WOMEN AND THE SUBURBS IN LATE 20TH AND EARLY 21ST CENTURY

AMERICAN FILM AND FICTION

A Dissertation

Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Duquesne University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By

Beth Buhot Runquist (Mary Elizabeth)

December 2011
 UMI Number: 3487570

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 WOMEN AND THE SUBURBS IN LATE 20TH AND EARLY 21ST CENTURY

AMERICAN FILM AND FICTION

By

Beth Buhot Runquist (Mary Elizabeth)

Approved November 14, 2011

APPROVED_______________________ APPROVED_______________________
Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Judy Suh, Ph.D.
Professor, English Department Associate Professor, English Department
Committee Chair Committee Member

APPROVED_______________________
Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan, Ph.D. APPROVED_______________________
Professor, English Department Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D.
Committee Member Chair, English Department

iii
 ABSTRACT

WOMEN AND THE SUBURBS IN LATE 20TH AND

EARLY 21ST CENTURY AMERICAN FILM AND FICTION

By

Beth Buhot Runquist (Mary Elizabeth)

December 2011

Dissertation supervised by Magali Michael

This project examines novels and films published/released between 1993 and

2005 that focus on the experiences of women in the American suburbs since the Second

World War. Todd Hayness Far from Heaven (1998), Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998),

Michael Cunninghams The Hours (2002), Alicia Erians Towelhead, Erika Elliss Good

Fences (1998), and Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993) all intervene in

suburban discourse in order to affirm, revise, or reject the suburbs reputations as

controlled and controlling environments that limit women to thankless domestic tasks and

physical and social isolation. This project looks to the interdisciplinary field of Suburban

Studies, which has documented that the suburbs have been either lauded or vilified since

the escalation of suburbanization after the Second World War. Pro-suburban discourse

describes the benefits of suburbia in terms of safety, superior schools, and privacy. Anti-

suburban discourse imagines the suburbs as materialistic, conformist, isolating, and

iv
spiritually bereft. The novels and films that this project analyzes intervene in these

discourses by suggesting that the features of the suburbs noted by pro- and anti-suburban

discourse have different implications for women, ethnic or minority suburbanites, gay

men, and lesbians than they do for white men. For these marginalized groups, many of

suburbias supposed advantages are withheld and the suburbs supposed disadvantages

are exacerbated by the suburbs built environment and social structure, particularly the

suburbs existence as a collection of private homes situated far from the city and from

most communities of color. In the years immediately following the Second World War,

these inequalities were intensified by Containment Culture; in the late 20 th century, the

suburbs entrenched social hierarchies persisted despite the feminist movement, civil

rights, and gay liberation. Through the work of feminist theorists I argue that the novels

and films I examine all demonstrate that suburban women can attain agency if they forge

connections with other women, experience empathy, and/or form coalitions with other

oppressed groups. At the same time, such optimism is often qualified. Some texts suggest

that this agency is limited, that women can only be empowered by leaving the suburbs

behind, or that coalitions are often problematic.

v
 DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to my family. I thank my husband, Matthew, for his

patience, encouragement, and humor. I would also like to thank my parents, Michael and

Theresa, for their support and faith in my abilities and my sister, Christina, for reminding

me of the importance of teaching and learning.

vi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The first class I was enrolled in at Duquesne was a post-1945 literature course

taught by Dr. Magali Michael. It was a period I knew I wanted to study, but although I

enjoyed this literature, I often did not understand it well. I was fascinated by the

experiments with word and form but could not quite convey why it was good literature or

why I was so fond of it. Dr. Michaels class, which was full of free-flowing but rigorous

discussions allowed me to develop an understanding of these experiments and their

relationship to politics and history. In turn, learning to make these kinds of connections

between texts and the world taught me what it meant to do graduate level work. Since

that time, I have had the fortune to take several more classes with her and to have her

supervise my exam and dissertation processes. Her suggestions and encouragement have

been invaluable, and the influence of her teaching can clearly be seen in the work

presented here.

Dr. Linda Kinnahans attention to both history and language in her teaching and

in her comments on this project and during the exam process have pushed me to better

articulate the vision of the suburbs found in these novels and its relationship to American

culture. Her suggestions for further reading have helped me to discover key theoretical

contexts for this project and she has inspired me both creatively and academically.

Dr. Judy Suhs insightful critiques and questions have pushed me to read critically

and to highlight important underlying themes in this project. I also had the fortune of

taking two courses with her, and her instruction in theory, the life and works of Virginia

vii
Woolf, and film analysis have provided me with valuable tools with which to approach

the texts examined in this project.

Dr. Kathy Glass and Dr. Greg Barnhisel both kindly agreed to serve on my exam

committees. They pointed me toward many helpful texts and critical questions that

ultimately helped to shape this project.

I would also like to thank Dr. Anne Brannen for always having her door open for

students who need to talk about teaching, learning, and life.

A special thanks goes to the following members of the departments dissertation

groupMichelle Gaffey, Suzanne Cook, Dr. Benji Jones, and Lee Ann Glowzenskifor

their feedback and for the chance to read their amazing work. I would also like to thank

Dr. Judy Suh, Lee Ann Glowzenski, and Gina Bessetti for organizing the group.

The McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Artss Dissertation

Fellowship provided the funding that allowed me to dedicate a year to completing the

first draft of the dissertation. The Graduate School also provided the funds necessary to

attend many conferences, some of which sparked ideas for this project.

The English Departments Archival Research Grant allowed me to visit

Richmond, Surrey and look at records corresponding with the Woolfs time at the

viii
Hogarth House, which inform the chapter on Michael Cunninghams The Hours. I am

very grateful for this opportunity.

I would also like to thank the Women and Gender Studies program at Duquesne

for providing portion of the funding that allowed me to attend the Peripheral Visions

conference at Kingston Universitys Centre for Suburban Studies in London in 2011. I

would like to thank the organizers of that conference, Dr. Martin Dines and Dr. Tim

Vermeulen. This gathering provided me with a wonderful chance to hear the work of

scholars from across the many fields that comprise suburban studies and to meet others

who are using work in this field as a lens through which to analyze film, literature, and

culture.

Finally, I would also like to thank the University of Rhode Island for extending

borrowing privileges to me and to all the residents of Rhode Island. This generous policy

opened the doors to their strong collection, allowing me to finish this project while living

at a distance from campus.

ix
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... iv

DEDICATION ............................................................................................................... vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENT ............................................................................................... vii

Introduction: Women and the Suburbs in Late 20th and Early 21st Century American
Film and Fiction ............................................................................................................. xi

Part One: Containment Culture, the Suburbs, and the Post-World War II Housewife in
Todd Hayness Far from Heaven (2002), Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998), Michael
Cunninghams The Hours (1998)..................................................................................... 1

INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 2

CHAPTER ONE Implausibility and Containment Narratives: Agency, History, and

Containment Culture in Todd Hayes Far From Heaven ........................................... 28

CHAPTER TWO Separating Out the Things that Are Pleasant from the Things that
are Unpleasant: Pleasantville and the Image of Suburban Life ................................... 77

CHAPTER THREE Still We Cherish the City: Womens Lives in City and Suburbin
Cunninghams The Hours ........................................................................................ 122

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 175

Part II: Good Fences, Charming Gates, and The Wall: Empathy, Agency, Family and the
Suburb in Alicia Erians Towelhead (2005), Erika Elliss Good Fences (1998), and
Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993).............................................................. 181

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 182

CHAPTER ONE Inside Charming Gates: Alicia Erians Towelhead and Pro-suburban
Discourse ................................................................................................................. 207

CHAPTER TWO The Good Life and Good Fences: African-American Suburban
Pioneers and Social Class in Erika Elliss Good Fences ........................................... 259

CHAPTER THREE Outside the Walls: Parabale of the Sower and the End of the
Suburban Middle Class ............................................................................................ 349

Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 442

x
 Introduction: Women and the Suburbs in Late 20th and Early 21st Century

American Film and Fiction

This project examines six literary and cinematic texts produced between 1993 and

2005: Michael Cunninghams The Hours (1998), Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998), Todd

Hayness Far from Heaven (2002), Alicia Erians Towelhead (2005), Erika Elliss Good

Fences (1998), and Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993).1 The suburbs depicted

in these books are not real American suburbs, nor are they failed attempts at

representing real suburbs. Instead, they consist of authors and directors self-aware

deployment of what I will call suburban discourse. This discourse is familiar to

academics and non-academics alike because it permeates both scholarship and popular

culture. On one hand, the pro-suburban discourse figures the suburbs as middle-class

utopias, as places where an individuals achievement of the American Dream can be

embodied in a suburban home of ones own, a piece of property that brings with it the

promise of personal safety and economic security (at least until the recent housing

crisis). On the other hand, anti-suburban discourse paints the suburbs as places that

isolate individuals, alienate families, and demand conformity, offering only material

comforts in recompense. For women, the price of this isolation is even greater. In the

immediate post World-War II years, the suburbs were thought to offer very few chances

for women to form fulfilling friendships. They were also thought to remove women from

1
This study is limited from the year of Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993) to Alicia Erians Towelhead in
2005. The ending date allows the project to end before the foreclosure crisis, which is already beginning to
leave an impact on the literature of the suburbs. The project begins just after the rise of the Culture Wars in
the early 1990s, a context that is particularly important to Part I and to Erians work. While the Culture
Wars still rage, 2005 forms a good ending point because, while issues of race, sex, gender, and sexuality
continue to feature prominently in these debates, the fiscal conservatism of the Tea Party movement has
taken precedence over these issues.

xi
educational and career opportunities that would allow them to achieve greater personal

agency. The texts upon which this project focuses craft highly-referential depictions of

suburbia that draw not so much from the diverse types of contemporary American

suburbs as they do from one or both of these discourses. Drawing on these discourses

allows these texts to question whether it is possible to dismantle the suburbs hierarchies

of privilege, which are based on race, gender, class, and sexuality.

While pro- and anti- suburban discourses often focus on either the happy middle-

class family on one hand or the alienated individual on the other, these novels and films

use suburban discourse to repoliticize the suburbs by examining how their particular

social and physical structure tends to amplify the effects of the many forms of

discrimination and oppression that exist in the nation as a whole. Moreover, the novels

and films examined in this project use these discourses to suggest how the suburbs have

changed (or how they have been slow to change) in response to broader movements

toward guaranteeing greater rights for African Americans and women. At the same time

that the six texts critique the suburbs, they also question dystopian views that suggest

how the suburbs built environment both dooms individuals to isolated lives inside often

unhappy homes and prevents them from building supportive communities. Instead, some

of the texts suggest that individuals can challenge the suburbs rigid social hierarchies by

building coalitions that bring oppressed individuals or groups together. In these texts,

women are often key to building such coalitions. As a result, these novels and films not

only rewrite suburban history but also test the possibility of a more collective future for

suburbia and greater agency for American women.

xii
 The texts that Part I of the project examinesTodd Hayness film Far from

Heaven, Gary Rosss film Pleasantville, and Michael Cunninghams novel The Hours

are all set in the post the World War II suburbs. Moreover, they all use one ideas from or

associated with one of the most well-known examples of anti-suburban writing, Betty

Freidans Feminine Mystique, to explore the ways in which womens oppression both

paralleled and contrasted to the oppression of gay men and lesbians and African

Americans. Although the three texts are set in three different kinds of suburbsHayness

in an unnamed, leafy, genteel suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, Rosss in a town that

evokes the suburban sets of television sitcoms from the 1950s, and sections of

Cunninghams book in what seems to be the pre-fab suburbs of post- World War II Los

Angelesthese texts can be compared because they put their suburban settings to similar

use. More specifically, they combine both pro- and anti-suburban discourses to show that

suburbs placid and pleasant appearance thinly veils more turbulent realities. Although

such observations about the dark underbelly of the suburbs are commonplace, the texts

examined in Section I use this trope in a novel way to discuss the way in which the

suburbs status as showplaces for the American middle-class, family togetherness, and

prosperity is undercut by the more troubling truth that this picture-perfect image conceals

the oppression of women, people of color, and lesbians and gay men.

In this way these narratives about mid-twentieth century suburbs explore the

hazards of Containment Culture. According to the work of Elaine Tyler May and Alan

Nadel, discussed more fully in the introduction to Section I, Containment Culture is the

domestic manifestation of Americas foreign policy of containing the spread of

Communism during the Cold War. Womens sexuality, a potentially disruptive force, was

xiii
to be contained in the home. This would not only ensure that women properly

shepherded their children into productive and patriotic citizenship, but it would also

ensure that men did not stray into the arms of other women, some of whom could be

Communist spies. For men, heterosexuality was compulsory; homosexuality was

considered a perversion that left men even more vulnerable to the wiles of Communist

operatives. Lesbians themselves were thought to be subversives who preyed on straight

women and led them from their proper role. Advocacy for civil rights, either on the

part of racial minorities themselves or white allies, was also heavily associated with

Communism.

The culture of suspicion fostered by Containment Culture served to reinforce its

power by creating in its citizens the compulsion to attest to their own loyalty to the nation

through strict conformity to these norms. Part I focuses on how the two films and novel

examine characters that are at odds with this culture because of their sexuality, support

for integration, or deviation from strict gender norms but are nonetheless unable to voice

their opposition, particularly in the suburbs. These move characters as if propelled to

perform the roles assigned to them by Containment Culture. Thus, the suburbs, painted as

coercive and controlling places that limit agency, become the stage upon which these

narratives are performed, despite the characters attempts to break with these narratives.

Each text differs, however, in how it portrays the degree of female characters ability to

escape from these totalizing narratives and the totalizing places in which they are

performed. Some texts accord degrees of choice to these women; others do not.

While the Post World-War II white, middle-class suburban mother vacuuming or

cooking in a formal dress is the iconic symbol of the suburbs, the texts upon which Part II

xiv
focusesAlicia Erians Towelhead, Erika Elliss Good Fences, and Octavia Butlers

Parable of the Sowerdepict the experiences of women from racial and ethnic groups

historically excluded from the suburbs. Since, until recently, suburban fiction and film

focused heavily on the white middle class, these texts have no set tradition of minority

and ethnic suburban writing upon which to build. Instead, they work within established

academic and literary discourses about the suburbsboth those that condemn the suburbs

and those that praise themin order to disrupt and transform these discourses. All three

novels critique the suburbs for the very same reasons that early white, male critics do;

they attack their materialism, their intellectual vacuity, and their conformity. At the same

time, however, these texts demonstrate that such drawbacks are not merely the perils of

privilege. Rather, they suggest that pitfalls of suburbia stem from consequences of

suburbias racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia.

All three texts, for example, contest pro-suburban discourse. This discourse,

initially identified as suburban ideology by sociologist David Mark Hummon in his 1990

book Commonplaces: Community and Identity in American Culture, maintains that

suburbs are safe, family-centered communities with the best schools for children (105).

The novels undercut this assertion by examining the drawbacks of schools that are almost

completely segregated and breed a provincialism that results in a hostile environment for

children of color. Moreover, the texts also dispute the common assertion that the suburbs

are safe; children and women in these novels are often subject to sexual and domestic

violence, a fact that is exacerbated both because the neighbors lack strong connections to

one another and because they deem it impolite to intervene in the affairs of the other

household.

xv
 These novels also critique pro-suburban discourse by suggesting that suburban

home ownershipoften cited as one of the tenets of the American Dreamfosters a

competitive culture that offers too little support for children and adults. The American

Dream and its emphasis on personal success has often been the target of critique because

it foregrounds individual striving and eclipses the ways in which structural inequalities

impede marginalized peoples from sharing in the economic progress promised by this

narrative. Indeed, these novels demonstrate that a home in a suburban community

exacerbates such individualism by increasing suburbanites tendency to distance

themselves from the poor. Moreover, these novels depict suburban communities not so

much as true communities but rather more often as collections of self-sustaining and self-

centered family households. The problems with this schema, these texts suggest, are

many. By striving to jealously guard their status, middle class suburbanites not only blind

themselves to the suffering of others but also miss opportunities to find friends and allies

and instead create an atmosphere of fear and one-upsmanship. Their defensive posture

and single-minded focus in turn widens the gap between the middle class and the poor

until the middle classs most valued assets, safety and economic security, can no longer

be retained unless the culture is overhauled by collective and cooperative efforts.

These novels also use anti-suburban discourses to speak about the problems of

ethnic, suburban women. Whereas the isolation of women in the home was a cause of

much concern for the early suburbs, for the women in these novels, that isolation can be

more profound as neighbors treat their families as suspect or incessantly fear that their

presence will bring down property values. Lastly, while materialism and conformity are

common objects of suburban satire, one of these texts suggests that the suburbs demands

xvi
for conspicuous consumption affect African American residents strongly because many

feel they must visibly signal their middle or upper-middle class status so as not to be

mistaken for outsiders.

Suburbs and Their Critics

Defining what a suburb is can be difficult. Working class, middle class, and

upper-middle class suburbs can be found near most major cities. Suburbs, while usually

defined as low-density residential developments, vary markedly in density, from the

quasi-rural exurb to the more densely packed, older suburbs of the inner ring, which

are contiguous to the central city. The classic definition of the suburb comes from

historian Kenneth Jackson in 1985: affluent and middle-class Americans live in

suburban areas that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the

center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous. This uniqueness thus

involves population density, home-ownership, residential status, and journey-to-work

(6). Today, even this general definition is problematic. Writing after Jackson in 1987,

Robert Fishman notes that Los Angeles shares much in common with the suburbs in that

the urban landscape is dominated by single-family homes and other low-density

development (Fishman 155). Moreover, as Fishman notes, since 1945 commercial

enterprises around the United States have increasingly moved to the suburb, and some

workers commute within or between suburbs:

. . . the most important feature of postwar American development has been the

almost simultaneous decentralization of housing, industry, specialized services,

and office jobs, the constant breakaway of the urban periphery from a central city

it no longer needs; and the creation of a decentralized environment that

xvii
 nevertheless possesses all the economic and technological dynamism we associate

with the city (Fishman 184).

In other words, he suggests, suburbs are no longer peripheral to the city but have indeed

become their own new cities.

While suburbs eventually brought with them both commercial and business

development as well as the heterogeneous mix of classes and races that some early

residents sought to flee, Jacksons definition details geographical features of the suburbs

that became the underpinnings of both pro- and anti-suburban discourses. That suburbs

are separate from the city and that suburban homes are detached from one another, sitting

on their own plots of land, is foundational to both of these discourses. Although these two

factors are sometimes praised as the suburbs greatest assets, they are also often viewed

as the concrete manifestations of suburbanites turn away from the city and inward

toward the family. This inward focus was perceived by many as a mark of insularity that

damaged individuals as well as the social fabric.

Critics saw the suburbs distance from the city as a rejection of urban intellectual

life. As American intellectual and critic of the suburbs Lewis Mumford wrote, For

esthetic and intellectual stimulus, the suburb remains dependent on the big city; theater,

the opera, the orchestra, the art gallery, the university, the museum are no longer part of

the daily environment (494). Post-World War II suburbanites instead busied themselves

about the home. As urban planner Robert A. Beauregard reports, home and consumption-

oriented hobbies dominated suburbanites lives: Men made repairs to the house, tended

the yard, and organized construction of additions to accommodate a growing family,

while women busied themselves with homemaking and shopping (Beauregard 127).

xviii
Moreover, distance from colleagues living in other suburbs and from extended family

members meant that suburbanites were likely to socialize primarily with men and women

in their own neighborhoods. As neighborhoods were composed largely of couples of the

same age and income brackets, the popularity of what Beauregard calls couple visiting

brought with it the possibility of a myopic outlook on life (130). Home-centered

concerns had a central role in such gatherings: Entertaining people in ones home

became more prevalent, part of an inward-oriented privatizing of social life generally but

also related to the pride that families had in their homes and in the skills of the

housewives and husbands-handyman (129). The home, in a sense, became its own

museum and restaurant. As it became more common for families to own television sets,

homes became a substitute for the theater and cinema and television became a way to

understand the outside world without ever having to venture into it. Lynn Spigel, a

communication scholar, writes, By turning ones home into a theater, it was possible to

make outside spaces part of a safe and predictable experience (40).

Mumford suggested not only that such social insularity affected suburbanites by

narrowing their life experiences but also that this insularity removed the suburbanites

from pressing social concerns. While the long-term, affordable mortgages offered by

suburban developers and supported by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and

Veterans Administration (VA) expanded the property owning middle class, the suburbs,

by limiting or eliminating the construction of rental properties and multifamily dwellings,

excluded the poor. Moreover, because suburbs were built at a distance from the center

city, poverty and other urban problems faded from the mind of suburbanites:

xix
 In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent

world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper.

Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of an illusion. (Mumford

494)

With such illusions preserved and the poor out of sight, out of mind, Mumford feared

that charitable work and activism aimed at either ameliorating or eliminating poverty

would fade (494).

This turn away from the city was also a turn inward toward the family. As Lynn

Spigel notes, it was not only the poor who were left behind in the city. Indeed, the

suburbs were dominated by white, middle-class families: Older people, gay and lesbian

people, homeless people, unmarried people, and people of color were simply written out

of community spaces, and were relegated back to the cities (34). Literary and cultural

scholar Martin Dines notes that the very layout of the suburban home is responsive

primarily to the needs of a nuclear family with the master bedroom, or Bedroom 1,

dominating a series of smaller compartmentalized spaces which promise division and

intrusion as much as they do privacy (3). He also suggests that the suburban

neighborhood with houses typically facing each other in the ubiquitous cul-de-sac,

facilitates the surveillance of any deviant activity, in particular, the monitoring of

visitors (3). Not only were homes too large for singles or couples without children but

the design of the suburban neighborhood would make it difficult for gay residents to

receive same-sex guests unnoticed.

Of concern to more recent scholars is that the suburbs expansion of the middle

class did not extend to persons of color. Instead, minorities were largely excluded from

xx
suburbanization by the efforts of developers, realtors, white suburban residents, and

government policy. While the VA and the FHA played a major role in providing housing

to returning veterans, little of that money went to African Americans returning from the

war (Lipsitz 7). 2 One of Americas most famous postwar developers, the Levitt

company (of Levittown fame) refused to sell to African Americans and continued to do

so for decades after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional (Kushner xv). African

Americans who managed to suburbanize despite these obstacles often met with

vandalism and arson, acts often perpetrated by anonymous white neighbors (Wiese 229).

American Studies scholar George Lipsitz documents that, each time fair housing

legislation was passed, white resistance, refusal, and renegotiation weakened its rules

or its enforcement (33). Furthermore, he writes, the denial of suburban housing to African

Americans had a multiplier effect because property taxes determine school funding.

Moreover, Opportunities for employment are also affected by housing choices,

especially given the location of new places of employment in suburbs and reduced

funding for public transportation . . . . (33). In addition to affecting childrens short term

economic futures and education, the appreciation of home values was, at least until the

recent housing crisis, a source of familial and intergenerational wealth that was denied to

African Americans and other racial minorities, who were excluded from or discouraged

from locating in the suburbs (Lipsitz 34).

As the keystone of the nuclear family, women were of course included in the

suburbs. Their role, however, was most often limited to the domestic. In fact, the

ideology that permeated the home and the suburb often echoed Victorian ideals. Robert

2
As Lipsitz notes, The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration financed more
than $120 billion worth of new housing between 1934 and 1963, but less than 2 percent of this real estate
was available to nonwhite familiesand most of that small amount was located in segregated areas (7).

xxi
Fishman notes that, in Catherine Beechers Treatise on Domestic Economy, instructions

on household management were infused with great evangelical themes that the home

was the best source of Christian morality and that, as such, it must be separated from

the profane concerns of the city (122). These instructions, Fishman argues, are an early

iteration of the idea that the suburbs are the best place in which to raise children (122).

Although suburban churches sprouted up soon after the post World War II boom, the post

World-War II variant of suburban domesticity encouraged homemakers to create not so

much a bastion of Christian morality but rather one of prosperity and patriotism. Both

ideologies, however, placed a heavy burden on the homemaker. In the post-World War II

suburbs, the discourse of duty to ones husband and family was particularly strong given

that many husbands were returning veterans. Barbara Kelley, in her work on Levittown,

reviews the demands places on the suburban wife:

Wives were urged to keep the charm in their marriages, to listen with interest to

their husbands conversation, and to remain physically attractiveall the while

raising children and keeping house as if they had a staff of servantsThose

women who managed to achieve the mythic state of romantic readiness also

managed to convey the impression that there was no work involved in keeping

house. It was as if they spent their days like Sleeping Beauty, graciously awaiting

the return of their men to waken them from their lifeless state. Husbands were

never to see them at work. (91-92)

While feminists like Betty Friedan were concerned that women were being relegated

back to the home after their more active wartime years, for male commentators like

xxii
Mumford, it was not the work itself but the isolation in which it was done that was

deleterious. Gone, for example, was the camaraderie of washing day:

For the wider the scattering of the population, the greater the isolation of the

individual household, and the more effort it takes to do privately, even with the

aid of many machines and automatic devices, what used to be done in company

with conversation, song, and the enjoyment of the physical presence of others.

(Mumford 511-512)

While one might wonder if doing wash by hand, even in good company, was ever truly a

boon, Mumford also notes that, in the decentralized suburban town, shopping was a chore

that was no longer combined with sociality:

The town housewife, who half a century ago knew her butcher, her grocer, her

dairyman, her various other tradesmen, as individual persons, with histories and

biographies that impinged on her own in a daily interchange, now has the benefit

of a single weekly expedition to an impersonal supermarket, where only by

accident is she likely to encounter a neighbor. (Mumford 512)

From here emerged the idea that not only commuting suburban husbands, who spent an

inordinate amount of time in their cars alone, but also suburban wives were alienated by

the atomism of the suburbs.

Friedans concerns about the housewifes insularity, of course, were more far

reaching than Mumfords. She worried not just about the suburban womans isolation

from friends, family, and a tight-knit community but also her isolation from the

intellectual life of the city. As I will discuss at length in the introduction to Part I of this

dissertation, Friedan felt that the return to domesticity in the suburbs was particularly

xxiii
damaging for women because they were physically isolated from opportunities for

careers, education, and community and instead became something like living dolls

trapped inside their suburban houses, attempting to mop and vacuum away the unknown

source of their boredom and sadness.

Whereas the relatively early critiques of Mumford and Friedan, variants of anti-

suburban discourse, emphasized the isolating and insular aspects of the suburbs, and

whereas much recent work like Lipsitzs tends to overturn pro-suburban discourse by

investigating the ways in which it obscures minorities exclusion from the benefits of

suburbia, a trend toward re-evaluating the suburbs has emerged in the last decade. Iver

Peterson, writing in the New York Times on December 5, 1999, reported that, In a

handful of new books and studies, academic revisionists are reporting that suburbia, far

from crushing lives, has had a liberating effect on residents, particularly many women

(Peterson).3 These revisionist works, he posits, focus particularly on how suburbia has

changed. In an interview for the article, Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture

at Syracuse University, says that ''There is a sense among some academics now that the

suburbs have developed their own culture and that it's time to move past the clichs that

were formed after World War II (qtd. in Peterson). In their book Picture Windows:

How the Suburbs Happened, scholars Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen write of

their own clichd preconceptions of the suburbs and how those preconceptions changed

during their time as scholars at a suburban branch campus of their university:

Initially, we didnt understand suburbia even had a history, we imagined it as an

anesthetized state of mind, a no place dominated by a culture of conformity and

consumption. We maintained a vision of suburbs defined by endless malls, tidy

3
No page numbers are given for this citation as the article was obtained from the newspapers website.

xxiv
 streets with manicured lawns, and houses with little character. This image was not

ours alone. Both critics and celebrants imagine suburbia as fixed and timeless,

existing without conflict or change. (Baxandall and Ewen xv)

They found that prevailing American academic discourse about the suburbs did not

correspond with the diverse suburb to which they commuted to from Manhattan every

day:

None of these books reflects the choices of our students and the myriad

Americanswhite, black, immigrant, gay, straight, old, young, married, divorced,

and singlewho have selected to live in suburbia and have inscribed their

signatures on its landscape. Moreover, none of these books has bothered to

uncover the changing contours of suburban history. (xxxi)

While their impetus for studying the suburbs was to note the way in which the suburbs

have changed, these scholars also suggest that the suburbs early reputation as mindless

engines for mass-produced commodities smacks of elitism. Through applying techniques

of mass production to housing developments, they argue, builders drove the expansion of

the home-owning class and these new homes, and the new products that filled them, had

a deep meaning for many post World War II suburbanites:

Most suburbanites had been crowded into slums during the depression and war;

given the opportunity, they wanted to leave the world behind them. Home

ownership in a virgin community is an adventure, a pilgrimage, they were moving

up, from one class into another. (Baxandall and Ewen 166)

Unfortunately, however, these expanded opportunities were for many years only

available to white families.

xxv
 Baxandall and Ewen also challenged the prevailing wisdom about suburban

women. They found that, far from mourning a move to the suburbs, suburban women

were often grateful for their new opportunities. Unlike Friedans subjects, they were not

disappointed that they were not working in fulfilling careers; instead, they were often

glad to have escaped the sweatshop work done by their mothers and grandmothers (161).

Moreover, the women they studied in working class suburbs, unlike Friedans isolated

housewives, founded supportive interpersonal networks. The writers suggest that,

because these women did not have the resources to hire professional babysitting or

cleaning services, they more readily depended on and formed strong connections with

their neighbors (162-163).

Other scholars have also begun to consider that many members of previously

marginalized groups have been eager to suburbanize. Recently, Martin Dines has noted

that, whereas the suburbs were once considered a straight space, gay men and lesbians

continue to locate there, many to share in the benefits of property owning and low taxes,

some to raise children, and others to become social pioneers (3). In addition to the

newfound diversity of sexual orientations and family types in the suburbs, many new

immigrants arrive directly to the suburbs, skipping what was once the usual pathway of

the urban enclave and African Americans comprise a larger portion of the suburban

population than they have in previous decades.

The fast-growing interdisciplinary field of Suburban Studies dedicates much of its

efforts to studying both this newfound diversity and the suburbs history of conflict.

There are centers dedicated to suburban studies at Kingston University in greater London

and Hofstra University on Long Island, and scholars from fields as wide-ranging as

xxvi
anthropology, law, sociology, history, education, urban planning, architecture, and

literary and cultural studies have gathered at conferences and collaborated on

publications designed to explore how these new suburbs can be understood even as they

are undergoing rapid change in the current economic crisis. Much of the work in this

field has been dedicated to understanding todays more diverse suburbs. Although some

of these scholars focus in on the ways in which women and Americans of all races,

ethnicities, and sexual orientations seek and often attain the purported benefits of the

suburbs, others are examining the suburbs history of conflict and focusing on the ways

in which the suburbs often continue to marginalize these groups.

Literature and culture are quickly emerging as important subtopics in this

burgeoning field. Two of the early monographs on these subjects, Catherine Jurcas

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (2001) and

Robert Beukas SuburbiaNation (2004) form a critical foundation for my project and for

many recent critiques of suburban film and fiction. In particular, these two critics have

laid out a framework for discussing the roles that conflicts over class, race, and gender

have always played in the suburbs despite suburbs tendency to conceal these conflicts.

While Jurcas focus is largely on novels written up to the end of the 1960s, her principles

inform my understanding of anti-suburban discourse. She suggests that the common trope

of the alienated or displaced white suburban male, which emerged in American literature

as early as the 1920s with Upton Sinclairs Babbitt and was reiterated in the postwar era

and beyond in works like Sloan Wilsons Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and

Richard Yatess Revolutionary Road (1961), obscures the reality that the suburbs offered

real material benefits to their inhabitants and that these benefits were historically placed

xxvii
beyond the reach of most people of color through commercial practices, government

policies, and coercive neighborhood associations. Using the paradigms of Whiteness

Studies, Jurca suggests that suburban literature and films erasure of discriminatory

practices and the tendency to equate middle-class suburban manhood with victimhood

function to allow white hegemony to go unrecognized and unquestioned. The novels and

films that my project examines use and transform the variant of anti-suburban discourse

that Jurca identifies to show that it is not white men but rather women, ethnic and racial

minorities, and gays and lesbians who are truly dispossessed by a suburban vision of

community.

Although a very small portion of her text is dedicated to minority writers, Jurca

herself does suggest that one novel, Gloria Naylors Linden Hills, uses this stereotype of

the soulless suburbanite to describe the experience of the African American residents of

one suburb (169). In Jurcas view, Naylors use of this stereotype problematically

associates middle-class privilege with this sense of dispossession and spiritual

deprivation: In Linden Hills, the experience of black homelessness is identical to what I

have called the White Diaspora, insofar as the suburb as such effectively makes the black

middle class indistinguishable from the white (169). While this reading opens up a new

way to look at Naylors novel, the texts I study in my project, all written several years

after Linden Hills, use this suburban discourse in a different way that is not identical to

the way in which white writers use it. That is, the novels and films I examine show

women, ethnic and racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians to be alienated not

because of their class privilege but because of social and structural features of the suburbs

that keep them, or at least attempt to keep them, from becoming agents in their own lives.

xxviii
These forces include a neighborhood culture that discourages the reporting of domestic

and sexual abuse, a corporate culture that both feeds suburban affluence and demands its

executives to be married family men, and a pervasive concern for property values that

prompts suburban homeowners to demand conformity to middle or upper-middle class

norms.

Beuka and Jurca share the fundamental premise that suburban literature and film

do not so much reflect the historical realities of the suburbs as speak to anxieties and

fantasies about the suburbs place in Americas history and society. Beukas work lays

the foundation for my formulation of pro- and anti- suburban discourse. Furthermore,

while I study texts depicting the post-World War II era, he locates the origins of these

polarized descriptions in the 1950s. He claims that 1950s sitcoms, which idealized

suburban domesticity, and the decades alarmist social commentary, which heralded

suburbanization as a dangerous threat to American life, have created images of the

suburbs that persist despite suburbias changing demographics. Moreover, Beuka

suggests that these dueling dystopian and utopian images of the suburbs are rooted not in

historical reality but in a desire to understand American culture. Using Foucaults idea of

heterotopias, Beuka argues that suburbs are places that in their very existence serve to

mirror the culture at large and hold both the promise and the failure of mainstream,

middle-class American culture (17, 16). Like Beuka, I also examine the literature and

film of the suburbs as places in which one can find authors and directors theorizing about

the nation and about the middle-class; however, rather than merely viewing these novels

and films as conceiving of the suburbs as the sort of funhouse mirror Beuka suggests, my

project argues that they describe the suburbs as stages where (sometimes dissembling)

xxix
performances are played. While the novels and films studied here do indeed portray the

suburbs in ways that lean toward exaggeration or in ways that paint characters as

representative types rather than idiosyncratic, realistic characters, these works also tend

to portray their suburban characters as driven to fulfill roles that are often at odds with

their realities and as enacting scripts written by Containment narratives, pro-suburban

discourse, or the American Dream. Mabel Spader in Good Fences, for example,

continually reminds herself that her family has made it although she is desperately

unhappy, and Laura Brown in The Hours blames her own unhappiness on maladjustment

rather than the confines of her role. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olaminas father

stubbornly upholds the American Dream, believing that if he plays by the rules, his

middle class life will one day return, although neither his government nor the worlds

corporations abide by any rules at all. While the suburb offers the perfect picture of the

family, these characters are indeed alienated. In a parallel manner, while the suburbs offer

the ideal picture of the nation, the performances the suburbs prompt also mask deep

inequalities.

In addition, the texts I analyze in this project, more so than those studied by

Beuka and Jurca, often open up more room for agency. Although these texts use suburban

discourse to show the way in which the suburbs can be debilitating, some also participate

to varying degrees in the drive to reevaluate the positive potential of the suburbs. They do

this by suggesting that suburbanites, particularly suburban women, can effect change in

their communities by working alongside other oppressed individuals or groups. While the

way in which Pleasantville imagines such coalitions is problematic and while Far from

Heaven suggests the need for such coalitions only through examining the cost of their

xxx
absence, the texts in Part II of the project suggest that modest collective efforts can

assuage the isolation of suburban women. These efforts, enacted through one neighbor

reaching across the boundary of private property to help another, dampen the loneliness

of the characters even if they do not make the more radical changes to the suburbs

physical and social structure that are needed to fully foster womens personal agency.

The most empowered characters of the novels are those who make some collective effort

to form communities outside of the suburbs, either in an urban or rural setting. In sum,

these texts suggest that suburban life can be bettered but that it is far from utopic.

This project also contributes something new to the field of suburban studies by its

focus exclusively on texts that focus on suburban women. That these texts include a

selection of recent texts about the post World War II era and a selection of texts about

minority and ethnic suburbanites also makes the project unique, although such a selection

in some ways simply mirrors a marked trend toward these topics in late 20 th and early 21st

century writing about suburbia. This focus allows the project to examine the political

significance of recent suburban writing by asking both why the post World War II

suburban housewife has become a figure resurrected in political rhetoric and why a more

integrated suburbia in which many women have greater agency than their 1950s

counterparts has not resulted in a utopia without a need for ongoing feminist or anti-racist

action.

The Texts

Part One: Containment Culture, the Suburbs, and the Post-World War II Housewife in Todd
Hayness Far from Heaven (2002), Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998), Michael Cunninghams The
Hours (1998)

The suburban tradition allows the texts discussed in Part I to focus on the personal

lives of the characters and the tropes of alienation and isolationkey components of anti-

xxxi
suburban discoursein order to examine characters uneasy relationship with the

Containment Narratives that pervade their suburbs and homes. Moreover, the texts cue

pro-suburban discourse by first installing and then subverting a picture of happy suburban

homes and neighborhoods. At the same time, while the characters are isolated by the

suburbs, the women at the centers of these texts have brief moments in which they can at

least attempt to connect with other women or members of other oppressed groups in order

to gain agency. In Hayness film Far from Heaven, upper-middle class housewife Cathy

Whitaker and her husband, advertising executive Frank Whitaker, live with their children

Janice and David in suburban Hartford Connecticut. The establishing shots, which show

the blooming beauty of suburban Hartford in the early spring as well as the quaint, well-

landscaped exterior of the Whittaker home, reiterate the traditional connotations of the

suburb as a haven for Americas happy, prosperous, middle-class nuclear families. Soon

thereafter, however, the film reveals the troubled state of the Whittaker marriage.

Although troubled marriages are a staple of suburban fiction, the Whitakers troubles are

mined not for scandal but for an exploration of the strictures of Containment Culture.

Frank is attracted to men and, in a Containment Culture in which homosexual men were

considered vulnerable to subversion and sick and in which wives were expected to

keep their husbands sexually satisfied in order for the home and family to become a

fortress against the intrusion of suspect influences, Cathy and Frank attempt to heal their

irreparable marriage and play according to the expected narrative. Frank goes to a doctor

in order to cure his homosexuality, and Cathy attempts to seduce him. Failing to do so,

Cathy seeks comfort in her African American gardener Raymond but in the end bows

under the pressure of neighbors and her husband to disavow the relationship.

xxxii
 In Rosss film Pleasantville, siblings David and Jennifer are transported from

their 1990s suburban home to the set of the 1950s sitcom Pleasantville (evocative of

programs like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best), in which they fill the roles of

wholesome teens Bud and Mary Sue Parker. David, a dedicated fan, tries to convince

Jennifer to carefully abide by the script so as to leave the world of Pleasantville as it

stands: a world where women stay at home and men go to work, where sex is so

unthinkable that married couples sleep in separate beds, where residents believe nothing

lies outside the borders of their town, and where books are blank, meant not to be read

but to decorate the library shelves. Through this world, Pleasantville depicts Containment

Culture by way of hyperbole. Much to Davids dismay, Jennifer disobeys and ignites a

sexual revolution. When David discovers that the books in the library are blank, however,

he soon joins the quest to modernize Pleasantville. He realizes that underneath the

chipper exteriors of the local teens lies not only unsated sexual curiosity but also

unquenched intellectual curiosity. He helps to fill in the books by telling his classmates

the plots (after which the pages are magically filled) and he helps to liberate his boss, Mr.

Johnson, from the more mundane tasks of running a soda fountain by helping the older

man discover his passion for painting.

In Cunninghams novel The Hours, Laura Brown is a pregnant suburban

housewife living outside of Los Angeles with her son Richie and husband Dan, a

returning veteran, just after the Second World War. Laura, like so many suburban wives

in the postwar era, feels a sense of duty toward returning vets like Dan, and, true to the

precepts of Containment Culture, she keeps a home, raises a child, and attempts to

provide a tranquil environment for her husband, the provider and war hero. At the same

xxxiii
time, she feels a sense of alienation from her life as a wife and mother, as if she is about

to perform in a play for which she has not adequately rehearsed" (43). She knows what

is expected of her, yet contrary to the popular discourse that womens talents are best

used in the home, she cannot find a creative outlet through baking or decorating. She

imagines another life writing novels or painting. Indeed, prior to her marriage, she was

known as a bookworm, although now the demands of her son Richie almost preclude her

from reading at all. Moreover, her marriage is not sexually satisfying to her. She is unsure

she loves her husband Dan, but she is electrified by a brief kiss with her neighbor Kitty.

The suburbs central to these textsand the homes situated within these suburbs

act as the stages upon which these loyalty oaths are performed. The suburbs, organized

as a collection of single-family homes, serve to keep gender roles intact as men remove

themselves from the home to work, leaving women behind to sustain the home or in rare

cases to delegate housework to underpaid female domestic servants. Moreover, as Far

from Heaven and Pleasantville demonstrate, suburbs are constructed as all-white spaces.

In Far from Heaven, although some of the more enlightened residents express their

abstract support for civil rights, African Americans are rarely seen except as domestic

servants, like gardener Raymond and housekeeper Sybil. In Pleasantville, once the

residents turn colored, they are refused the right to enter local stores or assemble

together.

Despite the characters alienation from Containment Narratives, they are almost

compelled to repeat them. Cathy Whitaker, for example, plays the part of the dutiful

executive wife and mother not only for news reporters and for company cocktail parties

but also in private. Her speeches to Frank, as well as her attempts to seduce him, seem

xxxiv
canned. Her act breaks only when she is whisked outside of this environment by

Raymond Deegan, either to the country or to the urban African American bar, where the

two tentatively connect in what might be called a romantic friendship. Franks affairs also

take place outside the suburbsat a downtown movie theater, in his abandoned office

building after hours, or in exotic Miami. When the consequences of Frank, Cathy, and

Raymonds actions come home to roost in the suburbs, the power of these narratives

becomes even more apparent. Cathy is subject to vicious rumors, Raymonds daughter is

bullied, Raymond is forced to leave town for his familys safety, and Frank, while he

ends the movie living with his lover, is on uncertain ground with his employer.

While Haynes draws attention to the theatricality of the suburbs through his use of

light and color, Pleasantville uses a literal stage set to mount its critique of Containment

Culture. Jennifer and David move from their real-world 1990s suburb to an idealized

1950s suburb. The film begins by indicating that the siblings present day reality is

troubling: Jennifer is promiscuous and obsessed with shopping while the likeable David

is shunned by most of his classmates for his geekiness. Their mother is preoccupied with

her love life; their father is absent. Moving outside the home, their neighborhood is

largely empty; an establishing shot shows an empty street, families presumably

sequestered inside their individual, identical, anonymous homes. Pleasantville, by

contrast, is a quaint, walkable community. Bud and Mary Sue (David and Jennifer) walk

to their redbrick school, passing picket-fenced yards and industrious neighbors carefully

grooming their properties and inquiring after the Parker family. At school, students are

clean cut, dutiful pupils. The film soon establishes, however, that the town offers the

mere faade of civic life. Children learn nothing in the schoolhouses. The books are

xxxv
blank, and teachers insist there is nothing outside of Pleasantville. There is no divorce

and spouses are unremittingly pleasant to one another, but their marriages are lifeless and

loveless and, when given the opportunity, wives protest their servitude. While the town of

Pleasantville and the suburban sitcom that features it seems a model of order, peace, and

prosperity, all paragons of Containment Culture, the faults in its institutions and homes,

and the unhappiness of its people, indicates this culture is flawed.

The Hours, by showing the way in which Laura oscillates between identifying

with Containment Narratives and her desire to escape them, also demonstrates how her

view of the suburbs fluctuates with her view of these narratives. Her home is at one point

a trap and at another point a treasure. She notes how her suburban home is artistically and

commodiously arranged with new silver and table linens. At one point, her neighborhood

seems full of possibility, with energetic squirrels and the ephemeral mist of sprinklers.

These depictions resonate with pro-suburban discourse, evoking the common wisdom

that the suburbs epitomized Americas postwar prosperity. At other points, however,

Lauras suburb seems suffocating and dolorous. It is smothered by oppressive heat; its

library sits virtually unused. While Laura enjoys brief moments of peace in the suburbs,

in order to find any fulfillment, she must escape to a downtown hotel room, where she

finishes reading Mrs. Dalloway and submerges herself in the bustling London of Woolfs

novel. Although she briefly contemplates suicide while in her hotel room, the novels

ending reveals that she later decides to leave her family and live in Canada. In order to

step out of the roles prescribed by containmentthose of wife and mothershe must

leave for another country altogether.

xxxvi
 Why, some may ask, do so many films of this era return to the immediate post

war era? The size of the baby boomer audience (whose formative years coincide with this

era) and millennial angst have both been cited as causes for this 50s retro mania, a

phenomenon also seen in fashion and home design; however, I propose an additional

cause: that the suburbs of this era have been idealized by the anti-urban, anti-feminist,

anti-gay, and often anti-immigrant and racist strain of social conservatism. In particular,

this strain of social conservatism depicts the postwar era as a time of economic prosperity

and national strength and works to tie that strength to the apex of the nuclear family. In

such discourse, the disintegration of such families and decline of such prosperity is laid at

the feet of working mothers, divorced or single parents, the rising acceptance of

homosexuality, reproductive freedoms, the supposed decline in personal responsibility, or

the rise in multiculturalism or programs to address the effects of structural racism, such

as affirmative action. Thus, the causes of economic decline, such as a diminishment of

workers rights and the movement of capital overseas, are eclipsed by such finger

pointing and nostalgia.

The texts examined in Part I of the project seek to dispel this nostalgia not by

looking at economic costs but by looking at the personal costs of such narratives. For the

cast of Far from Heaven, the ravages of Containment Culture are many. Frank Whittaker

is driven to alcoholism by his attempt to control his sexual attraction to men. Even after

breaking free and eloping with his young partner, his financial future is uncertain. At the

end of the novel, Cathy, having invested her entire being in making a loveless marriage

her vocation, is left alone in her suburban home. She has ended her association with

Raymond, and her best friend Eleanor abandons her in the wake of the scandal caused by

xxxvii
the relationship. Raymond suffers perhaps most of all. After a group of white boys

attacks his daughter, taunting her about his affair with Cathy, he is forced to flee for his

familys safety.

In the fantasy world of Pleasantville, the culture of containment literally

eliminates sex altogether; moreover, the intellectual development of citizens and basic

civil rights (the rights to free expression, representation, and assembly) are curtailed in

the name of order and predictability. As the film progresses and characters attain sexual

or artistic enlightenment, they turn from black and white to color, a change that ignites

the indignation of the towns mayor and chamber of commerce. In a move that parallels

segregated America, Pleasantvilles town leader bars these coloreds from the rights to

assembly and fair representation, as well as from entry into local shops. The Parker

household is split by the debate. Having discovered her sexuality, Betty becomes colored

and becomes an active defender of free expression while father George is inducted into

the Chamber of Commerce and sides with the repressive forces of the town. When the

coloreds grow in number, the town fathers campaign against them with vehemence. The

film thus demonstrates that the nostalgia for the postwar suburbs eclipses a culture of

repression and oppression that worked to contain sexual desire, the civil rights of its

population, and the emergent protests against this culture. While the equation of the

coloreds with African Americans in that film is somewhat troubling because it allows

the film to deal only tentatively with race, and while figuring Bettys feminist awakening

as purely sexual limits the films political efficacy, the film nevertheless engages in a

vehement, if not particularly nuanced or consistent, critique of Containment Culture

through the use of both pro- and anti- suburban discourse.

xxxviii
 For Laura Brown in The Hours, intellectual freedom and sexual freedom,

including the freedom to love a woman, is withdrawn by the constant demands of home

and hearth. The isolation and frustration that she experiences, moreover, are increased by

the fact that the life that she despises is supposed to be a reward for the suffering of the

depression and World War II. Unsure of why she does not feel grateful, she blames

herself for her depression and alienation. Whereas veterans like Dan are often haunted by

their experience of war, women like Laura are sometimes haunted by what could have

been and what was before the mens return. Moreover, through exploring the lives of

Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughn, the books two other main characters, the novel

shows how it would be damaging to women to reinstate the strict gender norms of the

past. Woolfs life in the London suburbs of Richmond, for example, gives her time to

write but isolates her from the intellectual ferment of the city. Moreover, her marriage to

Leonard precludes her from lesbian desire and the management of her home burdens her

with tiresome domesticity. For Clarissa Vaughn, a book editor living on the verge of the

21st century, sexual freedom and intellectual freedom are secure, but the 1950s

homemaker remains a cultural figure against which she measures herself and her

relationships, sometimes realizing that, as the more traditionally feminine figure in her

relationship with partner Sally, her needs and talents are often eclipsed.

Although only The Hours and Pleasantville explicitly compare past to present, all

of these works are in some sense historical novels or films in that they use the 1950s to

address the era in which they were made. In Far from Heaven, the toll that Containment

Culture exacts on the characters implicitly suggests the folly of rolling back such

progress. Released primarily to an art house audience, however, it is unlikely that it was

xxxix
intended to reach cultural conservatives. Instead, the film pushes its viewers to recognize

what the effects of resurrecting Containment Culture in the present would be on gays,

African Americans, and women, none of whom are completely free to love whom they

desire nor do the work they desire although the specifics of their oppression differ. While

the diverse characters in the film are not able to recognize the similarities between their

lives, the missed opportunity for a coalition becomes an emergent theme. All three

primary characters are, to various degrees and in varying ways, trapped by containment

ideology, and for all but Frank their attempts at escape are merely tentative. Moreover,

the film reminds viewers that groups that have formed a tentative coalition with one

another in the present-day left have much to fear from the right.

Part II: Good Fences, Charming Gates, and The Wall: Empathy, Agency, Family

and the Suburb in Alicia Erians Towelhead (2005), Erika Elliss Good Fences

(1998), and Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993)

The texts featured in Part II explore the suburban experiences of women from

ethnic and racial minorities who were often excluded from the post-World War II

suburbs. Like the texts studied in Part I, the three novels discussed in Part II also

transform established suburban discourses in order to reveal the ways in which, despite

the increased integration of the suburbs, they remain places that marginalize Americans

from ethnic and racial minorities in general and women of color in particular. In order to

critique pro-suburban discourse, these texts demonstrate that the supposed assets that

attract minorities and others to the suburbssafer communities and better schoolsmay

not in fact exist. In addition, the novels indicate that the pro-suburban discourse that touts

these advantages of the suburbs is built on racist and patriarchal foundations.

xl
 These texts also reshape anti-suburban discourse. Instead of insisting that the

suburbs are alienating and isolating because of their architecture or because of spiritual

impoverishment brought about by material wealth, they suggest that the isolation and

alienation experienced by minorities in suburbia are rooted in the fact that, even as the

suburbs become more diverse, they continue to marginalize people of color. The isolation

of one family from another and of the individual household from the urban sphere is

particularly isolating for women. The problem is no longer what Friedan feared

exclusion from educational and career opportunities. Rather, isolated family homes

concretize patriarchy, separating women into male-headed households and fostering a

culture that is hesitant to question spousal and child abuse.

All three novels sound echoes of pro-suburban discourse and then investigate

ways in which that discourse is flawed. In Erians Towelhead, when 13-year-old Jasira

Maroun is sent to live with her father, Rifat, they move into a new, upscale tract home in

the suburban subdivision of Charming Gates because he believes the suburb, which has a

reputation for safety and good schools, will benefit Jasira. Moreover, Rifats belief that

the home is a good use of his growing salary marks him as an adherent of the American

Dream; the house will be both a marker of his success and a financial investment. These

same tenets of pro-suburban discourse drive Good Fencess Tom Spader to tirelessly

chase a promotion so he can move his African American family from the lower-middle

class suburb of Hamden, Connecticut to posh Greenwich. For Tom, moving to

Greenwich is a sign that the family has made it, and both he and Mabel feel that their

children will be well-served by Greenwichs schools and that their neighborhood will be

free of violence. In the last novel, Parable of the Sower, although societal chaos has

xli
already led the school system to collapse, the neighbors believe that their walled

community is safer than the world outside.

In all three cases, these novels reveal pro-suburban discourse to be deeply flawed.

Moreover, in making this revelation they all suggest that the suburbs inward turn away

from the city and the public sphere and inward toward the family, the very turn thought to

keep the suburbs safe and prosperous, imperils the safety, security, and education of

minority suburbanites, particularly women. While the clustered organization of suburban

homes is a feature often thought to enable safety by allowing visitors to the neighborhood

to be monitored, in Towelhead, this feature of the built environment works at cross-

purposes. Although it enables Melina Hines to see Mr. Vuoso visiting the Maroun home,

it also enables Mr. Vuoso to track Rifats comings and goings, allowing him to visit

Jasira specifically when her father is absent. The distance between these homes

although small, is another factor that allows both Mr. Vuosos sexual abuse and Rifats

physical abuse to go unnoticed because Jasiras protestations cannot be heard by

neighbors as they might be in an apartment building or a neighborhood of contiguous

houses. Charming Gates turn away from diverse Houston also endangers Jasira and other

children. The relative racial homogeneity of the neighborhood and suburbs tendency to

associate danger with the urban sphere leave some residents of Charming Gates with the

mistaken impression that danger comes only from outsiders. For example, both Rifat and

Mr. Vuoso believe Thomas, Jasrias friend and the only African American boy in her

school, is a danger to Jasira although they themselves both abuse her in some way.

Elliss Good Fences also explores the dangers that can result from the insular

ethos of suburbia. While Mabel expects her new suburban neighborhood to be peaceful,

xlii
she is surprised to find that one of her most respected suburban neighbors, Norm Bonner,

beats his wife Ann Marie almost nightly. Mabel, accustomed to a neighborhood structure

that allows for fluid boundaries between homes, hopes that Greenwich neighbors will

drop by and continues her custom of leaving windows open. However, when she hears

Ann Maries cries, her husband counsels her to ignore them, which she can do only by

shutting up the house, metaphorically sealing herself off both from Ann Maries need for

intervention and from the rest of the neighborhood. In Parable of the Sower, residents of

the novels Rodeblo neighborhood, like those of Good Fencess Serendipity Street, are

hesitant to interfere with the affairs of individual households, particularly if the heads of

such households are powerful like Richard Moss, a wealthy engineer who dominates his

multiple wives, all of whom are former street dwellers whom he lured into servitude.

Another presumption of pro-suburban discourse, that the suburbs are home to

superior schools, is also challenged by these novels. Although structural inequalities do

indeed give suburban schools real advantages in terms of greater funding for educational

and extracurricular activities, these texts show that such advantages are not transmitted

equally to the children of minority and ethnic families who seek to share in the suburbs

bounty. In both Towelhead and Good Fences, children are taunted with racial slurs and

their teachers feeble efforts to create an equitable classroom environment are ineffective.

Schools in Greenwich and in Greater Houston also seem to be lacking in lessons on

ethnic American or world history. 4

The opportunities these families seek are part of the American Dreama

narrative that overlaps with suburban discourse. While the Dream has often been

4
While multicultural education seems commonplace now, it is important to remember that Towelhead was
set in 1991-1992 and Good Fences in the 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, these critiques remain relevant
as there has been continuous backlash against gains in multicultural education and ethnic studies.

xliii
conceived purely in terms of economic mobilityof being better off economically than

one started or being better off than ones parentsowning a suburban home has

sometimes been considered either part of the Dream or the Dream itself. In all three

novels, at least some characters share this variant of the American Dream but soon learn

that they are unwelcome in the suburbs, that participating in the Dream requires a

disavowal of their history and heritage, that the dream requires a ruthless, competitive

outlook, or that the dream is dying. In Towelhead, Rifat, a Lebanese immigrant, buys his

suburban home after years of working for NASA but finds that his neighbors cannot

reconcile the notion that he is at once cosmopolitan, deeply connected to the culture of

his homeland, and a loyal American. Unlike Rifat, Tom Spader holds something of a

double consciousness in that he is acutely aware that participation in the American

Dream demands he disavow any obvious signs of an African American cultural identity

in order to earn the trust of whites. He and his family play by these rules, but find

themselves mired in a hegemonic white culture that does not accept them as equals. Thus,

while the American Dream states that anyone can become the prosperous owner of a

suburban home, Good Fences functions as a reminder that this Dream comes at a price,

and both Good Fences and Towelhead suggest that the racism which plagued the early

post-World War II suburbs continues unabated today even as greater numbers of ethnic

and racial minorities move to the suburbs.

Parable of the Sower, on the other hand, presents this competitive ethos as

unsustainable. The novel predicts that, if the drive to accrue individual or corporate

wealth is left unchecked, the exploitation of labor will escalate until poverty, illiteracy,

and slavery become commonplace. In turn, when violence becomes the key to survival,

xliv
the resentment of the poor will turn on the rich and any remnants of the middle class.

Although the suburb of Rodeblos reaction to this state of affairs seems logicalto

rescue the American Dream by protecting their private property and trying to maintain

salaried employment at any cost, Parable suggests that a truly inclusive ethosone that,

unlike the American Dream, concentrates not on climbing from poor to rich but on

solidarity with the pooris key to survival.

Whereas pro-suburban discourse assumes that suburbias greatest assets are the

quiet, privacy, safety, and property that its insularity brings, the novels studied Part II

also sound echoes of anti-suburban discourse, which suggests that these same features of

suburbia bring with them isolation, alienation, and spiritual impoverishment. While, as

Jurca and Beuka have both contended, anti-suburban discourse is problematic because it

eclipses white middle-class privilege (and sometimes by extension the middle-class

privilege earned by some minorities), these novels insist that the suburbs produce

alienated, isolated, and dissatisfied residents. However, they do not blame material

privilege as the root of that despair. Rather, they demonstrate that, for minority and ethnic

suburbanites who are often shunned or discriminated against in their communities, deep

dissatisfaction results from the fact that their material and professional success does little

to counteract racism. While this anti-suburbanism also dovetails with Betty Freidans

concern that women are isolated from career and educational opportunities cities provide,

these texts seem more concerned that this isolation leaves women and girls vulnerable to

physical and sexual abuse.

Just as Towelheads Rifat is treated as suspect by his neighbors and Jasira is

taunted in her middle school, Good Fences Mabel endures repeated slights by neighbors,

xlv
shopkeepers, and service people. While anti-suburban discourse often critiques the

suburbs by suggesting that they are materialistic, conformist, and spiritually

impoverished, Mabels attempts to fit in and her high-end purchases may indicate

something else altogethera way to signal her belonging and to be recognized by the

women in her group as a peer. When these efforts fail, like many isolated and alienated

housewives before her, Mabel falls into drug addiction. That addiction, however, is

spurred not just by the lack of a career or of the intellectual stimulation of city life that

plagued many white suburban women; it is also an attempt to grapple with the

neighborhoods unremitting racism.

Similarly, Towelheads Jasira and Good Fencess Tommy appear to be

stereotypical alienated suburban teenagers. Texts ranging from Ordinary People (1980),

to Mendess American Beauty (1999), to Rick Moodys Ice Storm (1994) depict suburban

teenagers as driven to depression and/or rebellion by conformist culture and emotionally

absent parents sidetracked by their material pursuits. In the novels that Part II examines,

teenagers alienation and isolation is only in part a reaction to intergenerational conflict

or the privations of the unpopular and has much to do with their communitys lack of

racial equity. Teenagers like Towelheads Jasira and Good Fencess Tommy Two, for

example, grapple not only with preoccupied parents, but also with communities which

single them out as exotic or as outcasts, leaving them both vulnerable to predatory adults

and inclined toward rebellion.

Part II thus uses both pro- and anti-suburban discourse to suggest the suburbs hold

unique perils for minority residents; however, the texts do not suggest that the suburbs

completely determine the lives of their characters. Rather, they advocate for a collective

xlvi
approach to reform that emphasizes the extension of empathy or caring across family,

racial, and class lines, while recognizing such reform may be hard to achieve in the

suburbs. In Towelhead, the insular suburban culture that imperils Jasira is defeated by the

kindness of her neighbor Melina Hines. Although suburban neighborhoods are often

organized as a cluster of discrete private homes and neighbors are often wary of

interfering in one anothers affairs, in the novel, Melina is less hesitant than most. In

some ways, her adoption of Jasira late in the novel exemplifies the communal sort of

ethic that many say have been missing from suburbia. While this is the reading the novel

seems to have intended, in focusing on Rifats physical abuse of Jasira and Melinas

potential as a better parent, the book reinforces some aspects of sometimes maternalistic

western feminism because Jasira is saved from her Arab father by a white woman and

Melina is represented as liberated whereas Jasira is presented as benighted and ignorant

about sexuality.

Good Fences also endorses a more collective ethos. Tom Spader, who sabotages

African American Ruth when she announces her intention to buy another house on the

block by setting fire to her house, collapses under the weight of his guilt; however,

Mabel, who overcomes her fear that Ruths unpolished ways will reflect poorly on her

own family feels a great sense of relief when she welcomes Ruth into her home. In doing

so, she gains a friend with whom she can speak freely. Unfortunately, friendship is

merely a palliative; there is little hint that the two women together will overturn

Serendipity Streets well-entrenched racial hierarchy. On the other hand, Mabels

daughter Hilary, who leaves the suburbs, directly confronts the white power structure by

teaching her impoverished students to draw on their own knowledge rather than rely on

xlvii
the schools ethnocentric curriculum. In order to make such sweeping changes, the novel

suggests, one must be willing to reach across neighborhood lines which cluster together

people of like incomes and ideologies.

Parable of the Sower makes an even stronger statement by suggesting than an

integrated community in which residents engage in collective efforts to sustain

themselves cannot ensure its own safety and security if such efforts are not extended

outward to the world. Residents in the central community in the novel, Rodeblo, work

together to grow fruits and vegetables, defend their neighborhood, and educate their

children, but they hope to return to steady jobs and a stable political life. Lauren predicts

that her parents former prosperous lifestyle is never to return and, when the

neighborhood is attacked, she forms Earthseed, a nomadic community that opens its

ranks to the street poor, including some with criminal pasts and to orphaned children,

who represent mouths feed and bodies to protect. By basing the community on a radical

sense of empathyon an outward-looking ethos rather than an insular, competitive

oneEarthseed gains the street smarts of the fugitives and cements its members together

through their desire to care for the children. The strategy is successful and the group

survives several attacks before reaching its final destination.

Parable of the Sower, which presents the forecasted end of the suburbs along with

the end of the middle class, thus provides the perfect text with which to end this project.

Although scholars have begun to reevaluate the suburbs potential, it seems that, in the

realm of imaginative literature and films that focus on central female characters, authors

are only tentatively optimistic about the suburbs ability to foster communities conducive

to womens agency as well as equality for other marginalized groups. All of the texts

xlviii
seem to argue that collective efforts that bring women together, sometimes with members

of other oppressed groups, are necessary to reduce womens isolation and combat

patriarchy, but some texts suggest only the missed opportunity for such coalitions while

others show the limits of such coalitions. Parable of the Sower is clear in its suggestion

that while such coalitions may allow suburbs to survive in the near term, social justice

cannot be achieved in the suburbs. Coalitions remain important, but they must cross class

lines and community borders.

Although the novel begins with what one might think is the picture of a

progressive communitythere are families of all races, women like Lauren and her

stepmother are well-educated, and the neighbors work together for the betterment of their

neighborhoodthe novel implies that if progress for women and racial minorities is not

seen in the world outside, it cannot be sustained inside an individual neighborhood.

While in the past decade, scholars have begun to ask if the suburbs have moved past their

history of racism or if women have always had a more active role in the suburbs than

previously thought, Parable asks the question of the suburbs role globally. Parable

proposes that just as the insularity of the suburbs and their turn away from the public

sphere parallels deregulation and the reign of multinationals, which is a turn away from

the concerns of the public sphere (education, gender and racial equality, and the

eradication of poverty and slavery) in favor of private industry. Parable proposes that

while such a worldview may bring short term advantages to the suburbanite, the nation,

or the corporation, in the long term such a strategy threatens the economy because labor

will be readily exploited. In turn, the he safety of the middle-class will be threatened as

xlix
the poor grow desperate to survive in the face of declining social services and the end of

educational opportunities.

This text is an appropriate endpoint not only because it highlights the need for

suburban women to join progressive coalitions but also because its predictions of the

future have proven to be prophetic. While the suburbs have not yet succumbed to

cataclysmic violence, deregulation leading to the foreclosure crisis has dotted many once-

pristine suburbs with the blight of unoccupied foreclosed homes and the resulting

financial crisis has affected not only the poor but also many families who once held their

financial futures to be secure. While this has led some to forecast both the end of the

suburbs and the end of the middle class, it remains to be seen if progressive reforms can

be made or if further erosion of the economy, public services, and infrastructure will lead

as to the need for the radical restructuring of American society as Butlers novel predicts.

l
 Part One: Containment Culture, the Suburbs, and the Post-World War II

Housewife in Todd Hayness Far from Heaven (2002), Gary Rosss Pleasantville

(1998), Michael Cunninghams The Hours (1998)

1
 INTRODUCTION

Part One of this dissertation examines three recent texts that center at least to a

degree on post World War II suburban housewivesTodd Haynes film Far from

Heaven (2002), Gary Rosss film Pleasantville (1998), and Michael Cunninghams novel

The Hours (1998).5 All three texts draw on non-fiction analyses of post-World War II

American social life, particularly Betty Freidans identification of The Problem That has

no Name and descriptions of Containment Culture in order to examine the ways in

which the oppression of suburban women is connected to the oppression of lesbians, gay

men, and African-Americans. These texts, all published in the 1990s and 2000s, use

these connections to articulate an argument against the neoconservative valorization of

the 1950s and traditional family values during the escalation of the Culture Wars in the

1990s. All of the central characters examined in Part OneFar From Heavens Cathy

Whitaker, Pleasantvilles Betty Parker, and The Hours Laura Brownare, like

Friedans subjects in The Feminine Mystique, middle-class or upper-middle class

suburban homemakers who feel constrained by domestic life and seek intellectual

fulfillment; however, these texts seek to move beyond Friedans description of isolated

suburban women to show the way in which a sense of entrapment was felt to an even

greater degree by those marginalized due to their race or sexual identity. In this way,

these texts take what is perhaps the most prominent image of the suburban woman in the

cultural imagination and place it in the context of a national narrative that drew together

concerns of national security and prescriptions for personal morality. This narrative not

5
A film version of The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman,
Julianne Moore, and Ed Harris was released in 2002. I am limiting my discussion here to consideration of
the novel because the text provides allusive descriptions of Laura Browns community which demonstrate
the intersection of Containment Culture and the suburban landscape.

2
only emphasized domesticity as a respite from and defense against the harsh realities of

the Cold War but also painted gay men and lesbians as potential double agents and

indentified advocacy for African-Americans as politically subversive. Alan Nadel, Elaine

Tyler May, and Elizabeth Wheeler are a few of the scholars who identify this culture with

the spatial metaphor of containment. What they describe as Containment Culture takes its

name from the American policy of containing both the international influence of the

Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb.

As Nadel explains, the policy of containment translated to a national culture that

promoted a fierce protection of national intactness against the perceived threat of

covert Soviet infiltration:

The story of containment had derived its logic from the rigid major premise that

the world was divided into two monolithic camps, one dedicated to promoting the

inextricable combination of capitalism, democracy and (Judeo-Christian) religion,

and one seeking to destroy that ideological amalgamation by any means. (3)

According to Nadel, these rigid boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable

resulted in a culture of suspicion that prized conformity in social, personal, and political

behavior. As Nadel writes,

The virtue of conformityto some idea of religion, to middle-class values, to

distinct gender roles and rigid courtship ritualsbecame a form of public

knowledge through the pervasive performances of and allusions to containment

narratives. (4)

These texts that this project exploresall of which examine suburbia in the era of

Containment Culturedepict the suburbs as theatrical sets on which containment

3
narratives of middle-class values, distinct gender roles, and rigid courtship rituals

are performed (4). In this way, these texts slowly denaturalize a complacent image of the

suburb by analyzing the forces that work to maintain hierarchies of power that privilege

the white heterosexual male and the patriarchal nuclear family.

While both Freidans description of The Problem that Has No Name and theory

of a culture of containment have faced challenges from scholars in recent years, these

ideas continue to provide a helpful framework for studying the texts at hand. By

contextualizing womens oppression in terms of the struggles of gay men, lesbians, and

African-Americans, these texts acknowledge that Friedans work focused too narrowly

on white, straight, middle-class women. On the other hand, these texts do not reflect the

influence of a growing body of scholarship by historians and social scientists like Susan

Hartmann and Sandra Dijkstra that contests Friedans work by emphasizing the extent to

which middle-class women continued to enter the workforce in the 1950s or of the work

of numerous critics who have refined the concept of containment by emphasizing the

challenges posed to the status quo by beat and teen subcultures and civil rights activism. 6

While acknowledging these criticisms, Part One will retain the lens of The Feminine

Mystique and Containment Culture to analyze these texts for two important reasons. First,

these interpretations of the Post-World War II era clearly have a profound influence on

the texts studied in this section despite the fact that they provide incomplete pictures of

6
Susan Hartmann, for example, notes that The celebration of domesticity notwithstanding, by the mid-
1950s, rates of womens employment matched the artificially high levels attained during WWII. Most
striking was the rising employment of married women, which grew by 42 percent during the 1950s (86).
Sandra Dijkstra provides a slightly higher figure for womens employment. She writes that the postwar
retreat of women into domesticity was not as universal as Friedan would have us believe. Although the
fifties bore witness to a revitalization of family life and to a baby boom, it was also marked by a doubling
of womens employment outside the home. The most striking feature of the period was the degree to which
women continued to enter the job market (292).

4
the 1950s themselves. Second, while these portraits may be too monolithic, the

idealization of the 1950s by the right in the Culture Wars relies on this very same

monolith.7 While the descriptions provided by The Feminine Mystique and the analysis of

a culture of containment emphasize the limitations of this era by depicting it as one of

confinement, the rhetoric of neoconservatives offers the 1950s as the good old days.

Far from Heaven, Pleasantville, and The Hours, all written in the 1990s and 2000s,

reflect upon this culture and reexamine womens lives in the 1950s as conduits to

intervene against the rights position in the Culture Wars. In the political theater of the

Culture Wars, the right valorizes traditional families, and even moderates and some on

the left take up an (albeit less restrictive) rhetoric of family values in order to connect

with voters. In the midst of this discursive climate, these texts use the suburban

housewife, a symbol of traditional family values, to explore the problems inherent in

the structure of the patriarchal nuclear family. Moreover, these texts, by using the

framework of Containment Culture to tie racial discrimination and the persecution of

gays and lesbians to the problems of suburban women, interrogate the idealization of the

1950s as a whole.

The Feminine Mystique, Containment Culture, and the Culture Wars

Little more than a decade following the post-World War II suburban boom, Betty

Freidans 1963 invective The Feminine Mystique suggested that mass suburbanization

was a major factor in the oppression of post-World War II middle-class women.

Suburban women, she wrote, suffered from the Problem that Has No Name, a

syndrome too often seen but too seldom diagnosed. According to Friedan, this syndrome

7
As Paul R. Joseph notes in his work on Pleasantville, in the Culture Wars the views of both liberals and
conservatives are often presented in the public forum as cartoon-like even by the parties themselves
(3).

