Housekeeping English 223 – Week 7 “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work” “Not only has housework been imposed
on women, but it has been transformed
into a natural attribute of our female
physique and personality, an internal
need, an aspiration, supposedly coming
from the depth of our female character.
Housework had to be transformed into a
natural attribute rather than be recognised
as a social contract because from the
beginning of capitals’ scheme for women
this work was destined to be unwaged.
Capital had to convince us that it is our
natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling
activity to make us accept our unwaged
work”
How natural is housework?
“It takes at least twenty years of
socialisation – day-to-day training,
performed by an unwaged mother
– to prepare a woman for this
role, to convince her that children
and husband are the best she can
expect for from life”
How do these quotes
illustrate the idea of
interpolation?
•  How does Fanon describe his experience of being interpolated as a negro? •  How does Butler describe how people are interpolated as girls? •  Can we think of how this occurs in some of the novels we’ve read thus far? “When I went to college, I majored in American
literature, which was unusual then. But it meant
that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century
American literature. I became interested in the
way that American writers used metaphoric
language, starting with Emerson. When I entered
the Ph.D. program, I started writing these
metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing
in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I
read through the stack of metaphors and they
cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected. I could
see that I had created something that implied
much more. So I started writing Housekeeping,
and the characters became important for me.”
“For now we had to leave. I could not stay, and Sylvie would not stay with me. Now
truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping […]
All this is fact. Fact explains nothing […] imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a
restaurant, waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed – wearing, say, a tweed suit
with an amber scarf at the throat to draw attention to the red in her darkening hair.
Her water glass has left two-thirds of a ring on the table, and she works at competing
the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door,
smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats and combing our hair back with our
fingers. We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small
damp heap in the middle of the table, and sort out the gum wrappers and tickets tubs,
and add up the coins and dollar bills, and laugh and add them up again. My mother,
likewise, is not there, and my grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail
wagging, and my grandfather, with his hair combed flat against his brow, does not
examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille
may look, she will never find us there or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in
Boston, even to admire a store window. No one watching this woman smear her
initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets
of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts
are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does
not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” (219)