Page 33 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 27

between cleanliness and sexuality from a different angle. Beneath a quote ‘We’re
no longer happy, Mother!’ and a picture of a distressed (white, middle-class)
wife clutching her mother’s arm, text from a December 1929 advertisement
reads: ‘For some time the young wife had realized that things were changing
between herself and her husband…they did not enjoy the warm companionship
they had at first. They were drifting apart. Why? So often the answer lies in the
wife’s neglect—or more often misunderstanding—of the delicate part of her
toilette called feminine hygiene.’ The striking parallels or, in the case of Lysol,
identification between household cleaning products and feminine hygiene
products must lead us to immediately enquire with regard to the latter: what exactly
is being cleaned here?
As the culturally designated agent who constructs and maintains the symbolic
boundaries (inside/outside, nature/culture) effected by cleaning, the housewife/
woman absorbs or contains their contradictory and overlapping significations.
These contradictions then surface as problems with feminine identity or, as
indicated by these advertisements, with feminine bodies. Historically and
culturally relegated to perform tasks which establish the distinctions between the
natural and the cultural, inside and outside, dirty and clean, middle-class
housewives, generalized as the ‘feminine’, come to represent extremes of both.
Feminist analyses have long noted and critiqued the insistent ideological
alignment of ‘woman’ with nature or the body— woman is animal. But the
highly cultured is also consistently seen as feminine, as evidenced in the negative
stereotype of the effeminate man. The feminine’, as modernity has constructed
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it, therefore signifies and contains conflicting polarities that articulate, not an
opposition to a male other, but an enclosure, a parentheses in which ‘he’ figures
as norm/neutral/neither. Articulating this perception, Catherine Clement observes
that women ‘are double. They are allied with what is regular, according to the
rules, since they are wives and mothers, and allied as well with those natural
disturbances, their regular periods, which are the epitome of paradox, order and
disorder’ (Cixous and Clement, 1975/1986:8). While Clement locates the source
of this doubling in women’s physicality, I would argue that the cultural coding of
certain highly symbolic activities—cleaning—provides part of the frame in
which we construct and understand sexual difference. Further, the ideological
pressure of such a frame is evident in considerations of housekeepers’ and, by
inference, women’s proper sexuality.
As a worker whose practices create, police and maintain the cultural border
between purity and impurity, whose actions determine what comes close to the
bodies of her family and what is kept at a distance, and who supervises what
goes in and comes out of those bodies, the housekeeper’s own body is subject to
stringent limitations and cultural controls. These controls monitor the cleanliness
of both her body and her sexuality. If we look at popular culture narratives about
white, middle-class housewives, we can see that the stories they tell are often
marked by a confusion of literal and metaphorical cleanliness. In accounts of bad
or mad housewives, the woman is often associated either with a ‘dirty’ sexuality