5
manifests itself in depression, sickness, and boredom and was the result of the inability of

family, marriage, and home to fulfill educated women in the manner promised by the

American media. Friedan argues that womens magazines promulgated the idea of the

Happy Housewife Heroine, an affluent, attractive, competent housewife who longed

for no other task, duty, or joy than to provide a perfect home for her family and children.

For Friedan, the relationship between the suburban environment and the circumscription

of womens lives is almost axiomatic. While she acknowledges that The Problem that

Has No Name affects urban as well as suburban women in her chapter Housewifery

Expands to Fill All Time Available, she argues that the suburbs worked in tandem with

the feminine mystiquea discourse that glorified female submission and encouraged

women to focus their energies on the home, family, and marriage rather than careersto

keep women in the home and away from the public sphere. Cities, she wrote, offer most

of the jobs available for women, as well as the most readily accessible childcare and the

majority of educational resources they might need to complete or continue the training

for the paid workforce (Friedan 346). While Friedan argues that, in earlier suburbs, some

women had the wherewithal to avoid the busywork of suburban home and community

and could find, or make, the same kind of serious commitment outside the home that she

would have made in the city, she suggests that women educated after 1950 who moved

to newer suburbs fell prey to the infantilizing and debilitating feminine mystique, which

was intensified by the suburban glorification of an inward turn toward family. Such

women, she argues, rarely undertook serious public commitments:

When the mystique took over, however, a new breed of women came to

the suburbs. They were looking for sanctuary; they were perfectly willing to

6
 accept the suburban community as they found it (their only problem was how to

fit in); they were perfectly willing to fill their days with the trivia of

housewifery). . . .

So, increasingly, in the new bedroom suburbs, the really interesting

volunteer jobs the leadership of the cooperative nurseries, the free libraries, the

school board posts, the selectmenships, and in some suburbs, even the PTA

presidenciesare filled by men. (Friedan 347)

Whereas in the popular and academic discourse in the 1950s commentators fretted that

the suburbs would erode an American ideal of rugged masculinity, often describing them

as landscapes that would determine the lives of their inhabitants, Friedan argues that

womens migration from city to suburb produced a change in character by making

women more homebound and more dependent on men. 8

In addition, Friedan suggested that new suburban home styles such as the open

plan ranch expanded rather than reduced the workload of suburban homemakers: There

are no true walls or doors; the woman in the beautiful electronic kitchen is never

separated from her children. In what is basically all one free-flowing room, instead of

rooms separated by walls and stairs, continual messes continually need picking up

(Friedan 328). At the same time, she reports that the public image of this lifestyle was

held up as the envy of the world:

The suburban housewifeshe was the dream image of the young

American woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. She had

found true feminine fulfillment. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned

only about her husband, her children, her home.

8
See the Introduction and Section II for further discussion of this discourse.

7
 Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of

the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the

picture window, depositing their station wagonsful of children at school, and

smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. (61)

Here, Friedan suggests that the Happy Housewife Heroine image promulgated in the

media both established a normative image of American life and marked that image as

explicitly suburban. Part One of this dissertation explores texts that portray women who

try to live the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine while suffering internally from

The Problem that Has No Name. Although both the suburbs and the 1950s are often

idealized by the right, the troubles encountered by these women characters, two of whom

feel so confined by domestic life that they leave their husbands and families, indicate the

troubling aspects of any attempt to revive a culture that dictates womens place as in the

home. In addition, rather than view The Problem that Has No Name as an isolated

phenomenon, these texts demonstrate that the glorification of the Happy Housewife

Heroine is just one among many narratives of containment.

Containment logic enforced conformity and stasis through promulgating an

insistent fear of communist infiltration: the pressure applied to women to remain in the

home was heightened by the idea that they were responsible for policing the fortress of

the family. Containing sexuality within marriage became important as it was feared that

agitators or subversives would use sexuality as a channel to recruit American spies or

allies. In this environment of suspicion, gay men were perceived as more vulnerable to

international spies and blackmailing because they would have desired to keep their

sexuality a secret, while lesbians were painted as predators likely to corrupt other

8
women. Gays, lesbians, and women were not the only groups marginalized by this

discourse. The interest of communists in racial equality in the face of widespread racism

led many to suspect Civil Rights activists as Soviet sympathizers, while segregation

enforced the physical, literal quarantine or containment of African Americans. While

women, gays and lesbians, and African Americans largely did not mobilize around shared

concerns, the films and novel in this Part One indicate that they shared an analogous

though not identical relationship to Containment Culture.

Elaine Tyler Mays writing has been essential to articulating the ways in which

containment discourse connected public policy and private life. May suggests that an

inward turn toward hearth and home on the part of men and women and pressure exerted

upon women to return to traditional gender roles in the Post World War II era were

responses not only to both the triumph and the suffering of the War but also to the threat

of the atomic bomb, Soviet power, and the increasing bureaucratization of mens work.

Both the trauma of war and the drudgery of office work were used to justify demands for

womens quiescence. May writes that advice columnists urged women to be sensitive to

the needs of the returning veterans, since the mens battles were not at all behind them

(57). Corporate work, meanwhile, was painted as dehumanizing and potentially eroding

to masculinity, so women were asked to take responsibility for building up the male

ego (57). At the same time, the Cold War policy of containment and the social structure

that resulted from it centered on a fear of subversive individuals and activities. In such a

culture, women were asked to conform to prevailing notions of gender identity as part of

a performance of patriotism. A happy marriage was a defense against possible

subversionsexual behavior of any kind outside of marriage was thought to lead to the

9
kind of moral corruption that weakened national and familial strength and left the door

open to those double agents waiting to take advantage of uncontrolled desire. May

suggests that Alfred Kinseys 1948 and 1953 reports on American sexual behavior

unleashed anxiety about the extent to which sex shaped American life and that in

response heterosexual marriage was promoted as the appropriate container for the

unwieldy American libido (88). This was particularly critical, May says, because this

active American libido was seen as detrimental to American security. Both womens

sexuality and womens participation in the workforce were seen as threats to the strategy

of domestic containment:

public health professionals argued that inside as well as outside the home,

women who challenged traditional roles placed the security of the nation at risk.

The experts warned that young women were drawn to public amusement areas

that would lead them to sexual promiscuity, while the employment of married

women would lead to unsupervised homes where both parents are working. (88)

According to May, The Massachusetts Society for Social Hygiene (MSSH) cited both

trends as major causes for the decline of sexual morality among youths and a weakening

of the nations moral fiber at a time when the country had to be strong (88). Women

were to be sexual, but only for their husbands. A sexually satisfying and childbearing

marriage was seen as crucial to mens stability as workers and patriots, the nations

strength, and the defense against communism in future generations. Thus, containment

narratives also enveloped heteronormativity: 9

9
I am using the definition of heteronormativity developed by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner.
Articulating this definition, they write that By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of
understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherentthat is,
organized as a sexuality-but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take

10
 The logic went as follows. National strength depended upon the ability of strong,

manly men to stand up against communist threats. It was not simply a matter of

general weakness leading to a soft foreign policy; rather sexual excesses or

degeneracy would make individuals easy prey for communist tactics. According

to the common wisdom of the time, normal heterosexual behavior culminating

in marriage represented maturity and responsibility; therefore, those who

were deviant were, by definition, irresponsible, immature, and weak. It

followed that men who were slaves to their passions could easily be duped by

seductive women who worked for the communists. Even worse were the

perverts who, presumably, had no masculine backbone. (94)

Thus, medical discourses that pathologized homosexuality fused with Cold War political

strategy to paint gay men as a threat to national security. This discourse not only

permeated discussions of womens duty but also resulted in a culture of gay baiting that,

according to May, rivaled red baiting in its ferocity, destroying careers, encouraging

harassment, creating stigmas and forcing those who confessed their guilt to name others

with whom they associated (94-95). As Charles Kaiser notes, while heterosexual

government employees likewise may have had sexual secrets, gay men were thought to

several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or
marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that
could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory
manifestationsoften unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible
relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this
sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative.
Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences
is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because
homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it
would not be possible to speak of "homonormativity" in the same sense (548).

11
be more vulnerable to blackmail than their heterosexual counterparts, though of course

no evidence existed to support this claim (69). Although lesbians were targeted less

frequently by such sweeps, Donna Penn, who builds upon Mays work, suggests that the

1950s saw an increasing demonization of lesbians: .purveyors of the dominant

discourse now took it upon themselves to make the lesbian visible and narrow the cultural

space previously available that allowed them to go unnoticed, thereby delimiting if not

establishing the boundaries of deviant female sexuality (Penn 365). Whereas gay men

were painted as vulnerable to subversive infiltration, lesbians were painted as subversive.

In Cold War discourse, . . . the true lesbian was identified by her insatiable need for

sexual conquest, which made her a threat to the social order as well as to the containment

of female sexuality within the home and marriage (Penn 368).

Alan Nadels work is helpful in that it builds on Mays articulation of domestic

iterations of Containment Culture to explore containment as an example of a cultural

narrative with the totalizing power to define the possibilities of individuals lives. Nadel

argues that U.S. dominance in economic and military matters assured its unprecedented

capacity in the decades following WWII to deploy arms and images, to construct

alliances and markets, to dominate global entertainment, capitalize global production, and

epitomize global power, rendering containment perhaps one of the most powerfully

deployed national narratives in recorded history. He asserts that cultural narratives like

containment accrue their power by being echoed and reiteratedin the forms of national

narratives, religious dogma, class signifiers, courtship ritualswith a contagion that

resembles viral epidemics . . . . Articulated in such a wide range of domains, such

narratives do not completely foreclose upon the possibility of personal resistance, but, he

12
argues, they do have the power to unify, codify, and containperhaps intimidate is the

best word the personal narratives of its population. Therefore, personal narration

oscillates, situationally, between identification with and alienation from a historical

order. The power of containment narratives thus derives from the general acceptance

during the cold war of a relatively small set of narratives by a relatively large portion of

the population. The widespread acceptance of these narratives, Nadel argues, is

epitomized by the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era, but Americans endorsed such

narratives in oaths of varying kinds. According to Nadel, even rebel Holden Caulfields

repetitive insistence on his honesty in Catcher in the Rye can be seen as an example of

the ways in which Americans of the age broadcast their willingness to conform (4). The

texts that Part One explores paint the suburbsplaces created as middle-class havens

as places in which homemakers/mothers begin by performing containment narratives

even though they are all alienated from these dominant narratives, thus exemplifying

what Nadel calls the historical order. Such narratives, which emphasize aspects of

domestic containment noted by May and Pennstrictly demarcating gender roles and

heteronormativityare shown to be enforced by forces as various as Laura Browns

Catholic faith (The Hours), Frank Whitakers corporate culture (Far from Heaven), and

local schools and government (Pleasantville).

While Nadel and May do not focus as much attention on race as they do gender

and sexuality, a fuller articulation of the way in which racism in the post-World War II

era is tied into the ideologies of containment is provided by Elizabeth Wheeler in her

book Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Post-war America. Wheeler builds on Nadels

claims by examining the ways in which Containment Culture enforced not only

13
conformity to ideas of religion, middle class values, and gender roles but also residential

segregationthe spatial containment of African-Americans. Wheeler cites the

intensification of post-war segregation spurred on by suburbanization:

As racial division acquired new absoluteness, concrete reinforced the logic of

segregation. In homebuilding, the heated concrete slab replaced the basement and

permitted the boom in whites-only suburban subdivisions. Meanwhile, back in the

inner city, urban renewal bulldozed old neighborhoods and replaced them with

enormous concrete block housing projects.

With these divisions frozen in concrete, containment logic realized itself

on the landscape. (10)

African-Americans were thus contained socially and economically as well as spatially to

an urban core increasingly suffering from lack of private and public investment as white

suburbs burgeoned. Moreover, to advocate for desegregation was considered by many in

power to be a subversive and un-American act. In his book The Culture of the Cold War,

historian Stephen J. Whitfield cites the example of Albert Canwell, chair of the

Washington State Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, who

said, If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or

that there is an inequality of wealth, there is reason to believe that that person is a

Communist (qtd. in Whitfield 21). As Whitfield notes, Indeed, so insensitive were most

white Americans to systemic bigotry, in the era before racism became a common mode of

social analysis, that segregationists were not entirely wrong in suspecting that a dedicated

opposition to racial discrimination was often Communist-inspired (22). Whereas a

prominent non-communist organizations like the NAACP might successfully be

14
classified as non-communist by the HUAC, in southern states it remained vulnerable to

the testimony of ex-communists who insisted it was an instrument of international

conspiracy (22). While the oppression of African Americans has been a constant in the

history of the United States, its specific iterations in the post-World War II era followed

the logic of Containment. The status quo of race relations was reinforced by defining

activism as communist-inspired while the celebration of the nations prosperity

overshadowed the inequality of economic opportunity available to African Americans.

It should be noted that despite the ways in which these films echo both Friedans

ideas and the concept of containment described by Wheeler, Nadel, and May, both

historical frameworks have been disputed in recent years. While Friedans work

captivated U.S. audiences, it has also long been criticized for failing to account for the

struggles of lesbians, women of color, and both working women and homemakers in blue

collar and lower-middle class households. Yet Friedans text made such a broad impact

that few questioned the authority with which it spoke about the conditions of middle-

class and upper-middle class suburban women until recently. In fact, in popular culture

and even in some American historiographies, The Feminine Mystique often serves as a

bookend to what Paul R. Joseph called the Fifties of the Mind10 a transition from the

Dark Ages of the 1950s into the protest-era of the 1960s and beyond. Recent scholars

mentioned earlier, like Hartmann and Dijkstra, however, have emphasized the extent to

which women continued to enter the workforce after World War II, while Joanne

Meyerowitz has suggested that womens magazines throughout the 1950s featured career

10
I borrow this term from Josephs analysis of Pleasantville. He writes that the fifties of the mind is a
figment of the popular imagination associates with a golden age of peace, prosperity, and community
lasting from roughly the end of World War II until the coming of the Beatles (Joseph 1).

15
women as role models.11 For the purpose of this analysis, I retain the focus in part on

Friedans view of post-World War II womens world because, as even Meyerowitz, one

of Friedans greatest critics, notes, since Friedan published The Feminine Mystique,

historians of American women have adopted wholesale her version of the postwar

ideology, a fact that also inevitably leaves its imprint on the texts studied in Part One

(1456). Moreover, Far from Heaven, Pleasantville, and The Hours take up and examine

this archetype of the Happy Housewife Heroine for specific reasons: to intervene in the

Culture Wars through which neoconservatives often posited the time before second wave

liberal feminism as the apex of both American families and national strength and

prosperity. Likewise, Containment Culture has been criticized as too monolithic a view of

the post-World War II era. Although many newer critics retain the sense that dominant

cultural narratives emphasized conformity, they also emphasize the extent to which such

dominant discourses were challenged prior to the 1960s. Likewise while acknowledging

recent revisions, the chapters in Part One will also retain the use of the frameworks of

containment. First, like The Problem That has no Name, the theory of containment

clearly influenced the three texts at hand more than recent revisions. Secondly, the theory

of containment retains a powerful ability to explain the connections between the

inequalities experienced by various groups of Americans in the 1950s. Lastly, if such

11
Joanne Meyerowitz, while acknowledging the power of Friedans work as a harbinger of the new liberal
feminism, insists that Friedans analysis is shaped not by a visionary outlook but by prevailing popular
discourse which was already a space in which ideals of domesticity and of achievement both battled and
commingled (1481). In reviewing one of Friedans major sourceswomens magazine fictionshe comes
to a conclusion quite different than that in The Feminine Mystique:
From the 1930s to the 1950s, magazine articles advocated both domestic ideals and nondomestic
achievement for women. In the 1930s and 1940s as well as the 1950s, the womens magazines
presented housewives with romantic fiction, marriage advice, recipes, fashions, and ads for
household products. And in all three decades, popular magazines, including womens magazines,
spotlighted women of public achievement, addressed women as workers, and promoted womens
participation in community activism and politics. (1477)

16
portraits do indeed paint the 1950s as more conservative than it perhaps ever was, the

idealization of the 1950s by the right in the Culture Wars relies on this uber-conservative

image to describe the 1950s not as an era of constraint and repression but as Americas

golden age. Such rhetoric never, for example, focuses on the fifties as the genesis of the

Beat movement, Civil Rights activism, or the trend toward teenage rebellion

emblematized by James Dean and Elvis Pressley.

Produced in the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, these texts are

all to some degree interested in offering a counter-narrative in order to intervene in the

Culture Wars. As such they begin with and then systematically dismantle the

conservative portrait of that decade. In her book, A Kinder, Gentler America:

Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, political historian Mary Caputis analysis of the

film Pleasantville argues that . . . Americans finding solace in 1950s certitude long for

reassurance that contemporary Americafragmented, raging, cacophonousmight

claim some deeper, abiding meaning that ensures its stable foundation (21). Providing a

reading of the post-World War II era similar to that of Friedan, Nadel, May and Wheeler,

the three texts analyzed in Part One conclude that the cost of stability and certainty is a

system that contains the sexual freedom, economic opportunity, physical movement, and

social mobility of large portions of the population.

As conservatives attempted to rehabilitate the 1950s, the suburban homemaker

became a symbol around which texts like those I explore in this project organize a

response to a discursive environment in which even more moderate thinkers were

debating the place of women (particularly mothers) in the workforce, the increased

prevalence of divorce, the availability of family planning and abortion, and the rights of

17
gay men and lesbians. This constellation of issues is often grouped by conservatives

under the umbrella of family values. Furthermore, family historian Stephanie Coontz

suggests that family values rhetoric was embraced by national politicians on the left

and right. President Clinton, himself the son of a single mother, Coontz notes, was

saying that there were a lot of very good things in Dan Quayle's Murphy Brown

speech, a polemic in which the once-Vice President criticized Candice Bergmans

portrayal of a fictional TV journalist who chooses to become a single mother. As for the

right, while George W. Bushs famous 1988 Republican National Convention Speech

gave a soft sell for family values by evoking a Kinder, Gentler, Nation, in 1992 Pat

Buchanan attempted to rally his primary supporters to Bush through his vitriolic Culture

Wars speech. Evoking a strong fear of feminism and homosexuality, he painted Hillary

Clintons feminism as radical and employed the metaphor of cross-dressing to both

enforce gender binaries and instill a fear of moderate democrats. He called the

Democratic National Convention 20,000 liberals and radicals . . . dressed up as

moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American

political history (Buchanan). As a potential first lady, Clinton was attacked not only by

Buchanan but by a wide swath of the media for a quip she made about her choice to

continue practicing law when her husband became governor of Arkansas: "I suppose I

could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was

pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life

(Quotation). The controversy that resulted provoked a makeover for Ms. Clintona

wholesale attempt to soften her appearance and demeanor, complete with a bake-off.

After four years of Bill Clintons presidency, Clinton remained a polarizing figure,

18
someone who stood almost as a foil to the Happy Housewife Heroine of the

sentimentalized 1950s. While the baking controversy was largely diffused by image

making and humor, a new target was Hillary Clintons book It Takes a Village to Raise a

Child, which argued for the need for strong social safety nets and educational institutions

for American youth. At the 1996 Republican National Convention, Clintons book was

tied to the demise of the American family and, by extension, American dominance itself.

Figuring the Clinton presidency as an interregnum, Bob Dole called upon his audience to

reaffirm its faith in the great American past, a past that was characterized by intact

families. Only a few paragraphs into the speech he delivered to accept his partys

nomination for the presidency, he said,

And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon

this countryon which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a

village, that is, the collective, and thus, the state, to raise a child.

The state is now more involved than it has ever been in the raising of

children, and children are now more neglected, abused, and more mistreated than

they have been in our time. This is not a coincidence. This is not a coincidence,

and, with all due respect, I am here to tell you, it does not take a village to raise a

child. It takes a family to raise a child.

If I could by magic restore to every child who lacks a father or a mother,

that father or that mother, I would. And though I cannot, I would never turn my

back on them, and I shall as president, promote measures that keep families

whole.

19
 I am here to tell you that permissive and destructive behavior must be

opposed, that honor and liberty must be restored, and that individual

accountability must replace collective excuse. (Dole)

Here Dole links a discourse of family values, based in a mythical past, as a basis to argue

against the liberal assertion of collective responsibility for childrens welfare. The family

that has been decimated is implicitly the patriarchal nuclear family. Extending outward

from issues pertaining specifically to family and children, he goes on to employ the

conservative rhetoric of individual accountability to reduce any analysis of social need

or structural analysis of social inequity to a collective excuse (Dole). During the

1990s, welfare reform and the Los Angeles riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict

were discussed and debated extensively, and such rhetoric as Doles, typical of

conservative discussions of race, drew attention away from structural inequalities by

figuring economic inequalities as the result of a lack of familial or individual

responsibility. Earlier in the decade, for example Dan Quayle, blamed the LA Riots on

irresponsible parents, pathologizing both African American and Latino families

(Coontz). By inciting uneasiness about urban safety, by criticizing minority families, and

by refusing to acknowledge the existence of structural racism, culture war rhetoric added

to the idealization of the nuclear family and stay at home mother an implicit nostalgia for

segregated, white spaces such as the post-War suburbs. In my discussion of the three

texts in this chapter, I will establish the ways in which the texts critique the political aim

of such nostalgia.

20
Far from Heaven

Todd Hayness Far from Heaven (2002) depicts the life of Cathy Whitaker, an upper-

middle class housewife and mother of two young children living in suburban Hartford,

Connecticut. The film follows Cathy, her family, and her community from the fall of

1957 to the spring of 1958. Depicting the way in which the veneer of her perfect home

and family masks her deep discontent, the film probes depths hidden more deeply than

The Problem that Has No Name. Cathy is implicated in limiting the sexual freedom of

her husband, Frank, a gay man, as well as the spatial and social mobility of African-

Americans, most notably her gardener and almost lover, Raymond Deagan. In its

examination of the Whitakers lives, the film suggests that the suburbs are the stage for

the performance of containment narratives. Emphasizing peace and prosperity, these

narratives obscure the marginalization of African Americans through limiting their spatial

mobility through residential segregation. Moreover, these narratives emphasis on

domesticity forces homosexual desire underground. In Far from Heaven, the Whitakers

carefully appointed home and prosperous suburb become stages for a pageant of family

and community life, while romantic plots concerning interracial and gay romance are

forced off the suburban stage.

The film engages with the difficult question of agency; in this investigation of

agency, the suburbs become the venue in which characters simultaneously perform and

battle against gender norms, heteronormativity, and their cultures deeply engrained

racism. While characters attempt, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully,

to resist such narratives, such resistance is always depicted as difficult. One way these

characters resist these narratives is to physically step outside of them. In order for

21
Raymond to have a role in Cathys life other than the walk-on part of servant, the couple

must retreat to the country where they cannot be seen. If Frank Whitaker, an advertising

executive for the Magnatech corporation, wishes to be anything other than a suburban

father and an organization man, he must seek out urban gay bars. However, when Cathy

and Frank return to their suburban community, they not only step back into containment

narratives but they also reiterate and perform them for others. Moreover, these narratives

are depicted as so totalizing that characters cannot recognize the ways in which others

struggles are analogous to their own. Frank is blind to Cathys deep discontent while

Cathy insists Frank attempt to cure himself. Moreover, Cathy, despite her abstractly

expressed support for Civil Rights, is unwilling to risk too much for a romance with

Raymond. The films conclusion, which allows Frank to begin a new relationship while

Cathy and Raymond are forced apart, suggests that resistance to these narratives is

difficult but is to some small degree possible for the courageous. The struggles of the

films characters not only expose the rights idealization of the 1950s but also suggest the

coherency of a potential coalition to combat such nostalgia and the policies its supports.

While the characters cannot or do not support one anothers struggles, the very tragic

outcomes of their conflicts with one another reveal the desirability of such a coalition

between marginalized groups.

Pleasantville

Betty Parker, the housewife and mother at the center of Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998),

shares with Cathy Whitaker a perfectly coifed exterior and tireless dedication to her home

and family. While the Whitakers try, and often fail, to resist containment narratives,

Betty, who is a character in a black and white television show running in the year 1958,

22
begins the film living a life that is literally scripted by such narratives. Her words are

largely limited to the encouragement and gentle discipline of her children. Her activities

are comprised of compulsive cooking and baking punctuated by a weekly break for a

game of bridge with local women. That script is only disrupted when her teenaged

television children, Bud and Mary Sue Parker, are replaced by the films two main

characters, 1990s twins David and Jennifer. While Pleasantville seems to be a vibrant

and friendly communitythe homes are neat, neighbors know one another, a quaint

Main Street is lined with shops, and children go dutifully off to schoolDavid and

Jennifer find that its civic life is an empty scam unprotested by drones who do not have

sex, have no interest in books (they are all blank), and accept an insular worldview that

dictates that there is nothing outside the borders of their town. Disturbed by

Pleasantvilles unremitting pleasantness, Jennifer starts a sexual revolution while David,

frustrated by citizens reliance on stability and order, introduces the arts, specifically

American literature and modernist painting, as a way to encourage creative thought and

expression. He starts a reading craze among his classmates and encourages his boss, soft-

spoken soda fountain owner Mr. Johnson, to pursue his passion for painting. One by one,

each character who undergoes an intellectual or sexual awakening turns from the black

and white palette of the original sitcom into Technicolor. The increased sexual

experimentation and overwhelming demand for library books incenses the town fathers,

who begin a vast power-grab under the name of protecting the towns values. A series of

punitive rules are passed, banning rock n roll, colored paint, and double beds, while

colored residents are segregated from the conservatives who remain in black and white.

Betty lands in the center of this maelstrom. No longer satisfied to serve and remain

23
faithful to her husband George, an even-handed but authoritative businessman and father,

she begins a brief affair with Mr. Johnson and aligns herself with her children and the rest

of the youth rebellion.

As the most-remembered if nostalgically-constructed figure of the 1950sthe

sitcom motherBetty is the (almost too-perfect) medium through which to explore

connections between Containment Culture and the Culture Wars. Graceful and soft-

spoken, she begins as the helpless happy housewife heroinethe paragon of domesticity

Friedan describes as created by womens magazinesbut in time moves to openly defy

her husbands demand for her quiescence. The narrative fuses her quest for personal

liberation to the broader issues of free speech and civil rights when she aids her son and

lover in their fight for the right to paint forbidden subjects in forbidden colored paint.

While the films examination of civil rights is somewhat diluted in that it deals with race

only obliquely and while its argument in favor of feminism and free speech is

compromised because it strains too hard to remain palatable, in documenting the

transformation of Betty and of Pleasantville itself, the film captures the suburb of 1950s

sitcoms as the perfect setting for its fable about the similarities between Containment

Culture and conservative culture war politics. 12 The suburban town fathers, like the

purveyors of Containment Culture, promise safety and stability and present change and

the empowerment of women as a threats to shared values. While neoconservatives

advocate a return to the 1950s, the film implicitly argues that such a return would entail

the consolidation of power in the hands of a few. While the Pleasantville suburb does not

at all resemble the increasingly economically and racially diverse suburbs of the turn of

12
As the chapter will discuss, African Americans never appear in the film, Betty becomes a muse
rather and does not engage in fulfilling work of her own, and the artists condemned by the town
fathers produce rather mundane work.

24
the millennium, the film taps the sitcom suburbsperhaps the most powerful image of

suburbia in the cultural imaginationas a setting from which to interrogate a nostalgic

view of the 1950s and family values. As in Far from Heaven, the suburb functions as a

theatrical set on which narratives of containment are performed. Unlike Far from

Heaven, Pleasantville allows this set itself to be disrupted in order to dramatize the

possibility of agency. The town fathers are defeated by the youth and their allies (Betty

and Mr. Johnson), implicitly suggesting to the audience that, if the structures of

containment have already been overturned in the historical past, the drive to reinstate

such values can also be defeated.

The Hours

The sense that suburban womens lives are scripted is again depicted in The

Hours. Laura Brown, a pregnant post-war California housewife and mother of three-year

old Richie, knows the script but feels inadequately prepared to play her part as the novel

unfolds. Alienated from containment narratives of patriotic, wifely, and motherly duty,

she wishes she could stay in bed and reada pastime that had flourished in her single

life. Feeling compelled to perform her role nonetheless, she attempts to make a perfect

cake but fails. She cannot create the perfect cake, nor can the attempt to meet domestic

ideals fulfill her creative drives. She finds sexual passionsomething relatively lacking

in her marriagein a brief kiss with her neighbor Kitty. Laura is not only a frustrated

homemaker but also the victim of sexual containment so pervasive it seems to deny her

even the possibility of a loving relationship. Exploring containment and compulsory

domesticity in a suburban setting, the novel paints Lauras home and community as a

place built for the male-headed nuclear family and suggests that Lauras only possibility

25
of achieving agency lies in escaping that placeeither temporarily through reading

Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, or checking into an anonymous hotel room, or more

decidedly through contemplating suicide and abandoning her family.

The book alternates sections following the life of Laura Brown with those

following the lives of author Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughn, a book editor living

openly with her lover Sally, a public television producer, in New York City at the turn of

the 21st century. As the text ties together commonalities in the lives of these women, it

refracts the question of the relationship between time, place, and agency through three

distinct lives. Both Woolf and Vaughn dread the suburbs and describe cities as

invigorating hubs whose crowds and eclectic landscapes stand for the resiliency of the

human spirit. For these two women, only cities host social worlds with the ability to

stimulate and satisfy their creative and sexual appetites. In contrast, the suburbs are

marked throughout the book as aesthetically banal bastions of coercive heteronormativity

and social hinterlands. However, the novel makes its intervention into the Culture Wars

implicitly. Laura Browns life is painted as the most constricted of the three women,

suggesting that a return to the culture of the post-World War II era would have disastrous

consequences for women in general and lesbians in particular. Vaughn and Woolf have

recourse to the city and their professional lives, and Vaughn has the freedom to live with

her partner, but all these women struggle both with expectations created by idealized

notions of hearth and home and the limits intimate relationships place upon the self. By

showing that such prescriptive notions of gender and sexuality emerge and reemerge, the

novel frames backlashes such as those of the culture wars as a serious threat.

26
Agency, the Suburbs, and the Post World-War II Era

In fact, this question of agency unites all of the women studied in Part One. All of

them live in a built environment which, as Friedan suggests, can effect noticeable

changes on women moving from city to suburb. Suburbs, she suggests, burden these

women with more housework and foster a culture that encourages them to focus on the

home and leave public life to men. Moreover, the historical milieu of containment also

exerts a pressure on these women by deploying narratives that elevate the role of

homemaker to one of national importance and cast aspersions on women who work

outside the home or seek sexual fulfillment outside heterosexual marriage. Yet some of

these texts do suggest that women can resist such ideological pressures and retain the

ability to determine the course of their lives. These texts suggest that the ability to form

coalitions, to recognize others oppressions, and to connect with others is key to such

resistance. Because it is impossible for The Hours Laura Brown, for example, to talk to

other women about anything but coffee brands, she cannot resist her conditions except by

completely escaping them. In Far from Heaven, Cathy Whitaker is also denied the solace

and solidarity of female friendshipher friend Eleanor turns her back when she learns of

Cathys romance with Raymond. At the same time, Cathy herself refuses to empathize

with Raymond or her husband Frank, a fact that the film suggests is a missed opportunity

for all three characters to unify against the dominant order. Betty Parker alone seems to

make a decided break with containment narratives, owing perhaps to her membership in

the colored community, which presses the town government for freedom.

27
 CHAPTER ONE

Implausibility and Containment Narratives: Agency, History, and Containment

Culture in Todd Haynes Far from Heaven

The trailer for Todd Haynes Far from Heaven (2002) follows the dissolution of

the marriage of Frank (Dennis Quaid) and Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore). The

couples well-appointed and seemingly happy home at first appears to embody the model

of success held out to Americans in the post World War II era. As spokesmodels for

Franks company, the fictional television manufacturer Magnatech, the Whitakers are

widely known as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech. Yet this very fact marks their marriage itself

as an advertisement.13 Less than six minutes into the film, viewers learn that Frank is

arrested for loitering (or cruising). Deliberately ambiguous at first, the film allows for the

possibility that Franks drinking is the cause of both his arrest and a marital discord. Yet

the film reveals first to viewers and then to Cathy that Frank has been hiding and

attempting to suppress his attraction to men. Isolated by this secret and by her failing

marriage, Cathy finds solace in a romantic friendship with her African-American

gardener Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). The film proceeds by tracing two

relationshipsFrank eventually falls in love and leaves Cathy after the couples attempt

to cure his homosexuality fails while Cathy and Raymonds relationship is thwarted by

extreme social pressure from both the white and black communities. The films

investigation of suburban life includes adultery, alcoholism, and abuse only incidentally;

these suburban problemsrather than being seen as outgrowths of middle-class ennui

13
Sharon Willis suggests this connection as well: The Whitakers relationship is entirely mediated by TV;
they are constituted by Franks professional identity as its advertiser. In a sense, the couple is only this
image, and thus, exists only for and through advertising (141).

28
or as the pitfalls of status-seekingare used to investigate something else that lies

beneath the surface of the supposedly tranquil life of suburbanites of the 1950s: the

marginalization of women, sexual minorities, and racial Others. Franks alcoholism

erupts because he attempts to hide his sexuality and both Cathy and Franks affairs are

used to probe not so much marriage itself but more broadly romantic and sexual behavior

as it is narrowly defined by Containment Culture. Far from Heaven is an investigation of

the pressure applied by and on individuals to conform to containment narratives; it

underscores the pervasiveness of Containment Culture and its manifestations in spatial

segregation, compulsory heterosexuality, and the unrelenting idealization of the

patriarchal nuclear family and the role of the housewife.

Hayness use of the ostensibly ideal family of the late 1950s to investigate the

strictures of Containment Culture also allows the film to interrogate the late 20th and

early 21st centurys cultural fantasy of the 1950s. The films relationship to the historical

past has garnered as much critical attention as its relationship to the films of Douglas

Sirk, particularly All that Heaven Allows, the 1955 film upon which much of the plot of

Hayness film is based. The films concern with the position of African Americans,

women, and gay men in the historical 1950s has been characterized in many ways: as

pandering to modern audiences by presenting the denizens of the 1950s as primitive, 14 as

merely incidental to the films concern with critiquing cinematic conventions,15 or as

14
James Harvey dismisses the film, arguing that it posits itself as an enlightened movie about
unenlightened people living in a ludicrous time (55).
15
Salom Aguilera Skvirsky suggests that The film deconstructs the promise of identity politics and the
coalitions forged on their basis at the same time as it distances itself from the melodramatic mode at the
level of generic mode (91). Thus, she says, The interest of Haynes film lies in the way it questions the
ability of the moralizing mode of melodrama to address the social issues of the contemporary historical
moment, though she suggests it ultimately fails by its nostalgia for this process (91, 113). Marcia Landy
also emphasizes the films play on genre, noting that, If anything, the film is, in the vein of other Haynes
films, a deconstruction of the language of melodrama (22). While I find Landys analysis of the film to

29
suggesting the liberating potential of moral prohibitions, which enhance the audiences

pleasure in viewing the now relatively accepted practices of interracial dating and gay

sex.16 The films tactic of installing and then subverting idealized notions of the Post

World-War II suburbs and the patriarchal home not only challenges the decades own

insistence on a culture of conformity but also challenges the neoconservative rhetoric of

the late 20th and early 21st century, which equates that era and its family formations with

safety, prosperity, and strength. 17

Like the other two texts examined in Part One, Far from Heaven uses its suburban

setting to explore questions of womens agency and expands these questions to examine

the relationship with the agency of social and sexual Others. On the one hand, Cathy

Whitakers domestic role and economic dependence limit the possibility of contradicting

her husbands wishes. On the other hand, containment discourses place homemakers like

Cathy as the managers of the suburban stage. She is charged with orchestrating her

familys performance of containment narratives. She does so time and time again, even to

the point of attempting to force her husband to live as a straight man.18 At the same time,

be helpful in its attention to theatricality, I will suggest that this emphasis on theatricality is used to
rehistoricize the 50s by highlighting pressures inherent in that culture.
16
Todd McGowan suggests that Conservatives appeal to this fantasy [of the 1950s] because they believe
that our investment in it attests to a desire foror perhaps even an enjoyment ofstrict paternal authority
and the social stability that follows in the wake of that authority (116). He suggests that Haynes relocates
our enjoyment of the 1950s fantasy. The film does show the power of prohibition in this society, but it
allows the spectator to experience the enjoyment that the severity of the moral strictures of the 1950s
enables (116). I disagree that the film delights in the salacious power of prohibition, especially since the
film also shows the real and very plausible consequences each of the characters face for challenging such
prohibitions (116).
17
As critic Anat Pick suggests in his work on Todd Haynes, It is hardly surprising . . . that the suburb in
film, perhaps more than any other American locale, has come to embody the struggles and anxieties over
personal, cultural, and political in-tactness (146). In conservative nostalgia, this obsessive concern for
in-tactness replicates the logic of containment narratives.
18
Marcia Landy also notes the way in which Cathys character is used to explore feminine complicity in
racial and sexual oppression, though Landys analysis treats Cathy less as a character than a vehicle for
Haynes social analysis and narrative experimentation (23). Mary Ann Doane puts forth a similar
characterization of Cathy as the ideal mother of Containment Culture. She also notes that Cathy is a type of
character who arises again and again in Haynes works, regardless of the time period in which they are set:

30
the film often treats her sympathetically, calling attention to the extreme difficulty that

accompanies her attempts to resist such narratives.19 When expressing her feelings for

Raymond, confronting her husbands sexuality, or expressing a desire to take on a

commitment outside the home, Cathy stammers and grasps for the words usually so

readily available to her in her routine interactions.20 To use Nadels terms, the film thus

suggests that containment narratives elicit repeat performances, while those desires that

contradict these narrativesthose that are at odds with the historical orderare difficult

to express.

When Cathy and other characters do express desires at odds with containment

narratives, they often do so outside of the suburban Hartford setting that dominates the

film. This suburb acts as a stage on which these narratives are performed. Scenes

depicting interracial or gay romance usually take place offstage, outside the suburbs in

which containment narratives of race, gender, and sexual identity provide the only readily

available script for lived reality. In turn, the film emphasizes the theatricality of the

Whitakers suburban home and its status as a venue for performances of containment

narratives. In daylight, the Whitakers well-appointed home is almost the physical

In Hayness cinema, it is always women who try to hold the world and its contradictions at bay with a
perfection, a seamlessness, and an embrace of a faultless naivet . (Doane 5-6).
19
Willis, while she does not use the term Containment Cultures directly, implicitly argues that the film asks
questions about what might happen if women in the post-World War II era refused to perform containment
narratives: What if she failed to manage her man? What if she dropped the task of strictly regimenting
masculinity into the form of properly virile heterosexuality? What if, instead, she sought not just to support
equal rights in the abstract, but to make an actual connection across racial lines? And what if all of these
things were linked, and her personal politics exploded the heavily guarded boundaries of suburban
middle-class convention? (135)
20
With regard to Frank and Cathys conversation, Willis notes that the pairs dialogue could best be
described as haltingly inaccurate, stammering in bypasses (155). Amy Taubin similarly suggests that in
most routine conversations, What Moore does most brilliantly is to suggest the connection between the
wooden line readings that were typical of actresses in the Fifties and a condition of psychological alienation
where the words one speaks never seem like ones own (26). My argument builds on Taubins to suggest
that the characters feelings of estrangement from their own words and their alienation from themselves is a
result of the persistence and pervasiveness of containment narratives, which impinge upon them all.

31
embodiment of their marriage: seats are arranged in pairs, the advertisement enshrining

the couple as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech hovers above the television, and the living room is

raised like a stage. On the other hand, in evening scenes, the home is bathed in a murky

blue light, signaling an immersion beneath the surface of suburbia and into a world

decidedly not crafted for the public eye. By contrast, urban spaces and rural spaces allow

Frank and Cathy to express desires shunted from the suburban stage. These are

environments in which the Containment Cultures environment of surveillance is

disabled. With a use of light and color that is in some ways inherited from, or at least

pays homage to, Douglas Sirk, 21 Haynes affirms and then undercuts the idealization of

these suburbs, shifting the source of beauty and light to the liminal spaces in which Cathy

and Frank find fulfillment. The film begins by lavishing attention on suburban Hartfords

physical beauty but continues, particularly through its use of lighting, to depict the

suburban home as a prison. The films use of light and color also highlights the splendor

of the countryside (in which Cathy and Raymonds romance takes place) and the

sensuousness of urban bars (in which both Cathy and Frank find romance). In such

settings, the characters are able to transcend the contained narratives of their suburban

milieu. The film, however, is also insistent on the weight and persistence of containment

narratives. Characters resume their performance of such narratives when they step on to

the suburban stage, and the film repeatedly shows the drastic social and economic

consequences of any transgression.

In examining the late 1950s, the film warns that the good old days were not

always good. Cathy ends the film literally friendless, Raymond sells his business at a loss

21
As Todd Higgins suggests, Far from Heavens stylized use of color has both an affective and an allusive
source. It both pays homage to Sirk and manages to align our sympathy with his [Hayness] characters
(105).

32
and moves to Baltimore, and the film implies that Franks struggles have left his and his

familys economic futures uncertain. By showing that it is possible, though not plausible,

for characters to step outside containment narratives in any lasting way, the film argues

that the characters, particularly Cathy, may have access to some agency; however, to act

as an agent against the prevailing Containment Culture demands sacrifices few are

prepared to make and a courage few possess. In thus projecting the strong but not

absolute power of containment narratives, the film intervenes in Culture War rhetoric,

which, like containment narratives, fuses ideals of national strength with the demand for

the conformity to social and moral strictures. The films implicit intervention into these

Culture Wars indicates that, while conservative rhetoric constructs the period

immediately preceding second wave feminism, the Stonewall riots, and many of the gains

of the civil rights movement as a more innocent time, it was in fact a time when all but

the normative heterosexual white male was contained in some wayspatially, socially,

economically, or sexually. In addition, while refusing its characters both total agency and

the empathy necessary to see one anothers plights, the film allows viewers to see both

the parallels in as well as the differences between the characters struggles, suggesting

that the chance for coalition these characters missed might have been the key to battling

against their conditions. Such a coalition may be formed, the film hopes, in the

audiences own time.22 The film thus provides a counter-narrative to misty-eyed

recollections of the 1950s by the right.

22
Some critics have noted that Haynes refuses the possibility of such a coalition to Cathy, Raymond and
Frank. Aguilera Svirksy argues that the film refuses the consolation of a political alliance of the
oppressed, politicized identities joined by a chain of equivalences (107). I suggest that while the film
does indeed withdraw the possibility of such a coalition from its characters, in asking the audience to
recognize the analogous though not identical nature of the characters experiences, the film suggests that
the lack of such a coalition, or at least of identification and empathy, is a missed opportunity for the
characters.

33
 The opening shots of Haynes film establish the idyllic connotations of the

suburbs, the 1950s, and domesticity while at the same time providing hints of the way in

which the film will disrupt the nostalgia for this setting. These views show Cathys

powder blue, white, and chrome station wagonits ample gas-guzzling presence and

space-age design signaling post-War prosperity and confidencewending its way from

downtown Hartford toward her suburban home. As the station wagon rolls down the

quiet, tree-lined streets and pulls into the drive of the Whitakers large but inviting house,

allusions to suburban bliss are heightened. Cathys gently solicitous school-aged children

David and Janice are waiting to meet her with requests for presents and privileges, but the

film almost instantly subverts this nostalgic portrait of suburban life. Sybil, Cathys

African American housekeeper, rushes out of the house quickly to help her employer

with the groceries. Though Cathy prods David to help with the bags (as she will do again

later film), he does not help Sybil (he never will) but instead fiddles with his vintage

Schwinn bicycle. Sybil, meanwhile, does not make the futile effort to complain. In

depicting the subtle dynamics of Sybils relationship with her employers, the film quickly

disturbs its visual patina of nostalgia by raising questions of racial inequality.

The film continually makes such shifts between allowing and subverting

potentially sentimental readings of its setting. Characters performances of containment

narratives, like the 1950s life the films audience sees in television reruns, transmit an

image of grace and tranquility that Haynes continually disturbs with evidence of

oppression based on gender, sexuality, and race. The following scenes, which feature

Frank Whitaker, follow this pattern and introduce the themes of gender and sexuality into

the film. Flashing forward from the afternoon to evening, viewers find Cathy preparing

34
for a cocktail function at her best friend Eleanors home. She is formally and elegantly

dressed, and the camera is positioned so that the audience can see her in the mirror of her

vanity table. Her daughter Janice is seated on a petal-pink loveseat and shares the

audiences view of her mother. Janice gazes at her mothers reflection while also

expressing her wish to become her mothers reflection. Cathy of course supports this

wish, demonstrating the way in which the nuclear family functioned to perform and

replicate narratives of domestic containment that demanded that gender identity be

rigidly defined:

JANICE: Mother, when you were a little girl you looked like me, right?

CATHY: Yes.

JANICE: So when I grow up does that mean Ill look like you?

CATHY: Is that what you want, darling, to look like me?

JANICE: Yes, I hope I look exactly as pretty as you someday.

CATHY: What a perfectly lovely compliment coming from my perfectly lovely

daughter. (Haynes)

Both Janices wish and Cathys reply signal an endorsement of the 1950s hyperfeminine

standards of beautythe use of girdles, stays, bullet bras, heavy makeup and intricate

hairstyling that served to both exaggerate and accentuate physical differences between

men and women. Cathys seat at the vanitysurrounded by make-ups and perfumes

and her careful preparation for the party underscore that such femininity is not natural but

constructed. This attention to her preparations casts the vanity table as part of a green

room for an actress about to step on stage. Yet Cathys performance is literally

interrupted when she receives a call from Frank. As she descends the stairs to take the

35
receiver from Sybil, she is submerged in a blue light that soon becomes the visual cue

corresponding to her failing marriage.23 During the call, Frank informs her that he is

being held at the jail and will not be released without her. As she enters the jail to

orchestrate his release, the police officers discussion of Franks arrest for loitering can

faintly be heard by the viewers, but Cathy herself does not hear it. Just as Sybil is shown

to be contained to limited power and economic opportunities, Frank is locked away for

his sexualitya fact that undercuts any remaining nostalgia for the eras norms of gender

and sex. Whereas the scene between Janice and Cathy may have shown a sentimental

portrait of the relationship between mothers and daughters that naturalizes the

performative aspects of femininity, Franks brief incarceration undermines nostalgia for

the 1950s prescriptive codes for the expression of sexual and gender identity.

As Frank and Cathy drive home from the police station, Cathy is at the wheel of

the family car seen at the opening of the film. Whereas during the opening credits the

cars movement through the suburbs guided the viewers on a nostalgic tour, here the

shots of the vehicles interior emphasize both Cathys emotional distance from her

husband and her attempts to control him. Her task of helming the large station wagon

demands that she make little eye contact with Frank and the cars behemoth size ensures

that the two sit far apart. Her position at the wheel also underscores the fact that she is

enforcing narratives of containment by prompting Frank for an alternate explanation of

his arrest. He complies, painting it as a case of mistaken identity. Cathy seems uneasy

23
Scott Higgins notes that The combination of dominant blue lighting with warm highlights is present in
this scene, as well as Cathys approach to the police station, Franks walk to the gay bar, and Cathys
rebuff at her daughters ballet recital, all moments of social and economic tension (109). Such lighting,
he writes, is most forcefully bound to the marriage plot with each of the four confrontations between
Cathy and Frank, largely staged in their living room (108-109)

36
with his version of the events, but she heeds the advice columns of the day and moves

instead to stroke Franks ego:24

CATHY: So. . . . there were drinks after work?

FRANK: What do you mean?

CATHY: They said in. . . intoxication level, something.

FRANK: Christ, I had one lousy cocktail with Bill going over the portfolio.

Should I be arrested for that too?

CATHY: No, of course not darling.

This scene not only emphasizes Cathys attempt to control Frank and her unwillingness

to acknowledge his sexuality but also illustrates the ways in which containment narratives

place a particular onus on women to coddle their husbands egos in order to ensure their

compliance with these narratives. Cathy cajoles him forcefully, but always indirectly,

and, when he bursts out in anger against her, she gently soothes him.

If veneer-stripping were the films only purpose, these domestic travails would

continue in a downward spiral; however, in the scene that immediately follows, the

viewer finds Frank and Cathy collaborating to perform that same idealized image

presented at the films opening. The couple works together to announce their compliance

with containment narratives and to disseminate them to others through their performance

as spokespeople for Magnatech and social celebrities in their community. As such, they

not only encourage material consumption but also literally broadcast narratives of

heteronormativity through a picture that features them wearing their finest and posed as a

happily married couple. While viewers have already seen under the surface, this scene

24
Willis makes the point that Cathy is in a position of power over her husband here and that she appears
aligned with the repressive apparatuses here (153).

37
serves, curiously, to reiterate the same surface by featuring Cathy and Frank living like an

animated Magnatech advertisement. As the scene opens, the lively score alludes to 1950s

sitcoms and Cathy, immaculately dressed and groomed, waves as her children scurry

down the winding path that leads from the front door of their home to the school bus that

is waiting to meet them at the curb. She then meets Frank in the foyer as he dons his coat

and claps his fedora to his head. Her tightly girdled figure and flounced skirts emphasize

her bust and waistline, just as the lines of Franks hat and coat emphasize his chiseled jaw

line and broad shoulders. Cathys maternal manner with Frank exemplifies her role as

management wife.25 She sends him off to work in much the same way one might send

a child off to schoolby gently encouraging him and repeatedly offering more food. The

only remnant of the previous night is a vague Im glad you are feeling better,

accompanied by a peck on the cheek (Haynes). At just that moment, Cathy and Frank are

captured by a camera. Sybil introduces a team from the local society papers, reporter

Mrs. Leacock and her photographer, who have a scheduled appointment to interview and

photograph Cathy. While Cathy and Franks morning routine suggests the way in which

their lives are perhaps shaped by media like TV sitcoms, the presence of Mrs. Leacock

and the photographer allows the film to emphasize that Cathy and Frank in turn use their

positions as purveyors of media to disseminate the same kind of images. The film

captures one chaste, candid kiss before the couple becomes aware of the reporters

25
William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man, says in a 1951 Fortune article about The
Management Wife that, in surveys, wives of corporation managers characterized themselves as their
husbands helpmeets: Resolutely anti-feminist, she perceives her role to be that of a stabilizerthe
keeper of the retreat, the one who rests and rejuvenates the man for the days battle (88).

38
presence but Frank and Cathy then repeat this act for the papers camera, giving one

another a quick, perky peck before they part ways. 26

Furthermore, the home is arranged for display. For example, a pair of chairs

flanking an end table is tucked into an untraveled corner unlikely to be used. The multi-

level home is arranged on an open plan to ensure visibility throughout, and carefully-

chosen art work and brick-a-brack is drawn together in a cohesive color scheme of grays

and muted brightsthe same colors that comprise the palette of Cathys wardrobe.

Through attention to this scenery as well to the couples interactions with the press, the

film calls attention to the performative aspects of their marriage. After Frank excuses

himself, Cathy leads Mrs. Leacock and her photographer into the raised living room next

to the advertisement depicting Frank and Cathy as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech. Cathy,

seating herself underneath the advertisement in a pose closely resembling that in its hand-

drawn picture of her and Frank, tells Mrs. Leacock she cannot imagine why she is being

featured in the magazine. To Mrs. Leacocks rejoinder that To everyone here in

Connecticut, you (she and Frank) are Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech, Cathy replies, with a

cadence that seems rehearsed, Thank you, Im very flattered, but really my life is like

any other wife and mothers. In fact I dont think Ive ever wanted . . . (Haynes).

Cathys verbalization of what it means to be Mr. and Mrs. Magnatechto be in fact

everyman and everywomanworks in part to create a normative image of family and

marriage not only for herself but for others. Cathy gives the answer elicited by

26
This kiss is subject to much discussion among critics. As Richardson similarly notes, Although Mrs.
Leacock asserts that candid views are always the best, the image of the goodbye kiss actually appears as
the very opposite and seems theatrical and contrivedrather like two stars posing for the tabloid press.
Lynn Joyrich also comments on the irony of Mrs. Leacocks professed preference for candid poses even as
she goes on carefully to pose Cathy at the family hearth, defined by fireplace, television set, and framed
advertisement of Frank and Cathy as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech (196). Sharon Willis is a third to note this
phenomenon, arguing that Indeed this candid image suggests that it is posing that makes Frank and Cathy
a family at all (141).

39
containment narratives. In testifying that she never wanted anything else, she literally

evokes the woman Friedan describes in her chapter The Happy Housewife Heroine

the woman created by advertisers. In Haynes casting of the scene, however, Cathy

endorses the limitations of her life in the interview. In the following scene, the limitations

placed on her life are compared with the limitations she places on Raymond.

Raymonds appearance in the garden interrupts Cathys scripted incantation of

what it means to be a housewife, shifting attention to the ways in which African

Americans social and physical mobility are limited on the suburban stage and the ways

in which Cathy herself takes part in enforcing these limitations. Cathys response to Mrs.

Leacock is interrupted as she spots Raymond Deagan in her yard. She rushes onto the

patio and, making an uncharacteristic break in her usually refined language, asks him,

Who are you? When he introduces himself as the son of her gardener, Otis Deagan,

Cathy reverts to her genteel ways, saying, Im terribly sorry for speaking to you in that

manner. II didnt know who was in my yard (Haynes). Her tone changes because she

realizes that Raymond is present in his sanctioned role as servant, the only role available

to African Americans on the suburban stage. She fumbles for words because she knows

she has revealed her prejudicesomething that she would disavow as an upper-middle

class northerner. Calling herself back to this role, when she learns that the elder Mr.

Deagan has died leaving Raymond in charge of his business, Cathy places a patronizing

hand on his shoulder. While Mrs. Leacock, observing through the French doors, sees an

example of Cathys noblesse oblige, when the shot returns to Cathy and Raymond, both

40
are flustered, suggesting the awkwardness of a tentative romance.27 While the home is the

stage on which containment narratives are performed, this spark of attraction takes

place in a liminal space just outside the home in the garden. Diagetically, of course this is

logical. It would not be customary and would indeed be potentially scandalous for

Raymond to enter the home of a female employer. Yet, at the same time, this space

becomes one of many in the film to represent the limits of containment and the potential

of spaces outside the suburban home to disrupt these dominant narratives. Once Cathy

returns inside, however, these narratives resume as they will many times throughout the

film. The scene ends as Mrs. Leacock poses Cathy next to her fireplace like a vintage

Barbie doll. Viewers are left to wonder how such a model of girlish white femininity both

denigrates Cathy and raises her to a position of power over Raymond and others.

Just as Cathys relationship with Raymond is initiated in the liminal space of her

back porch, Franks sexual exploration also begins away from the suburban home. In the

scene that immediately follows Raymond and Cathys first meeting, Frank is seen leaving

some coworkers at the door of a downtown Hartford bar/steakhouse and wandering

purposefully yet surreptitiously toward a movie theater. After discovering some men

cruising there, he follows them from a distance into a gay bar several steps below street

level. As he steps into the bar, he leaves the lonely blue light of the street and enters into

the mysterious green light emanating from the bars door. To heighten the mood of

experimentation, a jazz-infused rendition of the movies theme plays once Frank steps

inside. The men in the barmostly alonelook at one another with sidelong glances.

Such looks convey both sexual curiosity and Cold War paranoia as considerable dangers

27
Willis writes of this view through the doors, Framed under glass, a picture that emblematizes Cathy, this
tableau will be publicized in Mrs. Leacocks article, which describes her as, a woman who is as devoted to
her family as she is kind to Negroes (142).

41
accompanied patronizing gay bars in the era of containment.28 Though this culture of

suspicion prevails, the bar remains a liminal place that allows the possibility of escape

when compared with the suburbs, whose very physical institutions (the single-family

home) and social institutions (couples cocktail parties) enforce heteronormativity.

Indeed, Frank does find a lover.

From the exposition of these tensions between the appearance and the reality of

the Whitaker household, the film moves toward the scenes in which conflicts concerning

Franks sexuality and Raymond and Cathys tentative affair erupt. Such conflicts

continue to emphasize that Cathy, a suburban housewife, plays a particular role in

Containment Culture even as she tries to resist its narratives. For example, when Cathy

turns up at Franks late office one night to surprise him with a home cooked meal, she

finds him with the lover he met in the bar. The confrontation between Cathy and Frank,

which takes place in their living room when they return home, features the room in a way

as to provide a marked contrast with daylight scenes in which the self-conscious display

of upper-middle class domesticity is highlighted. 29 Blue lighting obscures the care with

which the home is appointed and instead focuses the viewers attention on the scenes

28
The ability of the containment eras pervasive gay baiting to shape gay nightlife is highlighted by
historian Charles Kaiser in his book The Gay Metropolis. Of the dangers that awaited the patrons of New
York gay bars in the 1950s, Kaiser says, Plainclothesman tried to entrap men, even inside gay bars in
Manhattan, and uniformed officers harassed women dressed like men because women were legally required
to wear at least one article of womens clothing when ever they appeared in public (83). In addition,
Knowingly serving a drink to a gay person automatically made a bar disorderly under state law, and it was
illegal for two men to be on a dance floor together without a woman present (84). Because of the
criminalization and social stigmatization of homosexuality, Blackmail of the closeted was a constant
danger and in some cases criminals impersonated corrupt policemen to exhort money from the frightened.
A man robbed by someone he brought home for sex never reported such an incident to the police (84).
One might imagine that in the more provincial Hartford, these risks were present to an equal or greater
degree as they were in New York.
29
As Haynes remarks, this attention to interiors is part of the tradition of melodrama. He says, Interiors in
Sirks films and in Far from Heaven as well are extremely specific and the dcor and the furniture and the
colors and the objects that surround these characters in many ways determine who they are as people
(Commentary).

42
emotional register. The audience sits just beyond the fourth wall and is given a full view

of both characters in a series of highly composed shots. Frank lurches in, presumably

from the garage. His zombie-like movement toward her contrasts to his purposeful

movement toward the gay bar in the previous scene, suggesting that he here surrenders

such volition.30 Despite the fact that their lives as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech have now

undoubtedly been disrupted, Cathy continues to prompt him to follow the conventions of

patriarchal, heterosexual marriage. As he enters, she first steers the conversation toward

household business:

CATHY: Frank? . . . Oh, Frank. . . . Frank?

FRANK: Cathy.

CATHY: Mr. Maynard . . . Left an estimate . . . for the roof. . . I put it in the

kitchen. . .Twelve hundred something.

FRANK: Cathy.

CATHY: I can't.

FRANK: I don't

CATHY: What?

30
In describing Franks movement as zombie-like, I am borrowing a usage of the term zombie from critic
James Morrison. Morrison identifies a series of zombie-like characters (including Frank) in Haynes films,
and suggests that these zombies are Hayness visual treatment of critical-theorys much-proclaimed death
of the subject (134). He writes, The split self, the alienated subject, the interpolated body, the evacuated
being, even the literal zombiethese are the figures that populated the post-structuralist landscape and, in
turn, make up the cast of Todd Hayness movies (134). At the same time, he suggests that, if subjects
continue to feel, then they may not be dead and suggests that the persistence of feeling is what allows
Haynes to assimilate post-structuralist theory and his films implicit call for social justice (135). I find
Morrisons reading useful not only for its description of Franks physical state, but also for the films
overall treatment of agency, which recognizes the power of cultural narratives but anchors itself in an
affective argument for change.

43
 FRANK: Eh, you see, uh . . . Once, a long time ago, a long, long time ago, I had,

um, um, problems . . . I just figured that was that was it. I mean . . . II never

imagined. . .

CATHY: You had problems?

FRANK: Yes.

CATHY: You, uh, never spoke to anyone . . . aa doctor?

FRANK: No.

CATHY: No one? I don't understand.

FRANK: Neither do I.

CATHY: What if I mean, there must be people who . . .

FRANK: II don't know.

CATHY: Because . . .Otherwise, I don't know what I . . .

FRANK: Cathy. . .All right.

CATHY: Thank you. (Haynes)

Cathy opens the conversation by reiterating norms of gender and sex and by mentioning

the suburban homethe material rather than the emotional manifestation of their

marriage. Her choice to begin the conversation by referring to Mr. Maynards estimate is

of course rooted in a desire to skirt a deeply uncomfortable topic, but it also demonstrates

a desire to restabilize the marriage by appealing to their ostensibly complementary but

strictly separated roles as homemaker and provider.31 Throughout the conversation, the

31
Willis notes that Cathy resorts to small talk about a roofers estimate to avoid discussion of Franks
sexuality. I would add that this particular choice of subjects is an attempt to reinforce heteronormative
narratives. This idea of Franks inarticulateness is reinforced by Hayness own remarks about the film. He
notes that he cast Quaidan unlikely choice to play a gay man given his cinematic careerin a strategic
move designed to surprise audiences and reinforce the sense that his character had absolutely no language
for how to, uh, you know, experience and articulate what his struggle was (Commentary).

44
couples eye contact and their speech falters. Cathy sits seated with her hands in her lap

under the Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech advertisement; Frank stands before the steps of the

raised living room, his eyes on the far wall. They remain at a distance from one another

(at least ten feet) and in these stiff postures until the very end of the dialogue, when Frank

agrees to the treatment, steps toward her, and her eyes lift to meet his. The heart of what

they discuss here, however, cannot truly be represented. Franks pervasive tendency to

distance his attraction to men by terming it a problem and Cathys emphatic declaration

that she cant discuss the matter suggest that they can find no words in their lifes

script to handle the disruption of containment narratives (Haynes). Such narratives, which

re-envelop the popularized Freudian narratives of sexual adjustment and link them to

matters of national and familial security, became all the more persuasive with the

addition of scientific support. Their agreement marks their mutual reabsorption into

these narratives, which so thoroughly preclude the possibility of open homosexuality for

Frank that the conclusion to seek medical help is reached without either of them

mentioning his sexuality in a direct way. 32 Yet, rather than continue to probe the ways in

which Cathy contains Frank, the film continues to complicate any possible assessment of

her character by turning back to the ways in which dominant narratives constrain her. In

doing so, the film suggests containment narratives both exert power over the lives of all

32
Marcia Landys characterization of Frank and Cathys conversation is helpful here: Cathys discovery
of Frank in an embrace with a man in his office [which] is followed by a scene at home where Frank
confesses in a darkened living room and in stilted language that once a long time ago, [he] had problems.
And where Cathy, equally bound to formula, introduces the possibility of a cure for Franks problem and
for their marriage. Their language is couched in the clichd language of confession and medical cure that
calls attention to their role as mouthpieces for a pervasive cultural and political scenarios (22). Sharon
Willis suggests a similar reading, noting that Hayness characters tense and embarrassed exchanges often
stammer to a forced closure, trailing off in mutual disappointment (145). What I am suggesting is that
these tense exchanges are a result of having no scripted narrative to resort to.

45
of the films characters and blind them to the ways in which they participate in narratives

which ensnare others.

The following sequence, which takes place at a local show of modern art

organized by Cathys friend and unofficial social mentor Eleanor Fine, demonstrates the

ways in which both Cathy and Raymond are constructed by containment narratives that

manifest themselves in suburban social life. Both attend the art show and both are

subjected to suburban socialites assumptions about their relationship and their reasons

for attending the show. For example, while viewing some paintings, Cathy again meets

with Mrs. Leacock. The reporters photographer surprises Cathy with his flash, while

Leacock caricaturizes her with clichd banter that emphasizes the art shows role as a

social event:

MRS. LEACOCK: Wife of Hartford executive communing with Picasso?

CATHY: Mrs. Leacock, it's lovely to see you again.

MRS. LEACOCK: And how is that charming husband of yours?

CATHY: Hes very well. Thank you.

Mrs. Leacocks journalistic interest in Cathy is primarily due to her role as Mrs.

Magnatech; her interest in the art show is overlooked by Mrs. Leacocks gossipy banter.

In the same way, the fellow spectators at the art show cannot understand Raymonds

appearance at the cultural event or the nature of his relationship with Cathy. Interestingly,

it is not only the other spectators but Cathy herself who contain Raymond. She makes

her surprise at his attendance clear:

CATHY: Raymond, what a tremendous surprise finding you here.

RAYMOND: Mrs. Whitaker, hello.

46
Cathy is introduced by Raymond to his shy nine year-old daughter Sarah, whom he

encourages to go outside to play with the local boys, including Hutch, son of his

customers the Hutchinsons and a friend of David Whitakers. After Sarah reluctantly

obeys, Cathy takes up her line of inquiry:

CATHY: Well, how on earth did you find out about this show?

RAYMOND: Well, I do read the papers.

CATHY: No, of course you do. I just meant that its, its such a coincidence.

RAYMOND: I know, I was just teasing you.

CATHY: Because, you know, Im not prejudiced. My husband and I have always

believed in equal rights for the Negro . . .and support the NAACP.

RAYMOND: Im glad to hear that.

CATHY: I just wanted you to know.

Cathy attempts to disavow the prejudices that Raymond so playfully recognizes, again

indicating that she is implicated, however unconsciously, in the practice of containing

African American spatial mobility. 33 That is, she assumes Raymond is out of place at the

art show just as he is out of place at her home. The symmetry of these scenes suggests

that both private (residential) and public suburban spaces exclude African Americans,

who work as servants to maintain these spaces but are prohibited from owning homes and

discouraged from using public amenities. The scene moves on, however, to suggest the

basis of Raymond and Cathys friendship. They share something significant in common.

Just as Raymonds presence is constructed as surprising by Cathy and others, Cathys

presence at the show is assumed to be that of a dilettante socialite. No one grants the

33
Willis suggests that the use of camera angles in this scene also contribute to the sense in which Cathy
defines Raymond through the lens of white privilege (156).

47
possibility that they may both be interested in the art itself; yet, despite the dismissive

attitude of the community toward them, both are able to transcend their roles of

housewife and gardener for a moment.34 Their conversation about a painting by Mir

temporarily liberates them from these constructions by giving them an occasion to deepen

their relationship and granting them the opportunitydenied to them by the other

spectatorsto voice their opinions on the artwork. Though Cathy couches her opinion in

the self-deprecating and vague language consonant with the middle-class gender norms,

Raymond appreciates the import of her strong emotional response. Commenting on the

painting, she says, I dont know why, but I just adore it, the feeling it gives. I know that

sounds terribly vague (Haynes). Despite her limited ability to express this opinion,

Raymond seems to intuit the depth to which she appreciates the painting:

No, actually, it confirms something Ive always wondered about modern art,

abstract art, that perhaps its just picking up where religious art left off, somehow

trying to show you divinity. The modern artists just pares it down to the basic

elements of shape and color. But when you look at that Mir, you feel it just the

same. (Haynes)

This interlude, like Franks scene in the gay bar, allows the characters a moment of

escape from containment narratives. At the same time, their locationan art exhibit

organized as a suburban social eventserves to entrench these narratives, so that any act

that contradicts them is overshadowed. A culture of surveillance dominates this

34
This idea is owed to Celeste-Marie Bernier, who writes, In this scene, the director juxtaposes the search
for ideal and elemental forms of expression in the fine arts against constraints in social roles and the
consequent suffering encountered in daily life (124). While Bernier argues that Modern and abstract art
play a key role in unlocking this [the characters] journey towards the fulfillment of passionate love and the
rejection of the deadening forces of society, I suggest more tentatively that it allows Cathy and Raymond
to open up a liminal space that acts as a short-lived safe zone in which they can express their desires before
being reabsorbed into dominant narratives (129).

48
atmosphere. Indeed, in the middle of Cathy and Raymonds conversation, a guffaw is

heard and the camera pans behind them to show onlookers sniveling. Eleanor pulls Cathy

aside to warn her that she is causing an uproar. In addition, while Cathy and Raymond

make space for each other to transcend containment narratives, Raymonds daughter

Sarah is afforded no such opportunity. In the courtyard outside the building, Hutch and

the other boys ignore her as they play with paper airplanes. When she tells Hutch and his

friends that their airplane will not fly because the tail is weighted down, they ignore her.

Though she is indeed right, they will accord no respect to her opinions because she is an

African-American and a girl. It seems as if containment narratives cannot always be

ruptured, and any release from such narratives is likely to be immediately re-contained.

The following series of scenes both highlight Cathys collusion with the culture of

containment and pose difficult questions as to the degree of her agency. The suburban

environment continues to be depicted as a stage on which such narratives are performed

and a place from which these narratives are disseminated. This is most apparent in a

scene depicting the cocktail party that Cathy throws with Eleanors help. The party, a

public event taking place at the Whitakers private home, puts into perspective the way in

which the Whitakers social reputation is connected to Franks success at work; it

epitomizes the very public nature of their private lives. Though viewers have now seen

the way in which their lives are diverging from one anotherthis scene reiterates the

continued importance of their lives as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech. At the opening of the

scene, for example, an elderly female extra who at the art show expressed her preference

for the Old Masters says that while she supports integration as the Christian thing to

do . . . what happened in Little Rock could just as easily have happened here in Hartford

49
(Haynes). It is late September of 1957 and federal troops have just been sent to ensure

the integration of schools and defeat Governor Faubuss attempt to use the Arkansas

National Guard to prevent this integration. A man within earshot denies the possibility of

a similar occurrence in Hartford by protesting that, For one thing, there is no Governor

Faubus in Connecticut. But the main reasonthere are no Negroes in Connecticut. After

this statement, the camera pans to an African-Americans servant passing hors doeuvres

on a tray. 35 Cathy stands just a stair above the man and woman and is visibly

uncomfortable. The camera then tracks back to Dick Dawson, a local attorney, who says,

No, but there are some dangerous pro-integration types right here in Hartford.

Dangerous? the elderly woman asks with concern. Oh yes, and some very attractive

ones in fact. Noted, Im told, for their kindness to Negroes (Haynes). Cathy does not use

the opportunity to speak in favor of integration nor does she consider reacting to her own

objectification. Though Raymond, an African American, is willing to take her intellect

seriously, she only kids, Oh. Dick. Stop. Youre too much as he belittles her with his

flirtatious comments, transforming her into an object and Civil Rights into a party joke.

Cathy may embody the feminine grace of the 1950s that is so often mourned by lovers of

classic film, but this scene makes clear that cultivating such grace prohibits any

meaningful participation in controversial conversations. The extent to which the

narratives of wifely and womanly deference dominate are further emphasized when a

drunken Frank, overhearing Eleanors husband Stan give Cathy another compliment,

quips, Its all smoke and mirrors, fellas. Thats all it is. You should see her without her

face on. Cathy goes to her husbands side and says sweetly, No hes absolutely right.

35
As Joyrich notes, the servant is as invisible to the guests at the party as the television signals travelling
through the airwaves are (207).

50
We ladies are never what we appear and every girl has her secrets (Haynes). The scene

suggests that grace, which Cathy possesses in abundance, entails an unquestioning

submission even in the face of abuse. 36Another female guest tries to take the matter into

hand by raising a glass to Frank and Cathy. Truly Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech, the

couples sunnier alter egos (Haynes). This interpellation of Frank and Cathy as Mr. and

Mrs. Magnatech marks their marriage as a commodity whose value is determined by the

overlapping circles of Franks business community and their suburban set. The cracks

that are beginning to show threaten that marriage, and Cathy and this guest attempt to

diffuse the situation. Though Raymond has begun to validate Cathys interior emotional

and intellectual life and open her eyes to the reality of race and racism, this scene

suggests that Cathy continues to loyally perform containment narratives because these

narratives are inextricable from her own and her familys economic success.

