Who cares? Women's work in American women's fiction and film.

摘要

"Women's work" significantly impacts women's subjectivity. By "women's work," I mean the myriad duties women fulfill by way of dominant cultural expectations including housework, child care, and elder care. This caring labor provides the foundation upon which society thrives. Yet, American culture devalues this work while simultaneously idealizing the roles that require it. Exploring a range of literary and cultural texts to examine the effect of this contradiction on American women, I contextualize the domestic sphere as a space that simultaneously molds and erases women's subjectivity. Since women's caring labor is often intimate and emotional work, it often requires emotional detachment. My project asks, then, what kind of subject emerges from selfless service? I argue that the selfless subject finds her subjectivity within the matrices, the web of care, the communities of women and men with which she enacts strategies of survival, of care-giving, and care-receiving. Beginning with the popular women writers of the mid-nineteenth century, I anchor my study in a sociopolitical culture that idealized "women's work" and domestic space as women's vital contribution to the social contract. I trace the shifts in this ideal through women's popular fiction of the early twentieth century and the evolution of these narratives into women's film. American literary scholars typically have given only cursory attention to the various representations of "women's work" in women's fiction and film, opting instead for more liberatory points of analysis. This absence in an otherwise rich body of scholarship unfortunately ignores the actuality of women's real daily lives. My project foregrounds "women's work" and constructs an analysis of women's cultural expression that both acknowledges and articulates its significance in the formation of women's subjectivity.; Keywords. American Literature, Domesticity, Women's Work, Women's Fiction, Women's Film