"A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place": Reading Minimalism, Place, and Gender from Anzia Yezierska to Marie Kondo.

MINIMALISM (Literature); IMMIGRANTS; HOUSEHOLDS; JEWS; AMERICANIZATION

This essay examines the relationships among space, place, and gender in Anzia Yezierska's early twentieth-century work in relation to the current craze for minimalism, exemplified by Marie Kondo. In her memoir and autobiographical fiction, Yezierska pays special attention to interior design, often describing the domestic spaces that her characters inhabit; sometimes interior design plays a key role in plot developments. Her work responds to the campaign to Americanize new immigrants by showing the pressures that they faced to adopt middle-class habits and values. By participating in consumer culture and adopting an austere, modern aesthetic, her characters transform themselves—physically, spiritually, and racially. However, these minimalist spaces tend to reinscribe middle-class, Anglo-Protestant values and traditional gender roles. Although the minimalist design ethic first emerged in the early twentieth century, it has become the dominant design ethic of the twenty-first, in part due to the popularity of celebrity home organizers such as Kondo, who also promises self-transformation through the embrace of minimalism and the rejection of overconsumption. She presents herself through an "East meets West" trope that allows followers to adopt her Japanese sensibility and re-fashion it for a middle-class, American context. Juxtaposing Yezierska and Kondo reveals the extent to which current discourses of space, place, and gender echo beliefs that emerged during the earlier era when the United States was beginning to modernize, and consumer culture and American culture were becoming synonymous. Seen in these two contexts, minimalism can be read as a reaction to periods of consumer excess and a means of imposing middle-class notions about good taste, while inflecting them with moral and nationalistic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MELUS is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)