Page 47 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 41

concept of enunciation and its application, see Benveniste, 1971:206–8; Barthes,
1977:107–9. The work of Jacques Lacan is predicated on the identification of these
two subjects; see, for example, Lacan, 1977:146–78.
3 Nancy Armstrong addresses the modern construction of gender through the vehicle
of domestic fiction. Her introduction contains a fascinating account of this process
that emphasizes the interaction of cultural, economic and political forces
(Armstrong, 1987, especially pp. 33–27).
4 I thank Stephanie Hammer for the insight that the ‘scent’ is what verifies that the
cleaning has really been done.
5 The D’Arcy Collection at the University of Illinois Communications Library has
Lysol advertisements, collected from an array of magazine and newspaper sources,
dating from 1917 to 1969. They are contained in a category labelled ‘Household
disinfectants and Bleaches misc., 1917–69’.
6 See also Lacan’s provocative closure to ‘Guiding remarks for a congress on
feminine sexuality’ in which, commenting on ‘Feminine sexuality and society’, he
alludes to the particularly refined and cultured quality of groups of women (1982:
88–98).
7 Because of the moral slant of our popular culture, the ‘slob/slut’ type is usually
only a bit player—as in Dana Andrew’s first wife, played by Virginia Mayo, in Best
Years of Our Lives (1946) or Paul Muni’s wife in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang (1932). The construction of this type is used melodramatically in King
Vidor’s 1937 version of Stella Dallas when Stella is mistakenly assumed to be
sexually ‘loose’ in a scene immediately following one where her house is depicted
as untidy. Craig’s Wife (1936) is the exemplary instance of the frigid obsessive
type.
8 See, for example, Freud’s comments in ‘Femininity’ (1933/1953–74, vxxii:120).
9 The bourgeois claim against the aristocracy and its values is to a spiritual, moral
interiority that overrides or obviates class hierarchy based on lineage and property.
Hard work and an austere morality comprise the worth of the individual, not his
family background. The figure of the individual is crucial both to the successful
rise of the bourgeois and the universalization of middle-class ideas and values. For
two related discussions of this social transformation, see Ian Watt’s The Rise of the
Novel (1957) and Nancy Armstrong’s insistence on the importance of gender to its
functioning (1987).
10 Many theorists and social historians note the ways Freud repressed class issues in
the family romance by glossing over the social implications of the maid’s or
governess’s presence in the bourgeois home. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White’s discussion (1986:163–5); Jane Gallop (1982:142–8); and Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari (1983:352–5).
11 Stallybrass and White, who analyse this scene in terms very similar to mine, but
with very different emphases (gender is less important to them than the productive
effects of transgression in the maintenance of the social order) comment on the
Wolf Man’s name: ‘Rat Man and Wolf Man, for instance, find their metaphorical
proper names not in an unmotivated raid upon the taxonomic categories of rodents
and mammals, but in the terrors conjured up by semantic material from cultural
domains (the slum, forest) extraterritorial to their own constructed identities as
socio-historical subjects’ (1986:196).