Housekeeping

•Looking after the house: the home as individual•Cleanliness

•Ritual, nostalgia: “keepsake”•Family: defined by and through the home

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

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

“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.

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.

Crazy Aunt Sylvie

• The Fantasy Parent

• Thoughts are Elsewhere

• Unconventional History

• Unconventional Life

• Unconventional Housekeeper

The Lucky Children

• Negotiate a world without rules

• Girls grow apart

• Ruthie becomes Sylvie

• Convention asserts itself

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