Home Time: Reclaiming the Homely in the Work of Tillie Olsen

• In Event: The Political Flows and Social Engagements of Home and Place

Abstract

This paper begins with a meditation upon capitalism as an unhomely economy. Although the unhomely [unheimlich] has been understood in psychic terms as the irruption of an unsettling, often inchoate, apprehension of a threat hovering at the borders of the familiar, I explore the unhomely as an effect of a historical condition in which temporalities and life rhythms are fractured. I consider this unhomeliness by way of several recent approaches to capital as a conceptual organization of time, a living rationality shaped by a notion of labor time that is different from time as human experience. This splitting of abstract and experiential time registers in the contradictions and abstractions that configure the rhythms of daily life, the time of work at home and not-home. Under the surveillance of the clock, capital looks for scraps of time to close up the pores of the working day. In locating them, it wrenches the body into living differently in time, into abstract labor time, the indifferent time measured by the clock. Abstract labor time dismantles and fractures the temporalities that govern the activities and relationships that ensure the daily and generational reproduction of life. The ensuing bio-deregulation erodes homeostasis, the stable-enough condition that living things require for survival. It infects everyday life in the lived experience of what I am calling the “unhomely.”
In the paper’s second part, I turn to the writings of Tillie Lerner Olsen for their re-narration of capital’s unhomely conception of labor time and the devaluation of the domestic and the familiar on which it depends. I consider Olsen’s novel Yonnondio, drafted in 1932 and put aside in 1936-37, is set in the 1920s. It follows the Holbrook family over a two and a half year period as they scrape out a living in a Wyoming mining town, a farm in the Dakotas, and the packing house neighborhood of a Midwestern city. The first chapter, originally published as a story entitled “The Iron Throat,” foregrounds the time of the workday, marked by the whistle at the mine announcing the end of a shift or an accident. In placing this clock time in relation to the temporalities of maintaining life through labor at home, the novel discloses unhomely (as in unfamiliar) affective dimensions of the effort to conserve homeostasis that push on the boundaries of clock time and intelligibility. In her story “I Stand Here Ironing,” published twenty years later, Olsen pursues these untimely affective components of what she called “the maintenance of life.” Her re-scripting of its temporalities still has much to tell us about home and time and the feminized labor on which capital depends.

Author

• Rosemary Hennessy, Rice University (TX)