What is it about?
This article examines the depiction of mess, dirt, garbage, and housework in a range of novels published in the late 1960s and 1970s by female American writers influenced by or involved in the second-wave feminist movement. My argument is that these novels use experimental literary devices most commonly associated with avant-garde literature (a genre dominated by male writers, and which focuses on very different kinds of waste, garbage, and fragments to the kinds identified in these novels). These texts about “mad housewives” struggling against the constraints of their roles are full of detailed descriptions of dirt and mess, and written in a strikingly experimental way—characteristics that in turn challenge established ideas about waste literature on the one hand and avant-Garde literature on the other.
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Why is it important?
Contributes to and challenges existing literary waste studies scholarship and definitions of avant-garde literature
Perspectives
Literary waste studies remains focussed on literature by men, and the kinds of waste the field examines is extremely gendered. This article suggests ways of approaching literary waste as a feminist issue. It also shows how examining texts historically deemed “low-brow” or “popular” (and of little literary value) through the lens of waste might reveal their significance as experiments in form.
Rachele Dini
University of Roehampton
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This page is a summary of: ‘The house was a garbage dump’: waste, mess and aesthetic reclamation in 1960s and 70s ‘mad housewife’ fiction, Textual Practice, August 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/0950236x.2018.1508069.
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