Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro

Author:Laura Shapiro [Shapiro, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143034919
Google: kdvWAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 014303491X
Published: 2004-04-15T18:25:20+00:00

I HATE TO COOK ♦ I53

all the neighborhood kids underfoot, phones ringing to ask if I'd serve at the Brownie dinner or make cupcakes for the P.T.A., that the article would come back with the comment, 'This lacks authenticity.' "

Adeline Daley didn't see herself as a "trapped housewife," she saw herself as a trapped writer. Amateur or professional, the writers who chose home as their subject matter were creating a solution for themselves to a psychological problem that would resonate for everyone else into the next century. These women found they could reconcile—at least at the level of imagination—the clash of identities endemic to working mothers. To rig up a sense of self large and resilient enough to encompass both mother and professional, wife and money earner, homemaker and intellectual was an unwieldy emotional project, especially for a middle-class woman who could have afforded to stay home if she chose. When children clamored for her time or her husband glowered or a thousand interruptions plagued her writing, she could feel guilt and fury leap up and grab their swords. Working in the literature of domesic chaos didn't stop the kids from getting measles, but it enabled her to put her experience in perspective and gain a measure of control over the dueling sides of a harsh conflict. After all, her job was to make it funny.

This perpetual jostling between the narrator's housewife identity and her writer identity became an accepted feature of the genre. Jackson was unusual in keeping her work as a fiction writer largely muted in the family stories; more often, authors made a point of describing the conflict. "I've always wanted to be the kind of mother whose kids come in at 3:30 from school, cold and wet and hungry, and fmd cups of hot chocolate waiting, and freshly baked cookies, and the house smeUing of cinnamon and love," lamented Lesley Conger in Love and Peanut Butter. "The trouble is I also want to be a writer, so they're just as likely to come home and

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