Re: a quibble about 'for esme'

From: Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Date: Mon Oct 28 2002 - 02:06:46 EST

You've painted a VERY nice picture, thank you very much :). But we only
really see Muriel when she's vacationing with Seymour, right? Not at
home? And her mother worked, if I remember right? I suspect Muriel was a
housewife in the narrower sense of the word (we'll work with your
definitions because they're more specific and very nicely graphic) when at
home because her husband was, of all things, Seymour -- who was either in
the military at the time or just out of it (I could very easily be
screwing up details again).

Either way, I never imagined the Seymour that was married to Muriel could
afford to keep her as a member of the leisure class, and I didn't ever
really see her mother living that way either. I could be wrong,
though...feel free to correct me.

Jim

Tim O'Connor wrote:

> 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 Mon Oct 28 02:06:53 2002

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