Domestic service was viewed as a national service, as kitchens were the locus of many efforts to ensure the continued survival of the populous. With resources increasingly slim throughout the war, propaganda was directed towards the domestic habits of homemakers. “FOR GUNPOWDER – SAVE WASTE FATS – RUSH THEM TO YOUR MEAT DEALER”. “BUY FRESH FISH – SAVE THE MEAT FOR OUR SOLDIERS AND ALLIES”. There was an abundance of advertisements for the preservation of scarce food, for home canning and drying technology and information for fruits, vegetables, and meats. Posters and postcards were often directed specifically at housewives, “HOUSEWIVES! PLEASE FINISH TRAVELLING BY 4 O’CLOCK AND LEAVE BUSES, TRAMS, AND TRAINS FREE FOR WAR WORKERS!” Women were encouraged not only to preserve, but to recycle – “HOUSEWIVES UP AND AT ‘EM! PUT OUT YOUR PAPER – METAL – BONES – THEY MAKE PLANES, GUNS, TANKS, SHIPS & AMMUNITION!” There was a ‘make do and mend’ culture that was reliant upon housewives listening and obeying to propaganda in order to reserve resources, ensure the continuation of British trade, encourage and support their war worker family members and friends, and raise and educate children. While most resources and services were directed towards war, the country was run from kitchens, living rooms, and pantries. “HELP PUT THE LID ON HITLER BY SAVING YOUR OLD METAL AND PAPER”.

Both Warner and Plath portray a tension between being a woman in the home, and a woman outside of it. Between public life and private, dependence and independence, domesticity and what lies beyond. Both, however, fail to fall on either side of the binary. Plath’s poetic voice is always caught between two worlds, unable to happily settle in either space, in a form of torturous feminine purgatory, unhappy to be a mother, unsatisfied with her work. Consequently her feminine spaces are perverted – depicted as burning, or drowning, pictures have little smiling hooks, the sea has crockery – transformed into something unheimlich. Plath twists the homely, infuses it with myth until reality becomes escapist. Warner does the same, taking the upper-class idlewoman and refusing to give her either a domestic space or permanent employment. Lolly works temporarily through the war but isn’t liberated or changed by the experience. Warner denies the war its transformative power on gendered binaries, she denies Lolly a domestic space, rendering her forever transient. Instead, Lolly is granted a space of her own, one forged through magical realism – not Plath’s purgatory, but a unique niche, not between domesticity and work, but separate, and very much her own.

I have four exams, which equates in five essays, three comparitive, two on individual texts. So eight texts, and at least sixteen pieces of criticism. This all needs to go in my head.

So I’ve decided to streamline the process by essentially researching five essays.

Here it goes:

Romanticism to Decadence 1 - Food in Dracula and its function as a means of organising time, unravelling narrative, and allotting power

Romanticism to Decadence 2 - God knows. This is either going to be Bleak House as a metafiction (Lord help me) or the grotesque in the poetry of Robert Browning.

Renaissance - We’re getting this essay question to take home, so I’ll know for sure when I get it tomorrow. Right now I’m thinking something along the lines of cosmology and mineralogy in Paradise Lost?

Modernism to Contemporary - The representation of postwar domesticity in Lolly Willowes and Plath’s Ariel as a radical protest against domestic propaganda, focusing on the use of furniture in both texts.

Reason and Passion - Incest in 18th C literature as a means of undermining Enlightenment ideals of familiarization and unity with a focus on Evelina and The Monk.

If you are utterly uninterested or triggered by these topics then you may want to blacklist me for a bit.

i’m going to paint a fucking massive huge ass canvas portrait of medusa

in oils

lots of colours

paint everywhere

i will bathe in paint

jawdust:

Violet first noticed that they had really, truly grown up for good the night Vincent vomited blood all over carpet, and the only thing she could think was whether she should use bicarbonate of soda or vinegar to get it out.

