Review of The Home Plot: Women, Writing and Domestic Ritual

Authors

Evelyn I. Funda, University of Nebraska...Lincoln

Date of this Version

1994

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:2 (Spring 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

In entitling her book The Home Plot, Ann Romines refers not to a literal territory or the locus of domesticity, nor even to the Aristotelian, linear movement toward a denouement. "Plot," in the sense in which Romines uses it, is rather an on-going process akin to the daily routine of domestic ritual. The "home plot" is the rhythmic movement of the fiction as it is inspired by the nonprogressive, static, repetitive, non...linear domestic rituals of women's traditional lives. The term "domestic ritual," then, is especially significant because "Ritual implies repetition because the repeated act has or creates meaning, which becomes tradition through its continuance. Domestic implies an enclosure, somehow sacralized, which is both the house and the perceiving self" (p. 29).