Art, Domesticity, and Vonnegut’s Women

Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and stories are peopled by artists and failed utopian dreamers who try to make the world a better place, at least for a little while. Most of these artist figures are male—religious prophet and scribe Bokonon of Cat’s Cradle, who invents a new religion so that a group of downtrodden Caribbean islanders become like actors “employed full time … in a play they understood” (174-75); hapless millionaire Eliot Rosewater, who experiments with being kind to everyone he meets; abstract painter Rabo Karabekian, whose ridiculously overpriced painting of an orange stripe against a green background restores Vonnegut’s own faith in human nature; and even ubiquitous science fiction writer and Vonnegut’s alter ego Kilgore Trout, whose ludicrous stories nevertheless point out flaws in human behavior and imagine “impossibly hospitable” (God Bless You 21) new worlds. Although overlooked in most criticism of his work, Vonnegut also includes women artists and utopian dreamers in many of his stories and novels. This chapter examines Vonnegut’s depiction of these women. It argues that, along with other social issues that concern him throughout his career—war and violence, racism, environmental degradation—he is also interested in the role of women in American society, specifically in the relationship between gender issues and artistic practices.

Artists are people who say, “I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”

(Vonnegut, Timequake 162)