Chapter 2: My Home Is Your Home: Property, Propriety, and Neighbors

Abstract

“My Home Is Your Home: Property, Propriety, and Neighbors” traces suburbia’s interest in private property to two dominant discourses: the classical liberal theories of Locke and Kant, which advocate property as a form of protection from invaders, and the concept of dwelling articulated in Heidegger and Arendt, which posits property as a means for developing an isolated identity. I contend that the relationships characterized by T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, John Cheever’s Bullet Park, and John Updike’s Rabbit Redux can be better described by employing the redefinitions asserted by thinkers such as Kenneth Reinhardt, Eric L. Santer, and Jeremy Waldron, who see the neighbor as not an individual similar to the self, but an other who is in proximity and in need.