Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature 1945-1955

By
in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2010
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the uncanny in literature produced in America during the first
decade following World War II. The period between 1945 and 1955 was marked by
repressive socio-political forces such as McCarthyism and cultural conformity which
complicated the representation of what Philip Roth refers to as “demonic reality.” I
explore the ways in which the avoidance and minimisation of the unpleasant created a
highly circumscribed version of postwar American life while also generating a sense
of objectless anxiety.
According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, repression inevitably stages a return
registered as the “uncanny.” Animism, magic, the omnipotence of thoughts, the
castration complex, death, the double, madness, involuntary repetition compulsion,
live burial and haunting are all deemed capable of provoking a particular anxiety
connected to what lies beneath the surface of accepted reality. Although it is common
to argue that fantasy genres such as science fiction and gothic represent the return of
what is repressed, this thesis explores several realist novels displaying uncanny
characteristics. The realist novels included here are uncanny not only because they
depict weird automaton-like characters, haunting, and castration anxieties, thus
exhibiting a conscious use of Freudian theory, but because the texts themselves act as
the return of the repressed. Norman Mailer referred to this unsettling phenomenon
when he described writing as the “spooky” art; spooky because although a writer
might sit down to consciously write a particular story, another unwilled story might
very well appear.
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Acknowledgements
My most heartfelt thanks go to my supervisors Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson
whose tireless efforts in reading innumerable drafts, offering suggestions and editing
manuscripts was only matched by their generous willingness to provide letters of
support for financial assistance and job opportunities. Over the four years it has taken
to complete my MA and PhD, they have never once failed to make time for me,
regardless of the significant demands posed to them by teaching, research and family.
Their expertise and intelligence has been invaluable; so too has their encouragement
and humour - I doubt that other postgraduate students enjoy such lively supervisor
meetings! The best parts of this study must be attributed to their insight and support,
while any deficiencies are entirely my own.
I would also like to thank the staff in the School of English, Film, Theatre and
Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, particularly Harry Ricketts, who
took time from his busy schedule to share his expertise in the poetry of World War I,
and Mark Williams, whose advice was eagerly sought and generously given. His
cheery “Good Morning” at the start of each day was much appreciated. Thanks to
Helen OSullivan, who patiently guided me through various administrative duties and
never once laughed at my inability to work the fax machine. Special thanks go to
Peter Whiteford, who kindly took the time to advise me on writing a curriculum vitae
and who was nothing but encouraging during the fraught process of looking for
employment.
My studies were generous funded by Victoria University of Wellington, both
through a PhD Scholarship and faculty funding enabling me to conduct research in
Auckland, Sydney and New York. The New Zealand Education Postgraduate Study
Abroad Award enabled me to deliver a paper based on my research at the 2008
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Australian and New Zealand Association of American Studies, which was an
invaluable experience. I am extremely grateful to the J.L. and Kathleen Stewart
Postgraduate Research Experience Travel Award, which allowed me to conduct
research at New York Public Librarys Berg Collection. This award enabled me to
access manuscripts and unpublished letters, primary resources I would not have been
able to utilise without financial support.
There are of course innumerable other people who assist in various ways over the
period it takes to complete a PhD thesis. I am particularly indebted to Eluned
Summers-Bremner at the University of Auckland, who generously allowed a perfect
stranger to attend one of her graduate workshops on post-World War II British fiction.
Her class provided me with valuable insight as to what was occurring in Britain
during the period I was focusing on in American literature and her continuing
mentorship has been invaluable. Thanks also to Richard Nicholson at the University
of Auckland who organised the opportunity for me to deliver a seminar to the Faculty
of Arts based on my research. I am particularly grateful to Anne Garner at the New
York Public Librarys Berg Collection whose suggestions as to what papers to look at
during my period of research at the collection proved very fruitful.
Lastly, thanks always to my mother Pamela Mercer, whose care packages and
unwavering support are the foundation of everything I do, and to Zhenya, whose
name is always last on the list and first in my heart. Your love and light make forays
into darkness possible, so this is for you.
