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Domestic Imaginaries

Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral is at first glance a book about a failed vision of domestic bliss. Its protagonist, the blond- haired, blue-eyed Seymour “The Swede” Levov, “the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews,” from his youth as a star high school sports athlete to his years as a father and a husband, lives out a fantasy life of American domesticity (Roth 4). The Swede grows up in Newark and, later in his life, settles in the idyllic Old Rimrock, where he marries a former Miss New Jersey, Dawn Dwyer, and fathers Merry Levov, a perfectly normal daughter who seems to complete his vision of American domesticity. Seeing himself as a modern-day Johnny Appleseed (315) and maintaining “an unconscious oneness with America” (20), the Swede is a projection of American identity and, specifically, American political innocence. When Merry, at the age of sixteen, finds herself embroiled in the world of radical

anti-Vietnam politics, the Swede’s vision of domestic harmony begins to dissolve, culminating in the horrific realization that his daughter had been responsible for bombing a post office in Old Rimrock and, in the process, killing a local doctor.
When Merry disappears after the bombing, the Swede is left to reconcile his fractured existence with his prior visions of domestic harmony.
From the novel’s first descriptions of the Swede as a star high school athlete, we can see his investment in narrative production and how this later manifests itself in the domestic fantasy he creates in Old Rimrock. Early in the novel Roth describes the Swede’s symbolic role in the community and his function as an instrument that facilitates political repression.² He writes, “through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles) our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war” (3-4). Here Roth points out the tendency for individuals to produce redemptive narratives as a means of repressing the trauma embedded in narratives of political violence and war. Later Roth explains that the Swede “was fettered to history, an instrument of history,” capable of inspiring hope in the


² See Gary Chase Johnson’s article, “The Presence of Allegory: The Case of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral” for a more complete discussion of the allegorical dimensions of the novel. Johnson makes the critical distinction between the representation of allegory, which we see in the community’s perception of the Swede, and the later counternarrative, generated by the novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, which challenges the values invested in this allegoresis.
community even in the face of horrific accounts of American deaths at the hands of the Germans (5-6).
The Swede’s traumatic relationship to history, of course, has much to do with his Jewish American identity and his attempt, in the following years, to negotiate a post-Holocaust backdrop of violence in America. Here, forgetting “the war” (rather than the culturally-specific “Holocaust”) aligns the Swede within a particular American, rather than Jewish, cultural and national experience.
Consciously unwilling to confront the reality that his Jewish identity locates him as a target for subtle forms of political violence, he embraces a public persona that ostensibly erases his status as a political other. What he does not seem to realize, however, is that this performance—which he carries out for the rest of his life— deprives him of political engagement; it is no coincidence that his name references Sweden, which adopted a position of political neutrality during World War II. By writing an alternative history through the production of hero- narratives, he furthermore enables the community to repress political discourse and therefore render political violence invisible. More than just disavowing political violence, these narrative processes help the Swede and the community to repress Jewish identity and its traumatic foundations. This process occurs more prominently, and with more deleterious consequences, when, in the postwar years of domestic stability, he uses domestic space to channel his repression of the political.
The Swede’s domestic fantasy—the life he manufactures for himself and his family in Old Rimrock—is itself a form of narrative production, one which, while aligning him with a postwar generation that embraced visions of domestic stability, also serves to disengage him from the political. Soon after their marriage, the Swede purchases their home on the outskirts of Old Rimrock. Over 170 years old, the old stone house represents for the Swede an idyllic, pastoral way of life, a vision of an antiquated America in which he and his family can escape the political unrest stemming from the Vietnam War. His anxieties are similarly attached to the social unrest arising from the country’s movement toward globalization and the resulting transformation of the American economic landscape. This is evidenced most directly through the repeated descriptions of the Newark riots and the economic necessities of outsourcing that he faces with his glove business, Newark Maid. For the Swede, the stone house represents a space of domestic stability and ideological homogeneity. Roth writes, “He had been dreaming about that house since he was sixteen years old…It was the first house built of stone he’d ever seen, and to a city boy it was an architectural marvel. The random design of the stones said “House” to him as not even the brick house on Keer avenue did” (189). The Swede’s search for stability in the form of domestic space is significant, as the house’s stone construction seems to promise a sense of rootedness and a connection to history.³ Comparing the




