From Domestic Grounding to Domestic Play: Problems of Reproduction and Subversion in Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, I have traced several different forms that the project of redefining domesticity took in the work of different modernist women writers, where the historical gendering of the opposition between public and domestic spheres represented the limits of women’s social authority to either produce public discourse or to act as historical agents more generally. In this concluding chapter, I want to foreground two main points or defining tensions that have emerged over the course of this analysis: the tension between realistic representation and avant-garde experimentation, and the question of the extent to which modernist transformations of domesticity constitute a process of unlearning or undoing the forms of racial and class privilege that are presupposed by the model of domestic womanhood inherited from the nineteenth century.

The ground of modernism is both the absence of a ground and the explicit normative rejection by modernism of a ground, even if there were one.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (34)

In the midst of writing there is merriment.

Gertrude Stein, ‘Lifting Belly’ (54)