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Contents
Introduction Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Postwar Uncanny 1 - 49 Chapter One Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead 50 - 82 Chapter Two Haunting and Race: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 83 - 120 Chapter Three The Sacred Other: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood 121 - 155 Chapter Four The Dubious Double: Saul Bellow’s The Victim 156 - 194 Chapter Five The Familiar Made Strange: Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky 195 - 226 Chapter Six Repression and Confession: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road 227 - 246
Conclusion The Concealment that Fails to Conceal 247 - 259 Works Cited 260 - 292
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Repression, Return, and the Postwar Uncanny
Repression: c. Psychol. The action, process, or result of suppressing into the
unconscious or keeping out of the conscious mind unacceptable memories or
desires.
During the first decade following 1945, America was dealing with the effects of a war
with a casualty toll of an estimated fifty million people, as well as grappling with a
new Cold War reality that threatened complete annihilation, yet even the most cursory
glance over literature produced between 1945 and 1955 reveals a widespread
avoidance of what Philip Roth terms “demonic reality” (Reading Myself 90). While
there is little reason to expect Americans to write novels about the actual war, given
that conflict occurred at a distance and that information regarding the personal impact
of the Holocaust and the bomb was so difficult to obtain, it is reasonable to expect
writers of realism to engage with a postwar reality quite different than that of previous
decades. The end of World War II might have been the start of an invigorated literary
tradition, such as occurred following the First World War, but this was not to be the
case. Early war novels such as James Gould Cozzens Guard of Honor (1948) and
Herman Wouks The Caine Mutiny (1950) studiously avoid both the Holocaust and
the atomic bomb, even managing in many cases to completely avoid depictions of
combat, and popular novels such as The Hucksters (1946) and The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit (1955) purport to deal with the new difficulties facing the postwar
American, but imply that the most pressing threat to existence is conformity and
corporatisation. One critic disappointedly observed that “Since 1945, when all signs
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pointed to a literary revival comparable to that after World War I, our literature has
actually been in a state of decline” (Geismar 53).
Although some critics were vocal in registering their discontent with a literature
that seemed banal and lifeless when compared with that of recent decades, this
banality was not linked to the exclusion of disturbing subject matter. In fact, critics
frequently expressed gratitude at the avoidance of disturbing material. In a 1952
review of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man, Irving Howe describes the famous battle
royal scene and then reassures the reader that “Nothing, fortunately, in the rest of the
novel is quite so harrowing” (454). As Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann point out
that “there can be little doubt that the social and cultural effects of the mass
experience of violence and death during the 1940s were profound and colored all
aspects of life during the postwar decades, even when this was not necessarily
articulated explicitly”, but what these effects actually were and what constitutes the
connections between the violence of the 1940s and the normality of the 1950s remains
“extremely speculative” (7).
The first four decades of the twentieth century saw American culture far more
willing to acknowledge the more disquieting aspects of modern life. Literature from
the 1890s was marked by social protest, particularly in the works of naturalist writers
such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, and later writers such as Sinclair Lewis,
John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. Lewis novel Main Street (1920), Steinbecks
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Clifford Odetss play Waiting for Lefty (1935) are all
examples of early twentieth century American literature engaged with social
inequality, economic disparity and the need for reform. Difficult economic conditions
following the First World War and intellectual currents such as Freudian psychology
and Marxism contributed to the breakdown of traditional values and young Americans
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of the 1920s were deemed “the lost generation.” One result of the turbulence of these
years was a rich literary movement spearheaded by writers such as William Faulkner,
T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and
the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
The very richness of American literature produced before World War II only
served to highlight the failings of novels written in its aftermath. American fiction
since World War II, according to R.W.B. Lewis, “has been rich enough in quantity,
but its quality has been somewhat puzzling and contradictory” (144). There have been
many novels of “clear artistic competence”, but despite using the war as a marker of a
new era and referring to a writer known for his writing on the first global conflict,
Lewis was unable to explain the absence of “the decisive power of a Faulkner, or a
Hemingway, or even a Scott Fitzgerald” (144). Postwar literature was defined as
“superior entertainment best embodied in the New Yorker school of writers; writers
who are always leading up to something that never happens” (Geismar 54). Edmund
Wilson was especially dismissive, saving his most biting comments for bestsellers
such as The Turquoise (1946), the crudity of which “has not even the rankness of the
juicier trash” (318). Jack Kerouac summed up the situation in a 1951 letter to Alfred
Kazin by stating that “fiction is become FETID.”
