1 ARSENIC in the SUGAR by Sophia Reutter in Partial Fulfillment

1 ARSENIC IN THE SUGAR By Sophia Reutter In partial fulfillment of the degree Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English Wittenberg University 22 April 2020 2 Coveted Course or Chief Calamity—The Happy Housewife The existence of women in the realm of domesticity has been acknowledged, yet rarely ever questioned in our cultural past; however, the realm of domesticity in more modern years has vexed gender politics and has created a significant debate, especially concerning the dysphoria that sometimes occasions women’s identity. Barbara Welter, a feminist historian, identifies in her renowned work “The Cult of True Womanhood” the collective voices of various feminists from the 19th century, applying them in a modern context, such as S.E. Farley who claimed that “As society is constituted, the true dignity and beauty of the female character seem to consist in a right understanding and faithful and cheerful performance of social and family duties,” women were to work in the roles that were built for them (Welter 157). There were other writers that felt that “There is a composure at home; there is something sedative in the duties which home involves. It affords security not only from the world, but from delusions and errors of every kind:” a thought that perhaps paves the way for the thoughts that identify the agency that women built necessarily out of their domestic roles (Welter 157). Welter’s thoughts, though more reflective of her times, follow much of the same ideas on domesticity that exist in the modern day. This assertion that women were making about domesticity serving as a place of sanctuary, a place in which they could retreat away from their other worries, incidentally, brought them out of the shadows and into their own light. Judy Giles mentions in her work The Parlour and the Suburb that “the domestic and moral virtues ascribed to women also enabled some to challenge assumptions about private and public space, and to create identities for themselves in public movements,” women were becoming more sure of themselves in unsure roles (Giles 12). 3 One of the surest of these women is an author out of the 1950s, Shirley Jackson. Her works, originally found in domestic life magazines (Charm and Ladies’ Home Journal), dealt with topics of the daily housewoman’s life, and in the 1950s included gardening, cooking, and child rearing. These topics found their homes among women before Jackson later extended her writing to the international press. Her stories, including her penultimate work We Have Always Lived in the Castle, were widely read and she received national acclaim as a writer. In her works, this image of domesticity that is familiar and, for some, welcoming, is manipulated to demonstrate the complex and rather ambiguous relationship that women have with their domestic roles and how the stories of these women change with the addition of gothic story-telling. Her stories primarily struck a chord with women, which doesn’t come as a surprise given her previous affiliations with primarily female audiences. Unlike many of Jackson’s critics, these women, who were mainly comprised of housewives, sent the author hand-written letters, often thanking Jackson for her writing and even reaching out to her admitting their own desires for wanting to write. Within this group of women, there were two distinct, and ultimately unequal, halves: those who wished to write because writing “offered them an opportunity for extending and even challenging those domestic ideals,” and the majority who wrote expressing “their own desire to be an author…describe[ing] it with considerable self-deprecation,” while also stating that they “wanted to find their (literary) voices—to become speaking subjects,” which presented an interesting query (Neuhaus 117). It seemed that only a minority of these women truly sought the absolute dissolvement of their positions as housewives. Many of these women, however, seemed to, if not enjoy their position as a housewife, value it. For many women like Jackson, domesticity played an important role in finding their voices, so much so that feminist guilds, formed with the means to start conforming less to the 4 “housewife ideal,” started embracing the identity as a womanly force, an icon of sorts. The Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) of the 1950s, originally set up to give voice to marginalized housewives, made the assertion that “marriage and motherhood was ‘the greatest career of all,’” ultimately toppling any sort of traditionally “feminist” stance that it took to begin with and instead reclaimed the hyper-subordinated role into one that had a voice (Beaumont 2 150). Women, instead of casting off the housewife role, began making it their own, writing about their experiences and relating themselves to the writers, such as Jackson, that they saw taking control of their experiences and talking about the topics that were previously