A Pretty Little Place: Patti Smith's "Just Kids" and the Artistic Domestic Space
Rachel Kamphaus
1. Seef, Norman. Robert Mapplethorpe & Patti Smith. Photograph. Flickr. September 22, 2022. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gandalfsgallery/52328795398
Toward the end of Just Kids, the iconic queer photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, now on his deathbed with AIDS, tells his once partner Patti Smith: “We never had any children.”[1] This yearning for heterosexual parenthood is a strange statement coming from an artist who pushed the boundaries of queer representation in art, invoking the anger of Congress and heterosexual America in the process. In response, Patti Smith shuts Mapplethorpe down, telling him instead “our work was our children.”[2]Smith’s response does two important things. First, it legitimizes artmaking as a worthwhile life pursuit, elevating art to the status of childhood (which, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue, has achieved the “status of sanctified nationality” in America).[3] Second, this statement reveals a major project of Smith’s memoir—the reimaging of domesticity, the creation of a home centered around art, rather than a nuclear family.
Just Kids presents some contradictions. On the one hand, the book centers around Smith and Mapplethorpe’s budding artistic careers, aligning it with a genre known as the Künstlerroman, or the “artist’s novel.” This type of work is often characterized by its protagonist’s rejection of domestic, or at least earthly, attachments in order to transcend to the status of true artist. As Maurice Beebe argues, the protagonist of the artist’s novel must “test and reject the claims of love and life, of God, home, and country, until nothing is left but his true self and his consecration as artist.”[4] For this reason, it may seem contradictory that the setting of Just Kids is often domestic, centering around the homes that Patti and Robert build together (first in Brooklyn, then at the Chelsea Hotel). Not only does “the home” detract from the ideal of the artist as a detached genius, but, particularly for women, it also inhibits personal and meaningful work, making it not merely a roadblock, but an oppositional force to art. As Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes argue, the home, at least as represented in the rhetoric of family values, “is not a space that encourages women to be creative beyond, or in, the domestic sphere.”[5]
This essay, however, is not concerned with a narrative of the home as an obstacle to female artists. It is not interested in the idea of Smith “overcoming” the domestic to meet her artistic goals, since she does not view it as something to be conquered or transcended. That said, the homes in Just Kids look far different from those of the domestic novels in the 19th century, as they are a) occupied by an unmarried couple, one half of whom is queer, b) mobile, changing space according to Patti and Robert’s needs, and c) centered around art, rather than a family. This essay will focus primarily on that last point: the role of art in Smith’s home. Art is both the centerpiece of Smith’s domestic life as well as the thing that allows her to upset the traditional binaries of male/female and public/private that drive the home’s oppression and control domestic life.
The Domestic and Literature
Before discussing the way in which Smith destabilizes the domestic, it is worth outlining the domestic genre and its problems. Eigtheenth and nineteenth century domestic novels often centered around “courtship, marriage, and childbearing,” enforcing a separate-spheres ideology that cast women as moral and gentle homemakers who provided their working husbands with a haven from the outside, industrialized world.[6] Such an ideal domesticity tended to be exclusive, highlighting that which was “white, Protestant, middle class, and heterosexual.”[7]These beliefs are not mere relics found in old books; they provide a template that persists into the twentieth century and even the present day. As Gülsüm Baydar argues, “the normative structure of domesticity has largely been the single-family household governed by heterosexual relationships with man as the head of the household and women as the caretaker.”[8]
The separate-spheres ideology would become especially problematic to 20th-century feminist thinkers. To these intelluctuals, the idea of the separate-spheres home reduces women’s sense of identity in support of male projects. Simone de Beauvoir argues that cyclical and endless housework prevents women from pursuing their own projects, and instead puts them in charge of generalized and un-special series of tasks which supports men’s more meaningful and identity forming pursuits. Housewives perform labor for men so that these same men can go out into the world and make change.[9] As Iris Marion Young aptly summarizes, “man’s subjectivity draws on the material work of women’s work, and this work deprives her of a subjectivity of her own.”[10] Perhaps such meaningless tasks are what Betty Friedan refers to when she says, “There are aspects of the housewife's role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I’ without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive.”[11] Robbed of subjectivity, the woman becomes mechanical, or worse, to use Mark Wigley’s term, she is “ornamentation,” there to keep man’s home pretty.[12] If a woman screams inside her house, does she make a sound? If a woman’s work is to remain unseen, does she even exist?
