What Makes a House
a Home?: The Changing State of the American Family through Marcuse,
Danielewski and Ware
By RJ Sepich
Narrative & Technology, Dr.
Johns, Spring 2013
The once-sacred and traditional American household has crumbled. The
statistics about what it means to be an average “family” living in a “house” or “home” in the
United States of America have greatly shifted in recent decades. According to
numbers from the United States census bureau, the average number of children an
American woman gives birth to in her lifetime has been cut in half since the
1950s, dropping from almost four kids per women to just less than two children
per women currently. Even more telling about the trend of domesticated America
are the numbers regarding the composition of families. In 1950, about
ninety-three percent of families with children under the age of eighteen were
taken care of by married couples. But over recent decades, that number has
slowly but surely plummeted, and in 2010 roughly only sixty-eight percent of
kids lived under roofs with married-couple parents. Households run by single mothers and single fathers
now make up the difference that has developed, with statistics showing that the
single mother raising her children is much more common than the single father
raising his.
German philosopher
Herbert Marcuse noticed this shifting attitude that was already leading to a
different household atmosphere when he wrote his book One-Dimensional Man in
1964. “It has often been noted that advanced industrial civilization operates
with a greater degree of sexual freedom,” Marcuse explained before discussing
how the marketability of sexualized businessmen and businesswomen permeated the
American lifestyle of the 1960s, which led to more sexuality throughout culture
and, in turn, less privacy and stability at home. “The corrosion of privacy in
massive apartment houses and suburban homes breaks the barrier which formerly
separated the individual from the public existence and exposes more easily the
attractive qualities of other wives and other husbands” (Marcuse Chapter 3). As Marcuse pointed out almost 40
years ago, husbands and wives are not afraid to express their sexuality and
personalities in public like they were back in the 1950s and further back in
time, and the numbers validate his observation of a definitely changing landscape
with regards to the “family” and “the home” in American culture. As a result of
this constantly expanding sexuality and numerous other factors, it’s pretty
well known that about fifty percent of marriages in this country culminate in
divorce, and when the former husband and wife produce offspring together,
oftentimes the children are the ones affected the most by the divorce. But what
does this really say about America?
Why is it important? Well, it is important to me because I am one of the increasing
number of kids who grew up with divorced parents, living with one parent for a
few days at a time and then living with the other parent for another couple
days before repeating the endless cycle. (At least I wasn’t one of the kids
completely shut off from one of his or her parents.) It matters because millions
of American children are growing up with two homes and two families, which actually means they don’t really have
anywhere to call “home”. And it matters because if the trend continues at its alarmingly
swelling pace for another couple decades, eventually there will be no traditional
homes as we knew them, no traditional families as we knew them, and no economic
or social stability in our once-great country. The destruction of the trademark
American family that used to lay the groundwork for our nation’s future but now
has become borderline nonexistent is finally beginning to become an issue
discussed more and more throughout media and literature, and two of the best
modern storytellers, Mark Z. Danielewski and Chris Ware, both referenced and
rhetorically commented on the deteriorating American home in their recent
works.
Although Danielewski’s book House of Leaves and Ware’s graphic
novel Jimmy Corrigan differ significantly in the amount of
traditional writing used to tell each respective story, both books frequently
utilize complex visual elements that delve into this growing national problem.
One of the main themes in both of Danielewski’s and Ware’s comprehensive and
brilliant works is the abstract concept of what exactly defines a “house”. Danielewski always
writes the word in blue to further emphasize its importance—and he even uses it
in the title of his book—while Ware’s work with the complicated idea deals more
with what exists on a day-to-day basis within the usual house: the family. There is one particular
section in each respective work that I believe presents the reader with a
similar image of a house
gradually deteriorating into nothing.
Beginning on page 119 of House of Leaves,
Danielewski introduces a seemingly random blue box on the page that is filled
with a list of items used in the construction of a house. Considering his use of blue when typing
the word “house”
throughout the book, it is fair to say that this blue box should be viewed as a
emblematic representation of a home, especially given the lengthy written list
within it that includes just about everything that could ever be used to add to
the foundation of a house.
