Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses [Hardcover]

Marjorie Garber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2000

Sex and Real Estate is a witty, informative, and thought-provoking study of our complex relation to the ideas and actualities of house and home.

With vast erudition lightly carried, Marjorie Garber — professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University — ranges through literature, art, film, journalism, criticism, and the hard evidence of everyday experience, and gives us an acute analysis of the ways in which we think about the places we hang our hats. She discusses the House as Beloved ("Your house is the other person in your life," declares an architectural designer.), as Mother ("The house, we would like to think, loves us."), as Body ("both an ancient figure and a persistent desire"). She writes about the Dream House, the Trophy House ("We could call the purchasers of celebrity homes 'house-groupies.'"), the House as History, and the Summer House ("When you're seventeen, you dream of a summer romance. When you're forty-seven, you dream of a summer home.").

Each chapter is a superb, individually constructed essay. Taken together, they add up to an enlightening and challenging exploration of one of the most familiar — but also most emotionally charged — elements of our lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Were this book only about sex and real estate, it would quickly get dull. After all, the comparison between buying real estate and dating, while apt, doesn't merit more than the few pages devoted to it in the introduction. Fortunately, Marjorie Garber tackles much more than the title implies, delving into literature, history, cinema, and psychology in order to make sense of the fantasies and longings we project onto our homes. Chapters examine the cultural role of the house as lover, mother, body, dream, trophy, history, and escape, and range from Jane Austen to Steve Martin, the history of architecture to Puritan guilt. In her teasing and self-effacing way (Garber admits to her own house fetishes), the erudite professor gives us the history of the bathroom and analyzes the current trend of moving what was once the most hidden room of the house into the foreground (along with the kitchen, which wealthy families of the past would not have deigned to enter).

While contemplating the dream house, she looks at dreams themselves, in particular Carl Jung's famous dream of himself as a house and its image of the collective unconscious. In one of the best chapters, she explains how mother and home became conflated as part of the 19th-century idealization of domesticity. Ultimately, the idea of home as fantasy or desire is the foundation of Garber's thesis: "Home is more than a place ... it is the ground of possibility, a place of beginning and ending (or, as the poets have it, of womb and tomb). But more and more it is also a conscious fiction." As time becomes a longed-for commodity, home has become a substitute for the unlived life, the repository of our desires. Though these can never truly be satisfied, the attempt to bring our dreams to material life is a perennial one. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

Anyone who has looked, even casually, at what are called "shelter" magazines, or who has engaged in the exhausting process of buying or selling property, will have been struck by the peculiarly erotic quality of the language used to describe the houses we live in or seek to own. Perhaps prompted by her own foray into real estate, Garber, author of Symptoms of Culture and Dog Love, among many other books, applies her richly stocked scholarly imagination to a consideration of the cultural role of the house. In a series of witty essays on the "House as Mother," as "Beloved," as "Body," as "Trophy" and the like, Garber segues smoothly in the course of a page or two from Freud and Jung to Chaucer, Shakespeare and popular film, effectively elaborating her contention that the house is not just something on which we lavish our erotic or emotional attention in lieu of a more appropriate object, but is also "a primary object of affection and desire." As a professor of English at Harvard and director of its Humanity Center, Garber is an established academic. While dazzling, her erudition is not intimidating; this book is bound to prompt lively after dinner discussion and perhaps a little abashed self-recognition in the nation's suburban great rooms and downtown lofts. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (June 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375420541
• ISBN-13: 978-0375420542
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #803,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Presumptuous theories, August 4, 2000

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (Hardcover)

This series of connected essays purports to support a thesis, that for middleaged baby boomer (American, of a certain income level - let's face it) folks - the "We" of the title - real estate, specifically the house, is now in the place once reserved for sex. All the passion "we" brought to sex and love, now "we" bring to the desire for the right house. It's a glib and silly assertion, made all the more so by the annoying "We." Speak for yourself! I kept wanting to shriek.

Dr. Garber is an able writer, her eyes and ears are peeled for symbols and signs, and she can discuss her various themes wonderfully coherently, even elegantly. But she is not making sense when she attempts to pathologize (for example) communities' attempts to standardize exterior paint colors. For heaven's sakes, it's been done in Scandinavian and European countries (now democracies) for generations, with no measurable loss of the citizenry's psychic well-being.

She indulges in generalization which grate. Dr. Garber asserts that today's glossy,over-the-top shelter magazines such as Architectural Digest are today's pornography. She lists wording that anthropomorphizes real estate, as supporting evidence. This high-minded thought is evidently unknown to pornographers, who would appear to be doing a good business despite their continuing exclusion of real estate from their products. Again, one wishes that she could have personalized her assertions.

I think that a more honest subtitle for this book would have "Why I Love Houses." Were Dr. Garber to have simply written of her own passionate flights of fancy and considerable obsessions and attachments, rather than attempting to universalize them, I think she would have had a better treatise.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Gimmick by any other name..., December 28, 2000

By 

HeyJudy "heyjudy" (East Hampton, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating concept, and a marketable one as well, in light of America's current infatuation with the Edifice Complex. Considering the author's scholarly credentials, SEX AND REAL ESTATE should have been a absorbing book. "Should have" is the pivotal phrase here. No question that Garber's body of knowledge is vast--she hops all over the map with only the most tenuous connection to her thesis. Maybe she merely was showing off how much smarter she is than the average reader. While I have no doubt but that this fact is true, the book still quickly descends into boring psychobabble. Anyone seeking enlightenment is bound to be disappointed.

27 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Inane Nonsense, July 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (Hardcover)

This book is so bad, it deserves less than one star. I'm surely not alone in wondering why the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Harvard has stooped to publishing this kind of nonsense. Garber obviously thinks she's being hip in discussing "grabby" topics like "sexy" real estate, but the result is simply embarrassing and puerile--a new intellectual low for cultural studies, which in most quarters is already straining for credibility.