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Sunday, August 25, 2013

Please Don't Eat the Angst


By Dan Hagen
Reread the domestic humor of writers like Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck a half-century later, and you may detect a familiar undertone — the chatter of forced cheer mixed with a hum of quiet, if not desperation, at least constraint.
These were writers of considerable talent, a fact that gave them an outlet of expression largely denied to their audience — women raising large postwar baby boomer families who probably dreamed of other careers growing up, but found themselves bound to the lonely routine of housework. They felt unappreciated. People may pay lip service to drudgery, but nobody respects it much.
So, in magazines like “Woman’s Day” and “Good Housekeeping,” you could find short purported memoirs describing the life of a housewife as a lark of minor absurdities surrounded by reassuring routine. The happy home life was the hot fudge sundae, and those weird kids and that oblivious Mr. Magoo of a husband were the tasty sprinkling of nuts.
Those pieces from the late 1940s into the 1950s became a kind of cottage industry for freelance writers, and were reprinted in hardcover with titles like “Life Among the Savages” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.” Movies were made. The pickings were choice enough that even some male writers started to poach in the field with books like “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.”
And yet, with the women writers, there’s something unsettled there beneath the smiles. This was the freelance market of their discontent. Amplifying domestic trivia into Thurber-level wit was no easy feat to begin with, and it had to be done under editorial restraints as stringent as those for sonnet writing. No martini-fueled drunken rows. No despair. No rage. No childhood polio or kleptomania or sexual acting-out. No genuinely hostile in-laws. Certainly no infidelities, either imagined in vivid detail as you waited alone in the silent house for his return or performed yourself, in frustration, in resentment, in a search for a thrill that might make one of those days vary from the sameness of all the rest.
Sometimes you can see the outlines of those darker absurdities that the women might have wanted to include. Shirley Jackson, for example, talks about the period when her son kept attributing his own misdeeds to another boy at school who didn’t exist. She plays the experience for laughs, but it’s the sort of thing that must have caused parents some anxious nights, some whispered conversations.
Restraints can channel artistic composition, but they can also inhibit it, particularly overtly commercial restraints. What editors demanded be censored in these stories may sometimes have been the most powerful undercurrent in the housewives’ lives.
Transient entertainments might have been elevated to something more enduring in these compositions, had editors not silenced the cellos and the oboes and demanded to hear only the flutes, always just the flutes.

7 comments:

  1. Patrick Hasburgh:
    This might be my favorite post of yours, Dan - I love that you can appreciate these words, that you get it - a rare thing. Thank you... the grass doesn't grow greener over the septic tank (or does it) Our mothers were of this ilk... and mine resented it and fought against it in her own submissive and then, ultimately, self-absorbed way... My joke about my mother is this, I call her on the phone, "Mom! I'm being chased by headhunters!" ... long pause, then, my mom responds, "I have a bit of a headache myself."

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  2. Barbara Rassel Hasselriis Madsen:
    You never fail to amaze me, Dan. I read this and weep for my late mother who bore 5 children in 12 years, suffered silently w/an alcoholic husband, was not allowed a job outside of the home and could have been so much more. 😥
    Have you seen Far from Heaven w/Julianne Moore? I feel the need to see it again.

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  3. Bill Lair:
    My mom loved Erma Bombeck. I think Betty Boyer also did. My mom began working outside the home in 1960-61 when I was in 7th grade. She still was responsible for meals.

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  4. Pat McDonald:
    Nicely summarized and a keen observation that younger folks can’t even imagine. These themes are applied in the 2024 film NIGHTBITCH, which hits your nail on the head in a modern sense.

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  5. Ellis L Rose:
    The ending of your first paragraph, I suspect, is an acknowledgement to Betty Friedan's comment in her "The Feminine Mystique" about the "quiet desperation" of educated post-WWII housewives. If not, it should be because you capture it well in this particular blog!
    I remember when I sought out counseling because of relationship issues while studying at San Diego State University and found myself describing to the counselor/therapist the intense "quiet desperation" I was feeling within my otherwise wonderful relationship.
    She shared with me how she noticed that phrase and how similar what I was describing to what housewives were reportedly feeling in the 1950s and 1960s according to "The Feminine Mystique". And she validated that what I was saying made lots of sense to her. (Yeah, she was very good at her job, no sarcasm implied!)
    My reply was, I know that reference, and that, while I was not trying to plagiarize Friedan's words, I had come to understand that feeling on my own and independently of her book. And it is awful!
    Kudos to you, Dan Hagen , for recognizing it in the writings of these women! I don't know of anyone else who has done so.

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  6. Gaye Harrison:
    Mighty piece, Dan. Thank you - I remember being powerfully influenced by the “art” of my childhood,, and it chills me to the bone to think how many powerful voices, world-changing views, were smothered by that weak, frightened, jealous pillow.

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  7. Tammy Veach:
    This resonates with my mother’s experience. So smart, but encouraged to drop out of high school, get married 3 months before her 17th birthday, have her first child 10 months later, and be a mother of 4 before she turned 22, with 2 more stragglers to follow by age 31. She devoured Erma Bombeck’s column and later her books, covering silent desperation and disappointment with smiles and humor….

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