For the next twenty pages, the “house”
remains filled with this ridiculously long list of objects. During this time,
the “house” is always
safely protected by a slightly changing, but fairly consistent block of text
surrounding it. But on page 141, Danielewski’s “house” suddenly begins to deteriorate. Only
about half of the blue box is filled with text, and even the block of words
around it isn’t as stable. However, the main passage of words on the page near
the box, which is quoted from a 1990 New
York Times article by Andy Grundberg about photography, hugely represents Mark
Z. Danielewski’s view of the “house”
in a very indirect form:
“In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will
probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they
will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image
and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors
resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do,
the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of
reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they once
did” (Danielewski 141).
Danielewski
creates fake sources for a lot of his footnoted information in House of Leaves, but this is not one of those instances,
and I believe that this fact is vitally important to notice at this particular
moment of the book. What is also imperative to notice is that beyond writing
about photography and art, Andy Grundberg also wrote numerous obituaries for the
New York Times. I don’t believe that
it is a coincidence that on the same page the blue-block “house” begins to deteriorate,
Danielewski quotes a real-life obituary journalist from one of the planet’s
most recognizable newspapers. The message of this crucial page is very clear to
me: Grundberg’s rumination about the future of newspaper photography stands as
a metaphor for the decline of the American home. Seemingly perfect households no longer get
the benefit of the doubt in this country as less and less homes abide by social
norms; everyone always views happy families with skepticism, knowing there must
be some dirt or gossip just waiting to be uncovered. Essentially, page 141 of House of Leaves hints at Danielewski’s belief that the
American house is not
as real as it once was; it has transformed into a photograph constantly being
photoshopped.
This belief exposes itself further in the ensuing pages of
the book. Flipping House of Leaves to page
143, the blue box is now all of a sudden completely empty with no protective chunk
of writing surrounding it. Flipping again to page 145, and the box is gone
altogether, replaced by white space surrounded by some new text. On page 147,
some text begins to fill in the area where the blue box originally was, but
there are no remaining remnants of the box shape. Flip over to page 149, and
there are more words where the box used to be just a few pages ago. And by the
end of chapter nine on page 151, the entire area where the box stood is filled
with a block of text, which perhaps could be understood to be a new box-like
figure beginning to form in its place as a replacement.
Danielewski’s interpretation of what the “house” truly means in
modern American culture can be extracted from this brief section of an
incredibly dense book, and, as Natalie Hamilton points out in her scholarly
journal article “The A-Mazing House:
The Labyrinth as Theme and Form in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves”, by later ending
the story with its two main characters—Navidson and Karen—escaping the haunted house that seems hell-bent
on killing them together, “the novel implies that their love for each other
brings them safely out of their individual labyrinths” (Hamilton 7). With his
negative opinion about the ongoing destruction of the house in society declared
earlier in the novel in the passage I just pointed out, here we have a moment
where Danielewski suggests with positive insinuations that love can indeed
repair or escape any broken household,
even when it is stretched well beyond its limits (pun intended).
A similar extremely visual series occurs early in Chris Ware’s Jimmy
Corrigan. All on the same page at the beginning of the graphic novel
about a protagonist with a problematic relationship with his sketchy father,
Ware creates four main panels of the same place at different moments in time.
In the top left, the panel is sideways with a nice new house in the late winter/early spring,
presumably waiting for a family to begin living in it. In the top right panel,
the house is right-side-up
in the summer with two cars out front, showing that a family now lives there,
with the nice weather suggesting that the family is likely happy and
comfortable. Over time though, as the panel in the bottom left depicts, the house begins to show age and
only one car is parked outside in the fall, representing a diminishing of the
family living there. And in the bottom right panel of the page, the house is suddenly gone
completely in the winter, leaving behind only the tree that stood beside it for
so many years to show that this is indeed the same area where the house stood. A small red
bird, which appears throughout the graphic novel, is in the middle two frames,
representing a significant change in time and letting readers know that the house didn’t just dissolve in
thin air over night, but instead it eroded over a period of years (Ware).
