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“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. […] The battle against dust and dirt is never won”, writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.
Housework is essential for everyday life, and yet it is frequently overlooked. The question of who does domestic work – quite literally, who cares – is one closely related to questions of power in society. In this seminar we will explore how literature deals with the topic of domestic work, its links to issues of gender, race, and class, and how images of domestic work(ers) have changed over time. Starting with the rigid Victorian rulebook on how to organise a household, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and ending with a modern tale of domestic work and migration in Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia, we will examine the writings of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Lucia Berlin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others in regard to their approach to domestic work.
By exploring literary texts interspersed with some theoretical background, we will read these writings on housework not only as texts that represent household tasks, but as stories on freedom, money, love, agency, and status. |