Although the vitality of writing by the Lost Generation was frequently linked to
World War I, and although critics seemed dimly aware of the “something that never
happens” (Geismar 54) in American writing following World War II, no one appears
to have pointed to an avoidance of the unpleasant aspects of a postwar reality for the
eras literary banality. John Aldridge came close when he pointed out that “the novels
of this war simply do not have the impact that those of the first war had – nor, for that
matter, do the novels that have been written so far about the aftermath” (“Search for
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Values” 42). He suggested it is “as if they had been written too easily and their
authors had too painless an apprenticeship” (“Search for Values” 43). Utilising
common concerns about mass production, Aldridge described the eras literature as
“machine-made,” more a “prefabricated product” than a finely wrought piece of
craftsmanship, “the sort that can be obtained if more problems are avoided than are
met and overcome” (“Search for Values” 43).
Like the majority of the eras critics, Aldridge turned away from this brief
identification of the absence of painful problems to focus on what came to be a
continually reiterated theme in literary discourse. The increasing move towards mass
culture and the perceived failure of liberalism meant that the postwar writer had
inherited what Aldridge described as “a world without values,” the engagement with
which “can never form the basis of successful literature” (Devil in the Fire 9). 1 Critics
even justified literary banality by pointing out that it was hardly the writers fault if
the materials they were obliged to work with lacked meaning. Marcus Klein
suggested that the era had “no Puritanism, no Babbitry, no Booboisie, no
Comstockery. No tyranny of ideology, no ideology at all in the proper sense, no
hollow patriotism, no evangelical Christianity. No Prohibition, and scarcely any
prohibitions, no prudery, no social complacency, no somnolent insularity” (American
Novel 13). To suggest a lack of cultural material as responsible for postwar reticence
is startlingly disingenuous given that Klein made this claim only a few years after the
Holocaust, a devastating world war, the first combat use of nuclear weapons and the
start of a cold war that threatened complete annihilation. This popular line of
reasoning saw critics ignoring “demonic reality” in favour of a version of American
life much more manageable: one that positioned bland suburban complacency as the
1 Sociologists such as Daniel Bell declared the fifties “the end of ideology.” World War II and the Cold
War were seen as discrediting both the right and the left, leaving political ideas generally exhausted.
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cause of mediocre literature rather than as another symptom of the avoidance of the
unpleasant.
Reality and War
Following the long and difficult years of global conflict Americans were naturally
eager to put it all behind them and focus on the good things in life. This was relatively
easy, for unlike Europes devastated landscape America bore little physical sign of the
conflict. With no arduous task ahead of rebuilding shattered cities and with initial
fears regarding the postwar economy soon put to rest, 2 there was little reason for
America to focus on the nightmares of the recent past and the nation settled into a
period of unparalleled prosperity in which citizens could rest secure in the knowledge
that they were both the moral victors of the war against fascism and the new global
superpower. Increased affluence meant Americans could focus on building homes,
acquiring goods and raising families. 3 The American middle-class expanded
dramatically during these years and the availability of consumer items after years of
deprivation encouraged a frenzy of materialism with newly developed credit cards put
to use purchasing cars, televisions sets and household appliances. Alan Brinkley
points out that in 1956, for the first time in American history, workers in white-collar
jobs outnumbered those in blue-collar employment; homeownership rose from 40
percent in 1945 to 60 percent in 1960; and by the end of the fifties 75 percent of all
families owned cars, 87 percent owned televisions and 75 percent owned washing
machines (66).
