“All-Electric” Narratives : Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945–2020

__“All-Electric” Narratives__ is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the “all-electric” home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to “give back” time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or “return” them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Time-Saving Appliances and the American Century: A Case for the Significance of a Literary Trope 1. Why and How? 2. From the “Electric Age” to the 1920s: Devilry, Engineering Genius, and Efficiency 3. Emancipating Machines and Idle Housewives 4. From Luxury to Equality and Freedom “for All”: The New Deal and the Second World War 5. Paragons of the “Good Life”: Time-Saving Appliances and Cold War Ideology 6. Beyond White Male Ennui: Time-Saving Appliances, Gender, Race, and Class Chapter 1: “Everything in the Icebox”:: Domestic Energies in Jack Kerouac and Beat Culture, 1950–76 1. Time-Saving Appliances as Nostalgia-Makers: The Town and the City (1950), Sketches (1952–7), The Dharma Bums (1958), and On the Road (1957) 2. Conformity Producers and Sex Machines: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Bob Rosenthal 3. “The Thing that Bound Us All Together in this World Was Invisible”: “All-Electric” Democracy 4. Conclusion Chapter 2: “The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner”:: Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever and Richard Yates, 1947–81 1. Time-Saving Appliances and Early Postwar Television 2. “All-Electric” Pandemonium: Inconvenient Noise in Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” (1947) 3. “Il Frigidario”: US Appliances and Immigrant Help in Cheever’s “Clementina” (1964) 4. Vanquished Aspirations: Vacuum Cleaners in Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) 5. Blown Fuses and Nuclear Blasts: Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal (1964) 6. Drinking and Horror Behind the Scenes: Blenders and Refrigerators in Yates’s “Saying Goodbye to Sally” (1981) and “A Natural Girl” (1981) 7. Empty Refrigerators and the Stench of Recent Vacuuming: Yates’s Easter Parade (1976) and “Oh Joseph, I’m So Tired” (1981) 8. Conclusion Chapter 3: “I’m a Toaster with a Cunt”:: Time-Saving Appliances and Errant Women in Marge Piercy’s Early Fiction 1. Time-Saving Appliances and Second-Wave Feminism 2. “I Was Just an Appliance”: Time-Saving Domestic Gadgets in Sue Kaufman, Joyce Rebeta-Burditt, Emily Arnold McCully, and Marilyn French 3. “A Baby, a Husband, and an Electric Carving Knife”: Going Down Fast (1969) 4. Desiring Machines, Electrical Currents, and the Meat of Fleshy Women: Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) 5. “We Have Our Most Intense Scenes in Kitchens”: Braided Lives (1982) and Capitalism’s Co-option of American Jews 6. Conclusion Chapter 4: “I’ve Never Been Able to Get Another Girl as Efficient or as Reliable”:: Time-Saving Appliances in Black American Fiction, 1952–2003 1. The Racialized History of Time-Saving Appliances 2. Monstrous Machines: Appliance Interventions in Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker 3. “[L]ike Lookin’ in Your Icebox and Seein’ Nothin’ But Your Own Reflection!”: Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956) 4. “Vacuum Cleaners and Crazy Things like That”: Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) 5. Conclusion Chapter 5: “Ever Think About Being Attacked by a [...] Vacuum Cleaner”:: Time-Saving Appliances in Sci-Fi, 1950–78 1. Time-Saving Appliances at the End of the World: Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) and Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950) 2. “All-Electric” Escapes: Margaret St. Clair, Eleanor Arnason, Kit Reed, and James Tiptree, Jr. (1950–87) 3. Parodies of Misogyny Through Time and Space: Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer (1957) and Philip K. Dick’s “The Adjustment Team” (1954) and Ubik (1969) 4. “At Least She’s Not in Love with Her Vacuum Cleaner”: Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) 5. “[P]erhaps Some Defective Appliance Somewhere in Suburban Anytown”: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and The Two of Them (1978) 6. Conclusion Chapter 6: “The Angel of Death Pushes a Vacuum Cleaner”:: Retrospective Appliances in Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo, 1950–97 1. “Nothing Would Do But It Be Followed by Miracles”: Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Hocus Pocus (1990) 2. All-Powerful Vacuum Cleaners: Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater (1965), Dead-Eye Dick (1982), and Galapagos (1985) 3. From House of Slaughter to House of Magic: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and “Jenny” (ca. 1950) 4. “That’s a Vaculux, Isn’t It?”: DeLillo’s Americana (1971) 5. “Words to Believe and Live By”: DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) 6. Neoliberalizing the “All-Electric” Kitchen: DeLillo’s Americana (1971), White Noise (1985), and “Baghdad Towers West” (1968) 7. Conclusion Chapter 7: “You Can Overdo Remembering Stuff”:: Anti-Nostalgic Appliances in Postmillennial Fiction 