As the party guests leave and the lights dim, the film complicates its investigation

of the Whitaker marriage by examining the way in which each of the Whitakers gender

performances work to denigrate the other. Entering the darkened living room, Cathy

finds Frank drinking and begins to fill the air with meaningless banter. She begins, If I

do say so myself, it was a lovely party, all consideringI just wish it didnt have to turn

ugly in front of our friends. Honestly Frank, if you didnt insist (Haynes). Frank does

not respond but, in his most extreme zombie-like form, rises from his seat, walks toward

her, seizes her, and kisses her. This embrace and kiss is a grotesque mimicry of the

erupting passions in the earlier film, in which Rock Hudson kisses Jane Wyman

midsentence in a gesture that emblematizes his will to overcome the impediments to their

36
Willis suggests that Cathys reaction to Frank exhibits the housewifely pose exhibited by June Cleaver
and Harriett Nelson (147).

51
relationship. In place of this passion, Frank is propelled by his doctors attempt to cure

his homosexuality. He attempts to enact his cure by making love to his wife, but, as he

sweeps her onto the couch, he realizes that he cannot achieve an erection. The exchange

that follows suggests that each one contains the other with little awareness of their mutual

entrapment:

FRANK: (Stops) Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus! What's happening? I can't even. . . God!

CATHY: (Embracing him) Frank, it doesn't matter. The important thing is to

keep, to keep trying.

FRANK: Dont! What? Because I'm sure, you know, Dick Dawson wouldn't

mind lending his services every once in a while.

CATHY: Oh, Frank.

FRANK: I mean, you wouldn't mind that so much, would you? A good-looking

guy like Dick. Maybe even Stan would pitch in.

CATHY (caressing him): Frank, you're the only man that I've ever wanted.

FRANK: Just let go.

CATHY: Frank, Frank, you'reYou're all men to me. You're all man.

FRANK: Stop it! (Slaps her).Cathy. Cathy, I'm sorry. Oh. I'm so sorry. I didn't

mean to.

CATHY: (Holding her hand to where he has stricken her) It's all right. I'm-I'm

all right. (Haynes)

Frank turns his own fear of failure onto his wife by insinuating her willingness to be

promiscuous with the male rivals who flirted with her at the party. Curiously, in doing so,

he is endorsing the same narrative of masculinity that entraps him. Cathy enacts her duty

52
as a submissive wife by soothing him and refusing to protest his physical violence. She is

cooperating with the doctor, mandating the very virility that normalizes her husbands

violence. Essentially victims of both one another and themselves, they seem to be trapped

on a suburban stage that compels them to mirror national narratives of containment.

The structure of 1950s suburban middle-class social life, which separates families

into single family homes and demands that womens primary allegiances be to their

breadwinning husbands, isolates Cathy from the solidarity or aid of other women. In a

scene set the following morning, Eleanor comes to pick up the silver she lent Cathy. As

Cathy prepares to meet her friend, viewers see her once again in front of her vanity

primping for a performance as a graceful woman and dutiful wife. She is again arranging

her hair but this time to cover the bruise left by Franks slap with her bangs; not only

must her appearance be flawless, but she must also cover up for her husband. However,

when she drops a piece of Eleanors silver on the landing, the bruise is revealed. Though

she tells Eleanor she walked into a door, Eleanor holds back tears and urges Cathy to call

her day or night. Cathys excuse suggests that her home, and specifically the door that

separates her home from the world outside, is actually the physical barrier against which

she has bumped her head. Furthermore, though Cathy steps outside the door onto the

liminal space of the front stoop, the fact that she does not invite Eleanor in but quickly

closes the door behind her suggests the way in which the patriarchal home serves as a

barrier to the womens friendship. Eleanors exclusion from Cathys home represents

Eleanors exclusion from her confidences and Cathys inability to find a way even to

speak about her problems. Cathy ultimately chooses to protect her marriage and the scene

ends with the two women in tears. In the melodrama such tears, like the barrier Cathy

53
purportedly walked into, signal a reckoning with ideologies that entrap individuals. 37

Neither Cathy nor Eleanor can surmount the culture of containment and the patriarchal

suburban home in order to achieve a meaningful friendship; both react to the limits

placed upon them. As Eleanor exits, however, Cathy flees her front stoop to the back

garden, where she again finds Raymond.

In the scenes that follow, Raymond and Cathy achieve insight into the ways in

which the other is contained by the suburban environment. They achieve a level of

mutual understanding denied to Frank and Cathy or Cathy and Eleanor, and the scenes

speak clearly to the potential for the transformation of these two characters lives.

Shocked when she encounters Raymond, Cathy excuses herself for crying and tells him

she is having a difficult time with her husband. In an effort to cheer her, he invites her to

go along with him to a farm where he is driving to buy some shrubbery. At first she

refuses, fleeing inside quickly to take a phone call, but, when that call releases her from a

carpool, she decides to accompany Raymond on the ride.38 As they drive toward the

farm, long shots of Raymonds truck show an idyllic view of the autumnal countryside.

The journey parallels that of Cathys blue station wagon as it traversed the suburban

community at the beginning of the film. If the fatal flaws in suburban life are now

exposed, the film is turning to find hope in a retreat into the still-unpopulated

37
As Mary Beth Haralovich writes, melodramas such as Sirks All that Heaven Allows, upon which this
film is in part based, are also known as weepies because the characters struggles are tied so strongly to
ideologies over which they have no control. The emotions of characters critique ideology because these
emotions show how difficult it is to cope with ideological pressures (60).
38
Going inside to take the phone call, Cathy tells Raymond I have to get back (Haynes). Hayness
commentary reinforces the proposition that Cathys suburban home is like a stage set on which she
performs containment narratives. He says, I love when she says, I have to get back like she just stepped
out of her role; she is in the wings of the theater and shes going back on stage (Commentary).

54
countryside.39 The farm at which they stop presents an idyllic New England scene. After

paying for the shrubs, Raymond joins Cathy near a picnic table. It is a clear, sunny day

and what obviously is a leaf-strewn path crowned by the arch of trees lies ahead of them.

Cathy asks, Is that a path? to which Raymond replies, I think so (Haynes). Here, it

seems difficult for the two to recognize the chance that a secluded walk would offer them

to deepen their relationship (Haynes). Contained to such a degree by the suburban stage,

they must ask one another if what they see offers an alternative. Whereas Cathy tells

Eleanor she walked into a door, here Cathy seems to find a viable alternative to her

emotionally sequestered life in an open path. Another contrast is also apparent. While

Cathy and Franks most intimate conversations have all been accompanied by stark blue

lighting, Cathy and Raymond are bathed in autumn sunlight as they walk. After a jump

cut implying the passage of time, viewers learn that they have been talking about her

marital troubles. For Cathy and Frank, this hardship and the social stigma that

accompanies it serve only to exacerbate their cruelty toward one another. In discussing

the same matter, however, Cathy and Raymond begin to offer one another a glimpse of

empathy, capturing the scenes sense of possibility. As the two crouch beside a pond

framed by leafy trees and lit by golden hues, Cathy tells him that her experience with

Frank has led her to wonder what it must be like for him to live in a white world. The

exchange begins as Cathy opens the door she shut on Eleanor by telling Raymond about

the bruise:

RAYMOND: Did he cause that?

CATHY:) He didn't mean to strike me.

39
Niall Richardson notes that, as in Sirks All that Heaven Allows, in Far from Heaven sites of freedom
and happiness are connoted through soft browns, yellows, and golds.

55
 RAYMOND: Im so sorry.

CATHY: No. . .Heaven knows we all have our troubles. I'm sure you, yourself-

RAYMOND: What?

CATHY: I don't know. Ever since running into you at the exhibition, I kept

wondering what it must be like to be the only one in a room. Colored or

whatever it was. How that might possibly feel. (Haynes)

Here, while Cathy is not yet empowered enough to condemn Franks act, she has at least

voiced the truth. Furthermore, while Frank and Cathy are unable to connect their own

feelings of suffocation empathetically, Cathy voices the connection between her own

troubles and Raymonds experience with the color line. While he suggests his attempts

to cross that line are met with resistance both on the part of the black community and the

white community, Raymond tells her he chooses to be one of the very few to leave that

world in order to give his daughter the opportunities he missed as a child (Haynes). Just

as Cathy breaks with containment narratives by revealing the truth about her marriage,

Raymond emphasizes his break with these narratives by stressing that he refuses to be

thoroughly contained by spatial segregation, even if prejudice and scorn are the cost.

Meanwhile, he offers to show Cathy his world.

Raymond takes her to an African-American bar, Eagans, for a chance to teach

her what it is like to be the only one in a room (Haynes). While he cannot literally

place her in an analogous situation because she will always have the opportunity to return

to the privileges of her white, suburban world, this scene suggests that, although there is

no place in the world that the two can escape the surveillance of their respective

communities, they may in fact be able to rise above it. As they enter the bar, they are

56
spied by the prying eyes of town gossip Mona Lauder, who is picking up her car at a

service station next door. This foreshadows the white suburbs rage, but a more

immediate concern for the couple is that almost all of the African American patrons of

the bar either verbally or non-verbally express their disapproval. Several older men

confront Raymond, while the waitress Esther ignores Cathy. Cathy is visibly nervous, yet

still enchanted to share the afternoon with Raymond. She toasts being the only one and

even asks him to dance. As the camera pulls away, the couple floats, eyes closed,

seemingly out of reach of the communitys scorn. This shot makes a claim more extreme

than the woodland scene by suggesting that the two can step out of the narratives crafted

for them not only by literally stepping outside of the scope of their respective segregated

communities, but also by somehow transcending these narratives altogether. 40

Ultimately, however, this hope renders all that follows a crush of disappointment.

For example, what appeared to be an empathetic connection with Raymond and perhaps

an emerging understanding of racial oppression does not extend to Cathys relationship

with Sybil. Immediately upon returning home from Eagans, Cathy quickly collects

herself to attend her daughters dance recital. As she opens the door, she finds

representatives from the NAACP at the door just about the ring the bell. Rushing out,

she professes interest in their cause but quickly hands the brochure to Sybil and asks her

to sign the petition for her. Her actions call into question the sincerity of her racial

awakening and show her lack of consideration for Sybil, who is asked to handle the

40
Scott Higginss work on the lighting scheme is helpful here in identifying the parallels Haynes draws
between Eagans and the gay bar where Frank meets his first lover: Franks venture into an underground
gay bar reveals a world saturated in green, magenta, and red light. Similarly, Cathy and Raymonds trip to
Eagans, a black nightclub, is marked by powerful washes of red and green. Both scenes depict
transgressive spaces for the characters, places where they venture outside of the suburban trappings of
propriety (107). Sharon Willis also comments that the effect of the red/green lighting creates zones of
semi-privacy carved out from the public sphere, which provide a certain privatized sanctuary at the
expense of a protective segregation in the film (152).

57
matter though the phone is also ringing. Sybil and the petitioners exchange knowing

glances as Cathy flees down the walk.41 Cathys unwillingness or inability to transfer her

experience of intimacy with Raymond at the art show, in the forest, and at Eagans into a

fully-developed consciousness of racial injustice is further emphasized by the fact that

she quickly renounces their relationship under social pressure from her husband and her

community. While Cathy and Janice are shunned by all of the other mothers and

daughters at the ballet recital, Cathy remains unaware that Monas gossip has spread until

she returns home to a call from Eleanor. In response to being informed of the rumors,

Cathy fumbles but quickly attempts to conform to her suburbs expectations:

CATHY: Eleanor, that's-that's preposterous. I mean, yes, I've spoken to Mr.

Deagan on occasion, but this makes it sound like

ELEANOR: I know. You have no idea what it's been like around here. The phone

has been ringing off the hook since this morning.

CATHY: Eleanor, the entire situation is so absurd.

ELEANOR: Darling, I know.

Whereas the scenes shot in the woodlands and at Eagans suggested Cathy and Raymond

had permeated the borders between one anothers worlds, when Cathy reenters her

suburban community these lessons are lost and she denies her connection with Raymond.

Furthermore, she reiterates racial stereotypes by treating the communitys insinuations as

absurd and preposterous and forming the stock response that she has spoken to

Raymond Deagan on occasion (Haynes). As Eleanor and Cathy speak, Frank enters

from the dining room, appearing backlit by the blue wash of light in the doorway to the

41
Haynes makes a similar point in the commentary included in the DVD release: And then, of course,
shes so generous, but she doesnt have a moment to talk to the NAACP and its a side of Cathy thats a
little bit mixed (Haynes). He attests it was important to him to show the limitations of all of his characters.

58
dining room, stooped again in his zombie-like posture. Earlier in the film this pose

suggested the performance of his medical cure, and here again he lurches toward Cathy,

propelled forth by a narrative of hostile virility. He has also heard the gossip. As he

confronts Cathy, his words emphasize his reputation and the status of their marriage as a

publically traded commodity; Cathys response emphasizes the extent to which she is

willing to discount her experience with Raymond in order to preserve this commoditys

worth:

CATHY: Frank, I am sorry you even had to hear such nonsense.

FRANK: Yeah, well, Dick Dawson didn't seem to think it was such nonsense

when he snuck away from his desk to phone me today. Good heavens. He says

the whole friggin' town's talking!

CATHY: Frank, please. Sybil will hear you.

FRANK: I sent her out! Christ, Cathleen, do you even have the slightest idea

about what this could mean? (Screaming) Dont you realize the effect this could

have on me and the reputation I have spent the past eight years trying to build for

you and the children and for the company?

CATHY: Frank, I swear to you, whatever Mona Lauder saw or thought she saw

was entirely a figment of that woman's hateful imagination. Yes. I have spoken to

Raymond Deagan on occasion. He brought his little girl to Eleanor's art show.

(Gesturing angrily). But, but, apparently, even here in Hartford, the idea of a

white woman even speaking to a colored man

FRANK Oh, please! Just save me the Negro rights!

59
 CATHY: You know what that woman is capable of. And besides, I..I've already

given him notice and we (calmly, deliberately)we won't be seeing that man

again.

Here, the hopes viewers may have had for the characters to come to empathetic

understandings of one anothers positions are smashed. Frank erupts at his wife,

pounding the table with an anger that threatens to burst into violent action. His lines

emphasize that, as an executive, his marriage, family, and reputation are all business

assets subject to damage. Cathy, once served this reminder that her own welfare relies on

Franks success, denies Monas talk even more vehemently. While she momentarily

asserts the injustice of the rumors to both herself and Raymond, she ends by suggesting

that she has already fired Raymond and refers to him as a guilty party. He becomes

that man, just as Mona is that hateful woman (Haynes).

Whereas the argument depicts both Cathys reliance on the role of executive wife

and her willingness to contain Raymond to the role of that man, the errant gardener, as

the scene winds to a close, it begins to reveal the ways in which the role of organization

man and heteronormativity work in tandem to constrain Frank. Cathys anger dissipates

when she learns that he has been released from work for a one month vacation.42 The

script that prompts her to minister to her husbands egolike the one she uses to dismiss

Raymondis easily at hand. He has entered the living room and collapsed into an easy

chair and she kneels beside him, purring They do owe you a vacation after all youve

42
While upper-level company men like Frank were expected to spend much time away from home, their
families, in particular their wives, were considered important factors in their ability to be promoted. As
William H. Whyte notes, corporations often used social visits to screen wives when hirings and promotions
were being considered. As Whyte himself notes, his critique of companys scrutiny of executives wives in
Fortune only served to heighten such trends in the market: The rules of the game we paraphrased tongue-
in-cheek were reprinted verbatim as psychologically sound guides for peace of mind in corporate life.
Worse, the examples of corporate wife programs Whyte had described in the study stimulated other
companies to devise even more stringently controlled programs (259).

60
given them (Haynes). While both are aware that the vacation is not an honor, it is only

Frank who verbally acknowledges this and connects the downturn in his work

performance to his participation in the medical cure with his psychiatrist Dr. Bowman.

Cathy does not acknowledge his frustration with Bowmans cure but continues to

prompt him to assume the role of husband and provider. She says, I know it might not

seem like it now, she says, but a little time away, a vacation might be the best thing for

both of usFrank, what a wretched day it must have been for you (Haynes). While the

blue light suggests their dual imprisonment in their marriage, their mutual financial and

social dependence on these containment narratives elicit an attempt to reinvigorate their

marriage through a Christmas holiday trip.

In the following section of the film, Cathy and Frank work to reinstate their

performance of a perfect family. When Cathy meets with Raymond in order to fire him,

she firmly denies the possibility of the connection that seemed so evident as they walked

through the forest or danced at Eagans. They meet at a lunch counter in downtown

Hartford where the hostility of the host and patrons prompt them to move on and

converse while walking down the street. Perhaps because just a few years later sit ins

were launched to integrate Woolworths lunch counters, Haynes invokes the location to

complicate the question of the degree of choice Cathy has in the matter. Indeed, her

choice of words signals the films preoccupation with agency. As they walk down the

Hartford streets, she tells him, It isn't plausible for me to be friends with you. You've

been so very kind to me and I've been perfectly reckless and foolish in return, thinking . .

. (Haynes).43 Cathys use of the word plausible here to characterizes her choice to end

43
Sharon Williss assertion that Cathy delivers her decision to Raymond in the tone of bland, superficial
politeness that has characterized most of her discourse throughout the film also suggests her recourse to

61
the relationship suggests her ability to break with containment narratives exists. It is

possible but implausible for the two to remain together. To do so would require a rare

couragethe courage of the lunch counter protestorsthat Cathy does not posses. Their

conversation continues:

RAYMOND: Thinking what? That one person could reach out to another, take an

interest in another and maybe for one fleeting instant could manage to see beyond

the surface, beyond the color of things?

CATHY: Do you think we ever really do . . .see beyond those things the surface

of things?

RAYMOND: "Just beyond the fall of grace, behold that ever-shining place." Yes.

I do. I don't really have a choice.

CATHY: I wish I could. . . Good luck to you, Raymond.

RAYMOND: Mrs. Whittaker(grabs her arm)

ONLOOKER: You, boy. Hands off!

CATHY: (Not pulling away). Raymond, dont. . . .Youre so beautiful.

Both Raymond and Cathys short-lived connection and their halting conversations seem

to epitomize the widening gulf between them. Raymonds insistence on the ability of

individuals to reach out to another speaks to what has already happened between them.

While in one sense Cathy has already had the opportunity to see beyond the surface of

skin color, in another sense she cannot see beyond the surface of things, her material

containment narratives (163). In other words, Cathy speaks easily here, whereas she struggles to speak at
points in which she works against these narratives to pursue a relationship with Raymond or to understand
her husbands struggles.

62
interests.44 Raymond recognizes the difficulties of sustaining their relationship and

seeing beyond the surface, but he invokes the quest for a place in which those realities

will shift; however, the threats from the men in the assembling crowd make very clear the

risks inherent in any attempt to reach across the color line. 45

If this conversation between Raymond and Cathy highlights the difficulty

inherent in resisting containment narratives, the following scenes, depicting the

Whitakers Christmas and holiday vacation, shows the ease with which such narratives

are reiterated. Whereas at one point Frank found a lover in an underground bar and

Raymond and Cathys escape from the suburban environment seemed to provide a

glimpse into that ever-shining place, both Frank and Cathy appear to be wholly

reabsorbed into an idealized vision of suburban family life in the next scene, set around

the familys brightly-decorated Christmas tree.46 Frank and Cathy are dressed in their

holiday best and David and Janice are deferent children who are thankful and enthusiastic

about their single presents. Mr. and Mrs. Claus, as the Whitakers term themselves in

this scene, are looking forward to a tropical vacation. If this sentimental Christmas scene

shows the Whitakers/Clauses reaffirming the suburbs as a family paradise, the next scene,

which finds them dancing away New Years Eve at a Miami resort, suggests a

complementary version of idealized heteronormativitythe romantic escape from the

tedium of work and children. Despite its exotic locale, this vacation scene acts in the

film as the couples return to normalcy. Cathy leaves her romance with Raymond

44
As Willis suggests, Cathy is all external appearances, her clothing a dazzling carapace that codes her
interior as surface (163).
45
Lynne Joyrich also suggests that the threats shouted at Raymond in this scene mark the relationship as
implausible (201). My reading emphasizes that, despite this implausibility, the relationship is not cast as
impossible.
46
Willis suggests the scene provides a Hallmark version of holiday cheer (143).

63
behind while Frank leaves behind excessive drinking and the sexual passions that torment

him. To the strains of a Latin-infused rendition of the movies theme, Frank and Cathy

dance at the resorts New Years Eve Ball. Their profiles contrast; her gracefully bent

neck and finger-waved hair emphasize her delicate profile and play up the contrast with

Franks angular, chiseled features.47 Their physical embodiment of masculine and

feminine ideals seem to affirm a hetreonormative script. They float on the dance floor,

conversing in the easy banter provided to them by the scripts of containment narratives:

CATHY: I must say, you look extremely fetching all gussied up in your white

tux and tie.

FRANK: Well, it's a good thing, since I can hardly breathe in it.

CATHY: Oh. It's not that bad. You like my dress?

FRANK: Why, yes. Very much. Didn't I say?

CATHY: You did not.

FRANK: Well, it's a ravishing dress with a ravishing girl to go with it.

CATHY: That's more like it.

While the smooth repartee between the couple stands in striking contrast to their frequent

arguments and suggests a nostalgic reenactment of a classic film, the scene is clearly

ironic. Cathy prompts Frank to follow a heteronormative script provided by containment

narratives by complimenting his tuxedo. While the use of stays and girdles in womens

clothing of the period is often noted as emblematic of its restrictive gender roles, here it is

the male figure, Frank, who feels suffocated by symbols of masculinity. 48 Cathy assures

47
Haynes noted that he cast Quaid in part for his gritty masculinity (Commentary).
48
As Elaine Tyler May notes, In the late 1940s and 1950s quasi-Victorian long, wide skirts, crinolines,
and frills were back along with exaggerated bustlines and curves that created the aura of untouchable
eroticism . . . . Female sexuality was, once again, contained in stays and girdles that pinched waists and

64
him it is not that bad and in turn prompts him to compliment her dress. While Frank

will eventually break from containment narratives, Cathys promptings underscore that

such a choice remains difficult. Nonetheless, Frank soon locks eyes with a young man

who will become not just his lover but his partner. While in the setting of the resorts

front stage, he can only register the look by telling the boys father that he has a lovely

family; the two will later meet in secret (Haynes).

Franks relationship with the young man, like Cathys relationship with

Raymond, is most possible when it remains hidden. It is hidden so thoroughly in fact that

Kenneth has no lines in the film; the audience learns his name only by overhearing his

father address him. While the film thus suggests that Franks experiences are analogous

though not identical to those of African Americans (they are both contained by dominant

narratives), it also underscores that he does not awaken to this fact. Instead, the film

leaves viewers to make these connections and suggests the tragedy of the characters

failure to empathize with one another. As the last scene suggests, while the resort plays

up its exotic locale, its social life is an extension of upper-middle class suburbia. A

sequence of scenes beginning at the resort pool juxtaposes examples of segregation along

with a love scene between Kenneth and Frank. While the scenes do not equate the

oppression of gay men with that of African Americans, they do suggest ways in which

the two phenomena are analogous and both involve a degree of spatial containment. As

the sequence begins, the young son of one of the resorts African-American bellhops

attempts to enter the pool and is severely admonished by his father for descending one

padded brassieres that made women appear to have large breasts. But the body itself was protected in a
fortress of undergarments, warding off sexual contact but promising erotic excitement in the marital bed
(108-109). While the constriction of womens clothing thus serves as a metonym for the containment of
womens sexuality, Haynes film expands this trope and applies it to mens clothing and the containment of
homosexuality.

65
step into the water, an action that also causes all of the swimmers to exit the pool. Lest

viewers mistake this for an exploration of a Southern mentality, the scene is followed

by one set in Connecticut, which suggests that Sarah Deagans foray into suburban space

is as unwelcome as the young boys attempt to swim at his fathers workplace. Just after

the swimmers leave the pool, Frank agrees to go to the room to fetch Cathys book.

Kenneth is watching from the distance, foreshadowing a later meeting between him and

Frank. The scene shifts to suburban Hartford, showing Sarah Deagan about to cross a

suburban ball field, where Hutch and his two unnamed friends spot her and taunt her with

the epithet daddys girl and references to her fathers white girlfriend (Haynes).

Sarah flees but is eventually caught at the end of a blind alley. Cornering her and

scooping up rocks, the boys taunt her. Hutch sums up her transgression: Yeah. She made

a wrong turn all right. Just like her daddy. The boys throw the rocks, knocking her

unconscious. Though they are literally reacting to her fathers perceived incursion (his

interest in Cathy Whitaker), they figure their opposition to her fathers sexuality by using

a spatial metaphor. Sarah, by cutting through their ball field, has made a wrong turn

into the white suburb, just as her father, by being seen with Cathy, also makes a wrong

turn (Haynes). These scenes visually exemplify the containment logic inherent in

segregationRaymond, Sarah and the hotel workers son all make perceived trespasses

that threaten to undercut the quarantine of African Americans.

Meanwhile, though gay men like Frank and Kenneth can move freely, they

must quarantine their sexual desires. They appear in public only in the context of their

heteronormative familiesFrank with Cathy and Kenneth with his parents and siblings. 49

49
Willis maintains that Raymond is contained and surveilled by the social gaze continually, while Frank
becomes visible only if he enters a gay zone or appears coupled with another man (160). I suggest that,

66
The scene that follows shows Frank and Kenneth together in the Whitaker hotel room and

exemplifies the limited way in which Frank and Kenneth can indeed defy containment

narratives. While they must be clandestine, the film also betrays a sense of new

hopefulness through their first meeting. Whereas the scene featuring Raymonds truck

navigating countryside reopened the possibilities for happiness lost since Cathys station

wagon gave viewers a tour of her suburban community, this scene uses a mirror as an

expression of hope. While earlier in the film the mirror functioned as a vehicle for

repressive gender norms, here it is something that can reflect gay desire. As Frank

searches for Cathys book, Kenneth appears over his shoulder in the doorway. Kenneths

desirous gaze and gestures are captured by the mirror Frank stands in front of and this

mirror simultaneously affords Kenneth fuller access to a view of Franks body as he can

see both his back and a frontal view. Moreover, the men are not submersed in the

despairing blue light of the suburban home; rather, the room is filled with bright sunlight.

While this series of scenes documenting the arrival of the new year in Miami and

Connecticut points to some similarities in the spatial containment of gay men and African

Americans, the characters continually refuse to recognize such similarities. For example,

when David greets his parents immediately upon their return from Miami with the news

that an unnamed Negro girl was hit with a rock, Frank dismisses the incident as the

actions of a couple of foolish kids (Haynes). Whereas Cathy has earlier boasted of not

only her own social conscience, but also of Franks, he has no sense of alarm. While on

one hand Cathy is shocked by the news and refuses to let David play with Hutch, on the

while this is true, this series of scenes is structured not to oppose Raymonds visibility with Franks
movement between visibility and invisibility but also to evoke times in which African Americans too
become visible (when entering whites-only spaces in a way that presumes equality, such as when Raymond
talks to Cathy at the art show, the boy enters the pool, or Sarah attempts to cut through the baseball field)
and invisible (as servants like Sybil, the servers at the Magnatch party, or the resort workers).

67
other hand she cannot have any empathy for her husband when he reveals that he is

leaving her to be with Kenneth a few scenes later. Frank returns home racked with guilt

and Cathy sends the children upstairs as he begins to cry. He confesses that he has tried

and failed to cure himself:

FRANK: Cathy, something's happened.

CATHY: What?

FRANK: I've fallen in love with someone. . . who wants to be with me. Oh,

Cathy, I I-I just I I never knew what that feltBut I know that sounds so cruel,

but Oh, God. Cathy, I tried. I tried so hard to make it go away. It . . . It . . . I

thought that I could do it . . . for you and for the kids. But I can't. I just I can't. I

can't.

Cathy cannot look at him, but responds coldly, I assume then. . . youre wanting a

divorce (Haynes). Cathy has no insight into the way Franks struggles mirror her own.

This scene does create some hope, however, in that it demonstrates that Frank can resist

containment narratives of sexuality. While he grasps for words that are so at odds with

familiar scripts, he moves quickly from describing his request as a problem (telling Cathy

Somethings happened) to describing his emotions by saying that he has fallen in

love (Haynes).While in the earlier scene Cathy said vaguely I cant to describe her

refusal to attempt to understand or discuss the subject of Franks lover and to break off

her relationship with Raymond, here he uses the same phrase, I cant, to emphasize that

his sexuality cannot be changed. While his emotional state indicates that he continues to

struggle with the situation, he will be the one character who breaks free in the film from

containment narratives.

68
 Just as the film suggests that Cathy cannot empathize with Frank and Frank

cannot empathize neither with Raymond and his daughter nor Cathy, it also again

emphasizes barriers to empathy in relationships between women. Cathy, stricken by

Franks news, pays a visit to Eleanor. The two sit together, sipping coffee in the Fines

den. Eleanor listens sympathetically to Cathys troubles only until Cathy tells her about

Raymond:

CATHY: You know, it's funny.

ELEANOR: What's that?

CATHY: (Cathy rises and looks out the window)This whole time, the only person

I was able to talk to about any of this was Raymond Deagan.

ELEANOR: What?

CATHY: It's true. (Cathy turns toward her as she says this, then back to the

window.)

(ELEANOR looks at her, speechless)

CATHY: Not in the way that Mona intended. Nothing like that. But we would just

talk. And somehow, it made me feel . . . I don't know. Alive somewhere. Eleanor,

I know it's ridiculous and mad, but I. . .I think of him. I do. What he's doing. What

he's thinking. I . . . I do. (Haynes)

As Cathy turns away from the window smiling, she faces her friend, who is stone-faced.

Eleanor clears the cups away and turns away from Cathy as she formulates her reply.

Cathy is marginalized not so much by the failure of her familys performance as the

perfect suburban family; as long as she is the aggrieved party, she has Eleanors

69
sympathy. Yet, once she admits to having defied the expected narratives, she

unquestionably loses her friends support:

ELEANOR: What can I say? You're so full of surprises, I'm speechless.

CATHY: What do you mean?

ELEANOR: I'm sure I must've looked entirely the fool crusading away against

Mona Lauder and all her so-called inventions.

CATHY: Eleanor, how could you say such a thing?

ELEANOR: I didn't say a word. Who am I to tell anyone how to lead their

lives?

CATHY: Eleanor, nothing happened between us. I told you that.

ELEANOR: Cathy, it's none of my business, but you certainly make it sound as

if something had. (Haynes)

Eleanor quickly disavows the use of any coercive power by claiming that she is not in the

business of directing Cathys life and that, curiously, she didnt say a word (Haynes).

Her interpretation of Cathys words is clearly influenced by a racist discourse that

suggests that a relationship between a black man and a white woman can be only sexual

and not emotionally satisfying. The something she refers to, and the nothing Cathy

insists uponsexovershadows Cathys proclamation of verbal and emotional intimacy

between her and Raymond. The possibility of feminine community is here shown as

limited. Once Cathy summons the belated courage to break with containment narratives,

she is shunned. Eleanor turns her back on Cathy because, by advocating for Cathy, her

own status in the community has been threatened.

70
 While Cathy and Frank are castaways, the consequences for Raymond are perhaps

more extreme. Informed by Sybil that Sarah Deagan was the target of the boys attack,

Cathy obtains the Deagans address from Sybil and rushes to his house in town. At

Raymonds home, he announces he is moving to Baltimore. The consequences of his

affair with Cathy are drastic: he has suffered losses to his business, his daughters safety

is in danger, and local black residents are throwing rocks through his window. Cathy is

slow to grasp the ramifications:

CATHY: What about your . . . . your business, your shop?

RAYMOND: Oh, the business is through. Nobody's gonna hire me. So I'm gonna

sell the shop to a cousin of mine. Yeah. Things are pretty well finished for me

here. I've never lived anywhere other than Hartford. (Haynes)

Once perceived as having exceeded the boundaries of his role as a gardener in the white

Hartford suburbs, Raymond is no longer welcome even in that limited sense. He stands

outside his own home, prefiguring his permanent exile from Hartford. While

entrepreneurship was a viable solution to discrimination in the job market, Raymond is

once again being limited. When Cathy suggests that she could visit him in Baltimore,

pleading, weeping that No one would know us there, Raymond refuses, saying, I'm

just not sure that would be a wise idea. After, well, everything that's . . . What matters

now, what has to matter the most, is what's right for Sarah. I've learned my lesson about

mixing in other worlds (Haynes). Whereas earlier he professed his desire for mixing

in other worlds in order to afford his daughter opportunities, now in considering what is

best for his daughter he must primarily consider survival. He is folded back into

containment narratives because he fears for his daughters safety; he is forced to abide by

71
such narratives and sacrifice his ambition for advancement. On the verge of tears, he

takes his turn as the melodramatic hero trapped by ideology. He places his hand on

Cathys shoulder and encourages her to have a proud life, a splendid life (Haynes).

The films only optimism is that hope for a proud life seems to remain. 50 This

modest hope seems to characterize the lives of all of the characters at the end of the film.

When the scene returns to Cathys home, she is shown splayed out on the bed she shared

with Frank. Encompassing both her husbands side of the bed and her own, she mourns

her possible life with Raymond. In the midst of her tears, Frank calls, wanting to schedule

an appointment with Dick Dawson, who will act as his divorce attorney. He asks when

her carpool days are and she scolds him that You could never remember my carpool

days. And theyve always been the same. Wednesdays and Fridays. As long as I can

remember (Haynes).51 When she continues by asking firmly at what time the

appointment is, he seems taken aback by her clarity. Cathy has no empathy for her

husband; however, she does (albeit belatedly) recognize both the necessity and her ability

to break with self-abnegating models of femininity. As for Frank, as he speaks with his

50
Greg Dickinson, author of The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White)
Suburbia, also suggests that Raymond and Frank are banished from the suburb (226). He writes that, In
the end, Cathy is left alone in her vast and echoing suburban home, abandoned by her (gay) husband, her
(black) lover, and by her (heterosexist and homophobic) friends (226). While I read this as an indictment
of containment narratives and the way in which the suburbs act as spaces that elicit the performances of
such narratives to the exclusion of all else, Dickinson sees this ending as emblematic of the way in which
suburban films include interactions between suburbanites and marginalized others only to fulfill suburban
characters (and suburban audiences) tastes for a trip to the wildside before returning them safely home
to their homogeneous, controlled suburban worlds (227).
51
Whereas Niall Richardson writes that Cathys disappointment at Franks inability to remember her
carpool days is the fact that Frank failed to recognize the various activities which comprise her social
identityMrs. Frank Whitaker, the perfect wife and mother, I suggest that her disappointment reflects her
growing realism with respect to the way in which such an identity, which is dependent on her husbands
identity and appreciation for its existence, is always compromised (Richardson). While Williss reading of
Cathy is similar to mine in that she characterizes her as the image of the mother the 1950s dreamed of,
Willis also suggests that her character never becomes an ideal figure for feminist sympathy (165). I
suggest instead that, in these first moments of assertiveness, Cathy is beginning to shed the false
consciousness that ensured her compliance with containment narrativesa possible prelude to a feminist
awakening.

72
wife, the autumnal hues of the hotel room from which he calls suggest a sort of haven for

him and his lover, contrasting with Cathys bedroom, which is awash with the usual blue

light. He does achieve some measure of authenticity and wholeness by living with his

lover, although his tone during the phone conversation betrays a hint of the emotional and

financial costs that must have accompanied such a decision. The final goodbye scene, in

which Cathy goes to meet Raymonds departing train, suggests that both are determined

to have a proud life. After escorting Sarah to her seat, Raymond stands in the doorway

and waves to Cathy at the platform. His glance is the most frank it has been throughout

the film, suggesting that, though he may be in exile from his native Hartford, he has a

renewed determination to create his own proud life. While this proud life exists, one

might also wonder what could have been if the characters had better supported one

anothers struggles against containment narratives. Frank seems the only one to break

wholly from containment scripts, though he faces drastic consequences. Raymond, like

so many African-Americans throughout the nations history, becomes a fugitive in search

of greater freedom and economic opportunity, while Cathys future is more ambiguous.52

She seems to be more empowered as she works with Sybil to manage the home, but she is

left almost completely alone, without her husband, lover, or friends. Though each seems

52
As Robert Sklar notes, there is a difference in the consequences faced by Cathy and Raymond: Whats
directly at stake is not white racism, of which the film presents numerous insightful but not unfamiliar
examples, but the defensive fear and anger it inculcates in blacks. Raymonds friends make it abundantly
clear that he has stepped too far over the line. White skin privilege means this: if Cathys friends ostracize
her, life tragically can go on, but Raymond and his daughter face economic ruin and personal danger not
only from the racist whites but from their own black community. They move away, as Cathy helplessly
watches them go (Sklar 2). Sharon Willis suggests that Each of the films men is condemned and
endangered if he takes a wrong turn in the vocabulary of the men who harass Raymonds daughter, and
thus each is exiled at the end of the film (159). I suggests that, of the two men, Frank is the one who finds
an ever-shining place where he can live despite constraints. Raymond retains some degree of pride by
purposefully rejecting his communitys harassment by moving to Baltimore as does Cathy by soldiering on
in the single life she is wholly unprepared for; however, the financial and social consequences for all three
are drastic.

73
determined to wrest some satisfaction from life, they face the steep consequences of their

transgressions, however cautious, tentative, or temporary they might have been.

While several critics cited in the introduction have suggested that it is nave to

view this film as an intervention into the culture wars, I argue here that the film makes a

strong political statement. The film draws on Containment Culture both as a way of

demystifying the 1950s suburban family and as an explanatory tool. The rights reliance

on a sanitized image of the post-World War II suburban family is undercut as the film

constantly evokes a nostalgia for the era through its use of visual detail and then dispels

such nostalgia by examining the curtailment of the rights of women, African-Americans,

and gay men. Evoking Containment Cultures endorsement of the nuclear family, defined

gender roles, and heteronormativity as its historical framework, the film underscores how

each variant of discrimination has specifically spatial manifestations as well as the way in

which women were encouraged to center their lives on the home and indirectly direct

their husbands affairs. The suburban 1950s, while it is associated by many with growing

prosperity, is here depicted as an environment in which characters are alternately trapped

or expelled.

The film thus subverts the myth, perpetrated by Dole and others, that America can

return to its golden age by a focus on the nuclear family. Instead, the image of the golden

age is tarnished by emphasizing repressive aspects of family and marriage. By connecting

these private issues to the structural dimensions of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity,

specifically the dire consequences of Cathy, Frank, and Raymonds transgressions of

Containment Culture, the film implicitly argues against conservatives narrative of

individuals and families as the primary and sometimes the only agents of personal

74
welfare. Whereas Dole implicitly laments liberalism and multiculturalism as reliant on

excuses, an argument often explicitly stated in the burgeoning conservative media in the

1990s and 2000s, the film suggests that each character faces drastic economic ruin

because of structural inequalities. Frank is driven to alcoholism, which, along with

rupturing his family life, may threaten his career. Cathy, too, faces uncertainty in the

wake of her divorce; having spent her energies shepherding her husbands career, she

now faces a life without any marketable skills. Raymond, whose mobility is limited by

racism regardless of his compliance or noncompliance with dominant narratives, is driven

out of business altogether and physically threatened. Compounding these troubles is that

all three are socially isolated; their communities subject all three of these subversives

to containment or quarantine. Against a conservative discourse that rallied against

identity politics, this film asserts that those who are marginalized by dominant narratives

must contain themselves or suffer dire consequences unless collective action is taken to

remedy such taboos and prohibitions.

Indeed, it can be argued that the film is not hopeful; however, by refusing the

characters any ability to form a coalition, it leaves its contemporary viewers with the

feeling of missed opportunity. 53 The forces of these containment narratives may act on

Cathy, Frank, and Raymond in analogous ways and to more or less similar ends, but so

53
Niall Richardson and others would dispute this reading of the film as calling for a coalition based on the
shared (though varying) experiences of oppression among the characters. While he writes, Far from
Heaven draws deliberate parallels between all three leading characters by showing how Cathy, Frank, and
Raymond are all the victims of different types of prejudice. . .The film continually exposes how the
characters identities are the result of dominant society labeling . (Richardson). Richardson ultimately
rejects the possibility that the film sees identity-based politics as a useful tool. Sharon Willis suggests that
the film does aim to build a coalition but fails because it approaches the question of race through Raymond
and Cathys relationship and paints the black communitys reaction to the relationship as analogous to the
white communitys reaction rather than consider the historical factors that influence each groups
opposition (167). I disagree. Having cited numerous ways in which the film deals with white racism
outside the context of interracial relationships, I suggest the film makes an implicit call for coalition that
understands the differences as well as the similarities in oppressions experienced by these characters.

75
often these characters, particularly Cathy and Frank, miss the opportunity to connect their

experience to another characters. The experience of such missed connections, however,

largely strikes the viewer as tragic and as an implicit call to combat the reinstatement of

Post-World War II values.

76
 CHAPTER TWO

Separating Out the Things that Are Pleasant from the Things that are Unpleasant:

Pleasantville and the Image of Suburban Life

Shortly after Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1998) begins, fraternal twins Jennifer

and David are transported from their 1990s suburban living room into the world of the

fictional black and white 1950s sit-com that shares its name with the film. Trapped in

reruns of the show, which resembles Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, they

literally become characters Mary Sue and Bud, children of a wholesome TV family led

by gently paternalistic father George and consummate homemaker Betty. Though they

both experience an acute case of culture shock, each responds differently. David/Bud, a

fan of the shows reruns, insists that the two play along so as not to disturb the shows

plot, while Jennifer/Mary Sue, finding the wholesome atmosphere oppressive, insists on

bringing 1990s sexual mores to bear on Pleasantvilles sock-hop and soda fountain

culture. When David sees how dulled his employer, Mr. Johnson, has become by his

tedious and rigid routine at the soda fountain, however, he begins to see Pleasantville

differently. Once convinced that the towns unrelenting pleasantness (marked by an

absence of strife so absolute that the towns fireman know only how to rescue cats from

trees) produces two-dimensional citizens (literally flat characters), he begins cooperating

with his sister to transform the town. Whereas Jennifer initiates a sexual revolution,

David begins an educational one. He brings Mr. Johnson a book of canonical Western art

and introduces Pleasantville teens to the plots of frequently-banned books like

Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye. As Jennifer and David effect these changes in

77
the town, each character experiencing a sexual, emotional or intellectual awakening turns

from black and white into color. These changes initiate discord, dividing the town among

traditionalists who continue to appear in black and white and the rebels who are now

termed coloreds. Alarmed, the town fathers (Pleasantvilles mayor and Chamber of

Commerce) rally local citizens to restore Pleasantville to its former state.

The representation of the towns physical infrastructure as a manifestation of its

social structure connects the post World War II suburban habitat with the culture of

containment. Pleasantville, complete with white picket fences and town square of family-

owned businesses, suggests a time of prosperity and close-knit communities. On the

surface, its prominently placed public institutionsthe school, the library, and the town

hallseem to embody a vibrant public life. Yet, like Far from Heaven, the film

undercuts the nostalgia created by its period set and costumes by connecting the towns

very institutions to the oppression of its citizens. 54 The obedience of Pleasantvilles

teenagers, the film indicates, stems from having never been exposed to any ideas other

than those of their parents and teachers. The books in the school and town library are

blank until David intervenes, and Jennifer is the only person to question a teacher who

insists that there is nothing outside of Pleasantville. While the colonial-style homes may

be impressive, the women inside them are weary of being at their husbands beck and

call. The soda fountain may be an innocuous place for teenagers to gather but its owner

Mr. Johnson would rather be an artist. Although the store-lined streets evoke memories of

a time before the malling of America, halfway through the film the businesses are closed

54
With respect to these institutions, political theorist Robert Porter writes that both David and Jennifer
intuitively and explicitly rail against the sanitized, claustrophobic, even authoritarian atmosphere of a town
that has no access to information concerning what is beyond itself (i.e., the students are taught that nothing
exists outside of Pleasantville), a parochialism that is ever-more reinforced by a form of institutionalized
cultural philistinism (i.e., the books in the school and public library are filled only by blank pages) (410).

78
to all colored residents. While the imposing size and the traditional architecture of the

Greek-columned Town Hall function both to beautify the town and provide a symbol of

political stability, this building later becomes the center of an oppressive town

government.

Like the other texts explored in Part One, Pleasantville portrays suburban

communities and suburban middle-class family life of the post-World War II era by

contrasting nostalgic images with the repressive realities of Containment Culture.

Whereas Robert Beuka critiques the film for tending toward an over-the-top critique of

programmatic social rigidity, in which the suburb is depicted less as a lived place than

as a signifier of certain cooptive, even totalitarian impulses that lurk beneath the fabric of

centrist, middle-class American culture (14), I suggest that the film is engaging not with

what it assumes to be the reality of the 1950s suburbs or of centrist, middle-class

culture, but rather with rhetoric that posits a fantasy of 1950s suburbia as a cure for

todays ills. Like Far from Heaven and The Hours, the film examines the perils of

returning to a culture of containment. The film, through its use of the sitcom

Pleasantville, suggests quite literally that the suburbs are sets upon which performances

of containment narratives take place. Just as the Whitakers performance of nuclear

family life is broadcast through Magnatech advertisements in Haynes film (see the

previous chapter), the Parker family is potentially replicated in thousands of viewers

homes. While both the Whitakers and the Parkers broadcast containment narratives

through media, they are also shaped by these narratives. As Nadel has suggested,

narratives of containment were replicated in a variety of different discourses, from

commercial advertising to prescriptions of religious duty, from political rhetoric to

79
corporate policy. In Far from Heaven, the corporate structure of Franks employer

Magnatech, the advertising Frank himself produces, and the gossipy suburban social

circuit all work together to foist restrictive norms of gender and sexuality upon Cathy and

Frank. In Pleasantville, a similar dynamic wherein containment discourses are replicated

in and broadcast from multiple sources is at work. Local government attempts to legislate

these narratives, for example, by prohibiting the overt expression of sexuality,

controversial political material, or any unpleasant thoughts or ideas, in effect

containing all threats to its central authority. Local husbands like George Parker

replicate this authoritarian structure by attempting to curtail their wives moves towards

independence and away from the role of the Happy Housewife Heroine, literally

attempting to contain them in the home. In this examination of the relationship between

governance of the community and governance of the home, Pleasantville suggests that

the oppression of individuals, particularly women, is linked to other oppressions. As

Elaine Tyler May has established, Containment Culture situated the family as an

important mechanism for preventing the infiltration of subversive desires. The film uses

this framework and articulates the powers of these narratives through using both

Pleasantville and the Parker family as metonyms for the nation. Just as the town fathers

seek absolute control over the town, so George Parker takes for grantedat least at

firsthis absolute power in his home. The assumption of this autocratic power,

moreover, rests on the pretext of maintaining order.

Womens sexuality, youth culture, art, and advocacy for those marginalized by

virtue of race are all perceived as threats to such safety and stability. When

Pleasantvilles sexual revolution spreads to Betty, who pursues an affair with Mr.

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Johnson, the tentative divides felt in the community grow deeper. When she is absent

from the home for one night and is unavailable to cook her husbands dinner, Georges

distress becomes a rallying cry for Mayor Bob and his minions on the Chamber of

Commerce. Bettys desire to break out of her role as the Happy Housewife Heroine,

moreover, is aided by the coalition she forms with other citizens of the town who have

turned to color, namely Mr. Johnson, who is harassed and arrested for his controversial

artwork, and the towns youths, who rebel against strict parental rule and the censorship

of art, rock n roll, and literature. This groups collective pursuit of sexual and artistic

expression stands in direct defiance of the towns dictates. Collectively, the group is

known as the coloredsa name that allusively references battles over segregation.

While African Americans are absent from the film as they were from most television

shows of the 1950s, Pleasantvilles naming of this group as coloreds allows the film to

articulate a political allegory that ties the repression of African Americans and women to

a common impulse on the part of those in power to maintain authority, control, and

privilege. The coloreds are denied representation in court and access to public and

commercial spaces. Signs reading no coloreds appear throughout the town, sounding an

echo of the Jim Crow south. While historical allusions refer the audience back to the

1950s, the town fathers reliance on maintaining shared values identifies the film as an

intervention into the 1990s Culture War rhetoric of family values, which had

implications for womens rights and artistic freedom, and, less explicitly, race.55 As

55
In his article The Impact of Television on Our Perception of Reality: A Joint Review of Three Recent
American Films, author Michael Oppermann proposes a similar reading of Pleasantville but goes further
to claim that the Rights vision of the Post-World War II era is not only nostalgic but based in television
sitcoms themselves. Suggesting that the film is a comment on the Clinton-Lewinsky case, the author argues
that It comes out that the moral values that have brought Clinton to trial do not come from the Bible, as
many representatives of Americas moral right want us to believe. On the contrary, the film makes it clear
that these values are associated with American TV. The Moral Right defends a puritan and purified vision

81
historian Mary Caputi argues in her analysis of the decade in political discourse of

neoconservatives, the 1950s holds such an important place in neoconservative rhetoric

because it implies control: self-controlled individuals, controlled families and

neighborhoods, controlled conversations, a controlled foreign policy (21). The

emphasis on control and conformity also characterizes the containment era. In the 1980s

and 1990s, family values served as a shorthand for the controlled families that were

presumably lost in the wake of feminism, while nostalgia for controlled neighborhoods

is implicit in panics over gangs and rioting (Caputi 21). The town of Pleasantville, while

not set in contrast with an urban area, is contrasted with the populous, unnamed

contemporary Southwestern suburb Jennifer and David inhabit. This modern day suburb,

moreover, lacks both the family values and social cohesion that characterize

Pleasantville. Jennifer and Davids parents are bitterly divorced and their father is an

absentee parent. In contrast to the tight-knit community of Pleasantville, there is an

anonymity to David and Jennifers suburb. Their neighbors are never seen and every

home looks the same. While the teens of Pleasantville are wholesome and cheerful,

students in Jennifer and Davids high school live life in the fast lane or are disaffected

rebels. 56 The contrasts could not be more blatant. The film, however, refuses to privilege

Pleasantvilles social cohesion over Jennifer and Davids modern reality. Instead, this

self-described fable uses the Post-World War II suburban setting to explore the

of the world, which is raised on the concept of American family series (sic). The film reveals that this
vision of America hides a highly repressive outlook on life (2-3). While I suggest the film comments on
other aspects of the political culture of the 1990s, Oppermanns observations remain relevant.
56
Linda Mercandante also makes the argument that Pleasantville explodes ideas of the perpetually
pleasant environment but instead takes a theological perspective, critiquing the films depiction of
Pleasantvilles fall from an Eden-like place as misrepresenting Biblical concepts. She writes that
Pleasantville shows that change will bring pain and risk, not just liberation. They are realistic about the
price of freedom and knowledge. And they are good at exploding our idealized fantasies about how much
we would love a perfect world. However, their image of perfection is limited to material security, comfort,
predictability, good weather, and placid relationships (26).

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implications of the Culture Wars by suggesting that those seeking controlled individuals

and families in reality are not as concerned with values as they are with accumulating

power. If the father George, a slight, mild-mannered, yet nonetheless paternalistic man,

resembles George H.W. Bush, Mayor Bob, corpulent, sporting a silvery-grey crew cut,

and a fan of incendiary rhetoric is perhaps an analog to Rush Limbaugh. The two

exemplify strains of conservative rhetoric with similar aims but diverse strategies. The

aptly-named George is the films compassionate conservative who remains wistfully

fixated on the towns past while Mayor Bob confronts a changing Pleasantville with

metaphors of degeneracy and decay. Mobilizing the towns middle-aged men in the wake

of the transition of the town to color and womens increasing independence, Bob

promotes values to recoup the power of the towns white men. His plea for a return to

family values entails an endorsement not only of a return to the 1950s rigidly

demarcated gender roles but also to censorship of literature and art, a flashpoint issue for

Culture War battles in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.

These battles centered on a relatively small sampling of federally-funded art. The

$15,000 grant received by artist Andres Serrano,57 creator of the photograph Piss Christ,

and controversies surrounding a travelling exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpes

photographs organized by the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) 58

precipitated long and drawn out battles over the fate of the National Endowment for the

Arts. Then-chair John Frohnmayer stepped down and, in 1990, Congress passed a law

requiring the NEA to include general standards of decency" among its funding standards

57
Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Kastor wrote that The New York artist received $15,000 from the
Winston-Salem, N.C., Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which had gotten $ 75,000 from the
NEA, and his photograph was included in a national traveling show (Obscenity C1)
58
NEA grants to ICA were cut by the Senate Appropriations Committee as a result of the controversy
(Kastor, WPA C1).

83
(Marquand). A challenge to this criterion was mounted by a group of artists naming

themselves the NEA four (performance artists Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Tim Miller,

and John Fleck). In 1992 the NEA four won a settlement out of court to redress the

agencys revocation of their grants; however, their challenge to the agencys decency

criterion was less successful (Pressley G01). While the lower courts decided in the artists

favor, the Clinton administration appealed those decisions on behalf of the federal

government, sending the case to the Supreme Court, where the earlier verdicts were

overturned in 1998, the year Pleasantville was released (Pressley G01). In the film, Mr.

Johnson sparks questions of decency by painting a nude portrait of Betty on his shop

windows and collaborating with David on a mural celebrating everything banned from

Pleasantville. Like the congress, the town government attempts to enforce decency by

banning the use of colored paint after the portrait is sighted and throwing David and Mr.

Johnson in jail after the mural is discovered. Through the duos trial, the film investigates

the problematic aspects of legislating morality. As the crowd gathered in the back of the

courtroom to support the artists suggests, community standards are not easy to determine

in a town, let alone a nation, comprised of diverse individuals. In addition, Pleasantvilles

book burnings and book bannings reflect and refract the banning and challenging of

books throughout the 1990s. David, for example, must tell local teenagers the plots of

Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye because all of the books in the library are blank. While

attempts to ban these two novels are not exclusive to the 1990s, they were, respectively,

the fifth and tenth most frequently challenged books between the years of 1990 and 1999

according to the American Library Association (100). Davids actions spur a dramatic

uptick in reading among the towns teens, leading town fathers to order that the library be

84
closed and some books be banned. Through this exploration of the local governments

reaction to art and literature, the film suggests that the censorship of art and literature is

not a matter of values but rather a pretext to exerting more stringent social control over

a population. Indeed, Mayor Bob grows in power by inciting the indignation of some

Pleasantville citizens.

To further question the motives of those in the late 1990s who construct the 1950s

as a more innocent time the film reminds its viewers that the 1950s also preceded most

of the landmark Civil Rights victories. Colored citizens (who literally appear in

Technicolor in contrast to the black and white film) are banned from most shops on Main

Street. During the trial over the mural, David and Mr. Johnson, both colored, are

denied representation while their supporters are relegated to the gallery. Women who

appear colored, like Betty and Davids girlfriend Margaret, are subject to harassment

and attempted rape. While some audience members may have begun the film with a

nostalgia for Pleasantvilles placidity, the towns actions act as reminders that the violent

repression of African Americans social and spatial mobility characterized the actual

fifties. Furthermore, the way in which Mayor Bob uses some citizens anger against the

coloreds demonstrates the ways in which some conservatives have used racially

divisive rhetoric to ensure political victory. As political scientist Joel Olson argues, in the

post-civil rights era, race has been used to divide the white electorate and cement

loyalties to the Republican party:

During slavery and segregation, white identity functioned as a form of racialized

standing that granted all whites a superior social status to all those who were not

white, particularly African Americans. The loss of individualized standing due to

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 the victories of the civil rights movement, however, led to anger, anxiety, and

resentment among many whites, and a desire to restore that standing. This white

ressentiment, as I call it, presented a political opportunity for the minority party, if

they could mobilize it. Yet given post-civil rights movement norms against overt

racism, Republican strategists could not do so in a way that straightforwardly

evoked white standing. They solved this problem by creating a narrative that

portrayed the Democrats as the party of intellectual elites and undeserving rabble.

The GOP, meanwhile, represented the "virtuous middle" squeezed in between. In

constructing this conflict, Republican elites implicitly racialized both the virtuous

middle and the "snobs" as white. (704-705)

In its portrayal of Mayor Bob and his minions, the film indicates that the imperious

mayor (whose subjects often cower before him) consciously uses a divisive political

strategy such as that described by Olsen. As demonstrated by the trial and throughout the

film, the coloreds of the film represent both the snobs, the intellectual elite who

produce indecent art, and the rabble, the citizens cast as undeserving of their rights

(704-705). By turning the townspeople against the coloreds, Bob gains a rabid

following.

While Pleasantvilles allegory has been controversial because it recirculates

exaggerated images of the 1950s and the suburbs in order to accomplish its critique, this

chapter examines this framework as a conscious strategy with which the film intervenes

in both the Culture Wars and suburban history. The films return to what Caputi calls in

the title of her book the mythical 1950s, a sanitized, decidedly ahistorical vision of the

era, allows the film to draw parallels between the culture of the Cold War and the recent

86
Culture Wars. In exploring the drive for safety and stability that unites both proponents of

Containment Culture and conservative Culture Warriors, the text argues both that

suburban paradises such as Pleasantville never existed and that those who wish to

resurrect them may also wish to place considerable restrictions on individual liberty.

Furthermore, by aligning the audiences sympathy with the coloreds, the film implicitly

links issues of racial justice, free speech, and womens rights, showing the potential

power of political coalitions to topple oppressive forces.

At the same time that the films critique of contemporary racial politics is implicit

and that its critiques of censorship and patriarchy are muted drains some of the films

force. For example, no African Americans appear in the film. While in one sense this is

in keeping with the fact that the film recreates the world of 1950s sitcoms, in which

African Americans were unlikely to appear as major characters, it might also be seen as

ineffective in that it is circuitous in drawing the parallels between current and past

conservative rhetoric about race. If the battles of the coloreds evoke Civil Rights

struggles in order to represent the struggles of various other groups (women, artists, etc.),

then the struggle to end racial segregation lends a language to the film but is nonetheless

never fully represented. Moreover, although Betty leaves her life as a housewife behind,

her transformation is only a sexual one. While her daughter Mary Sue/Jennifer, who

belongs to the present, is swept up in Davids craze for reading, Bettys role in

Pleasantvilles new cultural and intellectual renaissance is muse to painter Mr. Johnson.

As such, her resemblance to wide-eyed, graceful Jacquelyn Kennedy, rather than her

intellect, is highlighted by the film.

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 The films critique of art censorship is also diluted. While parallels seem to be

intended between Mr. Johnsons nude paintings and the controversial work of Serrano

and the NEA four, Johnsons paintings are much tamer both than these works and some

of the more controversial works produced in Pleasantvilles own time. When he meets his

peers in the diner, David does not fill the pages of Ginsbergs Howl nor does Mr. Johnson

paint in the often misunderstood manner of the Abstract Expressionists. Moreover, while

his paintings owe much to Picasso, he does not adopt the painters unsettling use of

nudity in paintings like the Demoiselles DAvignon. A clearly mainstream film with high

production values and starring well-known actors, Pleasantville seems to shy away from

alienating any viewers through a strident political critique, sometimes making the

otherwise carefully drawn parallels between the past and the films present less effective

than might have been possible.

From its outset, the film announces that, for David, the sitcom Pleasantville is a

refuge from the confusion of his world. The opening credits of the film are played atop a

television screen running through various advertisements for everything from skin lotion

to batteries to the Psychic Friends Network. This barrage of images and competing array

of voices depict the kaleidoscopic confusion of contemporary reality. Soon the screen,

controlled by Davids remote, stops at T.V. Time, a channel whose kitschy graphics

and announcements voice approximate the Nick at Night phenomenon. 59 While the

programming is packaged ironically, David loves the show sincerely. Though he may

mimic Bettys impeccably clear and gentle voice, he knows all of the episodes by heart

and is emotionally invested in the make-believe town. When a friend later questions the

59
Nick at Nite ran on the MTV-owned childrens channel Nickelodeon in the evenings beginning in
1985. Its programming consisted of television reruns geared toward the baby boom generation.

88
veracity of a show in which no one is homeless, for example, David defends the program

by countering nobodys homeless in PleasantvilleBecause thats just not what its

like (Ross). After advertisements for familiar shows like I Love Lucy and Ozzie and

Harriet flash on screen, the commercial for the Pleasantville marathon begins. The

commercial lauds the upcoming Pleasantville marathon, featuring 24-hours chock-full

of family values and Warm Greetings (accompanied by Georges call of Honey Im

Home), Safe Sex (accompanied by the shot of George and Bettys two twin beds), and

Proper nutrition (accompanied by a shot of Betty and George at the kitchen table beside

a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies). The announcer promises that this

marathon will return the viewer to Kinder, gentler times, echoing George H.W. Bushs

call in his 1988 speech to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. While in

part the shots of the cookies and the twin beds indicate that the viewers relationship to

the past will be ironic and that the present is superior to the past in terms of its

understanding of human sexuality and cardiovascular health, the program appeals to

David because he longs for a more stable life. He hopes to win a quiz contest that will

accompany the marathon and award the winner $1,000 and a trip to any Pleasantville in

the United States.

Davids longing for the placid life he sees in Pleasantville includes the dream of

an intact home, a friendly neighborhood, a girlfriend, and a certain future. His love for

Pleasantville seems partly rooted in what Nadel calls the rigid courtship rituals of the

Containment era; David fantasizes about asking a popular classmate on a date, but even

his fantasy is tinged by the certainty of rejection (4). Unlike the giggly girls of

Pleasantville, this real-life classmate clearly surpasses David in her sophistication. In

89
Davids world, teens make their own rules, leaving him longing for a stricter sense of

authority. The sense of his dislocation is enhanced by short clips indicating that the

suburbs themselves are no longer the safe havens they once promised to be. Teachers

in his suburban school warn that both jobs and incomes are falling (middle-class status

may be unattainable) and that rates of ozone depletion (middle-class consumption habits

may be unsustainable) and HIV infection are rising (middle-class status will not protect

the young people from all dangers). 60 Before the scene returns to the interior of Davids

home, a lone police car is shown patrolling his street. While the image of the homes

identical beige stucco finish, red-tiled roofs, and understated landscaping suggest that the

neighborhood is desirable, the question of safety is posed by the presence of the police

car and the absence of any children playing outdoors at dusk.61 Moreover, the streets

abandonment speaks to the almost eerie anonymity of the neighborhood. Identical

garages, rather than picket fences, front the homes, giving neighbors the opportunity to

enter and exit their homes without interacting with one another.

The film not only establishes a nostalgia for the innocence of young people and

the safety of older communities but it also sets the audience up to understand Davids

longing for an ideal nuclear family. This opening sequence continues, showing David

slumped on the couch watching another episode of Pleasantville. On this episode, Bud

Parker brags, There were lots of swell projectsI guess mine was just the swellest

(Ross). Bemused, Betty places a gentle hand on his shoulder and returns that there is no

60
As Caputi notes, Educators offer no hope; rather, they understand their mission to be that of helping
students accept the worlds harsh realties (19).
61
In his article The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia, Greg
Dickinson makes a similar point about the way in which the contemporary suburban neighborhood is
compared unfavorably to Pleasantville. While the television clips introduce the audience to the perfect
nuclear family, the perfect house, and the perfect life, all photographed in crisp black and white, Davids
neighborhood is less utopic. Dickinson writes that the neighborhood is a contemporary suburb constructed
of look-alike beige stuccoed homes marching up the hills of California (212).

90
such word as Swellest, to which he replies, Well gee whizz Mom, it wasnt the

English fair! (Ross). Betty turns to the camera to give an exaggerated look of

befuddlement and says, Whats a mother to do? (Ross). At the very same time,

Davids own mother is heard in the background attempting to convince her ex-husband to

visit with David and his sister (Ross). She argues with her ex-husband well within earshot

of David, cueing him in not only to his fathers negligence but to her own plans to escape

with her boyfriend. Her most audible line is, Barry, well if I want to get a mud bath with

my new boyfriend, its really my business, isnt it? (Ross). Here the film heavy-

handedly contrasts Pleasantvilles cartoonish wholesomeness, particularly Betty and

Georges loving support of their son, with Davids broken family. 62 His fathers desire

to be bailed out of the custodial arrangement contrasts with Georges paternal pride, his

mothers sexually suggestive mud bath with a boyfriend with Bettys wholesomeness,

and his bag of corn chips with Bettys much-anticipated meatloaf.63 For David, the

suburbs of the 1950s and the idealized nuclear family heralded by the right as the

standard of American culture forms a desirable fantasy. By contrast, his sisters jaded

view of family life and sexuality might be seen to embody the hazards that the decline of

such families supposedly brought to bear. The difference between the twins is

exemplified by one scene in which David spends his school lunch hour practicing to win

the Pleasantville marathon while Jennifer stands nearby with her friends. When his friend

quizzes him as to why Pleasantvilles George and Betty Parker came home early from

their lake vacation, David answers correctly: Cause Bud didnt answer the phone and

62
As Dickinson summarizes The contrast is clear: Pleasantville is good, safe, warm, and loving;
Presentville is fractured, unsafe scary (221).
63
While Mary Caputi also focuses on Davids nostalgia, her argument centers on his longing for a perfect
union with his real-life mother. While drawing heavily on her ideas, I argue that David is implicitly longing
for the possibility of reuniting his entire family, including his father.

91
they were worried about him (Ross). Overhearing him, his sister puffs on her cigarette

and agrees with her friends that David is pathetic (Ross). Whereas the audience is led

to sympathize with Davids awkwardness and longing for a stable family life, they are

asked to be disturbed by his sisters embrace of independence from parental

authority. 64An updated 1990s version of a Valley-Girl, Jennifer cultivates an off-handed

cool through which she pretends to care about nothing. Unlike David, Jennifer looks

forward to her mothers absence and has invited high school stud Mark Davis to the

house to watch a concert televised on MTV; her purchase of new underwear signals her

expectations for the evening. While contextual cues lead the audience away from

sympathizing with hershes shallow and worries only about her skin, her popularity,

and her sexual conqueststhe cumulative picture of the two siblings plays into the hands

of those who tout family values. David represents overt need, while Jennifer represents

the danger of rebellion and lack of a role model. It is only after the two arrive in

Pleasantville that the film leads its audience to question such easy conclusions. The

conflict between David and Jennifer over the television remote will be their vehicle to the

world of the sitcom. When the two fight over the it, they are visited by the figure of a TV

repairman played by Don Knotts, a man who shares Davids fascination with

Pleasantville and, impressed by his knowledge, gives him an odd-looking, outdated

remote to replace the broken one. When he leaves, the twins fight over this dinosaur of a

64
Linda Mercandante suggests that the films emphasis on the troubled state of the contemporary world
construct[s] this ideal environment out of our [the audiences] fondest desires and in opposition to many
of our common complaints today (4). Audiences may be more likely to sympathize with David because he
is a more likeable character than Jennifer. In addition, as Mercandante suggests, audiences are likely to
identify with his sense of dislocation.

92
remote and are transported directly to Pleasantville, where they appear on screen as Bud

and Mary Sue fighting over a transistor radio.

As the two resolve their clashing ways of dealing with this new life, David moves

away from a nostalgic investment in the 1950s toward an acceptance of the contemporary

realities of both community and family as no more or less ideal than the intact

patriarchal nuclear family. In fact, David will ultimately accept his present as preferable

to the past because he learns that the sense of security, community, and family provided

by the idealized past of Pleasantville is maintained at the cost of individual freedoms

freedoms of expression as well as the rights of women, young people, and the group that

comes to be known as coloreds. While David finds his supernatural journey to

Pleasantville disturbing, he hopes in the beginning that both its perfect community and

the perfect Parker family will remain undisturbed. Led by the frame story to

sympathize with David, however, the audience is aligned with him as his first ambivalent

feelings about the town develop.

These feelings arise almost immediately. Betty Parker appears in a bell-shaped

dress and apron and summons Jennifer and David for a a nice big breakfast, consisting

of pancakes, eggs, sausage, some good, crisp bacon, and a ham steak (Ross). The

stacks of ham, eggs, and bacon glistening with grease and the sheer tonnage of

carbohydrates are presented so as to disgust the viewer. While Jennifer is the most

horrified of the two (she is worried about developing acne from eating such rich food),

David is also in acute culture shock. He grimaces and then gapes in shock as the piles of

calories accumulate. On the other hand, as David and Jennifer walk to school, David,

now Bud, is clearly pleased to recognize neighbors like Mr. Simpson, a retired man who

93
greets the twins as he waters his lawn; such friendliness provides a clear contrast to his

invisible neighbors in the 1990s.65 Overall, however, the film emphasizes the towns

overbearing pleasantness. Further along on their walk to school, David and Jennifer are

both surprised to see a fire truck screech to a halt in order to save a cat. At school, David

is befuddled to learn he cannot miss a shot in basketball practice. Even when he

purposely kicks the ball to the ceiling, the ball finds its way through the hoop. While

Jennifer is more critical than David, he too soon wants to go home. Whereas he once

studied vigorously in an attempt to win the Pleasantville quiz and be transported to the

real-life Pleasantville of his choice, life in the actual TV show is too alien to him. In

contrast to his sister, who rails against her fate, however, David at first stresses that the

best strategy is compliance with Pleasantvilles placid culture. Though he wants to leave,

he also wants to leave Pleasantville the way it is. He needs not so much to live in

Pleasantville as to hold on to his fantasy of Pleasantville.

David begins to concede that disrupting Pleasantville may be a good idea,

however, when he becomes frustrated by the characters inability to accept even the

slightest changes in their routine lives. As these characters perform containment

narratives, they literally follow scripts. For example, David discourages Skip Martin,

the captain of the basketball team, from asking Jennifer (whom he sees as Mary Sue

Parker) on a date. David fears (with reason) that her sexuality will disrupt the social

fabric of Pleasantville, yet when Skip replies, I dont know what Id do if she wouldnt

go out with me, David is quite annoyed by his lack of resilience (Ross). On the one

hand, David needs the security of knowing that Pleasantville will go on as it always has;

65
Dickinson remarks on this phenomenon as well, suggesting that in contrast to the California suburbs
shown at the beginning of the film, in Pleasantville, Neighbors connect over the fences and homeowners
devote time to yard work (219).

94
on the other hand, the script for life in Pleasantville exerts such a power over its

inhabitants that they appear without any will. As an employee at the soda fountain, David

also is disturbed that owner Mr. Johnson is unable to open up the shop without him.

David addresses this by instructing Mr. Johnson that he can both vary his routine and

perform those tasks he normally delegates to David. Though Mr. Johnson is the business

owner, he behaves much like a corporate drone until David intervenes.

Davids quest to empower the citizens of Pleasantville does not extend to women,

however. He seeks to control his sisters sexuality and in the process discovers that his

parents cannot provide the protection and safety that the sitcom format promises. He

convinces Jennifer to go on a date with Skip so as not to significantly alter the course of

the television shows reruns, but he instructs her to limit physical contact. Jennifer

ignores his instructions, however, and takes Skip by the hand, leading him away from the

soda fountain to drive to Lovers Lane. David chases after them in a panic but he is on

foot. David may want to change the placid culture of Pleasantville by making its men

more independent, but he does not want its sexual mores altered. The relationship

between his sister and Skip upsets him not only because it strikes against prohibitions on

premarital sex but because Jennifer is clearly the aggressor. David is so disturbed, in fact,

that he runs all the way home, where his parents reassure him that his sisters virtue is not

in peril. Though George attempts to understand his sons fears and assures David that his

sister is a fine young woman and that She would never do anything for us to be

concerned about, and though his mother provides comfort in the form of a bottle of milk

and a plate of cookies and marshmallow rice squares, David knows Jennifer well enough

to continue worrying (Ross). David now has an engaged, wise father and a mother who

95
fits every ideal, but he is distraught nonetheless because his parents cannot understand his

predicament. This is an instance in which the film foregrounds the difference between the

vision of the 1950s suburbs offered by sitcoms and the reality of suburban life. As

Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper note, Pleasantville disrupts a notion of family life

offered by sitcoms, in which no problem is too big not to be resolved in a half hour,

usually after a gentle talk with pipe-smoking Dad (549). In contrast, Davids experience

here leaves him with an accurate sense of his father Georges limitations. Here the film

begins to indicate what will soon become apparent: the fifties themselves do not live up

to the nostalgia that surrounds them.