2 Many thought that the economic downturn after World War I would be repeated after World War II.
After a few rocky years following 1945, however, Americas economy strengthened and continued to
grow throughout the 1950s. 3 Elaine Tyler May argues that the Cold War ideology of containment and the domestic revival were
“two sides of the same coin: postwar Americans intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure
in the future” (10).
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Popular art that sprang from the “happy days” vision of postwar culture were
sunny portrayals of domestic life such as television sitcoms Leave it to Beaver and
Father Knows Best, sentimental melodramas such as Douglas Sirks Technicolor All
that Heaven Allows (1955) and humorous bestsellers such as Edward Streeters
Father of the Bride (1949). Although films and novels frequently acknowledged
anxiety, they did so by aligning uncertainty with solvable issues deemed relevant to
the period. In Frederick Wakemans bestseller The Hucksters (1946), for example, the
anxious advertising executive acknowledges “the Fear” which pervades the offices of
Wall St as well as the paranoia which sees his colleague warn, “Somebodys going to
hear you talking like that one of these days and report you. I wouldnt be surprised if
he had spies planted in the agency” (Wakeman 90), but the protagonists “dark and
gloomy” feelings about the future are alleviated when he predictably runs into the
beautiful woman whose love will facilitate his redemption. Although Vic has
witnessed “the children of that harsh parent, Europe, lose all faith in the men who led
them, the gods who once comforted them, and finally, and oh, how inevitably, in
themselves” (Wakeman 96), it only takes a few outings with Kay (who unfortunately
is married) to transform an alienated cynic into a fully engaged idealist who stands up
to the bullying Beautee soap executive and who affirms the status quo by sacrificing
his illicit love for the sake of Kays socially-sanctioned marriage. Wakemans
protagonist is rewarded with a promotion and a new sense of psychic ease, which the
reader has little doubt will facilitate a more successful domestic pairing in the near
future.
Dwight Eisenhower summed up the eras optimism in 1949 when he claimed
during a commencement address at Columbia University that there “is nothing wrong
with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens
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cannot cure.” The most popular authors of the period adhered to this outlook and were
categorised by novelist Harvey Swados as “curative” writers whose reassuring tomes
offered “aid in the quest for security” (190). Laura Z. Hobsons Gentleman’s
Agreement (1947), John P. Marquands Point of No Return (1949) and Herman
Wouks Marjorie Morningstar (1955) all admit to a certain amount of unease, but
clearly link the difficulties facing the postwar individual to acceptable social and
political issues, particularly the effects of corporatisation and conformity. 4 Richard H.
Pells observes that the primary dangers of the first postwar decade were identified as
standardisation, uniformity and the moral consequences of abundance rather than the
social inequality and economic exploitation that concerned America during the years
of the Great Depression (187). Curative novels presented acceptable anxieties in
manageable form and offered reassurance through the eventual defeat of any threat.
So while Hobsons bestseller Gentleman’s Agreement might appear to be an
engagement with the horrors of anti-Semitism, its focus is on a manageable version of
prejudice which sees Jews snubbed at parties and barred from country clubs and never
even mentions, let alone depicts, the orchestrated murder of approximately six million
European Jews. The novel presents a sanitised version of a “topical issue” and
suggests that the American version of anti-Semitism is far less troubling than that of
Europe. 5
4 Andrew Hoberek points out that by the end of World War II there were over 500, 000 fewer small
businesses than at its start and over 1,600 mergers had taken place, about one-third of which involved
corporations worth $50 million or more taking over smaller enterprises (7). 5 Deborah E. Lipstadt describes a 1953 episode of This is Your Life devoted to the story of Hanna
Kohner, a Holocaust survivor whose husband, father and mother were all killed at Auschwitz. She
settled in America with her second husband who escaped from Germany prior to the war. Lipstadt points out that this show was one of the earliest treatments by American television of the Holocaust and
its portrayal “eschewed gloom and doom and ended on a note of „good overcomes all - particularly if
that good is American in origin.” The episode ends with the hosts reassuring conclusion: “The never-
to-be-forgotten tragic experiences of your life, Hanna, have been tempered by the happiness you've
found here in…