The home plot

Ann Romines

In this finely crafted study, Ann Romines builds on twenty years of feminist scholarship to show how domestic ritual--the practice and tradition of housekeeping has helped shape the substance and tone of some of the best fiction by American women. Examining works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty, Romines argues that one cannot fully appreciate this writing unless one understands the domestic codes in which it is inscribed. Romines opens with the American realist period, when such women as Stowe and Jewett began to experiment with plots generated by the rhythms of domestic ritual. Chapter 2 is an extended reading of Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, showing how the silent, traditional language of housekeeping becomes the medium for an autobiographical writer and her sibylline mentor. In chapter 3, Romines shows how Freeman devised a very different strategy, counterpointing climactic plots against relentless repetitions in ways that evoke the stresses and satisfactions of housekeepers' lives. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss Cather's ambitious career. Although at first determined to avoid the constraints of domesticity in her writing, Cather increasingly was drawn to women's culture, and her later novels include several triumphant experiments with domestic fiction. The final two chapters, on Eudora Welty, reveal how the priorities of housekeeping have marked her fiction from beginning to end. By reading domestic ritual as a gendered language, Romines seeks to reclaim one of the oldest female traditions-housekeeping--from trivialization and devaluation. In the process, she brings fresh insight to the work of five important American novelists. "In this important and stimulating study, Romines helps to pioneer a new direction in feminist criticism, one that locates women's aesthetics in their material practices, particularly in the rituals of domestic labor."