Stefanie Strebel - Between Dream Houses and God's Own Junkyard - Architecture and the Built Environment in American Suburban Fiction

As the detailed description of Babbitt’s bathroom illustrates, more weight is given to interior design than exterior architectural construction in the novel. Babbitt’s limited judgement on architectural taste, or his “large and complacent ignorance of all architecture” (42), does not allow him to partake in this discourse, and in the interior realm, design decisions are conveniently made for him. Public opinion makers determine taste, and as a result, the vast majority of homes in Floral Heights are equipped with the same modern appliances and proudly display the same interior décor:

(Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.) […] (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.) […] (Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Fait de la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.) (91-92)

The interior décor encountered in the houses of Floral Heights is, for the most part, a display of sheer materialism. Objects are purchased not because they are needed, because they reflect personal taste, or because they have sentimental value. They are purchased because they have aesthetic value, because they mark social status, and because they enable those who purchase them to keep up with or even surpass their neighbours.

This consumer behaviour strongly invokes Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption, that is, the behaviour of purchasing luxury items as a display of economic power and social status.2 In this behaviour, there are also clear reverberations of Marx’s commodity fetishism, on which Veblen’s concept is based, and which posits that capitalist societies treat commodities as though there were an inherent economic value to them. Considering that fetishism originally referred to the idea that inanimate objects possess supernatural powers, a parallel can be drawn to the fact that Babbitt, according to the narrator, looks at material possessions and modern appliances as his religion. However, an affinity to commodity fetishism can not only be observed in the character of Babbitt, but in most of the suburban population in the novel. The residents of Floral Heights are in a constant anxious struggle to reach a certain status and express this status in material terms – and they express it through what is available to them, that is, mass-produced commodities. As Downey (4) points out, “[t]hrough making our rooms, we display to ourselves and others where we fit in the social and material world.” In Babbitt , this is also true of certain status symbols outside the house, such as cars, cigarette cases and electric cigar lighters, to name only a few examples. The interior of houses is defined by a selection of décor that has been approved by designers and subsequently purchased by extended social circles. As a result, the interior spaces of most Floral Heights houses are strikingly similar and thus never overwhelming; they simply mark familiar, inoffensive territory. The rooms are generally devoid of interesting features; they are “as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice,” and they contain objects that look like “desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of commerce” (92).

The only unconventional middle-class suburban interior in the novel is encountered in the Rieslings’ apartment, which lacks standardised luxury items, or at least the presence of these remains unmentioned. It is especially Zilla Riesling’s unconventionality and flexibility of character that is mirrored in the unconventionality and flexibility of their architectural home. The apartment building they inhabit is experimental, condensed and excessively modern, and it features flexible rooms that can be converted from living rooms to bedrooms, as well as kitchens hidden in cupboards. Considering the numerous instances of mirroring character traits in the built environment, and in the home in particular, Lewis puts substantial emphasis on the parallels between architecture and the individual, and this applies to the Rieslings and to the Babbitts in equal measure. The direction of influence is necessarily reciprocal, and unconventional architecture and the unconventional individual, as well as standardised architecture and the standardised individual, are in constant dialogue with one another.

Standardisation and the Loss of “Home”

“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard 5). This is true of both unconventional and standardised interiors. However, the notion of home is unquestionably gradable, and it is due to their impersonality and radiating coldness, their similarity in architecture and décor, that standardised suburban houses lose their sense of home and are reminiscent of anonymous hotels within the context of Babbitt :

The [bed]room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the interior decorator who “did the interiors” for most of the speculative-builders’ houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture – the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt’s dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations – what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm but not too hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again. […] Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this. (14-15)

Architecturally speaking, the suburban houses in the novel are doubtlessly built and decorated with good – if somewhat decadent – taste. However, “there was […] one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home” (15). Jurca (5) observes that “as the suburban house becomes the primary locus and object of consumption for the white middle class, the artifacts and habits of domestic culture are seen to jeopardize or to destroy the home’s emotional texture.” With the emotional aspect being crucial when it comes to turning a house into a home, and with the suburban house losing this emotional texture increasingly, the sense of home is lost, and the house is transformed into an architectural shell devoid of meaning.

The emotionless standardisation of interior décor, the idea of lifeless but familiar territory, ultimately affects the average suburbanite’s character, with Babbitt being a prime example of the standardised suburban male. Furthermore, and similar to the domestic interior, Babbitt’s beliefs, too, are shaped by opinion makers. As a case in point, the Presbyterian Church and the Republican Party tell him what to believe and what to represent, and advertisers determine his perceived individuality. They tell him what to buy in order to have his passions represented, with the result that material items turn into substitutes for his actual passions and joys: “standard advertised wares – toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters – were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom” (95).