The kitchen has long served as more than just a functional piece of the home, developing into the household expression of technological and social progress in America since the dawn of the Cold War. The simple location of the kitchen within the home has changed over the decades, becoming more central to the architecture of homes and apartments. The kitchen is now in the middle of the home, attached to more open spaces, and designed to be a place to socialize as much as it is to prepare food. The explosion of appliances and gadgets, and the need by manufacturers to sell these items in a post-war industrialist system, greatly influenced Americans’ thinking regarding consumerism, war, and social interaction within the home and family. The reinforcement of this habitus continues today, with the stock of our kitchens not only with excess food products, but also with an increasing amount of technologically advanced accoutrements, serving as status symbols of success in a capitalist society.
Ray Bradbury offered an intricate and layered critique of technology, nuclear proliferation, and the role of family in the American home during the Cold War in his timeless piece There Will Come Soft Rains from 1950. Bradbury creates a wonderfully elaborate and technologically advanced house, standing eerily alone in what was formally an idyllic suburb destroyed by a nuclear blast. The building operates, sans the resident McClellan family, continuing to obliviously conduct its daily tasks as if nothing has changed. The kitchen is seen in this story to be a central hub of activity within the house. This is an expression by Bradbury that illustrates how an increased reliance on consumer technology can be a detriment to the fabric of the family unit.
The detailed and extensive descriptions of the kitchen and self-operating gadgets within are intended to illustrate not only the futurism of the home, but to establish that this dependence on technology has rendered these daily functions mechanical and devoid of any social interaction within the family unit. The inability of the house to feed the starving family dog while making excess food for its dead inhabitants displays how this technology is capable of performing its function, but not of caring, of providing basic nurturement. Bradbury also illustrates this as he describes a nursery in which the walls display hyper-real settings in which the children play, all fully automated, removing any parental involvement in the social developmental value of play.
To more accurately decipher the link Bradbury makes between the technology within this futuristic kitchen and its larger connections to family within a consumerist, war-ready environment, we turn to Rebecca Devers of the New York City College of Technology and her piece The Cold War Kitchen and Technology’s Displacement of Home. Devers writes of Bradbury’s short story, “The kitchen is a technological marvel, but it tortures the sick dog in disturbing ways. Ostensibly, the house has fully incorporated the modern technology that would have marked the McClellan family as successful Americans with considerable consumer power. The pushbutton automation the most modern kitchens imagined by Crosley or Nixon has not only been developed to its fullest potential but also applied to the entire house. As a result the house becomes a paean to the very science and technology that produced the bomb in the first place, and the apocalyptic balance is skewed: the space is all cataclysm and no salvation. The McClellan family dies in an atomic blast that occurs before the story begins. Their shadows are burned into the exterior wall; when the house eventually succumbs to the fire, its death reenacts, in slow motion, the incineration of the McClellan family. The death of the house becomes the death of The Home, the destruction of a family too reliant on modern mechanization and automation. Because Bradbury personifies the fire that destroys the house, the fire violently and permanently supplants the family that once rightfully lived there. In this way, Bradbury demonstrates the extent to which atomic technology, man’s ability to ‘harness the power of the sun’, has invaded our most private spaces. The fire displaces the McClellan family just as the bomb, and its accompanying technology, has displaced the traditional habitus of the American Family.”
As Devers points out this story also asks the audience to ponder a topic that held significant relevance in 1950, and sees renewed relevance in today’s geopolitical climate. How much is modern convenience worth? Bradbury did not need to set this story in an atomic wasteland to create a narrative on the ever emergent reliance of technology in the 1940s and 50s. The absence of the family in the house, the technology within, and the demise of the structure could stand alone in any setting and still accomplish a strong narrative on the role of consumerism in the home. Setting the story in the aftermath of a destructive nuclear engagement establishes an extra dimension; the connection between domestic technologies and military technologies. How the development and procurement of each are connected, a complex that began during the Second World War. Bradbury asks his audience to critically analyze the intersection between the reliance on consumer technology within the military industrial complex, effectively using the kitchen of the doomed house to illustrate its impact on the American family.
Source:
Rebecca Devers. "'You Don't Prepare Breakfast...You Launch it Like a Missile':The Cold War Kitchen and Technology's Displacement of Home." The Journal of American Popular Culture, Vol. 13, Issue 1, 2014