Was that combination of blood, bile and (she dipped her finger in the puddle and put it in her mouth – bourbon, malt, though she couldn’t quite pick up the year without a second taste and she didn’t wish to spoil her dinner) – and whiskey acid or alkali? She’d have to ask mother, next time she saw her. She’d put the rug over it until then. Hope the cat didn’t wiggle under it and feast on what was left of Vincent’s liver.

“I’m going to assume that’s a gift,” she said dismissively, and she put the rug over him too, because his lips were turning blue and clashing with the curtains.

“Don’t let the cat get at you,” she ordered deaf ears, because by now Vincent was snoring, and she wasn’t sure which liquefied organ was bubbling from his magnificently formed nostrils.

Even sprawled in this state he was like a painted statue, from Rome, or Greece, somewhere with pale marble and black leather jackets. He was a ruined purple thing, like a new born baby pickled in alcohol, and all the more beautiful for it. She loved every molecule of grease in his finely quaffed black quiff, nearly as much as every particle of dirt beneath his bitten-to-the-quick nails.

Violet switched off the light, and shuffled in her carpet slippers to the mattress on the other side of the room. It always tickled Vincent that to bed she would wear slippers and nothing else. She wondered if it would ever tickle him again, as she tucked herself under her moth-eaten blanket (the one made of bits of Vincent’s old boxers and her old knickers, from the days they used to bother even wearing such things) and let the uneven rhythm of his bubbly breathing lull her off to sleep. She dreamt of thick, scarlet milkshakes that clotted halfway up her bendy straw.

By the time he began to stir at three in the afternoon she was already eating breakfast and feeling quite productive for it. “Morning, darling,” she greeted, through a crumbly mouthful of dry toast, her glasses perched on the end of her nose and yesterday’s newspaper held up in front of her like a riot shield just in case he happened to vomit again. Her nightgown was real silk and she wasn’t one for taking risks. 

“Terribly sorry about last night,” he managed to grunt through the searing migraine, shrugging the rug from his back. On a normal man it would look like any old rug had been tossed over him by an uncaring matron. On him it was a regal cape, all velvet dripping from his shoulders like shimmery molasses. She tended to take to lyricism in the mornings.

“Quite forgiven. I did find it rather endearing, like a mother penguin fetching tea.” 

“That was, clearly, the desired effect,” he agreed agreeably, scraping himself to his feet, much like one would scrape dog shit from a boot. He winced at the crusting, rusty puddle left beneath him, which had, by this hour, roughly conformed to his sprawled body, leaving a Vincent-shaped blood splatter matted into the fibres.  “Oh my. I’d get some vinegar on that, if I were you.”

Violet spluttered an ‘a-ha!’ of victory, dropping her newspaper to her lap. “Vinegar! You know, that’s been haunting me all night.”

“Apologies. Should’ve left a note,” he nodded, delicately swiping at the corner of his mouth. He looked quite simultaneously rabid and vampiric, with a gossamer foam of maroon lining his lips like dollar store lipstick.

 “Make sure you do next time. I expect to find full instructions for your recommended method of clean-up stapled to your back next time you tumble through my door at 4am,” she said, coming as close to chastising him as she ever would or ever could.

By this point Vincent was padding around in his bare feet with her toothbrush between his tiny pearl teeth, “Staples? In this jacket? Do be so kind as to fuck off,” he replied, spitting a mouthful of pink toothpaste into her coffee mug. She finished its contents with a tiny grimace and pulled herself to her feet.

“Language. You’re under my roof now,” she reminded him, with a gentle wag of her finger, untying her nightgown and allowing it to pool at her feet in a puddle of printed silk. Naked and milky pale, she sashayed across the room like a dancer in a music box, stepping lightly over Vincent’s crusty shadow and into the iron tub set on the opposite side of the room to the tiny kitchenette.

“Help yourself to toast. There’s milk on the windowsill. I know you heathens like your coffee white.” 

(via beforeoctober)