約翰•契佛與戰後小說 The Suburban Dream, The American Nightmare: John Cheever and Postwar ...

121 Pages·2015·6.23 MB·English

郊夢•美國夢魘：約翰•契佛與戰後小說

The Suburban Dream, The American Nightmare: John
Cheever and Postwar Fiction
by
Nicholas Sumares 宋明達

THESIS
Presented to the Faculty of the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of
Tunghai University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS in
British and American Literature

TUNGHAI UNIVERSITY
June 2015
中 華 民 國 一 ○ 四 年 六 月
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郊夢·美國夢魘：約翰·契佛與戰後小說

The Suburban Dream, The American Nightmare: John Cheever
and Postwar Fiction

by

Nicholas Sumares 宋明達

THESIS
Presented to the Faculty of the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of
Tunghai University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS in
British and American Literature

TUNGHAI UNIVERSITY
June 2015
中 華 民 國 一 ○ 四 年 六 月
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Abstract
The suburban fiction found in John Cheever’s short story collections The
Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), Some Places People and Things That Will Not Appear in
My Next Novel (1961), and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964) presents readers with
characters who struggle to come to grips with their lives in the suburbs of postwar America.
This thesis will show how these struggles are related to two strongly conflicting ideologies
within American culture. It will be shown that these conflicts lie between, firstly, the notion
of individuality and the ability to “be whatever you want to be” in America based upon
idealized notions of the American Dream and, secondly, the stifling conformity and
exclusivity found within American suburbia and its ideology rooted in American capitalism
and the mass market – the seeming endpoint to the American Dream.
John Cheever’s final novel — Bullet Park (1969) — dealing directly with the suburbs,
takes the ideas he has written about previously, and extends them by presenting two
protagonists who are two extreme representations of the two conflicting American Dream
ideologies. The novel will be offered up as his attempt to warn of the inert, yet destructive,
endpoint to the clash between these two conflicting ideologies in American suburbia.

“約翰·齊弗”的郊區小說描述的是戰後美國郊區中產階級的生活奮鬥。本論
文將顯示這些奮鬥和美國文化裏強烈衝突意識形態有關。這衝突來自兩方面。第一，
每個人都是獨立個體的概念，以及從無定形的美國夢發展出來，在美國你可以成為任
何你想成為的人的想法；第二，在美國郊區可以看到令人鬱悶的一致性和排外性，其
意識形態似乎就是美國夢的終點。 約翰·齊弗最後的一本小説子彈公園（1969）直
接針對郊區，沿用他之前寫過的東西並加以延伸。這本小説會被呈現當成他對兩個矛
盾意識形態的衝突帶來呆滯具毀滅性終點的警告。
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Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank Dr. John Shufelt, who was willing to be my supervisor not once,
but twice during my years at Tunghai University. You have provided me with great
encouragement and support.
I also want to extend my appreciation to all my other literature lecturers at Tunghai
University during both my undergraduate and graduate studies. In particular Dr. Mieke
Desmet, Dr. David Decker, Dr. Thomas Argiro, Dr. Henk Vynckier, Dr. Chi-chang Tsai, and
Dr. Shuchin Lin. You have all inspired me and greatly expanded both my knowledge and
love for literature.
Thank you to Shannon Tsai for translating my abstract, to Nancy Chao for getting me library
books, and to Sabina Tseng for assisting with the printing of my thesis. You are all such
wonderful and helpful friends.
Finally, to my husband Craig, you knew I was capable of this even before I was. Thank you
for being the one person in this world who sees and understands me. I love you.
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Table of Contents
Abstract
 ..............................................................................................................................................
 4

Acknowledgements
 ..........................................................................................................................
 5

Introduction
 ......................................................................................................................................
 7

Chapter One: The Suburban Dream
 ..........................................................................................
 15

Chapter Two: The American Nightmare
 ...................................................................................
 47

Chapter Three: The Cheever Reality
 ..........................................................................................
 78

Conclusion
 ....................................................................................................................................
 114

Works Cited
 .................................................................................................................................
 118
Introduction

