WRITING THE MEAN: PHYLLIS MCGINLEY AND AMERICAN DOMESTICITY By MEGAN ANNE LEROY A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 Megan Anne Leroy 2 For Mom and Dad 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I want to thank my mom and dad. Without their love and support this project would not exist. My mother persistently fueled my desire to study poetry through example and encouragement. My father has been invaluable as a model of determination and constant source of support no matter how many times his cell phone rang. Also, my director Marsha Bryant, and my reader, David Leverenz, were instrumental in the success of this project. I appreciate their continual support and belief in me as a scholar. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................8 A Critical Survey ....................................................................................................................10 “Housewife Poet”: Refusing Models of Women’s and Postwar Poetry.................................11 2 MCGINLEY AND LIGHT VERSE.......................................................................................16 3 MCGINLEY COMPLICATING THE IDEA OF HOUSEWIFE ..........................................19 Eliding Expectations: “A Landscape of Love”.......................................................................31 Eliding Expectations: “A Word to Hostess”...........................................................................33 4 WRITING THE MEAN: “THE DOLL HOUSE” AND “THE HONOR OF BEING A WOMAN”...............................................................................................................................35 5 CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................42 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................44 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................46 5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts WRITING THE MEAN: PHYLLIS MCGINLEY AND AMERICAN DOMESTICITY By Megan Anne Leroy December 2007 Chair: Marsha Bryant Major: English American 20th century poet Phyllis McGinley was a prolific writer and publisher throughout her career (roughly 1920-1960), finding coveted space in both popular and academic magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and the New Yorker. McGinley was known in the literary circles as a brilliant light verse poet, specializing in humor and satire. But despite her productive career, McGinley was neglected by the second-wave feminist critics even as they sought to recover and expand new female writers like Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. As a result, McGinley has become virtually unknown in contemporary scholarship and has faded from cultural memory. Why has she been rendered so invisible to academia? My thesis answers this question by examining the perceived limitations of McGinley’s poetry and prose within LHJ and the NY. I posit that McGinley’s ignored status stems partly from her own recognition of herself as a domestic “housewife poet” before the more liberal Anne Sexton popularized the term. As postwar domesticity became taboo for feminist critics, McGinley audaciously embraced the housewife. She also chose to write in formalized light verse when the emerging modernist and avant-garde movements in poetry focused on free verse and serious philosophical issues. By labeling herself as housewife poet and continuing to use light verse, McGinley was stigmatized as a matronly comical poetess, whose writing refused to take 6 seriously the bonds that feminist critics were working to break through. She was, rather, writing the mean, taking ideas from both traditional values and contemporary women’s rights to create a hybrid, or a both/and, option for women in America. This thesis’ evidence is limited to 1950s America, as this decade is both the golden age of the American housewife and the prime of McGinley’s career. Through her work McGinley offers compromise to fifties housewives; she gives them hope, she gives them reason, and above all she gives them humor. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION To be a housewife is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed. —Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe American 20th century poet Phyllis McGinley was a prolific writer and publisher throughout her career (roughly 1920-1970), finding coveted space in both popular and highbrow magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and the New Yorker. She even won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for Times Three (selected poems). Aside from her sheer volume of textual production, McGinley was also known in the literary circles as a brilliant light verse poet, specializing in humor and satiric tone. But despite her dynamic career, McGinley was neglected by second- wave feminist literary critics even as they sought to bring her postwar contemporaries Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath into the canon. As a result, McGinley has become virtually unknown in contemporary scholarship. Why has she been rendered so invisible in the academy? My thesis answers this question by examining and returning to McGinley’s poetry and prose to question the limited perceptions of her work. I posit that McGinley’s neglected status stems from two major issues: she does not fit reigning models of women’s poetry or postwar poetry, and she adopts light verse. McGinley embraces domesticity at the start of second-wave feminism while she eschews free verse amidst the rise of both modernist avant-garde poetry and confessional poetry. And yet, McGinley needs to be included among major women poets because her bridging of both LHJ’s and the NY’s presentation of postwar domesticity complicates the image of the housewife poet. McGinley was what I will term writing the mean. She offered American women an option in between the fictitious perfect housewife and poets 8 who rebelled against domesticity. She created a both/and position for homemaking women to occupy, negotiating the space that had yet to be defined. The peak of McGinley’s career coincides with the stereotypical golden age of the American housewife; thus, I will focus on the decade of 1950-1960. I must clarify that McGinley’s targeted audience was, like Betty Friedan’s, white, middle-class, and educated women (a major constituency of LHJ’s demographic). These women of the 1950s were dichotomously labeled either super-heroine suburban moms managing to raise respectful children and have a full course dinner waiting for their bread-winning husbands, or they were liberated and enlightened intellectuals fighting for feminist rights—take your pick ladies, June Cleaver, or Sylvia Plath. Although recent criticism, headed by Elaine Tyler May, continually revises traditional history to show how fifties housewives were actually breaking out of their domestic containment instead of existing passively within it, the only internal motive posited is often boredom or unhappiness with domestic roles. McGinley, in writing the mean, expands the either Cleaver or Plath, happy or bored, binary and creates a multifaceted identity, modeling not a limited choice for women, but rather a merged alternative—the mean between two extremes. In her masterful light verse style, embedded in literary tradition, McGinley fashioned a self-given dual label and refused to be categorized as either housewife or poet, opting instead for “housewife poet” long before Sexton popularized the term. Unlike Sexton, McGinley was not being ironic or self-deprecating, she was choosing a professional career. “Housewife poet” was not a label to be denigrated or mocked; it was an honorable and purposefully constructed identity. McGinley resolutely chose to write the mean and marketed herself as such; thus she must complicate our current notions of postwar American domesticity. 9 A Critical Survey McGinley’s own bridged status as a housewife and poet becomes clearer when we look at her biography. Born in 1905, McGinley graduated from the University of Utah and moved to New York in 1929, where she simultaneously taught high school English and published poetry. She married Charles L. Hayden in 1936, and had her first child, Julie, by 1939 and a second, Patsy, in 1941. Traversing both personal and professional expectations, McGinley was an educated, published writer with a college degree, yet she still had two kids, a husband, and an in- home job. She portrayed traditional domesticity while she became quite invested in her poetry. She also had the money to hire a maid/nanny, creating more time for her poetic profession. Extending into pop culture and literary culture, McGinley published eight volumes of poetry, as well as individual