Reading & Composition

This course will examine a long legacy of cultural fascination with domestic space and its iconic caretaker, the housewife.  We will discuss literary texts and films that feature housewives as their protagonists – from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to the present.  Our task will be twofold: we will work to appreciate, on the one hand, how the texts engage with a longstanding (and ongoing) feminist critique of the tethering of women to domestic labor; on the other hand, we will try to understand why the housewife endures as a key aspect of the fantasy of “the good life.” What can literary representations of housewives tell us about the aspirations and assumptions surrounding our everyday lives – in the past and in the present?

This is a writing-intensive course, and we will explore all of these issues as a means of refining writing skills.  Students will write and re-write a number of essays, and writing “workshops” will occur on a weekly basis.  The final portion of the course will be spent on developing research skills, and will culminate in a research paper on one of the texts we have studied.

Required Texts:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
William Shakespeare, Othello
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Course Reader will also contain:

Jennifer O’Grady, “How to Clean Practically Anything”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Housewife,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Women and Economics (excerpts)
Emily Dickinson, “SHE rose to his requirement, dropped” “I ’M wife; I ’ve finished that”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (excerpts)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (excerpts)

Required Film Screenings:

Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life
Todd Haynes, Safe
Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (excerpts)
Mabou Mines DollHouse (excerpts)