Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses

by Marjorie Garber

Overview

Cultural historian Marjorie Garber offers incisive and witty commentary on what men and women today really want in her enlightening study of what may be the most meaningful relationship any of us will ever have.

Real estate has become a form of “yuppie pornography.” Hopes of summer romance have given way to hopes of summer homes, and fantasies of Romeo have been replaced by fantasies of remodeling. Even real estate ads are flirtatious in their offers of bedrooms that are sensuous and sinks that are seductive. Thus the house you live in, like the partner you choose, can be everything from your beloved to your dream to a status symbol trophy. Marjorie Garber has fashioned a uniquely fascinating book that is as provocative as it is pleasurable, as erudite as it is entertaining, one sure to make readers consider more closely the rooms in which they live.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385720397
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/18/2001
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Marjorie Garber is a professor at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Sex and Real Estate	3
1	The House as Beloved	25
2	The House as Mother	48
3	The House as Body	71
4	The Dream House	100
5	The Trophy House	120
6	The House as History	150
7	The Summer House	181
	Epilogue: Why We Love Houses	205
	Notes	209
	Index	231

Editorial Reviews

[I]lluminating.... Garber upends, tilts and shakes the house of our cultural imagination.”–Newsday

“[F]iendishly clever....”–Boston Herald

“[I]nteresting and valid.”–The New York Times

From the Publisher

Sex and Real Estate offers some fun, provocative reading-especially for culture mavens and, more particularly, for anyone who suffers from chronic real-estate cravings or house-swapping addiction.
—Hope Magazine

Kathleen Caldwell

Mixing cultural criticism with a belletristic style of writing, Garber (English/Harvard) argues that people love their houses as truly and as passionately as each other. "The house can be a primary object of affection and desire—not a displacement or a substitute or a metaphor," writes Garber (Dog Love, 1996). In other words, the quest for the perfect house does not represent, say, a need for security. It's simply an overlooked, legitimate, and integral component of our yearning: the desire for the perfect house. Garber maintains that houses have been at the heart of romance, particularly middle-class romance, as long as romance has been around. Similarly, she concludes that the concept of the dream house has been a fixture of consumer culture since its inception. Its cousin on steroids, the trophy house, provides Garber with still more examples of how a presumably mundane building can be the locus of desire. She points to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy's house has an air of "breathless intensity," and on the flip side, to Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, a realtor who, in a fit of self-love, ties his sense of personal authenticity to his profession. It's possible to find Garber precious, but difficult to blame her for this quality, since it appears to be a necessary element of her attempt to unify two seemingly disparate topics. Consider, for example, the long section about Garber's personal experience with the Historical Commission of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its strictures on what colors are permissible for the houses under its jurisdiction. The narrative is fresh and lively, but one does tend to wonder about a Harvard professor spendingherdays considering the social implications of Colonial Yellow and Essex Green. Then Garber relates these nitpicky issues to the question of nostalgia (which means homesickness), and a method emerges from the madness. An inventive, erudite analysis from a scholar and homeowner.

Kirkus Reviews