full of so much societal taboo. Gaining much needed ground, these women writers began shifting the pieces in the classic game of power, challenging the traditional power complexes. So, women were placed into these familiar roles that had been set out for them in society for centuries, yet some had trouble feeling happy or feeling like they were in a place where they fit into society, hence the dysphoria. Yet, there was still something drawing women to these roles, an internal voice. Renowned feminist critic, Betty Friedan shared this sentiment in one of her earlier articles found in the popular home magazine “Good Housekeeping,” claiming A woman may live half her lifetime before she has the courage to listen to that voice and know that it is not enough to be a wife and mother, because she is a human being herself. She can’t live through her husband and children. They are separate selves. She has to find her own fulfillment first (Friedan Women are People Too) These thoughts were instilled into the women of “Good Housekeeping’s” readership that it was understood if they found no satisfaction in their places in society. There were plenty of women 5 who were feeling the same thing after all. Friedan, quite adamant against the housewife role, represents the mindset that many women had concerning the restrictions of their societal roles, in which agency was constrained. Feminist politics have, since their invention, always had this conflict with domesticity and the extent to which women should play a role in it. Women who find themselves opposed to the roles have spoken out against it, calling attention to the fact that women have more to say and do than appease their husbands at the dinner table. However, there are also the women within domestic roles who appreciate the experiences that they have had as mothers, wives, housekeepers, and more. Defined as domestic “angels,” these women who found value and enjoyed their domestic roles were subjected to an unwanted “liberation” by way of the women’s resistance beginning in the 1970s (Fraiman 2). No damsels in distress, these domestic angels did not feel the oppression of the patriarchy as overtly as women like Friedan did. Thus, ambiguity surfaced as a crucial theme in women’s history. Those against the drone of domestic life claim that those residing within are suffering from a false sense of happiness, while others are reassured by the kind of agency that they have born out of domesticity. The struggle in determining whether the domestic is something to be admired or despised maintains one of the greatest debates in feminist politics and continues on into the fictional stories being told by women serving resolutely within the grey area of houseslave and New Age Woman. The 1950s manifested a presence in the very depths of the human cerebrum, primarily due to the constricting cultural roles. It is an era that is associated with a definite set of looks, social mores, and its own political crises that has fixated today’s contemporary thinking. To be a person in the 1950s, somebody had to exude a tragic air of postwar confidence, concealing the 6 traumas of a newly healing society, all the while maintaining their social aptitude and willingness to serve in the “normal” machine that plastered itself across the various local advertisements found among the pages of Home Beautiful magazine. “New Speed Heat BENDIX Heats its Own Water” flashes across the page to catch the readers’ desperate eyes. “50% FASTER!” it claims with all the urgency that clean clothes can bring within a three by two-inch ad – the limited space the ad is allotted to grab the readers’ eyes (Johnson 126). And yet, a certain comfort is instilled by the graphic, a mother and daughter standing in their matching dresses, both seemingly caught in a gleeful laugh at the sight of their new machine. Ads like these were not uncommon during this era. In fact, the deliberate frequency of the call for new shiny kitchen appliances suggests an ultimate call for normalcy through the all-too American medium of capitalism – America’s universally applicable final resort. Within this call back to normalcy came a new onslaught of social norms and, ultimately, tired roles that were spruced up and gifted back to women. The iconic women found flexing their biceps in war effort posters were offered new roles that had little to do with rivets and, perhaps, a different kind of washer. The familiar 1950s trope smiling across an ad for Dawn dish soap is none other than the “Happy Housewife.” It is with her brilliant ruby-red lips and pearly white smile that entire nations of unitedly disturbed men were comforted. Women’s jobs were to tend to their husband’s every need, after all “ensuring his meal is ready when he comes in from work, his food is good, his clothes are ready to wear ‘buttons on, shirts clean, [and] trousers pressed,” are only some of the components creating these “happy” households (Beaumont 62).

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