American Domesticity : From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama

From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen , housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues—the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism—were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere. Contents......Page 10 INTRODUCTION: Swept Away: The Truth about Dirt......Page 14 I: HOUSEKEEPING BY THE BOOK......Page 24 ONE: Housekeeping by the Book: From Hints to Home Economics......Page 26 TWO: Making Home, Making Nation: Catharine Beecher's Domestic Economy......Page 46 THREE: Tayloring the Home: The Fantasy of Domestic Engineering......Page 71 II: HOUSEKEEPING IN HOLLYWOOD......Page 90 FOUR: Silent Film, Silent Work: Early Cinema and the Domestic Melodramas of D. W. Griffith......Page 92 FIVE: Lessons in Labor and Love: The Melodramatic Imperatives of Hollywood Housekeeping......Page 119 SIX: The Labor of Maternal Melodramas: Converting Angels to Icons......Page 141 III: HOUSEKEEPING AGAINST THE GRAIN......Page 162 SEVEN: Housekeeping against the Grain: Feminist Domesticity's Visible Style......Page 164 EIGHT: Converting Melodrama to Manifesto: A Question of Silence......Page 180 NINE: Experimental Domesticities: Patricia Gruben's The Central Character and Zeinabu Davis's Cycles......Page 189 EPILOGUE......Page 202 Notes......Page 206 Bibliography......Page 228 A......Page 238 C......Page 239 D......Page 240 F......Page 241 H......Page 242 K......Page 243 P......Page 244 S......Page 245 W......Page 246 American Domesticity considers representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts, tracing key moments in the construction of an idea whose political power and effectivity in our national imagination cannot be overestimated -- that of normative domestic femininity. This work considers American representations of domesticity and domestic labour over the last two centuries in historical, popular and feminist texts. The author asserts that the political power and effectivity of the idea of "normative domestic femininity" cannot be overestimated