The Home-maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

First published: 1924

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: A small town somewhere in New England

Principal Characters:

• Eva Knapp, a harried housewife and mother who finds fulfillment as a sales manager
• Lester Knapp, her loving but absentminded husband who becomes the homemaker
• Stephen,
• Helen, and
• Henry, the Knapp children who mature with the exchange of parental roles

The Novel

Much of the action of The Home-maker is intended to illustrate the negative consequences of sexual stereotyping. The Knapps, a seemingly typical white Protestant American family consisting of parents, Lester and Eva, and three bright children, live in a quaint New England town during the early 1920’s. Nevertheless, this outwardly contented clan suffers from expectations which both Lester and Eva find impossible to meet.

Throughout, a sympathetic narrator acknowledges the determination of Eva, who, with the tenacity of Sisyphus, endures the drudgery of her mindless household tasks. Eva’s perfectionism creates an unhappy and frazzled family: Her youngest son, Stephen, becomes belligerent and disrespectful, while the distraught Helen and Henry try to remain as unobtrusive as possible. Ultimately, even they become victims of mother’s endless nagging. Eva’s only freedom from homemaking consists of her church and community service. Though her neighbors condescendingly sympathize with the poor Mrs. Knapp at home, they readily adopt her organizational skills and comment on the quality of her volunteerism in the community.

Lester, meanwhile finds an equal measure of discontent in his work as bookkeeper for the Willings Emporium, the local clothing and appliance store. When he fails to receive an expected promotion, given instead to a younger and less experienced employee, he sinks into a state of depression and diminished self-esteem. Finally, having lost his job altogether, he considers suicide as a possible method of escaping from the hell that he thinks all fathers share—the necessity of earning the family’s income.

Neither Lester nor Eva considers reversing their roles, but Lester’s near fatal fall off a neighbor’s roof brings about the novel’s unexpected resolution. Paralyzed from the waist down, Lester seems doomed to a life of tedium. Ironically though, he is set free by his infirmity. After the fall—a felix culpa to be sure—Lester is able to provide the careful and sensitive guidance that his children desperately need.

While Lester convalesces, Eva assumes the position of breadwinner with a profound sense of energy, enthusiasm, and joy. Within a short time, she is promoted to sales manager.

Fisher ends The Home-maker on a disturbing note, inasmuch as it is implied that Lester has really recovered enough to walk, he chooses to remain crippled in order to protect his family’s newfound cohesiveness.

The Characters

The thrifty, neat, and energetic Eva Knapp appears to her community as an enduring, virtuous wife and mother. Yet she is far from perfect. Fisher redeems what could be a cliche figure of the harried housewife by vividly describing Eva’s frustrations and her compulsive need for order. Fisher suggests that Eva’s eczema is related to the despair and tension that she suffers at home; her long dark hair, which she keeps tightly coiled about her head, symbolizes her anxiety.

Eva changes when she begins her career at the Willings Emporium. As new talents emerge—Eva discovers that she has a gift for public relations and for marketing ideas—her obsessions with domestic order relax. Thus, Fisher portrays the emancipated American housewife of the 1920’s. Her portrait, however, is fundamentally conservative.

Eva epitomizes the Old Testament definition of the virtuous wife. She sells fine linen and wool in the marketplace. She rises early and works at the store with willing hands. She provides for her children with the fruit of her labor and grows to admire and praise Lester’s strengths.

Lester Knapp is a complex character. His virtues are more obscure than Eva’s, so the sympathy he evokes requires much more finesse on Fisher’s part. Drawn probably from a composite of Fisher’s own father and husband, who were both professors, Lester has the idealism and the idiosyncracies characteristic of an academic thwarted by circumstance.

By rendering the opinions of Lester’s gossipy neighbors and former boss, the reader understands how the world berates Lester’s lack of ambition, his absentmindedness, his tendency to daydream, and his failure as a moneymaker. Lester loves to recite poetry, read novels, and conduct cheerful chats with his children.

It is through Lester’s own ability to analyze human nature that the reader comes to admire the quality of his mind. Despite acknowledged limitations, Lester is able to perceive the psychological and intellectual needs of his family. During a long and painful recovery, Lester concentrates on ways that he might stimulate his children’s individual development.

The reader can infer from dialogue and precise description the great changes that occur in the Knapp children when father takes over as homemaker. Stephen becomes the inquisitive, loving, and gregarious boy whose potential Lester has recognized. The once vacant-eyed and shy Helen responds enthusiastically to her father’s literary sensibilities. Henry, who is finally allowed to keep the dog that he dared not mention to mother, gains confidence by exercising his boyhood prerogatives.

The minor characters, including the Knapp relatives and friends, reinforce and vivify what Fisher’s omniscient narrator establishes. The delineation of these numerous characters through dialogue promotes a deeper understanding of the Knapp family in their community setting.

Critical Context

The Home-maker has much in common with the fiction of Willa Cather. Both Cather and Fisher practiced a quiet realism less concerned with external action than with the inner struggles of protagonists thwarted by the needs and desires of others. Written during a decade when prose flourished with the glittering passions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s romances and the incisive satire of Sinclair Lewis, The Home-maker has been rediscovered by readers who appreciate Fisher’s awareness of sexual stereotyping.

The Home-maker was the third of Fisher’s six novels. Less autobiographical than her earlier works, it nevertheless draws substantially on Fisher’s experience. The implied New England setting, the idealism of the protagonists, their sense of devotion to children and community all reflect elements of Fisher’s own life as an acclaimed children’s author, adult fiction writer, scholar, and civic leader. Fisher was later named by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the ten most influential women in contemporary life.

Fisher was a figure worth emulating, and her works are animated by an indomitable spirit and a belief in the inherent goodness of the individual.

Bibliography

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Keeping Fires Night and Day:Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Edited by Mark Madigan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Fisher’s lively personal voice is present in this excellent collection. In his introduction, Madigan provides a detailed chronology of Fisher’s life and an examination of her friendship with Willa Cather. A thorough bibliography and an annotated list of Fisher’s correspondents are included.

Madigan, Mark. “Profile: Dorothy Canfield Fisher.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 9, no. 1 (1992): 49-58. A narrative chronology of Fisher’s life and work. Madigan also discusses three of her novels as particularly worthy of critical attention: The Brimming Cup (1919), The Home-maker, and Her Son’s Wife (1926).

Price, Alan. “Writing Home from the Front: Edith Wharton and Dorothy Canfield Fisher Present Wartime France to the United States: 1917-1919.” Edith Wharton Newsletter 5 (Fall, 1988): 1-5, 8. Although this essay does not discuss The Home-maker, it does offer an interesting perspective on Fisher’s early themes, as well as their development in later works.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle Brow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. This well-researched study profiles the five people who made up the first Board of Selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, a job that Fisher held for twenty-five years.

Washington, Ida. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 1982. The first critical biography to be published about Fisher, this book gives an overview of Fisher’s prolific career. Also includes valuable information about Fisher’s family and a good analysis of how Fisher drew on their varying influences in shaping her career. A good starting point for learning more about Fisher in general.

Yates, Elizabeth. The Lady from Vermont. Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene Press, 1971. First published in 1958 as Pebble in a Pool, Yates’s book is a general biography of Fisher.