Housekeeping

1. Housekeeping Looking after the house: the home as individual Cleanliness Ritual, nostalgia: “keepsake” Family: defined by and through the home

2. Permanence and Transience • Tragedy intimately tied to family • Tragedy points to without explaining family relationships • Permanence of the home and kin: suggests that stability only possible in relation to domestic life

3. Coming of Age • Ruthie and Lucille: raised by “family” • Family itself impermanent and changing • Plot of the family largely missing from the novel. • Domestic narrative for women: childhood; courtship; marriage; children, parenting

4. “Family Values” • Most contested social issue in America today • Family: the source of America’s moral strength • Family perceived to be under attack, to be eroding; family needs to be protected, to be strengthened. • Women, woman’s agency: at the center of this debate.

5. Domestic Ideology Today • Women best able to do the work of the home • Work of the home at once undervalued and overvalued • Home is about safety, protection, nurture, intimacy of family members. • Woman’s abandonment of the home: rejection of those values, and of the social order they sustain.

6. Crazy Aunt Sylvie • The Fantasy Parent • Thoughts are Elsewhere • Unconventional History • Unconventional Life • Unconventional Housekeeper

7. The Lucky Children • Negotiate a world without rules • Girls grow apart • Ruthie becomes Sylvie • Convention asserts itself

8. American Ordinary • Celebrates the ordinary lives of domestic America • Places the home in relation to the wilderness, and the frontier • Imagines the role of women outside of the home • Self-Realization at the Heart of American national identity • Anti-conventionalism of America