Matt Godbey, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, noticed
several of these moments where Ware pays great attention to detail when drawing
several pictures of buildings over time throughout Jimmy Corrigan, and Godbey believes that, “Ware thus offers a new perspective
on the dwellings where we live and, more importantly, shows their importance in
preserving the social and public life of our cities”, suggesting that Ware wants
his readers to know that how we take care of our architecture—everything from homes
to business, both figuratively and literally—could determine where we are
headed as a society in the future (Godbey 124).
As I mentioned from the very beginning
of this essay, the styles of these two authors differ greatly in numerous
facets, but their end result reaches a similar ending point. Danielewski gives
a more abstract metaphor of a declining house before offering a sliver of hope, while Ware often shows
a concrete (sometimes literally) representation of an aging building to display
his more pessimistic outlook on homes and families, which could be possibly interpreted
as ending with his main character, Jimmy Corrigan, committing suicide in rather
saddening fashion by jumping off a building with his favorite childhood
superhero, Super Man. But regardless of their separation in methods of attack,
there’s no denying that these two men both want their readers to ponder a
similar question by the time they are finished with the book: What exactly makes
a house a home? And
as Marcuse and these more modern storytellers all reference, it’s glaringly
obvious from the inclination of the statistics and the overall American culture
that keeping a family together just isn’t as valued as it once was many decades
ago. There’s a popular cliché that I’ve heard far too many times in my life that
says “home is where the heart is”, but Marcuse pointed out long ago that the heart
of Americans seems to be so caught up in sexuality, success, politics and
numerous other materialistic and possessive ideals that many people have forgotten
about something that used to be more important than anything else: their home
lives with their family:
“This liberation of sexuality (and of aggressiveness) frees the
instinctual drives from much of the unhappiness and discontent that elucidate
the repressive power of the established universe of satisfaction. To be sure,
there is pervasive unhappiness, and the happy consciousness is shaky enough-a
thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust. This unhappiness lends itself
easily to political mobilization; without room for conscious development, it
may become the instinctual reservoir for a new fascist way of life and death.
But there are many ways in which the unhappiness beneath the happy
consciousness may be turned into a source of strength and cohesion for the
social order” (Marcuse Chapter 3).
This passage from One-Dimensional
Man can be read numerous different ways. But to me, it seems that Marcuse
approves of the “liberation of sexuality” that he claims allows the mind to
free itself from repression of home life and “the established universe” because
it leads to more political awareness, ensuring that fascist regimes don’t take
over. As he appears to support the twentieth-century trend of increased
sexuality and individualism, despite its obvious downgrading of the priority of
home life, it is important to remember that Marcuse is a Marxist—he is often
referred to as “Father of the New Left”—and that his political and social
beliefs drive this thought process. But his recognition of this transformation
in American society is still very important to notice, even for my argument’s
sake.
In conclusion, I firmly disagree with what Marcuse would argue about the
positives of a world filled with sexuality, extreme amounts of expression and
revolution because of the potential further harm it would cause to an already
increasing amount of American households that
are losing stability and cohesiveness, as referenced throughout House of Leaves and Jimmy Corrigan by Mark Z. Danielewski
and Chris Ware, respectively. It personally saddens
me to think that while people enjoy exclaiming that “home is where the heart is”,
it is becoming increasingly apparent to me and many, many other writers and
journalists that the heart of the American people certainly isn’t at home
anymore. About a half century ago, Herbert Marcuse noticed this worrying (or
not worrying, depending on who you are and what you believe) change in society.
And it certainly remains true today. As Mark Z. Danielewski suggests in the
index of House of Leaves, the blue house appears everywhere,
but the house written
in black DNE.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Census
Bureau Homepage." Census Bureau Homepage. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Apr.
2013.
Danielewski,
Mark Z. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print.
Godbey, Matt.
"Chris Ware's "Building Stories", Gentrification, and the Lives
Of/in Houses." The
Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Ed. David M. Ball and
Martha B. Kuhlman. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010. 121-30. Print.
Hamilton,
Natalie. "The a-mazing house:
the labyrinth as theme and form in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of
Leaves." CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.1
(2008): 3+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Apr.
2013.
Marcuse,
Herbert. One Dimensional Man. London: Sphere, 1968. Print.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York:
Pantheon, 2000. Print.
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