Davids desire to maintain the sexual status quo is reiterated when he senses an

attraction between Mr. Johnson and his mother. Shortly after Davids talk with his father,

Mr. Johnson arrives to inform David that he has closed up the shop without him. While

David is proud of his boss, when Mr. Johnson locks eyes with Betty, David quickly tries

to shoo the man away, repeating Goodbye. Goodbye! (Ross). Davids alarm suggests

that thinking of his mother as a sexual being is even more disturbing to him than what is

happening at Lovers Lane. If his real-life mother disappoints him in her lack of

wholesomeness, here he is shocked to learn that Betty is also human. If the point that

David is trying to control a sexual eruption is not clear enough, when Jennifer arrives

home, he grabs her arm and scolds her. She denies him any information, but the audience

has already seen her make love to a befuddled Skip. Smitten, the basketball captain

becomes the first character in the town to see color in the form of a red rose as he pulls

away from the Parker home. Davids worst fears are confirmed the next day when he

96
arrives at basketball practice to find Skip detailing his date with Jennifer to the entire

team. 66 In the basketball practice that follows, all the young men miss shots.

The following scenes both add further evidence that Jennifer and Davids arrival

has quickly changed Pleasantville and demonstrate that, in light of the swelling sexual

revolution, David is reconsidering even the incremental changes he favored. When

David confronts his sister after the disastrous basketball practice, Jennifer defends her

choice to change Pleasantville. While David was earlier disturbed by male characters

lack of agency, he insists to his sister that the townspeople are happy as they are and

should not be disturbed. In return, Jennifer quips that Nobody is happy in a poodle skirt

and sweater set and points to a girl whose bubble gum has turned pink. In showing this

second spot of color, the film suggests that the sexual freedom, casual speech, and sassy

attitude Jennifer brought to Pleasantville are beginning to catch on. The use of color to

highlight modernization will be carried throughout the film. Soon, people as well as

objects will change to color and characters who remain in black and white will be those

resistant to change while those who embrace change will appear in color. As critic John

Belton suggests:

In this new dynamic of the image, black-and-white in Pleasantville comes to

signify an absence of color. It is a lack that the films narrative seeks to liquidate.

If the image were all black-and-white, there would be no lack. Because it is part

black-and-white and part color, we sense the inadequacy of the films black-and-

white world. (62)

66
Joseph compares the sexual changes that take place in Pleasantville as analogous to the pill and the
sexual revolution of the sixties (6).

97
At this point, David does not see this inadequacy though Jennifer does sense it acutely.

When the scene switches to Lovers Lane, the line of convertible cars housing cavorting

couples suggests that many teens are embracing the culture Jennifer has imported into

Pleasantville. David, meanwhile, reacts decisively, retracting his support for Mr.

Johnsons burst of independence. When he walks into the soda fountain, the newly

liberated culture of Pleasantville is apparent in the blaring musical notes of Larry

Williams Lawdy Miss Clawdy and in the casual and suggestive postures of the

previously prim teens. Davids worst fears are further confirmed when he finds Mr.

Johnson slumped on the floor of the prep kitchen experiencing something of an

existential crisis:

MR. JOHNSON: What's the point, Bud?

DAVID: You make hamburgers. That is the point.

MR. JOHNSON: No. I know I do. It's always the same, you know? Grill the

bun, flip the meat, melt the cheese. It never changes. It never gets better or

worse.

DAVID: OK, just listen for a second.

MR. JOHNSON: I cant. Listen. . . the other night when I closed by myself, that

was different.

DAVID: Forget about that!

MR. JOHNSON: Oh, okay. I really liked it, though.

DAVID: Come here. Look. You can't always like what you do. Sometimes you

just gotta do it because it's your job. And even if you don't like it, you just gotta

do it anyway.

98
 MR. JOHNSON: Why?

DAVID: So they can have their hamburgers!

David provides the answer of a rational capitalist as he attempts to convince Mr. Johnson

that he should do his job because he has to. He also plays the role of the father to the

idealistic youth, emphasizing to his boss the importance of making a living. Mr. Johnson

in turn plays the rebellious son, revealing that the only part of his job he enjoys is

painting the windows at Christmas time because he can change the mural every year.

While David once also found the scriptedness of Pleasantville oppressive, the changes are

coming too fast and too strong for his taste. While David may have been attracted to

Pleasantville because its orderly world provided an antidote to his own, the ways in

which his sister and Mr. Johnson question authority threaten this vision of stability.

Jennifer brings a sexual revolution that leads teens to defy the morality of their parents.

While Mr. Johnson is an adult and his own boss, he is interrogating the ideals of

American capitalism, which holds that happiness is rooted in steady work and material

prosperity.

If David/Bud has a nostalgic investment in Pleasantville, however, it is innocent

in comparison to the Mayor Bobs reaction to the crisis. Although the audience can

sympathize with Davids reaction, Bobs character emphasizes the destructive potential

of such nostalgia. The men of the town are gathered inside the barbershop, pondering

whether or not the basketball team has lost before. The men speak cordially. Though,

they are clearly worried about the changes their conversation is slow and rational until

Mayor Bob arrives. A local man, Ralph, says, Maybe that's where they get that

saying...You can't win 'em all, to which George replies, That's a good point, Ralph.

99
They do have that saying. (Ross). At this very moment, Mayor Bob bursts through the

door and takes this opportunity to stir alarm over the loss. After displacing the current

customer from the chair, Bob pontificates as the barber and shoeshine boy obsequiously

groom him: But they do win 'em all. Theyve always won 'em all. . . . . What I want to

know is, if they've never lost before...and they've never tied before, isn't that winning 'em

all? (Ross). The men quickly agree with him. If Davids interest in preserving the status

quo is rooted in a need for safety and stability, Mayor Bob seems an expert on

capitalizing on this desire in others. The older men of the town are accustomed to some

modicum of power and willingly submit to Bob in return for his leadership, which

promises to further secure their power in their homes and in the town. In documenting

their drive on one hand and Davids increasing acceptance of change on the other, the

film destabilizes concepts of safety and security, the bedrocks of Containment Culture,

the suburban impulse, and neoconservative rhetoric. David will come to accept that life

without risk and without the freedom of individuals (including mothers and sisters) to

live as they choose is not ideal. In doing so, he becomes both the leader of a youth

movement and an advocate for his mothers transition toward independence.

Before David begins to question the containment vision of gender roles that

naturalizes a division between homemaking wives and wage-earning husbands, Betty,

following her daughters lead, will break from these narratives to a degree. Though

unlike Cunninghams Laura Brown (discussed in the last chapter in this section), Betty

has no particular intellectual passion, she does both quietly defy her commanding

husband and find a sexual awakening. Reversing the trope of the sitcom heart to heart,

Betty asks her daughter for advice as the two wash dishes together. Perhaps motivated by

100
Mr. Johnsons visit to her home, she asks Jennifer what is being done at Lovers Lane. In

an inversion of the scene in which David has a man-to-man with his father during Skip

and Jennifers date, Jennifer sits with her mother over milk and cookies and explains the

birds and the bees. Obviously, it is illogical that Betty, the mother of two children, would

be ignorant about sex. This scene, like the scene between David and his father, points out

the gap between the nostalgic images of the 1950s created by television sitcoms and

reality by comically reminding viewers that sex was not invented in the 1960s. After

Jennifers lengthy explanation, Betty expresses her consternation. She does not

disapprove but, rather, tells her daughter that your father would never do anything

like that (Ross). Jennifer slyly tells her that there are other ways to enjoy yourself, and

the next scene shows Betty masturbating in the bathtub that night. While Pleasantville,

like the 1950s sitcoms on which it is based, erases sex to an impossible extent, Bettys

experimentation here also represents a break with the containment narratives of the

historical 1950s. Such narratives dictated that womens sexuality was not so much for

their own enjoyment but rather a tool with which they could stabilize the family and

nation. According to containment narratives, the proper use of sex within marriage was to

keep husbands satisfied, ensuring they remained family men bound to their employers

and out of the hands of seditious spies. The explosiveness of this event, then, can be

understood both in terms of the sitcom world and the historical 1950s. In the imaginary

world, the event causes a literal explosion; the tree in front of the Parker house bursts into

flame. David runs to the local fire department and, after several times of shouting fire,

shouts cat, which finally sends firefighters rushing to the scene, where he instructs them

on how to use their hoses to extinguish the flames. No one will know the source of the

101
flames, but, in the narrative arc of the film, Bettys sexual awakening accelerates the pace

of change.

This will be the last time David puts out the fires of change in Pleasantville. In

fact, the recognition he earns will soon propel him to the front of the youth rebellion

ignited by his sister. While Davids receipt of a medal of honor from Mayor Bob suggests

that his actions helped to maintain the pleasant status quo, his actions also reveal to the

towns youths that he has knowledge of the world outside Pleasantville. Such knowledge

is coveted by his fellow high school students, whose teachers maintain that nothing exists

beyond the boundaries of their insular community. Whereas Jennifers efforts erode what

Nadel calls rigid courtship rituals (4), Davids efforts will result in intellectual

challenges to Pleasantville, particularly its rigid definition of decency. As David

returns to the soda fountain from the awards ceremony, he is greeted by an eager crowd

of onlookers. When a boy in the crowd asks David how he knew how to put out the fire,

in his hesitation to change Pleasantville, David remains vague:

DAVID: Oh. Wellwhere I used to live ...That's just what firemen did.

BOY: And where's that?

DAVID: Um ... Outside of Pleasantville.

BOY: What's outside of Pleasantville?

DAVID: Look. It doesn't matter. It's not important.

BOY: What is it?

DAVID: It's really not important.

David is willing to speak at length only when the question is posed again by Margaret

Henderson, a local ingnue who shows an interest in dating him. He describes a world in

102
which roads and rivers keep going instead of continuing in a circle, a world that does

not remain static. Sharing this knowledge with the rapt crowd gives Davida bookish

outcast in his own timea social currency he finds surprising. The growing excitement

on his face also shows that, as a studious young man, his sympathies are stirred by the

groups curiosity and lack of knowledge. When a boy references the Mighty Mississippi

as another river that keeps on going and explains that he has been reading Huck Finn,

Jennifer tells her brother that she told the boy about the plot of the novel but only as far

as she had read: up until the part with the raft. . . (Ross). The boy and all of the

onlookers are eager to know what comes next. As David explains the plot to an eager

crowd, the pages of the book continue to fill in and he moves on to field questions about

Catcher in the Rye. The public library soon becomes a center for teen life in

Pleasantville. Its red brick faade, once just an another ornament of a picturesque

community, now houses a living, breathing institution. Students flock there, leaving a line

winding out of its doors.

The film emphasizes that the spread of color and sexuality and the growing

popularity of books are equally alarming to the town elders. Watching the crowd of youth

congregate at the library, the men gathered outside of the barbershop bemoan the state of

the town. The logic of containment is emphasized by the mens use of metaphors of

quarantine. Roy, one of the towns almost-identical older men, worries about the

contagion. He remarks that both color and reading are spreading all over the place

(Ross.) Ralph has a similar feeling that the town is headed down a slippery slope and

asks, Going up to that lake all the time is one thing...but now they're going to a library?

(Ross). As they say this, a young woman in a crimson sweater walks past, a stack of

103
books perched provocatively on her swiveling hips. The connection between the

forbidden knowledge brought by Jennifer and that brought by David is here given an

icon who fuses sexuality and intellect. As the men watch the rear view of the woman

passing, they gasp in fear. The men wish to limit both sexual and intellectual knowledge

and to spare themselves from the temptations of both. The masculine fear of temptation

is long-standing. This young woman, like figures as ancient as the Sirens or Eve, is

perceived as a threat to the mens dominance and purpose: they find her magnetism

distracting and she holds the power to reject them. To compound the matter, the woman

is carrying a book, emblematizing the new teenage passion for reading. Keeping

populations illiterate has long been a strategy to ensure compliance with authority; to

teach a slave to read, for example, was a crime. The teenagers interest in reading then

threatens the authority of the patriarchs because it exposes the youth to new ideas and to

the world outside Pleasantville. The mens complaints about the books would of course

be humorous to those living in an age when countless and often less-challenging pastimes

compete with the pastime of reading, but the mens fear is consistent with their overall

feeling that power and authority is slipping out of their hands. This fear-based reaction is

mobilized by Mayor Bob, who sees the potential for power in fanning the flames of their

insecurity.

Bobs determination to capitalize upon mens fear of the encroaching trends is

developed more fully in the following scenes, which also contrast Georges newfound

patriarchal fervor with Bettys marked moves away from her role as homemaker. Bob

begins building a base of support. In recruiting George, Bob is more than willing and able

104
to capitalize on both his vanity and anxiety. In an unannounced visit to the Parker home,

he captures Georges support by recruiting him to the Chamber of Commerce:

BOB: I'm sure you've noticed the same things we all have. Certain changes in

the town. You know what I mean by changes?

GEORGE: (meekly) Changes.

BOB: Changes. And I'm not just talking about big stuff like the fire. It's the

little things. Did you hear about Bill Miller?

GEORGE: No. What?

BOB: Wife wants him to get one of those new beds.

GEORGE: One of those big beds? Oh, my gosh. What's he gonna do?

BOB: I don't know. (Laughing) I meanIt's everywhere. Bill Anderson's boy

just quit his job at the market.

GEORGE: Quit? What do you mean quit?

BOB: Yeah. Just took his apron off right in the middle of an order...said, I

don't feel like it anymore." Groceries all over the counter. (laughing) Took 'em

three hours just to sort it out. . . .

GEORGE: Sheesh.

Here, Mayor Bob gives carefully chosen examples of a world gone awry. The surge in

interest in large beds marks womens growing interest in sexuality, while the boy quitting

his job marks the destruction of parental authority. After alarming him, Bob begins to

flatter George in order to convince him to take action:

BOB: (leaning toward George) Everybody really likes you, George.

GEORGE: Oh, well ...

105
 BOB: No, well they do. Not just 'cause you're a good bowler. People respect
you.

GEORGE: Well, thank you.

BOB: And it's important for them to see someone they respect stand up for

what's right. If you love a place, you can't just sit back...and watch this kind of

thing happen, can you?

GEORGE: No, of course not.

BOB: That is why I want you to be a member of the Pleasantville Chamber of

Commerce.

GEORGE: Oh my gosh. Oh, II hardly know what to say. [Bob hands him a

button picturing the Chamber of Commerce logo]. Its just like yours.

BOB: Well its exactly like mine George. (both laugh). Well, you can start by

saying yes. (Ross)

Bobs speeches, always bombastic in tone and scripted in feel, are characterized by

dramatic pauses, repetitions, and rhetorical questions. The mayor strategically seeks to

contain threats to patriarchal and government power. In eliciting Georges cooperation,

his speech offers a chance to trade such fears for a sense of belonging.

At the same time, this scene marks the beginning of Betty and Davids

collaboration against this drive for patriarchal control. As in the barber shop, Bob is quick

to make himself at home. He asks George for a taste of Bettys famous pineapple kabobs.

Demonstrating a newfound assurance of his power, George does not even rise from his

chair but yells to Betty from his seat. He must, however, yell several times before David

appears to say he will find his mother. As the shot moves inside the kitchen, Betty is

indeed standing by in the kitchen in a full-skirted dress, apron, heels, and pearls;

106
however, unlike iconic domestic goddesses of 1950s sitcoms, she is leaning over the sink,

weeping. When she turns toward David, her face is revealed in striking full color. While

George continues to call, David gently retouches her face with cosmetics that are still in

shades of black, white, and gray. Bettys delay in responding to her husband, though it is

in part motivated by her colored face, marks the first time she breaks his expectations of

timely and doting service to her family. At the same time, David, who has already struck

a note against the restrictive educational system of Pleasantville, is joining in this first

step of his mothers feminist awakening by keeping her secret from his father.67

If Davids support of his mother in the kitchen signals his willingness to question

the role of homemaker, his support of Mr. Johnsons painting signals his support for the

restaurateur's redefinition of masculinity. Remembering his bosss desire to paint more

than his yearly Christmas window decorations, David brings him a book of great western

art. Some of the best-known paintings, such as those of Titian, Van Gogh, Juan Gris, and

Picasso, are unknown to Mr. Johnson, but he is clearly inspired. At the same time,

however, he is dismayed by his lack of access to colors. As the camera captures a series

of paintings in the book, a conversation ensues that encapsulates the films theme:

BUD: Its . . . just where am I gonna see colors like that?

67
Whereas I suggest Davids turning point begins with his introduction of the plot of Huck Finn to the
teenagers at the soda fountain, Caputi suggests that this scene is pivotal: The act of powdering Bettys face
and accepting her imperfections produces a great emotional turning point in David. Her transformation
away from her former role, and subsequent need to feign that roles continuing sentence, causes him to
recognize that feigning has long been a part of his life. David has been living in a dream world under the
spell of a television show, imagining, hoping that his life could be just like the Pleasantville he enjoys
(135). While Caputi suggests that this is where David gives up his search for a perfect past and a perfect
mother, I suggest that he has already realized that the past is imperfect. Even since the scene in which
George and Betty try to comfort him with a father-son talk and some cookies and milk, he has realized the
inability of even the seemingly-perfect family he longs for to solve all of his problems.

107
 MR. JOHNSON: Must be awful lucky to see colors like that. I'll bet they don't

know how lucky they are.

The obvious irony, of course, is that David is beginning to realize how lucky he was in

the 1990s and is in fact bringing his world to Pleasantville through the art book, his

support of his mother, and the start of what Jennifer calls a dorky reading fad (Ross).

With renewed confidence, he even asks Margaret Henderson on a date. With the

inspiration provided by the book and Betty, Mr. Johnson begins to produce art, his oeuvre

multiplies quickly, and colors appear in his world. This too will ultimately anger Mayor

Bob and his chamber.

In a series of juxtaposed scenes that follow the actions of Betty and Mr. Johnson,

George, Jennifer, and David together with the towns other teenagers, the film connects

the flowering of youth culture, feminism, and the arts to a tide of change that opposes

Mayor Bobs desire to suppress the arts, sexuality, and womens rights and to gain

complete control over the towns affairs. As David and Margaret make their way to

Lovers Lane, Betty approaches Mr. Johnsons soda shop. Seeking out Mr. Johnson,

Betty enters the shop and is amazed by his still lives and Cubist figures. Together, they

marvel over the art book David has given him. They stop at a Picasso, which Mr. Johnson

thinks depicts a woman resting. Betty, however, knows the girl in the painting is crying

and is quickly moved to tears. As her black and white makeup begins to run, she turns

abruptly away from him. In a reversal of the scene in which David and Betty collaborate,

Mr. Johnson turns Betty back to face him and removes her makeup as gently as David put

it on. This ends Bettys muffled dissatisfaction and begins her rebellion. Her face appears

in full color. Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, shuns the provider role and shuts his shop for

108
the evening to paint Bettys picture in color. Meanwhile, the camera cuts again to

Margaret and David at lovers Lane with the rest of the local teens. When Margaret offers

an apple from the tree, he accepts, signaling that he will taste the sexual knowledge that

has thus far eluded him. At the Parker home, while Skip interrupts Jennifers reading (she

has taken to D.H. Lawrence) by calling to her from beneath her bedroom window, she

disappoints him by choosing to continue with the book rather than keep a date for

Lovers Lane. While Jennifers awakening is intellectual rather than sexual, she, like her

mother, is moving to prioritize her own desires over the demands placed on her by others.

In fact, she does so to an even greater extent than Betty. Although Betty trades her role of

homemaker for that of Mr. Johnsons muse, she never takes up any artistic or intellectual

passion of her own.

At the same time, George and Mayor Bobs reaction to the womens rebellion

suggests that any feminist action is jarring enough to cause controversy. By juxtaposing

these scenes detailing Pleasantvilles fall from innocence with scenes in which Mayor

Bobs forces seek to return hierarchical order to the town, the film demonstrates how

those who seek power frame the definition of innocence to suit their needs. For

example, by defining the 1950s as innocent based on a lower divorce rate, conservative

culture warriors exclude from consideration the limitations the decade placed on

womens rights. Mayor Bob exemplifies such a strategic use of language when using the

mens fear of their wives growing independence to mobilize political support. Rather

than use the word innocent, he rails about making the town pleasant again; the film,

however, asks the question Pleasant for whom? The effect of the womens growing

self-determination on the men is shown in Georges entrance into his home the night of

109
the storm. Like a classic sitcom father, he walks in the door, removes his hat, and places

it on the rack, yelling Honey, Im home (Ross). Betty, however, does not respond.

Thunder claps overhead and George turns back to the coat rack, reaching for his fedora as

if repeating his entrance and his linesreturning again to the scriptwill elicit the

expected response.

Metaphorically of course, rain bodes ill, as it does for George, but in contrast

David leads the group of teens into the rain, dancing as he twirls with his hands upturned

toward the sky, beckoning them to come out from under the parks gazebo. For Betty

and Mr. Johnson, the rain is unexpected but romantic. In fact, the rain initiates a key

event in their relationship. As Betty goes to the window to investigate the storm, she

catches sight of the portrait Mr. Johnson has painted of her and is touched by the

rendering of her face. Jennifer finds the rain enhances the pleasure of contemplative

solitude. For George, however, the thunder clapping overhead and the lightning

intermittently illuminating his empty home in flashes portends misery. After placing his

hat on the rack, he shouts Honey, Im home once more and proceeds to look for his

wife (and his dinner). He moans Wheres my dinner? while looking under a pot lid and

in the oven. By repeating key phrases, George relies on the shows literal script, here

perhaps a stand-in for containment narratives. He performs his scripted part and expects

to retain the power to control his wife and his home. When he finally gives up on finding

her (and his dinner), he walks to the bowling alley where he meets his fellow townsmen.

While Betty, Mr. Johnson, and the high-schoolers are pulled toward greater

liberation by Pleasantvilles first rainfall, the rain alarms the towns men and provides

110
Mayor Bob with a pretext for consolidating his power.68 Bobs fist is upraised in a

celebration of victoryhe has just scored yet another strike in a perfect gamewhen he

turns to see George enter, crestfallen and wet. The implication is clear. Georges

perceived defeat is Mayor Bobs opportunity for victory. George recounts his story as he

slumps forward in a chair:

GEORGE: I came home like I always do...and I went in the front door...and I took

off my coat...and I put down my briefcase...and I said, "Honey, I'm home." Only

there was no one thereNo wife. No lights. . . . No dinner.

GROUP OF MEN: No dinner?

Mayor Bobs use of repetition signals his rhetorical suavity, while Georges insistence on

repetition here and when he enters his home functions as a product of his astonishment

that he cannot summon his wife to do his bidding. She is figured almost as part of the

home, expected to be there always with the lights on, waiting for him. As the befuddled

townsmen listen to the story of Bettys departure, Bob stands confidently by, pats George

on the shoulder, and says Its gonna be fine, George. Youre with us now (Ross).

Telling the men that anyone could be next, he urges another bowler, Roy, to show George

his shirt. Roy pulls up his cardigan to reveal a dress shirt emblazoned with an iron print.

The men collectively gasp as Roy explains, She said she was thinking (Ross). With his

characteristic ease Mayor Bob begins a stump speech full of parallelisms and emphatic

gestures:69

68
Joseph, while not focusing on Mayor Bob in particular, argues that To the extent that a false image of
the fifties of the mind has been used for political gain, Pleasantville seeks to remind us that the image is
false (7).
69
Porter argues that for all the menace Bob and the men may present to the freedoms of the towns women
and other citizens, The scene clearly is played for laughs, as the seriousness of the characters actions
operate as an obvious counterpoint to the silliness of provocation of their discourse (415). In other words
viewers are both to laugh and be alarmed that the men mobilize over missed dinners and burnt shirts.

111
 BOB: Wellwe'll be safe for nowthank goodness we're in a bowling alley

but if George here doesn't get his dinner, any one of us could be next. It could be

you Gus, or you Burt, or even you Phil . . . . That's real rain out there gentlemen.

This isn't some little "virus" that's going to "clear up on it's own." My friends, this

isnt about Georges dinner. Its not about Rays shirt. Its a question of values.

Its a question of whether we want to hold on to those values that made this place

great. So the time has come to make a decision. Are we in this thing alone, or are

we in it together? (Ross)

One by one, the men begin chanting Together! Together! (Ross).70 To create this

cohesion, Mayor Bob summons the metaphors of containment. He describes the womens

new stance on housekeeping and marriage as a virus attacking this (once healthy) body of

the community and emphasizes the need to contain this threat. The Mayors rhetoric is

designed to drive the men to coalesce around the perceived threat, while the amorphous

and undefined and unexamined term values provides easy justification for their furor.

His self-serving motivations are clear to the audience if not to the men he leads. The

mens coalition, however, will stand up against a decided opposition on the part of

women like Betty and their allies.

When Betty returns home, George attempts to return her to the script provided by

containment narratives. He orders her to attend a meeting staged by Bob to discuss the

changes taking place in the town: You're coming to this meeting. You're going to put on

70
As Caputi notes, The mayors values are unequivocally those of the right as he speaks of American
values that are eroding.The cohesion touted by the mayor in the name of conservative values parallels the
mission of many of the right (95). She also suggests this scene exemplifies the mayors conservatism:
Pleasantvilles ability to dramatize the contemporary struggle between American neo-conservatism and
the cultural lefts tolerance of shifting signifiers is made clear when the citys mayor laments the
unwillingness of Pleasantville housewives to perform wifely duties (94).

112
some makeup. You're going to be home every night and you're going to have dinner

ready on this table. She resists and tells him, No Im not (Ross). She has realized that

Pleasantville has never been pleasant for her, so returning to the status quo holds no

appeal. The power of containment narratives, however, has not diminished. Before

leaving, she instructs George on the meals she prepared for him. She rebels but cannot

completely throw off her subservience. 71 Unappeased, George pleads, Betty, dont go

out there like that. Theyll see you! (Ross). For George, Bettys color is a visible attack

on his masculinitya sign that he is not in control. The colored townspeople are the

cultural and sexual rebels and George is a firm ally of the Mayor. As part of an alliance

that seeks to restore patriarchal power to the home and hierarchical government to the

town, George is ashamed that his own wife is not following his personal and political

lead.

These scenes emphasize womens issues and free expression in order to critique

both Containment Culture and Culture War rhetoric. Moreover, these critiques are

shadowed by a more tentative discussion of race in which the spatial and social

containment of African-Americans is addressed. In the scenes that follow, the film uses

the divide between the colored and the non-colored as a stand-in for race, a

substitution that could be explained by the virtual absence of African Americans from the

sitcoms of the era. The association of the colored residents of Pleasantville to African-

Americans is made early in the film by the use of African American R and B and jazz

music to accompany scenes depicting the burgeoning teenage culture. As Krin Gabbard

71
This point was suggested by Porter, who writes, Refusing point-blank to adopt the role attributed to her
by George, Betty no longer is totally seduced by the image of herself as dutiful wife. Yet, for all this, her
continuing complicity with the patriarchal value-system of Pleasantville is reflected by the fact she cannot
bring herself to leave George without first preparing a number of ready-meals or TV dinners for him
(412).

113
notes, like so many other American films, Pleasantville abundantly recruits the music of

African American artists to define and refine transformations in its characters (94). 72

The power of this music, like the power of the literature found in the library, will

ultimately become the target of Bobs censorships efforts. The equation of color and race

becomes more apparent in scenes like the one in which the ironically named Whitey, a

blond, buzz-cut youth who works on behalf of Bob, pulls up to see David and Margaret

kissing at the curb and asks David why he is not at the town meeting. When David

refuses to give much of an answer, Whitey sarcastically asks him if he is too

busy...entertaining your colored girlfriend (Ross). This harassment marks Margaret and

Davids relationship as taboo (he still appears in black and white)73 and makes a racist

insinuations about Margarets sexuality, a clear reference to stereotypes about exotic or

promiscuous African American women that circulated since African Americans arrival

in the new world and were disseminated in order to justify the rape of slave women. This

metaphor of race is further developed when Mayor Bob names as his first order of

business to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant,

a clear reference to segregation. Soon, signs reading No Coloreds appear in the

windows of local businesses (Ross). Scholars like Greg Dickinson, however, have argued

that the substitution of color for race is problematic as it conflates whites desire for

freedom from cultural taboos and African-Americans more fundamental quest for civil

rights: all those liberated from Pleasantvilles strictures are white (222). While that I

would argue that some of Pleasantvilles residents are looking for more than freedom

from cultural taboos I would agree with Dickinson that there are risks to appropriating

72
At the same time, however, such use of the music might be seen as appropriation, a topic I will not
discuss here.
73
He will turn to color after defending his mother from an attempt by Whitey and his gang to rape her.

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the history of the Civil Rights movement without representing the specific struggles of

African Americans.

As his use of Whitey and other local toughs as his cronies implies, Mayor Bobs

message may be one of law and order but his tactics are incendiary. Whitey and his other

acolytes round up citizens for the meeting, spark mob violence, and fuel the fire at

book burnings. 74 A culture of suspicion similar to that of the Cold War ensues as the once

friendly neighbors scramble to reveal one anothers transgressions; at the town meeting a

call can be heard from the crowd that Roy Campbell has a blue front door! (Ross). In

addition, Bobs supporters are prepared to use rape as a weapon of terror in containing

rebellion. After leaving home, Betty again spends the night with Mr. Johnson and he

paints her nude portrait and hangs it in the store window. When townspeople discover the

portrait, they are outraged, and Whitey and others circle in on her in the street, making

sexual innuendos about her blue dress. While David successfully defends his mother,

prompting his appearance to change to color, the mob violence continues. Outraged over

the painting, the crowd of self-righteous citizens breaks the window of the soda fountain

and proceeds to gut its interior. Margaret again becomes a target as she is seen fleeing,

the bodice of her dress ripped. This demonstrates that, while advocating law and order

and pleasantness, Bobs forces obtain and maintain power by threatening the very

security they claim to protect. This effectively demonstrates the dangerous misogyny of

Mayor Bobs forces. At the same time, it says little about feminism as the women are

saved not through their own efforts, but through Davids.

74
Porter also notes the relationship between the conservative lawmakers and their outlaw counterparts. He
writes, Of course, none of these repressive and ridiculous measures would be heeded if they were not
backed up with the threat of violence, a violence that is expressed in many forms; that is, overt racial
taunting and exclusion of coloreds, smashing of store windows, vigilante policing and institutionalized
segregation (410).

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 While Town Hall uses these tactics in a supposed defense of the community, all

of the towns institutions are now defunct. The library has retreated back into oblivion,

the commercial district is closed to coloreds, the only integrated store (the soda

fountain) is destroyed in a frightening outbreak of mob violence, and power is cleverly

consolidated in the hands of the mayor. The code passed at the next town meeting bans

not only vandalism and incivility but also the use of the library, Lovers Lane, and paint

colors other than black, white, or grey, music other than that of Johnny Mathis, Perry

Como, Jack Jones, the marches of John Phillips Souza, or the Star Spangled Banner, the

purchase of umbrellas or of mattresses wider than 38 inches and any approach to a

history curriculum that does not emphasize continuity over alteration (Ross). This code

of conduct obviously attempts to return the power to the hands of the town fathers. David

and Mr. Johnson, however, respond by painting a large mural on the wall of the soda

fountain. The mural not only defies rules about paint colors but also represents everything

that is bannedbooks like Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn rise from the ashes of a

fire, teenagers gather around a jukebox to dance to rock n roll, and a nude woman sleeps

in the corner. As a mob gathers in front of the mural, a public outcry ensues. Those who

remain empowered members impose a standard of decency that was decided upon at a

town meeting that excluded all colored residents. While the mural is admittedly tamer

than controversial works by Serrano and Mapplethorpe and while Mr. Johnsons art does

not represent art that pushes the boundaries of aesthetics or decency as far as some of his

actual contemporaries did, the artists are still subject to legislated standards crafted by a

few but passed off as representative of the communitys morality. The pair is thrown in

jail to await trial.

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 This trial (which a newspaper announces is the first-ever in Pleasantville) points

to a hodge-podge of historical moments, which draws connections between the fictional

Pleasantville controversy and Culture War debates over womens liberation, civil rights

for African Americans, and debates over public funding of the arts. Just as the coloreds

shift between representing all citizens opposed to the towns government and African

Americans specifically, the trial evokes several famous miscarriages of justice. The

courtroom, for example, is segregated, with the entire contingent of coloreds sitting in

the balcony. 75 As coloreds and thus potentially seditious figures, David and Mr.

Johnson are denied representation much as African Americans were often denied

representation or the right to testify against whites in southern courts (Ross). In a way

that is characteristic of the Salem Witch trials or the trials of the House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAC), the two are not so much given an opportunity to defend

themselves as they are exhorted to make a public confession. Under questioning, Mr.

Johnson is ready to give in and allow the town hall to dictate the terms of his art to him.

David, however, seizes control of the trial to give his own defense:

DAVID: I know you want it to stay pleasant around here... but there are so many

things that are so much better. Like silly or sexy or dangerous or brief. And every

one of those things is in you all the time if you just have the guts to look for them.

MAYOR BOB: That's enough.

DAVID: I thought I was allowed to defend myself.

MAYOR BOB: You're not allowed to lie.

DAVID: I'm not lying.

75
Paul R. Joseph suggests that the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird is a cinematic antecedent for
this scene (6).

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While the trial sounds a multitude of historical echoes, Davids emotional defense

initially seems void of political content. The laughter that ensues when an angry Mayor

Bob admonishes David that he cannot turn this courtroom into a circus turns the

audience into colors, again suggesting positive emotion (here happiness) is one way to

effect the transformation (Ross). David then changes his father to color by evoking

another emotion, making him admit that he still loves Betty. When David turns to

question Mayor Bob, the political nature of his self-defence, wedded to the metaphor of

emotion, emerges; his words make clear that his endorsement of the uncontained emotion

is also an endorsement of uncontained lives for all of Pleasantvilles citizens, including

women. He moves in front of the mayor, blocking both the audience and the viewers

access to the officials face:

DAVID: Come on. Everyone is turning colors. Kids are making out in the street.

No one is getting their dinner. Hell, you could have a flood. Pretty soon, the

women could be going off to work . . .while the men stayed at home and cooked.

MAYOR BOB: That is not going to happen.

DAVID: But it could happen!

MAYOR BOB: No, it could not happen!

As the Mayor utters this last line, his face changes to color and the courtroom erupts in

laughter. As Mayor Bobs emotions are brought to the surface, David reveals the

connection between his fear of the loss of personal power and his fear of the loss of

political power. Catching his mothers compact mirror from the balcony, David shows

Mayor Bob his face. In response, the mayor runs away from the courthouse and the

laughter grows louder as he flees. A young person looks after him to see where he has

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gone and beckons the courtroom audience and the viewing audience to witness that the

entire world has turned color. Critic John Belton asserts the overall importance of this

change to color at the end of the film: Things do not return (as in Wizard of Oz) to the

social and domestic order of the pre-fantasy world. They changeand the characters

embrace the uncertainty of the future (65). Indeed, the film documents the way in which

first Jennifer, then David, and finally all of the townspeople embrace these changes. At

the films end only Mayor Bob attempts to flee.

The last scenes, however, vex the feminist undertones of the film. Betty does

not go to work and remains as much like June Cleaver as she was at the beginning of the

film. Margaret and Betty stand by to send David back to his hometown via the television

set while Jennifer goes off to college. Betty packs fried chicken, hamburgers, and a

sweater for David, returning her to the idealized and sentimental role of 1950s mother.

Margarets plea that David never forget her and come back to visit suggests that she

remains the loyal woman who is left behind. As Caputi notes, however, the final scene of

the film shows Davids support for his real-life mothers independence. Returned to his

1990s living room, David discovers his mother sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She

has returned unexpectedly from her trip to the lake after realizing that dating a younger

man is not the solution to her problems. In a reversal of the scene in which he put on

Bettys makeup, he wipes the tears and smeared makeup away from this modern mothers

face while assuring her that there is no one way that life is supposed to be and that his

life has not been ruined because her marriage to his father failed.76 David thus overturns

76
Caputi also terms this as a pivotal moment, which signals Davids lasting acceptance of the uncertainty
of gender roles and family structure. She writes, Thus, in Davids casein ours tooit is precisely
because he let go of his hopes for perfect happiness in a perfect world that he is able to enter the present at

119
the script of containment narratives that he so willingly allowed to guide him earlier in

the film. He now affirms his mothers ability to be an individual rather than a selfless

paragon of domesticity. In addition, he is allowing for the fluidity of family structures by

refusing to see divorce as a criminal failure on his parents part. This sense is affirmed by

the closing scene in which the camera returns to Pleasantville, first showing Betty and

George and then Betty and Mr. Johnson sitting next to one another on a park bench. Both

pairs look wistfully into the distance and say they do not know what is going to happen

next; the future of each of these relationships remains unclear.

While Mayor Bobs defeat, in its demonstration that reactionary political impulses

are outgrowths of a human fear of change that need only be named and confronted in

order to be defeated, is a bit optimistic, the film nonetheless provides a helpful

interrogation of the ties between gender and racial oppression and the suppression of free

speech. By stressing through the stories of David, George, and the town fathers that

contemporary resistance to changes in womens status and family structure is tied to a

restrictive impulse that would revoke the rights of all for the benefit of a few, the film

suggests that the fantasy of the 1950s as an Edenic time is flawed. The portrait of a

Containment Culture that is drawn paints the 1950s suburbs as concerned chiefly with

stability and safety. Pleasantvilles residents do not know how to proceed if they are not

to live as they always did. Order and harmony are guaranteed, but the price is surrender

of individual liberty. The housewife at the center of this drama, Betty, slowly awakens to

her sexuality and her independence, and her quest for this independence connects her to

others suppressed by this cultureMr. Johnson, the youth, and the coloreds. Unlike

last. He connects with his real mother in the 1990s only after he lets go of believing in a perfect, pristine
mother (137). I would add that he is also implicitly accepting his fathers absence here.

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Cathy Whittaker, Betty has the ability to both change her world and join in a coalition.

That she can do so and that this coalition can succeed is perhaps meant to inspire

contemporary audiences, although Bettys transformation seems to be from one feminine

ideal to another. Change, Pleasantville might paradoxically claim, has already happened;

the task of the viewers is to halt those forces that threaten to reverse it.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Still We Cherish the City: Womens Lives in City and Suburb

in Cunninghams The Hours

In interviews concerning his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Hours, Michael

Cunningham has said, As a writer, I do think of myself as trying to chart the lines where

futures we make for ourselves, and by our own will and hard work, intersect with the

futures that have been made for us, by everything and everyone from our parents to

various government agencies (Qtd. in Petersen, 19). This chapter explores the ways in

which Cunninghams novel The Hours considers the impact of geography and history on

individuals abilities to determine their own futures. The novel is divided into discrete

sections following the lives of its three primary characters, all of whom share common

struggles with identity, gender, sexuality, and creativity despite the fact that they live in

vastly different times and places. They all also share a connection to Virginia Woolfs

novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours, Woolfs novel works as a lens through which the

women characters can interpret their struggles and a source in which they can find

degrees of solace. At the same time, Mrs. Dalloway influences the plot of The Hours and

the rhythm of its prose. The Hours also takes its title from an early draft of Mrs.

Dalloway and adopts its strategy of tracing a single day in the lives of its characters.

Clarissa Vaughn, nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her life-long friend Richard for

her similarity to Woolf, is a book editor living in New York City at the turn of the 21 st

century; Laura Brown is a housewife living in Los Angeles in 1949; and Cunninghams

re-creation of the writer Virginia Woolf is shadowed as she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway

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in her home in the London suburb of Richmond. The novel follows these three women as

through their own will and hard work they attempt to make futures for themselves and

as these futures collide with the futures that are made for them by idealized notions of

domesticity, prescriptive definitions of femininity, and narratives of heteronormativity

and monogamy. These futures are made or are at least in part shaped not only by the

historical moments in which the characters live but also, as the text suggests, by the cities

or suburbs that the women inhabit.

This chapter examines how Cunninghams novel responds to concerns that the

built environment can at least in part determine the course of the lives of those who live

there. Its focus on each of the three central characters and the ways in which their urban

or suburban surroundings help or hinder their quests for intellectual, emotional, sexual,

and creative self-actualization both echo and revise Friedans argument that suburban

communities contribute to the isolation of housewives. In particular, its treatment of

Laura Brown captures the same sense of disappointment with the promises of home and

family life reported by Friedans subjects in The Feminine Mystique. At the same time, in

exploring the ways in which containment narratives both enhance the appeal of the

suburbs for ethnic lower-middle class women like Brown and the ways in which these

narratives lead her to suppress her lesbian sexuality, The Hours illustrates how the

idealization of domesticity impacted women other than the upper-middle class

heterosexual women who were the subject of Freidans book.

Browns life is also contrasted to those of Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughn,

who also both struggle with notions of domesticity. The text follows Vaughn, who like

Woolfs Clarissa Dalloway, is preparing for a party. Vaughns party is in honor of

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Richard, who was just won the Carrouthers Prize for literature and who is dying of AIDS.

In exploring the relish with which this modern Clarissa enjoys this June day in New York

despite Richards struggle with the advanced illness, the novel suggests that urban places,

with their heterogeneous architecture, population, and mix of public and private space are

not only intellectually and creatively stimulating but also stand as testaments to the

hardiness of the human spirit. For Vaughn, the suburban housewife serves only as a

phantom she fears that she or her daughter Julia might become. She attempts to define

herself against the cultural memory of this housewife. By virtue of the fact that Vaughn

lives in Americas least suburban of places, yet is frightened by an image of idealized

domesticity, the text suggests that the mid-20th centurys ideals of family and marriage

continue to hamper women no matter their time and place. Moreover, Vaughns concern

over the imbalance of power in her own relationshipSally is more well-known for her

work as a public television producer than is Vaughn for her work as a book editor

suggests that imbalances of power are not limited to the traditional partnerships of the

post-World War II nuclear family. For example, Vaughn performs more of the

traditionally feminine tasks such as decorating and hostessing. Unlike Brown, however,

she enjoys this work. The novel, like much of Woolfs writing, suggests that the problem

with such work is not that it has no aesthetic or social value but that it is simultaneously

devalued and expected of every woman, even those who wish to spend their time and

talents on other pursuits.

Such a reading is further supported by the novels portrayal of the character of

Virginia Woolf herself. Woolf is shown living with her husband Leonard in Richmonds

Hogarth House, where she has been moved to recuperate from mental illness. Whereas

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for Vaughn suburban housewifery is simply a specter, in the novel, Woolf struggles with

isolation from London, a place she relishes for the same reasons Vaughn loves New

York. It is a place home to aesthetic variety in its landscape, architecture, and attractions,

a place essential to her creative process, and a place that emblematizes her sexual desire.

Moreover, Woolfs suburban experience is marked by a deep imbalance of power; her

husband Leonard and her doctors have been named her caretakers, infantilizing her. They

believe the suburbs will keep her safe, but, as in Pleasantville, the price of safety is

confinement. While she will ultimately be much better known for her work than Leonard,

he is in the role of her keeper. In addition, a child of a consummate Victorian mother, she

feels the press of the elevation of the domestic arts and self-sacrifice to the near-sacred.

Thus, her talents seem relatively invisible in the face of her sister Vanessas motherly

demeanor and the competent management of her brusque servant Nelly. Unlike Vaughn,

she is not domestically inclined but, like Vaughn, Woolf struggles with the idealization of

the family home. Furthermore, her location in the suburbs surrounds her with a culture of

domesticity and heteronormativity; Richmond lacks the artistic ferment of London and is

a place populated by married couples whose lives center on the home. The novel suggests

she sees both its built environment and its residents are conventional. 77 While some

accounts of Woolfs time in Richmond suggest that she was more involved in cultural life

there than one might guess from reading the novel and while some of her diary entries

suggest she did not always disparage Richmond, Cunninghams depiction is largely

drawn from the feelings expressed in Woolfs diary entries in June of 1923.

77
No critics to date have written substantially on The Hours depiction of cities and suburbs. Charles
mentions it in passing, saying, For Virginia, London represents life; Richmond represents a living death
(310).

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 Overall, it is Brown who suffers most from the idealization of the home. Like

Woolf, she is removed from the attractions of the center city (particularly one like

London or New York). Like both Woolf and Vaughn, she yearns for the freedom and

anonymity a city can provide, but, unlike the other women, she finds such freedom only

in the pages of Mrs. Dalloway. She is connected to the other characters not only through

allusions to this novel but also by her struggle to express her creativity, sexuality, and

intellect. Though she dreams of spending the whole day in bed reading, Brown bumps up

against narratives of containment that prize the home as a safe haven against uncertain

global realities. In reaction, she attempts to funnel her creativity into the domestic sphere.

In contrast to Vaughn, she does not find such efforts satisfying; she cannot create the

perfect cake for her husbands birthday or live up to the ideal of selfless but effortless-

looking motherhood that containment discourse demands. Though she is alienated from

such narratives, she finds them difficult to escape. Unlike Far from Heavens Cathy

Whitaker and Pleasantvilles Betty Parker, Brown seems acutely aware from the very

beginning of the text that such narratives demand that she leave a part of herself behind,

yet it is only by taking extreme measures that she escapes them. This is in part because

her suburban environment reinforces such narratives at every turn: its cozy houses are

designed to accommodate the nuclear family, the suburbs isolate women from their

commuter husbands and from public life, and the elevation of suburban domesticity as a

new haven (or heaven) reserved for men returning from the Second World War demands

women revive the role of angel of the house. 78 Unlike for Vaughn, for whom the suburbs

78
Andrea Wild was the first to comment upon the importance of Woolfs reaction to The Angel in the
House for her main character in The Hours. She cites Woolfs Professions for Women as a clear
example of her struggle with her mothers legacy. She also extends commentary on this legacy to the
novels other two main characters. I would argue, however, that the Happy Housewife Heroine is the

126
are only a cultural memory, and Woolf, who holds on to the hope of returning to London,

Brown bears the full weight of the burden of the suburbs hopes. Ultimately, she

contemplates suicide and later leaves her family.

In its characterization of each of these womens lives, The Hours is attentive to the

built environment and its intersection with both historical narratives and personal

determination. The novel privileges the urban environment, which at least since post-

World War II has been a destination for gay and lesbian Americans seeking solidarity and

escape from heteronormative family structures. While the urban environment was not

immediately welcoming, Elizabeth Wheeler suggests that, in New York, it came to

represent the resilience of the gay community:

Within a context of gay bashing, police harassment, military witch-hunts,

conflation of gay people with dreaded Communists, and constant fear of job loss,

it took great bravery to label city space as queer space. Nonetheless, gay and

lesbian communities emerged and grew, especially in Greenwich Village. (197)

Though a few recent authors have begun to reconsider the assumed association of the city

with what Wheeler calls queer space, this construction certainly informs The Hours, in

which New York and London are contrasted with the pervasive heteronormativity of the

suburbs.79 Furthermore, just as New York City is identified by Wheeler with the

resilience of the gay and lesbian community in the face of persecution, it is identified in

figure that Brown and Vaughn struggle against. While to some degree a resurrection of the Angel of the
House could be said to haunt all three women, an updated understanding, such as the ideal Friedan called
the Happy Housewife Heroine, is helpful in comprehending Browns struggle with her sexuality (she is
not expected to be pure but to entice and fulfill her husband) and Clarissas struggle with her profession
(she feels she is an ancillary to Richards writing career and Sallys career in television).
79
Brett Beemyn comments on a recent trend toward reconsidering gay life and gay history in small cities
and towns. He writes that while there is still A subtle elitism that views all but a few major metropolises
as backward and entirely inhospitable to gays . . . . in recent years, more and more historians have begun to
examine the richness of gay life in areas not well known today for their lesbian, gay, and bisexual
communities (1-2).

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the novel as a manifestation of the resilience of this same community in the face of

AIDS.80 It is the city that allows the gay community to survive in the face of loss. It also

allows Vaughn to survive Richards suicide, which takes place before her eyes when she

comes to bring him to the party planned in his honor.

The text expands this metaphor to associate cities with all three characters

resilience and will to survive. While arguing in part for the construction of human

subjects by suggesting that ones environment as well as ones historical time shape ones

life, the text emphasizes that its three main characters share the common experience of

suffering because they all survive or attempt to survive times in which womens intellect

and work are devalued and womens sexual experiences are circumscribed. To combat

such suffering, all three women look to the people and presence of the city. Woolf

remembers her time in London, Vaughn relishes her home, New York City, and Brown

devours the second-hand experience of London provided by the pages of Mrs. Dalloway.

All three sections of the book suggest that suburbs definition of physical beauty, which

stresses landscaping and regularity, is too narrow to reflect the scope of human life,

which encompasses both suffering and triumph, but that urban areas, with their crooked

beauty, provide a living monument to human struggles such as those these women

experience. Woolfs Richmond neighborhood is a fine place for a light stroll, but it

cannot provide the spectacle of human life afforded by London. Vaughns New York

City environs are endowed with the same power as Dalloways London. Brown,

however, can neither summon such a place in her memory nor retreat to such a place in

80
Expressing a slightly different view on the attention to gay men in the novel, critic Henry Alley argues
that The agony of its gay character, for example, is brief, quickly extinguished, and without evocation
from his own point of view (416). While his observations are true, I think the omission of Richards
perspective not as a gaffe on Cunninghams part but as consonant with the novels focus on women.

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reality. Her neat suburb is one dominated by homes and cars rather than public spaces

and pedestrians and nearby Los Angeles, a spot amidst vast sprawl, presents little

walkable space to explore. Cities like New York and London, with all of their aesthetic

flaws and eclecticism, become a metaphor for lifes struggles not only due to their

eccentric landscapes but also because they are home to a wide cross-section of people

that one cannot encounter in a suburb.

In The Hours, idealized notions of intimate relationships and domestic life rooted

in both Victorian and mid-20th century American ideals hamper the lives of characters in

both urban and suburban places. Even Woolf and Vaughn, who seek bustling urban life as

an antidote for the isolation of domestic life, feel the press of various incarnations of the

self-sacrificing domestic woman. While Woolf fights against Victorian ghosts,81 Vaughn

fights against the Happy Housewife Heroine, the legacy of a figure that drives Brown

to flee her home and family altogether. Brown, meanwhile, lives in the very era in which

the ideal of the Happy Housewife Heroine takes ascendancy. Though she has the

luxury of being a housewife and lives in the promised land of the suburbs, she is

desperately depressed and lacks access to the public sphere, adult company, and female

solidarity. Whereas the other two texts discussed in Part One intervene more explicitly in

81
Other critics writing in response to the novel have analyzed Woolfs relationship to domesticity. As critic
Marilyn Charles writes of Woolf, Born into an era and class in which the social graces had reached the
form of an art; Virginia Woolf seems to have been haunted by memories of her mothers consummate
mastery of that art, in harsh juxtaposition to her own relative ineptitude (305). Hermione Lee likewise
paints Woolfs mother Julia Stephens as one who embodied the Victorian model of self-sacrifice to a
masochistic degree: She spread herself thinly between a great many people: a husband first, eight children,
hypochondriac mother, aunts, sister, sisters family, brother-in-laws family, endless further relatives,
friends, the sick and the poor (81). Woolfs own comments validate Charless and Lees focus on this
figure. In describing the Angel of the House as the enemy of the woman writer, Woolf said in a speech,
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in
the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there
was a draught, she sat in it. In short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own,
but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above allI need not say itshe
was pure (278).

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the Culture Wars by mobilizing a liberal agenda that engages directly with conservative

nostalgia for the ideal families of the post-World War II era, in portraying three women

living in three different decades, Cunninghams novel highlights the persistence of

narratives that glorify domesticity and feminine sacrifice at the expense of womens

creative, intellectual, and sexual freedom. In suggesting that Brown is, of the three, least

able to resist such narratives from her historical and geographic position as a Post World

War II housewife, the text highlights the power of 1950s norms of sex and gender and

implicitly argues that they should not be reinstated because they paint homosexuality as

suspect and demand that women be sexually and intellectually submissive.

Mrs. Dalloway/Clarissa Vaughn

Through the character of Clarissa Vaughn, the text explores the modern-day

remnants of containment narratives, which emphasize that women should remain

homebound to stabilize their families and husbands. Rather than claim womens domestic

work as trivial as Friedan did in The Feminine Mystique, however, the chapters dedicated

to Vaughn accomplish this critique of containment narratives by reconsidering domestic

work. Vaughn enjoys domestic tasks such as preparing for a party or decorating and she

also performs the difficult task of caring for Richard, whose mind is deteriorating along

with his body. In highlighting Vaughns homemaking and caretaking, the novel suggests

that what is traditionally thought of as womens work is vital to human life while

acknowledging the problematic fact that such work is undervalued. As the partner who

performs more domestic work, Vaughn has less power than Sally. In showing this, the

book suggests that while much has changedafter all, Vaughn has her own career and

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she and Sally live openly as a coupledefinite traces of containment narratives remain.

Vaughn, who is aware of her predicament, battles against these cultural norms by trying

to craft herself as the antithesis of the suburban housewife. As such, she relishes the city

and dreads even the idea of the suburbs.

For Clarissa Vaughn there is something intangible about what cities provide that

is central to her experience of being human; what is to be loved in life is to be found in

the vitality of New York City. 82 In passages that mimic Mrs. Dalloways stream-of-

consciousness, this vitality is defined by New Yorks lack of regularity, its heterogeneity,

and its spontaneity. Vaughns musings are similar to Mrs. Dalloways both in style and

content. As she prepares for Richards party, she walks through Washington Square Park

and notes its more obvious beauties, such as fruit in a vendors cart, but also what

Pleasantvilles Mayor Bob might call its unpleasantness:

. . .here after all is the sturdy squalor of the park, visible even under its coat of

grass and flowers; here are the drug dealers (would they kill you if it came to

that?) and the lunatics, the stunned and baffled, the people whose luck, if they

ever had any, has run out. Still, she loves the world for being rude and

indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich,

though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go

on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? (Cunningham 14-

15)

82
Few critics have remarked on the similarities between the ways in which Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours
depict cities. One exception is James Schiff, who notes Woolfs depiction of the urban environment as part
of its appeal for modern writers who allude to her work: Mrs. Dalloway is unique among city novels in the
way in which Woolf established a network of external and internal connections between her inhabitants,
making a large city like London begin to feel like a small town. Woolfs technique for managing the
complexities of urban life and for rendering that existence almost pastoral has enormous appeal (364).

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As Andrea Wild suggests, in this description Cunningham retains this (Woolfs)

fascination for the urban cacophony, although he updates some of the now-outmoded

sounds which were reverberating through the London of the nineteen twenties (5). Yet,

the passage goes beyond providing an homage to Mrs. Dalloway or connecting the

characters of Vaughn and Dalloway. It also highlights the sense that the city is both a

metaphor for human beings struggle for survival and a reason to engage in that

strugglea sense shared by Vaughn and Woolf in The Hours. New Yorks attempt to

beautify itself here becomes only a coat of grass and flowers and the city and its

peoplewhether or not they fulfill the standard definition of beautybecome a symbol

for Vaughn herself. Thus, she identifies both with the persistence of those whose luck, if

they ever had any, has run out and with the citys sturdy squalor, which cannot be

whitewashed by landscaping. Thus for Vaughn, the city stands for herself, for life, and

for the rude and indestructible world (Cunningham 15). Furthermore, this passage

draws on the language of both Mrs. Dalloway and medical discourse to allow a reading

specifically linked to the AIDS crisis. For Vaughn, the bustling city is also a testament to

both the gay community and AIDS sufferers will to survive. When she asks, Why else

do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed, the

word compromised, by echoing the phrase immune compromised, seems to refer to

those living with the disease (15). While Richard does indeed give up laterhis pain and

hallucinations become unbearableVaughns own buoyancy remains. At the same time,

the word compromised can be read as relating to her own life; as readers learn,

Vaughns life is often compromised (15) by the feeling that, as a woman, and as the

more traditionally domestic partner in her relationship with Sally, her work is

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undervalued. Nonetheless, the city seems to provide her with the strength to resist such

blows to her self-concept.

Although the novel gives no indication that Vaughn has spent any time in the

suburbs, in her imagination they lack all of the benefits of the city. While the citys

attempt to conceal the struggle of human life is perfunctory and half-hearted and its

robust if not always beautiful nature prevails, Vaughn associates the suburbs with an

overly controlled landscape and overly genteel manners designed to conceal any trace of

hardship or any sign of the variety and complexity of human life. Her image of the

suburbs is, in other words, consonant with the idealized images suburban life revisited

and dismantled in Pleasantville and Far from Heaven. On two separate occasions, the

image of the suburban housewife arises as the epitome of a life that is conventional,

dishonest, disempowering, and to be avoided at all costs. When she meets acquaintance

Walter Hardy on the street as she walks through New York in her preparations for

Richards party, Vaughn turns from him so that his kiss falls on her cheek. Hardy is an

athletic club-goer who cares for his partner Evan, a man battling AIDS. He is a favorite

acquaintance of Vaughns although Richard dislikes him for his flashy dress and success

at producing trite but profitable gay romance fiction. She berates herself for turning away

from him:

Im so prim, Vaughn thinks; so grandmotherly. I swoon over the beauties of the

world but am reluctant, simply as a matter of reflex, to kiss a friend on the mouth.

Richard told her, thirty years ago, that under her pirate-girl veneer lay all the

makings of a good suburban wife, and she is now revealed to herself as a meager

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 spirit, too conventional, the cause of much suffering. No wonder her daughter

resents her. (Cunningham 15-16)

As The Hours, much like Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, is largely about inner life, it often

depicts women assessing themselves and wondering how it is that others assess them. In

the novel as in many of the texts discussed in this project, the suburbs are imagined as

sugar coating reality. Vaughn worries that she is hiding suburban conventionality behind

an urban, bohemian exterior. She will later reveal that she hesitates to kiss anyone on the

lips because of a fear of AIDS, though she knows of course that HIV cannot be

transmitted through a kiss. Her fear of conventionality reveals that the conception of the

suburban housewife is largely one created by cultural production rather than experience;

the prim figure she fears is the sanitized mom figure of the suburban sitcom, much more

the heiress of June Cleaver than actual post-World War II suburban women who were

encouraged to be highly sexual within marriage in order to contain their husbands

libidos.83 Though such an image is ahistorical, it has a deep resonance for Vaughn. This

presence again haunts her as she returns home to find her daughter Julia and Julias friend

Mary Krull, a Queer Theorist at New York University whose staunch political fervor

echoes that of Dolores Kilman in Woolfs novel. Vaughn worries that Krull is critical of

her relationship with Sally because she sees it as too closely approximating a traditional

heterosexual marriage with its attendant imbalances and conventionalities and the novel

confirms this fear by providing Mary Krulls thoughts:

83
In contrast to this prim image, Friedan has suggested that sexuality was central to the role of the
housewife as it was created by popular magazines, television, and Freudian discourse. As discussed earlier,
Elaine Tyler Mays work on Containment Culture emphasizes that housewives were held responsible for
their husbands fidelity and encouraged to use their sexuality to stabilize their marriages and home lives in
order to thwart mens possible seduction by corrupt and corrupting communist agents.

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 Fool, Mary thinks, though she struggles to remain charitable or, at least, serene.

No, screw charity. Anything better than queers of the old school, dressed to pass,

bourgeois to the bone, living like husband and wife. Better to be a frank and open

asshole, better to be John fucking Wayne, than a well-dressed dyke with a

respectable job. (Cunningham 160)

Yet for Vaughn, it is Krulls relationship with her daughter that mimics a traditional,

patriarchal partnership:

Fraud, Clarissa thinks. Youve fooled my daughter, but you dont fool me. I

know a conquistador when I see one. . . . . Youre just as bad as most men, just

that aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing, and your hour will come and go.

(Cunningham 161)

While Krull thinks that long-term relationships, cohabitation, a middle-class lifestyle, and

conventional dress define women like Vaughn and Sally as politically reactionary, for

Vaughn it is Krulls assumption of the patriarchal role that defines her relationship with

Julia as regressive. Indeed, she fears that her daughter is akin to the submissive

housewife of the 1950s: Clarissas daughter, this marvelous, intelligent girl, could be

some cheerful wife, shepherding her husband through a day of errands. She could be a

figure from the fifties, if you made a few relatively minor alterations (Cunningham

159).84 The oppressiveness Clarissa attributes to the typical heterosexual relationship in

the post-World War II era is the crux of why the housewife of the 1950s remains a ghost

that haunts the present. While Vaughns fear of being prim and grandmotherly is in

part based on a misunderstanding of that eras mores, her insight into the dangers

84
While here the focus is on the 1950s and not the suburbs, in the context of a book that spends a third of
its time with the character of 1950s suburban housewife Laura Brown, the words become almost conflated.

135
inherent in her daughters unequal relationship with Mary does find its analogue in

postwar ideals of marriage.

Vaughn attempts to deflect Krulls criticisms while battling with the perceived

imbalance of power in her relationship with Sally. Krulls critique of their relationship is

all the more punishing because it echoes Vaughns own harsh self-appraisals and the mix

of nostalgia and regret with which she remembers her youthful, more tumultuous

romantic relationship with Richard.85 In addition, Sally has a higher-profile career than

she does and as a result Vaughn often fears that she herself has become a conventional

wife. She is hurt, for example, when she is not invited along with Sally to lunch with

Oliver St. Ives, a prominent gay actor. She feels that he thinks of her as a wife; only a

wife and that it is a sign of the waning of the worlds interest in her and, more

powerfully, the embarrassing fact that it matters to her even now, as she prepares a party

for a man who may be a great artist and may not survive the year. I am trivial, endlessly

trivial, she thinks (94).86 In a book in which all of the characters struggle with their own

mortality, Vaughn simultaneously chides herself both for leaving no lasting legacy and

for thinking of that legacy at all in the face of Richards decline. That others, such as

Krull and Richard, may also think of her as a helpmeet only exacerbates this tension. Yet

Vaughn fears Krulls reproaches not only because they emphasize a perceived gap in

power and public presence between her and her partner Sally, but also because she

genuinely enjoys domestic arts such as cooking, decorating, and hostessing. When those

85
The book thus adopts and reverses the relationship between characters in Mrs. Dalloway, in which
Clarissa is married to her husband Richard but continually ponders a girlhood romance with the character
Sally Seton. As Charles notes, For this latter day Clarissa, much like her prototype in Woolfs novel,
Richard is the person she might have loved had she not opted for security (307).
86
As Mary Joe Hughes notes, Clarissas creativity lies in her efforts to bring radiancy into the lives of
others (354).

136
arts are deemed trivial, she internalizes these judgments. As several critics have noted,

the care with which Vaughn prepares for Richards party links her not only to Woolfs

Mrs. Dalloway but also to her character Mrs. Ramsey in the novel To the Lighthouse.

Like Mrs. Ramsey, she is often overshadowed by her more powerful partner, and her

domestic talents are overlooked because of the gendered norms of what constitutes art

and work. While Vaughn has to some degree internalized these norms, she also works

against them to affirm the value of her life and work:

She will give Richard the best party she can manage. She will try to create

something temporal, even trivial, but perfect in its way. She will see to it that he is

surrounded by people who genuinely respect and admire him (why did she ask

Walter Hardy, how could she be so weak?); she will make sure he doesnt get

overtired. It is her tribute, her gift. What more can she offer him? (123).

Despite the fact that Vaughn is often haunted by others criticisms of her, she here

betrays some sense of the importance of her efforts to nurture Richard in his time of

sickness. While the unsparing portrait of her in the book suggests that she tends to

Richard in part to distance herself from her own fear of death, the text also at times

moves the reader toward an awareness of the value of domestic work that is traditionally

trivialized.

In the sections that follow Vaughn, the text reevaluates domesticity and examines

Vaughns connection to the city, implicitly tying Vaughns story to those of the other

women. While Vaughn cannot completely determine her own future by escaping all

cultural prescriptions for femininity, she can by the end of the novel recognize the value

of her work both in creating the party and in supporting Richard as he fought against his

137
illness. Nonetheless, the book argues against mandating that such work be the center of

all womens lives by suggesting that idealized visions of femininity damage women.

Vaughn, for example, fears that she or her daughter will succumb to the ideal of the

suburban housewife, a vision that haunts her even though she has a great degree of sexual

freedom and a successful career. In detailing Vaughns fears, the novel suggests that such

norms have a long afterlife. The books examination of the lives of Vaughns

predecessors, Woolf and Brown, continues to mount evidence to implicitly argue against

the reinstatement of restrictive models of femininity. In all three of these sections, the

novel pinpoints suburbs as a crucial component of such models. Cities, it suggests,

provide women not only with the opportunity to craft a life that defies the suburban norm

of the patriarchal home but also provide an irregular and varied landscape to ignite

womens imaginations and stimulate their creativity.

Mrs. Woolf

Woolf is connected to both Vaughn and Brown by the two threads that intertwine

throughout the novel: the intersection of history (primarily norms of gender and

sexuality) and geography (particularly the character of urban and suburban places) and

their impact on womens lives. Whereas Vaughn struggles with the fact that her domestic

work goes unnoticed, for Woolf, as for Brown, domestic work is dolorous. Woolf

attempts to shrug off the expectations of her servant, Nelly, who enforces idealized

notions of domesticity by demanding Woolfs attention to her suburban home in

Richmond. Like Vaughn, Woolf cannot completely shake off these expectations despite

her recognition that she possesses a considerable intellect. Like Vaughn, she is haunted

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by a ghost from the past. Woolf struggles against the Victorian ideals of femininity and

domesticity embodied by her mother just as Vaughn struggles against the image of the

Happy Housewife Heroine. In response to these pressures, Woolf imagines London in

much the same way as Vaughn imagines New York City: as a place where she can enter

the public sphere, explore lesbian sexuality, and absorb creative stimulation from the

varied landscape. The suburbs are as stifling for Woolf as they are for Vaughn and

Brown, in part because they are centered on domesticity and the family home and in part

because their social and physical character lacks imagination.

While Clarissa Vaughn is merely haunted by the possibility that her metropolitan

life resembles that of a post-war wife or, explicitly, a suburban housewife, Virginia

Woolf, or Mrs. Woolf, as she is called in the section headings for The Hours, experiences

the contrast between city and suburb bodily. 87 Longing for life in London, she feels

stifled by the unremarkable character of Richmond, the location of the Hogarth House.

While she has the free time in which to write, the business of running the household

remains burdensome. Her servant, Nelly, a model of competence, makes only a show of

deference that cannot hide her contempt for her mistresss inattention to domestic

matters. Leonard acts as Woolfs nurse, an arrangement that for all his attempted

sensitivity is sometimes oppressive. While longing for the intellectual ferment of London,

Woolf feels estranged from her conventional neighbors.

In the novel, Woolfs contrasting experiences of London and suburban Richmond

are heightened by the fact that she is consigned to Richmond as part of a rest cure

87
The very odd choice of calling Virginia Woolf by the moniker Mrs. Woolf emphasizes her
commonality with the texts other main characters, who are called Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Brown in
the chapter headings. This choice also enhances Cunninghams focus on her domestic life.

139
prescribed by her doctors to combat her mental illness. 88 For Woolf, Richmond is dull, a

fate worse than the premature death from which it is intended to save her. As they are

presented throughout the text, the suburbs for Woolf in these scenes are highly

conventional places associated with the patriarchal control of women. This feeling is in

part a reaction to her doctors orders but is also enhanced and complicated by her

husbands role in her cure. Leonard is charged with assuring her compliance with

doctors orders; in The Hours he does so tenderly and with respect for the importance of

her writing career. Nonetheless, the situation creates an imbalance of power, which

heightens that of most traditional marriages. As a result, Woolf sometimes sees their

marriage within the framework of Richmond lifean experiment in social control and

enforced tranquility. 89

Using the familiar trope of the suburbs as places in which a superficial, placid,

regularized, and pleasant surface masks more troubling depths, Cunningham reveals

Woolfs thoughts as she plans to comply with the terms of this experiment only to secure

her return to London:

If she can remain strong and clear, if she can keep on weighing at least nine and a

half stone, Leonard will be persuaded to move back to London. The rest cure,

these years among the delphinium beds and the red suburban villas, will be

pronounced a success, and she will be deemed fit for the city again? (Cunningham

34)

88
While the suburbs of the United States and England have often been thought of primarily in terms of
their differences, these differences, such as the greater density of British housing estates, are downplayed in
this novel while common connotations are featured.
89
In an interview with Bomb magazine, Cunningham notes the ambivalence around Leonards role in his
own writing and among Woolf scholars: Was Leonard a saint and her helpmate, assistant and devoted
husband, or was he her oppressor and jailer? (Spring 8).

140
Here Woolf herself internalizes the suburban trope of the tension between surface and

depth to suggest that the suburbs placid surfaces conceal, but do not heal, the troubled

depths of her mind. Though lacking the power to directly ignore the doctors advice or

escape from her husbands oversight, Woolf feels she cannot truly recover in Richmond.

She seeks to return to the city by the only path available to herfeigning health by

keeping her weight up and her thoughts clear. This will allow her to escape the suburban

tranquility so invested with hopes for her recovery, yet so oppressive to her. Her

desperation is palpable. Richmonds pleasant beauty consists of red suburban villas

and delphinium beds (34). The way in which these homes and this landscaping are

grouped together in this short, dismissive description indicates that the landscapes

uniformity and conventionality combine to offer a beauty that is akin in its superficiality

to her performance of health.

Later descriptions link this banal beauty and conventionality with patriarchal

control. These descriptions also highlight Richmonds relative lack of intellectual

stimulation and companionship. As Woolf composes Mrs. Dalloway from her Richmond

home, she continues to compare the suburbs atmosphere of regularity and tranquility

with the adventurous air of London. In these descriptions, it becomes clear that she sees

this atmosphere not only as a product of Richmonds regimented physical landscape but

also as a marker of its lack of social, sexual, and intellectual vigor:

Although it is among the best of them, Richmond is, finally and undeniably, a

suburb, only that, with all the word implies about window boxes and hedges;

about wives walking pugs; about clocks striking the hours in empty rooms.

Virginia thinks of the love of a girl. She despises Richmond. She is starved for

141
 London; she dreams sometimes about the hearts of cities. Here, where she has

been taken to live for the last eight years precisely because it is neither strange nor

marvelous, she is largely free of the headaches and voices, the fits of rage. Here

all she desires is a return to the dangers of city life. (Cunningham 83)

Again, Richmonds landscape offers nothing more than the dull aesthetic pleasure of the

predictable angles of window boxes and hedges (Cunningham 83). This sterile,

controlled environment in turn creates an atmosphere of social and intellectual drudgery,

which is described as a marked contrast to London life. The striking clock is not the Big

Ben of Mrs. Dalloway a sound that resonates across the citybut rather of individual

clocks striking in empty rooms, betraying the loneliness of the suburbs in which

enclosed private spaces dominate over public space (Cunningham 83). When Virginia

thinks of the love of a girl, she is reflecting on her character Clarissa Dalloways love

for Sally Seton, which lingers long after the two share a youthful kiss. Quickly followed

by this thought is that She despises Richmond. She is starved for London, linking the

kiss syntactically to London, which the text hints offers possibilities for sexual expression

not permitted in Richmond (Cunningham 83). The earlier reference to wives walking

pugs further supports this possibility by suggesting that Richmond women, like the

diminutive but waddling pugs, are highly domesticated, so domesticated in fact that they

are named only in relationship to their husbands (Cunningham 83). Woolf is as ill at ease

with her surroundings as Clarissa Vaughn is with the legacy of the suburban housewife of

the 1950s. She longs for the danger and the irregularity of London, which is both

strange and marvelous (83). The suburb offers tranquility and Woolfs health seems

to improve. She is largely free of the headaches and voices but just how much of this is

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due to her attempt to fool Leonard and her doctors is unclear (Cunningham 83). Her visit

with her sister Vanessa is clearly the highlight of her time in Richmond and the two even

steal a furtive kiss behind Nellys back. It is clear that Woolf both admires Vanessa for

her ability to fulfill the expectations of domesticity and also enjoys transcending those

expectations by sharing the kiss despite Nellys watchful eye. What is not ambivalent is

that, without the excitement such occasional visits provide, the suburb cannot provide

social, sexual, or intellectual sustenance; it is not long after Vanessas visit that Woolf

attempts to escape to London.