1. End-of-Millennial Luxury Appliances: David Wojnarowicz and Joan Didion 2. From “The New Domesticity” to the #Tradwife: Time-Saving Appliances, Nostalgia, and White Nationalism 3. “She Decided to Grill the House”: A. M. Homes’s Music for Torching (1999) 4. “The Whole Universe Is in Our Refrigerator!”: Charles H. Johnson’s “Dr. King’s Refrigerator” (2005) 5. “Creating an Entire Superhero Universe to Make a Point”: Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues (2017) 6. “. . . the Fact That There’s Also the Vacuuming”: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and the Trump-Era “All-Electric” Kitchen 7. “Everything Melts”: Anti-Normative Appliances in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door (2020) 8. Conclusion Conclusion:: “All-Electric” Narratives after 2020, and the “Use” of Time-Saving Bibliography Archival Materials Primary Texts and Criticism Index "The significance of domestic time-saving electrical appliances in 20th-century American literature is given unique attention in this wide-ranging study. This book examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens across a range of literary genres and forms published between the early 1910s, as Fordism and Taylorism entered the home, and the 2010s, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects into the 21st century. Rachele Dini argues that literary scholarship has too long ignored the influence of electrification on literary form, and of domestic electrification on the literary representation of home and on shifting understandings of the relationship between the home, body, and nation. Dini further argues that the appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification comprised a crucial, but overlooked, element in specific twentieth-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. "All-Electric" Narratives thus demonstrates the extent to which American writers over the last century have enlisted appliances to raise questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanisation and the potential replacement of humans by robots, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated"-- Provided by publisher "This book is the first-ever study of the representation of domestic time-saving electrical appliances in twentieth-century American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens across a range of literary genres and forms published between the early 1910s, as Fordism and Taylorism entered the home, and the 2010s, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects into the twenty-first century. Rachele Dini argues that literary scholarship has too long ignored the influence of electrification on literary form, and of domestic electrification on the literary representation of home and on shifting understandings of the relationship between the home, body, and nation. Dini further argues that the appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification comprised a crucial, but overlooked, element in specific twentieth-century literary forms and genres including postmodernist fiction, science fiction, and second-wave feminist fiction. All-Electric? Narratives thus demonstrates the extent to which American writers over the last century have enlisted appliances to raise questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanisation and the potential replacement of humans by robots, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated."-- Provided by publisher Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies "All-Electric" Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the "all-electric" home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to "give back" time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or "return" them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated. PART I. Contextualising Domestic Electrical Appliances in the Cultural Imagination -- Introduction: Time-Saving Domestic Appliances, Modernity, and the American Century: A Case for the Significance of a Literary Trope -- 1.'Oh So Beautiful is the MixMaster': Appliances in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sinclair Lewis, and Gertrude Stein -- Part II. Mechanisms of Containment: Cold War-Era Literary Responses to the 'All-Electric' Home -- 2. 'Everything in the Ice Box': Appliances in Jack Kerouac and Beat Culture -- 3. 'The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner': Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever and Richard Yates -- Part IV. Gadgets of Protest: Feminism and Civil Rights Short-Circuit the 'All-Electric' Home -- 4. 'I'm a Toaster With a Cunt': Radical Feminist Appliances in Marge Piercy -- 5. 'If a N***** Buys a Woman a Washing Machine': Appliances and Race in Post-War African American Fiction -- PART V. Appliances, Techno-utopianism, and Hyperreality -- 6. 'Like Being Attacked' by a Vacuum Cleaner?: Appliances in Post-War Science Fiction -- 7. 'The Angel of Death Pushes a Vacuum Cleaner': Postmodernist Appliances in Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo -- Conclusion: Appliances, Contemporary Culture, and Twenty-First Century Nostalgia for the 1950s -- Bibliography -- Index