Other groups of scholars criticize the home for its exclusivity, particularly towards queer individuals. In contemporary housing policy, many homes are built with the heterosexual couple or family in mind. Marion Roberts notes that, in the UK, “the majority of houses have been designed for a nuclear family,” even though “the nuclear family [is] now a minority type of household.”[13] This is only one way that the home excludes queer people. In her book Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed explains how people become “oriented” towards heterosexuality through the home: “At home, ‘things’ are not only done a certain way, but the domestic ‘puts things’ in their place. The family itself becomes what we implicitly know, as well as what surrounds us, a dwelling place.”[14] Under this paradigm, queer bodies become disoriented within the home because their existence contradicts the implicit knowledge that the home imposes.
Although the home is problematic within literature and scholarship, many are “not ready to toss the idea of home out.”[15] This group of scholars concedes that the home can be a space of oppression and exclusivity, but they also note and praise its potential for instability. As Christopher Reed argues, although the home may be “the main arena for the enforcement of conventional divisions of masculinity and femininity (along with their complement, heterosexuality)...the modern home has also been a staging ground for rebellion against these norms.”[16] Kristin Jacobson uses the term “neodomestic” to describe an outgrowth of literature in the neoliberal era that points out the contradictions and exclusions of the “single-family, privately owned” home.[17] Jacobson's book shows that the home is far from dead in 20th century feminist writing; it is just challenged and transformed. Rather than abandon domesticity altogether, recent writing surrounding the home tends to focus on its potential for instability, and the positive outcomes that come from it. More and more writers seem to advocate for revision of the home, rather than abandonment.
Artist as Mother and Father–Challenging Separate Spheres
Smith uses art to challenge the idea of separate spheres; to the musician and poet, the individual artist must embody both masculine and feminine roles—an idea that transfers onto homemaking. Smith imagines the process of making art as parallel to birth, placing the artist as creator in a maternal role. Early in the book, Smith compares an important day in her life with Robert: Memorial Day, 1967, the day they both dedicated themselves to art. What is interesting is not so much the fact that the two both dedicated themselves to art, but rather the context surrounding these scenes. Smith’s decision to become an artist follows an extended passage describing her giving birth to her first child, which she put up for adoption. Robert’s takes place during an acid trip he embarks on to create drawings. Smith thus seems to view the two actions (childbirth and creating art) as being closely related, made evident not just by the thematic and proximal parallel between the scenes, but also by the language Smith uses to describe Robert’s trip and artmaking. After ingesting LSD, which he hopes to use as a stimulus for drawing, Robert feels the initial sensation of the drug in his stomach: “he traced the thrill and fear blossoming in his stomach.” He then clenches “his teeth,” pants, and drops “to his knees.”[18] The scene culminates with the emergence of his creation: two drawings. To create art, Robert’s body must go through immense, laborious physical strain, one that starts in his stomach and radiates out, just as in childbirth.
While Smith imagines creation as a process of birth, aligning the artist with the maternal, she also envisions the artist as embodying male roles. Patti’s heroes include a long list of male writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jean Genet, William Blake, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, and more. Patti often models her behavior and actions after these men, in hopes of living a romanticized artistic life. “Filled with the spirit of Genet,” for example, Smith shoplifts colored pencils and a sharpener.[19] After reading a collection of Blake poems, Smith and Robert “adop[t] Blake’s palette as [their] own.”[20] Smith even sees something as basic as looking for food as inspired by an artistic great: “even Baudelaire had to eat. His letters contained many a desperate cry for want of meat and porter.”[21] What these poets share is not so much a similar method or style, but a “bad boy” or “outlaw aura,” as Daniel Kane argues.[22] Kane further criticizes Smith for her overreliance on these male poets, while she “pastoralizes” female poets such as Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer elsewhere in her work. Smith seems to have an aesthetic aversion to what she views as tame, mannered, and yes, feminine. She prefers instead to emulate a rebellious "idealized masculinity.” [23] It is not hard to see how this contrasts with the archetype of the mother.
