In Articulating his artistic objectives for his fiction, V. S. Naipaul speaks in a 1994 interview about “delivering truth” and a “form of reality” (Hussein, 154). While he seems to be speaking about an idea of reality he shares with his readers, he is really only indicating his own subjective confidence about the significance of what he has created. He does not share a frame of reference about his Trinidad or Central Africa settings with many of his readers (especially his American readers), nor does he have any reason to assume that his novels will be accepted as culturally authoritative. Naipaul includes in his recipe for “pinning down reality (Hussein, 155) the search for and invention of the most revealing narrative. But again here he does not seem to be referring to a familiar pattern of events concerning a familiar world – for this he pejoratively designates the term “plot” and applies it to the stories of television dramas and “blockbuster” novelists. His means for exploring new strata of experience, on the other hand, is “narrative,” the formal orchestration of events in order to excavate and dramatize the most significant elements residing in his material (Hussein, 154–55; Schiff, 148).

Literary and Cultural Theorist Terry Eagleton argues that “the aesthetic” was from its very inception a development toward a representation of human subjectivity. For Eagleton, the discourse of aesthetics assigned the body to “a subtly oppressive law … a specious form of universalism … [that] blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards … community.” The aesthetic became a “coercion to hegemony,” by informing and regulating sensuous life while at the same time allowing for what seemed like a prospering autonomy. For Eagleton, aesthetics is not ultimately concerned with art objects but with the project of “reconstructing the human subject from the inside.” Autonomy, as it has been described by many theories of the aesthetic, becomes for many a desirable model of independent subjectivity and individual subjective experience. Even though aesthetics works on the subject “from the inside,” as Eagleton writes, it does so through material means. Architecture, art theory, and curatorial practices provide other instances of what Eagleton describes as “apparatuses” of power in the cultural field. One of the things I want to suggest is that cultural practices represent possibilities for subjectivity. Critical, architectural, and museological representations seem to concern artistic production, but also function as subtle suggestions about what it means to be human. These practices work to affect the formation of subjects by attempting to limit and pre-scribe the possibilities for subjectivity. Joel Fineman has similarly argued that subjectivity is constructed from “subjectivity effects” that are in turn produced in a web of discourses. One of Fineman's primary concerns is for how rhetoric can be used to establish compelling and realistic representations of subjectivity, while providing evidence of the artificial nature of the subject at the same time.

The Provision of improved facilities for women in domestic space and their increased participation in the design process were material aspects of the Modern movement in architecture. While initially directed toward the provision of improved conditions for lower-income families, the main outcome would occur in postwar middle-class housing, particularly in North America. This outcome was associated with a renewal of conservative suburbanization and populist capitalism. The consequences of these design and socioeconomic practices – especially as demonstrated in that significant liminal space between theorized professional production and anecdotal public consumption – for the reinscription of women's presence in domestic space was therefore of considerable import. Scholarly attention has concentrated on the architectural consequences of revised gender relations and on the activity of women designers and architectural writers. This essay seeks to advance discussion of those consequences and activities by means of a situated approach that is centered on a multivalent analysis of the supposed inscription and representation of the modern woman in the Modernist suburban home. The site is the rapidly expanding but physically, socioeconomically, and culturally discreet North Shore area of Vancouver, 1945–65. The location typifies the resuscitation of the middle-class suburb through what might be termed Automod-ernism. The extension of North American trends such as the individual family automobile and home ownership reinforced by laborsaving appliances became a distinct phenomenon of the Modern movement. The time frame corresponds with the postwar baby boom and sustained economic and demographic growth, when child rearing generally kept women, especially of middle-income families, mostly at home.