Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising

College Literature, Summer 2002 by Bryant, Marsha

Through her magician status, the 1950s housewife became a suitable companion for a variety of strange beings that inhabited-or visited-her kitchen. Greeting her each morning were the genie from Wish-Bone Salad dressing, the Brownie on the Betty Crocker mix, the sprite on the Philco "Quick-Chef" oven, and the "Minute Minder Man" in appliance timing devices. Thus postwar culture continued what Roland Marchand calls "the 're-personalization' of life through advertising" in which "inanimate things come alive" (1985, 358). Marchand discusses the invention of corporate personae such as Betty Crocker during the modernist period. Their presence in radio and print advertisements prompted voluminous-and often intimate-- mail from consumers (356). But the 1950s housewife did something decidedly odder-he bypassed the corporate intercessor and interacted directly with her kitchen companions. As we see in this graphic from a 1953 Lux ad, the Minute Minder Man and his adoring user have a love relationship (Figure 3). The Jolly Green Giant gives a cooking demonstration to a pleasantly surprised housewife in an ad from 1952 (Figure 4); note how the combination of photographic and drawn images blurs boundaries between real and fictive space in this kitchen. And lest we think that housewives are "seeing things" or are just plain crazy-this 1952 ad includes a husband to verify that Elsie the Borden cow is "really" there (Figure 5). Fifties television ads also employed male presences both to construct and verify the domestic surreal. Invisible men addressed aproned women in their kitchens, telling them to use Anacin, Gleem, or Quaker's Oats. In the context of advertising, hearing voices and having visions were perfectly normal household activities.

Not all ads for 1950s kitchen products were surreal, of course, but the motifs I have sketched here reflect a consistent trend that spanned the decade. They also raise intriguing questions that prove relevant to Plath's construction of domesticity and female agency. Did magical products such as "self-- washing" Dreft detergent simply continue the cultural myth of labor-saving conveniences? Karal Ann Marling notes that convenience foods such as fruit cocktail "seemed to demand ever more elaborate decorative forms of presentation," while Friedan asserts that "each labor-saving appliance brought a labor-demanding elaboration of housework" (Marling 1994, 225; Friedan 1983, 240). Were the powerful illusions in these ads, then, signs of the housewife's illusory powers? Were they dressing up drudgery? The kitchen magician figure also prompts other kinds of questions. To what extent is domestic surreality an expression of women's experience, and to what extent is it a performance? Who was the kitchen magician's audience, and how does her daily act pressure public/private boundaries? Did crazy kitchens cut women off from reality, as Friedan believes, or did they enable them to refashion it? Like domestic space in Plath's poems, Madison Avenue's kitchen constructs a space between real and surreal, labor and magic, authenticity and performance.