Similarly, Robert embodies masculine archetypes in his own art. Smith portrays him as both “priest and magician” as he becomes increasingly interested in working with religious imagery.[24] Robert even dresses the part; when Patti comes home one day, she finds him in “a Jesuit robe he had found at a thrift store.”[25] It is clear that this is not out of a genuine religious impulse, but for aesthetic purposes. He uses satanic imagery in his art, as he seems to delight in the juxtaposition between the sacred and the occult. Smith thus identifies him as not only priest, but also magician—an archetype which Jungian psychologists Moore and Gilette identify as being of the "mature masculine."[26] The idea of being priestly (celibate) or occultic (destructive) puts him at odds with the procreative mother, although Smith does not think of the two as mutually exclusive. While the feminine creator artist allows the art to come into being, the masculine provides the aesthetic guidelines for such art to flourish. In this way, Smith sees it necessary for the artist to inhabit both masculine and feminine roles.
But what does artmaking have to do with homemaking? Just because Patti and Robert inhabit masculine and feminine artistic roles, does that necessarily mean that this dualism is mapped on to their roles as homemakers? Smith seems to equate the process of homemaking with artmaking, as she compares creating home decor to making jewelry and expresses a concern that all elements in the house must “harmonize” with each other.[27] Smith's idea that the artist must adopt both masculine and feminine roles translates into homemaking. Rather than enforce the oppressive and gendered division of housework labor that occurs within the home, Patti and Robert split tasks and take turns. They decorate the space together. Patti cooks, Robert cleans. Robert works for some time, and then Patti becomes the “breadwinner.”[28]Smith is skeptical of the idea that men must provide and protect, and that women must serve and maintain. She instead sees provision and service as fluid, changing as her and Robert’s needs arise: “For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me.”[29]
The conflation of homemaking with artmaking has an important effect on the regular tasks of making home as well. Because Patti and Robert see the home as a special project of theirs, the way in which they arrange the space is loving, intentional and meaningful. Although something like “restringing lamps” or looking for furniture may seem like tedious work to some, Patti and Robert find ways to make it personal and interesting. Robert tattoos lamp shades with his own designs, and Patti describes the process of finding their furniture as “magic.”[30] The cultivation of this space is precious to both. One cannot deny the delight in Smith’s narration as she describes the “monastic mess” she creates of her workspace.[31] In her narrative, Smith seems to recognize that there is, as Iris Marion Young claims, “world-making meaning in domestic work.”[32] In homemaking, Patti and Robert do not merely maintain space—they build it in a way that is highly personal and reflective of their own artistic identities. Thus, Smith rejects de Beauvoir’s idea that housework is harmful to one’s own subjectivity; instead, in aligning it with artmaking, she elevates homemaking to the level of the transcendent. Performing tasks like furnishing and cleaning a bedroom does not doom Patti to a life devoid of meaningful expression; rather, it affirms her own transcendent aspirations as an artist.
Reorienting Space
So far, I have discussed the way in which Smith reimagines the possibilities of domestic labor and gender roles within the home. Now I will go over how she reimagines the physical space of the home and the role that art plays in this reimagining. Smith’s destabilizing of the home goes beyond her shared roles with Robert. The way that the two arrange space challenges the domestic values of separate spheres, heteronormativity, and privacy.
Geographers, architects, and scholars note that the arrangement of a space, as well as the positioning of objects within it, have the potential to either uphold or undermine normative structures. Mark Wigley argues that, during the consolidation of architecture as a discipline, “the task of architectural theory becomes that of controlling ornament, restricting its mobility, domesticating it by defining its ‘proper place.’”[33] This means that women become confined not only to the domestic sphere, but to its innermost private spaces, because they are viewed as accessories more so than subjective persons. Marion Roberts, for example, notes that working-class homes in the Victorian and Edwardian eras placed kitchens and laundry rooms at the back of the home to remove women’s labor “from the public gaze.”[34] Even the building of recent homes incentivize a separation between genders. The standardized height of kitchen counters and sinks is based around an idealized (albeit unrealistic) female body: 5 feet and 7 inches.[35] This construction makes domestic labor uncomfortable for men and discourages them from doing kitchen work. To use Sara Ahmed’s terminology, it “directs” the female body toward domestic (or kitchen labor) and the male body away from it.
