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Starting Out from Home / 33riage with conditions actually existing in many Middletown homes . . . The husbandmust “support” his family, but, as pointed out above, recurrent “hard times” makesupport of their families periodically impossible for many workers; the wife mustmake a home for her husband and care for her children, but she is increasinglyspending her days in gainful employment outside the home; husband and wife mustcleave to each other in the sex relation, but fear of pregnancy frequently makes thisrelation a dread for one or both of them; affection between the two is regarded asthe basis of marriage, but sometimes in the day-after-day struggles this seems to bea memory rather than a present help. 7Despite the growing acknowledgment of marital unhappiness and failure,neither changing standards of living nor the permissiveness of the roaringtwenties did much to weaken the American belief in the mythology of the family.Nor, according to historian James Patterson, did the 1930s shake the foundationsof the myth: “The depression years, far from promoting sexual liberationor economic feminism, sustained traditional beliefs in the father as headof the household.” 8 Platitudes such as “a man’s home is his castle” and “awoman’s place is in the home” were reinforced by the rapidly growing advertisingindustry, which convinced the public that the family ideal could bereached through the purchase of the appropriate consumer products. 9 Even if,as the Lynds argued, a happy, supportive family life was never more than amyth sustained through advertising, the ideal has nonetheless been so ingrainedin the American mind that negative depictions have been virtually absentin painting. Rejecting the myth of the family as a haven from the pressuresof the public realm, Neel devised an artistic counterpart to sociology’s empiricalmethodology, with its reliance on transcribed interviews and analysis ofdata gathered ƒrst-hand. 10 Her 1969 portrait of Helen Lynd can thus be considereda tribute from one “pioneer” to another (ƒg. 18).If the subject matter of The Family is unusual in American painting, its format,where the „oors of the house are like the various registers of a comic strip,is equally exceptional. Of course, the use of the rectangular canvas to createthe appearance of looking into a single room is a standard one in realist painting,particularly in family portraiture. However, the convention of the cutawayhouse is found only in low art sources: popular lithographs, children’sbooks, satirical cartoons, and comic strips such as Winsor McCay’s “LittleNemo in Slumberland.” The Family is the ƒrst instance of Neel’s use of popularart in general, and the tradition of satirical caricature in particular, not simplyas a device to capture personality, but to signal that the work is a critique. 11The pedigree of the trope of the cut-away house as a metaphor in artisticsatire for both family and society can be traced as far back as the nineteenthcentury, however. An explicit connection between the „oors of a house and so-