Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

by Susan Edmunds

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call for state protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. Edmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism, consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social
conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realized maternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested this historical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in "family values."

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an essay on the culture wars in At Large and At Small, a collection of 'familiar essays', Anne Fadiman briefly outlines two positions on the role of literature: it helps us to learn to become better selves and also to stop being so narcissistic. In Grotesque Relations, Susan Edmunds' position resists neat placement in either of these camps.

Edmunds explores the development and role of the domestic exterior from the Progressive Era through the New Deal in six works of modernist fiction. It is not simply that these works help to teach us how to become better people, and it not simply that it would be solipsistic to read fiction to learn about how to live well. Rather, Edmunds analyzes the ways in which six authors – Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Edna Ferber, Nathaniel West, Tillie Olsen, and Flannery O'Connor – employed the grotesque in their fiction in order to render intelligible – and beautiful – the massive social shifting that underwrote the move toward a welfare state in the United States. That is, Edmunds' writes, fiction helps us to explore – with both critical distance and intimate proximity – the meta-self that is a reader of fiction – the socialized, social self born from both relational and fictional culture.

In the contested social spaces from which debates over revolutionary discourses were staged, a different kind of social, socializing self was born, as was different ways of relationship within community among those selves. By creating fictional accounts about the shifting nature of “real” social and relational space, these authors were able to reproduce the uncertainty and pain – but also possibility - in a discursive space that could better be the object of critical examination. In this way, fiction - particularly as it distorts and faithfully misrepresents 'reality' - may be able to produce a view of and a view from culture, which can more fully receive our critical attention.

Review by Kristina Grob