Ahmed’s ideas of orientation and direction don’t only apply to the way space is gendered, but also the way that space enforces heterosexuality. The family table is a particularly strong example. Tables are both objects that allow the family to “cohere as a group” as well as spaces that make gatherings possible. These gatherings, however, are fundamentally “directive,” instructing their inhabitants into the “right” way of interacting with each other.[36] Ahmed argues that tables tend to present the “same form of sociality”—the heterosexual couple and the family.[37] Even the photographs and artifacts placed around the table (family photos, wedding gifts etc.) have a way of keeping the members of the table “in line.” The touting of a lineage—i.e. photos of grandparents, parents, and finally children—places an emphasis on the continuation of the family line and directs the younger members of the family to aspire to such a continuation. It tells them, This is your place within the world. You are part of a family, and you will continue that tradition. So, those who do not participate in these structures, such as queer or childless adults, stick out at the table.
A scene in Just Kids, in which Patti and Robert visit the latter’s family, demonstrates Ahmed’s idea:
“The entire family was grouped around the dining room table—his older sister and brother and their spouses and their four younger siblings. The table was set, everything in place for a perfect meal. His father barely looked at me, and said nothing to Robert except, ‘You should cut your hair. You look like a girl.’”[38]
The table attempts to orient Patti and Robert, as a childless and unconventional couple (Robert is queer and Patti is straight), toward heteronormativity in several ways. First, it surrounds them with couples and children, reminding them of the dominant and acceptable form of sociality at the table. Second, its members engage in the act of verbal (or nonverbal) shaming to place Patti and Robert back in line. Robert’s father does not address Patti, signaling that she is not welcome at his table. The one time he speaks to Robert is to remind him of the way he does not fit in: his feminine physical appearance, a feature that may align him with queerness. Both the placement and behavior of people at the table pressures Patti and Robert into behaving in a way that aligns more closely with the nuclear family.
In the traditional heterosexual home, space has a way of keeping the members of the home in place. The placement of rooms enforces the separate-spheres ideology, while the arrangement of objects within the home places pressure on those who do not conform to stay in line. Patti and Robert, however, refuse to fall in line.
Although they do not have control over the height of the kitchen sink, Patti and Robert resist the architectural imperative to keep everything in its place. There is little separation between where activities occur in Patti and Robert’s apartment. They maintain an open plan–only a beaded curtain separates the bedroom from the rest of the space. It is unclear what boundaries, if any, there are in the home (which comprises the entire second floor of their building). Patti and Robert eat on the floor, a space which enables them to look at their artwork while they dine. Although Patti says she has a study area, she often works “side by side” with Robert.[39] Patti wakes one night and spots Robert working under the light of votive candles–does he make art within their bedroom? Or is it the lack of door, the lack of boundary, that allows Patti to spot this? Regardless, artmaking happens in any space within the house; it is so pervasive in Patti and Robert’s life that it seems to encroach on their daily functions like sleeping and eating. To return to the idea of the transcendence (associated with maleness) and immanence (associated with femaleness), we can see that there is virtually no separation between the domain of each. The transcendence of artmaking occurs side by side with the immanence of eating.
To see how important this arrangement is for Patti and Robert, we should return to Ahmed, who argues that spaces like the “writing room” pose problems for female bodies because of their historical association with maleness. The woman inside such a room necessarily sticks out and is thus oriented away from the realm of writing itself. With the non-male thrust aside, writing again becomes associated with maleness, and the cycle repeats:
So, for instance, if the action of writing is associated with the masculine body, then it is this body that tends to inhabit the space for writing. The space for writing—say, the study—then tends to extend such bodies and may even take their shape. Gender becomes naturalized as a property of bodies, objects, and spaces partly through the “loop” of this repetition, which leads bodies in some directions more than others as if that direction came from within the body and explains which way it turns. [40]
In arranging their home so that artmaking can occur virtually within any space, Smith and Robert break this loop. Ahmed’s paradigm only exists because there is a space for writing to begin with. Without a fixed “space” for art, Patti cannot feel out of place as an artist, and as such, the space does not “direct” Robert toward artmaking more than her. We can also extend this logic in the opposite direction. Because there is little separation between where traditionally domestic and meaningful artistic work takes place, then Robert can feel more “at home” within the domestic sphere.
