1. Klassen 1
Corinn Klassen
ENGL 3311
Dr. Zink
10/15/2016
The Housewife ISA
This one hits close to home, having established that I myself am a housewife and tend to
enjoy fitting into some of the characteristics I will describe that fit into the ideological state
apparatus of the general, every day, American housewife. When one first pictures a housewife,
the typical 1950s “perfect housewife” symbol would probably be the first image to pop into our
heads. Now, if one were to take that image and apply it to Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat
Death of the Universe,” it would correspond quite well to the main character of the story, Sarah
Boyle. Sarah is a mother and scientist who is trying to fit into the prescriptive housewife role,
even as it slowly breaks her down in inner turmoil. Her character can be explained through the
use of Louis Althusser’s theory of the ideological state apparatus, and the Marxist theory of the
dialectic and dialectical materialism. The first, referred to as an ISA, is a system of beliefs
designed to influence the affected person by way of certain ideologies impressed on them
throughout their lives. Some of these include but are not limited to the church ISA, the
educational ISA, the political ISA, and what our character, Sarah, is caught up in, the family
ISA. She is also affected by the dialectic—that is, the struggle between the classes and their
interposing ideologies—which causes her to try to maintain the ideology instilled in her of the
characteristics of how the perfect housewife should be. Dialectical materialism is evident in
Sarah Boyle’s obsession with the material objects around her house, giving proof to a certain
degree of commodity fetish. In these various ways, Zoline succeeds in expressing the housewife
ISA in a Marxist reading of her character, Sarah Boyle.

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“Heat Death of the Universe” is formatted throughout as if it were a scientific manual of
sorts, describing details of Boyle’s life as they come up seemingly in her mind, and numbered as
if they were steps. In one of the early “steps” in the story, specifically step number four, the
dialectical materialism is seen in Sarah’s life through her children and their demand for their
breakfast cereal, which represents a commodity of sorts. She scrutinizes the cereal box, saying
“The box blatts promises. Energy, Nature’s Own Goodness, an endless pubescence” and “Three
offers on one cereal box. To Sarah Boyle this seems to be oversell. Perhaps something is terribly
wrong with the cereal and it must be sold quickly, got off the shelves before the news breaks.
Perhaps it causes a special, cruel cancer in little children” (Zoline 3). To Boyle the cereal is
blatant in its reinforcement of the commodity fetish in society, in which commodities provoke
the desire for more commodities. One box of cereal promises more prizes and more rewards to
buying further boxes and so on. More examples of this occur a little later on in this story,
specifically step 26, when Sarah is obsessing over the objects in the room and reveals that she
has counted every one for a total of 819 (Zoline 7). This expresses evidence of Marx’s theory of
economic determinism in that, Sarah’s fixation with the objects in her home, as she cleans them
daily and refers to them continually, represents the idea that the need or want for objects, or
commodities, stands at the base in the infrastructure of society, therefore driving the person
affected to act a certain way unconsciously. In the case of this story, material objects not only
ground Sarah in a “housewife” frame of mind through encouraging her to continue purchasing
them; in addition, through her obsession with them, it seems she also finds stability in their being
there. It must be remembered that she has every object in her house numbered (819), but cannot
remember the number of her children.

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The ideological state apparatus that controls Sarah’s life is what controls her to believe
she must act in such a way that is befitting to a housewife and mother: cleaning every day;
throwing birthday parties; and serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These all entail actions
which she does not seem to relish doing, in fact, Zoline gives the impression as the story
continues that Sarah Boyle is barely holding on to her sanity the further she continues employing
herself in what she deems meaningless housewife activities. In step 14, Boyle is cleaning her
house for the second time in the story, and reads to herself various notes she has written to
herself and taped up on the walls. One of these notes reads, “’Many young wives feel trapped. It
is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between
changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns’” (Zoline 4).
This demonstrates how she is seeking science to explain the phenomena of her unhappiness,
despite the fact that the society around her is telling her: “Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and
intelligent young wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud of her growing
family which keeps her busy and happy around the house” (Zoline 3). Boyle is a kind of
representation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics—that is, the law of entropy—in that she
seems to be increasing continuously in pressure as the story moves forward until she finally
mentally breaks down in the end. She demonstrates this when she looks in the mirror and finds a
wrinkle, which she marks on a piece of paper as “Face Lines and Other Intimations of Mortality”
(Zoline 8). Another example of this progression toward explosion occurs when she has gone to
the grocery store to pick up supplies for the birthday party. She purchases a superfluous amount
of items, including one of every cleaning product in every size she can find. Not only is this
evidence of a certain degree of psychopathic behavior, it is also more evidence for Boyle’s

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obsession with the obtainment of commodities—a seeming result of the housewife ISA instilled
in her from youth.
For another example of the ideological state apparatus that controls Boyle, it will be
helpful to look at her character in the broader light of Marxism. Boyle is under the influence of a
certain degree of false consciousness—that is, the degree to which an established belief system
causes one to act unconsciously against their own interest—by which she is acting against her
own interest in trying to follow the set system of principles enacting out her housewife role. She
persists in this false consciousness ideal until the duties that she feels so oppressed by lead her to
a kind of nervous breakdown. By continuing on in this role against her own better judgment, she
is enforcing the role that society’s oppression of expectation puts on her, rather than breaking
against the mold through a form of what Marxists would call relative autonomy. Relative
autonomy could be described as the degree to which one deviates from the dominant ideology, in
which case, if Boyle were to persist against the housewife ISA instilled in her, she would retain a
certain amount of individuality, but only in so much as the “prepackaged set of options “ (Parker
234) of interpellation would allow in her. If interpellation can be defined as the apathetic falling
continuation of a person’s mind toward the popular train of thought, then Boyle is, in more ways
than one, evidence of the Law of Entropy.
In conclusion, by reading through a Marxist lens, Zoline’s “Heat Death of the Universe”
opens up as an excellent example of the peculiarities of the class systems, and the popular
ideology in society, which Marxism seeks to explain by way of certain concepts. Some of these
concepts include the dialectic and dialectical materialism, which entail the conflict between the
classes and their opposing ideologies, and explain Boyle’s obsession with material goods.
Another one of these concepts is that of ideological state apparatuses, which describes a set of

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behaviorisms prescribed by certain institutions; for example, the institution of how a family
should interact or how a housewife should run her home. The character of Sarah Boyle is
evidence of this in her actions as a housewife and mother who is performing against the better
interests of her mind, the same way in which the proletariat acts against their better interest
because of the ideologies they have unconsciously accepted.

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Works Cited
Zoline, Pamela. “The Heat Death of the Universe.” N.p., 1967. PDF file.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays. France: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Marxists.org. Web. 14 Oct. 2016.
Parker, Robert. How to Interpret Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print.