The ideal home can be a perfect prison-Modern women are feeling the pressure to have a glamorous home and lifestyle. But with a bit of healthy chaos

Jenny McCartney

The ideal home can be a perfect prison

Modern women are feeling the pressure to have a glamorous home and lifestyle. But what's wrong with a bit of healthy chaos, asks Jenny McCartney.

Domestic perfection

There was a novel out last week called The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, the very title of which, I suspect, will resonate painfully with female readers in possession of a fixed abode and small children. In my case, one could substitute the pile of stuff teetering on top of the fridge, or lurking underneath the bed. (I learnt my lesson about leaving things on the stairs during my last pregnancy, when I slipped on a stray sweater and performed an appalled parabola worthy of a Victorian melodrama; mercifully, no lasting damage was done.)

The book, by Christina Hopkinson, is a witty paean to domestic and marital discontent from the perspective of Mary, a middle-class mother of two who works part-time and spends the rest of her hours knee deep in nappies, mouldy cups and balled-up laundry. All this makes Mary so cross that she looks at her laid-back, messy husband Joel and finds him severely wanting. She resolves to keep a secret chart with a black mark for every incidence of Joel’s sloppiness: too many, and it will end in divorce.

It’s an exaggerated scenario, but the book struck a chord. Not, I should hasten to add, because I can pretend to any Mary-like superiority on the home front: I make efforts, but I think I might frequently be a bit of a Joel. Still, the novel encapsulates rather vividly the degree to which the modern woman keenly resents her immersion in the dreary round of clearing-up, cooking and cleaning that comes with bearing children, at the same time as yearning to achieve a more picturesquely immaculate house than at any time in history.

Mary is trapped in this paradox, and raging. She paints a wall in blackboard paint, exactly as she has seen in the magazines, but no one ever writes on it. In the mags, she notes enviously, the chalked shopping list would read “Goji berries and champagne”.

We are all familiar by now with the effect upon the average woman of being perpetually bombarded with airbrushed magazine images of younger, thinner, more beautiful models and actresses. More ordinary women than ever before are neurotic about their bodies, even to the point of seeking expensive surgical “remedies”. But when the relentless industry of dreams expanded into the broader category of homes and “lifestyle”, it scattered fresh discontents.
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Women’s magazines are now bursting with bragging individuals who have acted as stylists to their own lives, or had their lives assiduously styled for them. Such people sing out the praises of spotless Egyptian cotton sheets, and freshly ground Colombian coffee. Their spouses surprise them with weekends in Paris, bottles of organic scent, and specially commissioned gold rings. Their children snuggle up under Scottish wool blankets and daintily slurp hot chocolate from hand-crafted Cornish mugs. And somehow, we can’t get enough of all this: call it the nest-building instinct run riot, but we women are sponges for domestic froth.

I’m not knocking the appeal of a tidy house with nice things in it, or the whiff of glamour. Yet glamour is like a drug: inhale too much of it, too obsessively, and you start to go nutty. Once, we fretted that other women were prettier than us; now, we worry that our entire home life is mysteriously failing to make the grade, as judged against some image of desirability hatched in a features editor’s office.

The saturation of internet porn has apparently had a damaging effect on many relationships, by making men see their own sex lives as dull and uninventive. I suspect that the glamour deluge might be doing the same thing to women. It fuels both the thirst for romance, and the drip-drip of discontent, to the point at which we begin to feel a bit hard done by if our other half never wows us with a mini-break in a traditional gipsy caravan (in real life, of course, the roof would leak almost immediately, and you would all repair, arguing furiously, to a Travelodge).

Old-style feminists used to be proud of their chaotic houses, because it showed that they were concentrating on higher things. Now, such reverence is paid to the notion of the house beautiful that it has become the higher thing in itself. Glamour has come home: the problem is, no one wants to be the scrubber any more.