Like the character Mrs. Dalloway, Cunninghams Woolf celebrates Londons

bustling atmosphere. Clarissa Vaughns meetings with friends suggest the city affords a

balance of anonymity and community; Woolf desires the same. Haunted by the fear of

going mad and driven by her hunger for life in London, after her sisters visit she plans

her escape there:

What a lark! What a plunge! It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she

has London around her; if she disappears for a while into the enormity of it, brash

and brazen now under a sky empty of threat, all the uncontained windows (here a

womans grave profile, there the crown of a carved chair), the traffic, men and

women going lightly by in evening clothes, the smells of wax and gasoline, of

perfume, as someone, somewhere (on one of these broad avenues, in one of these

white, porticoed houses), plays a piano; as horns bleat and dogs bay, as the whole

raucous carnival turns and turns, blazing, shimmering; as Big Ben strikes the

hours, which fall in leaden circles over the partygoers and the omnibuses, over

stone Queen Victoria seated before the Palace on her shelves of geraniums, over

143
 the parks that lie sunken in their shadowed solemnity behind black iron fences.

(Cunningham 167-168)

She finds in London the visual and aural variety absent from the Richmonds planned

tranquility. While the suburbs red villas, window boxes, and hedgerows indicate that its

scale and homogeneity is designed to please the eye, the citys contrasts provide a deeper

aesthetic pleasure. London combines the monumental (Big Ben, the statue of Queen

Victoria, and the park) with the ordinary (pedestrians, omnibuses), and the refined

(strains of a piano and people in evening clothes) with the crass (the smell of wax and

gasoline and the sound of bleating horns and barking dogs). In the citys spontaneity

and variety, Woolf sees Londons ability to survive the recent historical trauma of World

War I. In turn, she feels the city could ensure her own survival. Her response echoes

Clarissa Dalloway as well as Clarissa Vaughns feelings about New York. While she has

been told by her doctors and Leonard that the rest she can find in the suburbs will return

her to mental stability, Woolf craves stimulation rather than stability. She craves the

privacy London offers by virtue of its enormous scope. Though Richmond may be more

centered on domestic life, Londons crowds provide more privacy and promise Woolf a

place of her own. The city thus represents a feminist space free of the intrusive

watchfulness of Leonard and her highly conventional servant, Nelly.

While the Woolfs eventual return to London is not enough to save her life, this

does not negate the way in which the city is depicted favorably in contrast to Richmond.

As the book winds to its close, she and Leonard are packing the Hogarth House for their

return to the city. Even readers previously unfamiliar with Woolfs life have already

learned of Woolfs suicide as her drowning comprises the very first section of The Hours.

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Despite this fact, readers are left with a reminder of the hope that the novel finds in the

city. Preparing for her move to London, Woolf remembers again the kiss with Vanessa

in the garden. The respite offered by the kiss from the doldrums and restrictions of

Richmond is compared with the vitality of London:

The kiss was innocentinnocent enoughbut it was also full of something not

unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex

and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoons

manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from

the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already

fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today,

this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all. (209- 210)

Here, as it has been throughout the text, London is figured as multifaceted (210). Both the

kiss and London are outlets for the lesbian longing that coexists with Woolfs chaste

marriage to Leonard. Moreover, though Cunninghams portrait of Leonard is perhaps

gentler than many depictions of the historical Mr. Woolf, it is linked throughout with a

numbing sort of control. He is part of the suburban drive for safety, which exacts as its

price all sense of possibilitythe possibility of the love of a woman, of aesthetic beauty,

and of creative stimulation. Woolf writes in fits and starts in Richmond but returns to

London in order to finish Mrs. Dalloway. Thus London and the kiss represent both a

sexual charge and stand in general for all of these possibilities. While in the midst of this

section Woolfs decision to save the character of Clarissa Dalloway and to kill the

novels deranged poet, literally Mrs. Dalloways shell-shocked veteran Septimus

Warren Smith but perhaps also herself, reminds readers of her immanent suicide, this

145
section also leaves readers with the sense that the risk entailed by returning to London is

worth the opportunity to leave stultifying Richmond behind.

Cunninghams depiction of Woolfs feelings about Richmond and her life in the

Hogarth House are largely drawn from her diary entry dated June 28, 1923:

Always to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here & wait for

Margery, to wonder what it is all forwhen, alternatively, I might go &

hear a tune, or have a look at a picture, or find out something at the British

Museum, or go adventuring among human beings. Sometimes I should

merely walk down Cheapside. But now Im tied, imprisoned, inhibited.

(250)

While these sentiments inform the portrait of Woolf, her life in Richmond was not as dull

as these diary entries and the portrayal of the Borough in The Hours might have one

believe. Although this entry shows that Woolf did tire of Richmond, particularly of

commuting in and out of London, an entry dated 12 March 1924 cited by Margaret

Evans, author of a pamphlet on Woolfs life in Richmond, points to the affection Woolf

sometimes held for her life on the periphery. The entry, the last before the Woolfs

departure to 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, reveals Woolfs love of the Hogarth

House:

And now Im going to write the very last pages ever to be written at Hogarth

House . . . . Nor at the moment can I think of any farewell for this beautiful and

lovable house, which has done us such a good turn for almost precisely nine

years, so that, as I lay in bed last night, I nearly humanised it, & offered it many

thanks. (Qtd. in Evans 16)

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Although basing the description of Richmond on the first diary entry is a logical choice

given that the novel does not account for the entirety of the Woolfs lives but rather their

lives on a single day in June 1923,90 the choice to represent this sentiment also

strategically connects Woolfs story to Browns.

Yet although Brown lacked any intellectual outlet, Woolf remained engaged in

public and intellectual life while in Richmond. Although Richmonds reputation as a

quiet place suitable for convalescence is touted in a local historical guide from 1919,

which enumerates the benefits of the Boroughs climate, water supply, and sanitary

services as well as its low death rate, and although the Woolfs purpose in moving to

Richmond was to remove Virginia from London to improve her poor health, Woolfs

years at the Hogarth House were active ones. In addition to making frequent trips to

London, Woolf wrote, assisted Leonard with the press, and presided over meetings of the

local chapter of the Womens Cooperative Guild, for which she also arranged speakers

(Bingham 22, Evans 11). Although Woolfs occupation and her ability to return to

London gives her at least some opportunity to step outside of the narrative of the Angel

of the House, the gulf that divides who she is from the person she is expected to bethe

same divide experienced by Laura Brownexacts a major toll on Woolfs psyche. By

asking the reader to make connections between Woolf, Vaughn, and Browns situations,

the novel suggests that ideals seeking to contain women emerge and re-emerge

throughout history. While such narratives are so clearly deleterious to Woolf, more than

90
In the afterword, Cunningham writes While Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Nelly
Boxall, and other people who actually lived appear in this book as fictional characters, I have tried to
render as accurately as possible the outward particulars of their lives as they would have been on a day I
invented for them in 1923 (229). In the first section on Woolf, the narrative voice announces it is June.
This is one of the many ways the novel echoes Mrs Dalloway, which also took place on a single day in
June.

147
twenty years later, Browns struggle echoes the events of Woolfs life. Even further into

the century, Vaughn attempts to cast off similar expectations. In stressing these parallels,

the novel clearly speaks back to those who would attempt to resuscitate Cold War

culture. In addition, while the specifically suburban ideal of the housewife, captured in

Friedans description of the Happy Housewife Heroine, Cathy and Franks Magnatech

advertisements in Far from Heaven, and Betty Parkers character on the television show

Pleasantville, is thought of as a Post-World War II American phenomenon, Woolf also

struggles with the isolation of suburban life. This view of the suburbs as fundamentally

flawed in their design as a collection of private homes placed at a considerable distance

from the city contributes to the novels reversal of the urban panic of the 1990s, which

saw the urban rather than the suburban as a threat to personal safety and well-being.

Mrs. Brown

Whereas Clarissa Vaughn is haunted by the image of the mid-20th century

housewife and Virginia Woolf in part struggles to shed the mantle of the Victorian cult of

domesticity, The Hours third character, Mrs. Brown, lives a life so dominated by

domesticity that time to participate in literary activity must be furtively stolen.91 Her lack

of access to an autonomous self is further emphasized by the fact that, while she is

already deeply ambivalent about her marriage and motherhood, she is pregnant with her

91
Cunningham has said that the character of Laura Brown is based on his mother. In an interview with
Bomb magazine he said, Initially the book was going to involve a section that was entirely fiction, though
based on previous fictions, an imaginative selection based on a deceased person, Virginia Woolf, and a
section that was as close to fact as I could possibly make it, about my mother, Dorothy Cunningham, a
housewife in Los Angeles. And to my immense relief, as I wrote, it began to drift away from that.It felt
increasingly necessary to alter and manipulate what really happened. But that was where that character
came from. I had tried to lift a day out of my childhood with my mother, who then metamorphosed into
Laura Brown in the early drafts, its my mother. If it felt necessary to the book, it would have been a
strange experience for her. Im relieved the book turned away from that (Spring 9).

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second child. While Woolfs London suburb of Richmond may have little in common

architecturally with the Los Angeles postwar suburb Cunningham chooses as the setting

for Browns story, the central themes of relationships, domesticity, gender politics, and

their relation to history and geography remain constant as does the connecting thread of

the womens relationship to Mrs. Dalloway. As in the case of Mrs. Woolf and Mrs.

Dalloway, Mrs. Browns location is key to the way she imagines herself and her own

sexuality. While she wakes up in the morning dreading performing the role of wife and

mother, she seeks two avenues of escape, reading Woolfs novel in her bed and then,

perhaps because she does not have a room of her own, checking into a downtown hotel in

order to find the privacy necessary to finish it. For Brown, who is living in the years

immediately following World War II and who, unlike the other main characters, is not a

member of the literati, the discourse of womens duty to confine themselves to what

will later be called simple and essentially foolish tasks in order to provide homes for

their families is powerfuleven more powerful than the ghost of the Victorian angel of

the house that haunts Woolf (Cunningham 42). While Browns dilemma is in many

ways similar to Woolfs and Vaughn's, the sheer force of the narratives of domestic

containment are emphasized as readers learn how and why Brown becomes a housewife

and mother despite strong feelings that she belongs elsewhere. While Rosalyn Baxandall

and Elizabeth Ewen dispute the relevance of Freidans depiction of The Problem That

Has No Name for working class women by emphasizing the supportive structures these

women formed in modest suburban communities like Levittown, New York, their work

does provide insight into the way in which suburban life and home life was particularly

appealing for women whose families were fairly recent arrivals in this country and whose

149
mothers and grandmothers had labored intensely in factories or on farms. Baxandall and

Ewens work thus provides a window into the specific power that discourses emphasizing

marriage and family had for a woman like Brown, who had not yet been fully integrated

into the middle class or into the national concept of what constitutes an American. Such

narratives are so powerful that Brown (then Laura Zielski), while she seems to want a

creative life, accepts the marriage proposal of local returning soldier Dan Brown. A self-

described bookworm, she seems like a woman who would not under other circumstances

choose domestic life. Dan, only faintly described in the novel as handsome and good-

hearted, evokes little feeling in her (Cunningham 32). Narratives of domestic

containment, however, impress upon her a sense of duty toward the returning soldier.

Such narratives tell her that, after the war, shelves are stocked and radio waves are full

of music owing to young men who have known deprivation and fear worse than death,

young men who have willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty

and beyond, havent any more time to spare (45). Her husband is not only a veteran but

a friends brother who was once assumed dead. In addition, marriage to a soldier seems

to promise to provide prosperity and a place in the national fabric. Whereas Laura Brown

is described as foreign-looking and her family has been failing to prosper in America

for more than one hundred years, as a soldier and as a man with the common name

Brown, Dans Americanness is evident and his financial future is promising as, with

his soldiers training, he is up at sunrise, uncomplaining (45). Studious in a time and

place in which intellect was not prized for women, foreign-looking at a time when

patriotic fervor rendered the visibly foreign suspect (40), and Catholic at a time in

which Catholics national loyalties were still considered by many to be compromised by

150
the papacy, Brown feels almost obliged to accept the opportunity provided to her by

Dans proposalthe opportunity, the novel suggests, to achieve social mobility by

becoming part of the white, American middle class.92 As Ewen and Baxandall explain,

The expansion of the postindustrial economy after WWII was supposed to make it

possible for second-generation families to realize the dream: women at home,

men at work, children in school. Suburbs became synonymous with the

achievement of this new status. Given this pressure, it is not surprising that most

suburban women did not seek paid work outside the home until two decades later.

(Baxandall and Ewen 149)

The idea that Dans proposal might be seen as both a duty and an opportunity to cast off a

burdensome family history is captured by the text:

What could she say but yes? How could she deny a handsome, good-

hearted boy, practically a member of the family, who had come back from the

dead?

So now she is Laura Brown. Laura Zielski, the solitary girl, the incessant

reader, is gone, and here in her place is Laura Brown. (Cunningham 40).

92
Theorists in the fields of Critical Race Studies and Whiteness Studies have explored the way in which
20th century immigrants began to be constructed as whites. As George Lipsitz notes, During the decades
following World War II, urban renewal helped construct a new white identity in the suburbs by helping to
destroy ethnically specific European American urban inner-city neighborhoodsWrecking balls and
bulldozers eliminated some of these sites, while others were transformed by an influx of minority residents
desperately competing for a dwindling supply of affordable housing units. As increasing numbers of racial
minorities moved into the cities, increasing numbers of European ethnics moved out. Consequently, ethnic
difficulties among white became a less important dividing line in US culture while race became more
important. The suburbs helped turn Euro-Americans into whites who could live near each other and
intermarry with little difficulty (7). David Roediger offers a similar perspective on the role of the suburbs
in creating the concept of whiteness in America: Of course any of the white suburbs that were so
overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of federal aid for housing and highways in the 1940s and 1950s could
have been termed mixed too if the national heritage of those moving there were traced far back enough.
Indeed, any serious demographic study used would have found many suburban residents descended from
stable unions between inharmonious racial and national groups. But suburban developments, new and
protected by firm restrictions against non-Europeans seemed not to require such strict scrutiny where the
descendents of new immigrants were concerned (233).

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Though containment narratives offers Brown a sense of place, she will continually

wrestle to accept the demands of this position. 93

Unlike those women in Friedans text whose dissatisfaction manifests itself in

physical and emotional symptoms but who cannot understand the root of their afflictions,

Brown is somewhat aware of her predicament and the way in which discourses about

womens duty are woven into the Post World-War II narrative. She assesses herself and

other women:

She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair

done, if the other women arent all thinking, to some degree or other, the same

thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of

transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform

simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer,

because it is her art and her duty. Because the war is over, the world has survived,

and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating

not just books or paintings but a whole worlda world of order and harmony

where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond

imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to

perfume, to plates and napkins. (Cunningham 42)

Although Brown acknowledges her unsuitability for this role, she imagines that she must

fulfill it nonetheless, particularly because the quiet remove of suburban life provides a

rest cure of sorts for the men who have served in the war abroad. Moreover, absorbing

and adopting a discourse that seeks to stress the importance of domesticity, Brown

93
As Cunningham says of his character, Laura is an intelligent, passionate person whos got the wrong
life. It is, to some extent, an accident of time and place (qtd. in Spring 6).

152
imagines that domesticity may be an outlet for her creativity. While in the context of the

novel this discourse of duty is clearly suspect, here Cunningham presents its appeal

sympatheticallyit promises comfort and safety that the text has already shown it cannot

deliver. Whereas the gritty and tumultuous nature of the city is for Woolf and Vaughn

associated with a testament to a nations survival and is key to individual survival, Brown

struggles to accept what she instinctually feels is wrongthat in the aftermath of the

Second World War, the order and harmony, of suburban communities and the

patriarchal nuclear family will ensure survival, providing safety at the cost of happiness. 94

Brown undertakes the weighty responsibility of ensuring this order and

harmony although she knows it to be only a panacea and although she feels ill at ease

with its demands. She questions this performance of tranquility just as Woolf questions

Richmonds own ability to cure her through its placidity. As in Far from Heaven and

Pleasantville, the suburb in which the Browns live acts as a stage upon which

containment narratives are performed: a podium from which to recite loyalty oaths. 95

Brown, having internalized these narratives, self-censors her rebellious nature and moves

toward compliance by keeping to the expected script. She is repeatedly . . . possessed (it

seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings,

about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and

for which she has not adequately rehearsed, (Cunningham 43). This image stands in

stark contrast to that of the Happy Housewife Heroine living the good life. Like

94
For a detailed discussion of the texts use of parallels between World Wars I and II and the AIDS
epidemic, see Christopher Lane, 30.
95
Claudia Olk also comments on Browns sense of alienation: The difference between image and reality
willremain constitutive for Lauras self-consciousness in general. Her efforts to balance self-image and
self-experience grow increasingly complicated because Laura Browns notion of reality is undermined by a
sense of role play she acquires when looking at herself (210).

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characters in the other texts discussed in Part One, Brown seems to be propelled forward

by something outside of herself, a powerful narrative that leads her to question herself

rather than her circumstances: What, she wonders, is wrong with her. This is her

husband in the kitchen; this is her little boy. All the man and boy require of her is her

presence and, of course, her love (Cunningham 43). By twice attempting to bake her

husband a perfect birthday cake, Brown attempts to fuse her creativity with containment

narratives that promote elaborate attentions to homemaking. Such narratives of domestic

containment, as Nadel and May have shown, are not only products of media engines

critiqued by Friedan but also of norms that were reinforced by religion, national policy,

and psychology. Thus, they remain pervasive forces in Browns mind despite her doubts.

Woolfs book Mrs. Dalloway offers an alternative to that narrative, however, much in the

same way that modern art seems to provide Cathy and Raymond with an alternative in

Far from Heaven.

Between her time reading Mrs. Dalloway in the morning and checking into the

Normandy hotel, Brown receives a visit from her neighbor Kitty. Like the scenes

between Eleanor and Cathy in Far From Heaven, this episode shows the way in which

post World-War II suburbs distanced women from one another; however, this scene

allows for a disruption of that distance. Their visit begins with small talk about their

husbands, the sort of niceties that do little to betray the substratum of Browns pointed

analysis of her own life and Kittys. Brown wonders, for example, if she could ask Kitty

a question: The question has to do with subterfuge and, more obscurely, with brilliance.

She would like to know if Kitty feels like a strange woman, powerful and unbalanced the

way artists are said to be, full of vision, full of rage, committed above all to creating . . .

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what? This. This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world

(106). She continues to struggle with a vision of herself at odds with the worlds vision of

her and at the same time tries to fit herself into dominant narratives. She intuits that Kitty

must have similar struggles, yet the women find themselves comparing the relative merits

of Maxwell House and Folgers coffee. Their conversation resembles that of the robotic

women of Brian Forbess The Stepford Wives; they are completely products of consumer

culture. The impersonal surface of this conversation is shattered however, when Kitty

reveals that she has come to ask Brown to watch her house when she undergoes an

operation to have a uterine tumor removed. When Brown moves to comfort her, an erotic

charge passes between the two women that conveys not only sexual attraction but the

unspoken connection between themeach of them is disappointed with her life despite

the containment narratives that tell them they have arrived in paradise because neither is

living up to the image of the ideal family created by these narratives. Both are unhappy

with their lives. Kittys sorrow is that she cannot be a mother and Browns is that she has

discovered too late that she does not want to be a mother: They are both afflicted and

blessed, full of shared secrets, striving every moment. They are each impersonating

someone (110). While they cannot verbally convey this feeling to one another, their

posture conveys their emotional intimacy. Kitty rests her head against Browns breasts.

As Kitty lifts her face, the two womens lips meet in a not-quite kiss. When Kitty pulls

away, however, Brown berates herself in a manner consonant with the decades image of

the lesbian as predator. Brown identifies herself as the guilty party, the subversive

opportunist who has undermined Kittys otherwise exemplary character: It is Kitty

whose terrors have briefly propelled her, caused her to act strangely and desperately.

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Brown is the dark-eyed predator. Brown is the odd one, the foreign one, the one who

cant be trusted. (110). The visit ends as it beganwith small talk. The women discuss

the more mundane details of Kittys trip to the hospital; rather than talk about her illness

or the operation, they talk about Browns dog-sitting duties. As Kitty leaves, Brown is

immediately struck by the sense that her world is both too small and too removed from

reality. The suburbs, unlike the city, are characterized by a sense of stagnation and

isolation:

The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.

There is the heat falling evenly on the streets and houses; there is a single string of

stores referred to, locally, as downtown. There is the supermarket and the

drugstore and the dry cleaners; there is the beauty parlor and the stationary shop

and the five-and-dime; there is the one-story stucco library, with its newspapers

on wooden piled and its shelves of slumbering books. (111)

This image of stasis, of the small downtown sweltering in the summer heat is cast against

the sense of possibility conveyed by the passage life, London, this moment of June

from the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway (qtd in Cunningham 111).

It is this suburban environment, emblematic of her life, that Brown wishes to

escape. Her enthrallment to containment narratives is apparent in that she tries to bake

her husband Dan a second, more pleasing birthday cake, and then puts her house in

impeccable order before leaving the house to drop Richie off with babysitter Mrs.

Latch and drive to Los Angeles (142). Brown looks to Woolfs novel Mrs. Dalloway as

her fellow characters look to their respective citiesfor the experience of anonymity and

for aesthetic stimulation. She seeks in Woolfs novel and in attempting to find a private

156
place to read it an anonymity akin to that which Woolf and later Vaughn seek in their

walks through London and New York. Moreover, she seeks connection with other adults,

something unavailable in a life lived in large part with only a small child for company.

She does not seek to lose herself but rather she is trying to keep herself by gaining

entry into a parallel world (37). Mrs. Dalloway provides this alternative world, and an

alternative to Containment Culture, in much the same was as the experience of reading

books does for Pleasantvilles characters. In a novel that celebrates urban space, it is

tempting to see Brown escaping to Los Angeles itself, yet Los Angeles as Cunningham

depicts it does not inspire the same lan that Woolf and Vaughn find in London and New

York. Instead, the sprawling, almost suburban city lacks both the sense of vitality and the

sought-after anonymity that so energize the other womens urban experiences. Los

Angeles is a completely commercialized landscape in which interactions between people

and the landscape are already scripted:

Here is the city, and Brown must either enter it, by way of the left-hand lane, or

switch to the right-hand lane and bypass it altogether. If she does that, if she

simply continues driving, shell be headed into the vast, flat stretch of factories

and low-rise apartment buildings that surround Los Angeles for a hundred miles

in every direction. It would be possible to veer right, and find her way to Beverly

Hills, or to the beach at Santa Monica, but she doesnt want to shop and she hasnt

brought anything for the beach. There is surprisingly little to enter, in this

immense bright smoky landscape, and what she wantssomeplace private, silent,

where she can read, where she can thinkis not readily available. If she goes to a

store or restaurant, shell have to performshell have to pretend to need or want

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 something that does not, in any way, interest her. Shell have to move in an

orderly fashion; shell have to examine the merchandise and refuse offers of help,

or shell have to sit at a table, order something, consume it, and leave. If she

simply parks her car somewhere and sits there, a woman alone, shell be

vulnerable to criminals and to those wholl try to protect her from criminals.

Shell be too exposed; shell look too peculiar. (Cunningham 144-145)

Most notably, both the anonymity and the sense of possibility afforded Woolf and

Vaughn by London and New York is missing in Browns Los Angeles. Whereas Clarissa

Vaughn and Clarissa Dalloway are free to chart their course through New York and

London, Los Angeles offers surprisingly little to enter (145). Its center city is miniscule

in comparison with the vast sprawl of mostly low-rise buildings that surround it.

Furthermore, this model of a city offers her no place to escape being watched. Whereas

within the home domestic narratives determine the use of her time and her son Richie is

always watching, the environs of the city seems to offer no possibility of stepping outside

of these narratives to rediscover herself. Although Brown, like Woolf and Vaughn, seems

to desire the feeling of being alone in public, her very existence as a lone woman marks

her as a target, as someone literally shut out of the public sphere without the company of

a man. Those most concerned with her safety will also be thoselike Leonard Woolfto

most limit her freedom. While there are placeslike stores and restaurantsthat she can

enter relatively unnoticed, there are rules by which she must interact with the spaces

notably she must purchase something. The landscape is privatized to a degree not seen in

Cunninghams descriptions of New York and London.

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 Brown chooses the best option available to hertotal obscurity in the form of a

sterile room in the Normandy Hotel. While this is surprisingly different from the urban

carnival in its silence and feeling of withdrawal, it does provide her a world free of some

of the burdens of her suburban home:

Nothing, of course, could be further from Mrs. Dalloways London than this

turquoise hotel room, and yet she imagines that Virginia Woolf herself, the

drowned woman, the genius, might in death inhabit a place not unlike this one.

She laughs, quietly, to herself. Please God, she says silently, let heaven be

something better than a room at the Normandy. Heaven would be better

furnished, it would be brighter and grander, but it might in fact contain some

measure of this hushed remove, this utter absence inside the continuing world.

Having this room to herself seems both prim and whorish. She is safe here. She

could do anything she wanted to, anything at all. She is somehow like a newlywed

reclining in her chamber, waiting for . . . not her husband, or any other man. For

someone. For something. (Cunningham 150)

Though the hotel room might be as sterile as Woolfs Richmond landscape, it provides,

nonetheless, a chance for privacy and solitudethe most important element missing from

downtown Los Angeles, her suburb, and her home.96 The sense of freedom she achieves

provides her with a feeling similar to what a plunge into a London or New York morning

mighta chance to recognize her sexual, intellectual, and aesthetic needs. Coming on the

heels of her interlude with Kitty, her room at the Normandy provides her with a place to

96
As Andrea Wild writes, this scene is Browns attempt to find a room of her own, In The Hours,
however, the purpose has changed: the room is no longer used for writing fiction exclusively, but the claim
has been extended beyond the creative act of writing to the act of reading. Wild also notes that Dorris
Lessings short story To Room Nineteen is a source for this passage.

159
explore what might have come of this kiss. In the confines of her suburban home she

must adhere to containment narratives; she kissed Kitty there, but this leads her to panic

and Kitty flees quickly. Here, despite the sexual connotations of being in a hotel room,

she is not waiting for her husband or any other man but perhaps For someone. For

something (150). This implies that she could be waiting for a woman or even

fantasizing about Kitty specifically. At the same time, the fulfilment she longs for is, of

course, creative and intellectual as wellshe waits for somethingperhaps what is to

be delivered by the book itself.

What she gains is not just the aesthetic pleasure but also an identification with the

character of Clarissa Dalloway that allows her to reckon with a buried desire to end her

life. The passage Cunningham quotes from Mrs. Dalloway reads,

She [Clarissa Dalloway] remembered once throwing a sixpence into the

Serpentine. But every one remembers; what she loved was this, here, now in front

of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking

toward Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all

this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become comforting to

believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow on the streets of London,

on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in

each other . . . (Woolf Qtd. in Cunningham 150)

This passage brings to Browns consciousness that she could choose to cease

completely by ending her life, but at the same time it dissuades her because, like

Clarissa Dalloway, she loves life, loves it hopelessly and because she is connected (like

Dalloways web spread over the trees) to othersher son, her unborn child, her husband.

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Curiously, she poses the narrative of her domesticity against the story of Woolfs life.

Suicide, she suggests, would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything

shes createdthe orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supperwould be

sucked away (152). She decides to return to her family, yet decidedly this adventure

seems to have lead her toward the ability to break with containment narratives.

The descriptions of Browns suburban neighborhood provided in the scene in

which she returns to pick up Richie mark the landscape as a manifestation of the

narratives of containment. This landscape becomes a key element in the tangle of

thoughts and emotions she experiences in the wake of her time in the Normandy Hotel:

Laura occupies a twilight zone of sorts; a world composed of London in the

twenties, of a turquoise hotel room, and of this car, driving down this familiar

street. She is herself and not herself. She is a woman in London, an aristocrat,

pale and charming, a little false; she is Virginia Woolf; and she is this other, the

inchoate, tumbling thing known as herself, a mother, a driver, a swirling streak of

pure life like the Milky Way, a friend of Kitty (whom shes kissed, who may be

dying), a pair of hands with coral-colored fingernails (one chipped) and a

diamond wedding band gripping the wheel of a Chevrolet as a pale blue Plymouth

taps its brake lights ahead of her, as late-afternoon summer sun assumes its golden

depths, as a squirrel dashes across a telephone wire, its tail a place gray question

mark. (Cunningham 187-188)

This passage is marked by a sense of liminality, of a world between Browns desire to

escape and a desire to resume her life, between a questioning of her identity and a

certainty of the role she is assigned. One senses here that the reading of Mrs. Dalloway

161
has opened to her a series of possibilities for her identity other than that provided by post

World-War II containment narratives. By reading, she was literally able to assume, or try

on, the consciousnesses of Mrs. Dalloway and of an English aristocrat. She has also

gained the possibility of aesthetic enlightenment and of connection to other lives across

time and space so much that she can imagine herself a a swirling streak of pure life like

the Milky Way (188). The book also seems to open the possibilities of combining

seemingly opposed identities; she is both a mother wearing a diamond wedding band

and she is a friend of Kitty (whom she kissed and who is dying) (Cunningham 187).

She is competent (she grips the steering wheel expertly) and highly fallible (her

fingernails are chipped) (Cunningham 187). She both celebrates life and fears Kittys

death. Though she has reentered the suburban neighborhood, the prescriptive musts of

containment narratives have dissipated into the question mark of the squirrels tail.

Yet, as she nears the home of Mrs. Latch, the doting older neighbor who is

babysitting her son, this reverie of the imagination dissipates and she is confronted by the

reality that her life is one that is bound and limited. She has not escaped. The text links

these limitations through a description of Mrs. Latchs house:

She has been away. She has been thinking kindly, even longingly, of death. It

comes to her here, in Mrs. Latchs drivewayshe has been thinking longingly of

death. She has gone to a hotel in secret, the way she might go to meet a lover. She

stands, holding her car keys and her purse, staring at Mrs. Latchs garage. The

door, painted white, has a little green-shuttered window in it, as if the garage were

a miniature house attached to the larger house. (Cunningham 188)

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While perhaps simply bristling at the thought of an encounter with Mrs. Latch, Browns

view of the garage door, something so at pains to conceal its function and to convey

warmth and hominess as to render itself ridiculous, is connected with her feeling of terror

at returning to the life of a suburban wife and mother. She realizes that her contemplation

of death has given her a chance at freedom. The house with the small house attached to it,

symbolizing what Brown experiences as a suffocating sense of her sons attachment to

her, functions as a physical manifestation of the midcentury suburbs own unique take on

the cult of domesticity. The text suggests here that Laura Brown is gripped by an

overwhelming desire to leave the suburbs and, by extension, her family.

As Brown continues to drive toward her home with Richie, however, the text

gives an idea, again communicated through the built environment, of why and how

narratives that elevate domesticity and suburban life are so persuasive. These narratives

give Brown a stable identity. Moreover, containment narratives endow domesticity not

only with patriotic significance but also with religious significance that echoes the

teachings of Browns Catholic upbringing. As Brown drives down the street,

The weight and grain of life reassert themselves; the nowhere feeling vanishes . . .

Laura enters it [her street] the way she might enter a church from a noisy street.

On either side, sprinklers throw brilliant cones of mist up over the lawn. Late sun

gilds an aluminum carport. It is unutterably real. She knows herself as a wife and

mother, pregnant again, driving home, as veils of water are tossed up into the air.

(Cunningham 191)

For Brown, returning to her suburb, while it forecloses possibility, has a weight and

grain that is for the moment preferable to suicide or even a disparate and unstable

163
identity (Cunningham 191). The interplay of dread and awe and of safety and suffocation

forces the reader to struggle along with Brown as she oscillates between identification

with containment narratives and alienation from those narratives to such an extent that it

may become painful for readers. Over the course of the following pages, Brown is

absorbed and reabsorbed by containment narratives, to escape only by the final act of

leaving her family. Despite the ways in which her personality and intellect are largely at

odds with what is demanded of her, the elevation of this way of life in the post-war era

lends it an almost mystical status conveyed here by the ephemeral sprays of the

sprinklers, which throw up veils of watera Marian image associated with holy

motherhood (191). At the same time as the suburbs are surrounded by mystical

connotations, they also seem safe and solid, unutterably real (191). This almost

transcendent feeling soon fades as, continuing on in the car, Brown again feels the

oppressive weight of her duty. No matter how sacred that duty may be claimed to be, its

weight becomes once again frightening rather than reassuring (192). She is also

burdened by her own guilt and her feeling of being under surveillance. She worries that

Richie will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. He will

always know precisely when and how much she has failed (193). The text continues to

link this flow between contentment and despair to the suburban environment. Despite the

fact that Dans birthday cake is not what she would have hoped, when she sets the forks

and dessert plates on the table, she senses an achievement of both the artistry she aspired

to and the domestic peace she is expected to achieve:

The dining room seems, right now, like the most perfect imaginable dining room,

with its hunter-green walls and its dark maple hutch holding a trove of wedding

164
 silver. The room seems almost impossibly full: full of the lives of her husband

and son; full of the future. It matters; it shines. Much of the world, whole

countries, have been decimated, but a force that feels unambiguously like

goodness has prevailed; even Kitty, it seems, will be healed by medical science.

(207)

The passage explicitly evokes national narratives that celebrate American prosperity and

domesticity, particularly in contrast to the devastation experienced by Europe and Japan.

The wedding silver symbolizes the symbolic link forged by containment discourses

between the patriarchal family and the consumption of such bounty. At the same time,

however, Laura reads the moment as it passes. Here it is, she thinks, there it goes.

The page is about to turn (208). Evoking the image of a book, the text indicates that

Brown is moving out of and beyond containment narratives. In an episode not recounted

in the novel, she later leaves her family and moves to Canada.

It is only at the end of the novel that the two surviving main charactersClarissa

Vaughn and Laura Brownare brought together. Brown, now a woman of eighty, is

revealed to be the poet Richard Browns mother. The daughter with whom she was

pregnant in the opening pages of The Hours has long since died in a car accident, and

Dan Brown has succumbed to the ravages of alcoholism. At the end of the novel, she

joins Vaughn to mourn her sons suicide. She is presented as still lacking the happiness

for which she longed, but the audience is also aware that she might have committed

suicide had she never left her family. In a novel that so carefully records the costs of war

(World War I and World War II), sickness (AIDS and mental illness), and survival,

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Brown stands as a different kind of survivor.97 While the book follows her life in the

period immediately following World War II, an era that is often associated with peace

and prosperity, the text suggests through her story that the narrative of postwar tranquility

and domestic harmony exacted a heavy toll on women, particularly young wives, and that

self-negation is as debilitating as violent memories of war.

Domesticity and death preoccupy all three women in the novel; this final scene

brings both of the texts themes together. Most importantly, Vaughn makes peace with

her own fears that her domestic work is short-lived and unnoticed. Brown is hosted by

Vaughn at her apartment, which had been prepared for Richards party. Here death

intrudes into the final party scene much more directly than it does through the mention of

Septimus Warren Smiths suicide in Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway. For Vaughn, the display of

the food prepared by the caterers brings together concerns of death and domesticity. The

text relishes in its description of the food, the virtuosic language perhaps designed to

complement the virtuosic preparation for the party:

There are spirals of grilled chicken breast, flecked black, touched with brilliant

yellow, impaled on wooden picks, arranged around a bowl of peanut sauce. There

are miniature onion tarts. There are steamed shrimp, and glistening bright-red

squares of rare tuna with dabs of wasabi. There are dark triangles of grilled

eggplant, and round sandwiches on brown bread, and endive leaves touched at

their stem ends with discrete smears of goat cheese and chopped walnuts. There

97
The parallels between historical traumas are also noted by James Schiff, who writes AIDS has replaced
World War I as the catastrophic event that has taken the lives of so many young men (367). Critic
Christopher Lane also notes the parallels between the traumas of World War I and the AIDS epidemic, but
he focuses on the concept of an aftershock, suggesting that both novels depict characters (Mrs.
Dalloways Septimus and The Hours Richard) who remind readers that the eras respective wars were
not over (31).

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 are shallow bowls full of raw vegetables. And there is, in its earthenware dish, the

crab casserole Clarissa made herself, for Richard, because it was his favorite.

(Cunningham 223-224)

The repetition of there are phrases and the abundance of sensual adjectives suggests

that the arrangement of food is like a still life evoking visual as well as olfactory senses.

This depiction of food as both painting and experiment with language suggests that,

despite her fears of triviality and mortality, Vaughn views domestic work as both artful

and lasting: It seems, briefly, to Clarissa, that the foodthat most perishable of

entitieswill remain here after she and the others have disappeared; after all of them,

even Julia, have died. Clarissa imagined the food still here, still fresh somehow,

untouched, as she and the others leave these rooms, one by one forever (224). With

Sallys gentle reminder that it is time to eat and go to bed, however, comes Vaughns

realization that the food will vanish. Yet she also realizes that her worries about mortality

and triviality are not unique. She sadly acknowledges that Richards books, like most art,

will vanish along with almost everything else (225). Long influenced by a culture that

assigns domestic work to women while simultaneously devaluing such work, Vaughn

here re-values her own efforts and those of the caterer by seeing the art in the work of

hostessing and cooking.

The text stops short of declaring human existence futile. Rather, as it draws to a

close, the lives of the three women serve as the fuel for a broad meditation that posits the

city as life-sustaining and as a metaphor for survival. The sense of possibility

emblematized by the city defines life as worthwhile. The book ends by applying this

metaphor to its readers as well as its characters:

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 We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we

struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and

unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we

do, and then we sleepits as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of

windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accidentally and most of

us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if were very

fortunate, by time itself. Theres just this for consolation: an hour here or there

when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us

everything weve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even

they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and

more difficult. Still we cherish the city, the morning we hope, more than anything,

for more. (Cunningham 225)

The Hours thus ends by extrapolating from the lives of Clarissa Vaughn, Virginia Woolf,

and Laura Brownall of whom have been shown to be shaped by culture, geography and

historyto the human condition in general. Much of the text suggests that womens lives

are shaped by historical circumstancesthe eras in which Woolf, Brown, and Vaughn

live, for example, all accord the women different degrees of freedom to openly express

their sexuality and creativity, and none are free from the struggles of life or the

idealization of domesticity. Virginia Woolf, perhaps due to her class position, is

relatively free to write, though she experiences profound guilt for her lack of domestic

skills and is bound to a traditional heterosexual marriage despite her lesbian desires.

Laura Browns life, if anything, resurrects the Victorian cult of domesticity Woolf fought

so hard to reject. There is little room for a creative life in a time in which housework and

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childrearing was expected to consume and fulfill a woman. Even more so than in Woolfs

era, a compulsory heteronormativity dominatesso much so that in this book her sexual

duties are emphasized to the same degree as her domestic ones. While she does leave

her family and begin life again in Canada, critic Debra Sims notes that it is difficult to

ascertain from this ending whether Brown ever achieved happiness. Sims asks So, did

she have the opportunity to live during the past-half-century? (12). Such nuances

complicate Cunninghams picture of agency, once again summoning a vision of

domesticity that haunts characters even as they distance themselves from it. Clarissa

Vaughns field of opportunity is relatively wide open, but contemporary times bring their

own, different kind of limitations. She lives with her female lover and she has a

successful career as a book editor. At the same time, however, she doubts the institution

of monogamy or the politics of sexual identity and she mourns the lack of respect she

receives as the more traditionally domestic partner in her household. In addition, the text

suggests that the womens opportunities can differ according to space as well as time. All

three women seek in the city of their own times something they cannot find in the

suburbs, real or imagined. Clarissa Vaughn flees the image of the 1950s suburban

housewife, Laura Brown attempts to recreate Mrs. Dalloways London in a Los Angeles

hotel room, and Virginia Woolf literally attempts to escape the suburb of Richmond to

London. At the same time, regardless of the fact that some historical eras offer a more

open field of possibilities than others, the text ends by offering the blunt conclusion that

suffering, happiness, and death are part of all human life across time and space. While

the text thus refuses to idealize any one time and place depicted in its pages, it does, in its

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very last sentence, symbolically and syntactically link the city with the hope that justifies

and motivates human beings struggle to live.

While the final paragraph as a whole attempts to convey a sense that the human

experience is both shared and essential(that is fixed across time and space) and

(historically and geographically) constructedthe last sentence, still we cherish the

city, by using the city as a metaphor for the struggle for meaning, lends special

significance to the urban environment. This statement privileges the urban over the

suburban despite the fact that it refuses to paint the urban as a utopia. When Cunningham

writes, still we cherish the city, the morning we hope, more than for anything more, he

notes the urban environment not just as a place, but as one with the condition of

possibility, hence its connection with morning. This brings readers full circle both to the

beginning of the text and to those places in the text in which each character takes her

plunge into a new day.98 Like morning, the city brings renewal, while the suburbs

represent stasis and constriction. From the slowly unfolding days of suburban Los

Angeles, to the neat shrubbery of Virginia Woolfs Richmond, the suburbs are shown to

limit characters possibilities. They are not only peopled by their domesticated

inhabitants, but they also lack the heterogeneity and spontaneity of the city. While the

suburbs focus is on private, domestic life, they do not offer the opportunity for true

privacy that the women crave. As Browns and to some extent Woolfs story shows,

suburbs provide no public space in which women can escape domesticity itself. In those

instances in which spontaneity does shatter the placid surface of the suburbs, it brings

panic rather than the freedom found in urban places: Kitty and Brown are overwhelmed

98
For Brown that is the plunge into Mrs. Dalloway and its depiction of London, as the suburbs and the
suburbanized city of Los Angeles remain too insubstantial to provide true succor.

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by their kiss, and Leonard is alarmed when Woolf disappears to the train station. While

The Hours shows that the relative freedom of contemporary urban life does not offer

Vaughn everything for which she hopes or even a total escape from historical narratives

of gender, it does provide the possibility of wresting happiness from life and of

rebounding from suffering.

The text thus places a great faith in the notion that cityscapes can lend to their

inhabitants a measure of both excitement and emotional resilience. This belief, coupled

with the texts fairly traditional depictions of the suburbs, indicates that the text remains

largely outside the recent revisionist discourse about the suburbs, which finds the

persistence of mid-20th century ideas of the suburbia illogical with respect to the suburbs

increasing economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. While the contributions of these

revisionist histories indeed illuminate changes in the nations regional landscapes or

actual histories of the post World War II era that have been largely neglected in the

nations cinema and fiction, there is a pressing and valid reason that writers continue to

take up and take on the post-World War II suburbs of the cultural imagination. Most

pressing, perhaps, is the use of this era by social conservatives to embody a national

ideal.

Cunningham, while in part offering a critical look at the limitations that the

culture of the post-World War II suburbs placed on women, returns to this era not simply

to mobilize a simple reaction against the rights culture war politics but also to use it as

one case study of how dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, and domesticity place

limits on characters lives. 99 While his portrait of 1950s suburbia as a time and place

99
Despite the fact that Cunningham complicates notions of sexual identity, his vision of family is shaped
by his experience as a gay male writer. In an interview with Michael Coffey, Cunningham said, I think my

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that was highly oppressive to women and sexual minorities resonates with other texts

explored in Part One, he also voices some ambivalence about claiming the urban as a

utopia or offering a clear-cut narrative of historical progress to counteract conservative

ideology. 100 In exploring city and suburban landscapes and traditional and non traditional

partnerships in tandem, Cunningham examines the intersections between certainty and

uncertainty, unfolding possibility and stasis, safety and adventure. Whether examining

the lives of characters in traditional heterosexual marriages or lesbian partnerships, and

whether exploring the lives of characters living in suburbia or in the metropolis,

Cunninghams text acknowledges that compromise always accompanies stability and that

cultural narratives of all kindswhether those valorizing heterosexual marriage or those

dividing human sexuality strictly into a homo/hetero binaryplace limits on individual

lives. 101 The texts intervention into Culture War politics is thus in some ways more

nuanced than Far from Heaven or Pleasantville; it not only refuses to privilege the past

but also suggests that such destructive cultural narratives continue to haunt the present.

Moreover, through the story of Woolf, the novel suggests that containment narratives

interest in the post-nuclear family, which might include, say, a biological mother, a same-sex lover, and the
drag queen that lives downstairs, probably comes from being a gay man living through the AIDS epidemic.
Everybody writes about what they knew, obviously. Ive lived through an epidemic that involves seeing all
kinds of things, maybe one of the most significant of which is seeing non-biological families come through
in the way that biological families might not (55).
100
The nuances of Cunninghams depiction of sexual identity and personal freedom have sometimes been
overlooked. In Commentary, Carol Iannone suggests that Cunningham provides a wholesale condemnation
of traditional sexual relationships and characterizes homosexual relationships as ideal. She sees
Cunningham as suggesting that Clarissa becomes whole by shedding at last the one part of her life, a
lingering romantic attachment to a man, that has the look of traditional commitment (53). In addition, she
sees The Hours as suggesting that women must bravely confront the choices before them either take the
radical, even countercultural paths that are necessary to bring them contentment, or end their misery (53).
Instead I maintain that Cunningham explores how even contemporary norms of sexuality and gender,
which posit a homo/heterosexual binary, are limiting.
101
James Schiff also makes an allusion to the novels attention to the limitations inherent in all
relationships, noting that, Although Cunnighams Clarissa Vaughn is free to live openly as a lesbian, her
interior life is nevertheless plagued by similar regrets and uncertainties about decisions she has made . . . .
(368).

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themselves, particularly the ideal of the Happy Housewife Heroine are perhaps a

resurrection and a modification of the Victorian ideal of the Angel of the House. In

showing that women across the twentieth century are affected by these reemerging ideals,

the novel suggests that backlashes like the one mounted by Culture War conservatives

continually threaten feminist progress.

In addition, the novel implicitly connects the characters experiences struggling

against narratives of domesticity and femininity with other struggles which are more

visible. While the characters hardships are often internal in the sense that they are not

shared with others, the text suggests that the womens battle to survive in a culture

dominated by idealized notions of marriage, family, and home is an experience akin to

living with mental illness (both Woolf and Richard are to some degree sufferers),

surviving a war (Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway live in London during World War I while

Dan Brown is a soldier in World War II), or fighting AIDS (the book depicts Richard as

well as a few walk-on characters living with the disease). Like AIDS, war, and mental

illness, narratives of domesticity exact their toll on the survivors. For Clarissa Vaughn,

this toll is a wavering self-confidence. She is fortunate, however, in that she can often

overcome her doubts by pursuing her domestic and professional work or by immersing

herself in New York City. Virginia Woolf finds the narrative of the Angel of the House

compounded by the fact that she is consigned to her suburban home and to the care of her

husband. While she returns to her beloved London, unlike Vaughn, she ultimately will

not survive. Laura Brown is equally hampered by containment narratives though she

lives several decades later than the sections of the book dedicated to Woolf. That Brown

must completely leave her family and her neighborhood in order to escape these

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narratives suggests how the particular convergence of psychological, national, and

religious narratives that defined womens roles in the post-World War II era rendered this

time particularly oppressive for all women. For Brown and for the other women, the force

of narratives of idealized femininity is multiplied by the fact that their lesbian desires are

prohibited by a discourse that glorifies heterosexual marriage. Through putting these

womens attempts to overcome cultural prescriptions on par with events more

traditionally thought of as battles, particularly mens experience of war, the novel makes

an emphatic though implicit statement that restrictive norms of gender and sexuality

should be combated, not rehabilitated.

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 CONCLUSION

What Joseph called the fifties of the mind had powerful resonances in the

family values debates that raged throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Responding to these

debates in various ways, the texts explored in Part One of this dissertation take up the

figure of the post-World War II suburban housewife in order to offer narratives that

challenge neo-conservative nostalgia. While the Right locates the fall of America in the

1960s as well as the decline in two-parent families and stay-at-home mothers, these texts

all include some examination of the ways in which such patriarchal nuclear family

structures limited women sexually, intellectually, and creatively. In their focus on

creative and intellectual awakeningsCathy Whittaker is stricken by Mir, Betty Parker

becomes an ally of Pleasantvillians fighting for free expression, and Laura Brown tries to

funnel her creative energies into baking a perfect cake but finally steps outside such

pressures in order to resume reading, her lost pastimethese texts all in some sense

ground themselves in ideas brought to light by Betty Friedans The Feminist Mystique

(1963), which suggested that the talents of intellectually capable women were wasted on

household work and a life organized primarily around the needs of children and spouses.

Moreover, Friedans sense that not only Madison Avenue and the psychiatric

establishment but also suburban developers played a role in womens conditions is also

particularly evident in these texts. Cathy Whittakers narrow-minded neighbors ostracize

her and her home, though carefully-appointed, is often depicted as a hollow prison. Betty

Parker benefits from modern appliances in her well-equipped kitchen but, rather than free

her time for other pursuits, the new gadgetry only consigns her to producing bigger and

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more elaborate meals for her family. Laura Brown achieves new social mobility by

marrying the town hero and moving to a suburban home, but she cannot and will not step

into her role as suburban mother. At the same time, however, these texts reflect an

awareness that Friedans paradigms do little to contextualize the troubles of middle-class

suburban housewives in terms of the ways in which the suburbs marginalized racial,

cultural, and sexual Others.

While attacks on even the modest and still-unrealized goals of liberal feminism,

including reproductive control and fair treatment in the workforce, render Friedans

critique as relevant today as it was half a century ago, these texts also work to connect

and compare the world of these housewives to groups too often left out of historical

accounts. In Far from Heaven, Cathy seems powerless to confront her husbands

alcoholism and physical abuse, but audiences feelings are complicated by the fact that

she coerces her husband to seek a medical cure for his sexuality. While her own

existence is proof that the ideal of traditional marriage is far from an ideal, she reinforces

this narrative at every turn. Moreover, when she begins her relationship with Raymond,

one senses a hope that she can truly understand the limitations that the white world

attempts to foist on his life, but this hope slowly vanishes as viewers observe her

dismissive attitude toward her housekeeper Sybil and her willingness to end her

relationship with Raymond in order to save her marriage and her status. The film

suggests that, while the oppression of all of the characters is tragically similar, they miss

the opportunity to join together to better their conditions. Pleasantvilles Betty Parker, on

the other hand, does form an alliance with her children and the rest of the towns

teenagers who challenge the town fathers prohibition of rock n roll music, literature,

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and art. Moreover, the film, by terming Betty and her cohorts colored examines the

ways in which nostalgia for the fifties finds its roots in the desire to roll back the gains of

both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement. The Hours presents Laura

Brown as a woman who suffers in the patriarchal world of the Post-World War II suburbs

not only because she is a woman but because she is a woman at odds with what the

culture demands of her. She feels compelled to marry her husband because he is a

returning veteran and because, despite her considerable intellect, she seems to have few

other options, yet she dreads sex with him and is thrilled by a kiss with her neighbor,

Kitty. While reading Mrs. Dalloway seems to open up limitless possible selves and

limitless ways of resolving or embracing the contradictions of her life, once she closes

the book she finds the only way to recoup herself is to leave her family.

The suburbs in these novels are not incidental but critical to these womens

struggles. First, they were thought to be the apotheosis of what was termed the good life

because they provided homes for the nuclear families that formed after the war, which

had put a hold on family life, and because they expanded the property owning class to

include families like Laura and Dan Browns. As such, they form part of the nostalgia for

the period in which family life and prosperity are assumed to go hand in hand. These

texts dissection of the Post-World War II suburban promised land is less the suburban

expos that has become so common today as an informative way in which to trace the

limits of this overly sentimental cultural memory. Moreover, the way in which these

explorations of the suburban nuclear family consider not only the Problem that Has No

Name but also the implications of the suburban ideal for gays, lesbians, and people of

color allows for a consideration of the suburbs as stages upon which containment

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narratives were performed. Suburbs, like containment narratives, attempted to create

controlled environments that prioritized safety at the expense of freedom; homogeneity is

a value promoted both by containment narratives and by those who extol the benefits of

the suburbs. Thus, in showing the ways in which people of color and gays and lesbians

cannot appear on the suburban stage unless they appear in the guise of a servant or a

straight man or woman, these texts exemplify the greater trends in the nation during the

containment era.102 Women were curiously both the victims and sometimes the stage

managers in such performances inside the suburban home. This question of agency,

particularly of womens ability or inability to act freely in a historical time (the post-

World War II era), which many historians agree was dominated by cultural narratives of

containment, and in a place (the suburbs), which Friedan characterized as restrictive,

unites these texts and links them to those studied in Part Two of this dissertation.

On this question of agency for women and other marginalized groups in the

suburbs, the texts discussed in Part One provide varying answers. In Far From Heaven,

the characters are faced with a world in which change is possible but not plausible. A few

short years later, whites and blacks would demonstrate together at Woolworth counters.

At the time the film unfolds, the Little Rock Ninea group of African American high

school studentsrisked physical harm to integrate Little Rock schools. For the films

characters, however, the challenge is too great. Only Frank lives authentically at its

conclusion, and the film indicates he does so at a price. Most of the characters refusal to

see the way in which they themselves place limits on one another leaves them unable to

102
The concerns of lesbian women had been considered in tandem with domesticity and the division of
labor between men and women beforeparticularly in Mary McCarthys The Group (1963) and Marilyn
Frenchs The Womens Room (1977). Despite this, it might be said that these texts reiterate gay and lesbian
concerns which continue to be forgotten in most mainstream narratives of feminism.

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form any coalitions and thus unable to effect change. The film implicitly asks viewers to

look at the ways in which their own choices mirror those of these characters, asking if

they might, unlike the characters, see the connection between their own lives and those of

others and work on all fronts to combat conservative backlash. Pleasantville, which calls

itself a fable, is perhaps not so bound to reality. Change, the film reminds us, has already

happened; it is the audiences job perhaps to protect such changes from a growing

conservatism. It moves from the 1950s into the 1960s with the hope that viewers will

recognize that it is not inevitable to succumb to the push to resurrect the 1950s of the

mind. Betty Parker and her son David are largely able to win personal freedoms because

they act together with the broad-based coalition of coloreds fighting for civil liberties

and freedom of expression. Lastly, in The Hours, Clarissa Vaughn has the freedom to

love whom she chooses as well as the freedom to work, but she continues to be haunted

by the fact that, as a woman who performs a variety of domestic tasks, her contribution to

her partnership, her friendships, and the world is not valued as it should be. Virginia

Woolf and certainly Laura Brown are denied the opportunity to explore their sexuality

and their patriarchal culture affords them little chance for solidarity with other women.

Browns discontent is further compounded by her isolation in the suburbs and the

unavailability of the time and privacy necessary to pursue creative work. At the same

time, however, the book questions the possibility of total agency, suggesting that ideals of

self-sacrificing marriage and family-centered women continue to be resurrected. While it

offers no solution to this dilemma, the novel implicitly asks readers to recognize the

power, danger, and persistence of these ideals. The novel does, however, also offer a

glimmer of hope: some of its characters can step outside of these narratives of femininity

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at least for a time by stepping into the city, which allows them to imagine limitless

possibilities for their lives.

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Part II: Good Fences, Charming Gates, and The Wall: Empathy, Agency, Family

and the Suburb in Alicia Erians Towelhead (2005), Erika Elliss Good Fences

(1998), and Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993)

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 INTRODUCTION

Part II of this dissertation continues to investigate ways in which women

characters in texts written in the United States in the 1990s and the early years of the new

millennium experience the suburbs as constricting environments and yet work to move

beyond those constructions. The characters studied in the following chapters work to

achieve agency for themselves and for other members of their communities. They are

sometimes able to achieve small victories, but often the novels hint that large-scale

changes to the suburbs and the society that surrounds them will be necessary if minority

and ethnic women are to become truly empowered. In sketching the suburban

environment, these texts evoke pervasive discourses about the advantages and

disadvantages of suburban life and ultimately transform these discourses in order to

address the concerns of women doubly marginalized by virtue of both gender and race (or

ethnicity). In place of familiar anti-suburban criticisms sounded by mid-20th century

intellectuals who depicted the suburbs as places that foster a privileged but spiritually

empty existence for the white middle classparticularly middle-class menthe texts

studied in this chapter examine the sense of alienation and dislocation experienced by

women from groups historically excluded from suburban life. In doing so, the texts at

hand show that, though the suburbs are growing more diverse, they continue to operate

on racist and patriarchal foundations.

At the same time, these texts also disrupt established pro-suburban discourses.

Pro-suburban discourse, in contrast to the intellectual strains of anti-suburban discourse,

maintains that the suburbs are superior to the central cities, citing safety, family-centered

life, and well-performing schools as the suburbs chief advantages. While the literary

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texts featured in Part II center on diverse middle-class families attracted to the advantages

that the suburbs claim to possess, they also reveal that pro-suburban discourse is deeply

racialized. By showing the ways in which the suburbs exclude families of color from the

privileges they confer, the novels studied in the coming chapters reveal that pro-suburban

discourse is built on racist assumptions about the inferiority of multicultural

communities. While these texts embrace a hellish vision of the suburbs derived from anti-

suburban discourse and while they work directly against a pro-suburban discourse that

claims suburban homeownership ensures childrens futures and represents the

achievement of the American Dream, they do not work entirely within these familiar

discourses. Rather, they quote these discourses but suggest both that the experience of

ethnic and minority suburbanites is unique and that suburban women can gain some

agency. Though these novels demonstrate that the suburbs subjugate women to

patriarchal authority and exclude people of color and the poor, they make clear that these

marginalized people need not remain excluded. Though the suburbs are often regarded as

built environments that exert a great deal of control over their inhabitants lives, all three

novels discussed in this section venture that this control is not absolute and that

determined leaders can transform the suburbs into somewhat more inclusive

communities.

Whereas Far from Heaven and The Hours call attention to the racism that

pervaded early suburbs in order to combat a creeping nostalgia for the post-World War II

era, the texts studied in Part IIAlicia Erians Towelhead (2005), Erika Elliss Good

Fences (1998), and Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993)are set in suburbs that

are no longer racially homogenous but are by no means free of the suburbs legacy of

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segregation. These three texts use the deep association within the cultural imagination of

the suburbs with alienation and isolation on one hand and with upward mobility and the

American Dream on the other as starting points from which to explore issues germane

to the lives of suburban women from racial and ethnic minority groups. These texts thus

adapt anti-suburban discourse, which paints the suburbs as mirages or false paradises, or

as spiritually and socially empty places fronted by glittering exteriors, to detail the

disappointment experienced by minority and ethnic suburbanites in newly integrated

communities by pushing beyond the idea of the mirage to examine how social isolation

and alienation are intensified for those traditionally excluded from the suburbs.

In Good Fences, African American homemaker Mabel Spaders observations of

the empty streets and silent homes of Greenwich, Connecticut echo mid-century

invectives against suburbanization. Yet, as the text progresses, her sense of alienation and

isolation becomes clearly linked to the racism of her white neighbors, who include her

only provisionally in the social life of the town. In addition, her despair is a response to

the loss of African American family and community ties, ties that her husband fears will

hurt the familys chances for mobility. Moreover, the novel, like the other texts studied in

this section, interrogates pro-suburban discourses that equate suburban home ownership

with safety, success, and economic and educational opportunity while at the same time

promoting segregated communities. Alicia Erians Towelhead does this by inverting the

suburbs claim to safe, family-centered communitiesa claim primarily founded on the

suburbs geographical distance from cities and exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities

to show the ways in which racialized ideas of safety and patriarchal notions of family

contribute to tragedy in the life of one Arab American teenaged girl.

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 In contrast to Elliss and Erians texts, which use traditional pro- and anti-

suburban discourses to explore the experience of the integration of the suburbs, Octavia

Butlers futuristic Parable of the Sower invokes anti-suburban discourse to offer a highly

ambivalent portrayal of an already-integrated gated community. While previous anti-

suburban writers have cited the gated community as representative of a complete

withdrawal from public life into private lifethe apotheosis of the suburban impulse

Butlers text portrays a gated community in a way that highlights the neighborhoods

collective spirit and is sympathetic to residents desire to achieve safety and economic

security. At the same time, the text is unflinching in its depiction of the structural

inequalities that rule the world outside the neighborhood, rendering the masses desperate

and forcing vast numbers of people of color into slavery or near-slavery. Through the

ultimate collapse of the gated community, Butlers novel suggests that the very notion of

classand the boundary systems that define classmust be discarded in favor of a more

sustainable, egalitarian social structure. While some of the cooperative relationships

fostered within the gated community serve later in the text as an inspiration for a more

radical model of diversity and collectivity, the protagonist Lauren senses early in the

novel that she must drastically revise ways of life in order to form a truly inclusive

community.

In putting ethnic and minority suburbanites at the center of their texts, Erian, Ellis,

and Butler address the concerns of groups often invisible in the American news media

and popular culture. Though the racial and ethnic diversity of the suburbs continues to

grow, little scholarship exists that focuses on cinema and fiction centered on characters of

non-European heritage in the suburbs. The texts I examine in the following three

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chapters seek to end this invisibility by interrogating conflicting ideas of suburban life

that are deeply rooted in the American cultural imagination. These conflicting ideas,

solidified into what I am calling pro and anti-suburban discourse, have been discussed at

length by Robert Beuka in his book SuburbiaNation (2004), which details Americas

deep ambivalence about the suburban places that have been portrayed as both utopias and

dystopias throughout their history. While neither pro- nor anti-suburban discourses

directly address race, I believe the literary texts I explore in Part II work to reveal racism

as an ever-present component of suburban life and the discourses used to understand this

life. In making this suggestion, I am building on the work of previous scholars such as

Beuka, Catherine Jurca, David Mark Hummon, and Steve Macek.

Anti-Suburban Discourse and Race

Both Jurcas White Diaspora (2001) and Beukas SuburbiaNation (2004) identify the

relationship between what I am calling anti-suburban discourse and race. Jurca traces

this discourse in its literary variant, beginning with Sinclairs Babbit (1922) and moving

through the suburban novels and stories of Yates, Cheever, and Updike to the present

day. She suggests that, despite the fact that these texts mostly male protagonists were

materially secure, Suburbanites have long been characterized by alienation, anguish, and

self-pity (161). Jurca points out that this mid-20th century concern for alienated white

suburbanites eclipsed consideration of the exclusion of African Americans from the

material advantages of the expanded home-ownership brought about by post-World War

II suburbanization (9). As she explains, While suburbs obviously do not guarantee

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familial perfection, just as slums do not ensure familial failure, it is possible to take the

former insight too far and re-mythologize the suburbs as the parodic antithesis of the

good life, where gratification on every level is non-existent. The suburban novel errs

conspicuously in this direction (166). This is particularly true, Jurca says, of suburban

novels depictions of their male protagonists:

The literary treatment of suburban masculinity, in other words, has never really

had a bright side for contemporary novelists newly to refute. Writers since the

1960s have not invented a tradition so much as carried on and reworked the

legacy of suburban homelessness that emerged so insistently in [Upton Sinclairs]

Babbitt . . . . (161)

This trope of homelessness is prevalent in the most famous works of suburban literature.

Cheever and Updikes work provide two prominent examples. Cheevers The

Swimmer, for example, is a send-up of the suburban good life Neddy Merrill is intent on

celebrating as he hops from pool to pool. By the end of the story, it is apparent that he is

both literally homeless and a friendless alcoholic. In John Updikes Rabbit series, Rabbit

Angstrom repeatedly attempts to escape the suburbs despite his increasing affluence.

According to Jurca,

. Harry Rabbit Angstrom is in a trap. He runs. He returns. Having

discovered that home and family are inescapable, he runs again, impelled by a

desire for escape that is no less powerful. He returns again, and some thirteen

hundred additional pages record his enduring fantasies of flight. (162)

This depiction of the suburbs as a miragea destination that reveals itself to be a trap

continues to form a predominant image of the suburbs in the American cultural

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imagination. In the Oscar-Winning American Beauty (1999), for example, Lester

Burnham also runs from his corporate job and suburban doldrums, looking for spiritual

renewal in marijuana and escape in sexual fantasies about his daughters friend Angela.

In 2008, Beauty director Sam Mendes returned to the suburbs with a screen version of

Richard Yatess Revolutionary Road, the story of a suburban couple with two young

children who dream of escaping their prosperous suburban neighborhood to live abroad

in Paris.

As Robert Beukas scholarship demonstrates, the academic variant of what I am

calling anti-suburban discourse, like its literary cousin, also focused its concerns on white

suburban men. According to Beuka, anti-suburban discourse in the social sciences (what

he calls dystopic representations of the suburbs) suggested that the suburbswhich take

the private home as their primary unit while grouping similar homes together in relatively

close proximity to one another (but removed from the central city)engender both the

alienation of the individual and a mindless sort of social conformity. This narrative was

originally built primarily around a mid-century crisis of masculinity, in which cultural

commentators articulated fears that the twin phenomena of the corporation and the suburb

would erode an ethic of rugged individualism. Though, unlike Betty Friedan, these

commentators often sidelined the suburbs implications for women, like Friedan, these

commentators suggested that the suburbs built environment in part determines the lives

of their inhabitants, particularly suburbanites expression of gender (here masculinity).

As Beuka states,

Perhaps the most plausible catalyst for this overlap between landscape and gender

psychology can be found in the homogenous design of the new suburbs

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 themselves. At once instantly recognizable and unavoidably disorienting for their

very sameness, the postwar suburbs eliminated any visual evidence of difference

between residents, thus positioning new suburbanites as interchangeable elements

of a planned environment, rather than as individuals active in the shaping of their

own space and identities. (110)

Anti-suburban proclamations, while they shared this concern for an implicitly masculine

ideal of rugged individualism, took on a variety of tones.

In his book, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, Its Prospects

(1961), influential historian Lewis Mumford offered the most articulate theory

connecting the built environment and the social outcomes of burgeoning American

suburbs by pinpointing what he saw as the curious tendency of the suburbs to foster both

the isolation of the individual and pervasive social conformity. While noting that early

suburbs were in part a response to the crowded conditions of the city, he saw increasingly

crowded suburbs as even poorer alternatives (592). For Mumford, by isolating their

residents within virtually identical private homes away from commercial and communal

spaces such as parks, stores, and churches, suburbs left their inhabitants more vulnerable

to social control via mass culture:

The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its

supposed benefits. The end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more

either in a motorcar or within the cabin of darkness before the television set.

Soon, with a little more automation of traffic, mostly in a motor car travelling

greater distances under remote control so that the one-time driver may occupy

himself with a television set, having lost even the freedom of the steering wheel.

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 Every part of life, indeed, will come through official channels and be under

supervision. With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as

possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and

through guarded channels too costly to be utilized by small groups or private

individuals. (Mumford 511-512)

While Mumford was concerned with women as well as men, theorizing that the

dependence on automatic appliances and television was replacing the companionship

housewives normally found in their daily work in both rural and urban communities, this

pervasive anxiety about social control was largely framed around the concerns that

suburbs would erode male independence (Mumford 593). 103

A less scholarly exploration of the suburbs potential threats came in the form of

John Keatss polemic A Crack in the Picture Window (1956). Focusing on the fictional

John Drone, a returning GI, and his wife, Mary, this didactic novel sounded a blaring

alarm about the emasculating effects of the suburbs. Like Mumford, Keats traced this

threat to the built environment. Keats bemoaned the fact that people whose age, income,

number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions and perhaps even

blood type were exactly alike settled new suburban developments (xi). Not only was this

loss of individuality in itself harmful, he proclaimed, but the distance of the development

from the city ensured that residents friendships were recruited entirely within their

103
While his extensive thought on the relationship between the built environment and social life continues
to influence todays New Urbanist thought, which seeks at least ostensibly to build more inclusive
communities, this concern about the erosion of individuality seems to be geared to the needs of white men
and women receive only secondary consideration. Nonetheless, Mumfords legacy is an important one.
While todays cultural commentators often decry the suburbs dependence on automobile travel as
environmentally unsustainable, over four decades ago, Mumford warned that car culture would change the
American social fabric. Today, the Lewis Mumford Center at SUNY Albany sponsors critical research on
urban and regional development worldwide, including many projects focusing on the intersections of race
and development.

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neighborhood block, encouraging even further conformity (61). In addition, husbands

sizable commutes prolonged their daily absence from the home, leaving bored wives

many opportunities to congregate in lawn dates or koffee klatches to commiserate

about their marriages, potentially eroding both family stability and male power (58).

Phillip Wylie echoed Keatss rhetoric by contending that the relative ease of suburban

life and the long hours spent by husbands commuting to and from the city led bored

suburban housewives (whom he dismissively calls Moms) to spend much of their time

volunteering for organizations (203). Such organizations, he said, are intimidating to

all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they

terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards (203). For

Keats and Wylie, as well as for the male authors studied by Jurca, the suburbs were

emasculating.

While there is clearly a difference between the gravity of Mumfords arguments

and the misogyny of Keats and Wylie, what I wish to emphasize is that the pervasive

strain of anti-suburban thought that was developed at mid-century and that continues to

sound its echoes today was developed primarily in response to mens concerns.

Furthermore, as Jurca emphasizes, this discourse focused on suburbias supposed threats

to white suburbanites themselves, while failing to address racial minorities that had little

opportunity for affordable home ownership. Just as the legacy of anti-suburban discourse

is longstanding, so are the racial disparities stemming from the unequal distribution of

homeownership opportunities. Racist laws and practices ensured that Americas post-

World War II suburbs were primarily home to white residents. It is only since the 1970s

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that African Americans and other minorities have settled in suburban communities with

increasing frequency.

Pro-Suburban Discourse and Race

The work of sociologist David Mark Hummon is particularly helpful in describing

pro-suburban discourse. In his 1990 book Commonplaces: Community Ideology and

Identity in America, Hummon defined this phenomenon as Suburbanist ideology. As

Hummon reports, many suburban residents use race-neutral language to express a

preference for communities they see as safe and family centered. These enthusiastic

suburbanites, whom he identifies as Suburbanists, are likely to conclude that

suburban residents are particularly interested in matters of home and family life and that,

as a result, suburban life is especially good for children (Hummon 101). They conceive

of the suburbs advantages for children in terms of health and safety. Moreover, they see

suburbs as clean, quiet, natural, and secure places, in contrast to polluted, noisy,

crowded, artificial and dangerous cities (105). Closely linked with safety in the minds of

these Suburbanists is the presumption that suburban schools are superior to urban schools

(Hummon 105).

Perhaps Hummons most important finding is that Suburbanists mention of

schools and safety serves as a euphemism for their preference for segregated

communities:

In talking about suburbs and the community in which they live, suburbanites do

not characterize suburbs as predominantly white communities, despite the fact

that the racial segregation of the suburbs is one of the most notable community

differences within the metropolitan context. (Hummon 106)

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While Suburbanists often do not mention race when explaining their choice of

communities, Hummon has argued that they define safety using race-bound assumptions,

which give preference to relatively segregated communities over multicultural ones.

Subjects speaking to Hummon off the record, for example, would admit such preferences

to him, while during official research, they were hesitant to mention race. Although anti-

suburban discourse ultimately functions to eclipse the relationship between white

privilege and suburban expansion, pro-suburban discourse, also politically fraught, tends

to use race-neutral language to describe some Americans implicitly racist preferences for

suburban communities.

