Page 45 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 39

libidinal) in relation to their positions in them; in both, they are master. Their
confusion, occurring at a juncture of sex and cleaning, marks the perverse
relation of these systems as they are inhabited and enabled by the bourgeois
housewife. What she inhabits, mystifies and e/liminates is the connection, the
overlap of the economic and libidinal economies whose distinction and
difference, as institutionalized in public and private spheres, is vital to both the
modern bourgeois imaginary and the social order that it dominates.

From Kathe Bauer’s point of view, from Grusha’s very different point of
view, these narratives, these cleaning scenes are not about gender, not about
sexuality in and of itself. Rather they are narratives about the crucial differences
between women in terms of labour, status and class. For the proper woman, for
the lady, everything hinges on there being a clean difference between public and
private sexuality, between the bourgeois wife and the prostitute, between the
wife and the maid. Everything hinges on the making of symbolic boundaries
whose significance overrides the intimate proximities of bodily contaminations
and other threatening erasures of social difference. Everything hinges on there
being a difference within difference, a splitting of the feminine into a symbolic
binary—clean and dirty—that organizes and naturalizes contingent, historically
relative distinctions between women, such as their varied relations to money or
to work. The obsessions with cleanliness and hygiene that arise in the modern
period and that symbolically bolster the social division of gendered spheres
provide normative, naturalizing and visible criteria for discriminations between
women. A woman who must perform manual labour or cleaning, who must have
explicit, public congress with dirt, reveals, in the effects of these practices on her
body, her imposture as a lady. Class difference is absorbed within and masked by
propriety, cleanliness and one’s success or failure to assume the position of a
lady. The ruse, finally, in the question of any difference is the implicit fantasy of
ever determining a clean difference.

Coda: Lily-white hands and the odour of things
This article has been very difficult to clean up, finish up. Issues spill over. In
American advertising for products like Bon Ami and Ivory soap, there is an
insistence from the turn of the century up to the 1930s on the dilemma of ‘wives
who must do their own work’. For these women, non-abrasive, gentle cleansers
are a necessity, because delicate, unblemished white hands are the indisputable
mark of a lady (ladies don’t work, don’t clean, but if they must…). Margaret
Mitchell uses this cultural truism to great effect in Gone With the Wind when
Scarlett visits Rhett in jail, ostensibly for a social call, but actually because she
desperately needs money. Attired in a dress made from velvet curtains, her face
lightly painted, her charade of affluence is a tremendous success until Rhett, in a
moment of tenderness, takes her hands to kiss them. They are calloused, the nails
broken and dirty. ‘You’ve been working like a field hand,’ he says. Signs of