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The Whereabouts Of Domestic Fiction In The Twentieth Century And Beyond

There was little about domesticity in the twentieth century that was self-evident, especially in its last decades. That century witnessed a decline of the so-called “traditional nuclear family” which theoretically consisted of a male “provider”, his wife and their biological children.

According to Desmond F. McCarthy (1998), the number of American households that can be defined as traditional nuclear families “declined from 60 percent in 1955 to 7 percent in 1985″.  It is illogical to expect that traditionally-attributed gender roles can withstand such voracious changes. The decline of the traditional nuclear family has been accompanied by a diversification of household arrangements not only in the United States but in the whole world.

The very existence of these alternative households necessarily challenges traditional attitudes regarding “the proper role and place of women, the regulation of sexuality, the boundaries of families, and appropriate child-rearing environments and philosophies” (McCarthy, 1998, p.2).

Considering the traditional nuclear family as an ideal or historically permanent institution, we see that this notion is as imbued with much of the same degree of utopianism as the representations of “alternative” families in contemporary American fiction.

In twentieth century American literature we see illustrative instances of alternative domestic arrangements in novels by prestigious authors such as John Updike, John Irving, Alice Walker and E. L. Doctorow, to name a few. These writers have shown us that they clearly perceive this new world where domestic life has been radically altered, inevitably yielding new sorts of household complexities. However, differently from their antecessors in the previous centuries, each of these writers has achieved both critical and public acclaim. Some of their works are still among the most widely read novels of our times. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and two of John Updike’s ‘rabbit’ novels have received the Pulitzer prize for fiction, one of the most important tokens of artistic talent recognition.

There is, naturally, confusion over the future of families and of family life as we know it. Some novelists are imagining compelling alternatives and are dealing with realistic and recognizable conflicts. In their depictions of new domestic arrangements they eliminate most of the traditional gender-based hierarchies.

According to poet and feminist critic Adrienne Rich, the intention of the artist is not simply to portray social realities in a realistic and convincing manner, but “to bring a skeptical consciousness and an unfettered imagination to bear upon these conditions–to conceive of alternatives…” (In: McCarthy, 1998, p.3).

A prime example of these alternatives can be found in one of the most celebrated breakthrough female writers of contemporary times. We can see in Jhumpa Lahiri a certain face of Domestic Fiction – definitely a new face – which is very much alive today, in this case, in a short story format.

In her book of stories Unaccustomed Earth Lahiri brings back – full throttle – issues on domestic ideology with a bittersweet flavor, something that strongly resembles the old and at the same time intertwines with the new. The first short story of this compilation is also called Unaccustomed Earth.

It is the story of Ruma, whose now retired father travels the world enjoying the benefits of freedom and old age. Ruma seems to follow her father’s each step by keeping “the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator” (Lahiri, 2009, p. 3).

On the days he is scheduled to fly she watches the news on television in a casual yet careful search for information regarding plane crashes anywhere in the world – just as Stowe’s “women with faculty” would keep always up to date with news of the world and with the latest literature in the mid-nineteenth century.

An interesting observation is that the available evidence as to who exactly read fiction in the 1850s America points to females, Northern, urban and young (Goshgarian, 1992) – roughly one in ten Americans (at least the ones drawn from the population who kept servants or slaves). Thus the typical clientele of the popular novels would have been the wife or daughter of “a small capitalist, shopkeeper, company official, bureaucrat, or professional living in one of the larger Northern towns” (p. 41).

Ruma is the daughter of immigrants from India. She is thirty eight years old and is a lawyer. She is also an Indian-American married to a white American. They have a son – Akash – and another on the way. She lives in a new house she and her husband – Adam – have just bought in the Eastside of Seattle, Washington. They formerly lived in New York, in Brooklyn, and moved as a consequence of Adam’s job.  

Over the telephone, her father suggests making a visit. Note Lahiri’s choices of environment. Ruma was making dinner in her new kitchen (p.4).The author makes it clear whose task it is to prepare the meals. After Ruma’s mother died, she was the one who assumed the duty of talking to her father every night asking him how his day had been. This hints us as to a sense of the perpetuating of female roles through the generations.