With the rise of the middle class American suburb after the Second World War there
was also an increase in fiction set in the suburbs. The most widely-read works engaged with
suburban life just after World War II at the beginning of suburbanization were Sloan
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Richard Yate’s Revolutionary Road
(1961). Few writers, however, remain more immediately or definitively associated with the
fiction of the suburban middle class than John Cheever and his Shady Hill and Bullet Park
stories found in his short story collections The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), Some
Places People and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and
the Golf Widow (1964), and his novel Bullet Park (1969). Christened the “Chekhov of
American suburbia” by John Leonard in a Harper’s review in 1977 (78), Cheever “explor[ed]
the frustrated longings of the middle class in the United States, employing the mundane
settings and character types common to satires but mixing them with a pathos-laden
surrealism and a profound sympathy for his subjects” (George 528).
This thesis will analyze Cheever’s suburban fiction, specifically his literature set in
his fictional suburbs of Shady Hill and Bullet Park, in terms of Louis Althusser’s and
Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist concepts of ideological structures, state ideological apparatuses,
and hegemony. Althusser’s theory argues for “a system of representations at the heart of a
given society … which makes culture a crucial vehicle of the values which underpin the
status quo in any society” (Goldstein 23). Ideology is thus “a system of representations
endowed with an existence and an historical role at the heart of a given society” (Goldstein
23). Related to Althusser’s ideological structures is Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony,
which is “the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant
meanings, values and beliefs of a kind which can be abstracted as a ‘world-view’ or ‘class
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outlook’” (Williams 101). I will argue that there are two ideologies or forms of hegemony
within American society, both of which originate from the amorphous notion of the
American Dream. The first ideology stems from the original belief of the American Dream,
that of individuality and the ability to “be whatever you want to be” in the United States, i.e.
the personal “pursuit of happiness” first stated in the American Declaration of Independence.
The second ideology came later, drawing from the original “American Dream conceit” and
transforming it into a social ideology that was strongly maintained within the American
postwar suburbs which “enforced strict codes of behavior and appearance [and] was rooted in
American capitalism and the mass market” (Aubry 65).
I will also relate and match these two disparate ideologies to David Riesman’s social
study The Lonely Crowd (1950). In the study, Riesman refers to “inner”- and “other”-directed
modes of conformity in the United States. According to Riesman, inner-directed individuals
are people “characterized by increased personal mobility” (14) and an “individuality of
character [that] need not be highly developed to meet prescriptions that are objectified in
ritual and etiquette” (15). Furthermore, inner-directed ideology “seems to present people with
a wide choice of aims” (15). Thus “inner-directedness” can be linked to the original concept
of the American Dream, wherein what is of utmost importance is individual choice and
unrestricted freedom. “Other-directed” individuals are described by Riesman as people who
are “sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others” (8). They are typically members
of the “ ‘new’ middle class — the bureaucrat, the salaried employee in business,” whose
“pressures of [their] peer-group are reinforced by the mass media” (20). “Other-directedness”
is directly linked to the people of the American suburbs. The suburbs, as negatively described
by Lewis Mumford, are places inhabited by people of the same class, same incomes, the
same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless
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prefabricated food, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect
to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis” (486).
According to Robert Bueka, John Cheever is one of the few American writers of the
twentieth century that has “consistently [drawn] attention to the fractures that compromise
the structure of a seemingly placid suburban society” (69). This thesis will, first, examine
John Cheever’s short fiction set in his fictional suburban creations of Shady Hill and Bullet
Park and show how these stories explore the clash of the previously mentioned disparate
American ideologies within 1950s suburbia. Cheever has an ambivalent view of the suburbs.
On the one hand the characters in his stories appear to feel lost, stifled, trapped, damaged and
pressured by their suburban environment, yet Cheever can never truly indict the suburbs. His
characters, in spite of their crises, tend to want to return to their middle-class way of life at
the stories conclusions. These conflicted notions of individuality and self-determination and
the suburban drive toward consumerist ostentation and conspicuous consumption in the
United States in the 1950s can be related to Cheever’s own personal struggles (with what he
referred to as the “forceful absurdities of life”) and (what I propose to be) his suggestion that
the creation of the suburbs was driven by the original concept of the American Dream and yet
the suburbs also acted as a major inhibitor of its presumed ideals.
The first two chapters are divided and organized according to general connecting
themes and ideas. These themes and ideas are related to the aforementioned conflicting
ideologies within Cheever’s suburban short stories set in his fictional neighborhoods of
Shady Hill and Bullet Park. The stories chosen for the first chapter will have seemingly
positive outcomes wherein, after experiencing some crisis or conflict about the suburban
“other-directed” ideology they have been hegemonized into, the protagonists of the stories
decide to return to the apparent safety and conformity of the suburbs and find peace.
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The second chapter will concentrate on the negative aspects of suburban life.
Characters in the stories chosen for this chapter lie to themselves in order to survive in their
suburban environments, losing any sense of self or truth within their lives. This chapter will
also include a section dealing with inner-directed antagonists who challenge other-directed
protagonists by attempting to expose the stifling and restrictive ideology of the suburbs.
These stories conclude with the protagonists either dead, isolated and alone, or stuck deeper
than ever in the lies they have created about their lives in the suburbs.
The thesis’s final chapter will investigate what Cheever believes to be the seemingly
inert, yet destructive, endpoint to his exploration of the suburbs and its conflict between the
“inward” (individuality) and the “outward” (ostentation and consumerism) pull felt by the
people of the suburbs. This conclusion is reached in his final novel dealing with the suburbs:
Bullet Park. In the novel we meet two characters (Paul Hammer and Edward Nailles) that are
allegorical representations of these diametric oppositions. Cheever himself was a man of the
suburbs, and I will use examples from his own posthumously published journals to show the
link between the conflicts between these American ideologies, their continual presence in
Cheever’s fiction, and the struggles he had with these ideologies in his personal life.
***
Despite Cheever’s critical acclaim in the late 1970s when he was ranked third in a
Philadelphia Enquirer survey of living American writers who were “expected to endure and
be read by future generations” (qtd. in Bailey 870), Cheever biographer Blake Bailey noted
that if the survey were to be held today “it’s unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top
twenty” (870). Thus, the height of critical writings on Cheever’s work seems to have
occurred after the publication of Cheever’s collected short stories in 1978, for which he won
the Pulitzer Prize, and just after his death in 1982. Following the publication of his letters and
journals in the late eighties and early nineties, there was also an upswing in scholarly writing