Moreover, pro-suburban discourse, which paints the suburbs as superior to cities,

makes no room for the analysis of the relationship between the urban core and the

periphery. While suburbs and cities stand on either side of a good/bad, prosperous/poor,

safe/dangerous, white/black dichotomy, no mention is made of the drain suburban

expansion exacts on cities or of the policies that limit people of color from living where

they choose. By exploring the lives of ethnic and minority suburbanites, the literary texts

examined in Part II pose explicit challenges to this pro-suburban discourse. Whereas

Hummons white suburbanites implicitly identified the homogeneity of their community

with safety, these literary texts show the threat that this insularity poses to residents who

are among the first to integrate their communities.

Like Hummon, historian Steve Macek also finds that suburbanites show a

tendency toward extreme privatism and atomistic individualism (33) and define

themselves in opposition to city-dwellers. In his book, Urban Nightmares: The Media,

The Right, and the Moral Panic over The City (2006), Macek suggests that suburbanites

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glorify domesticity and tout the suburbs as the antidote to cities they view as corrupted,

polluted, and dangerous. Furthermore, Macek argues that the mass media magnifies such

views of the city by broadcasting images of urban violence conforming to suburbanites

views of urban life:

While the mainstream mass media encourage the suburban middle classs

attachment to insular, home-centered life, they are also one of the few sources of

information about the urban core. This dependence on the media for knowledge of

the urban Other by itself generates a psychological distance between suburbs

and cities. . . . this sense of distance is compounded by the fact that the stories the

media tell about urban existence are often alarming and derogatory and tend to

feed into and reaffirm agoraphobic leanings of the contemporary suburban

outlook (35).

Macek suggests that such anti-urbanism has long been a means of drawing attention away

from economic injustice.

He cites that fears of the city accompanied rapid industrialization in the late 19 th

and early 20th century, diverting attention from the exploitation of immigrant labor (43);

similarly, the urban panic of the late 20th century accompanied the polarization of the

American economy:

The growing economic disparity between American cities and suburbs in the

1980s and 90s was so dramatic that it was virtually impossible to ignore. Also

impossible to ignore was the intense poverty and host of social ills that came to be

concentrated in the black and Latino inner city as a direct consequence of this

polarization. Many suburbanites (and virtually all of their political leaders)

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 reacted to this deepening divide with a fear and growing unease about an urban

underclass seen as criminal, degenerate, violent, and a threat to the family-

oriented way of life they cherish . . . (36)

Macek further notes that, like earlier urban panics, this latest wave of anti-urbanism is

politically motivated:

However, I contend that the panic over the city was neither a simple reflex of the

suburban mentality nor a realistic response to a genuine threat; rather, it was

created, fueled, and organized by a right wing discourse on the urban crisis

that supplied an ideological framework and a set of ideologically laden concepts

for interpreting conditions in the inner city, one which both amplified suburban

fears and gave them a decidedly reactionary spin. (138)

While the shaping of the suburban electorate is not my focus here, it is important to note

that the often-sentimentalized comfort of the suburban home is a politically fraught

concept. As Hummon and Maceks work shows, such a concept, whether articulated by

the media or by suburbanites themselves, is created through vilification of the city and of

city-dwellers. Moreover, this vilification consistently draws attention away from the

concepts of social, economic, and racial privilege and naturalizes disparities between

cities and suburbs.

The texts studied in this section will use this pro-suburban/anti-urban discourse in

a variety of ways. Good Fences and Towelhead both portray families who feel that

moving to the suburbs will bring safety, security, and opportunity to their children. In

both cases, the suburbs are instead unwelcoming to these families of color. In Parable of

the Sower, the community of Rodeblo is emphatically anti-urban in its outlook. As the

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text progresses, however, its protagonist Lauren Olamina becomes conscious of the

structural inequalities that divide urban and suburban communities and begins to build a

community that bridges these divides.

African American Suburbanization

As historian Andrew Wiese argues in Places of Their Own: African American

Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (2004), residential segregation was one of the

white Norths response to the Great Migration:

. . . the Great Migration coincided with white efforts to restrict black mobility in

social, economic, and spatial terms. In cities and suburbs alike, the arrival of

black migrants provoked new initiatives in land-use planning, education, and

public space designed to secure black inequality and white privilege. (40)

According to Wiese, discrimination confronting black families seeking to move to the

suburban fringe has existed since the early decades of the 20th century. From this time

forward, strategies designed to maintain residential segregation were initiated from

various sectors of American society, ranging from private business (particularly the

lending and real estate industries), to government agencies, to white suburban residents.

Work to create and maintain segregated neighborhoods was both covert and overt,

persisting despite the passage of civil rights legislation designed to prohibit

discrimination.

According to Wiese, by the year 1914, the National Association of Real Estate

Boards widely promulgated the idea in its textbooks that nonwhites devastated the value

of property and sought to systematically exclude African Americans from majority-

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white neighborhoods by including in its code of ethics a prohibition against selling to any

persons whose presence will clearly be detrimental to real estate values (41, qtd. in

Wiese 41). The practices of builders and lenders also supported residential segregation

(41). These institutions would not provide housing for African Americans outside a few

segregated districts (Wiese 41). During the initial suburban boom of the 1920s, which

was interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, builders of new

developments wrote into their deeds covenants that would dictate the future use of the

developed land; these covenants included restrictions on non-white or ethnic occupancy

of the homes developed, thus insuring that all future buyers would be white (Wiese 42).

In addition, white suburbanites often made if difficult, if not dangerous, for non-whites

to set up housekeeping through tactics like arson and bombings (42). While African

Americans were the primary targets of such policies and actions, Wiese reports that

restrictive covenants in some places also excluded Latinos, Asians, and Jews from new

housing (42).

After the Second World War, some African Americans sought to join the legions

of whites seeking the American Dream on the urban periphery; however, as Wiese asserts

suburban land became a focus of racial struggle in the postwar United States (95).

Despite the fact that the era is widely remembered for government-backed no- or low-

money-down, long-term mortgages that expanded homeownership exponentially, African

Americans remained largely excluded from the suburban boom. Those who attempted to

build their own homes, like black homebuilders in Woodmere, Ohio, were often thwarted

by white officials who fined and even arrested them for the violation of arcane building

codes or of newly minted codes designed to discourage black homebuilding (94). In

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addition, slum-clearance programs, while often associated with the urban core, were also

prevalent in the suburbs. Authorities invoked such programs to oust suburban African

Americans from their homes in order to make room for more lucrative developments

(106-107). To prevent the integration of white neighborhoods, the real estate industry, as

well as builders and lenders, continued to propagate white fears that nonwhite residents

would diminish property values, though numerous studies of race and property values

refuted any causal link between integration and property values (98). White

homeowners also continued to present an obstacle to black suburbanization, often

forming neighborhood associations to enact race-restrictive covenants that barred

current and future owners from selling or renting property to non-whites (100). Those

African Americans who successfully surmounted these barriers to homeownership were

often met with death threats, property destruction, and physical violence (100).

According to Wiese, When it came to race, arson was as suburban as the backyard

barbeque grill during much of the postwar period (100).

Government interventions in the 1940s and 1950s most often limited rather than

expanded opportunities for African Americans to own suburban homes. In fact, courts

upheld covenants restricting the sale of homes to blacks (100) and until 1950 the Federal

Housing Administration insured mortgages only in racially segregated neighborhoods

(101). Barriers also confronted the few developers whose goal was to create integrated

developments. Suburban jurisdictions used zoning authority and control of municipal

sewer and water services to thwart plans for integrated housing (101). In an era

remembered for the expansion of the home-owning middle class, African Americans of

all classes continued to face a multitude of constraints when searching for a place to live.

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It was not until the 1970safter the gains of the Civil Rights movementthat African

American suburbanization began to increase markedly, although barriers remained and

discrimination met those who did move to the suburbs. The introduction to Chapter 2 of

this section, dedicated to the novel Good Fences, will develop the history of African

American suburbanization from the 1970s to the present.

Agency, Empathy, and Suburban Life

For all their differences, pro and anti-suburban discourses converge in that they

are deeply deterministic. Pro-suburban discourse suggests that the suburban environment

nurtures childrens emotional, social, and intellectual growth while the urban

environment stunts this growth. On the other hand, anti-suburban discourse layers spatial

isolation with social isolation and visual conformity with social conformity, conflating

uniform suburban architecture with the purportedly conformist psyche of the suburbanite.

The literary texts discussed in the subsequent three chapters diverge from these

discourses both by reinserting race into the discussion of the suburbs and by refusing to

see the suburban environment as wholly deterministic. While the fictional suburbs built

environments may seem to determine social structures and individual lives to a degree,

these texts offer female characters who have some agency to attempt to form more

inclusive communities. These women effect change in a variety of ways. In Good Fences,

Mabel Spader welcomes an outsider to the neighborhood, restoring a sense of African

American womens solidarity despite challenges from both her wealthy white neighbors

and her husband. In Towelhead, Jasira Maroun claims her voice by reporting an act of

sexual abuse and her neighbor Melina Hines crosses traditional lines of property and

family to open her home to Jasira. In Parable of the Sower, protagonist Lauren Olamina

leads a band of refugees from the greater Los Angeles areasome drawn from the urban
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poor, others from her own neighborson a quest to form a new, more egalitarian

community in Northern California. Towelhead, Good Fences, and Parable of the Sower

all ascribe some agency to the women at their centers and react to the image of the

suburbs as inescapable and unchangeable prisons in various ways. Despite the fact that

their female characters are not powerless, they are limited in their ability to make change.

Jasira, for example, is portrayed largely as a victim and must be saved by Melina. Mabel

and Ruth, while they form a strong bond at the end of the novel, may not be able to

challenge the power of the neighborhoods oldest families. Parable paints Lauren as a

strong leader, but she must leave her suburban neighborhood behind in order to form an

inclusive community.

In addition to the task of confronting racism, the women featured in Towelhead,

Good Fences, and Parable of the Sower grapple with their communities tendencies to

draw rather rigid boundaries around the family. While Mumford has suggested that the

citys abundance of public space fostered public interaction and whereas Hummon has

noted that the manageable size of small towns also supported public life, what both pro-

and anti-suburban discourses emphasize about the suburb is that the private home is its

essential unit. Suburbs emphasis on privacy, in fact, has engendered a genre of salacious

fiction and television dramas that revels in exposing sensational acts that take place

behind closed doors, including murder (Desperate Housewives, 2004-), drug-dealing

(Weeds, 2005-), and Vampirism (The Gates, 2008-). While these series caricaturize the

ways in which the suburbs emphasis on privacy and propriety shields criminal and anti-

social behavior, some academic scholarship suggests that the suburban value of family

privacy both exists and has serious implications.

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 In her book, Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White and Middle Class (2000),

sociologist Lorraine Delia Kenney studies the relatively economically and racially

homogeneous community of Shoreham-Wading River Middle School in suburban Long

Island and finds a culture that persistently values non-interference in private or moral

affairs. Kenney described this culture as a variant of what MP Baumgartner called moral

minimalism in her study of another suburb (Baumgartner 1). Moral minimalism,

Baumgartner writes, creates a culture in which people prefer the least extreme reactions

to offences (1). Kenney summarizes that such an approach to conflict results in a

culture of avoidance with a tendency toward tolerating or doing nothing at all about

disturbing behavior, abandoning contentious matters, avoiding annoying individuals,

approaching offenders in a conciliatory fashion, or complaining secretly to officials

(21). In all three novels discussed in Part II, such a culture of avoidance enforces a

silence about violence against women.

For the victims of violence in these novels, the heavy physical boundaries that

surround the familythe private home and lawnsolidify a culture of avoidance that

deflects attention away from gender-based abuses of power and hence away from

domestic and sexual violence. 104 Furthermore, this culture also denies other forms of

difference and attending imbalances of power by enforcing a strict heteronormativity on

the one hand and by never directly discussing sexuality on the other, for example

(Kenney 26). Overturning the effects of a culture of avoidance is key to the ability of the

three main characters discussed in Part II to transform their communities. Towelheads

Melina Hines and Parable of the Sowers Lauren Olamina must first recognize and

104
Kenney makes a similar assertion about the relationship of a culture of avoidance and sexual abuse in
her exploration of the case of Cheryl Pierson, a Long Island teen convicted of murdering her abusive father.
See Kenney, Chapter 3, Justify My Love: The Heterosexuality of Teenaged Girlhood.

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address sexual abuse in their respective neighborhoods in order to create safe

communities. Mabel Spader, on the other hand, has clear insight into the way her white

neighbors have crafted a culture of avoidance: they overlook a white resident who beats

his wife (eventually to death) and choose to focus their attention instead on Ruth Crisp,

the new African-American neighbor who violates the towns aesthetic sensibilities by

using her front lawn to host parties. True to the culture of avoidance, most neighbors

complain about, but do not confront, Ruth. They hope instead that Mabel will relay their

concerns to her.

Although these novels recognize the effects of suburban racism, a built

environment emphasizing the private home, and a culture of avoidance, they suggest that

women can overcome some obstacles to agency by crossing the boundaries of the private,

patriarchal home in order to forge nurturing and collective bonds with other women.

While some achieve radical visions and others make modest gains, they all recognize that

others experience similar oppression and work alongside others to end their shared

oppression. In order to do this, these characters must have the ability to empathize with

others. As psychologist Martha Manning writes, empathy, an ability often associated with

women, is a trait that is often devalued and misunderstood: Traditionally, empathy was

seen as a good thing for a woman to have with children and sick people. But often it was

constituted as little more than warm fuzzies. It was not an important quality for males to

cultivate (Manning 33). Indeed, as researcher Carol Gilligan notes, Western cultures

often devalue empathy because it emphasizes interdependence rather than independence:

The individualism defined by the idea of the autonomous self reflects the value that has

been placed on detachmentin moral thinking, in self-development, in dealing with loss,

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and in the psychology of adolescence (6). Studying the moral development of women,

according to Gilligan, destabilizes the gendered bias that equates detachment with moral

maturity. Through such a study, one can recognize that attachment or interdependence

rather than independence is the primary dimension of human experience (Gilligan

Remapping 5), and the empathetic moral reasoning apparent in girls tendency to wish

not to hurt others and attempts to devise a way of solving conflicts so that no one will

be hurt can be seen as marks of moral maturity rather than as a lack of mature

independence (Gilligan Concepts 65). Whereas male critics and authors of the mid-

century portrayed the suburbs as alienating and isolating, the women in the texts explored

in Part II create more inclusive communities by practicing empathetic moral reasoning.

Both Gilligan and Manning are careful to delineate true empathy from the self-

abnegation inherent in ideals like the Happy Housewife Heroine and The Angel in the

House discussed in Part I, emphasizing that striving to understand others should not

entail striving to please others or basing ones identity solely upon the opinion of others.

As Manning writes, researchers have applied the distinction between communion

(having a positive, caring orientation toward others) and unmitigated communion

(taking that orientation much further, to the point where the focus is on others to the

exclusion of the self) (57). Women who neglect themselves in caring for others cannot

be defined as emotionally healthy:

They depend on the reaction of others to determine their identity and worth. This

is a recipe for distress. If a womans self-esteem comes only from other people,

she must remain active and highly invested in their lives. She neglects herself

even more. She burns out. This is the story of too many women. Born with the

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 belief that their identity is reflected solely in how helpful they are to others, they

are set up for lives in which they are constantly physically and emotionally

overextended. (Manning 57)

Gilligan concurs, writing that emotional maturity entails not letting others make ones

choices:

To the extent that women perceive themselves as having no choice, they

correspondingly excuse themselves from the responsibility that decision entrails.

Childlike in the vulnerability of their dependence and consequent fear of

abandonment, they claim to wish only to please, but in return for their goodness

they expect to be loved and cared for. (Gilligan Concepts 67)

Active, empathetic moral decision making, on the other hand, constitutes emotional

maturity.

The characters in each of the texts studied in Part II all exercise active and

sometimes courageous moral decision making in order to free themselves and others from

the institutions of patriarchy and racism that thrive in the suburban settings of the texts.

For example, when Mabel Turner welcomes Ruth Crisp in Good Fences, she immediately

begins to feel the burden of her neighbors intense racism lift from her shoulders,

demonstrating that true empathy does not lead to self-sacrifice but rather to

empowerment. Moreover, Mabel defies her husband and her more powerful white

neighbors to welcome Ruth. Mabel exercises moral decision-making based on fairness

and empathy rather than on pleasing others.

Towelhead explores both the risks of what Manning calls unmitigated

communion (57) and the necessity of women to eschew the competition encouraged by

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patriarchal society and act empathetically toward one another. When Jasiras mother Gail

discovers that her live-in boyfriend Barry physically assaulted her daughter, she does not

defend Jasira but blames her for Barrys actions, verbally insults her, and sends her to

live with her father.105 Jasiras father physically abuses her, becoming violent any time

Jasira transgresses his strict rules. Lastly, Jasiras neighbor Mr. Vuoso sexually assaults

her repeatedly. Surrounded by selfish and corrupt adults, Jasira tries desperately to please

them all, accepting her life as if she has no choices. It is a neighbor, Melina Hines, who

awakens Jasira to her ability to choose. Melina provides her with a mother figure and

educates her about physical and sexual abuse. As an adult that cares for Jasira

empathetically and without a personal agenda, Melina allows her to learn that she does

not exist to please others.

Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower places perhaps the greatest emphasis on

empathy. Its main character, Lauran Olamina, suffers from a condition called

hyperempathy, which causes her literally to feel anothers physical pain. Because any

pain she inflicts will also be inflicted on her, Lauren crafts a way to survive that uses

violence sparingly. Laurens condition allows her to understand the similarities between

her experiences and those of others despite the competitive conditions of the world

around her. As Manning writes, because no two human beings experiences are identical,

The ability to use the tastes we gain from our own experiences allows us to

understand others (35). Though Lauren grew up in a middle class community and never

105
The focus of this discussion will be on the abuse Jasira suffers at the hands of Rifat and Mr. Vuoso
because this abuse takes place in Charming Gates; however, it is worth noting that, in an interview, Erian
stressed the effects of emotional abuse (such as that inflicted by Gail) on Jasira. Erian says, Emotional
abuse is the worst thing. Its the low hum of distress. If someone just beats the crap out of you, that is high
intensity and very obviously bad. But if you are in a situation where things are always sort of bad, and it
doesnt let up, that is the stuff that gives you problems as an adult. That is the stuff that sends Jasira to the
guy next door, and that it why its alarming (Mehegan C1).

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knew the deprivation that some of her followers didthey are largely drawn from the

street poorher illness, her race, and her gender are also facets of her identity that allow

her to find analogies between her own experiences and those of others. 106 Her ability to

find these analogies between her experiences and those of others (analogies that often

evaded Cathy and Frank Whittaker in Far from Heaven) allow her to form ACORN, a

communal spiritual community dedicated to the groups survival.

106
Lauren J. Lacey notes that Laurens age prevents others in her original community from taking her
seriously. Her gender must be disguised so she can travel safely, her blackness marks her as a target for
racism, and her hyperempathy syndrome is perhaps the ultimate vulnerability (385).

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 CHAPTER ONE

Inside Charming Gates: Alicia Erians Towelhead and

Pro-suburban Discourse

Alicia Erians novel Towelhead (2004) uses both pro- and anti-suburban

discourses as its framework; however, the novel transforms these discourses, which

usually obscure questions of race, in order to address problems that confront an Arab

American family who is one of only a few minority families in a Texas suburb.

Specifically, the novel inverts both pro-suburban discourse, which presents the suburbs as

safe places perfectly suited to raising children, and anti-suburban discourse, which

suggests that economically-privileged suburbanites are trapped in stultifying communities

and unfulfilling lives. While both of these discourses tend to elide questions of race or

ethnicityanti-suburban discourse by ignoring the fact that suburbanites supposedly-

crippling advantages were secured at the expense of poor communities of color and pro-

suburban discourse by naturalizing the institutional racism which enriches the suburbs at

the expense of central citiesthis novel uses the experiences of the Maroun family to

expose the racist underpinnings of these discourses and to critique the suburbs from a

specifically feminist point of view.

First, in tirelessly documenting the discrimination Jasira Maroun faces in the

suburban subdivision of Charming Gates and in her local school, the novel suggests that

while pro-suburban discourses tout the suburbs as ideal places to raise children, the racist

foundations of suburban life threaten children who are not typical suburbanites.

Second, in using the familiar anti-suburban strategy of revealing the suburb to be only a

mirage of the good life and applying it not to white suburbanites but to a family largely

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cast out of suburban society, the novel suggests that racism is as serious a problem as the

drive toward conformity often bemoaned by mid-century cultural critics.

Whereas anti-suburban writers as Lewis Mumford, John Keats, and Philip Wylie

suggested that the suburbs were both atomisticthat they separated individual

households from the public sphereand conformistthat their socio-economic and

generational homogeneity foreclosed on the possibility of forming dynamic

communitiesTowelhead suggests that this distinct blend of conformism and

individualism is particularly threatening to women. The subjugation of public spirit to

family life, for example, allows Jasiras abuse by her father to happen without timely

interference by neighbors, while the tendency toward consensus or conformity renders

others slow to suspect Mr. Vuoso, a neighbor and Army reservist, of sexually assaulting

her. These alarming incidents of physical and sexual abuse also disrupt pro-suburban

discourse by showing that danger lies not in urban centers, but rather in suburbia itself

and even in the heart of suburbiathe suburban home.

The novels treatment of race, while it is often insightful, is at times hampered by

its insistence on recirculating Western assumptions about Arab cultures. On one hand,

because the novel centers on an Arab American family, it is in a unique position not only

to expose racism at the heart of suburbia, but also to question the validity of American

racial categories altogether. Through numerous discussions of whether Jasira, as an Arab

American girl, is white (as she is in U.S. legal discourse) or non-white (as her peers

and neighbors consider her) the novel points to the instability of racial constructs. On the

other hand, the novel plays into the hands of imperialism and imperialist versions of

Western feminism. For example, in portraying Jasiras Lebanese American father Rifat as

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violent, the novel could be seen as portraying Arab culture as brutish, backward, and in

need of enlightenment from Western powers. In addition, the novel depicts Melina Hines,

the Marouns neighbor, as singularly capable of rescuing Jasira. According to theorist

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Western feminism errs in drawing Third-World women as a

homogeneous group, which produces the image of an average third world woman

who is portrayed as the antithesis of the liberated white woman (56). In this common

depiction,

The average third-world woman leads an essentially truncated life based

on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being third

world (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic,

family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the

(implicit) self-representation of Western Women as educated, as modern,

as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom

to make their own decisions. (56)

While Jasira is multi-ethnic (her mother is Irish) and American-born, and while her father

is deeply concerned with her education, some of these words certainly describe the

dichotomy drawn between Melina Hines and Jasira in the book: Jasira knows nothing of

sex until she learns of it first from Mr. Vuosos Playboy collection and then from

Melinas gift of a book akin to Our Bodies, Our Selves. She is also incessantly

victimized until Melinas multiple interventions on her behalf. The risk inherent in

drawing such crude and binary contrasts, Mohanty suggests, is that These distinctions

are made on the basis of the privileging of a certain group [i.e. Western women] as the

norm or the referent (56). Hence, despite calls for feminist sisterhood, Western

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feminists alone become the true subjects of this counterhistory. Third world women, on

the other hand, never rise above the dehabilitating generality of their object status

(Mohanty 71). In addition, such a binary is of course a falsity. As Towelhead itself will

show in its critique of American gender norms, Western culture is not necessarily

feminist. As Mohanty reminds us, This is not to suggest that Western women are

secular, liberated, and in control of their own lives. I am referring to a discursive self-

presentation, not necessarily material reality (74). In Towelhead, Jasira remains a nave

narrator throughout most of the book and it is only after Melina takes her into her home

that she gains any agency. The novel at the same time makes an interestingly progressive

critique in suggesting that Mr. Vuosowho is both an all-American (read: Euro-

American Christian) father and a potential American soldier in an Arab nationis the

one who most violently attacks Jasira. Using him as a representation of American

patriarchy through his affection for Playboy and his abuse of Jasira, the book, despite its

imperialist traces, also reminds us that the discursive self-presentation of the western

women as uniformly secular, liberated, and in control of their own lives is a false one

and that If this were a material reality, there would be no need for political movements

in the West (Mohanty 75).

Despite Vuosos villainy, the novel is not strictly anti-suburban. Whereas anti-

suburban discourse would suggest that the suburbs are a trapthat their environments

determine the lives of their inhabitants by both isolating them and forcing them into a

conformist moldthis novel suggests that while suburbs may not be the utopias pro-

suburban discourse claims them to be, they do not necessarily doom their inhabitants.

While the novel demonstrates that the Marouns Houston suburb is far from a paradise

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for women and Arab Americans, it suggests that reaching across the boundaries of the

private home can bring about an environment that is truly beneficial to families and

children. The books sexual and racial politics become complicated, however, in that a

white neighbor, Melina Hines, takes the primary role in reimagining the suburb, whereas

Jasira only gains marginal agency under Melinas tutelage. The other texts discussed in

this section, Good Fences and Parable of the Sower, each to varying degrees make the

claim that women of color can work to transform their communities. While Towelhead

also posits a more collectively-oriented suburb as a possible cure for the ills of these

communities, it problematically presents this sea change as something that takes place

under the leadership of white women only.

______________________________________________________________

Unfortunately, little research exists on Arab Americans living in the suburbs.

While there remain imperialist implications to the books argument for better suburban

communities, the book remains an insightful critique of American racial politics in part

grounded in Arab American history. This history suggests that Arab Americans have

alternated in the popular perception between an invisible minority whose presence as a

culturally and politically unique group was neither recognized by the mainstream nor

asserted by its members and a highly visible out-group whose loyalties to the United

States are deemed suspect. Early in the 20th century, Arab Americans positioned

themselves as a distinct group in the political arena. As political scientist Michael W.

Suleiman writes, Before World War I, Arabs in North America thought of themselves as

sojourners, as people who were in, but not part of American society. Their politics

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reflected and emulated the politics of their homeland in substance and style, because they

were only temporarily away from home (6). When World War I cut these immigrants

ties to their homelands, however, Arab Americans generally moved into the mainstream

of American society (Suleiman 4-5). Scholars Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham

write, The reasons behind their lack of ethnic visibility lay partly in their small numbers

in relation to most ethnic groups in America and partly in the fact that they were

generally well-integrated, acculturated, and even assimilated in to mainstream society

(1). Literature professor Steven George Salaita notes that between World War I and 1967,

most Arab Americans left behind the Arabic language and passed on only cultural

features of the so-called Old World (eg. food, theology, childrearing, [and] family ties)

(75). Their ethnic identity, most scholars agree, had little bearing on their political

affiliations. After the Six-Day war in 1967, however, a distinctly Arab American

consciousness began to develop as Arabs in America became dismayed and extremely

disappointed to see how greatly one sided and pro-Israeli the American communications

media were in reporting on the Middle East (Sulieman 10). While scholars suggest this

conflict marks the beginning of a specifically Arab American consciousness, the groups

visibility to other Americans has continued to fluctuate according to other world events.

The 1973 oil embargo, the first Gulf War, the events of September 11, 2001, and

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have repeatedly thrust Arab Americans into the

forefront of the American political imagination, which often misconstrues them as a

politically and religiously homogeneous group fundamentally at odds with all of

American culture. During the oil embargo of 1973, Arab Americans became the last

ethnic group safe to hate in America (Nicholas Von Hoffman qtd in Orfalea Before 6).

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In 1991, with the Gulf War, historian and writer Gregory Orfalea documents that racist

sentiment again emerged. In 1990, prior to the Gulf war, the ADC (Arab American Anti-

Discrimination Committee) reported 29 hate crimes against Arab Americans (Arab

Americans 277). In 1991, that number rose to 119 (Arab Americans 277). This anti-

Arab American sentiment reemerged after the events of September 11, 2001. As Orfalea

reports, as many as 700 violent attacks on Arab Americans took place in response to 9/11

and as many as 11 people were killed in the backlash (Arab Americans 304). In the

ongoing, well-publicized investigations of terror suspects, Arab Americans were subject

to indefinite detentions, seizures, and wire-tapping. While there was an outcry on the left,

seemingly equal numbers of Americans supported such measures. Towelhead, while its

action ends in 1991, captures the parallels between that time and the second Gulf War (it

was published in 2005). In 1991 as in 2005, Arab Americans are highly visible and

treated with suspicion. For example, although Jasiras father Rifat works for NASA, the

Marouns neighbor Mr. Vuoso assumes that he is anti-American and supports Saddam

Hussein.

Moreover, exploring the relationship between Jasira and her boyfriend, an African

American student named Thomas Bradley, allows the novel to examine the indeterminate

racial status of Arab Americans. The novel and its characters repeatedly question whether

Jasira is white, or, like Thomas, she is non-white. American law considers Arab

Americans white, a fact that Jasiras father Rifat invokes on one occasion to distance

himself from African Americans. Historian Sarah Gualtieri traces both Arab Americans

legal status as white and the divide between Arab Americans and other minorities to

early Syrian immigrants battles for the right to become citizens, a privilege often

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forbidden to non-whites during the early years of the twentieth century. Early legal

arguments for Syrians whiteness often rested on the cultural contributions of the Arab

world to Western religions and cultures (102). However, as racial discrimination against

Syrians mounted and many immigration battles were lost in courts, the ways in which

Syrian whiteness was defined both within the community and without shifted. No longer

did Syrians simply claim whiteness by asserting their Christian credentials; they began to

do so in terms that explicitly excluded blacks and Asians (102). In 1915, an appeal by

immigrant George Dow secured the status of Syrians, and by extension all Arab

Americans, as white for the purpose of immigration laws. While in the novel Towelhead,

Rifat considers the Lebanese culturally superior to Americans, he emphasizes his

daughters legal status as white and assumes that African Americans are inferior.

Rifat also points to the forms (Erian 267), standardized documents such as

census questionnaires or job applications, as his evidence for Jasiras whiteness, while

more recently Arab Americans have fought to be recognized as a distinct group on such

official documents. According to National Public Radio and other news outlets, Arab

American activists urged members of their community to write in Arab in the blank

next to the racial designation Other on the 2010 census (Kahn). While census officials

insisted this group would nonetheless be counted as white, activists hoped their efforts

would allow them to assert their political presence and prompt the government to gauge

more accurately the size of the Arab American community in the United States.

Suburban Discourse

While its feminist and racial politics are somewhat compromised by its imperialist

tendencies, the novel does add to academic and literary discussions suburbia in that it

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offers a critique of suburban discourse not from the point of view of a privileged white

male, but from a family who are deemed outsiders by their suburban neighbors. The

novel examines what should be a promising start in the suburbs for Jasira and Rifat (they

move there from Rifats cramped Houston apartment), and yet Charming Gates stands as

something of a false paradise. The neighborhood purports to offer safety, good schools,

and a spacious home, all elements of what Beuka calls the utopian ideal of the suburbs.

This ideal is perhaps even easier to conjure than its dystopian cousin explored in the

next chapters discussion of Good Fences and in the introduction to Part II. Phrases like

white picket fences and the American Dream are so common as to be clichd. While

these sentimental depictions of suburbia are repeatedly debunked in contemporary film

and fiction, it is worth examining how what I will call pro-suburban discourse works in

the novel because it is pervasive in day-to-day American lifefor example, suburban

home ownership continues to be a goal of many and is promoted by policymakers and

realtors alike.

Towelhead (2005)107 shares with Good Fences and Parable of the Sower an

impulse to transform familiar suburban discourse in order to explore the ways in which

the suburbs physical and social structures affect suburban girls and women who are

members of ethnic and racial minorities. The text recounts Jasiras life as she moves from

107
The controversy surrounding the name of the text arose primarily when the novel was adapted into a
film. According to Julie Bloom of The New York Times, An Islamic civil rights group has asked Warner
Brothers to change the title of the forthcoming movie Towelhead . . . . The greater LA Area Office of the
Council on American-Islamic Relations said the name should be changed because the term is considered a
racial and religious slur (E2). While the movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival
under the name Nothing is Private in 2007, it was ultimately released with the original title. According to
Bloom, Erian defended her (and Balls) choice of titles, saying she chose it to highlight one of the novels
major themes: racism (Erian qtd. in Bloom E2). While I do not discuss the title in this project, it seems
that the novels title straddles the line between the shocking and the thought-provoking. Nothing is
Private seems an equally appropriate title considering the ways in which the text questions the assumed
divide between family life and neighborhood life.

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her mother Gails home in Syracuse, New York to Rifats apartment in Houston, Texas

just as the first Gulf War is beginning. Gail sends her there because her boyfriend, Barry,

admits to having persuaded Jasira to allow him to shave her pubic hair. Gail, rather than

protect Jasira, blames her for being around Barry with her boobs sticking out and warns

her that she needs to learn how to act around men (2, 8). Ostensibly to teach Jasira

how to act around men, but most likely in retaliation, Gail sends her daughter to live

with Rifat although he is known for his mercurial temper and although Jasira has only

seen him for a month every summer since she was a small girl (8, 1). Shortly after

Jasira moves to Houston, Rifat buys a home in Charming Gates (with its overtly ironic

name), a subdivision of an unnamed suburb. In the novels opening pages, both Jasiras

father and a local real estate agent echo what David Mark Hummon has called

Suburbanist ideology, a mode of thought (which I call pro-suburban discourse)

privileging the suburbs as safe, family-centered communities with strong educational

opportunities for children.

However, this ostensibly child-centered environment ultimately provides cover

for those who would harm Jasira. Like recent films such as Todd Solodnzs Happiness

(1998) and Richard Kellys Donnie Darko (2001), Towelhead depicts a suburb that

emphasizes child-centeredness and an outward conformity that delineates insiders from

outsiders but also unwittingly provides safe haven to child predators by refusing to

acknowledge that danger can emerge from within the community itself. Furthermore,

through its examination of the impact of Rifat and Gails failures, Towelhead joins recent

films like American Beauty (1999) and Little Children (2006)108 in suggesting that, while

suburbs single-family homes, ample yards, and well-funded schools are thought to
108
Also a novel by Tom Perotta.

216
provide a child-centered environment, these features do not on their own produce a

culture that is child and family-centered.109 While assumptions about schools and safety

are at the heart of suburban discourse, Towelhead analyzes this discourse by showing that

while seeking the ostensibly child-centered environment of suburbia, Jasiras parents fail

to nurture her growth. Unprepared to handle Jasiras immanent transition into physical

maturity, her mother and her father verbally insult her and endow her with a shame about

her developing body. Her father, for example, refuses to allow her to wear tampons and

demands that she pay for her own maxi pads while her mother, as discussed earlier, tells

her that her breasts are to blame for the actions of an adult man who assaults her. The text

suggests that the shame instilled in Jasira by her parents, along with their collective

neglect, leaves her open to repeated sexual assault by neighbor Mr. Vuoso. 110

Though it draws on pro-suburban discourse, Towelhead reinterprets this discourse

by refracting it through the lens of an increasingly multicultural suburbia. While

characters like Jasiras father and the real estate agent who sells the family their home

draw heavily on pro-suburban discourse, the text examines the way in which the structure

of the homea spacious single-family dwelling virtually identical to those around itis

ill-suited to the needs of Jasiras family, which consists of a single parent and child.

Furthermore, the text explores the ramifications of a suburban environment that

109
In fact both films suggest that the suburbs are presided over by childish adults. Little Children
emphasizes the childishness of the suburban communitys cult of intensive competitive parenting (mothers
who surround the main character Sarah gossip like teenagers and are dogmatic judges of character who
seem to expertly sniff out any lapses in parenting skills). Sarah and her lover Todd, who try to escape the
stultifying suburb through a return to adolescent behavior, are also the little children of the title. In
American Beauty, daughter Jane is ashamed of her father, who has also chosen to relive his adolescence.
110
The books straightforward accounts of several incidents of sexual abuse have caused considerable
comment among reviewers. Joe Neumier, who misidentifies the book as a memoir, writes, Uncomfortably
single-minded, this tale (from Alicia Erians memoir) of Jasira, a 13 year old Lebanese-American girl
living in Houston, is so eager to be frank it turns into dark parody (40). Cameron Woodhead writes, To
say that Towelhead courts controversy is a massive understatement (24). However, other reviews
mentioned later in this paper consider the books account of abuse part of an insightful critique of parenting
and sexual mores.

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emphasizes the single family home for women. Whereas Friedans primary concern was

the social and intellectual isolation of women who moved to the suburbs from the city,

Towelhead comments on the risks of what sociologist Lorraine Delia Kenney calls a

culture of avoidance. 111 Adherents of such a culture avoid conflict and interfering in

others private lives, even when to do so might be helpful. The novel posits that this

culture should be supplanted in favor of an ethic of collective responsibility, particularly

since this would ensure the wellbeing of children. In doing so, the text suggests that an

environment that privileges family-centered life fails because it provides no alternatives

for children whose biological families are in crisis. On the other hand, the book suffers

from drawing too much on the imperialist trope that Arab cultures need to be enlightened

by Western nations and specifically on the notion that Arab women must be saved by

Western ideals.

Even so, the book also offers an insightful critique of American constructions of

race and residential segregation through its exploration of Jasiras relationship with her

African American classmate Thomas and the resistance of most adults to that

relationship. The scenes which feature this relationship allow the text to use Jasiras

voice, both candid and naive, to expose the inconsistency and hypocrisy that surround the

constructions of race offered by peers, parents, and other adults who assume that the

suburbs relative segregation is a boon to Jasira. 112 Both of her parents, for example,

condemn the relationship. Her father forbids her to see Thomas, while her mother, in a

rare moment of parental involvement, calls from Syracuse to lend her support to Rifats

111
See the introduction to Section II.
112
See also Claire Sutherlands description of the narration: Alicia Erian has found a unique and
believable voice in Jasira. Shes not a tragic figure, rather an increasingly knowing and dispassionate
observer of the adults who surround herall of whom are much more slaves to their own emotional
immaturity than Jasira (W26).

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decision. Ironically, Mr. Vuoso, who brutally violates Jasira, also forbids her to see

Thomas, warning against the boys assumed sexual intentions. What complicates the

texts discussion of race is that Rifat perpetuates suburban racism at the same time that he

and Jasira fall victim to that racism, allowing the book to critique pro-suburban discourse,

which implicitly or explicitly touts the suburbs homogeneity as among its chief assets.

Towelhead systematically dismantles pro-suburban discourse, but it ends by

suggesting that neighborhoods like Charming Gates can change from exclusive

environments that threaten children into inclusive, child-centered environments. In fact,

the novel envisions a way to expand and fulfill the suburbs purported commitment to

family-centered communities by replacing a family-centered ethic with an emphasis on

communal responsibility. The revelation of Jasiras rape by Mr. Vuosoa neighbor who

is in many ways emblematic of suburban America (he is white, a father, and an Army

reservist)forces the adults of Charming Gates to negotiate racial, political, and personal

tensions in order to come together to support her and seek justice. 113 The lines drawn by

the suburbs between insiders and outsiders, safety and danger, are revealed to be faulty

constructions.

Melinas generosity in acting as Jasiras foster parent and her bravery in

confronting Jasiras father and Mr. Vuoso are presented as a necessary corrective to the

suburban vision of a child-centered ethic rooted in the private home. In broader terms, the

113
While the Vuosos are depicted as all-American in the novel, the Latinate origin of Vuosos name further
complicates ideas of race. While he and his family may have also once been considered ethnics, their
established assimilation into white culture renders them foes of the Marouns. The ethnic ambiguity of the
Vuoso family, like the way in which the novel shows that Jasira is considered white in relation to Thomas
and non-white in relation to European Americans, suggests that racial categories are cultural constructions.
Alan Balls film version, on the other hand, stars Aaron Eckhart, a blond actor with a history of playing
exploitative corporate bad guys in films like Thank You for Smoking and Swimming with Sharks, as
Vuoso. Eckharts Texas accent and facial expressions throughout the film seem to evoke those of George
W. Bush.

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way in which Towelhead draws its cast of characters together at the end of the novel in

the interest of better nurturing and protecting Jasira suggests that the suburban life need

not be determined by the built environment (which emphasizes the family unit) or its

racist past (fostered by a longstanding, deliberate distance from communities of color).

On the other hand, Jasiras bravery in confronting her attacker is slow to surface and it is

her neighbor Melina Hines (and to a lesser extent her husband Gil), who is the impetus

behind Jasiras awakening. Jasira herself has little agency and perhaps little role in

forming this new, collective vision of community. While the novel emphasizes that the

Hineses work together with Rifat to support Jasira at the end of the novel, there is little

doubt as to whom the leaders of this new collectively-oriented neighborhood are. While

they are gently satirized as unreflectively liberal (they assume Rifat will share their relief

at the end of the Gulf War, whereas in fact he is disappointed in the continuation of

Saddams rule), Melina and Gil are clearly painted as the heroes in a book in which few

characters are likeable. Thus, while the book, like others discussed in this section, argues

for the power of forming empathetic bonds beyond the confines of the family, its vision

of feminist agency is compromised by the fact that it is only Melina who exhibits the

ability to lead the community.

The novel begins by giving voice to a pro-suburban discourse, which conflates the

privilege of primarily-while suburbanites with these suburbanites sense of racial

superiority, but proceeds to subvert this discourse by demonstrating that the suburbs will

be a menacing environment, rather than a safe haven, for Jasira and her father Rifat. It

also disrupts anti-suburban discourse, which takes as its focus the deleterious effects of

the suburbs on the privileged suburbanite by showing that the alienation experienced by

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an Arab American girl who is marginalized by her peers and community is far more

dangerous than white suburban ennui. Rifat decides to move to the suburbs because Jasira

has joined him in Houston. In doing so, he implicitly follows along with a suburban

discourse that argues that the suburbs are the appropriate venue in which to raise a family

while cities are mires of crime and poverty. As Jasira and Rifat search for a new home, he

and the realtor, Mrs. Van Dyke, reiterate a suburban discourse that insists the suburbs are

uniquely family-centered.

Although both Rifat and the real estate agent echo what Hummon has called

Suburbanist ideologya mode of though which privileges suburban neighborhoods over

urban ones and uses terms like safety and school quality to implicitly suggest a

preference for segregated communities, Jasiras descriptions of the home, which imply

that it is spacious but spiritually and physically empty, resonate with anti-suburban

discourse. Mrs. Van Dyke, the realtor, stresses the amenities of the home and

neighborhood by citing the commonly held assumption that the suburbs are the best

environment for raising children. Jasira reports, She talked a lot about the beauty of the

home, its reasonable price, the school district, and safety (Erian 4). Jasiras father is

receptive to her speech because his reasons for moving to the suburbs are also influenced

by pervasive pro-suburban discourse: he was making a good salary at NASA, and

besides, the schools were better in the suburbs (Erian 3). Though race is mentioned by

neither the realtor nor Rifat, through an examination of Rifats opposition to Jasiras

relationship with Thomas Bradley, the novel will later reveal that while he is indeed

concerned with the quality of Jasiras education, he also participates in the presumption

that relatively segregated schools and communities are superior to multicultural ones.

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Even before Jasira and Thomas begin dating, the text destabilizes Suburbanist ideology

or pro-suburban discourse by complicating notions of race and safety. Rifat feels that a

suburban home is better for Jasira than his former downtown apartmentin part, the text

suggests, because of its distance from the perceived threats of Houstonyet he also

quickly becomes the victim of this preference for suburban living. After relocating, he

and his daughter are subject to chilling racism that is expressed both covertly and overtly

by other members of the community. The suburban home, so often held up as an emblem

of prosperity and security, becomes a stage for a demonstration of the neighborhoods

insularity, a force that creates simmering racial tensions and diminishes Rifat and Jasiras

quality of life.

Before the two meet the neighbors, the text hints at Charming Gates atmosphere

of conformity and homogeneity through Jasiras early description of the house. Though

these descriptions resonate with anti-suburban discourse, the next scene will suggest that

Jasira and Rifats sense of isolation and alienation has less to do with being relatively

privileged suburbanites than it does with the fact that neither their home nor neighbors

offer much welcome to them because they are not typical residents either in terms of their

ethnicity or of their family structure. Jasiras reactions to her new home resonate with

descriptions literary scholar Catherine Jurca found in early suburban novels like Sloan

Wilsons The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Jurca analyzes the Wilsons use of a crack in

the wall of the Rath family home as an objective correlative for the broken lives of the

novels central characters, Tom and Betsy Rath:

. . .there is nothing unusual about a twentieth-century American novel that begins

by repudiating the home of its protagonists, whether the trap is an overcrowded

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 and overpriced kitchenette like the Thomass [in Hansberrys A Raisin in the

Sun], or less convincingly, a two-story Dutch Colonial. (134)

Although the Maroun home is brand-newthere are no cracks in the newly plastered

wallswhat becomes clear from Jasiras descriptions is that her home, like the homes

build during the Post-World War II boom, seems to impress upon her and her father a

pre-determined pattern for life.

Unlike Tom Rath, who feels squeezed into the mold of a family man and

corporate worker, the Marouns suffer not because they conform to the mold of white,

middle-class life, but because they vary from it. Their home, while it is in literal terms

too large, is in other ways confining because it tailored to a nuclear family consisting of a

married couple and children. Despite the increased prevalence of divorce, delayed

marriage, singlehood, and alternative families, the floor plan of the Maroun home, like

those of the homes around it, is designed with a nuclear family in mind. While Rifat and

Jasira do not consciously perceive their new house as a trap, the language used by Jasira

to describe the homes interior conveys a sense of entrapment or limitation:

It was a nice place with four bedroomsone for Daddy, one for me, one

for an office, and one for a guest room. Daddy and I each had our own

bathroom. The name of my wallpaper was adobe, since it looked like all

these little earthen houses, and my sink and countertop were cream with

gold glitter trapped underneath. (5)

While in pro-suburban discourse suburban home ownership often connotes upward

mobility, the gold in the Maroun home is mere glitter, and it is trapped or immobilized

beneath the counter (5). The image of the gold underneath the countertop, like the

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number of bedrooms in the home, implies the home has a prefabricated feel because it

evokes features pervasive enough to be easily recognized by American readers from a

variety of geographical regions. Furthermore, while the name of the wallpaper, adobe,

may hint that the homes designers are nodding toward its Southwestern context, at the

same time the name could imply an innocuous cream color popular in tract housing. The

implied critique here moves beyond the aesthetic domain. The one-size fits all approach

is not suited to the Marouns small family. As a consequence, Jasira and Rifat attempt to

fit themselves into the home, expanding into four bedrooms.

The eerie emptiness of the home, and the relative isolation of the Marouns, is

apparent as Jasira continues to guide the reader through the rest of the home. Just as

Jasira and Rifat find a use for all of the bedrooms, they attempt to tailor their social lives

to the pattern of the homes very standard living areas. As noted by Hummon,

suburbanites perceive themselves to be home and family-centered (101). Thus, as

Maceks work suggests, suburban homes ample living spaces are intended to supplant

public spaces such as cinemas and theaters (10). By extension, the suburban homes

multiple eating areas could suggest a penchant toward entertaining in the home rather

than meeting friends and family in pubs and restaurants. This sense is conveyed by

Jasiras description of the multiple living areas in the home she shares with her father:

There were formal and informal living rooms, as well as a formal dining

room and a breakfast nook. We started using everything for what it was

named for. Breakfast in the breakfast nook, dinner in the dining room. TV

in the informal living room (which also had the fireplace), and guests in

the formal living room at the front of the house. (Erian 5)

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Although the homes many rooms might be viewed (according to pro-suburban

discourse) as a testament to Rifat's success or as a promise of a cozy, home-centered

lifestyle, the text repeatedly disrupts such assumptions. The meals Jasira and her father

share are largely eaten in silence. As for the comforts of the formal and informal living

rooms, the Marouns first visit, with the neighboring Vuoso family, will be clearly

awkward and even vaguely menacing. While the early descriptions of the Maroun home

are as foreboding as those in Wilsons The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the Marouns

problems over the course of the novel will not be brought on by the privations of

privilege, but rather by the way in which both the home and neighborhood marginalize

them as a non-traditional, non-white family.

The Marouns visit with the Vuosos, which takes place in the very hearth, or

heart, of the Maroun home, undermines the conflation of the suburban home with

comfort and safety. The novel suggests that the Vuosos are the standard family of

Charming Gates; on the other hand, Jasira and Rifat, despite their efforts to expand into

their new home, do not fit. The Vuosos are a married couple with a child and the

passage suggests that their gender roles within that nuclear family structure are strictly,

almost cartoonishly, demarcated. Mr. Vuoso, an Army reservist, has bulging muscles;

Mrs. Vuoso bakes a pie. While the text does not go so far as to say the pie is an apple pie,

the Vuosos are almost stereotypical in their all-Americanness, contrasting with what they

perceive as Rifats foreignness. Although Houston itself was a diverse city in the early

1990s, the suburb itself does not mirror that diversity. The 1990 census, taken just

months before the book is set, counts Houstons population as 28% African American,

27% Latino/a, and 4% Asian and only 41% white (Population); however, in this

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Houston suburb, it appears that the only African American family is the Bradleys.

Furthermore, there are only two Latino/a characters in the novel and they are not cast as

Charming Gates residents, but as a cabdriver and a female custodian who works at the

school.

This homogeneity, although implicitly marked as an asset of suburban

communities by pro-suburban discourse, creates an uncomfortable and at times even

hostile environment for the Marouns. As Jasira describes,

Our first guests were the next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Vuoso and their ten-

year-old son, Zack. They came over with a pie Mrs. Vuoso had baked. Daddy

invited them to sit down on his brown velvet couch, then brought them all hot tea,

even though they hadnt asked for it. Oh my, Mrs. Vuoso said, tea in a glass.

(Erian 5)

Mrs. Vuosos expression of surprise signals disapproval, Rifat explains that that is how

tea is served in Lebanon:

Mrs. Vuoso asked him what country that was in, and Daddy told her.

Imagine that, she commented, and Daddy nodded.

Her reaction to Rifats customs and to his revelation of his Arab origins is disapproving

but is, as might be expected in a culture of avoidance, circumspect.114 Her husbands

reactions, while slightly more straightforward, do not match the hostility that he later

114
As discussed earlier, participants in Charming Gates' culture of avoidance avoid discussions of sex and
sexual abuse. In addition, as Kenney suggests, they avoid mentioning race and, consequently leave racial
privilege unquestioned. Mrs. Vuoso is not overt about her racism in this scene. Instead, her reaction is
typical of a push toward silence that allows suburban racism to continue unquestioned: Though suburban
white America does not necessarily see itself as a racialized placeindeed, the culture of suburbia largely
dodges addressing the issue of race, its or anybody elsesnevertheless, by identifying suburbia as the
anti-Other America, I am insisting that there is a fundamental racial (as well as class and gendered)
component to suburbia, one based on the exclusion of the Other and the denial of this practice (see also
Lipsitz 1992) (6). As we will see later in his interactions with Thomas, Rifat himself practices both such
exclusion of the Other and the denial of this practice (6).

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expresses in private. Nonetheless, Jasiras description of his presence in the Maroun

living room contains a hint of menace:

You must have some interesting opinions on the situation over there, Mr.

Vuoso said. He was a very clean-looking man, with glossy brown hair and a black

T-shirt. He was wearing jeans that looked ironed, and had very big arm muscles.

The biggest Id ever seen. They got in the way of his arms lying flat at his sides.

Id like to discuss them with you sometime. (Erian 6).

Mr. Vuosos assumption that Rifat is pro-Saddam and Mrs. Vuosos ignorance of the fact

that Lebanon is a country are mistaken notions perhaps fostered by Charming Gates

geographic and cultural insularity. While the formal living room promised to be the ideal

environment for entertaining guests in this suburban home, the Vuosos' ethnocentrism

forecloses on the receipt of the Marouns hospitality.

Although Mr. and Mrs. Vuosos racism boils beneath the surface of the suburban

culture of avoidance, throughout the book their son Zack, who lacks a concern for a

polite veneer, repeatedly reveals his parents attitudes, repeating racial slurs he learned

from his father. Despite the initial awkwardness in the two families relationships, the

Vuosos ask Jasira to become Zacks babysitter. Whenever Zack wants to ignore Jasiras

instructions, however, he calls her a towelhead. He uses the slur when she reprimands

him for hitting the shuttlecock into her breasts during a game of badminton, when she

tells him to stop leafing through his fathers Playboy magazine, and again when he finds

an Arab woman pictured in the magazine.

Furthermore, Rifat is subject to the racist assumption that he is anti-American.

While Rifat tells Jasira that he considers Mr. Vuosos implication about his political

227
opinions beneath rebuke, he shortly thereafter begins an ongoing battle to show his

patriotism by continually competing with Vuoso over who can fly the American flag

higher and longer. If Mr. Vuoso is the prototypical American father and suburbanite,

then Rifat attempts to best him by visibly asserting the Americanness that Vuoso

attempts to deny him. After the visit in which Vuoso learns of Rifats ethnicity, Vuoso

buys a large flagpole and begins to fly the American flag daily. As Jasira recounts,

When Daddy found out that Mr. Vuoso was getting a flagpole, he got one, too. He put it

in the exact same spot in the front yard as Mr. Vuosos, and installed a floodlight that he

turned on at night (49). Rifat is at first wholly satisfied that he can fly his flag twenty-

four hours a day whereas Mr. Vuoso has to retire his flag at dusk each night. Yet over

the course of the novel, the demonstration of patriotism symbolized by the flag becomes

such an obsession that Rifat delights whenever Mr. Vuoso is late taking his flag down

and Mr. Vuoso gloats when Rifats spotlight burns out.115 Each relishes the others

missteps as evidence of a lack of true patriotism. This flag episode, like the Vuosos visit,

shows that the promised tranquility of the suburbs promoted by pro-suburban discourse is

repeatedly compromised by Charming Gates residents assumption that Arab Americans

are anti-American. Furthermore, any potential for neighborly relations is diminished by

hostile competition. Rifat and Mr. Vuoso reinforce the dividing lines between their

suburban homes by marking their individual territories (here lawns) with flagpoles. In

addition, proving right the critics who point out that the suburbs enforce conformity, the

men choose an identical symbolthe American flagto express their superiority at

embodying the same ideal of bullish patriotism. As the book moves from recounting

Jasiras experience in the subdivision to her experiences in the school system, the
115
He also uses this as a pretext to see Jasira while her father is out.

228
intolerance that motivates the competition between Vuoso and Rifat is revealed to be

widespread.

As the subsequent chapter will make even clearer, despite bussing laws and

increasing minority suburbanization, suburban school segregation remains a fact of life

because such laws have been met with rigorous opposition by white suburbanites and

because much of minority suburbanization has taken place in poorer inner-ring suburbs

contiguous with struggling urban communities of color. Pro-suburban discourse often

touts the superiority of suburban schools while ignoring the fact that urban schools (and

poorly funded suburban schools) suffer from disinvestment. In sum, suburbanites trumpet

their schools performance without acknowledging the costsor the causesof defacto

class and racial segregation. Moreover, as Hummon has noted, they often praise schools

and other assets of the suburbs in order to speak in code about their preference for

segregated communities, thereby ignoring the facts of racial and economic privilege and

instead claiming that the white middle class is innately superior to diverse urban dwellers.

The events of Jasiras life at school suggest not only that pro-suburban discourses claim

to superior schools is flawed but that this discourses racialized definitions of safety and

school quality are in part responsible for the failures of the school system.

As is evident from Rifats conflict with Vuoso, the book is set at a time in which

Arab Americans were a highly visible (and often vilified) minority. At her suburban

junior high school, Jasiras presence is unremarked upon until her classmates discover

her ethnicity. Early in the novel, a Latina janitor attempts to speak to Jasira in Spanish,

whereas Jasiras classmates do not remark on her ethnicity. Once her classmates discover

her Lebanese heritage, however, it becomes clear that her suburban schoolconsidered a

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boon by her fatheris in reality an alienating, isolating, and even menacing environment.

Shortly after beginning school, Jasira receives a letter written in French from her

grandmother in Lebanon. Her father, convinced of the quality of the schools, assumes

that Jasira will already be able to translate this letter. When he finds otherwise, he asks

her to take the letter to her French class in order to ask for help. 116 The teacher suggests

that the class translate the letter together, after which Jasira is subject to a barrage of

insults:

By the end of class, everyone was calling me a towelhead. They also

called me a sand nigger and a camel jockey, which Id never heard of before.

Even Thomas Bradley, who was black, called me a sand nigger. (54)

While Rifat is convinced that the suburban schools will allow his daughter to become an

engineer, this episode suggests that both the quality and the climate of the school are not

what he had hoped. The term towelhead, which gives the book its title, is a repugnant

slur that reveals the malice of the bullies. The term sand nigger, by building on another

racial slur, suggests that this malice and ignorance is strengthened by the United States

long history of racism, which has inscribed hierarchies of privilege according to skin

color for hundreds of years. Although the teacher attempts to call attention to cultural

diversity by having the class translate Jasiras letter, she does not censure the students

who insult Jasira. This incident, like the Marouns first meeting with the Vuosos, reveals

the insularity and provinciality of the suburbanites in the community and therefore

implicitly suggests that Rifat is perhaps mistaken in believing that the suburbs are a more

suitable environment for his daughter than the city.

116
Alan Balls film adaptation, which is patterned closely off the novel, is particularly successful in
conveying the irony of the suburbs claim to good schools. The French teacher welcomes Jasira to class by
having the students repeat Bon-Jer Jas-eye-ra after Jasira has introduced herself as Jasira (Ya-see-ra).

230
 The readers awareness of this irony is sharpened when Rifat later refuses to

allow Jasira to see Thomas Bradley. Building on the episodes that expose the racist

underpinnings of pro-suburban discourse, Rifats reaction to Jasiras relationship with

Thomas demonstrates the instability of the racial constructions that serve as the

foundation for this discourse. While Jasira and Thomasseemingly the only ethnic or

racial minority students in their schoolare quick to become allies, Rifat and Jasiras

mother Gail are also quick to attempt to redraw racial boundaries in order to mark Jasira

as superior to Thomas. In exposing the compromised logic through which they attempt to

do sologic that, ironically, parallels the racial discourse of the American legal

systemthe text reveals the arbitrary nature of Americas color lines. Moreover, as

participants in a pro-suburban discourse which situates violence and rape as the ills of

urban communities of color, Jasiras father and Mr. Vuosoboth of whom abuse Jasira

in some wayassume Thomas, as the only African American boy in school, is a threat to

her.

In its attempt to expose the ironies of this pro-suburban discourse and of

Americas labyrinthine construction of race, the novel contrasts Thomas as Jasrias

tentative romance with Rifat, Gail, and Vuosos hysterical reactions to this relationship.

Thomas and Jasiras relationship is described in terms and in settings that underscore

their youth. Although Thomas is among Jasiras classmates who taunt her with racial

slurs, the next day he approaches her in the cafeteria. Having realized he was wrong to

insult her, he asks if he may sit down next to her at lunch. When she accepts, he

apologizes: I am sorry I called you that name the other day. I dont know why I did that

(62). Jasira quickly accepts his apology, allows him to clear her cafeteria tray for her, and

231
after lunch, walks with Thomas to his locker then hers. A few days later, Thomas invites

Jasira to his home to dine with his family. Rifat resists giving Jasira permission because

he feels his daughter is too young to date, but he is convinced by Thomass mother to

allow her to dine at the Bradley home.

Rifat is incensed, however, when he drops Jasira off at the Bradleys and

discovers that the family is African American. His explosive anger is contrasted with

Jasiras naivet in order to underscore the irrationality of the racial constructions he uses

to bolster his argument for forbidding Jasira to see Thomas. Although Rifat allows her to

stay for dinner, upon picking her up, he scolds her,

When you told me about this dinner, you did not give me the full

information. So I could make a proper decision.

I didnt know what to say to this.

Do you know what information Im referring to? he asked me.

I think so, I said, even though it didnt make any sense.

Good, he said. Because if you continue to visit this boys house, no one

will respect you. I know what Im talking about. (Erian 87)

While her mother Gail has largely stepped out of Jasiras life, when Rifat calls to inform

her of the date, she makes a point to speak to Jasira and reinforce his decision:

Your father isnt even black, and people used to call me all kinds of

names.

Like what? I asked.

Like nigger lover. (Erian 88-89)

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Jasiras reaction to this conversation reveals not only the poignancy of her narration, but

also the ways in which her naivet is used to show the convoluted logic through which

her parents rationalize their unspoken racism, 117

I didnt understand how this would work, since the kids at school already called

me a sand nigger, it seemed like that would make Thomas a nigger lover too.

Plus, I didnt even know if we loved each other. (Erian 89)

Jasiras literal interpretation of the slur underscores for her readers the constructed nature

race, and by extension of a racist pro-suburban discourse that attempts to naturalize itself.

The text plainly depicts Rifat and Gail as misguided through both Jasiras deconstruction

of their rationale and through the results of their refusal to acknowledge the relationship

between Jasira and Thomas.

This refusal ultimately harms their daughter, who is hence unable to approach

them for advice on negotiating her sexual desire; it also forecloses on the potential for

friendship between the Bradelys and the Marouns, who face a similar sense of isolation in

this predominantly white Houston suburb. Thomas and Jasira quickly begin a relationship

that combines innocent flirtation and sexual experimentation. On one hand, he tries to

impress her with adolescent theatrics like playing air guitar to Jimi Hendrix and Van

Halen; on the other, the two take advantage of any lapse in supervision to fondle one

another and quickly proceed to intercourse. Jasira has no adult with whom she can

117
Jasira might then be thought as a subtype of Wayne C. Booths unreliable narrator, one who engages in
the practice of nave defamiliarizationa phenomenon identified by James Phelan in his article
Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita. Nave defamiliarization renders
strange common acts so as to engage the audience by a reading of events that both acknowledges and
closes the perceptual gap between the narrator and the audience (Phelan 8). Here, that perceptual gap is
Jasiras literal interpretation of the slur and the potential audiences awareness of the slur as a figure of
speech. While Jasiras seemingly strange interpretation forces the reader to acknowledge her innocence and
feel a sense of regret that a child must face such slurs, the perceptual gap is also closed because the passage
forces the reader to examine the words that are individual components of the slur.

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discuss either the emotional facet of intimacy or the possible consequences of intercourse

until she meets her neighbor Melina Hines. Moreover, the fact that the Bradley family

expresses a strong interest in Jasiras Lebanese heritage indicates that the two families

might have been potential allies. When Jasira eats with them, Mrs. Bradley eagerly makes

hummus, baba ghanoush, lamb kebobs, salad, pita bread, rice, and tabouleh, for

example, while Mr. Bradley is interested in learning about Jasiras family in Lebanon

(83). 118 Whereas Thomas initially insulted Jasira, the Bradleys, unlike the Vuosos, seem

interested in fostering multiculturalism, erring only, perhaps, by alarming Jasira with

their enthusiasm. Rifats motives for forbidding the relationship and for moving with his

daughter to the suburbs are consistently called into question as the novel highlights the

ways in which his actions as a parent threaten rather than assure Jasiras growth and well-

being.

While Rifat and Jasira attempt to fit their lives and their family into a supposedly

family-centered neighborhood and while a key motive for the journey to the suburbs was

safety, the insularity of the suburbs not only exposes Jasira to racial slurs, it also, by

ensuring that her and Rifats lives are centered around the home, allows him to repeatedly

physically abuse her without interference from the neighbors. Moreover, this insularity,

118
While the Bradleys are held out as an explicit contrast to the Vuosos, even those who are sympathetic to
racial difference are not exempt from Erians farce. Although Jasira smarts from the tortures imposed by
her classmates, she is generally bemused by adults reactions to her ethnicity. Describing the dinner at
Thomass home, for example, she reports that Mr. Bradley asked me different questions about my family
in Lebanon, and I felt kind of embarrassed that I didnt know the answers. . . . I tried to switch the
conversation to my mother being Irish, but Mr. Bradley didnt seem as interested in that country (83). The
book also gently skewers Gil and Melinas progressive attitudes, perhaps to underscore the way in which
these attitudes may also serve to stereotype Arab Americans. When Jasira visits Melina to ask for tampons,
Melina too comments on her ethnicity. Jasira says, It bothered me, how she was trying to talk about my
nationalities now, instead of tampons (64). In addition, Melinas husband Gil, who worked for the Peace
Corps in Yemen, assumes that Jasiras father will be against the Gulf War and is taken aback when Rifat
expresses his support for the war.

234
in part based on the racist assumption that suburbs are safer than cities, enables Mr.

Vuoso to continually sexually abuse Jasira without raising the suspicions of most

neighbors or of Rifat himself. The supposed safety of the neighborhood perhaps makes

such a crime unthinkable; only racial others like Thomas are deemed suspect. Although

Rifat dislikes Vuoso for his ignorance, he sees not his neighbor, but Jasiras classmate, as

a sexual threat to his daughter.

Rifats violence against of Jasira casts an ironic light on his professed concern for

her safety, which leads him to choose a home in Charming Gates. While pro-suburban

discourse touts the suburbs as safe places to raise a family, danger comes to Jasira not

only from racist classmates, but from within her own family. Her father repeatedly hits,

slaps, or punches her for violating sexual codes of conduct which not only encourage her

to be ashamed of her body, but that are also never made explicit until they are violated.

Early in the novel when Jasira appears at the breakfast table in her nightgown, he slaps

her across the face and demands that she change clothes. He slaps her again because

Thomass mother calls to convince him to allow her to come to their home, and slaps her

again when he learns that in an interview for the school newspaper, she asked Mr. Vuoso

why he packed condoms in the duffle bag he keeps ready event of his deployment to Iraq.

Rifat himself is not subject to the same rules. When he spends the night with his

girlfriend Thena on their first date, she appears in the kitchen the next morning wearing

only her nightshirt. Later in the novel, he often leaves Jasira alone in order to spend the

night at Thenas because Jasira hog[s] all the attention when Thena visits (60). By

documenting this abuse and contrasting it to her fathers fear of people of color (here

Thomas) and his conviction that Jasira is best served by suburban schools, the novel

235
critiques pro-suburban discourse by suggesting that it obscures danger that comes from

within suburbs and from within isolated nuclear families.

While this offers an insightful critique of pro-suburban discourse, the influence of

Orientalism on the books depiction of Jasira and Rifat is problematic. The focus on

Jasiras abuse by her father and Mr. Vuoso, and her eventual rescue by Melina Hines

risks defining Jasira by her status as victim rather than by her potential for agency. For

example, Jasira is portrayed as ignorant about sex. However lascivious her appetite for

sexual stimulation becomes (which she fulfills alternately from encounters with Thomas,

fantasies of Vuoso, and looks at Playboy), she remains too nave understand the depth (or

lack thereof) of Vuosos interest in her and repeatedly mistakes his abuse for romance.

Melina, on other hand, is portrayed as knowledgeable about her body and as one who

must enlighten Jasira with the information Rifat refuses to provide. At the same time

Jasiras ignorance about sexuality may not be entirely attributable to the books

employment of Orientalist tropes; it is not only Rifat, but also Gail who is culpable for

Jasiras sexual confusion. She abandons Jasira and reacts both jealously and prudishly as

her daughter enters puberty.

The novel suggests that Rifats violence and Gails verbal abuse and neglect leave

Jasira psychologically vulnerable to Mr. Vuoso. Despite the problematic aspects of its

critique, it does remain an indictment of the supposedly child-centered culture of the

suburbs. First, in the midst of negative messages about her sexual development, she too

quickly welcomes any appreciation of her body. At one point, for example, she strips in

front of her mirror and says, When I thought about my mother or Daddy seeing me like

this, I felt bad, but when I thought about Barry or Mr. Vuoso, it was better (41). Second,

236
she begins to use masturbation and sex as a drug that allows her to escape the emotional

pain of her fathers violence and her mothers abandonment of her. Emotionally, she

knows something is deeply troubling about her encounters with Vuoso, but some of his

milder transgressions excite her, enveloping her in his web of manipulation. For

example, while Melina is the only neighbor to ask about his interest in her, Jasira does

not heed Melinas warnings against him because, as she says, I believed that my body

knew best (62). Third, she is accustomed to attempting to please her fickle parents and

craves attention from even those adults who betray her. Even after Mr. Vuoso forces his

fingers inside of her, for example, she longs for a hug from him (67). While this trait

allows her to be open to Melinas maternal love, it also leaves her open to Mr. Vuosos

betrayal of her trust. Fourth, the lack of supervision in Jasiras home leaves her physically

vulnerable to Mr. Vuoso, who can track Rifats comings and goings and attempt to see

her alone. Rifats concern that Jasira grow up sheltered from the urban environment and

away from African Americans like Thomas eclipses the real danger, which comes to her

through Mr. Vuoso.

Like Maceks work, Towelhead suggests that the suburbanites position

themselves as the opposite of supposedly dangerous city dwellers. As Octavia Butlers

Parable of the Sower (Chapter 3 of this section) will suggest, this leads them to ignore

dangers from within their borders. In Towelhead, it is Jasiras lone African American

classmate, Thomas, and not Vuoso, the all-American suburban father, Army reservist,

and local business owner, who attract the scrutiny of Jasiras father. Although Rifat

dislikes Vuoso, he allows Jasira to babysit for the family in order to build her college

fund; Vuosos ideas are contemptuous, perhaps, but he is not considered a danger like

237
Thomas. Unfortunately, he proves unworthy of this trust and repeatedly sexually assaults

Jasira over the course of the book. These incidents of molestation begin when Vuoso

finds Jasira with Zack looking at a pile of Playboy magazines. While Jasira warned Zack

at first not to look at the magazines, she soon becomes drawn to the photos inside them,

and often covertly masturbates while imagining herself being photographed for the

magazine. When Mr. Vuoso catches Jasira and Zack looking at issues of Playboy, he

dismisses Zack and capitalizes on Jasiras guilt by asking her about the magazines. He

promises not to tell her father if she will tell him why she likes the magazines. When she

tells him she does not know, he beckons her over and caresses her buttocks before

sending her home. His pursuit of Jasira escalates to the point at which he comes to her

house when her father is out. This time, he again manipulates her. He makes her feel

guilty by coming to chastise her for hitting his son Zack in response to the boys latest

barrage of racial slurs. He beckons her over and begins to fondle her. Despite her

protests, he grips her tightly when she attempts to break free and penetrates her with his

fingers. He stops only when he realizes that he has broken her hymen.

Despite the fact that he repeatedly molests Jasira, Mr. Vuoso, like Jasiras father,

warns her that Thomas is a threat to her; in doing so, he reiterates a pro-suburban

discourses which implicitly marks the suburbs as safe and people of color as unsafe.

Days after the rape, Mr. Vuoso asks Jasira on a date to a Mexican restaurant, playing at

chivalry in an attempt to make up for his brutality. Jasira, mistaking his interest for love,

accepts. While this first rape will not be the last, he uses the date to instruct Jasira that

dating Thomaswho is her own agewill ruin her reputation. He implies that

continuing to see Thomas will lead others to think she is promiscuous, thus denying any

238
possibility that her relationship with Thomas could be more than one-dimensional. The

conversation begins when she reveals her desire to be in Playboy:

Its for sluts. Are you a slut?

I dont know, I said. I didnt think so, but I wasnt sure.

Well youre not. Thats why youre not going to be in Playboy.

The food came, and we put our napkins in our laps and started to eat. After a few

minutes, Mr. Vuoso said, If you keep going around with that black kid, youll be a slut.

Thats not true,

Yes it is, he said.

Hes better than you, I said. He only touches me when I say he can (Erian

117-118).

As is often the case in Towelhead, Jasiras naivet is both tragic and disarmingly

insightful. Her desire to be in Playboy displays her uncritical and nave acceptance of the

commodification of womens sexuality, while her acute retort to Mr. Vuoso suggests she

can easily see the true nature of his racist assumptions about Thomas.