It is also important to note that Smith deconstructs heteronormativity in her home through their arrangement of space. The arrangement of objects within Patti and Robert’s home directs its inhabitants away from the family line and towards an artistic lineage. While Ahmed argues that objects such as wedding gifts and family heirlooms encourage people to strive toward reproduction and childrearing (the continuation of the family), the objects within Patti and Robert’s home inspire a different form of (re)production: artistic creation. Patti tapes photos of her artistic heroes to the wall, a placement which encourages her to emulate these creators and continue what Smith sees as a shared artistic mission. Rather than continue a bloodline from her parents to herself to her own children, she desires to continue a creative line from Rimbaud to herself and Robert.
Queering Home
Of course, taping up a bunch of photos of Arthur Rimbaud is hardly a wrecking ball to the idea of heteronormativity; while Robert and Patti challenge normative domesticity in their Brooklyn apartment, they still retain many of its elements. Their home is still centered around a (in Smith’s eyes) heterosexual couple. Despite Robert’s queerness and insistence that they should have relationships with other people, Smith is bothered by it, hoping to preserve the unit of Patti-and-Robert. Smith feels “completely alone and confused” and falls “into long bouts of weeping” when Robert starts seeing a man named Terry.[41] She compares her experience to that of the protagonists in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird:
“Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck’s children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.”[42]
Smith’s allusion to Maeterlinck’s story exposes her yearning for the stability of the home, along with the monogamous, heterosexual relationship that supports it, and this contradicts what she sees as the threatening instability of non-monogamy and homosexuality. Not only does Smith portray the space of the past (symbolic of a time before she and Robert began to have sexual relationships with other people) as warm and comforting, but she also sees it as a space of true happiness. In Maeterlinck’s story, two children traverse dangerous territories to find a so-called “bluebird of happiness,” —only to find it at home. Thus, while living in Brooklyn, Smith clearly prizes domestic stability and sexual privacy, even as she undermines the traditional home in other ways.
It is only after leaving Brooklyn and moving into the Chelsea Hotel that Smith can challenge the privacy of the home as well as the heterosexual couple that supports it. It is important to note that the hotel as a literary symbol tends to stand at odds with the domestic; in the Modernist period, it “challenges or even displaces the home and the domestic ideal that it stood for in the Victorian period.”[43] Hotels are places in which the idea of a public/private dichotomy is challenged, as they combine the public spaces of lobbies (“ultrasocial” spaces, as Despotopoulou, Dimakis, and Marinou describe) with private rooms in which individuals or couples live. This design, while allowing for limited domestic-looking privacy, ultimately encourages the individual to expand their own relationships beyond the couple or family unit. Thus, by discouraging family life and encouraging communal living and networks of care, the hotel becomes a natural place in which alternative relationships and modes of being (those that are not based around heteronormativity) thrive.
These effects are all heightened in the Chelsea Hotel, a place in which non-normativity, at least within the cultural imagination, is the norm. The New York Times once decided to interview a (nuclear) family, hoping to capture unusual residents in the hotel, whom they saw as the real oddballs in the artists’ colony. The article went on to explain: “The hotel, on West 23rd Street, may be a good place to meet artists and eccentrics, but it is hardly viewed as a family setting.”[44] In part, this is an effect of intentional design. The architect of the Chelsea Hotel, Philip Hubert, wanted to create a space in which communal interaction was encouraged, in hopes that artists would be able to collaborate artistically and even share in domestic work. He was especially inspired by the work of Charles Fourier, who “envisioned a community where workers, scholars and artists intermingled — all sharing in domestic duties but having the freedom to pursue their creative whims as well.”[45] By design, then, the Chelsea Hotel is opposed to the model of the home as a self-sufficient unit, where a single couple provides for and maintains the home.
