THE previous entry quoted Canadian author Susie Moloney as saying that housewives typically “concealed a core of brutality toward their families.” I thought of that early this morning as I was marketing. I saw a number of women shopping with their young children, buying strawberries and fish. They seemed nice.  I guess the core of brutality was cleverly disguised.

Moloney said:

The cruelty was directed outside and they were evil because, ultimately, I think all housewives are evil,” she says. “I do think that in order to get the ultimate stay-at-home mom’s life — be slim and attractive, have beautiful kids, a successful husband and a beautiful home — you need witchcraft, especially the thin part. [emphasis added]

In response, reader Joe Long writes: 

Many years ago, the great science fiction and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber wrote a quite funny supernatural novel called Conjure, Wife. (I believe someone made it into a bad movie at some point.) Told from the point of view of a faculty member at a university, the premise was that the faculty wives were all witches (unbeknownst to their husbands), and that faculty politics was actually largely driven by their voodoo. Eventually Lieber reveals that the whole world actually works that way; all of the men supposedly in authority are just enjoying delusions of grandeur, as housewives casting spells make the world go ’round.

Back when the book was written, it had just the right level of pseudo-plausibility to work; the machinations of faculty wives could certainly be construed as little short of attempts at hexing, and the complex social interactions of women have always impressed us men as operating on a level which mere reason cannot entirely explain. Some call it “emotional intelligence,” but magic works as an alternate explanation. “The wise woman builds her house; the foolish tears it down with her own hands,” as Solomon said – and in ways we males comprehend but dimly. “Rock the cradle, rule the world”, and so forth.

Leiber’s whimsically paranoid novel took the evident fact that traditional wives are downright magical, and added drama by making a certain cabal of them (among faculty wives, of course!) evil. (Trouble begins when the professor stops his wife from spinning protective magics for him, because that’s “superstitious nonsense” – then it turns out she’s been shielding him from malevolent influences all along.) This modern authoress seems to start from the notion that a home-and-family woman is evil, then (apparently) adds the magic to dramatize THAT evident fact.

Though perhaps I shouldn’t read too much into that. After all, it’s not as if “evil” is “bad” anymore, anyway.

                                             — Comments —

James P. writes:

It is natural to suspect that Susie Moloney thinks housewives are typically brutal and evil toward their families because SHE is brutal and evil toward HER family.

Please follow and like us: