It was serious time in a serious palce -- Florence, a maximum security state prison in Arizona. I landed there as I had landed in the others, by being a poor kid with too much anger and the wrong skin color" (Baca, 2001, p3)
Don't be fooled They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories" (Silko, 1977, p2)
The real-life Liu, like the fictional Korean Suzy Park, grapples with his relationship to language, but not in terms of a fluency that gives him another life and identity, but the fact that in spoken Chinese, he is not quite conversant, even though many of his relatives speak Chinese best. Even more paradoxically, despite his erudition in English (Liu is a Yale Law graduate) he is illiterate in Chinese writing
His work is explicitly informed by the Depression through its subject matter, and it is implicitly informed by the Depression through its particular stylistic approach. However, John Steinbeck's work does not fully account for the literary response to the Great Depression, because even as he was documenting some of the social causes and effects of the Depression, other writers were taking advantage of the state of flux the country found itself in order to explore themes and subject matter previously unheard of in American literature (Ahern & Sandmann 277-278)
The first of these authors, Zora Neale Hurston, published her first major anthropological work Mules and Men in 1935, just as the Federal Writer's Project was getting underway. Mules and Men is a piece of literary anthropology, and in it Hurston attempts to record the folk tales of the South, and particularly of rural blacks, "before it's too late" (Hurston 8)
By considering Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath alongside Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men and Richard Wright's Native Son, one is able to better appreciate how the legacy of the Great Depression in American Literature is not solely one of darkness, despair, and the death of the American Dream, as seen in Steinbeck's work, but also, through the work of authors like Hurston and Wright, looks forward toward the potential for a world better that the world of the Depression or even what came before. Like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, John Steinbeck participated in the Federal Writer's Project, and this is part of what gave him the freedom and support necessary to complete The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which follows Tom Joad and his family as they make their way West following the Dust Bowl, gradually realizing that opportunity promised them by optimistic handbills is nothing more than an illusion (Steinbeck 147)
As Soviet policies embedded themselves in every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives, and communism represented a questioning of not only the visible political constructs of America, but also the economic, religious, and social ones, Americans soon realized that the political actually permeated everything about American society. The American response to communism was spastic and reactionary, as leaders attempted to rebut the central ideological attacks of communism simply by stepping up their blind devotion to their own in "a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres" (Adams 250)
In effect, the latter two stories demonstrate the farcical extremes to which consumerism and the fear of death replace all other meaning in postmodern America. In "Neighbors," Bill and Arlene Miller only really talk about themselves "in comparison with the lives of their neighbors, Harriet and Jim Stone," and are given the opportunity to forego comparison in favor of embodiment when they watch over the Stone's apartment (Carver 9)
John Updike's Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, is the earliest text to be considered here, and offers a basis around which to orient the following discussion of postmodern, Cold War texts, because its narrative exists superliminally, bridging the gap between what can be considered the relative "blissful ignorance" of the decade immediately following World War II and the active, angry, disillusionment of the 1960s and beyond. In "John Updike's Rabbit, Run: A Quest for Spiritual Vocabulary in the Vacuum Left by Modernism," author David Fekete argues that "the protagonist, Harry Angstrom [the titular Rabbit], flounders with feelings of spirituality that his culture cannot sustain" (Fekete 25)
" The futility of these struggles is demonstrated by the main character's inability to escape their gender roles, even as those roles are mutated in the laboratory of suburban America. According to Michael Moreno is his essay "Consuming the Frontier Illusion: The Construction of Suburban Masculinity in Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road," the shift "between the waning era of manual industry and the emerging computer age" during the emerging Cold War precipitated a "transformation [that] firmly reifies, rather than revolutionizes, gender roles in the domestic sphere and, in the process, re-manufactures the suburban male from the "GI Joe" image of masculinity to an emasculated body, an anonymous, gray-flanneled consumer" (Moreno 85)
Bill Mullen identifies this total acquiescence to envy and consumerism as a result of television's dominance in American culture at the time, and "finds that some of the effects […] are feelings of emotional distance from events in one's own life, absence of critical reflection or thinking fostered by television's static immediacy, and a general feeling of powerlessness." This plays out in the characters' lives as "an absence of both self-awareness and class consciousness, induced and compounded by a longing to merge into the generic (middle class) needs and desires that television targets as its demographically broad-based 'audience'" (Mullen 102)
According to Matthew Packer, "Babette's desire for the mysterious drug Dylar, Murray's desire to be Jack, the latter's urge to redeem his self-image, and Mr. Gray's obsession with Babette-all feed into one another, each character necessarily responding artfully to the others" so that the narrative itself represents a kind of new normal, an unbroken chain of desire and yearning formed out of the remnants of modernity and the social mores of a previous era (Packer 652)
Before looking at each of the narratives in further detail, it will useful to examine how the social upheavals of the 1960s precipitated a dramatic shift in cultural production, and more specifically, the literature of the subsequent years. In the essay "Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics," author Michael Rothberg sees the 1960s as the site of a revolution "that represent[s a] novel development" in the history of American politics "rather than [a] return to important topics or rescaled geographies" (Rothberg 301)
As "her breasts are used without shame, [as] tools like her hands" by the baby, Janice is drained of her agency and meaning, to the point that she breaks down crying, exclaiming "I'm dry. I just don't have anything to feed her" (Updike 195, 203)
Whereas Janice's pregnancy offers at least a temporary bridge between the two protagonists, April's pregnancy in Revolutionary Road serves to disrupt her and her husband's plans, effectively acting as one more outdated tie to an earlier conception of America, inescapable but revealed as repressive and horrible in the new, politicized America. When John, the Wheeler's unstable but incisive neighbor confronts them over their decision not to move to Paris, he asks "little woman decide she isn't quite ready to quit playing house?" (Yates 301)
But that potential had to be unlocked or cultivated. A man had to either retreat to nature to observe the wonderment of life (Thoreau) or engage in intellectual pursuits or meta-cognitive exercises (Emerson) to transcend his humble beginnings and low station in the world
But that potential had to be unlocked or cultivated. A man had to either retreat to nature to observe the wonderment of life (Thoreau) or engage in intellectual pursuits or meta-cognitive exercises (Emerson) to transcend his humble beginnings and low station in the world
That is because the "active soul" does not require financial success to be activated. Rather, it requires a belief in the self (Sealts)
There are a number of slaves in this section who are servants to their own brothers and sisters; whose fathers have robbed them not simply of liberty but of the right of being well born. Do you think these things will last forever? (Harper)
Whereas before the existence of her son and daughter Linda desired to escape to the North and distance herself from the repressive, reprehensible chattel slavery of the South, her priorities are irrevocably altered after she engenders life, which the following quotation suitably demonstrates. My friends feared I should become a cripple for life; and I was so weary of my long imprisonment that, had it not been for the hope of serving my children I should have been thankful to die; but for their sakes, I was willing to bear on (Jacobs 140)