The torment of Sisyphus

The torment of Sisyphus names the housewife’s exhausting cycle of work that must be repeated as soon as it is finished. In this account, the comparison makes domestic labor legible not as a sequence of completed achievements but as a struggle that renews itself every day, leaving its worker without a final sense of conquest.

The Cycle of Housework

The passage opens with Mrs. G., who says through tears that she hates the house because nothing she can do will make it pretty. Her despair gives a particular voice to the recurrent fatigue shared by women whose work never secures a lasting victory: even in privileged circumstances, the result cannot be final. Dishes must be washed, furniture dusted, and clothes mended, only for them to become dirty, dusty, and torn again. The comparison to Sisyphus turns this recurrence into the passage’s governing image. The housewife runs on the spot: she perpetuates the present rather than gaining a positive good, struggling against what the text calls evil in an effort that begins again the next day. A valet’s refusal to polish his master’s boots sharpens the point. His question about the use of work that must immediately be repeated applies with particular force to the housewife’s daily tasks.

A Girl Recognizes the Future

The passage then shifts from Mrs. G.’s expressed frustration to the discouragement of young girls who already anticipate the cycle. It recalls an essay by a sixteen-year-old student that begins on housecleaning day, with the sound of her mother’s vacuum in the living room. The girl wants to run away and vows that, when grown, she will never have a housecleaning day in her own home. That resolve meets a deeper recognition in the kitchen. Seeing her mother wash dishes, the girl understands that the same hands have returned to greasy water and china every afternoon over the years. The realization changes how the future appears: instead of an ascent toward an unknown summit, time stretches horizontally, each day resembling the last. The housework metaphor thus links an ordinary household routine to a larger sense of labor without culmination, and to a child’s early awareness of the life that routine may impose.