The Clean House

Lane is frustrated because she cannot force Matilde to clean her house. Her frustration is rooted in her need for control and her desire to prevent death and change. As a doctor, Lane must make life-or-death decisions while maintaining a professional demeanor and showing just enough emotion to be compassionate. The hospital is a clean, sterile environment, its rooms sanitized, and dead bodies removed by the unseen hands of orderlies and nurses. Lane has control over the hospital environment, and as she demonstrates for Matilde, can bark orders at a subordinate if anything falls out of line. There is no room for mistakes, as a misplaced speck of dirt can become life-threatening in a hospital. There, cleaning staves off death and decay. But without a team of well-trained nurses, Lane’s home life is less easy to control. In her pristine, white house, with her white clothing and perfectly white underwear, Lane leaves no space for mistakes, spills, or messes. When Matilde won’t clean, however, and when Charles leaves the home he and Lane shared, Lane’s loss of control over her house symbolizes loss of control over her life. Dust and dirt accumulate unchecked, like Ana’s cancer.

Virginia, too, controls her life by keeping things clean, but she does the cleaning herself and only trusts spaces she can control with her own hands. Continuously cleaning is her way of preparing for the unexpectedness of death by always having her affairs in order. She seems to consider her own mortality constantly, worrying about the ways her life could spin out of control. For instance, she resigns herself to not having children (despite an obvious need to nurture) out of fear of the dangers they would face. Virginia doesn’t understand why Lane willingly spends all her time at the hospital, because she doesn’t see hospitals as sterile but as receptacles for the most offensive of human filth, such as waste, fluids, and dead bodies. She is appalled by the idea of allowing someone else to clean her house and losing control over the intimacies of her home. Virginia believes that she has more control over and better understanding of her husband because she smells and cleans his dirty clothes. This proves to be true in a sense, when Virginia notices Ana’s underwear in the laundry, a detail Lane has missed in her own house. Throughout the play, dirt and clutter are embarrassing elements to be erased and hidden, but seeing another person’s mess is also a form of intimate knowledge.

Lane and Virginia sanitize their lives and relationships, creating distance from their husbands and from each other. Since Lane pushes her away, Virginia forges an intimate relationship with her sister by secretly cleaning her house. This enrages Lane, who feels that her sister is exposing her by seeing her messes. Ana, however, is unafraid of mess and rejects the burden of keeping up appearances. She chooses a mastectomy over a less intense treatment and is less concerned with losing a breast than with withstanding a lengthy confinement in the unfriendly, antiseptic atmosphere of a hospital. Ana chooses to die at home instead of in a hospital room, where her death would be sanitized and impersonal, and she chooses to die laughing. Through Ana as well as through Matilde, Lane and Virginia learn to make messes without immediately cleaning them up and to embrace the inherent messiness of human intimacy.