Moreover, the scene again points out the hypocrisy inherent in a suburban

environment that is purportedly child-friendly; despite his so-called concern for her

reputation, which prompts him to circulate pernicious cultural myths of black mens

excessive sexual drives, Mr. Vuoso plainly exploits Jasira. Later in the novel, in fact,

Thomas, along with neighbor Melina Hines, is among the first to discern Mr. Vuosos

interest in Jasira and warn her against him. His concern, and Jasiras intermittent

wariness of Vuoso, however, do not prevent the most egregious incident, in which Mr.

Vuoso capitalizes on her sympathy by telling her he has been called to serve in Iraq and

239
brutally rapes her by forcing her to perform fellatio, then turning her onto her stomach

and penetrating her with his penis. After climaxing on her face, he leaves quickly,

sadistically telling her he will think of her in Iraq (232).119

Mr. Vuosos actions not only signal that the scrutiny to which Thomas is subject

is misplaced; they also question the purported safety of the suburbs by showing that in

this insular community, repeated incidents of abuse can occur without the awareness or

interference of the neighborhood. Towelhead, like Good Fences and Parable of the

Sower, demonstrates that a culture of avoidance, by circumventing discussions of

sexuality and sexual abuse, unintentionally provides cover for a sexual predator like

Vuoso. By their very nature, the suburbs are centered on the private space of the home,

and as Mumford suggests, the cars that shuttle people to and from the city and through

the suburbs low-density developments (511). The atomistic and individualistic culture

fostered by these automobiles and suburban homes work together to make Jasira

vulnerable. Mr. Vuoso often comes to Jasiras home without witnesses, while her father

beats her at home and in his car. While the books depiction of Rifats actions and

Melinas role in Jasiras life is permeated by imperialist tropes, the novel also displays

elements of an anti-imperialist critique in its depiction of Mr. Vuoso. The book

deconstructs the rhetoric that American military action in the Middle East will liberate

Arab women by destroying Arab patriarchy. Vuoso, the all-American solider, could

perhaps represent one variant of American patriarchy. By warning her against Thomas,

for example, he embodies the paternalist ethos evident in American discourse about Arab

119
Jasira initially suspects Mr. Vuoso is lying about his deployment because she knows the war has ended
quickly. When she confronts him, he reframes his story and tells her that he will be sent on a special
mission and may still die.

240
women; at the same time, he represents a culture that sexualizes ever-younger girls while

maintaining a double standard about womens sexuality. 120

In fact, Rifat and Vuosos brand of patriarchy are linked in the readers mind by

the fact that it is Rifats discovery of the Playboy given to Jasira by Vuoso that leads to

her final beating.121 The final beating, which takes place in the car when her father picks

her up from the a trip to the mall, sends her running to the Hines family for safety. Rifat

is so outraged over his discovery of a Playboy (a gift from Mr. Vuoso) he found while

making Jasiras bed that he physically assaults her by hitting her thigh repeatedly as he

drives home:

. . . he hit me on the leg and told me there would be more when we got home. He

said, You are not living in the moral universe. The things you do are very

different from what normal people do. You are not normal. This is a magazine for

men, not women. You are looking at pictures of whores, and you like them so

much that you save the magazine. You do not obey me; you do not obey your

mother. One day, Jasira, you will run out of places to live. (Erian 241)

In his desire to punish what he sees as Jasiras sexual abnormality, Rifat overlooks the

question of the source of the magazine.122 While on one hand this may present Rifat as

too much a caricature of an Arab American father, on the other hand Rifats silence about
120
This sexualization of young girls is also highlighted by the actions of a worker in a mall photography
studio, who makes advances on Jasira and attempts to lure her into posing suggestively. While Jasira
initially finds it an empowering fantasy to be in front of the camera, she leaves the store apprehensive about
the adult male photographers insistent flirtation.
121
The parallel between Vuoso and Rifat mentioned here was suggested by reviewer Stephen Holden of the
New York Times Towelhead may have been conceived as a dark comedy, but it is rarely funny. It
pointedly presents Rifat and Travis [Vuoso] as an unlikely two of a kind. If one is an overprotective father,
and the other a predator, both see Jasira as an inflammatory force of nature and tend to blame her for it. (8)
122
The book reviewer Ty Burr notes that the novel contrasts Rifats Puritanism with Mr. Vuosos predatory
sexuality: The message of the novel and of the movieand its a worthy oneis that growing up sane is
impossible in an American both hypersexual and puritanical. The culture commodifies lust then punishes us
for buying, and any young girl trying to navigate between virgin and whore as puberty kicks in is
doomed (Burr D13)

241
sexuality is also typical of suburban culture. This is consonant with what Kenneys

description of cultures of avoidance, which take both girls heterosexuality and purity

for granted, thus seemingly eliminating the need for discussions of sexuality. 123 Rifat, as

a participant in this culture, wants to raise a daughter who conforms to the

heteronormativity of both American and Lebanese culture and allows this desire to

eclipse a concern for her person. Moreover, the relative lack of interactions between

families in the suburban environment allows Jasiras physical abuse to continue

unnoticed for some time.

Like the texts discussed in both sections of this project, Towelhead suggests that it

is by moving to a more collectively-oriented society and away from a culture centered on

the isolation of individual families that suburbia can foster womens agency and inclusive

communities for women, sexual minorities, or ethnic and racial minorities. Melina senses

early in the novel that Jasira is in danger, but as a participant in this culture of avoidance,

even she hesitates to engage in direct confrontation.124 When she finally does overcome

this hesitation, however, she ensures Jasira is safe from harm. Throughout the first two-

thirds of the novel, she is the only adult who expresses concern about Mr. Vuosos

interactions with Jasira. Although Jasira denies her relationship with Mr. Vuoso, Melina

offers her a key to her home and encourages her to let herself in any time she needs to

feel safe. While pro-suburban discourse touts family-centered communities and an

emphasis on homelife, such a home-centered life ultimately exacerbates what Mumford

123
See Kenney Justify My Love: The Heterosexuality of Teenage Girlhood, Chapter Four in Daughters
of Suburbia.
124
As Peter Howell says, The only person who seems to have any real empathy and concern for Jasira is a
pregnant neighbor played by Toni Collette, but her suspicions are slow to surface (E08) Kirkus Reviews
further downplays Melinas role, saying, Not even the cool and pregnant neighbor Melina, who senses the
crisis and gives Jasira the progressive primer Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, is able to protect Jasria
from herself . . . . (Kirkus). I agree that Melina cannot prevent Jasiras abuse, but it is important to
recognize the magnitude of her positive influence on Jasiras life.

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warned was the atomistic culture of the suburbs by leaving each family isolated from the

next (511). While Melina is slow to directly confront the problems she fears Jasira faces,

by offering Jasira a key to her home, she provides a pattern of a new kind of child-

centered culture, one that reaches across property lines and between family circles,

breaking down the divisions between suburban homes. When Jasira uses that key after

receiving the beating in the car, Melina documents the Jasiras bruises and she and her

husband unofficially adopt Jasira. Whereas suburban culture is thought to be strongly

individualist, and whereas Jasiras mother had in the past offered her no protection from

abuse of any kind, Melina brings an empathetic approach to Jasiras life although she is

not a member of the family. While the novel thus insightfully suggests that suburbs need

to leave behind an atomistic culture in favor of a more collective one, present an

insightful critique pro-suburban discourse, it is somewhat problematic that Melina is the

only person to react to either Rifat or Vuosos actions. While a multi-cultural coalition is

formed at the end of the novel, it is one that clearly privileges Melinas position. Jasira, at

least until the very end of the book, can only hurl herself on Melinas mercy. She is much

like the shuttlecocks in her games of badminton with Zackshe is continually volleyed

back and forth between opposing forces (Vuoso and Rifat, Gail and Rifat, and later

Thomas and Rifat) until Melinas almost divine-intervention.125 Thus, while the novel

like the others discussed in this section suggestions the possibility of a more collectively

oriented suburb, this novel offers little in the way of models of agency for ethnic and

minority women.

125
The use of the shuttlecocks to symbolize Jasiras role in the novel was suggested by Carey Rickey, a
reviewer of the film and by Kathy Knapp, leader of the panel on suburban literature at the 2010 NEMLA
conference, where an early draft of this chapter was presented.

243
 Melina and Gil break with the culture of avoidance that enforces silence about

sexuality; in fact, they break with most of the neighborhoods norms. If the Vuosos are

the family that fits in Charming Gates, the Hines family is as much an anomaly as the

Marouns. Several quick details sketch them as uncharacteristically liberal suburbanites.

Melina cooks with exotic spices and wears form-fitting maternity clothes; her husband

Gil is a former Peace Corps volunteer. Although Gil currently works for Merrill Lynch,

the couples politics stand considerably to the left of the Vuosos and apparently most of

their neighbors. Melina forges a relationship with Jasira early in the novel, when Jasira

comes to retrieve a shuttlecock she hit over the fence as she played badminton with Zack.

Melina becomes Jasiras ally when she tells Zack to stop calling Jasira a towelhead.

Thereafter, Jasira begins hitting shuttlecocks into the Hines yard purposefully to that she

can visit Melina. If we extend the analogy between the shuttlecock and Jasira herself, we

can see this as the novel suggesting that Jasira explicitly puts herself in Melinas hands.

Melina then moves deliberately toward becoming a maternal figure in Jasiras life.

Having once received Vuosos Playboy magazine by mistake, she questions how Jasira

came to possess an issue of the magazine and consistently monitors Mr. Vuosos comings

and goings. While it may be problematic that Melina supplants Jasiras eyes and ears and

is Jasiras only path toward agency, in terms of the books critique of suburbia, Melina

becomes a hero because she is the only adult to break with the suburbs culture of

avoidance.

Melina, as the only adult to act empathetically toward Jasira, does not encourage

her to be ashamed of her body (as Rifat and Gail do), sexually exploit her (as Barry and

Mr. Vuoso do), or dismiss her as a nuisance (as Mrs. Vuoso does). Although the culture

244
of the neighborhood enforces a silence about sexualityparticularly for young girls,

when Jasira asks Melina for tampons early in the novel, Melina becomes concerned that

Jasira does not know that a womans period stops when she is pregnant. Melina offers

Jasira a book about sexuality and puberty called Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, and

repeatedly attempts to open conversations with Jasira on the subjects of puberty, sex, and

rape. As Martha Manning notes, such conversations are often key to the development of

empathetic relations between women. All women, she stresses, go through puberty with

breasts of uncertain growth potential, and menstruation, often not the happy kickoff into

adolescence mothers and teachers make it out to be (36). Such conversations are missing

from Jasiras tenuous relationship with her mother Gail. While Gail represents an

extremely unhealthy view of sex because she blames mens egregious actions on Jasiras

developing body, Manning emphasizes that it is all too common that mothers fail in more

ordinary and accidental ways to guide their daughters empathetically toward sexual

maturity:

For many mothers and daughters the perfunctory sex talk is basically about the

plumbing and how to protect it. Theres very little discussion of sexual desire and

activity. Its a bit like trying to teach someone about tennis by giving detailed

descriptions of the rackets, nets, and balls and a pep talk about the greatness of the

game and good sportsmanshiphoping shell draw the necessary inferences

about: (1) how to play the game, (2) when and why she should and shouldnt play

the game, (3) how to choose a partner, (4) how to protect herself from getting

hurt, (5) how to keep score, and (6) how to learn more. (173)

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Melinas willingness to discuss the topic beyond the rudimentary anatomical aspects,

then, is quite rare.

Not only do Melinas straightforward conversations with Jasira contrast to Gails

distortions of sexuality, they run counter to the sort of polite embarrassment displayed by

Mrs. Vuoso when she learns that Jasira was pilfering her tampons. Unlike Melina, she

cannot broach the subject of menstruation and chooses instead to leave Jasira an

impersonal note chastising her. While Melinas interventions on one hand cause the book

to veer dangerously close to a picture of Jasira as the mute victim of Arab-American

patriarchy, the text also offers Melinas open engagement of the issue of sexuality as an

antidote to a culture of avoidance and a failure of empathy practiced by Gail and Mrs.

Vuoso, women who lack Melinas feminist sensibilities. 126 Her non-judgmental but firm

point of view is underscored in her conversation with Jasira about a Playboy magazine

she discovers Jasira has:

Women look at these pictures? I asked, remembering how Daddy had

said they didnt.

Sure they do, Melina said. Why shouldnt they?

I shrugged.

They look at these pictures and feel bad about themselves.

Oh. I thought for a second, then said, Do some women look at these

pictures and feel good?

Maybe, Melina said. Is that how you feel?

I didnt answer.

126
Thus, it could be seen to contrast with Western feminists presentation of Western women as uniformly
liberated.

246
 I mean, theyre sexy pictures.

I guess so, I said.

The thing is, she said, closing the magazine, how anyone feels when

they look at the picturesit doesnt matter. Its private.

I nodded.

But how a kid your age has a magazine like this isnt private. You see

what Im saying?

I nodded again.

This is a magazine for adults only. (Erian 257-258)

Melina, while she does not explicitly confront Mr. Vuoso, returns the magazine to him in

order to let him know she is aware of his actions. Rather than naively enforcing a silence

about sexuality, Melina confronts the culture of by supporting Jasira in her transition to

sexual maturity.

This culture of avoidancewhich allows Jasiras abuse to continue too long and

allows Rifats unexpressed racism to go unexaminedis destroyed in the final pages of

the novel, which brings Thomas, Jasira, the Hines and Rifat together in the Hines home in

a situation in which conflict can no longer be avoided. Through tense confrontations

about interracial dating and sexuality, the neighbors are led toward a moment of

reckoning in which Jasira reveals her rape by Mr. Vuoso and this ostensibly child-

centered community is brought face to face with the ways in which it has failed its

children. While Jasiras path to recovering from abuse is perilous, the possibility for

cooperation between the Hines and the Marouns begins. Rifat realizes he has overlooked

a prominent threat to his daughter and quiets his criticisms of Melina and Gil, whom he

247
once feared were permissive guardians for Jasira. In addition, through this realization that

it is Vuoso, and not Thomas, who posed a threat to his daughter, and through his

girlfriend Thenas censure of his racism, he is brought to reconsider his views. While the

most positive outcome of the end of the book seems to be this multi-racial, cross-familial

alliance formed in Jasiras best interest, this alliance remains clearly problematic because

it privileges the Hineses as its leaders and because it requires that Jasira be completely

removed from Arab culture in order to begin her recovery.

The dinner party at the Hines home and the Vuosos visit seems to bookend the

novel by exemplifying vastly different interactions between the Marouns and their

neighbors. While during the tea shared by the Marouns and Vuosos, the assumed political

differences between the families (and the Vuosos racism) is implicitly but not openly

expressed, in this scene conflicts about sexual and racial politics are forced to the surface.

Thomas, who accompanied Jasira home from school, has just been invited by Melina and

Gil to stay for dinner. The Hineses are unaware that Thomas and Jasira have just had sex

in the spare bedroom while Melina, who is experiencing some complications in her

pregnancy, took a brief nap. As the couple, Jasira, and Thomas prepare dinner for four,

Rifat arrives with his girlfriend Thena. A few weeks prior, Melina and Gil had extended a

dinner invitation to the two for that night; however, they assumed this party was

cancelled due to simmering tensions over Jasiras decision to live with them. In the end,

however, the parties form an unlikely alliance, albeit one unmistakably headed by the

Hineses.

Before this can happen, however, the often-avoided topics of race and sex must be

discussed openly, even explosively. Throughout this scene, the tension rises, creating a

248
mini Culture War. The children (Jasira and Thomas) around whom both the suburbs and

family values debates purportedly center, meanwhile, are virtually silenced. Until much

later in the conflict, Jasira remains much like the shuttlecock volleyed between opposing

sides. In addition, while Rifat has expressed his prohibition against interracial dating to

his daughter privately, here his racism is brought under public scrutiny. While Thena

sometimes uses light-hearted banter to attempt to assuage the tensions, her questions also

both intentionally and unintentionally expose Rifats discomfort with sexuality and his

views on race.

As the dialogue begins, she innocently sets Rifat, the Hines, and Thomas on a

collision course when she asks Melina about her due date:

May I ask when your due date is? said Melina.

Officially, April twenty-third. But it feels like it could be any day now.

Shes already dropped.

Dropped? Daddy said.

They reposition themselves in the uterus as the birth gets closer, Melina

told him.

Daddy looked embarrassed then, like he wished he hadnt asked. Oh.

So you know its a girl? Thena asked.

Melina nodded.

How exciting, she said. Congratulations.

Thank you, Melina said.

Girls are so much more fun than boys, Thena said.

Why? Daddy said. How do you know?

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 Everyone knows that, she said. Girls have more personality.

Daddy raised an eyebrow. He probably wanted to say something like I

didn't have much of a personality, but he didnt.

I agree, Thomas said. About girls.

Excuse me, but may I ask what youre doing here?

Im a friend of Jasiras, Thomas said.

Uh-huh, Daddy said. Except Jasira isnt supposed to be seeing you.

Thomas shrugged.

Why not? Melina asked.

Because Im black, Thomas said.

Daddy didnt say anything.

Is that the reason? Thena asked Daddy.

He didnt answer.

My God, Thena said, Thats ridiculous. (Erian 275-276)

The scene takes a routine discussion of childbirth and uses it to underscore Rifats

discomfort with sexuality. Furthermore, this conversation gives Thomas the opportunity

to speak. While Thomas speaks directly to his hosts throughout the gathering, Rifat does

not acknowledge him except to censure him. Thomass agreement that girls are more fun

than boys, spoken from a teenage boys perspective rather than a parents perspective,

both introduces humor and shows that he, like Jasira, often misunderstands what is said in

the adult world. At the same time, his naivet, like Jasira's, is used by the text to expose

the racist motives that often underlie the doublespeak of the adult word.127

127
Many reviewers remark on the childishness of the adults who surround Jasira. As Jeff Giles says, What
the novel really nailed, though, is grown ups: their delusions, their pettiness, the way they sometimes seem,

250
 Uncomfortable with Thenas disapproval, Rifat explains his rationale. While he

omits the more overtly racist supposition that Thomas will ruin Jasiras reputation

something he expressed to Jasira privatelyhe does compare the twos relationship to his

own relationship with Gail. He first says Jasira is not old enough to date, then continues:

And second of all, it can be very hard for white women in interracial

relationships. It was hard for Jasiras mother, for example.

Jasiras not white, Thomas said.

Oh yes she is, Daddy said. On the forms, Middle Eastern is considered

white. Caucasian.

What forms? Thomas asked.

Any forms! Daddy said. I could tell he didnt think Thomas should be

speaking to him in that way, and that was the real reason he was getting mad.

(Erian 276).

Rifats desperate insistence that Jasira is both white on the forms but that he and her

mother were an interracial couple exposes the constructed and indeterminate nature of

racial categories and destabilizes his own rationale. He claims to want to protect Jasira

from the social challenges posed to interracial relationships, but to do so he must claim

Jasira is white (on the forms) and non-white (the child of an interracial marriage

between himself and Gail). Although Rifat has forbidden Jasira to date Thomas in the

past, while at the same time acting non-confrontational with the boy himself and

outwardly polite toward his family, here Thomas forces him to break the culture of

as a class, uniquely unqualified to raise children (14). In the London Guardian, Scott Montgomery
concurs, writing that Towelheads dissection of the confusing tangle of adult hypocrisy which surrounds
Jasira and, unsurprisingly, sends her moral radar askew, is razor sharp (19).

251
avoidance and voice his prejudices aloud. 128 In the process, Rifat must also confront their

logical fallibility.

In the immediate present, he is unable to do so and responds with an unreflective

rage that will ultimately force Jasira to speak up on Thomass behalf to disclose her rape

by Mr. Vuoso. This revelation shatters the insular precepts of a pro-suburban discourse

that situates danger in racial others and in diverse urban centers and instead implicates

Vuoso, a father and soldier. Before the revelation, Rifats anger is unleashed by

Thomass retorts. He becomes angered that Melina and Gil let his daughter spend time

with Thomas. He begins a fact-finding mission to investigate what he sees as Melina and

Gils lax parenting and he discovers Jasira and Thomas had sex. He demands to see

Jasiras room, where he discovers Thomass jacket, and then checks a nearby bathroom,

where he finds a used condom floating in the toilet. Since Melina is pregnant, he deduces

that the condom belongs not to Gil, but to Thomas. He blames Melina for what he

assumes is the loss of Jasiras virginity. As Jasira reports, "You think Im so terrible!

Daddy said, looking from Melina to Gil. You both think Im so terrible. But then you let

my daughter take boys in her room and use rubbers! (286). When Rifat continues to

berate the Hineses, the couple, who share his view that Thomas and Jasira are too young

to be intimate, are stunned and speechless. Suddenly Jasira, who has been silent up to this

point, abruptly tells the crowd assembled in the living room that she has been raped by

Mr. Vuoso. With this revelation, the tone of the scene shifts away from the divisive

128
While it is not Rifats intention to question Charming Gates racial norms here, the confrontation, which
forces him to articulate his views on race, does exactly that. As Kenney notes in her discussion of suburban
racism, The early stages of my work at SWR(Shoreham-Wading River Middle School) taught me that my
terms of analysis (whiteness, middle-classness, and femininity) mattered so much in this community that
they were not open for discussion, let alone interpretation. Interpreting the norm denaturalizes it and
undercuts the seamlessness of privilegeprivilege built on a foundation of silence and avoidance. The
moment one calls attention to privilege, it begins to unravel (33).

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conflicts over race, parenting, and values, toward a shared effort to support Jasira. Jasira

says, 129

I didnt lose my virginity in this house.

She lost it at my house. Thomas said to my father.

No, I didnt, I said.

Thomas looked at me.

I lost it at your house, I said to Daddy. Mr. Vuoso did it. With his

fingers. I didnt want him to, but he did. (287)

Jasiras revelation signals the ultimate failure of suburban life as it is. Whereas Rifat sees

danger in the Hiness liberal parenting and in Thomas, he is brought to face the reality

that his daughter was raped by an adult from the neighborhood in the place that ought to

be the safesther own home. First, this revelation seems to be the first, and only, time

Jasira claims any direct agency throughout the book. Second, although this revelation

forces a silence upon the room, it at the same time serves as the bottom from which the

suburban neighborhood can climb toward establishing the safe, child-centered

environment it promises. The book signals clearly that the way to do so is not to retreat

into the private home and reaffirm the nuclear family, but to strengthen empathetic ties

between families. While Melina and Gil now recognize that they have acted too slowly

and perhaps too tentatively to the danger posed by Vuoso, it is to them that Jasira turns

for comfort: she places her head against Melinas stomach so that she can feel the babys

kick. While Jasira has up to this point been jealous of Melina and Gils expected child,

129
My reading of this revelation as the turning point in Jasiras road to empowerment is influenced by Alan
Balls reading of Erians novel and his subsequent portrayal of Jasira in the film. As Ball said in a Boston
Globe interview, Jasira descends into a kind of underworld and then she comes back into the light at the
end (Ball Qtd. in Baker C8)

253
this action emblematizes her informal adoption by Melina and the hope that she finds in

the childs new life. The Hiness care for Jasira exemplifies a sense of renewed

possibility for the communityif neighbors are willing to reach across property lines and

ideologies. At the same time, the books exploration of this care, and of the support that

extends across family boundaries, unduly enforces colonialist assumptions by suggesting

that as an Arab American woman, Jasira must be rescued from her culture.

By naming Mr. Vuoso as the man who violated her, Jasira also reveals the

instability of a suburban ethos that attempts to draw clear geographical and racial

delineations between insiders and outsiders, safety and danger. Although Rifat dislikes

Vuoso, this truth was previously unthinkable to him. Perhaps realizing his error, he

relinquishes his efforts to forbid Jasira and Thomas to see one another. The interest in

ensuring that Vuoso cannot further harm Jasira or any other girl prompts the Hineses and

Marouns to mend their relationship. In the aftermath of Jasiras revelation, an uneasy

peace descends on this gathering of neighbors as they work together to involve the police

and keep Jasira safe from Mr. Vuoso when he is released on bail. Jasira continues to live

with the Hineses, but the couple allow Rifat to have supervised visits with his daughter.

The families become, as Jasira reports, unlikely allies:

Melina and Daddy started to talk a lot about Mr. Vuosos sentencing, and how

much jail time they hoped he got. They still fought about different thingswhat

time I should go to bed how short I should be allowed to cut my hairbut more

and more they were becoming friends over how mad they were. At first I was glad

that they liked each other better, but then the things they said about Mr. Vuoso

made me nervous, especially when they talked about how other people in jail

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 didnt like men who hurt children, and how they did mean things to those men.

(Erian 306)

The text here stops short of sentimentality. While a common cause in a sense forges a

sense of community between neighbors of disparate backgrounds and while Mr. Vuoso is

swiftly punished, Jasira suffers from the psychological trauma of her molestation and

continues to identify with Vuoso. Furthermore, while no one would recommend returning

Jasira to an abusive home, the depiction of that home as one which entails both physical

abuse and an enforced ignorance of sexuality which must be defeated by American

influence suggests the text takes a monolithic and imperialist view of Arab cultures.

Furthermore, Jasira (save for the moment she reveals Vuosos rape) is largely denied the

capacity to achieve agency on her own.

The text begins as largely anti-suburban in its outlook and dismantles the pro-

suburban discourse to which Rifat and the real-estate agent subscribe, but it ends with a

clear trope of renewalthe birth of a babythrough which signals both Jasiras rebirth

and the birth of a new community. When the Hiness daughter Dorrie is born, Jasira too

joins the family. When Vuoso is released on bail, Jasira approaches him as he is retiring

his much-contested flag. Spotting her from the doorway of her home, Melina lurches

after her and stumbles on her stoop. The fall prompts the slightly premature but safe

delivery of Dorrie in the hospital. While Jasiras view of sexuality has been warped by

Vuosos attentions and the shame-based attitudes of her parents, the text argues that being

present at the birth of Dorrie, the Hiness daughter, allows her to see the human body at

work and a healthy and whole vision of sexuality. It also allows her to experience a

biological bond with her now semi-adoptive mother. This scene thus forges a symbolic

255
link between the holistic view of sexuality (which recognizes the bodily nature of human

beings) and an effective nurturance of children (as symbolized by Melinas assumption of

parental responsibility for Jasira). By the end of the text, Jasira has found an adoptive

family who can nurture her. At the same time, however, the novels ending, in which an

attempt to protect Jasira from Vuoso induces Melinas (early) labor could perhaps also be

seen as melodramatically arguing for the need to rescue Jasira, the novels

representative of the (American) Third World Woman.

Despite this melodrama and other problematic aspects of the text, the novel does

offer an example of a trend identified in recent suburban literature. The text, while

exploring an increasingly multicultural suburbia, systematically questions the assumed

superiority of the suburbs, yet its ending suggests that the suburbs are not by their nature

irredeemable traps. The willingness of the Hines family to care for a child not their own

and to dismantle the ineffective and dangerous culture of avoidance suggests that the

suburbs, despite their physical status as communities centered on the single-family home,

can be reimagined as places that truly foster the growth of children. The novel suggests

that the suburbs built environment, which is tailored to the nuclear family and which

assumes the link between geographical distance from the city and safety, cannot in itself

guarantee the effective care and education of children. In fact, Towelhead implies that, by

assuming that all dangers to children are posed by those outside the family and

community, particularly by racial others, that suburbs leave children vulnerable to threats

from within the family and community, threats which are moreover deemed unlikely or

unspeakable by a culture of avoidance. In addition, in depicting a suburb that like many

across America is becoming more diverse, the text explores the effects that suburbs

256
racist and patriarchal cultures have on these new inhabitants from historically

marginalized groups. The text ends, however, by eschewing an environmental

determinism that would equate the suburban environment with unavoidable negative

outcomes for its residents. Instead, Erian suggests that communities can effectively

nurture youth by questioning the assumptions upon which suburban neighborhood and

family life are built and by allowing conflicts which stem from this newfound diversity to

be confrontedand resolvedrather than avoided.

By depicting a white family as the impetus behind this sea change, the book

(seemingly unwittingly) falls into the analytical trap identified by Mohanty. It privileges

the subjectivity of white women (i.e. Melina) at the expense of non-white women

(Jasira). Yet while the books critique of suburban racism is vexed by its own imperialist

tendencies, it also offers elements of insightful global allegory which contrast the Wests

rhetoric about womens rights in the Arab world with the need for continued feminist

progress in the United States. In exploring patriarchy in both its American and Arab-

American variants through Vuoso and Rifat, it both draws Arab culture in broad strokes

and in ways that justify American imperial projects and criticizes those ambitions through

its portrayal of reservist Mr. Vuoso as a menacing representative of American patriarchy

rather than a liberating force. The book, like others studied in this section, offers an only

slightly optimistic view of the possibility for womens agency and inclusive community

in suburbs. As we will see in the next chapters, while Good Fences suggests that Mabel

Spader can make her community more inclusive by welcoming her lower middle class

neighbor, her empathetic actions do not prevent her children from experiencing

difficulties as they grow up in a predominantly-white suburban community. In Octavia

257
Butlers Parable of the Sower, the protagonist Lauren Olamina is unquestionably a

powerful leader, but she gains agency only after leaving her suburban home and

neighborhood.

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 CHAPTER TWO

The Good Life and Good Fences: African-American Suburban Pioneers and

Social Class in Erika Elliss Good Fences

Like the other texts discussed in Part II of this dissertation, Erika Elliss Good

Fences draws on widely circulated critiques of the suburbs and transforms these familiar

narratives of isolation into frameworks for discussing the concerns of marginalized

peoples. Specifically, the book references the seemingly contradictory but often

complementary tropes of suburban alienation and suburban conformity, or alternately the

absence of social interaction and a surplus of social control. As discussed in the

introduction to Part II, these ideas emerged at mid-century in response to the dual threat

against an American vision of rugged masculinitythe corporation and the suburb. Good

Fences draws on this anti-suburban discourse and uses it as a vehicle to explore the

particular concerns of one African-American family. Through the novels account of

main character Mabel Spaders move with her family to Greenwich, Connecticut, Elliss

novel inserts into the tropes of suburban isolation and alienation a perspective that

necessarily politicizes this discourse by suggesting that African-American suburbanites

struggle not because of an excess privilege but because, despite their privilege, they

continue to be subject to unconscious insults and malicious affronts.

In addition, the affronts are accompanied by a perceived pressure to maintain and

uphold the narrative of the American Dreamthat anyone, regardless of station, race, or

gender, can dramatically improve his or her social position through effort alone, without

any shifts in the structure of the society. While it is true that Tom Spader moves from

rags to riches, in order to attain success, he has had to be vigilant not to do what he often

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calls rocking the boat by drawing attention to the racism that posed impediments to his

rise from poor farm boy to judge.

The novel also allows Mabels narrativethe fictional account of an African-

American suburban homemakerto intervene in the most famous feminist narrative of

the suburbs. Like Friedans Happy Housewife Heroine, and arguably like the white

housewives discussed in Section I of this dissertation, Mabel suffers from boredom and

isolation, but Good Fences shows that Mabels suffering is compounded by racial

discrimination. White housewives in the novel are oppressed by suburban patriarchy, but

they are themselves guilty of limiting Mabels role in the community. While the Spaders

first maid, Sylvia Falcon, refuses to move to the suburbs for fear her house will be burned

down by white neighborsa realistic fear given the violence many African-Americans

encountered by the suburbsthe racism the Spaders face after their 1978 move to

Greenwich is oftentimes more subtle. By assuming, for example, that African-American

magazines are examples of low culture read only by poor blacks or that Mabel is a maid,

the white neighborhood women exercise overt class prejudice and covert racial prejudice

based on the assumption that African-Americans are not (and cannot be) middle class. In

response to such racism, Mabel vigilantly matches her consumption habits to those of her

neighbors.

At the opening of the novel, Mabel and her husband Tom, an attorney whom she

met and married in her hometown of Lovejoy, Illinois, live in Hamden, Connecticut with

their three school-aged children, twins Stormy and Hilary and son Tommy, nicknamed

Tommytwo. Mabel has close ties with her neighbors on multi-racial, multi-ethnic

Patterson Streeta neighborhood full of middle and lower-middle class families striving

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for the American Dream. While Hamden is already a far cry from the abject poverty in

which Tom began his life and the very modest circumstances in which Mabel was raised,

Toms sights are set on more promotions and prestige. After years of laboring

intensively and anonymously in the research department of his firm and being repeatedly

passed over for promotions because of his race, Tom is pulled into a high-profile case on

which he serves as a member of the defense team for a white arsonist accused of setting

fire to his own vacant property, killing two African-American youths who squatted there.

The novel implies that the promotion and assignment to the case do not represent a long-

delayed recognition of Toms talent but rather the firms attempt to avoid charges of

racism by appointing a black attorney to handle the controversial case. Tom is aware of

this but seizes the opportunity. While his work on the case earns him the ire of his

Patterson Street neighbors and of the larger African-American community, it also enables

a move to Greenwichs exclusive, upper-middle class Serendipity Street.

In exploring the Spaders lives in the suburbs, the novel implies that, like

Charming Gates, the neighborhood featured in Alicia Erians Towelhead, Serendipity

Street is ironically named. For Tom, his big break is seemingly serendipitous, but, for

Mabel, it marks the beginning of relative social isolation. In addition, Mabel is

ambivalent about the promotion. At times, she supports her husband. When he appears on

television, for example, she rationalizes that Any fool knew that a colored man with the

word Expert floating beneath his chin on the nightly news was doing valuable race

work, no matter what he was saying (27). On the other hand, she hesitates to share the

details of the case with her own parents. Unscrupulous as Toms work on the case may

be, over the course of the novel readers gain insight into Toms motivations for the

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extreme measures he takes to acquire wealth and prestige. The final chapters reveal that

he has encountered racism more extreme than that which forestalled his climb up the

corporate ladder. While Mabel knows nothing of his history prior to his mysterious

arrival in Lovejoy, readers learn that he escaped to the town after fleeing Leflore,

Mississippi, where he was captured by a lynch mob led by Avery Carter, an uneducated

white who accused Tom of raping his sister, but who in reality was intimidated by Toms

intellectual prowess. After escaping Carters posse and floating in a nearby swamp, Tom

receives money to relocate from the black community, who hopes that his exodus will

calm an upsurge in racist violence that began with the Leflore lynching of Chicago

teenager Emmet Till, whose real-life murder Ellis weaves into her story. The

townspeople feel Toms academic pursuitshe is rumored to have a shelf of books each

one thicker than a white mans thigh and he has beat a white student for first place at the

regional spelling beehave foolishly attracted the suspicion of the towns whites (183).

While Toms desire for success is not deterred by persecution or the wishes of his more

cautious elders and peers, the violent attempt on his life helps to shape his distinct take on

the classic American narrative of upward mobility.

In order to overcome the fear instilled in him by his narrow escape from death, he

works tirelessly to achieve wealth and prestige. He also labors just as tirelessly to cater to

the wishes of whites, taking care not to rock the boat by asserting a black cultural

identity or by directly confronting white racism. While he becomes, like his Leflore

neighbors, afraid of attracting the attention of malicious whites, he distances himself from

those, who, like the same neighbors, choose to avoid such attention by remaining

ensconced in identifiably African-American physical and social communities. On the

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contrary, he has nothing but disdain for any African-American who asserts a black

cultural identity, whether they be the poor rural residents of Lovejoy or the attorneys he

describes as being best known for wearing kente-cloth cummerbunds to ABA

[American Bar Association] banquets (Ellis 181). Instead, Tom buries his memory of

the lynching attempt, refuses to publically confront racism, and insists that persistence

and effort will always directly result in personal success. He also equates individuals

professional accomplishments and wealth with the key to racial progress. Thus, while he

is well aware of how both structural racism and individual racists have impacted his own

life, he champions a Horatio Alger narrative to his children. Although Toms life is

indeed proof that the rise from rags to riches is possible, the book implicitly questions his

personal philosophy by demonstrating that his refusal to acknowledge or directly contest

white supremacy can neither erase his traumatic past nor prepare Hilary, Stormy, and

Tommytwo to battle the racism that meets them in Greenwich.

Unlike Tom, Mabel contends with the moral qualms that result from his decision

to defend the arsonist. Since she is a housewife, she must also grapple more regularly

with the social ostracization that results from their move. Although Hamden neighbors

once visited and phoned several times a day, calls drop off considerably when news about

Toms case spreads. In addition, not only does Tom dislike visiting Mabel's poor kinfolk

in Lovejoy, but his choice of cases makes it difficult for Mabel to decide what aspects of

their lives to reveal to her family. Although she is uncomfortable with her husbands

choices, she has no one in whom to confide. Thinking about Toms victory in the arson

case, she muses, "Truth was, Mabel hadn't discussed the court's decision with a soul, not

even Ma. She'd call home and do some bragging when she figured out how to best

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explain it (35). Mabel is thus isolated from both her family in Lovejoy and her neighbors

in Hamden. Moreover, upon arriving in Greenwich, she finds that she will not be fully

accepted into the social structure there.

In fact, at first, she is shunned. Her sense of estrangement is amplified by her

husbands demands that she mimic neighborhood women in order to avoid rocking the

boat. Toms pressure is relentless and the list of infractions which constitute rocking

the boat are endless. He demands that Mabel cancel her subscription to Jet magazine

and feign old-money status by telling the local PTA mothers that her mother grew

gardenias, rather than cabbage, in her garden (52, 57). He also tells her to follow the

neighbors lead and hire an African-American maid although she is uncomfortable with

doing so (56). Mabel, on the other hand, craves a connection to her past life regardless of

her new social standing. She revels in her ability to buy jewelry, designer handbags, and

satin sheets, but she secretly keeps her subscription to Jet, ponders attending Baptist

services with her first maid Sylvia, and invites Tina, a friend from Hamden, to lunch

while Tom is at work. Furthermore, her accurate and pointed observations about the often

unhappy lives of the neighborhood women and insight into their racist outlooks

demonstrate the painful dissonance between the good life Tom strives so hard to

maintain and the grim realities of her own day to day experience, between the appearance

that the family has achieved the American Dream and the reality that she feels the desire

to expose the faults in that Dream, which presupposes a colorblind society that never

existed. Over time, Mabels desire to make it in Greenwich battles with her feelings of

isolation from and distrust of her neighbors; as a result, she is ultimately pulled into

addiction to the prescription painkiller Fiorinal.

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 Her central internal conflict (between her desire to enjoy and preserve her

familys success on the one hand and her sense of dislocation from African-American

cultural ties on the other hand) is forced to a crisis point by the introduction of an external

crisis. Ruth Crisp, a lower-middle class African-American woman from Florida, moves to

Serendipity Street upon winning the lottery and, unlike Mabel, shows no intention of

deferring to Greenwichs patrician sensibilities. Tom immediately grows anxious that he

will be blamed for her perceived incursions. When a prominent local resident, Norm

Bonner, beats his wife to death and is looking to sell his house quickly to fund his move

to California, Ruth announces the intention to buy the house for her relatives. Upon

hearing the news, Tom hatches a plan with Joe Klein, an old associate from the law firm,

to persuade Ruth to seek financing and then stall her purchase on a technicality until

another buyer can be secured (168). Tom attempts to enlist Mabels help; however,

Mabel secretly refuses. Though Tom resorts to extreme measures, burning the house

before Ruth can buy it, Mabel ultimately befriends Ruth when she visits selling products

door to door for a home-based business.

By welcoming Ruth, Mabel acts out of empathy. The connection that she forges

with Ruth ends her own isolation and perhaps Ruths. Here, Mabel makes a move from

the individualist culture of the suburbs to the collective mindset that allowed

Pleasantvilles Betty Parker and Towelheads Melina to begin to break down their

communities hierarchies. At the same time, the novels hopeful ending is compromised

by the fact that it is, like those of the other texts, almost too hopeful to be believable.

Good Fencess final scene illustrates Ruth and Mabels budding friendship, but its final

chapters as a whole suggest, much like Butlers novel, that such acts of kindness between

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neighbors are not enough to radically alter the structure of social relations. The two

women may find comfort in one another, but they must still contend with the rest of the

neighborhood.

Moreover, Mabels children find happiness only by leaving Greenwich. It is

certainly worth noting that the two children whose dreams diverge most markedly from

those of their parents fare best. Tommytwo defines making it as leaving Greenwich for

the historically black university Morehouse, where he finds love and begins a family with

his girlfriend LaKisha, a poor student from downtown Detroit. Hilary, who once

emulated her father by distancing herself from poor African-Americans, finds fulfillment

not in material success and suburban living but in teaching impoverished students at a

diverse Boston elementary school. On the other hand Stormy (Hilarys twin), who grew

up under the shadow of Greenwichs white beauty norms yet possesses her fathers

dreams not just of wealth and status, but also of fame, becomes obsessed with a modeling

career, which she pursues by winding a destructive path through Spain.

Good Fences and the African-American Suburbs in Literature

In documenting the Spader familys adventures and misadventures in

predominantly white Greenwich, Ellis deploys familiar suburban tropes. Tom Spader and

to some degree Mabel, like the Marouns in Towelhead, subscribe to what sociologist

David Mark Hummon calls a Suburbanist outlook. That is, they believe that the suburbs

are more quiet, pleasant, and safe than cities and are better places to raise a family (102).

They also believe that sending their children to suburban schools is advantageous. While

the economic disparities exacerbated by suburbanization do in fact often result in

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suburban schools which are better-resourced than their urban counterparts, the Spaders

experience in suburbia illuminates the ways in which the persistent discrimination faced

by the first African-American families to integrate white suburbsa group historian

Andrew Wiese calls suburban pioneersdiminishes the benefits of suburbia, including

well-funded schools.

Like many of the pioneer families interviewed by Wiese, the Spaders face both

subtle and blatant discrimination. While Tom understands that whites are always

watching based in his early experiences in Leflore, Mabel senses the reality of such

surveillance for the first time in Greenwich. Mabel and Tom work vigilantly to make

their upper-middle class status known; their friendships, habits, and tastes are altered to

match those of the more established neighborhood residents. Nonetheless, the family

remains on the outskirts of Greenwich society. The neighborhood women, for example,

are slow to include Mabel and, when they do, their friendships exist on unequal footing,

with Mabel playing the role of silent confidante to the Greenwich socialites. Moreover,

Mabel feels her children have too little appreciation for the pains the family has

undertaken to secure their privilege. Having believed that arriving in the upscale suburb

would result in both a materially and a socially comfortable life and better opportunities

for her children, she grows disappointed and spirals into despair and addiction.

On the surface, Good Fences might be seen as a simplistic warning to African-

Americans not to become so-called sellouts by moving to the suburbs. Extracting such

a moral from the novel, however, would be reductionist. Indeed, in examining the pitfalls

of African-American suburbanization, the novel shares much with Gloria Naylors

Linden Hills (1985), which suggests that wealthy suburbs force African-Americans to

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disavow their cultural identity. Good Fences, however, stops just short of this radical

conclusion. Once Mabel decides to risk her standing among the neighbors by welcoming

Ruth Crisp to Serendipity Street, the two women forge a quick connection, suggesting

that while the wealthy suburbs encourage individualism, they cannot force dissolution of

communal ties or an erasure of African-American cultural identity.

Most critics in the field of suburban studies have suggested that Linden Hills

problematically equates African-American social mobility and suburbanization with

internalized racism and a lack of authentic identity. In Naylors novel, friends Lester

(who lives in one if the more modest homes of Linden Hills) and Willie (who lives in a

poor neighborhood bordering the suburb) work their way through Linden Hills during

their Christmas break, doing odd jobs for its residents in return for spending money. As

they move toward the center of the community, they work for residents who are

progressively wealthier, more unhappy, and more estranged from African-American

history and culture. As scholar Robert Beuka suggests, Linden Hills explicitly suggests

African-American suburbanization is the cause of an attrition of racial identity and an

assumption of white patriarchal norms:

Ultimately, this cautionary allegory about the alienating effects of bourgeois life

on African-American identity and community paints the middle-class suburbs in

no uncertain terms as a living hell, a place that subordinates women and dissolves

racial identity and community within a miasma of unreflective American

materialism. (Beuka 214)

Offering a similar interpretation, literary scholar Catherine Jurca criticizes Linden Hills

for its unreflective adoption of every stereotype of the soulless suburbanite and its

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implicit assertion that living in the suburbs makes the black middle-class

indistinguishable from the white (169). As Jurca suggests, the novel, like the suburban

fiction pioneered by Updike and Cheever, suggests that material privilege is equated with

spiritual deprivation. As these scholars show, Linden Hills depicts suburbanization as

necessarily entailing the choice of individualism over community and historically-white

cultural preferences over African American ones, driving African-Americans to sell out

their cultural heritage. Such a contention, Beuka notes, becomes problematic because it

suggests that authentic African-American culture can only flourish in poverty. As

Beuka suggests, Linden Hillss formulation raises a potentially troubling aspect of

Naylors treatment of race and class by suggesting that the only genuine black

experience is to be found among the poverty-stricken urban underclass (208).

Good Fences complicates and questions Naylors causal chain by its suggestion

that economic mobility and suburban living do not necessitate selling out. Rather, it

argues that it is the intertwined nature of racism and classism that pushes suburban

pioneers to identify with the white middle class. While the novel, like Linden Hills,

suggests that such assimilation is undertaken at a great cost to the suburbanites

emotional health, it is more optimistic than Linden Hills in that it hints at the possibility

that suburban African Americans can embrace more collective models of community.

Even before welcoming Ruth, Mabel draws on her African-American cultural heritage in

order to bolster herself against hostile members of the community. Mabel, like her

husband, thinks that the family has finally made it when they move to Greenwich (55).

She finds, however, that her more overtly racist neighbors assume she is a domestic,

while even those neighbors who style themselves as progressives hide their prejudices

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behind rhetoric of colorblindness and fair play. As a result she lives two livesone in the

past and one in the present, one in the dreamlike suburb of the American imagination, the

other in the darker reality of a nation still divided by racism. To sustain herself, Mabel

remembers her roots in the supportive community of Lovejoy, the stories of the Civil

Rights movement, and the advice of her parents. Swayed by Toms injunction not to

rock the boat, however, she never asserts herself or her cultural heritage until she and

Ruth become friends. The two womens first coffee klatch, which takes place at the end

of the novel, hints that suburban pioneers can flourish by forming supportive community

ties. Like other texts in this chapter, however, Good Fences is careful not to claim that all

of suburbias ills can be cured by strong neighborly relations. While Mabel finds solace

in her nascent friendship with Ruth at the end of the novel, thus demonstrating a more

inclusive ethos than her husband or her Greenwich neighbors, it is apparent that their

friendship cannot do much to change the neighborhoods marked tendency toward

exclusivity. Ruth and Mabel may have one another, but Greenwich will remain as it is.

African American Suburbanization and the American Dream

Although the ways in which Tom and Mabel signal they belong in Greenwich

seem trivialMabel buys seven-dollar cookies for a PTA meeting, for exampleTom

also leads the family in the choice to adoptor at least fervently proclaimthe ideology

of the American Dream. The American Dream has been taken to mean many things.

According to Jennifer Hochschild, a scholar of African and African-American studies,

Many people (some of whom are not real estate agents) consider owning ones home to

be a central component of the American Dream (42). Literary scholar Catherine Hume,

who writes on the American Dream in recent literature, notes that an assumption inherent

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in the American Dream is that each generation will be more prosperous than the last (3).

Hume also notes that the Dream tells Americans that both prosperity and home

ownership are within the reach of all: Prosperity for anyone willing to work hard is a

crucial component of that Dream, a house of ones own being the icon (Hume 3). In

Good Fences, Tom narrates his life story as an exemplar of the American Dream,

emphasizing his rise to prosperity. Living in a large home in Greenwich, along with first

being promoted to partner in his law firm and then being appointed a judge, stand as

icons of the Dream achieved.

It is thus important to note that Tom has achieved more than the basic tenets of

the Dream. He is not just better-off than his parents; he has risen from rags to riches.

Thus, the narrative he passes onto his children is not one simply of the American Dream,

but that of Americas most famous narrative of dramatic upward mobilitythe Horatio

Alger narrative. There is no doubt that Tom has, like the protagonists of these narratives,

made the climb from rags to riches through his own industriousness. The problem with

such a narrative, however, is that it poorly reflects the reality of race and class in

America. These problems are elaborated by political scientist Jane Flax in her writings

on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomass use of the Horatio Alger narrative during

his confirmation hearings:

A story so well established and cherished as the mythic Horatio Alger narrative

can produce magic, this narrative teaches that our individual circumstances are

irrelevant to our ultimate fate, that there are no intrinsic barriers to individual

success, and that failure is not a consequence of systemic structure but of

individual character. Conversely, it also teaches that success is independent of

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 privilege, that one succeeds through individual effort and that there are no favored

starting positions that provide competitive advantages to those who occupy them.

The narrative teaches that we all act independently, that it is not even a dream but

an achievable reality defining Americas unique greatness. (15)

While Tom certainly cannot be faulted for wanting to inspire rather than discourage his

children, it is important to note that the Horatio Alger narratives myth of a class- and

color- blind society bears little relation to his life. He was born in a poor town where

most adults (aside from his mother and one schoolteacher) discouraged him from

pursuing an education; he escaped a lynching attempt; he was passed over for

promotions in his law firm for less-qualified candidates; and Greenwich greets his family

with something less than enthusiasm. His choice to adhere to such a narrative is certainly

not born of naivet. Tomwith his vigilance about preventing white neighbors real

estate panicsis hyper-aware of racism.

Rather, Toms choice to assert that there are no favored starting positions that

provide competitive advantages to those who occupy them (15) is part of his belief that

it is best not to rock the boat. He not only warns his family against displaying what

could be seen as markers of racial identitysuch as African American music or

magazinesbut he also does not discuss or confront the racism he encounters. Nor does

he acknowledge any part of American history that might contradict the narrative of a

colorblind society. In Ernest Dickersons film version of Good Fences, this aspect of the

novel is revealed in shorthand when Tom turns off the popular 1970s TV documentary

based on Alex Haleys Roots.130 In the novel, this is embodied by Tom talking about

130
The film version of Elliss novel, starring Whoopie Goldberg and Danny Glover, was released in 2003.

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picking cotton as a boy but never discussing the social and political circumstances

surrounding sharecropping. Neither does he ever mention the lynching of Emmett Till.

He thus places himself into the Horatio Alger narrative as what Flax would call an

abstract individual:

The story also teaches, however, that as individual subjects rise to success, they

must strip off their particular histories and social positions and become abstract

individuals, unmarked by any race/gender position. Such positions are irrelevant,

even a barrier, to their standing under the law. (Flax 15)

The novel suggests, however, that the problems inherent in shedding ones history and

position are manifold. The psychological distress that Mabel experiences when cut off

from friends and family and that Tom experiences when he violently represses his

memories of Leflore is readily apparent. The novel also explores the broader social

implications of this wholesale adoption of the narratives of Horatio Alger and a

colorblind American Dream. As Cynthia Griggs Fleming points out, in a racially

stratified society, the broader culture is quick to employ accomplished African-

Americans such as Tom as proof that Kings hope for equality of economic opportunity

has finally been realized, though the condition of the poorest African Americans has not

improved in recent decades (147). When race and class are thus ignored as factors that in

part determine ones starting position and continue to shadow even some of the most

successful citizens, effective analysis of social problems and effective action to address

such problems is largely impeded. Whereas Hochschild notes that the American Dream

can encompass the striving of an entire community and is not necessarily individualistic,

she stresses that it is always individual in that it shines the spotlight on peoples

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behaviors rather than on the economic processes, environmental constraints, or political

structures as the causal explanation for social orderings (36). When the focus on the

individual in place of analysis of social conditions is paired with the longstanding belief

that virtue leads to success, success makes a person virtuous, success indicates virtue, or

apparent success is not real success unless one is also virtuous (Hochschild 23), the

cultural belief that poverty is caused by a lack of virtue rather than by systemic flaws

dominates, thus leading to the belief that no affirmative measures to remedy such

conditions are necessary. Tom reinforces such thinking both by repeating a colorblind

narrative of his own life and by distancing himself from poorer blacks, whom he blames

for their own poverty.

Through an examination of Toms actions, the novel suggests that an individuals

achievement of the American Dreamprosperity and a house in the suburbscannot be

taken as evidence of racial progress. Pressured by forces outside himself, Tom chooses

not to rock the boat. While the deleterious effects of Toms choices are apparent, one

may of course also say that it is this very adoption of the identity of an abstract

individual (Flax 15) and the adoption of a colorblind narrative that allow Tom to

succeed in a white-dominated society. The next section, which discusses the racist

practices of the housing industry and the role of white homeowners in containing black

suburbanization, also suggests that Toms insistence not to rock the boat is born not of

paranoia but of realistic fears. At the same time, although the novel demonstrates that

Tom is reacting to a system stacked against him, I will argue that the novel also clearly

suggests that Toms practice of distancing himself from other African Americans and of

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accepting and overlooking racism ultimately hurts him, his family, and progress toward

equality.

Good Fences and the History of African-American Suburbanization

Good Fences is informed by both the long history of discriminatory practices that

influenced the lives of suburban pioneers and the growing class disparities between

African Americans. While there is no mention of the Spaders encountering any difficulty

buying their home and their move to Greenwich is not met with violence, they do

encounter the everyday racism of white neighbors, service people, teachers, and

shopkeepers. In response, the Spaders work tirelessly to distance themselves from lower-

middle class African-Americans like Ruth Crisp and the students who are bussed to the

childrens Greenwich high school. 131 This attempt to create distance, and thus preserve

the favor of the white neighbors who fear the Spaders will be responsible for ushering in

more black families, takes a drastic turn when Ruth Crisp attempts to buy the Bonner

home. Tom burns this home to the ground before Ruth can buy it to prevent the Crisps,

and possibly other African Americans, from gaining a foothold in the community. The

actions the Spaders take to assuage or impress their neighbors and to exclude the Crisps

are best viewed in the context of African American suburbanization, which shows that

131
Bussing, often called forced bussing was introduced in 1971 by the Supreme Court Decision Swann
versus Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education as a possible remedy for persistent de jure segregation
in schools resulting from biased districting or segregated residential patterns. The ruling stated that
Bussingthe transportation of students from one part of the district to a school in another part of the
district to achieve desegregationwas a permissible tool for dismantling a dual system where feasible
(Rossell 9). Further bussing laws, and opposition to those laws, followed. In many areas, magnet schools
later became the preferred means of integration. For more information, see Christine Rossell, The Carrot or
the Stick for School Desegregation Policy.

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racial disparities continue to shadow even those African American families who make

it to the upper-middle class.

Good Fencess story of the Spaders life in Greenwich reflects the struggles many

African-Americans faced when attempting to reap the gains of the civil rights movement.

While the movement did earn important victories in the name of open housing, allowing

black suburbanization to increase in the 1960s and 1970s, as urban historian Andrew

Wiese writes, The chief stumbling block to black suburbanization after 1960 was the

entrenched resistance of white home owners and real estate professionals, who met each

new turn with creative determination (225). Although one cannot underestimate the

housing discrimination which existed before the civil rights movement, it is important to

note that covert and extralegal discrimination perpetrated by both individuals and

institutions persisted long after legislative victories were won. Unlike the Spaders, many

African-Americans seeking to move to the suburbs were discouraged by such practices.

Ironically, Tom Spader uses two of these tacticsarson and erecting barriers to

financingagainst Ruth Crisp in order to forestall what he predicts will be a mass exodus

of whites from Greenwich if she is allowed to own a second home on the street.

Legal challenges to state fair housing laws in the 1960s, as well as evasions of

them, were common. Housing tests confirmed that realtors steered black buyers away

from white neighborhoods by lying about the availability of housing or financing, by

demanding inflated down payments, or by evading potential black homebuyers requests

to see homes (226). Such treatment persisted even after the federal governments passage

of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in housing based on

race, color, religion, sex, and national origin (qtd. in Wiese 223). Continuing

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discrimination was due in part to the laws poor provisions for enforcement, which

initially required those with complaints to bear the cost of their own suit (223). White

homeowners, like the real estate industry, found ways to prolong segregation, even going

as far as to employ guerrilla tactics in order to terrorize African-Americans who planned

to move into their neighborhoods. As Wiese notes, Arson, vandalism, and house

bombings remained common enough to deter most black families from venturing into the

white unknown (229). Local governments also worked to skirt regulations and to deter

African-Americans from moving into their suburban neighborhoods. Thomas A. Clark,

an urban planning and policy scholar, notes that regulations governing Minimum house

size requirements, extensive and costly subdivision requirements, administrative delays,

and expensive though arbitrary demands in exchange for local building permits

discouraged new construction of affordable suburban housing, a tactic that affected

African-Americans in disproportionate numbers (8).

These barriers to geographic mobility were also barriers to opportunity. While

African-Americans were often prevented or discouraged from settling in suburban

neighborhoods, increasing numbers of whites left central cities during this era and white

flight widened disparities between the quality of life of African-Americans and white

Americans. As political scientist Valerie C. Johnson writes,

Images of urban poverty and slums were juxtaposed in the American psyche with

those of tranquil, tree-lined suburban communities. The common perception was

that movement to the suburbs would offer whites a safe haven from the ills

associated with rising urban crime and poverty, and would provide them with a

better life for their families. In many ways, this common perception created a self-

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 fulfilling prophecy as city tax coffers were drained of needed resources, and

strong and viable communities began to crop up outside of the city limits. (4)

As legal scholar john a powell (sic) notes, along with tax dollars, consumer spending and

structures of opportunity moved away from the urban centers to the periphery.

Commercial development followed residential development. While recent gentrification

has brought middle-class residents and retail enterprises back to certain urban

neighborhoods and suburban poverty has become more widespread, many of todays

urban communities of color continue to lack basic resources such as quality education,

grocery stores, transportation, and jobs, although such opportunities are often plentiful in

white suburbs (powell). The construction and maintenance of most middle-class suburbs

as white communities thus continues to affect not only African-American suburbanites

but also African-American and Latino communities in the urban core.

Despite these obstacles, in the 1970s, the era in which Good Fences begins,

considerable numbers of African-Americans moved to the suburbs. Between 1960 and

1980, for instance, the proportion of African-Americans living in the suburbs increased

from 16% to 47% in Washington, DC, 26% to 42% in Los Angeles, 9% to 16% in

Chicago, and 3% to 27% in Cleveland (Wiese 212). As Johnson notes, however, even

when African-Americans successfully integrated suburbs, they often met with racism:

The reception that African-Americans received in the suburbs . . . was chilly at

best. The same factors that drove mass white migration away from the city were

renewed as African-Americans moved to predominantly white suburban

communities. As it had been in urban jurisdictions, the integration of public

schools again became a contentious issue. (5)

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In addition, African-American suburbanization did not always result in moves to better

neighborhoods with better resources. Thomas A Clark writes that, despite the fact that

many saw the rise in African-American suburbanization as desirable because it indicates

rising black affluence, or growing interracial accord, or new hope for the black poor,

there were clearly many kinds of black suburbanization, not all of which led black

residents to prosperous, life-enhancing neighborhoods (19). As Wiese notes, The

tendency of whites to shun integrated neighborhoods and most blacks disposition to

avoid untested white areas meant that the majority of black suburbanites lived in racially

segregated neighborhoods, a result that does little to heal Americas legacy of racism

(258). Many of the neighborhoods designated as black suburbs, therefore, are de-facto

segregated urban ghettos expanding beyond their capacity into contiguous suburban

areas (245). In 1977, for example, 979,000 blacks, or 20 percent of the total black

suburban population, lived below the poverty threshold (Clark 69).

In the 1980s and 1990s, African-American suburbanization continued to increase.

As Wiese notes, in 2000 there were at least 57 major metropolitan areas in the United

States census reporting a suburban African-American population of at least 50,000, as

opposed to only 33 metropolitan areas with 50,000 or more African-American

suburbanites in 1980 (255). Yet into the 1980s and 1990s, inequalities persisted, with

suburban migration unable to insure integration or an equitable quality of life for middle-

class African-Americans. As sociologist Mary Patillo-McCoy writes in her book Black

Picket Fences, a consequence of this persistent segregation is that, unlike suburban

whites, black middle-class families must contend with the crime, dilapidated housing,

279
and social disorder in the deteriorating poor neighborhoods that continue to grow in their

directions (6).

This is true even in the most well-to-do African American suburbs, like Prince

Georges County Maryland (in the metropolitan Washington, DC area). As the decline in

the manufacturing sector reached northern cities and the United States economy became

increasingly reliant on the low-paying service sector, economic stratification drove the

African-American middle class and upper-middle class out of cities like Washington, DC

and Atlanta, GA into the surrounding suburbs while impoverished African-Americans

remained in the central cities (Wiese 259). Today, suburbs like those in Prince Georges

County are receiving these poorer African Americans, who are now being pushed from

the boundaries of cities like the District of Columbia due to gentrification and the lack of

affordable housing that follows in its wake. According to legal scholar Sheryll Cashin,

this is a nationwide phenomenon:

The black middle class carries much of societys load regarding

concentrated black poverty. This group usually provides the buffer from ghettoes

for the rest of society. The (racist) rules of the housing market are set against it.

. . . When migrating blacks reach a critical mass, whites flee, and demand

in the local housing market falls, causing poorer blacks to move in behind middle-

class blacks. Within a period as short as a decade, the black middle class finds

itself once again in close proximity to social distress and often moves again, even

farther from the centers of economic growth. Meanwhile commercial and retail

investors shun these emerging black enclaves since the social distress they attract

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 increases crime, often lowers property values, raises taxes, and reduces school

quality as the student population rapidly becomes impoverished. (135-136)

Thus, Cashin surmises, African Americans who look to well-off, predominantly-African

American suburbs expecting to find lower property taxes, better commercial and

government services, better schools, and safer communities are often disappointed within

a decade, often making settling in majority-white neighborhoods a better financial

decision regardless of preferences (136). Like the numbers which show that African

American suburbs have been disproportionately poor throughout their history, Cashins

examination of the recent history of black middle and upper-middle class suburbs

suggests that, while in the cultural imagination, suburbanization is associated with

upward mobility, African American suburbanization will continue to be a deceptive

measure of economic and social progress as long as race shapes the housing market.

Moreover, this context illuminates the complexity of the social issues with which

Good Fences engages. When Ruth Crisp moves to Serendipity Street, Tom Spader fears

white flight will ensue. Both in the context of the novel and of many American

neighborhoods, this is a realistic fear. Thus, Toms admonition to his son that whites are

always watching has a grain of truth. Many of Wieses suburban pioneer interviewees felt

as if they were being scrutinized like goldfish in a bowl (156) and that their arrival

touched off a panic of selling by whites, whom one pioneer describes as acting as if they

came in contact with the black plague (156).While Linden Hills pokes fun at the

conspicuous consumption of the suburbs residents, who make the mistake Grandma

Tilson warns Lester againstselling the mirror in your soul, or selling out for

wealthGood Fences and the observations of sociologist Bruce D. Haynes, emphasize

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that such habits can be seen as a strategic response to the difficulty of living what Tom

calls watched lives (180).

Haynes, who studied the New York City suburb of Runyon Heights, suggests that

Runyon Heights residents are engaged in negotiating a course between the racial

antagonisms they experience with white mainstream society and the class antagonisms

they experience with the black working class, a position which could in many ways

describe the Spaders interactions with the established Greenwich neighbors on one hand

and Ruth Crisp on the other (xix). As sociologist Karyn R. Lacy writes, such antagonisms

persist because the broader American society assumes blacks are not middle class:

Middle-class whites fit the public image of the middle class and may therefore

take their middle-class status for granted, but blacks who have made it must

work harder, more deliberately, and more consistently to make their middle-class

status known to others. (3)

Both Good Fences and Parable of the Sower attempt to address this class divide. In Good

Fences, Mables final willingness to welcome Ruth into the community accompanies her

embrace of the lessons of her poor, small-town upbringing, but throughout most of the

novel she outwardly attempts to fit in with Greenwich society despite the frequent slights

she experiences. Mabel Spader overcomes pressures to assimilate by risking her own

status to welcome Ruth Crisp, who is slow to signal her middle-class status to neighbors.

While her action is a small step, the context discussed here underscores its

importance. Tom is correct in his prediction that the white neighbors will react poorly to

the Crisps arrival. On the other hand, by contrasting the psychic distress that Tom

experiences as a result of the arson with the joy that Mabel feels after welcoming Ruth

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and the lan Hilary feels after teaching an inspiring lesson to her class of impoverished

third-graders, the novel firmly suggests that however unfairly a racist society

disadvantages middle-class African Americans, neither the individual nor the collective

good can be served by sacrificing the interest of poor and lower-middle class Americans

for the gain of an individual or his or her family.

Good Fences and Southern Folk Ideals

The bond Mabel forges with Ruth at the end of the novel seems to be rooted in the

Southern Folk ethos. While Mabels hometown of Lovejoy, Illinois is not in the

geographic South (it is a poor, rural town just over the border from Mississippi), the

admonition Mabel hears from her parents ghosts when she is about to sabotage Ruths

purchase of the Bonner home resonates with what critic Lawrence R. Rodgers, in his

work on Dorothy West, identifies as the most salient characteristic of the Southern Folk

ideala cooperative ethos. In contrast to Southern communal culture, he asserts, the

black North falsely emulates the acquisitive, individualistic, hierarchical white ideals and

in so doing distances itself from the folk roots of the Black South (167). Whereas

Naylors Linden Hills seems to equate the African-American suburb with the

individualistic black Northern ethos described here, and whereas in that novel collective

Southern Folk survive only in Putney Waynean urban neighborhoodElliss text

suggests that well-heeled African-American suburbanites can also invoke the lessons of

Southern Folk ideals inherited from their families or ancestors.132 In her essay The Black

Writer and the Southern Experience, Alice Walker elaborates that these communal ties

are born of shared economic hardship. According to Walker,

132
As Beuka notes, Willies destitute friends from Putney Wayne, Ruth and Normal Anderson, are the
moral center of the novel (216).

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 What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of

community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these days, to

come by. My mother, who is a walking history of our community, tells me that

when each of her children was born the midwife accepted as payment such home-

grown or homemade items as a pig, a quilt, jars of canned fruits and vegetables.

But there was never any question that the midwife would come when she was

needed, whatever the eventual payment for her services. I consider this each time

I hear of a hospital that refuses to admit a woman in labor unless she can hand

over a substantial sum of money, cash.

Nor am I nostalgic, as one French philosopher wrote, for lost poverty. I am

nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest existence can sometimes bring.

We knew, I suppose, that we were poor. Somebody knew; perhaps the landowner

who grudgingly paid my father three hundred dollars a year for twelve months'

labor. But we never considered ourselves to be poor, unless, of course, we were

deliberately humiliated. And because we never believed we were poor, and

therefore worthless, we could depend on one another without shame. (17)

While the conditions that fostered this communal ethos were poverty and segregation

both in Walkers formulation and in the tight-knit community of LovejoyGood Fences

suggests that this ethic of interdependence and mutual responsibility can be imported

across time and space, becoming a resource for middle class African-Americans. By

welcoming Ruth, Mabel moves away from an architectural and cultural environment that

conceives of the community as a collection of discrete, private homes, to one which,

while existing within the same infrastructure, embraces the notion of permeable borders

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and favors a more communal ethos. Mabel and Ruth ultimately become friends even

though Ruth breaks all of Greenwichs ruleseven going as far as to entirely disregard

the physical borders of homes by taking a shortcut through the neighbors immaculate

front lawns to get to Mabels door. And while formal attire is the means by which Mabel

signals her status and distinguishes herself from those like Ruth who go barefoot, this

distinctionanother kind of borderis dispensed with when Mabel asks Ruth to make

herself comfortable by inviting her to take her shoes off and kicking off her own high

heels.

While Linden Hills sees the Southern Folk ethos as flourishing only amidst

poverty of neighborhoods like Willies, Ellis offers this culture as a resource that can be

drawn from to combat discrimination and hardship in any form. While adopting this

culture may entail risking their newfound prosperity, for Mabel Spader, the acquisitive

values critic Lawrence Rodgers associates with the black North do not take primacy. The

novel does not, however, suggest that this ethos is enough to destroy Greenwichs racism.

Mabel and Ruth can find comfort in one another, but they gossip rather than confront the

neighborhoods social hierarchy. In addition, while Mabels friendship with Ruth

represents a woman of status welcoming the nouveau riche, the gulf between the women

is not so wide as to represent the broader polarization between the rich and poor.

The text discussed in the next chapter, Parable of the Sower, suggests a more

radical confrontation of economic inequality. While Rodeblo, the suburb at the center of

this futuristic novel, is racially integrated, the text documents an ever-widening, highly

racialized gap between the rich and the poor in the world at large. The protagonist Lauren

Olamina is forced to abandon Rodeblo when a band of desperate addicts attacks. As she

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tries to form a more equitable community from the ranks of the dispossessed, the novel

suggests that true social progress lies not just in an integrated middle class but in the

formation of a new, more just economy. In Good Fences, the novels scope is narrower

and its vision more pessimistic. While Parable addresses itself to a post-suburban

possible social order, Elliss work confines itself to a discussion of African-Americans

living in a majority white suburb and to the questions of whether a fulfilling existence is

possible in a historically white, racist suburb and whether racial progress is served by

individual success alone.

What connects all three texts studied in Part II is that all three conceive of agency

as something gained not by an individuals effort on behalf of herself but, rather, as a

byproduct of an effort undertaken on behalf of another individual or on behalf of a

collective. The power Mabel assumes at the end of the novel, like the power of Lauren

Olamina in Parable of the Sower and Melina Hines in Towelhead, is rooted in empathy.

When she sees Ruth selling Amway productsgeneric household goods sold at

something akin to a Tupperware partyMabel recalls that she herself used to buy these

products. Mabels efforts are rooted in her experience of Lovejoy, a small, tight-knit

community of African-Americans, and Hamden, a multiracial community of friendly

neighbors who pay informal visits to one another. By showing Mabels ability to

circumvent the highly individualistic culture of her neighbors, the text calls into question

a determinist view that has characterized much of the writing about the suburbs,

including Linden Hills. Mabels ultimate decision to affirm the lessons of the Southern

Folk ethos by welcoming Ruth, who shares Mabels humble roots but displays this more

plainly than Mabel, suggests that African American pioneers can indeed retain ties to

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African American peers, family, and community despite the fact that white racism

continues to flourish in many suburban communities. At the same time, however, Good

Fences is quick to point out that Mabels change of heart will be difficult to put into

action. While Mabels nascent friendship with Ruth indicates to readers that the suburbs

are not destined to produce alienated, isolated, and spiritually empty residents, the novel

also ends before Mabel admits to Ruth that Tom burned down her new house. If one

imagines the arc of the story beyond the ending provided, it is difficult to conceive that

Mabel could remain both Ruths friend and Toms wife and confidante as their interests

are in direct conflict with one another. The narrator also provides details about the

difficulties in the lives of Mabels husband and children that ultimately raise questions

about the psychological implications of suburbanization and social mobility. The books

multivocal structure thus allows for a nuanced depiction of African-American

suburbanites. In addition, by maintaining a critical eye on Greenwich, the novel suggests

that it is not mobility itself, but racism, which is in part responsible for the difficult

negotiations between individual economic progress and the collective interest.

