Elizabeth Builds a Laboratory at Home

Elizabeth Builds a Laboratory at Home is the transformation of Elizabeth’s kitchen into a working scientific space after Hastings moves to dismiss her for being pregnant and unmarried. What begins at two in the morning with a sledgehammer ends, four months later, in a laboratory fitted with sinks, steel counters, burners, and a fume hood. The project converts a domestic room into a place for research, while making visible the resourcefulness required when institutional science excludes her.

Causes and Beginning

The immediate background is Elizabeth’s dismissal from Hastings. Miss Frask invokes the institute’s code of conduct and tells Elizabeth to sign a paper and clear out her desk. Elizabeth challenges the unequal rule directly: she is being fired because she is pregnant and unmarried, and asks what will happen to the man involved. The exchange establishes the pressure that precedes the laboratory’s construction: her scientific work has been displaced not by a lack of ability, but by an institution’s standards for women’s private lives.

About three months after Calvin’s death, Six-Thirty finds Elizabeth awake in the kitchen at two in the morning. She is wearing a nightgown and galoshes, all the lights are on, and she is holding a sledgehammer. She swings it into a wall of cupboards, pauses to assess the damage, and swings again. For two more hours, she demolishes the kitchen, attacking hinges and nails with care as the old floor fills with boards and hardware. Six-Thirty watches from beneath the table. When the destruction is done, Elizabeth carries the debris into the backyard in the dark. The force of the scene is also practical: the familiar kitchen must first be dismantled before it can serve a different purpose.

Planning and Construction

The demolition gives way quickly to planning. By eight in the morning, Elizabeth has sketched a rough design; by ten, she has made a shopping list; by eleven, she and Six-Thirty are driving to the lumberyard. Materials arrive later that day. Using a set of Popular Mechanics magazines borrowed from the library, she starts building. The sequence is brisk, but the work is not presented as effortless: she has to plan, obtain materials, and make a functioning space from what she can get.

Over the next four months, the kitchen changes room by room. Shelves running its length hold chemicals, flasks, beakers, pipettes, siphon bottles, empty mayonnaise jars, litmus paper, medicine droppers, and glass rods. The assortment mixes laboratory equipment with ordinary or improvised materials. A garden hose and discarded tubing from an alley behind a local phlebotomy lab join the supplies; a used centrifuge and a cut-up window screen repurposed as wire flats add further equipment. Utensil drawers now contain acid- and puncture-resistant mitts and goggles, and metal pans beneath the burners are intended to aid alcohol denaturation.

Several familiar objects are altered for new uses. Elizabeth empties her favorite perfume bottle to make an alcohol burner, cuts up a lipstick container, and fits it into the cork of Calvin’s old thermos to create a stopper. Wire hangers become test-tube holders, while a spice rack becomes a suspension structure for liquids. These details show the laboratory not as a complete professional installation delivered ready-made, but as a working arrangement assembled through careful reuse and adaptation.

The Finished Laboratory and Six-Thirty’s Role

The old Formica counter and ceramic sink are removed. Elizabeth makes a plywood template, takes it in pieces to a metal fabrication company, and has it turned into a fitted stainless-steel countertop. On the finished surface sit a microscope and two used Bunsen burners. One burner comes from Cambridge, which had given it to Calvin as a memento of his time there; the other comes from a high-school chemistry laboratory shedding equipment because of a lack of student interest. Above the new double sinks, two hand-lettered signs distinguish WASTE ONLY from H2O SOURCE.

The last major installation is the fume hood. Elizabeth assigns Six-Thirty a specific part in making it usable: when her hands are full, he must pull a chain, and he must also learn to press a large button. His contribution is practical rather than incidental; the laboratory’s operation depends in part on him responding to her instructions. The finished room is the result of four months’ construction and a partnership in which Elizabeth designs and builds while Six-Thirty assists.

Significance

The completed laboratory reverses the meaning of the kitchen. A room associated with domestic work becomes a place equipped for chemical research, without Elizabeth having to abandon the tools or materials available to her there. The transformation does not erase the circumstances that made it necessary: Hastings has pushed her out, and the equipment is used, salvaged, improvised, or repurposed. Instead, those constraints become part of the laboratory’s form.

The scene also links grief and construction without reducing the building to a simple recovery. Elizabeth begins by destroying the cupboards, then moves almost immediately into measuring, shopping, and making. The sequence turns a forceful rupture in domestic space into sustained, exacting work. By the time the laboratory is complete, the kitchen’s former fittings have given way to steel counters, laboratory supplies, and a hood that requires its own operating procedure. Elizabeth’s scientific practice has a home again, made tangible through the labor of building it.