Who
Does Your Feminist Laundry?
I was at a bookstore (City Lights, the
top of the heap, if there are still enough bookstores left to form a heap)
event recently, a “conversation” between Rebecca Solnit and another author I’ve
conveniently forgotten. They both had new books out, adding to a large body of
work both in print and online, so the room was full, and rather airless.
Somehow, the subject of Thoreau and his laundry came up, specifically how silly
it was to mention the fact that all the time he was writing Walden, the transcendentalist classic
about solitude and self-sufficiency, Thoreau went home for hot meals and clean
linen, and brought his dirty laundry with him for his mother to wash. Sure, in
the book he was profoundly alone and on his own, but surely we can accept that
the reality of dirty laundry is not important, and move on.
For some reason, this is the only
part of the program that stuck with me. I had no interest in the books they
were shilling, and as literary personalities, neither was on my A list. But
something resonated about the idea of measuring laundry independence as part of
a literary reputation. Perhaps I was a little jealous of the person who did the
archival work and wrote the book that exposed Thoreau’s lack of attention to the
details of his own upkeep. (This is
assuming that the idea even came from a book. A few minutes of Internet
research did not reveal the original source of the literary rumor, but then, it
never does). His practice of laundry avoidance is hardly surprising. The point is
only interesting (to me, at least) as an example of the importance of
maintaining an ongoing discussion on our own literary tropes. Do we know who
swept Freud’s floors, or kept food on the table while Stephen King wrote that
bestseller topping the charts? It is the nearest woman, of course. The idea of Thoreau dipping his linen in
scalding water, rinsing it clean, and hanging it up in the open air is oddly thrilling,
while the image of his mother doing so is merely ordinary.
This whole issue probably would not
even have registered if laundry wasn’t something I have spent a lot of my time
doing, for myself and my family. And it is always griped me that we romanticize
the writing life so much that we’re sure that domestic chores shouldn’t be a
part of it. In fact, since this question has come up, I’ve been a little more
observant about the mention of mundane chores in the books I read, and I see
now that they are rarely even mentioned, except in the portrayal of drudgery or
as historical reference.
I’m assuming by the snide way that this
subject was referenced, that the argument that Thoreau should be re-evaluated
in light of his less-than-egalitarian laundry habits was originally a feminist
one. We all know now to roll our eyes at the more egregious examples of
academic deconstruction or hermeneutics. But, perhaps some have forgotten the
monumental contributions that feminist thought, and yes, even theory, has given
to our current literary landscape. Would we even be listening to Rebecca Solnit
without these contributions? The hard truth is that laundry (and preparing
food, and sweeping the floor) is part of everyone’s life. We are all human. To say
we produce great art and ignore the chores is to perpetuate the myth that these
tasks don’t exist, rendering the people that do them invisible. I wonder what
kind of book Thoreau’s mother would have written.