³ For an illuminating discussion on home design and its role in defining social and familial roles through the house’s connection to history, see Moira Munro and Ruth Madigan’s “Negotiating Space in the Family Home.” They write, “Architectural historians have drawn our attention to the ways in which the design
Swede’s domestic fantasy to the symbolic function of the green light in The Great Gatsby, Derek Parker Royal writes, [the Swede’s] new rural home becomes for [him] a means to assimilation into ‘normal’ American society” (189-190). As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, however, this desire for a “normal” America is largely a product of processes of narrativization that define American innocence and security in depoliticized terms that appeal to an American public in search of affirmative modes of national identification. Founded on mistaken notions of an ideologically-pure America, the Swede’s projection of domestic stability—in its apparent political neutrality—is itself a political act.
This process is complicated by the Swede’s unconscious fears of ideological subversion. Political discourse of any kind threatens to undermine his faith in the imaginary ideal of a historically-static America. Again, Roth’s descriptions suggest that the Swede’s attraction to the Old Rimrock house owes itself largely to a vision of America as a fortified homeland, one capable of housing, protecting, and fostering narratives of American exceptionalism. He writes, “The stone house was not only engagingly ingenious-looking to his eyes— all that irregularity regularized, a jigsaw puzzle fitted patiently together into this square, solid thing to make a beautiful shelter—but it looked indestructible, an impregnable house that could never burn to the ground and that had probably

of nineteenth-century housing reflected the ideal of the bourgeois family, with its strictly demarcated boundaries between public and private, masculine and feminine, and rigidly differentiated internal spaces. The ideal of the bourgeois family lived on into the twentieth century as a model of domestic respectability” (107). Considering the Swede’s Jewish heritage, his desire to be connected with history is more likely a desire to assimilate to white, American bourgeois culture.

been standing there since the country began” (190). The “indestructible, impregnable” exterior suggests that the Swede’s fears of ideological violence are directed toward the outside world, where political unrest threatens to contaminate his fantasy of domestic stability. At one point, Zuckerman, Roth’s narrator, tells us, “Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything” (23). What is ironic about the Swede’s relationship to the old stone house is that, because of his inability to adopt political positions and “run counter to anything,” he is incapable of identifying the very ideological threats capable of dismantling his domestic fantasy.
The Swede’s deep-rooted psychological attachment to the Old Rimrock house and the pastoral narratives it contains are worth examining through the lens of Gaston Bachelard’s theories in The Poetics of Space. Taking a phenomenological approach, Bachelard identifies the psychological attachment we all share to domestic space, and the ways that houses, both materially and symbolically, serve as repositories for memory. Furthermore, houses offer us the promise of protection, both physically and psychologically, from the real and imagined threats of the outside world. Describing our encounter with domestic space, he writes, we “see the imagination build ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection—or just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts” (Bachelard 5). Beyond the promise of protection, houses provide vehicles for narrative, history, and memory.
Bachelard explains, “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house…We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images” (5-6). While his comments largely apply to the personal encounter with domestic space—the memories we bring to domestic space through our childhood experiences— Bachelard more broadly speaks to the ways that domestic spaces function as repositories for cultural memory; the narratives of protection and security he identifies with domestic space function in a broader context through symbolic connections to the nation as homeland and the narratives of protection and security that it produces.
Although The Poetics of Space almost universally overlooks the political dimensions of space, as containers for memory, narrative, and history, houses— whether or not Bachelard chooses to acknowledge it—are intrinsically political. In his excellent discussion on public policy and housing in postwar Britain, Joe Moran exposes the political dimensions of Bachelard’s work. The abstract houses referred to throughout Poetics, Moran explains, represent “a particular kind of Euro-American settlement, made of brick or stone, with a rectangular structure which allows it to be divided into separate rooms connected by stairs and hallways” (29). “[They are] clearly reminiscent of the actual houses of a particular historical tradition” (28). Bachelard’s conception of the house, therefore, is itself a political projection, one that implicitly endorses a particular Euro-American ethos and one whose political dimensions—white, middle-class, bourgeois—are
inherently inscribed in that space. Moran concludes his commentary: “Bachelard’s discussion of the house shows that the poetics of space are always unavoidably linked to a politics, whether this is explicitly acknowledged or not” (31). In this way, the narratives and memories attached to domestic spaces, too, are unavoidably political, and when domestic space comes to function symbolically for the homeland, these narratives—like the pastoral fantasy of protection and security that the Swede produces—can be particularly dangerous.⁴
This process is all the more pertinent in light of recent shifts over the last several decades in our understanding of an American homeland as a concept closely linked to discourses of nationalism. Traditionally a term attached to diasporic cultural and ethnic movement⁵, our understanding of the homeland— with its connotations of cultural origins and foreign national identification—has more recently become synonymous with the home front, a term marked by militarism and national defense.⁶ Catherine Lutz’s book Homefront: A Military




⁴ See also Irene Cieraad’s “Anthropology at Home” for further commentary on the house as an inherently political spatial locus. She looks at the ways that houses provide crucial sites for political activity, particularly in industrialized countries, like Britain, that have seen dramatic social and labor reform.


⁵ For more on the homeland as a term connected to cultural and ethnic diaspora see the collection of essays, The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present. In the context of American multiculturalism, this concept functions apart from the more recent trend toward defining America as a homeland in its own right. It is worth noting the ways that our understanding of an American homeland only gained purchase in the postwar years, concurrent with the rise of the military state.


⁶ The newness of the term “homeland” in reference to an American domestic presence is remarkable. As Amy Kaplan notes, “Presidents before Bush never used the word to refer to the United States during periods of world crisis” (85).