Lahiri portrays Adam, Ruma’s husband, as constantly away, many times for a whole week, mostly on business trips. It was rare when he spent two consecutive weeks at home and tagging along with him did not seem to be an option. He, nevertheless, encouraged his wife to hire a babysitter, even a “live-in” if it should be necessary. Since Ruma knew no one in Seattle the prospect of leaving a stranger with her small son seemed to be more daunting than taking care of him herself.

In her consciousness lied another issue – she was not working, and, for her, that meant nothing would justify paying someone for doing something she therefore had the freedom to do. “It was the house that was her work now” (p.6) – her chores included leafing through piles of catalogues that came in through the mail, marking them with post-its and ordering sheets with dragons on them for Akash. Here we can see some not so new or alternative household dispositions. On the other hand, the author reminds us that when Ruma worked, there were fifty-hour weeks and a six-figure paycheck.

Alas, Ruma does not seem to miss her husband so much as her mother, for she feels that her mother’s presence would have been the helpful one, doing as she knew best: taking over the kitchen, singing songs to Akash, teaching him Bengali nursery rhymes and throwing loads of laundry into the machine. Moreover, whenever she would compare herself with her mother there always seemed to be an ever-present feeling of inferiority involved. She could not imagine herself taking care of her father the way her mother did or serving the meals the same way she had. She was struggling with the idea of offering her father a place to stay, to live with them, in her house. Her father had, nevertheless, other ideas going on in his mind. During his travels he had met a Mrs. Bagchi, an Indian widow who lived in Long Island alone, who held a doctoral degree in statistics and taught, since the seventies, in Stony Brook University. That is the only description of another woman in the story.

Ruma’s conflicts extend to simple yet important everyday events. Lahiri reveals to us that  – “there were mornings [Ruma] wished she could simply get dressed and walk out the door, like Adam” (p.10). She could not understand how her mother had coped with all of this. While growing up, Ruma saw her mother moving to a foreign place – the United States – for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and the household. In Ruma’s opinion, all of this had served as a warning, as a path not to take, yet this was the life she was living now.

Remains of Sentimental notions sometimes flood the narrative. Ruma held a framed photograph on her bedside table of her and Adam on her wedding day, slicing the white layered cake. Though his absences contributed to her isolation, she was beginning to wonder that it was, in fact, sometimes preferable to having him home constantly asking her about her state of mind or her mood. Even with Akash to care for she was beginning to prefer solitude.

Finally, the same father who, in the end, will not live with his daughter in order to pursue his very own renewed romantic interest, gives the readers the innovative and groundbreaking performance that follows, and with it, we see a fresh and new face of domesticity as I believe we have never had before. 

Ruma’s father seems to be pretty handy around housework, something unthinkable for nineteenth century audiences, and hopefully not for twenty-first’s for that matter:

After finishing the dishes he dried them and then scrubbed and dried the inside of the sink, removing the food particles from the drainer. He put the leftovers away in the refrigerator, tied up the trash bag and put it into the large barrel he’d noticed in the driveway, made sure the doors were locked. He sat for a while at the kitchen table, fiddling with a saucepan whose handle –he’d noticed while washing it – was wobbly. He searched in the drawers for a screwdriver and, not finding one, accomplished the task with the tip of a steak knife (p.27).

 With this narrative, Lahiri masterfully changes the face of Woman’s fiction – yet still preserves the characteristics that makes it a domestic story. This paper arose out of the intersection of two kinds of concerns: the first, a fascination for the incredibly – still – understudied history of domesticity in literature of English expression and second what I think to be the yet understudied status of domesticity in contemporary literature. To conclude, I believe one can safely say that, in an ever-changing manner, as long as there are families in a household, Domestic literature will live on indeterminably, even though no one knows what the future holds in store for us. Perhaps the angel-in-the-house is not dying, but simply, changing.

REFERENCES

Goshgarian, G. M. To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Available at: <http://www.questia.com/read/103719005?title=To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance>. Accessed in: 23 Aug 2009

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

McCarthy, Desmond F. Reconstructing the Family in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. Available at: <http://www.questia.com/read/6897578?title=Reconstructing the Family in Contemporary American Fiction>. Accessed in: 22 Aug 2009.

About the Author

Gustavo Cohen is a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in English of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil) in the area of Literatures in English Language.

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