3. Abott, Berenice. Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street. 1936. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 24, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5178b920-99a3-013a-9f32-0242ac110003
In her own narration, Smith recognizes that the Chelsea Hotel is a place that challenges “self-sufficiency” of the heterosexual, nuclear home. She shows that the architecture of the hotel encourages or even requires some members to depend on one another for both their physical and artistic needs. Some of the rooms are small and lacking in facilities, pushing members to use public spaces like communal bathrooms to shower or lobbies to converse, a layout that facilitates interaction and dependency among various members in the hotel. For example, Patti and Robert’s room is small and cluttered and does not contain its own bathroom, so the two venture down the hall or to others’ rooms to shower or catch inspiration. Patti visits her neighbor Sandy frequently: “If I needed a shower or just wanted to daydream in an atmosphere in light and space, her door was always open.”[46] Sandy’s door is not the only one that remains ajar–while wandering the halls, Smith notes the many open rooms in the hotel, from which she can catch a glimpse of impressive artists and intellectuals, all of whom “had something to offer.”[47]Smith’s focus on the rooms as places of exchange mirrors her description of the lobby, which she characterizes as a “marketplace” in which “influential people” pass through.[48] Thus the rooms in the Chelsea Hotel, with their seemingly perpetually open doors, are not the private spaces that rooms often are. Instead, they are semi-public places that encourage Patti to travel outside the bounds of her room and relationship for the intellectual and physical benefits and opportunities for exchange they offer.
In exposing Patti and Robert to individuals and environments marked by their public nature, the Chelsea Hotel exposes the limits of Patti and Robert’s home and private life together. While Patti and Robert lived a self-contained life in their Brooklyn apartment, acting as each other’s muses and collaborators, their artistic networks were quite limited, consisting mostly of each other. The Chelsea Hotel has an undeniably positive effect on the two, as both of their artistic careers are improved by expanding their circles and forming relationships with other inhabitants. Patti’s friendship with Matthew Reich, a musician with a “Dylan fixation,” inspires Patti to put her poems to music, while it is at Sandy’s suggestion that Robert picks up a camera.[49] The artistic pursuits that Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe become most well-known for (music and photography, respectively) are not born out of their relationship with each other, but with others at the Chelsea Hotel, proving that the other residents of the hotel offer benefits that Patti and Robert cannot offer each other.
Living at the Chelsea Hotel also exposes the inadequacy of Patti and Robert’s sexual relationship, allowing them to end their sexual partnership and reimagine the nature of their relationship. Within the Chelsea, and the general artistic community that surrounds it, Robert is free to meet other queer people. New friends of his introduce him to sex shops and the queer underworld, a network which allows Robert to thrive socially and form more artistic connections. As Smith notes, “He had been so shy when we first met, and as he negotiated the challenging waters of Max’s, the Chelsea, the Factory, I watched him come into his own.”[50] Seeing Robert transform both artistically and socially enables Smith to accept his homosexuality and put an end to her sexual relationship with him. That said, their parting is far from a breakup.
There is a promise that Patti and Robert make to each other before they move to the Chelsea Hotel, which Smith, invoking the language of marriage, characterizes as a wedding vow: “that we’d never leave one another again, until we were ready to stand on our own.”[51] Even after the two end their physical relationship, Smith claims that “Robert and I kept out vow. Neither would leave the other.”[52] To some, such a commitment could present problems. How can Patti or Robert maintain this vow when they both want to build lives with other people? Smith thus portrays her new relationships, as well as Robert’s, as extensions of their own partnership. When Patti begins to date another person, she notes that “Robert felt like he was part of the equation.”[53] Furthermore, Smith sees Robert’s partner David as part of both her life and his, stating that “our life seemed easier with David in it.”[54] The unit of Patti and Robert does not end as much as morph and even expand.
Thus, in encouraging artistic collaboration, the Chelsea Hotel pushes its inhabitants to form communal networks that differ from the private relationships that sustain the traditional home. Living at the Chelsea enables Smith to realize forms of love and relationality that differ from that of the family and loyal heterosexual couple, and within this space, she and Robert can live in a way that is, although less normative, more fulfilling for both. We might, then, think of Patti and Robert’s home in the Chelsea as a queer home, which is not necessarily a gay home (although, in this case Robert is queer), but one that “upsets the strict gender roles, the firm divisions between public and private, and the implicit presumptions of self-sufficient economics and intimacy in the respectable domestic household.”[55]
Conclusion
Although Smith spends a significant period in the Chelsea Hotel, which has a transformative effect on her, I want to emphasize that her time there is not a complete rejection of the domestic. Not too long after ending their relationship in the Chelsea, Patti and Robert part ways. Smith ends up in a heterosexual marriage, building a family in Michigan with the musician Fred Sonic Smith–a relationship that is, at least at surface, quite normative.
