ABSTRACT
After World War II, an ideal of suburban family life arose in the United States that narrativized the home as an oasis of pleasure apart from the "real" world of work, politics, and social life. This ideal represented the highpoint of a transition which began in the eighteenth century: the dismantling of the integral agrarian household in favor of the "separate spheres" model, where men performed paid labor "at work" while women performed unpaid labor in the home. Taking Duncan and Jess's home as exemplary of a private public sphere, the chapter analyzes collage texts by both artists that use juxtaposition in order to challenge Cold War understandings of "public" and "private" essential to the separate spheres model. It is primarily concerned with three collage texts: Jess's early paste-up, The Mouse's Tale, along with two sections of Duncan's extended series "Passages," "Passage 1: Tribal Memories," and "The Architecture: Passages 9."
