“I have no country”: Domesticating the Generic National Woman

  • Annette Cozzi
Chapter
Part of the Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters book series (19CMLL)

Abstract

Sweetie-pie and cream-puff, tart and cheesecake, honey, cookie, and cupcake—the delectability of the idealized woman, as sweet and insubstantial as a sugar bride atop her wedding cake, is evidenced by the countless nicknames of both insult and endearment deployed to diminish and reduce women to nonthreatening, consumable commodities. Neither nutritive nor sustaining, these edible goods are, of course, light, frothy, frivolous, and deliciously insipid. No sweetnothings are whispered into the dainty, delicate ear of his beloved leg o’ mutton or roasted capon. Naming is a powerful instrument of coercion and control. The authority to name, to interpellate, is, as Louis Althusser contends, the ability to define the subject, a subjectivity inseparable from the ideology that hails it, for the “existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.”1 According to Althusser, “the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time … the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (171).

Keywords

National Identity Household Management National Imagination Concrete Individual Generic Disjunction 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
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© Annette Cozzi 2010

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  • Annette Cozzi

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