What I do want to emphasize is that Smith views the home as inherently mobile, changing as her artistic needs change. In portraying her home as shifting, she recognizes a key feature of what Kristen Jacobsen calls the neo-domestic “domestic mobility,” or the idea that home can span multiple locations, in contrast to the normative, stable house.[56]Home for Smith is not tied to its sense of privacy, its separation of spheres, nor its comforts—it is instead tied to art.
In centering art within her home, Smith is able to resolve many feminist critiques of domesticity. To accommodate artmaking, Smith must build her home in a way that enables her to have time for meaningful work. She refuses to subscribe to a model of the home that relegates women to doing invisible, meaningless background tasks in lieu of pursuing their ambitions. In trying to build such a home, Smith finds her assumptions of relationality and privacy challenged. Home, she comes to realize, might not consist of a couple, but of a community of artists looking out for each other. Or it could be a quiet house in Michigan with a guitarist and two children. No matter what, for Smith, home is where the art is.
Endnotes
[1] Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), 274.
[2] Smith, Just Kids, 274.
[3] Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 550.
[4] Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 6.
[5] Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes, introduction to Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, eds. Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), xviii.
[6] The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), s.v. “Domestic Fiction.”
[7] Kristin J. Jacobson, Neodomestic American Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010), 5.
[8] Gülsüm Baydar, “Figures of Wo/man in Contemporary Architectural Discourse,” in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, eds. Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), 34.
[9] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London, England: Vintage Classics, 2015).
[10] Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” in On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138.
[11] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963), 293.
[12] Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 357.
[13] Marion Roberts, “Gender and Housing: The Impact of Design,” Built Environment 16, no. 4 (1990): 266.
[14] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 124-125.
[15] Young, “House and Home,” 123.
[16] Christopher Reed, introduction to Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 16.
[17] Jacobson, Neodomestic American Fiction, 3.
[18] Smith, Just Kids, 21.
[19] Smith, Just Kids, 56-57.
[20] Smith, Just Kids, 49.
[21] Smith, Just Kids, 36.
[22] Daniel Kane, “‘Nor did I Socialize with their People’: Patti Smith, Rock Heroics, and the Poetics of Sociability,” Popular Music 31, no. 1 (2012): 107-108.
[23] Kane, 119.
[24] Smith, Just Kids, 61.
[25] Smith, Just Kids, 63.
[26] Robert Moore and Douglas Gilette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990).
[27] Smith, Just Kids, 44.
[28] Smith, Just Kids, 56.
[29] Smith, Just Kids, 79.
[30] Smith, Just Kids, 44.
[31] Smith, Just Kids, 45.
[32] Young, “House and Home,” 141.
[33] Wigley, “The Housing of Gender,” 357.
[34] Roberts, “Gender and Housing,” 263.
[35] Leslie Land, “Counterintuitive: How the Marketing of Modernism Hijacked the Kitchen Stove,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, eds. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
[36] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 81.
[37] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 82.
[38] Smith, Just Kids, 67.
[39] Smith, Just Kids, 45.
[40] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 58.
[41] Smith, Just Kids, 79.
[42] Smith, Just Kids, 79.
[43] Anna Despotopoulou, Athanasios Dimakis, and Chryssa Marinou, “Hotels in Literature,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1-11.
[44] Elaine Louie, “At the Chelsea Hotel, Married, With Kids,” The New York Times, May 19, 2005.
[45] Joe MacNeil, “Make America Bohemian Again,” Observer, February 21, 2017, https://observer.com/2017/02/make-america-bohemian-again/.
[46] Smith, Just Kids, 102.
[47] Smith, Just Kids, 112.
[48] Smith, Just Kids, 112.
[49] Smith, Just Kids, 102.
[50] Smith, Just Kids, 150.
[51] Smith, Just Kids, 88.
[52] Smith, Just Kids, 157.
[53] Smith, Just Kids, 163
[54] Smith, Just Kids, 148.
[55] Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13.
[56] Jacobson, Neodomestic, 4.
Rachel Kamphaus
Rachel Kamphaus is a Junior at Brown University studying English and Classics. Her research is particularly interested in the ways that female and queer bodies conform to and resist the spaces around them. In her free time, she is the Editor-in-Chief of the Brown Classical Journal and a tutor. She also writes for the Brown Film Magazine, the Brown Alumni Magazine, and the RIB (a female-led comedy publication).