Re: a quibble about 'for esme'

On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 08:56:48AM -0400, Jim Rovira wrote:

> Tim -- how exactly are you defining "housewife"? Seymour's wife
> was married, and didn't work outside the home. To me, that's the
> definition of a housewife. The word does carry other connotations
> that may or may not apply.

Indeed, it does. This goes to show how subjective language is, I
guess. In my experience growing up, a housewife stayed home all day
working full-time on the household: cleaning, doing laundry, tending
to the children (since in my experience, they always had children),
getting groceries, cooking dinner, and so on and so on.

Seymour's wife is a distinctly different breed. Sure, she doesn't
work. I sense that her life is spent shopping, critiquing other
women's clothes with her mother, arranging dinner reservations,
shopping, having her nails done when she's not touching them up
herself, visiting the hair salon, shopping, fighting with her mother,
playing "can you top this?" with her friends, going to matinees,
meeting friends for drinks, checking the latest fashions in magazines,
and shopping.

That is my impression of Muriel. If you agree with a characterization
something like this, I would guess that you might agree with me that
such a character may be a wife and may not "work outside the home,"
but she doesn't fit any definition of "housewife" that I know.

I readily admit that one may define "housewife" in some other way that
includes all these leisuretime activities I associate with Muriel.
But no housewife with whom I was ever acquanted had time or money for
all these activities. Rather, they always had another load of laundry
to do. And this division of character types was even starker in
Salinger's 1940s milieu, when it was rather common (at least in
fiction!) to have household help of one type or another to look after
the dull business of housework.

Your experience of housewife (or, much more rarely, "house-husband")
may vary significantly from my prototype, as mentioned above. For
this I can offer no explanation except a change in times, a change in
mores, and a change in the economy.

--tim

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Received on Sun Oct 27 13:34:30 2002