Page 46 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

40 CULTURAL STUDIES

work on a white woman’s hands align her with racial and occupational
degradation. And the emphasis on soft, white, lovely hands persists, lingers, even
today.
With apologies to Mary Douglas, I would like to amend her statement to say
‘Where there is dirt, there is difference’. Trivial cultural references to cleanliness,
dirt, odour, to who cleans and who doesn’t, frequently serve as ideological and,
more important, practical shorthand to connote, naturalize and subtly devalue
individuals marked as racial or class others. They become marked by their
relation to cleaning or cleanliness. With two brief examples, I will close my
essay:
In the collection of Lysol advertisements I examined, the latest I found for
Lysol as a feminine hygiene product was also the only advertisement in the
category addressed to African-Americans. Dated February 1959, it features a
photograph of a middle-class African-American woman, dressed in a tailored
suit, looking slightly worried. The copy touted, among other things, Lysol’s
effectiveness in controlling ‘embarrassing odour’. Of all the advertisements that
promoted Lysol as a feminine hygiene product, it was the only one to mention
odour.
King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) structures its narrative about Stella’s class
rise and fall in part with motifs of cleaning. Stella intentionally impresses
Stephen Dallas when she first meets him by insisting that she wipe his glass
clean before he drinks from it. (She has, unbeknown to him, already observed
him doing the same thing.) Their daughter Laurel, separated from her father and
raised primarily by her mother, nevertheless takes after him. The film gives us
this information by depicting Laurel, as a toddler in her highchair, wiping her
tray clean with her bib. Stella laughs and says, ‘She’s the spit of her old man.’
Laurel’s cleanliness, fastidiousness in dress and innate reserve differentiate her
from her mother in terms of their class proclivities. Stella’s aspiration to the
middle class fails. Laurel’s will not, not because of her father’s wealth, but
because she is characterologically middle class. In the novel and film, the class
difference between Stella and Steven becomes a difference in sensibility,
delicacy and taste between Stella and her daughter Laurel. Stella admires the
ostentatious, the vulgar; from a very young age, however, her daughter Laurel
shuns ruffles and bows, preferring simple, austere, ‘classic’ lines. Her innate
cleanliness designates her middle-class status as genetically bestowed, not
acquired. Laurel is clean; her mother is not.

Notes

1 Special thanks to Erika Suderburg, Stephanie Hammer and Catherine Lui for their
careful consideration of and suggestions about earlier versions of this article.
2 Many theorists have addressed psychic and semantic relations or identification
between the grammatical subject and the discursive or symbolic subject. On the