domesticity

crafted hat rack with painted book bindings and attached objects — Carlynn Crosby, Women’s Writing Hat Rack

Today I wrapped my graduate seminar Women’s Writing & Pedagogy with a reveal of students’ Domestic Arts Assemblage projects, crafted from discarded items at our community’s creative reuse center, The Repurpose Project. This is a debut DIY assignment I designed specifically for this course, which combines a seminar on 20th/21st century women’s literature with a practical workshop on assignment mock-ups students design for courses they might teach in future.

Over the past 3.5 months we’ve read women’s writing in various forms: novels, experimental prose, poems, and image-texts. Our writers/makers: Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Carter, Alison Bechdel, Rita Dove, Margaret Atwood, and Ange Mlinko. We also explored our library’s archive of Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Literature and Art. Keyed to this range of women’s literary writing in English, the series of assignment mock-ups focused on: City, Domesticity, Literary Magazine, Myth. Students also did other short assignments, including a conference paper proposal about teaching and a draft syllabus that featured women’s writing.

The Domestic Arts Assemblage is the outlier assignment. My rules were loose, resourceful, and communal:

plastic bottle with crinkled sheets green paper and pages of writing — Zuzu Tadeushuk, Writer’s Block 2024

(1) Make a Domestic Arts Assemblage with items from The Repurpose Project. MB will give you $8.00 to use for your project. At least one of our syllabus texts or a mock-up assignment should be a source of inspiration.
(2) Submit a photo of your Domestic Arts Assemblage + a 250-300 word Maker Statement.

By doing a creative-critical assignment, students could curate syllabus materials alongside everyday objects to reflect on our semester’s discussions and generate ideas for future work.

The resulting assemblages were stunning, as you can see from the writing-themed examples I’m sharing here (with students’ permission). Viewing the projects as a gallery and discussing them with their makers in today’s class, I was struck by how they reassembled our syllabus and discussions in analytical and inventive fashion. This teacher became the student, learning new pedagogies. Here are some of my takeaways:

Women’s writing can be laden with everyday objects, bringing texture and heft to the words.
Domestic Arts Assemblage makes us question why we label some work as domestic, and some work as art.
The domesticity in women’s writing covers some things while revealing others.
In women’s writing, the women characters can succumb to and liberate themselves from the cycles of time.
In women’s writing, domestic objects can signify burdens and rebirth, fragmentation and integration, restriction and possibility.
The household objects we donate or otherwise discard are inanimate narrators of our everyday lives. – MB

Wall clock surrounded by a collage of objects — Hyunjung Kim, Fragmented Writing in Domestic Time

Tidiness is not a delicacy… Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

What serendipity teaching Tender Buttons again during a week I’m also watching the Netflix sensation Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Doyennes of domesticity, Stein and Kondo make the home and its objects come alive in unexpected ways. Their revolutionary household manuals are 100 years apart. To tidy up our households, Kondo tells us, we must make a bigger mess of them. To establish her household, Stein counters the establishment. Both women disrupt standard thinking about housekeeping.

Animation

The house and all things within it come alive in Kondo’s and Stein’s visions of domesticity. If you’ve seen Kondo’s show, you’ve seen her ritual of greeting the client’s home. When tidying clothes we must touch each item–and thank those we don’t keep. When tidying books, she instructs, we must tap each stack to wake them up. Kondo’s book insists that your possessions want to help you. Stein also has a singular way of perceiving clothes and accessories. ‘A Long Dress’ acquires the serene length that renders it an object of meditation. Animating ‘Colored Hats’ and transforming their textures, Stein writes: A large hat is tall and me and custard whole. The hat becomes her.

Repurposing

Thinking outside the box with boxes, Stein and Kondo repurpose these ordinary household objects into ordering strategies. Kondo uses small boxes as drawer dividers that suit tidied items such as neckties and socks. The boxes your iphones and MacBooks came in are perfect for storing writing tools, while shoeboxes have infinite uses. Did you know that the lid of a shoebox is shallow and can be used like a tray? Stein would agree that a box is never just a box: A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large part of the time there are three which have different connections. Like Kondo’s drawer dividers, Stein uses boxes to partition a whole. Parts of Tender Buttons are divided into labeled text boxes, including ‘A Plate,’ ‘A Chair,’ ‘A Box’–tools for writing about the house.

Results

Tidying up yields domestic delights and new ways of living. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo declares that a dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. That reanimating perspective starts with reenvisioning everyday objects and household relationships. Tender Buttons responded to Stein’s dramatic reorganization of her expatriate life in Paris. With her brother out of the apartment, Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas set up a household where Stein could pursue her experimental writing within a liberating domesticity.

Toward the end of her book, Stein writes: Tidiness is not a delicacy, it does not destroy the whole piece, certainly not it has been measured and nothing has been cut off and even if that has been lost there is a name, no name is signed and left over, not any space is fitted so that moving about is plentiful. Moving freely across normative syntax, Stein’s words reflect the transformative abundance of her home. –MB

SOURCES
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)
Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014)
Stein photo: The New Yorker; Kondo photo: BestLife

Marsha Bryant

Department of English

Women’s Writing as Domestic Arts Assemblage

Tidying Up with Gertrude Stein