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December 04, 2004
Post-Lapsarian Housekeeping
From Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithesdale Romance, which I have just started reading. The narrator, one Mr. Coverdale, speaking of a planned commune based on Brook Farm, laments:
"What a pity . . . that the kitchen, and the house-work generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of degenerated morals--from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day."I'm not far enough along in the novel or sufficiently familiar with the character to know how much irony is intended here. . .
Posted by Miki at December 4, 2004 09:18 AM