Page 29 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 23

The narrative moves from indoors to outdoors in The Central Character
according to a deconstructive logic which illuminates the differing senses of the
words ‘cultivation, cultivate, culture’. Deriving from the same Latin stem as
‘culture’ and almost synonymous with it, ‘cultivate’ means to till the soil, to
plough and fertilize, to dig soil around growing plants. It also means to foster or
nourish, and, finally, to refine or polish. Gruben uses the differing meanings of
this term to reveal paradoxes relating to dirt, to depth and surface, and to indoors
and outdoors that all affect the ‘character’ of housewifery, the home and, by
implication, women who keep house. To cultivate out of doors, as Gruben’s film
illustrates, involves getting dirty, getting beneath the surface, and concerning
oneself with growth, roots and fertility. Alluding to women’s role in the
primordial sexual division of labour, that of cultivators and gatherers, she wittily
contrasts this function with the cultivation expected of them indoors. Such
cultivation implies ridding oneself of dirt and vulgarity, cleaning and polishing
all aspects of one’s person (physical, mental and social), and obsessively
concerning oneself with surfaces and appearances. While the cultivation one
practises outdoors often produces food, indoors one cultivates the intangible
nourishments associated with a refined sensibility. Cultivation in its sense of
‘refinement’ implies activities of purification and discrimination; fertility, on the
other hand, requires the mixing of disparate elements. Beginning with the
inferred oppositions which structure the opening sequences of the film, between
the sterility the housewife should strive for within the home and the messy
fertility that is a necessary component of nourishment, The Central Character
playfully explores the plethora of contradictions, both actual and symbolic,
managed and provisionally effaced by the activities of housework.
The housewife performs tasks of erasure, of purification, that function to keep
indoors separate from outdoors, activity from its effects or residue, the body, the
traces of the body, from the work involved in satisfying its needs. One of the
housewife’s chores is to efface the signs of her own work (food particles) and
those of her role in it (fingerprints). In so doing, her work makes manifest a
system of spatial distinctions, at the cost of erasing all traces of her own labour.
While Gruben’s film illustrates the role of cleaning in establishing cultural
boundaries and distinctions, it also suggests the fragility of these boundaries and
the profound interdependency of the two realms created by them. By depicting
household places and practices that differentiate and compartmentalize space
(cabinets and floorplans), that make boundaries (bricks on the patio), and that
erase the traces of outside from inside (sweeping, scrubbing the floor), the film
visually suggests the degree to which the ideas of nature and culture, inside and
outside, cleanliness and fertility depend on the everyday practices that construct
and maintain them. Though the housewife’s work keeps these distinctions ‘neat’,
their implicit connections and interdependence resurface in the paradoxical,
contradictory significations that permeate ‘her’ identity (as wife/woman). The
gender binary presumably manages these significations by subsuming them all
within a ‘feminine’ character that neatly opposes a ‘masculine’ one. However, if