produced. In her footnote to this claim, she cites Lauren Berlant and Amy Kaplan as two critics who convincingly treat domesticity as a locus of what could be broadly conceived of as an imperial pedagogy, but at the cost of “eliding the differentiatiable, microhistorical realities of the home as a social process and space, which the literary, in all its contestatory and emergent forms, enters into shaping.” What happens, she asks, “after we chronicle continuities—as opposed to ruptures—between commodity culture and high modernism,” between the languages of domesticity and imperialism? Blair’s advance on these approaches suggests that we ought to pay closer attention to the intersections of literary modernism and modern domesticity or, in her words, the “fluid, bidirectional circulation of texts, tastes, and fantasies” between “the bourgeois home and the modernist salon.” Let it suffice to say that I fully

Okin on Justice, Gender, and Family

Susan Okin has written an important book on justice and the family. Animated by the experiences that contemporary feminism has sought to articulate, and guided by a principled hostility to the subordination of women that continues to disgrace American life, she argues that the current ordering of domestic life in the United States is unjust and that its alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.Families, according to Okin, are not havens in an otherwise heartless world. Instead the current division of domestic labor marks them as the centerpiece of a broader system of inequalities between men and women. Justice condemns those inequalities and commands their remedy through the transformation of our domestic practices. Because the division of domestic labor is so fundamental to injustice, we need in particular to ‘encourage and facilitate’ (171) equal sharing by parents in the responsibilities of child-rearing, and in the more quotidian chores that provide the material foundation of modern domesticity.