col49 2 pt2

[Dave Monroe]

Another interersting observation ...

--- Karen Hudes <kade at inch.com> wrote:
> 
> Her name in the book starts out with buffers around
> it--Mrs. Oedipa Maas. She's just returned from a
> tupperware party--a celebration of containment?

Not to mention of plastic.  From Jeffrey L. Meikle,
American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995), Ch. 6, "Growing Pains: The
Conversion to Postwar," pp. 153-82 ...

"Most characteristic of all was a set of bowls
marketed as Tupperware, a line of products that served
to domesticate plastic more than anything else since
nylon." (p. 180)

"Injection-molded in light, delicate colors from
translucent polyethylene, Tupperware was sold from
about 1950 onwarrd only in private homes at parties
given for friends and acquaintances by hostesses who
hoped to earn bonus prizes.  While Tupperware was one
of teh few inexpensive mass-marketed products to gain
admittance to the permanent design collection of the
Museum of Modern Art, the Tupperware party enetered
middlebrow folklore--and highbrow scholarship--as one
of the most common symbols of the time....  It was
lightweight, tough, flexible, unbreakable, and
equipped by its inventor Eral Tupper with a patented
air-tight seal ....  In a number of ways Tupperware
epitomized plastic's development during the 1950s. 
For one thing, Tupperware was no mere imitation.  It
substituted for older materials but also offered
qualities previously unattainable....  Both
thermoplastic and petroleum derivative, Tupperware was
one of those attenuated products that verged on the
disposable.  Even its method of selling, which made it
less a product than a vehicle of sociability,
suggested impermanence." (pp. 180-1)

"Tupperware's popularity signaled overall acceptance
of plastic.  Its domestic convenience reflected
aspirations for a casual life of leisure identical to
those in the promotions of the damp-cloth utopians. 
At teh same time, however, Tupperware's
acknowledgement of plastic as plastic, as a material
with its won unique appearance and texture, indicated
the beginning of a trend that continued through the
1950s and into the 1960s and beyond.  Forms taken by
plastic increasingly expressed American society's
fluidity and mobility, its acceptance of change for
its own sake,its desire for impermanence, its urge
finally to control all life by transforming it into
the whimsical or fantastic play of entertainment. 
Even plastic's imitative potential, more convincing
than ever before, often seemed less an opposing
movement than an especially outrageous instnace of
modling things to an arbitrary measure just because it
could be done....  During the last half of the
twentieth century ... its cultural significance was
contained in the words of a skeptical John Gloag, who
suggested that plastiuc should be understood as what
happens 'when the artificial becomes the real.'" (pp.
181-2)

Citing ...

Gloag, John.  "The Influence of Plastics on Design."
   Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts 91
   (July 23, 1943): 466-7.

Hyperlinks ...

http://www.tupperware.com/

http://www.tupperware.com/party/

http://www.artagogo.com/reviews/sjma/Tupperware.jpg

And see also ...

Clarke, Alison J.  Tupperware: The Promise of
   Plastic in 1950s America.  Washington, D.C.:
   Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.

But wait, there's more ...

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