Femme Maison (House Woman)

One Book One Northwestern, 2023–24

In Femme-Maison, translated literally as “House Woman” and alluding to the term “housewife,” the artist Louise Bourgeois represents a lone female figure whose bottom half is nude and upper half is an architectural structure. The home is large and complex—multi-storied with arches and stairways—and the figure has a confident stance, waving at the viewer. But it feels limiting that the upper body and head—the space of a person’s interior thoughts and feelings—have become a house. One reading suggests that the woman’s identity is subsumed by her role as homemaker.

The work is part of a series that Bourgeois, who often used her own biography as a starting point, began in the 1940s when she moved to the United States from France and was balancing being an artist and raising three young children. In the memoir Crying in H Mart, Zauner attempts to reconcile her mother’s life path with her own, wondering if she may have wanted more or was content with her domestic life. She writes, “That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and how much I had taken mine for granted.”