While Good Fences stops short of Linden Hillss wholesale assertion that

suburbanization and upward mobility destroy African-American identity and solidarity,

the novel does suggest that because mobility requires both an abnegation of ones prior

history and denying any structural impediments to that mobility, such experiences can be

alienating. Furthermore, the novel adapts the well-worn idea of the American

nightmarethe idea that success and a quaint house in the suburbs brings disappointment

and spiritual death rather than satisfactionto explore the little-known experiences of

African American pioneers. Whereas writers such as Catherine Jurca have argued that

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suburban narratives by Updike, Cheever and others, which substitute spiritual

impoverishment for material success, downplay the fact that racist laws and practices,

particularly those governing the housing market, excluded African-Americans from the

possibility of achieving the material comfort of the suburbs, Elliss novel, in which a

family previously excluded from suburban life moves into one of the most privileged

neighborhoods of the nation, uses the dualistic American Dream/American nightmare

trope of the suburbs in order to argue that the peace and comfort promised by material

success and suburban homeownership remains a chimera for African-American suburban

pioneers. Although the book acknowledges that a gap of privilege separates the poorest

African-Americans from wealthy families like the Spaders, it is insistent on

demonstrating that racism remains a factor even in the lives of the wealthiest African-

Americans despite the fact that their very success is used as positive proof of Americas

myth of a colorblind meritocracy. Because no tradition of African-American suburban

writing existsLinden Hills is a notable, but rare example of a narrative about suburban

African-American lifethe author carefully signals these views within the more well-

known framework of white suburban writing. The isolation Mabel experiences contrasts

to her life both in congenial Hamden, where local women gathered to swap secrets and

beauty tips and tight-knit Lovejoy, where families remained rooted for generations and

neighbors were well-acquainted with one another. While the novel addresses experiences

unique to the African-American suburban pioneer, it relays them in a manner familiar to

readers of suburban fiction and/or academic discourse on suburbia.

For example, the suburbs most famous critic, Louis Mumford, a champion of

urbanism, decried the lack of public space and the car-centered culture of the suburbs,

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which contrasted with the pedestrian sidewalks and public parks of major cities that

served as meeting places for city-dwellers and brought diverse city residents into contact

with one another. While, as discussed in in the introduction to this section, these

concerns were at the time centered on men, Mabel sounds a similar observation about

Greenwichthat its lack of social interaction seems to be connected to its lack of public

space:

As pretty as this town looked, she felt like she was walking on pins and needles.

When she tried to put a finger on why, all she could think about was the missing

sidewalks. Whoever was in charge had forgotten to lay sidewalks. The

neighborhood was a ghost town. It was a miracle if she ever saw somebody

milling about outside to say hello to. (53-54)

While anti-suburban discourse has long asserted that the suburbs lack of public space

engenders anemic social ties, the novel depicts the empty but eerily watchful

neighborhood as emblematic of the reception the Spaders receive. 133 The sense of the

abandoned public space is intertwined with a feeling of being carefully observed. While

Mabel has the uneasy feeling of walking on pins and needles (53) long before she has

evidence to corroborate the suspicion that she is being watched, it is quickly affirmed that

133
Betsy Groban, writing in the New York Times Book Review, suggests that the novels depiction of the
Spaders life in Greenwich is hyperbolic. She writes: In the second chapter, archly but aptly named
Greenwich Mean Time, Mabel's troubles beginand, unfortunately, so do the novel's. Ellis's portrayal of
the Spaders' unrelieved suffering in this lily-white community is so harsh and unsubtle that it taxes the
reader's sympathy. Mabel is unable to connect emotionally with anyone but her household help; her
children grow into spoiled, defiant and then troubled young adults. Worse still, her husband's continuing
bargains with the devil, both within and without, at times make for incoherent reading. Although Good
Fences engages us at the start with a likable protagonist, it soon descends into well-worn clichs,
implausible plot turns and stick-figure characterizations (14). The review, however, does not consider the
way in which the book attempts to be satiric as well as realistic, using well-worn types such as Ruth Crisp
to evoke both laughter and analysis. The treatment of the story in the film version directed by Ernest
Dickerson and starring Whoopie Goldberg and Danny Glover, with its variety of distorted angles and
dream scenes, clearly conveys the sense that the events portrayed are not to be taken as purely realistic.

289
neighbors will sooner spy on her than converse with her. For example, Mabel first meets

neighbor Anne Marie Bonner as the woman, a rare pedestrian on Serendipity Street, is

walking her dog and children. Anne Marie looks at her with her eyebrows up to her

hairline (47). When Mabel moves to shake her hand, Anne Marie shrinks from her

outstretched hand as if it were "a plate of stale cookies," (47) and when she finally

deigns to make conversation with Mabel, she suggests that Mabel must be praying the

movers dont break these gorgeous lamps since she was left in charge (48). When

Anne Marie asks if the family has arrived and Mabel answers in the affirmative, Anne

Marie does not yet understand that Mabel is the woman of the house and not a domestic.

Although Anne Marie leaves with a promise to drop by and say hello to the family, she

never does (49). What she does do, however, is to carefully watch her dog each time she

lets it into the yard as if she suspects the Spader children will harm it (61).

Although suburbs have often been associated with the habit of monitoring ones

neighbors, the intensity with which the Spader family is watched is unique to their

experience as African American pioneers. Media scholar Lynn Spigel has commented

that suburban architecture, with its open plans, sliding glass doors, and large windows

that characterized both elite modernist designs and tract homes tended to maximize the

visual field (2). Thus, while spontaneous social interactions may have been limited by

the lack of public space and car culture, Spiegel suggests a highly visual culture emerged

in the suburbs, leaving many suburbanites with concerns about privacy (41). Mabels

initial impressions of the neighborhood suggest both this sense of isolation and the

feeling of being watched. Andrew Wiese found that real-life pioneers shared Mabels

sense of being shunned or being treated as suspect when they moved in majority white

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neighborhoods (156). The fact that Mabel feels as if she is walking on pins and

needles indicates that she negotiates every social interaction extremely carefully, as not

to make a painful misstep and reap the consequences of disrupting the status quo.

Although Mabels wariness about neighbors scrutiny may not seem to readers to connect

logically to her next thought about the missing sidewalks, her particular experience of a

combination of isolation and surveillance may be the product of a historically racist

suburban culture. She is socially isolated both because of the lack of public space and

because of the neighborhoods cold welcome. In addition, the sense of surveillance she

detects immediately, although it has often been attributed to typical suburban

architecture, has less to do with the design of her home and more to do with the

neighborhoods reaction to integration.

Although some enthusiastic suburbanites, like the Suburbanists identified by

sociologist David Mark Hummon in his work on suburban ideology, feel that the suburbs

are safe havens and danger comes from outsiders like the urban Other, like the other texts

studied in this chapter, Good Fences draws attention to violence against women that is

perpetrated by suburban insiders. Moreover, in its brief dealings with domestic violence,

Good Fences also explores the way in which Mabel, as an African-American woman, fits

into the hierarchy of power that determines neighborhood residents relationship to one

another. Although the Spaders behavior is closely monitored, the Serendipity Street

neighbors look away from Norman Bonners nightly beatings of his wife Anne Marie. In

Greenwich, domestic violence not only exists, but is tolerated. While disturbing family

secrets, ranging from alcohol abuse to marital discord, have long been a staple of

suburban literature, Good Fences uses this incident neither for its shock value nor

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exclusively to engage in an examination of the patriarchal codes that condone and enable

violence against women. Rather, the novel focuses on the way in which the incident

affects Mabel, who believes that the suburbs are an endpoint to the American Dream.

Although Mabel sought peace in the suburbs, she recounts nights of uneasy sleep

caused by Anne Maries screams. While she has already been spurned by Anne Marie,

she is deeply affected by the violence:

All she truly wanted was to get a good nights sleep and then get up

tomorrow morning and get her husband and children baconed and egged and out

to school and off to work. Peace, that was all shed ever wanted, and a happy

home life for her family. Only colored woman in town not cleaning houses, shed

be a fool to start spouting off about how things ought to run, she knew that. Her

best bet was to keep her two cents to herself, and just be thankful theyd made it

to Greenwich at all.

The first shriek out of the catty-corner house felt like a gunshot in Mabels

stomach. Her neck bucked out from the pillow. (54-55)

The effects of this beating are figuratively transferred from Anne Maries body to

Mabels. Anne Maries scream wrenches Mabel from sleep like a gunshot and her body

convulses (55). Clearly, such disturbances are at odds with what Mabel expected to find

now that the family has made it to Greenwich (55). When the next beating happens and

Mabel ponders calling the police, Tom counsels her to let the violence go unreported. In

turn, Mabel learns to shut her windows and shut out Anne Maries cries although she

prefers to air out her house by opening windows. In doing so, she adopts the

neighborhoods practice of fortifying boundaries between homes. This not only

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symbolizes an assent to patriarchal normsToms order to ignore the beatings as well as

Norms right to rule his own home with an iron fistit also symbolizes Mabels

acceptance of a position of limited power within the neighborhoods racial hierarchy. To

report the abuse would require more than a transgression of gendered norms; for an

African-American woman and a newcomer to speak out and implicate a wealthy white

man would be to rock the boat. Ironically, whereas racialized ideas of violence

prominent in American culture deem suburbs as safe havens, here Mabels arrival in this

exclusive neighborhoodthe first majority-white neighborhood she has ever inhabited

is marked by an end to the peace she so craves. 134

When Mabel attempts to introduce herself to the neighborhood by hosting a PTA

meeting, she learns that, although most of the women warm to her quickly once they

learn her husband is an attorney, their prejudice runs deep. Whereas The Feminine

Mystique documented how isolating suburbs can be for women, Good Fences, through its

satirical look at the cliquish neighborhood women of Greenwich, suggests the suburbs are

particularly isolating for women of color. Although the PTA meeting begins as an

amusing event, the event turns from humorous to humiliating when the neighbors begin

to unknowingly but pointedly ridicule Mabels taste. At first, Mabel is relieved by the

way in which her restrained neighbors drop their pretensions to joke and giggle.

134
The way in which Greenwich betrays the Spaders investment of hope in the community is paralleled by
a passage in The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir, by former Yale professor turned business consultant
Jennifer Baszile. Baszile recounts a sense of alarm when the garden patio of her familys home in Palos
Verdes, California is vandalized with the slur Go Home Niggers:
We were home. There was no place to go. This house, nestled in a town so remote and exclusive
that residents drove twenty minutes to the nearest freeway, was supposed to provide a sanctuary
for our striving. This refuge, with its garden court and wrought iron gate, was meant to make us
safe. The home was supposed to remind us, and everyone else, how much we had overcome. This
was the house where I was supposed to be the black girl next door. (17)
As pioneers, both Basziles family and the Spaders are considerably disappointed by both the crime
(vandalism, domestic violence) and racism that they experience or witness in their neighborhoods.

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 .There was a sort of game being played, right in the meeting. Mabel

perked up in her seat.

The rules seemed to be, each time Helen Hurd bragged about her Freddy,

Becka RainierRahn-yay, if you pleaserolled those round blue eyes. Rolled

them so hard they just about rolled right off the edge of that narrow oval head.

White woman knew how to roll herself some eyeball, yes, she most certainly did.

And then Freddy said, But Mummy! Helen Hurd would say, and Becka

Rainier would set those pupils spinning like pinballs. Others were in on it too,

pitching their own eyeballs like marbles, two and three sets erupting

simultaneously. Mabel had to fight to keep a straight face.

.Something about all these white ladies in their hair spray acting up like

teenage girls tickled Mabel terribly. She nearly laughed right out, but managed to

cover it up with a sneeze. Which was when Becka Rainier swooped in on Mabel

with those pinball eyes. And before Mabel could say boo, there she was, drawn

into the game. (64)

While Becka seems to be moving to include Mabel as the meeting draws to a close, when

she finds Mabels issue of Jet magazine, her prejudicesand those of the other

mothersbecome apparent.

As she flips through the magazine, Becka engages in a blackface routine that

Mabel feels powerless to confront:

Becka Rainier conjured up a Southern accent to read aloud. Television

Stahs Lib Duh Good Laf, she drawled, and the rest of them fell over one

another, choking with laughter. What kind of magazine calls someone a

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 celebrity that nobody on the entire planet ever heard of, somebody said. A

kidney-shaped pool, thats not news, someone else cried out. (67)

Engaging in this distorted mimicry of vernacular speech, Becka attacks not just the

magazine but the very idea of African American economic mobility. By questioning the

status of the celebrity in question, another member displays an ethnocentric

understanding of American culture; since she has not heard of this celebrity (John Amos,

the actor who played the father on Good Times), she assumes no one has. A kidney

shaped pool, which may indeed be a luxury to the vast majority of Americans is,

according to another mother, not news (67). These comments serve to codify the

gathering of mothers as the true practitioners of the good life by denigrating the

accomplishments of the celebrities featured in Jet. Beckas attempt at a distorted black

vernacular evokes the character of Zip Coon, a comic figure in minstrel shows beginning

in the 1820s. According to historian James H. Dorman, the character of Zip Coon was a

black stage caricature: the character of the black dandy, sporting his flashy attire and

projecting a slick, urbane persona, (this, of course, within the overall demeanor of the

ignorant black buffoon mimicking the manners of sophisticated white folks) (451).

Beckas act suggests that, like this offensive character, wealthy African Americans can

obtain the trappings of wealth but never the substance or what she would term the class

of wealthy whites. Rather, the African American as presented by this minstrel figure

was un-questionably ignorant (though not always stupid: the minstrel blacks could be

wily and even sage), maladroit, and outlandish in his misuses of the forms and substance

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of white culture (451). In other words, Becka suggests that African Americans can only

pretend to be wealthy or sophisticated.135

Although Mabel, conscious of the precarious nature of her status, does not

confront the women, the insults foment in her head as she sits by quietly. As the women

laugh, she recalls the advice of her family and neighbors:

Dont you never, never trust em, folks with sense used to say about white folk.

And here was Mabel, living so close to them the air in her house smelled like wet

chickens if she kept the windows open on rainy daysthe old wives tale was

much more than a notion. (67)

In defense against the white womens racism, Mabel specifically recalls that both her

own mother and the townfolk advised her not to trust whites (67). In tracing one origin of

her mothers advice, the novel carefully recounts an episode in which Mabels mother, a

laundress, once gave her white employer a four-dollar loan to be repaid only in a gift of

overripe strawberries (16). Mabel is immediately drawn to the berries by her sharp sense

of smell, which covers the loathsome scent of her fathers foot ointment (16). Mabels

mother is incensed that she is duped by the gift and quickly admonishes her. Whereas as

a child, Mabel was too quick to savor the strawberries and whereas as a newcomer to

Greenwich she has perhaps once again been too trusting, recalling her mothers advice

sustains her. Unfortunately, as the family becomes more and more successful, their visits

to Lovejoy become more and more infrequent. This incident also demonstrates that the

135
While Dorman suggests that the function of Zip Coon and other such characters was to be
personifications of a type of humanity not to be taken seriously and thus acceptable to enslave (451), he
notes that post-reconstruction coon figures shifted to depict razor-wielding savages (455). Dorman
suggests this shift is reflective of the push against integration. By suggesting that African-Americans were
dangerous at the same time as they wanted to be whiteto break down the most important barrier of all
the boundary separating us from them, such figures created a rationale for enforcing segregation and
ensuring that African Americans are controlled and subordinated by whatever means necessary (455).
Becka seems to be evoking the older of the two stereotypes.

296
indignities Mabel suffers in her wealthy suburb strongly parallel those suffered by her

mother in poor, rural Lovejoy, again emphasizing that race is a factor in the lives of

wealthy as well as poor African Americans.

Although Tom is much like the characters of Naylors Linden Hills in his

insistence on abandoning ties to poorer African-Americans, Mabels desire for continuing

affinity with African American culture and communities is more typical of pioneers.

While Andrew Wiese primarily studies African American pioneers who move to suburbs

from cities, the desire for continuity he finds parallels Mabels experience: Suburban

pioneers often worshiped, shopped, and purchased services like hairstyling in black

neighborhoods back in the city or in nearby suburbs. They maintained ties with black

peers through active involvement in sororities, fraternities and other social or civic

organizations, and they made special efforts to find black peers for their children (156).

Karyn R. Lacy, the author of Blue Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black

Middle Class, identifies this phenomenon as strategic assimilation, which she defines

as middle-class blacks intentionally limited incorporation into the white mainstream, a

process that privileges maintaining strong ties to the black community (Lacy 153).

Although Mabel has this desire, it is always sublimated beneath the surface.

Outwardly, she complies with her husbands call for self-surveillance. For

example, Greenwich, with its emphasis on the display of wealth, is a place in which

residents drive, rather than walk, when they pay visits to their neighbors homes. As

mentioned earlier, there are no sidewalks, and it becomes clear that lawns are not to be

used or crossed. Although Mabel initially finds these unwritten rules pretentious, because

she is a pioneer, she adopts such customs in order to maintain her fragile position. At

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times, in fact, she maintains such customs more rigidly than other residents of Greenwich

because, due to her race, too many residents and workers in the town assume she is a

servant. Her experience is similar to those described by the upper-middle class African

Americans interviewed by Lacy. As Lacy reports, Washington area middle-class blacks

are firm in their belief that it is possible to minimize the probability of encountering

racial discrimination if they can successfully convey their middle-class status to white

strangers (75). While shopping, for example, Lacys subjects tended to signal that they

belong in the store (i.e., that they have money, can afford the merchandise, and have no

need to steal) by carefully dressing for the occasion (75). Likewise, although before the

PTA meeting Mabel is critical of the neighborhood womens preferences for overpriced

cookies and their habit of wearing dresses with pantyhose to what should be an informal

meeting of local mothers, she begins to dress formally in order to negotiate the suburbs

social hierarchy. A simple visit to the grocery store or banker, for example, necessitates a

nod toward conspicuous consumption. Yet, even this outward display of wealth is

sometimes not enough to ensure recognition of her membership in the community. Later

in the novel, she bemoans the fact that she still had to wear jewels to the post office to

get treated with common decency after six years (113).

The discrimination Mabel continues to face long after the familys move to

Greenwich takes a toll on her mental health despite the fact that she maintains a placid

exterior with the help of Fiorinal, which is originally prescribed to treat her migraine

headaches. Just as anxieties about surveillance, the absence of public space, and

squabbling neighbors have long characterized suburban literature and entertainment, so

too have contrasts between placid surfaces and turbid depths. Most often such a trope

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contrasts the suburbs material prosperity and a controlled aesthetic with the characters

psychological, marital, or familial turmoil. One might think of other narratives of the

troubled suburban well-to-do: Neddy Merrills alcoholism in Cheevers The Swimmer

or The Graduates Ben and his scandalous affair with Mrs. Robinson. Good Fences, by

depicting Mabels internal dialogue, also plays with this trope of a shiny exterior masking

a troubled depth. Her submerged anger and her potentially scandalous drug addiction,

however, are not the products of mere ennui; they are the products of trying to attain

upward mobility in a racist culture that insists there are no barriers to upward mobility.

While she meets these challenges with strong counter-assertions of her African-American

identity, such trials soon become too taxing.

For example, when she attempts to buy steaks to serve her friend Tina from the

old neighborhood, Mabel is at first tempted to buy fish in order to avoid the racist

butcher. Although the capacity for extraordinary resilience and resistance is a resounding

theme throughout African-American history, Mabel feels that she can draw on that

history only silently and internally and, thus, she experiences a psychic split. Mabels

highly composed exterior and profoundly disturbed inner life are manifestations not of a

spiritually-impoverishing prosperity but, rather, of a dissonance and a fractured identity

engendered by the difficulty of integration. Knowing that the butcher has snubbed her in

the past, she steels herself with the memory of the Civil Rights movement for what is

destined to be yet another deflating encounter:

Mabel took a deep breath as she approached the glass case with its sausages

hanging above, Made Fresh Daily For You. Her headache nearly cleaved her in

two. Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks. (79)

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Unfortunately, the butcher again ignores her as he has in the past:

He reached his clean hands, as she stood there blinking, into a mound of sausage.

He molded his fingers through it. He coughed into the crook of his elbow. His

hands went back into the sausage. Mabels body moved when she saw what was

happening, but she kept her black mouth shut. Yes, Lord, this was it. The butcher

took his sweet time stuffing sausage. (79)

Shunned by the butcher, she imagines beginning a killing spree in the grocery store. 136

Mabel, explicitly and implicitly pressured not to rock the boat of Greenwich or

confront the racism in her community, suffers with a headache that cleaves her in two,

emblematizing the split between her thoughts and actions (79). The Fiorinal becomes not

only a headache remedy but the means to heal this internal schism.

The novels depiction of Mabels prescription drug abuse is another way in which

the book draws on common suburban themes in order to address problems specific to

pioneers. Mabel is in one sense another one of the seemingly-perfect wives driven to drug

abuse by a hidden reality of loneliness and boredom. As Andrea Tone notes in her work

on the history of American tranquilizer use, Betty Friedan suggested in The Feminine

Mystique that suburban wives often abused prescription drugs to quell their nameless

distress (176). By the 1970s, Tone documents, an outcry against the over-prescription of

tranquilizers to American women, a commercial bonanza achieved at patients expense,

rose up among feminist advocates for womens health (176).137 Although earnest

136
Lacys study also suggests the realism of Mabels feelings: Still, asserting public identities can be
emotionally taxing at the personal level. Even when such strategies pay off, they can be tiring and irritating,
exerting a potential psychological toll that informants [i.e. her studys subjects] are either unaware of or
tend not to express (76).
137
Tone is also careful to document that opposition to widespread tranquilizer use also came from
conservatives worried about the creeping influence of American counterculture on the middle class (176).

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concern was widespread, Good Fences also makes use of the salacious undertones of

womens prescription drug use. Tone emphasizes that, although the problem had serious

ramifications, the media eagerly grabbed the story in part because of its scandalous cast.

After all, it was an unusual moral panic over drug use: Typically, the villains in these oft

told tales were marginalized men: the unemployed, political radicals, and criminals, not

middle-class mothers and wives (179). Mabels addiction evokes this suburban

sensationalism because it is a secret that lurks beneath the shiny faade of her familys

suburban success story. In Good Fences, she is not the only character for whom

loneliness leads to substance abuse. Becka Rainier, who is responsible for introducing

Mabel to Fiorinal, is a more comic version of the bored housewife who fills her empty

days with pills, affairs, and gossip. For Mabel, however, this addiction is symptomatic of

isolation deeper than that experienced by Becka and the other neighbors.

Like these women, she must contend with distance from her extended family, a

husband who spends long hours at the office, and the mixed blessing of a life with few

chores or duties. While the novel does not mention any personal ambitions Mabel may

have set aside in favor of marriage, and while it is clear she loves her husband, she is

distressed by the fact that she spends the majority of her time among neighbors with

whom she has shallow and inequitable relationships. Like her mother, whose white

employer insisted she was member of the family but who cheated her from her

earnings, Mabel is treated by Becka Rainier as a close confidante but is not respected.

Becka shares intimate details of her life that Mabel does not wish to know but shows no

interest in the details or even the major happeningsof Mabels life. Mabel is

perturbed by Beckas disregard for her but is somewhat hesitant to ascribe it to racism for

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fear of admitting disappointment in the fruits of the familys accomplishments. Although

she insists she is colorblind, Becka routinely exploits Mabels time and energy in order

to both complain and brag about her extramarital affair with her Mexican-American lover

Felipe, whom she paints as hypersexual and exotic. In one scene, Becka describes to

Mabel a fantasy in which Felipe licks her armpit:

Mabel shuddered to think of someone licking that woman's old pruny armpit, held

the phone far enough from her ear that she could barely hear. Becka must realize

that while she was handing Mabel all of her business on a silver platter, Mabel

never gave a thing back. Which wasn't right. It was nothing but that same old

negro pessimism Daddy and the rest of them had tried to instill in Mabel as a

child. Here she was living proof that Martin Luther King's dream had come true.

Negro and caucasian living in the same community, walking hand in hand to the

mountaintop. And at the same time, she was holding the phone punched between

two fingers, nothing but cynical as she pictured some poor Mexican's tongue in

that white woman's underarm. (112-113)

Following Toms call for obsessive self-monitoring and desperately trying to salvage the

threads of her own investment in a straightforward narrative of progress, she succeeds in

retaining her outward composure in the face of this latest indignity, but at a great personal

cost. As soon as it becomes obvious to her that her fathers old negro pessimism, while

perhaps exaggerated, provides a much more accurate picture of her life than any rags to

riches narrative could, Mabel abuses Fiorinal with increasing frequency (112). The

connection between her anger at Becka and other white neighbors and her drug addiction

is emblematized by the end of this scene, in which she puts down the phone as Becka

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Rainier describes in detail making love to Felipe, finds and swallows a handful of pills,

and returns to the call before Becka stops speaking or realizes that Mabel is no longer

listening. Like many Happy Housewife Heroines before her, Mabel is pulled into a

prescription drug addiction. Unlike these heroines, however, she uses these drugs to

contend not only with boredom and isolation but also with the experience of living in a

society that insists on its colorblindness despite the omnipresence of discrimination.

Mabels internal conflict between her desire to confront her so-called friends

habits and the belief that she should not rock the boat, and between the conviction that

her family has achieved the dream and the realization that insults and obstacles remain a

part of their daily lives, is moved toward resolution by the introduction of an external

conflict. Ruth Crisp moves onto Serendipity Street after winning the lottery and shows no

intention of deferring to Greenwichs norms. For example, shortly after she arrives, Ruth

uses her lawn to host large, informal barbeques for her family and friends. On the other

hand, lawns in upscale Greenwich, in the tradition of what historian John Stilgoe calls the

early American borderland suburbs, are maintained in order to beautify the home and

to serve as a subtle form of fortifying family privacy; neither of these purposes is served

by Ruths raucous barbeques, or her habit of sitting on a lawn chair in her front lawn. To

use such a lawn is thought of as spoiling its beauty and the privacy it affords. Hence,

Ruths crude outdoor furniture is anathema. In borderland suburbs, there was a custom of

setting the house well back from the street, preferably far enough back so pedestrians

could not see into the windows, curtained or not (198).138 Neighbors who disturbed such

emptiness with activities such as outdoor laundry drying were generally scorned as

138
Around 1920, it became more common to introduce hedges to further discourage gawkers from
interfering with family privacy. (Stilgoe 198)

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actually using a lawn defies the suburbs function as an escape from the bustle and

industry of the center city (122). Accordingly, Mabel silently chastises the Crisps for

having flower cuttings sitting in jars on a metal table theyd dragged into the yard and

worries that the former owner, Mrs. Kennedy, must be rolling in her grave to see those

countrified negroes all over her property (122).

At the same time Mabel fears Ruth will threaten her standing in the neighborhood,

she enjoys Ruths willingness to confront Greenwichs power structure. After hearing

that Ruth kidded with the postman that she intends to buy the home vacated by Norm

Bonner so that her nephews can chase white teenaged girls, Mabel agrees with neighbors

that That woman moved to this town looking for trouble, but she defines trouble

differently than those neighbors (123). She was looking for trouble all right, Mabel

thinks, Speaking her mind in front of white people (123). As Mabels experiences have

shown, Greenwich dictates that white women may use Mabel as a Mammy figure

someone to whom to tell their troublesbut black women like herself and Ruth are

expected to listen and not speak. The novel indicates that Mabel appreciates Ruths

humor but that she publically agrees with neighbors to protect her own tenuous status. In

response to Ruths incursions and Toms fears that this behavior will reflect poorly on

their own family, Mabel attempts to pay Ruth a visit to try and introduce her to the way

things worked on Serendipity Street (123). Ironically, however, Mabel is now so

indoctrinated into Greenwichs non-confrontational culture that she is unable to deliver

her complaints to Ruth. She uses a fundraiser for new streetlights as a pretext for her

visit, but, when Ruth straightforwardly conveys her disinterest, Mabel is so flummoxed

that she leaves immediately.

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 For Mabel, Ruth is too visible as well as too audible. Her discomfort with Ruths

presence is often expressed in descriptions of the womans body, specifically her strongly

ethnic features, which come to stand in for an audacity that Mabel outwardly condemns

but secretly begins to appreciate. Mabels thoughts betray the extent to which, despite

the fact that she fears for her own social position, she savors the news of Ruths

impending purchase:

Ruth Crisp was going to do it. Hair as nappy as a burr patch, legs fat as a bulls,

but she was doing to buy the Bonner house. Nose flat as a skillet, arms black as

blood sausage, but she was about to own two pieces of property on Serendipity

Street. And the rest of these neighbors were about to lose their minds. (163)

The description of Ruth with her Nose as flat as a skillet, arms as black as blood

sausage echoes the very terms local boys and her own parents used to describe Mabel in

the opening chapters of the novel (123). Ellis says Lovejoy boys joked that Mabels

arms were thick and black as blood sausage, and that her elbows stayed silver despite all

the grease she slathered onto them (17), and her own mother urges Mabels father to

accept Tom because she fears Mabel wont get many suitors because she is black as a

skillet with a nose so flat its a wonder she can even breathe (22). As a teenager, even

Mabel herself believes she is more of a dog biscuit than a sugar cookie, and, as an

adult, she continues to be self-conscious about her weight and hair (17). Mabel and Ruth

are linked through the use of these phrases and by their unlikely attainment of

socioeconomic status in the context both of the racism of whites and the internalized

racism of some African-Americans expressed in preferences for light skin and European

features. Hence Mabel is both shocked and secretly appreciative of Ruths lack of self-

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consciousness about her own body, which like Mabels conforms neither to white nor

African-American ideals of beauty. While on one hand she feels Ruths incursion

threatens her family, on the other, Ruths open revolt seems to contain the possibility of

Mabels own liberation, should she garner the courage to dismiss the power of the

neighborhood women and of her husband.

Mabel is forced to choose between these competing sentiments when the

neighborhood begins to campaign against Ruths plan purchase her second home. When

the neighbors appeal to Mabel to reason with Ruth (i.e. to dissuade her from buying the

Bonner house), Mabel is at first offended that she is chosen as the best person to present

their case simply because she and Ruth are of the same race. Despite her intermittent

flashes of empathy and appreciation for Ruth, she is angered by being associated with her

in the minds of the neighbors. Ruth, she thinks went barefoot until November, but

somehow she and Mabel had so much in common they could have an intimate chat about

buying property although theyd barely ever said boo to one another (164). After all,

Ruth goes barefoot while Mabel dons designer high heels every time she answers the

door. What later becomes more infuriating to Mabel, however, is the neighbors

insistence that fairnessnot raceis at the heart of the issue. On the very day Ruth

inspects the house, Mabel gets visits from no less than seven neighbors, all wearing a

look of concern (162). Mabel lists each woman who comes to visit her, along with what

the woman brings to eat and the excuse she offers for not wanting Ruth to buy the Bonner

home.

What incenses Mabel the most is that, at the very same time the women vocally

insist that race is not the reason for their opposition to Ruths purchase, they both seek

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Mabels absolution for their implicitly racist motives and ask Mabel to intervene because

she, like Ruth, is African American. While each woman couches her opposition in

different words, the thread of their arguments is strikingly similar. Ginny Riggs

complains of the underhandedness (163) of Norm selling to Ruth for cash rather than

putting the house on the open market, while another woman, Bev Potemkin, calls Norms

decision a knife in the back of Greenwich (164). Meanwhile, Becka Rainier, Lorraine

(whose last name is never mentioned), and Helen Hurd, all say that Ruths opportunity to

buy a second house on the same block amounts to reverse discrimination (165).

Echoing a phrase used most often by opponents of Affirmative Action, these women

suggest that Ruth is getting more than her fair share of opportunities. The use of this

expression to describe Affirmative Action most often bears the suggestion that there is

already a level playing field (or colorblind society), and that any affirmative measures to

remediate discrimination are tantamount to discrimination against whites. Hence, they

disavow the existence of racism and attest to their own colorblindness while at the same

time lobbying against Ruths purchase of the home because they feel it will result in too

many black-owned homes on the street.

The hypocrisy inherent in their colorblindness and accusations of reverse

discrimination surfaces in the womens faulty logic and slips of the tongue. Lorraine

claims that it could be the Rockefellers or the Gettys, two of Americas foremost old

money families buying the two homes, but nobody needs more than one house per

blackper block, (165). Lorraines slip of the tongue clearly reveals her true motive is

race. Moreover, when Helen uses the same accusation of reverse discrimination to

complain that young people like her son and his fianc will not have a fair shot at

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buying a house and raising their kids in a sought-after neighborhood like this, it is clear

that that the root of the concern is not the possibility that one family will own more than

one house per block. Freddy owning a home on her street would be the same as Ruth and

her extended family both living in the neighborhood. Moreover, while she sees Ruths

deal with Norm as so unfair as to amount to reverse discrimination, the possibility that

Freddys family wealth would help him buy a home in Greenwich despite the fact that he

is a neer-do-well is not unfair in her mind. Mabel is aware of this irony inherent in the

womens statements and in the fact that Ruths wish to buy a second home is seen as

more of a threat to the neighborhood than Anne Maries murder:

Norman Bonner had beat his wife until her kidneys failed, and now he was a

merry widower fixing to move to California. That was who they should have been

watching, Ruth Crisp might be an uncouth mess, but at least she didnt beat folks

up at night. Shed hollered at a Girl Scout about selling cookies door-to-door

once, true, but Mabel bet her bottom dollar there was more to that story than met

the eye. (163)

Mabel guards her thoughts but enjoys for once holding a certain amount of power over

her neighbors. They are soliciting her help. While this power is compromised by the fact

that she does not feel able to directly confront them, she is able to coyly play as if she

does not understand their requests and gladly eats the desserts they proffer. She refuses

to take the bait that her neighbors dangle and simply smiled and said Oh Really and

poured coffee and cut Danish and saw no evil, heard no evil (164). Using the

neighborhoods culture of avoidance to her advantage, she indirectly refuses to speak to

Ruth by pretending not to understand what they are hinting she should do. This begins to

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reverse the early trope of the strawberries. Whereas as a naive child she was oblivious to

the hypocrisy of her mothers employer, who insisted Mabels mother was a member of

the family but offered her rotten strawberries in place of the money she owed her, now

she here savors the neighbors desserts although she is wary of the intentions of their

bearers.

While Mabel is amused by her newfound status in the neighborhood pecking

order, she is dismayed to learn that her husband also insists that she trick Ruth into losing

the Bonner home. She resists the demands of her neighbors, but she is hesitant to defy her

husband, who counsels her to tell Ruth not to pay cash for the home but to see a local

lender who has agreed to stall her application until another buyer can be found. Toms

idea is similar to the tactic employed by the housing industry to avoid integrating white

neighborhoods. Delaying or denying financing was a means of evading non-

discrimination laws when African American buyers located and attempted to purchase a

home in the suburbs. Mabel is for a short time so persuaded by Toms arguments that she

herself is almost convinced that Ruths new purchase represents a potential threat to her

family; for example, she conjures hyperbolic nightmares of Ruth ushering an invasion of

drug-dealers into the neighborhood.

As she prepares to speak to Ruth, however, Mabel is visited by the ghosts of her

mother and father, who reiterate Southern Folk ideals and the importance of African-

American solidarity. Her mother, who appears to her in what literally might be

interpreted as a drug-induced hallucination, scolds her for even considering representing

the neighborhoods interests to Ruth. She hears her mothers voice suddenly:

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 .Mabel Agnes Turner, you got a white girl washing your dirty drawers

and you aint called to tell nobody? You crazy? Hard as I slaved for those people

all my life?

Ma? said Mabel, ducking her head as if from flying bats. Ma was dead!

But she could hear them; there were definitely people in this living room. Ma?

Ma, howd you get in here?

There on your fine sofa about to do what? You about to walk over to that

Crisp womans house and do what? Girl? You better start doing some explaining

before I have to find my switch. (172-173)

Her mother relates her hardships in order to remind Mabel of her potential ties to Ruth.

Exploited as a laundress by her white employer, Mrs. Turner is astonished that her

daughter, who has her own maid to do her laundry, would use her newfound wealth and

power to exploit another African-American woman. Though she does not fully believe

that she is speaking to her mothers ghost, Mabel does decide to stay home and later

implies to Tom that her mission has been completed. Ruth then forges ahead with her

plans and her purchase of the new home indeed has the consequence Tom feared; white

neighbors contemplate moving to New Canaan. While Mabels silent refusal to dupe

Ruth clears the way for her to purchase the home, Tom is quick to react by secretly

committing arson, burning the Bonner home to the ground before Ruth can buy it. By

doing so, he replicates the extralegal tactics white homeowners used to drive away new

African-American neighbors and the actions of the white arsonist he defended at the start

of the novel. Toms extreme tactics, particularly when counterpoised with Mabels move

toward empathy, suggest an answer to the books question as to whether or not

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professional and economic mobility, when gained through moral compromise, can ever

constitute valuable race work (27). The novel appears to answer resoundingly in the

negative by showing that such compromises leave the actor on a slippery moral slope.

Toms initial claims suggest he intends to lead his people to a higher ground, but his

actions repeatedly sacrifice the opportunities of other African-Americans for his own

self-interest.

It is empathy rooted in the experiences Mabel shares with Ruth (those of being

upwardly mobile African-Americans in a traditionally white community) that moves her

to welcome Ruth when she drops in for an unannounced visit. Just after the arson, Tom is

resting upstairs, having fallen deeply ill. Mabel, frightened that she will be questioned

about the crime (with her sharp sense of smell, she detects the gasoline on Toms clothes

but never confronts him), has herself become a part of the neighborhood surveillance

apparatus. Hidden behind the curtains, she carefully tracks the progress of the

investigators and spots Ruth Crisp walking up the road. On first inspection, Ruth seems

as bold as ever, squat and square as a dump truck, storming up Serendipity Street, a

highly visible presence in what neighborhood convention dictates should be an empty

landscape traversed only by automobiles (204). At first, Mabel regrets that she cannot

simply avoid Ruth because she has no maid available to lie and say she is out. Yet when

Mabel discovers that Ruth has come not to talk about the arson but to sell Amway

products, she begins to recognize the common threads of their experience.

She notices with regret that Ruth is undergoing the same transformation that she

herself underwent upon moving to Greenwich. While Ruth retains her informal manner,

she is adopting the local style of dress. For example, Mabel at first marvels that Ruths

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once short, curly hair is smooth, straight, and long, but then she notices Ruth repeatedly

bending over to scratch her scalp as she walks though the doorway:

Ruth Crisp doubled over, pulling sections apart to scratch deeper. Mabel

couldnt help but lean in, take a look for herself.

She squinted into Ruth Crisps scalp and saw the hair so short and nappy it

could have been stitches, with strand cut out of somebody elses head pasted

directly onto the skin itself. The scent of Ultra Sheen passed up Mabels nose,

blue and creamy. Odd thing was, Mabel sniffed that womans head on purpose.

Felt like a kind of truth serum, coursing through her body. (207-208)

Although at first Mabels inspection of Ruths head is motivated by a sort of competitive

curiosityshe wonders how it is that Ruth has rid herself of her former hairdo, a

teaspoon of fuzzas she draws closer, the familiarity of the scent acts as truth serum

(207, 208). Looking at Ruth, she seems to grow disappointed that Ruth is wearing a

weave, a hair extension which allows her hair to mimic white womens straighter, longer

hair. This truth serum thus reveals to Mabel that she herself has made many

compromises, ranging from the trivial (dressing like her neighbors) to the serious

(allowing her neighbors to take advantage of her) (208).

Mabel has heretofore enjoyed Ruths defiance (although she publically

condemned her), hence she is somewhat taken aback by Ruths attempts to emulate local

women. As she looks at Ruths Louis Vuitton handbag, she remembers that she also

once paid three hundred dollars for pleather just because shed seen a white woman do

it 139 (214). Although Mabel simply notices surface details like Ruths hair and her

handbag, on a deeper level, she regrets that she and Ruth have been duped by the
139
Pleather is slang for plastic (fake) leather.

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neighborhoods senseless trends. She pauses to consider that, if a man-made, plastic

handbag is considered more of a measure of taste than a natural leather one, the

neighborhoods conceptions of class must be flawed in other, more significant ways. On

the other hand, Mabel is relieved to discover that Ruths transformation is not complete.

In fact, Ruth has visited because she is helping her niece sell Amway products, affordable

products that Mabel herself used in her days in Hamden (214). The products (mainly

health and beauty aids and cleaners) are so familiar to Mabel that she wonders why she

ever stopped using them. The implied answer is that they are not fashionable, and Mabel

again seems to regret that she was not more wary of copying her neighbors. Moreover,

Ruths attempt to sell the products despite the fact that she has instantly amassed a large

fortune reveals to Mabel that she has been mistaken in dismissing Ruth as a spendthrift.

She smiles as she thinks about Ruths venture:

Amway. How about that. Selling Amway. Mabel began to feel just the slightest

bit giddy.

. . . . . Woman was selling Amway. Thirteen million dollars, and selling Amway

to the neighbors. Black folks lives were always such an adventure. (215)

This adventure Mabel alludes to implicitly contrasts with the highly regularized social

mores of Greenwich (215). Whereas before she had seen Ruth as an adversary, the fact

that the women share some experiences allows Mabel to be more empathetic to Ruth and

to see her own life in Greenwich in a more critical light.

In the closing passages of the novel, the quick bond that develops between Ruth and

Mabel is promising. The novel hints that it will heal the psychological schisms dividing

Mabel between past and present, between Lovejoy and Hamden on one hand and

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Greenwich on the other. Mabel imagines talking to Ruth about subjects that she cannot

talk to the other women about because of either their lack of shared experience or

because of the lack of reciprocity in their relationships. Whereas Mabel conveyed the

sense of being watched early in the novel as that of walking on pins and needles (53),

here she employs the theatrical metaphor of being on stage to describe the same sense of

pressure she feels from the Greenwich neighbors. Extending hospitality and empathy to

Ruth, however, allows her to reject the neighborhoods demand for continual self-

surveillance and to step off that stage. Ellis describes Mabels thoughts about possible

topics for conversation:

That bad Freddy Hurd was back, living with his mama and looked like he might

be on drugsthey would definitely need to discuss that situation. Mabel hadnt

chewed the fat like the fat was supposed to be chewed in quite some time. She

pushed back her chair and stood, and somehow she felt like she was stepping off a

shaky platform. (216)

The scene ends just before their talk begins. Mabel invites Ruth to stay and makes a

gourmet coffeea special strawberry blendto share with Ruth. While Mabel shared

coffee and desserts with the other neighborhood women when they visited her to

persuade her to join the crusade against Ruth, in those conversations she felt compelled to

hold her tongue rather than admit she sided with Ruth. With Ruth, by contrast, she feels

free to speak her mind. Moreover, the strawberry flavor carries a special symbolic

significance in the novel. Although the strawberries given to her mother in Lovejoy

represent her exploitation by a white employer who took her confidences and her labor

for granted in much the same ways that Becka Rainier and other neighborhood women

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expect to be nurtured by Mabel but offer Mabel no support in return, Ellis makes clear

early in the novel that Mabel loves the scent of strawberries. Her ability to share

strawberry coffee with Ruth at the end of the novel thus symbolizes her ability to enjoy

such material luxuries on her own terms with a woman who rightly recognizes her as a

peer. Thus, Good Fences suggests that suburbanization itself is not necessarily alienating

for pioneers; Mabel has the opportunity to enjoy her life on Serendipity Street if she has

the courage not to play by the rules. On the other hand, through Toms story, the novel

suggests that the adoption of the norms of a racist culture in order to achieve success is

always damaging. Moreover, through stories of Mabels childrens disappointments and

trials, the novel demonstrates that the suburbs are not, as many suppose, always

uniformly advantageous places in which to come of age. Furthermore, the new friendship

between Ruth and Mabel has yet to stand its greatest test. Mabel defers the onerous task

of revealing Toms role in the arson, and the novel never ventures to explain how the two

women could remain friends once this fact is revealed.

While its central narrative thread (Mabels story) suggests (albeit problematically)

that acts by courageous individuals can transform the suburbs into places more hospitable

to racial and class diversity, the novel also self-consciously portrays some ambivalence

about African-American suburbanization. Toms and the childrens experiences contrast

with Mabels. Although the primary third person narrative follows Mabel, the limited

omniscient narrator sometimes slips inside the thoughts of the children and husband Tom.

The shifts in narration that bring the readers more of Toms perspective allow the novel

to delve into and complicate the notion that upper-middle class suburban African-

Americans are sell-outs. By including a flashback that records Toms adolescence in

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Leflore, including his escape from a lynch mob, the text indicates that, although Toms

sabotage of Ruths plan to buy another home is abhorrent, all of his actions are driven by

an intense fear that stems from this near-death experience. What emerges from

considering the narratives of the entire Spader family together is a portrait of the

outcomes of one familys pioneer experience in a way that is both sympathetic to their

goals and unflinching in its suggestion that upward mobility itself cannot constitute

valuable race work because it cannot in itself guarantee any confrontation or

amelioration of structural racism and can, in extreme cases, push one to replicate that

racism (27). The novels depiction of the three Spader children suggests that all three

reject suburban life. Stormy pursues a modeling career in Spain. Hillary teaches

impoverished children in a Boston middle school, and Tommytwo attends Morehouse in

Atlanta. More significantly, it is Tommytwo and Hillary, the children who reject Toms

push for success at all costs and firm class distinctions, who achieve happiness, while

Stormy, who follows in her fathers footstep, does so at her own peril.

As a child, Stormy vacillates between acceptance of her fathers offer of a

tightrope-width path to fortuneplaying by the rules set by whitesand identifying with

the familys young African-American maid Sylvia Falcon, whom Stormy considers a best

friend. Stormy grows up isolated from other African Americans, save Sylvia and her

family; therefore, she adopts the Eurocentric beauty culture she learns from magazines

and television without question. When young Stormy hears her father tell her brothers

that they (whites) are always watching, she misinterprets the they to mean aliens and

hopes to be taken aboard a spaceship. At the same time, she will be the child most

influenced by this dictumwith a slight twist. She wants to be watched and craves the

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attention and lust of a culture that has traditionally defined beauty according to white

norms. Later, she grows more comfortable with her curvy body, but desperately needs the

cameraand many mento affirm her beauty. Even in elementary school, she revels in

the results of having her hair straightened despite the pain and boredom she must endure.

Each time her mother finishes the process, she poses in front of the mirror, flipping her

hair and whispering Fly me, a line from a popular commercial for PanAm airlines.

Sylvia Falcons brief presence gives her the rare opportunity to identify with a young

African-American woman. Stormy looks forward to Sylvia braiding her hair. Toms

refusal to give Sylvia a raise and Mabels uneasiness supervising Sylvia, however,

quickly disintegrate the relationship and Stormy resumes her struggle with her body.

As a teenager, Stormy is a math genius but would gladly trade her talent for two

size thirty-four double-Ds and a mane of Tommytwos curly hair (101). She is always

at war with her hair and body. She commands her hair, Dont frizz up, and Ellis quips

that There were three body parts that she was not on speaking terms with absolutely at

all: both cheeks of her butt and her left boob (102). Dismayed at the way her body

refuses to conform to the ideal of a slim white woman with large breasts, she curses the

fact that she has the only butt shed ever seen that stuck out of a back like a pumpkin

propped on a shelf (102). Not only does she feel she is not beautiful, but she echoes

racist pseudo-science in concluding that, because she is black, she cannot fully be female.

She thinks that, Between her hair and her vital statistics, she was barely even female

(102). Her conceptions are reinforced not only by television commercials but by the

cliquish standards of her upper-middle class high school, where girls police one anothers

appearance in a manner that makes todays paparazzi look tame by comparison:

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 Just like boys kept lists of the girls who gave blow jobs, girls were always

whipping out photo albums full of dog shots of other girls. There were

tons of backstabbing wenches who kept cameras in their lockers, lying in

wait for their so-called friends to show up at school with dandruff standing

out like sugar on their black sweaters. (104)

While she craves affirmation, she vacillates between this feeling of being hyper visible to

peers who enforce normative beauty standards and invisible to men who see only those

women who conform to those standards.

While Tom sought recognition and wealth through becoming an attorney and

Stormy seeks to become a model, the importance they place on rising from obscurity to

prominence links them. Unfortunately, Toms single minded insistence on the narrative

of the American Dream, and Mabels assent to Toms wishes, precludes Stormy from

receiving the support or guidance she needs to combat such a racist culture. While both

Tom and Mabel continue to encounter racism, they perhaps believe their success will

spare their children such troubles. What is certain, however, is that they also believe that

directly confronting racism is the most egregious and dangerous way of rocking the

boat now that they have made it to Greenwich. Thus, Stormy and her siblings are left

with few resources to combat the racism they will confront. Stormy, for example, dreams

of receiving the same admiration as Bob Newhart star Suzanne Pleschette did when she

visited the local Greenwich grocery store. Although Stormy has begun to emerge from an

awkward preteen into an admired young woman, she continues to be scarred by those

who would denigrate, exploit, or exoticize her. Thus, despite the fact that her father (and

to some extent Mabel) insist that both the American Dream and Martin Luther King

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Juniors dream have been achieved, Stormys attempt to recreate Pleschettes descent

among mere mortals recalls her mothers humiliations moreso than it does Pleschettes

throng of fans. Seeing Pleschette, however, left an almost indelible mark on Stormy:

As long as she lived, shed never forget the time she saw Suzanne Pleschette at

the grocery store. It was absolutely an unforgettable moment, a turning point in

Stormys life. The aisles were clogged with voyeurs watching her push her cart

through the fruit-and-vegetable department, not an eyeball in the place glued on

anything but her. The butcher came out swiping his hands on his bloody apron

like hed won the academy award when Ms. Pleschette set a steak in her cart.

Screw being anybodys stupid math teacher. Shed rather give herself a whiskey

enema than be a math teacher. Shed be flinging kisses out of a silver screen

someday, thats where she'd be, if any of these numbskulls ever bothered to ask.

(105)

Elliss choice of the grocery store as the setting for Ms. Pleschettes descent amongst

mere mortals of Greenwich is telling. The butcher enchanted by the stars presence is the

same man who ignored Mabel when she approached the counter for service. While

Pleschette enters the store and not an eyeball in the place is glued on anything but her,

Mabel also attracts stares in the same grocery store, but for different reasons (105). When

Mabel enters the store, customers and staff alike seem to stare and question whether or

not she belongs there, a fact that motivates her to flaunt both her wealth and kindness by

wearing jewels and waving heartily to the deaf bakery department employee. As was the

case in her early run-ins with Anne Marie Bonner, Mabel is both invisible and highly

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visible. Although she attracts scrutiny, she is ignored by the very same butcher who is so

proud to cut Pleschette a steak.

Mabel, who like Tom carefully upholds the narrative of the American Dream, does

not prepare Stormy to confront such adversity. When Stormy decides to recreate Ms.

Pleschettes star appearance on the bus to the UCONN math program, she does not

realize that she will, despite her charm, attract both admiration and scorn. After

repeatedly noticing Roscoe, the bus driver for the program, glancing her way in the

rearview mirror, she decides to saunter down the aisle of the bus in imitation of Marilyn

Monroe. When she reaches her stop, she turns on a studied charm as she passes each seat:

One after another, she began to drop specially selected smiles down onto each

rider.Each rider perked up as she passed, she was a priestess lighting candles. (108).

While Stormy is seen here discovering the power of her beauty, she also quickly

discovers the limits of that power. A white student from her trigonometry class

repeatedly mumbles nigger to her as she passes: Happened just that quickwham

bam thank you mamand it was over and nobody else could possibly have heard

anything more than a hum. But there were his corn-yellow teeth, gleaming at her

gleefully now, and his eyes, roaming her face, searching for a reaction, as if hed ask her

a riddle (109).

Much like her mother in the grocery store, she forces herself to maintain her

composure in the face of humiliation: Keep smiling, she ordered her cheeks, which

were so fucking lame they were quivering. You stay up there, she demanded of the tears

that had heated instantaneously to the sizzling point like drops of oil in a scalded pan

(109). Stormys ambitions, like her fathers, only increase when she is presented with

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such humiliations; however, like her fathers pursuit of the judgeship, her pursuit of a

modeling career requires her to continually weather the racism of the profession. She is

recruited by a hack talent scout who coaxes her to undress, then charges her a premium

price to shoot her portfolio because a look like hers must be done right (134, 135). He

promises her contacts in Europe, where he feels what he calls her Josephine Baker-like

beauty will be understood and appreciated (135, 134). Stormy eagerly goes to Spain

despite the lack of guaranteed work. While she tells her parents she is studying art

history, and while the talent scout promised her a career, her life there consists of

waitressing and barhopping.

As her narrative winds to a close, readers learn that she is not yet a model but

rather works as a go-go dancer in a Spanish bar. While men often proclaim her beauty,

they also often perpetuate the myth that black women are hypersexual and assume that

Stormy is a Brazilian prostitute. In the bar where she works, the other dancer, Yessica, a

blonde, often steals the spotlight. Moreover, her confidence does not evolve to the point

where she develops any discernment about her suitors; many men who appreciate her

beauty also abuse her relative naivet and lack of self-confidence. For example, while her

boss Juan Carlos assaults her and threatens her with a gun, she continues to work for him

because he offers her a job at a better bar, La Castellana, where he promises she will meet

models, photographers, and international celebrities like Julio Iglesias (150). While the

last section of the book dedicated to Stormy reveals that she has succeeded in turning all

eyes away from Yessica and toward her, as she writhes under the spotlight, Tears came

to her eyes just as they had on the school bus; she is desperately hoping that she is not

pregnant (203). Although her period comes in this scene, readers are left with her bitter

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reflection on her job as a dancer: Unfortunately, tonight was the one night she could

give a damn whether all these Spics and tourists wanted her body (204). While she has

finally received recognitionalbeit on a small scalethe victory is hollow and the text

offers little hope that she will find a new, more self-affirming dream.

The Spaders youngest child Tommytwo also flees the suburbs; he realizes his

lifetime goal of attending Morehouse, a choice not only at odds with his familys wishes

but in fact partially motivated by the desire to displease his father, who wants him to

attend Princeton and avoid other African Americans altogether. Tom is particularly

concerned that his son not socialize with lower-middle class or poor Africa Americans.

As Tommytwo grows up, Tom the Senior continually warns him against becoming a

nigger, his choice of epithets for these groups. Although both Toms warning and the

way he voices it are unsettling, it soon becomes apparent he is not motivated by classism

alone, but also by an internalized racism born of fear. In short, he feels that if he gives his

son a life of privilege and pursues a life of even greater privilege, Tommytwo will be safe

from the kind of harm that plagued him as a boy in Leflore. The novel, however, like

Towelhead, suggests that the suburbs are perilous places for young people of color,

including Tommytwo. To further emphasize the irony of Toms hope for a better life for

his son in the suburbs, the novel underscores that his domineering manner and emphasis

on prescriptive definitions of masculinity thwart, rather than foster, his sons self-

confidence. From the time Tommytwo is just four years old, his father begins teaching

Tommy an ethic of rugged individualism by encouraging absolute self-reliance. When

Tommytwos older sisters threaten to shove him into the refrigerator, Tommytwo recalls

his fathers words: Dad said if youre a man, then nothing can hurt you. Dad said walk

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tall, dont crawl like some little nigger. (39). His fathers insistence that Tommytwo

rely only on himself does not make the preschooler fearless, rather, Tommy is ashamed

that he cannot singlehandedly defend himself against his sisters, who outnumber him and

are bigger than him.

Although Tom insists on a heavily-masculine display of pride, his actions and

words overwhelm his son, who is moreover forced to take part in his fathers uphill

battles for wealth and prestige before he is even able to understand what those battles are.

After Tom appears on television defending the white arsonist, Tommytwo is shunned and

threatened at his karate lesson: While the girls sparred, Tommytwo asked three separate

guys if they wanted to come over to play Battleship. Even White Ralph said no.

Tommytwo felt sick to his guts (45). Next, he gets word that his sparring partner

Chuckie intends to cause him serious harm. When Tommytwo faces Chuckie, his fathers

words ring in his head: Stand tall like a man, dont crawl like a nigger, Tommytwo

chanted inside his head as he slunk out to the middle of the mat, where Chuckie had

already stood, laughing like a murderous fiend (45). This is the first of many times that

the image of a monster will appear to haunt Tommytwo. Each time, words like fiend,

murderer, or monster (or here a combination of these words) appear, representing a

violent threat to Tommytwo. These threats echo descriptions of the Carter lynch mob,

who wrestled with one another, threw stones, and let out war whoops before attempting

to murder Tom (185). Whereas Tom Sr. hopes that his success will put ample distance

between his son and such threatsas long as he is careful to act, dress, and speak as he is

instructed and associate with the right crowdsthis strategy works only up to a point

in Tommytwos life. When he is a young child, his fathers wealth can provide some

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protection, even though the controversies surrounding Toms career engender threats. At

the karate lesson, when Tom Sr. and Mabel appear outside the studio window with a new

Volvo, the childrens offers of friendship are renewed. Proudly refusing the apologies of

his classmates, Tommytwo leaves feeling ten feet tall; however, when Tommytwo

grows into a young man, his familys success is unable to guarantee security (46). Rather,

Tommytwo bumps up against the same strain of racism that threatened his fatherthe

myth that black men are rapacious sexual predators.

Although Tommytwos life is never threatened, his adolescence eerily echoes his

fathers. While Tom is accused of rape, Tommytwo is seduced by a much older woman

with fantasies about supposedly-rapacious black males and is led into an act that

ultimately amounts to statutory rape. Quick to grow tall and athletic, Tommytwo joins the

varsity basketball squad at the age of just fourteen. Yet while his athleticism and

popularity epitomize both the success and masculine strength his father advocates, such

success does not have the effect of diminishing the threats he faces as a young African-

American man. On his fifteenth birthday, he becomes the object of the fetishistic fantasy

of his friend Kazus motherMrs. Mihiko Yakiharo, an immigrant from Japan. The

episode certainly is problematic in terms of its own racismthe episode critiques the

exoticization and sexualization of Tommytwo while replicating orientalist tropes in its

treatment of Mrs. Yakiharo, who is portrayed as a sex-crazed vixen who speaks English

poorly. Despite these problems, the episode seems intended to illustrates the fallacy

inherent in Toms prescription for racial progress because the same racist views of black

mens sexuality that haunted his life continue to follow his son despite the gulf of

privilege and time separating the two mens adolescences. This implicitly suggests that

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confronting structural racismrather than insisting upon colorblindness in order to

achieve the Dreammay better serve to eliminate such threats.

The episode begins when Tommytwo decides to spend the eve of his fifteenth

birthday at Kazus. Although the boys friendship is waning because Kazu is not part of

the in crowd Tommytwo has recently joined, he decides to spend the night as a favor to

his friend. After Kazu falls asleep early, Mrs. Yakiharo, a sculptress, begins to flirt with

Tommytwo after noticing his sudden transition into physical maturity and minor

basketball stardom. Tommytwo enjoys the more innocent aspects of this flirtation, but he

grows increasingly uncomfortable when she recruits him to move one of her large nude

sculptures into storage. There, Tommytwo notices a circle of big cauliflower-headed

guys arranged around a futon like Romans watching slaves getting torn into pieces by

lions (91). Although the reader has long been aware that Tommytwo is being seduced,

he is innocent of Mrs. Yakiharos fetish for African American men even after hearing her

tape recorder play jungle drums and shrieking monkeys and seeing the statues (he

thinks the abstracted cauliflower-like Afros on the statues are an homage to Mrs.

Yakiharos favorite vegetable) (91-92).

At first, he enjoys being massaged by Mrs. Yakiharo; however, in the sex act

which follows, Tommytwo is no more individualized or humanized than the dildo (a

black penis) he sees lying on the couch. Whereas his father could save him from the

gladiator Chuckie, here he becomes the slave being torn to pieces on the futon as the

gallery of statues looks on (91). Although he finds Mrs. Yakiharo attractive, he ultimately

complies because he must. It was like, she was the mom, he thinks, so what could he

do (93). He is particularly frightened when Mrs. Yakiharo reveals her violent fantasies.

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When she asks him to bite her and then to bite her harder, Tommytwo thinks, It was

like; she was the mom, so Tommytwo bit her. This was her house and she wanted to be

bitten, so he bit her again and again. The sheiks place was done and hed shrunk down to

being the same Tommytwo his sisters used to stuff into the refrigerator, scared and

skittish (94). His fathers warning to walk tall cannot help him. On one hand, he is afraid

he must comply because Mrs. Yakiharo is an adult. On the other hand, he is afraid that he

will be characterized as the aggressor:

If he broke the skin, that would be bad, real bad. Shed take Polaroids of the

wounds and tell his parents, Kazu would find out, theyd kick him off the team,

maybe kick him out of school altogether, maybe get the police involved. His

whole life would be ruined. He concentrated all his energy on toothlessly nipping

the skin on her neck.

Despite his fear, when the time came he fucked her, because what the heck

else was a guy supposed to do. (94-95)

This episode shows that as an African-American teenager, Tommytwo has little power in

Greenwich. He obeys Mrs. Yakiharo because she is an adult, but at the same time he

fears that by complying, he will be viewed as an attacker. Although his fathers success

has certainly allowed him to easily access some opportunities that Tom did not have

access to a quality high school, for exampleand while Tommytwos own striving for

successbecoming a star athletehave indeed brought him recognition, Tommytwo is

viewed through the lens of the same pernicious cultural stereotypes that haunted his

father. These stereotypes underlie both Mrs. Yakiharos fetish and shape Tommmytwos

fear of being reported to the police.

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 Tommytwo returns home distressed only to meet his father. Unable to perceive

Tommytwos emotional state, Tom takes his sons birthday as an opportunity to reiterate

the color-blind narrative of the American Dream. Just as the novel examined the

dissonance between the good life proffered by Greenwich and the reality of the day to

day humiliations faced by Mabel so as to question whether individual accomplishments

and material success (including the move to a wealthy suburb) can alone constitute

valuable race work, so this interaction between Tommytwo and his father underscores

how privilege is not enough to counteract racism (27). For his birthday, the elder Tom

Spader gives his son what is meant to be an inspirational speech about his rise from an

impoverished Mississippi farm boy to a high-ranking judge, a speech Tommytwo coins

the Your responsibility as Heir to My Dream Speech, which the teen calls the same

old one about how hed already saved up half his college tuition by his sixth birthday by

working ninety-nine hours a day after school, which he had to walk four hundred miles

to, barefoot and backwards. How hed planned all his fabulous success way back in the

womb when he was the wonder fetus (97). Although, like many of the descriptions in

Good Fences, Tommytwos summary of his fathers speech is laugh-out-loud funny, the

gravity of the scene is chilling. Tommytwo ponders his night at the Yakiharos during his

fathers speech, making the irony of his fathers conviction that enough success will

allow one to be invulnerable to racism. Tommytwo imagines speaking back to his father

but is too intimidated to do so:

Ive got bite marks on my ass, he wished he had the guts to say to his dad, who

could have been along in the room chatting with his mirror. He was sick and tired

of his dads monologues. Tommytwo watched his fathers mouth bow in and out,

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 wide, then small, like one of those toys the girls used to make in elementary

school. (98)

As he does elsewhere, Tom insists tirelessly on the power of the American Dream. As a

result of his single-minded focus on the rags to riches narrative, however, he gives his

children no way to grapple with their day to day encounters with racism.

While Toms accomplishments are indeed numerous, he gives his children a sense

that one must set aside demands for justice and instead sacrifice everything to play by the

unfair and often punishing rules of the culture as it is. After breakfast, for example, Tom

shows his son the splinters he has from picking cotton:

His father suddenly shoved his hands at Tommytwo and flexed them right

underneath his nose, so close Tommytwo could smell the sausage. Oh God, this

was the absolute worst part, the magic-splinters routine. It seemed like

Tommytwo has had a million private viewings of the stupid black pinpoints that

became visible beneath his skin if Dad had his flashlight handy, which he always

did. (99)

Tommytwo complies by examining the splinters and throwing in a couple of small

groans (99). He reports that it it worked like music on a savage beast, soothing his

father so that he will finish his speech (99). Toms ego emerges as the third of the so-

called beasts that threaten Tommytwo (after Chuckie and Mrs. Yakiharo). While the

animalistic description of Mrs. Yakiharo is disturbing, the connection between her belief

that Tommytwo has an unrestrained, violent sexual appetite and the Carters use of this

same belief as a pretext for attempting to murder Tom indicates that circumventing,

rather than confronting racism, is not a viable tactic. Importantly, what Toms speech

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does not include is any examination of the dynamics of the sharecropping economy that

engendered his exploitation or of possible ways to end the oppression of African-

Americans. Rather, it is focused on the possibility that an individual can rise above

desperate circumstances. While Tom has just lectured his son on the importance of

seizing opportunities for (economic) mobility, Tommytwo describes his father twisting

his tie up to his throat as he prepares to leave for work, suggesting that his father has,

despite escaping the lynch mob, become his own captor.

After graduating, Tommytwo takes off for Morehouse and the company of black

peers. While the novel suggests he is happier there than in Greenwich, it also indicates

that his Greenwich upbringing has pushed him to foolish extremes to prove his

authenticity. Isolated from other African Americans in his adolescence, he hopes to

find an authentic black identity at Morehouse. While Linden Hillss excoriation of the

suburbs leaves readers with the unsettling conclusion that authentic blackness is only to

be found in impoverished urban neighborhoods, Good Fences challenges such simple

assertions by problematizing the very notion of authenticity. Seemingly adrift in a culture

that defines black masculinity in terms of rebellion, Tommytwo belonging to a cadre of

middle-class Morehouse students who affect the black vernacular and urban fashion, a

fact that draws attention to the possible performativity of any group identity. The book

also gently pokes fun at the things that impress Tommytwo about his new girlfriend,

LaKisha. She was the real deal, he says, She was from Detroit, down and dirty, knew

guys whod taken heroin, had gone out with a guy whod stabbed his cousin (139). This

tongue-and-cheek description suggests that Tommy foolishly glamorizes poverty and

conflates it with authenticity. At the same time, through dating LaKisha and ignoring the

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way in which his parents draw strict class boundaries, Tommytwo finds happiness.

When LaKisha reveals she is pregnant, Tommytwo asks her to marry him, refusing his

fathers advice to Always remove yourself from a bad situation (137). One may

wonder, however, how well Tommytwo will fare; he has decided to drop out of college,

to secretly spend his tuition money to buy an engagement ring, and to take a job at a

video store.

While the novel suggests that the affluent Tommytwo is nave to believe that his

life will not be financially difficult, it also depicts him as having found a sort of pure

happiness akin to that Mabel and Tom experienced early in their marriage, when they too

struggled financially. That Tommytwo and LaKisha live on a diet of hotplate popcorn

and are expecting a child though they have little means to support a family echoes an

earlier description of the young Tom and Mabel eating from a bottomless Spam

casserole, watching cars out the window and pretending the whole world would someday

be their oyster, as if the world could ever be some negros oyster, while Hilary and

Stormy shared not just a crib, but a blanket (14). A notable difference, however, is that,

for Tom and Mabel, this time coincided with Toms years in law school, while

Tommytwo and LaKisha seem to have suspended their educations indefinitely. By

showing that Tommytwos attempt to fashion an authentic identity leads him both to love

and to an uncertain future, the novel problematizes both the glamorization of poverty and

Toms strident classism.

Before moving on to discuss how Hilary escapes the individualist ethos of her

father, it is helpful to note that the novel examines in detail how and why Tom himself

formed his beliefs. Toms pursuit of the American Dream necessitates that he outwardly

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deny the United States history of racial violence. Though everything he does to avoid

rocking the boat is motivated by his escape from lynching at a young age, his choice

not to directly confront Americas history of racial violence in particular and racism in

general directly necessitates that he wall off his personal memories from his conscious

thought. While his rise from abject povertyMabel remembers Tom as being clearly

dirt-poor, the kind of poor that folks bragged about having survived and having arriving

in Lovejoy with a suitcase [that was] more tape than cardboard and more string than

tape could indeed be an inspirational story, he insists so fervently on a Horatio Alger

narrative and on how success is a matter only of personal effort that he forces himself to

patiently endure whites slights, exclusions, and assumptions and refuses to ally himself

with any political cause. Ironically, whereas both home-ownership and economic

mobility have been synonymous with the American Dream at various points in time,

suggesting that becoming a judge and owning a home in a prestigious suburb would

ordinarily be taken as the endpoint of this Dream, for Tom, the endless striving does not

abate in Greenwich. His tactic of carefully acknowledging and acting according to the

fact that he is living a watched life is part of his continual effort to stave off the

downward mobility that would result from white flight.

While Toms fear is in part realisticin the book more than one family considers

moving to New Canaan after the Crisps move to buy the former Bonner house, the novel

clearly does not endorse his extreme tactics, particularly burning down the home. Rather,

the novel conveys via Toms story the implicit argument that individual achievementbe

it a judgeship or a house in Greenwichdoes not equate with racial progress. The lesson

is that Toms individualism perpetuates and intensifies, rather than diminishes, the impact

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of racism. Moreover, the idea inherent in the American Dream that one can strip off

their particular histories and social positions (Flax 15) and put on new identities comes

under question in that Tom cannot will awayor achieve awaymemories of his

boyhood and adolescence. In fact, he falls into a deep coma when the floodgates that

have contained these memories burst open. As readers learn from Mabel, his sleep has

always been perturbed by nightmares and, at the end of the novel, he falls into a coma

punctuated by violent fits. Moreover, in order to sustain a narrative of progress, Tom

must sever himself from even the good parts of his past in order to associate himself only

with wealthy white peers.

He feels he must work ceaselessly to preserve his status with these peers, even

going as far as to burn Ruths house, replicating the violent means some whites took both

before and after the Fair Housing Act to prevent the integration of their suburban

neighborhoods.140 The fire also echoes another instance of arsonthat committed by

Toms first high-profile client, the dentist who burned down his own property while two

black youths squatted inside. This suggests that Toms earlier, abstract breeches of ethics

(defending the arsonist and a commuter-killer who targeted the homeless) pave the way

for these more concrete transgressions. As the omniscient narration enters Toms

consciousness, however, readers are for the first time able to experience his own narrative

of the event through free-indirect discourse, allowing them to sympathize with him by

showing him more fully as a product of his past. Not only is compassion key for Mabel

140
Included in the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

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and Hilarys survival, but the novel asks the reader to find some compassion for Tom

even as he pursues this heinous act.141

As Tom leaves his home to burn down Ruths new home with a carton full of

gasoline, the novel uses the metaphor of doorways to describe the way in which Toms

experience in Leflore opens onto the present. As he laces his shoes before leaving the

house, a memory, a bad one, managed to slip in through the cracked door within his

mind, and lance at him like a knife (176). He is, however, able to keep the memory at

bay long enough to proceed with his plan: He slammed the door, convinced, as he often

was, that his carefully cultivated ability to suppress memory was his only true weapon

against his own complete destruction (176). In such a light, one might see his refusal to

go back to Lovejoy often or to even once visit his mothers grave in Leflore as a tactic for

survival. Moreover, Toms inability to empathize with others might be viewed as a

product of his tendency to wall away memories, which leaves him with a compromised

ability to access emotion of any kind. Even when he remembers his courtship with

Mabel, for example, the door to his memory again locked (177). When he finally

permits himself to think of his love for Mabel and his children, the emotion is almost too

overpowering to bear.

Yet, the novel suggests that the purposefulness with which he recreates himself

cannot make the past disappear. As he watches the fire burn,

he realized something had gone terribly wrong: a certain door stood wide open

in his mind, held open by a gale-force wind. He forced himself to break his gaze,

141
This point was first stressed by Nancy Pearl in Booklist: Despite Tom's occasionally over-the-top
behavior, Ellis is not unsympathetic to him; the section of the novel that explores Tom's childhood is
beautifully handled (1594).

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 to concentrate on shutting the door. His eyes shot back to the fire of their own

accord, watched it dance slow mambos up the drain pipes on either side of the

face of the house. It was hypnotic, the fire. Burned yellow. Burned yellow as a

white womans hair. (182)

While the yellow of the white womans hair might remind the reader of the way in which

Mabel described the homes former owner Anne Marie as having blonde hair like Lana

Turner, the text soon reveals that Toms mind opens upon the memory of the lynch posse

formed in a supposed attempt to protect the honor of a white woman, Avery Carters

sister.

Toms captors, like Emmet Tills, pursue him in order to avenge purported affronts

to a white woman. While this was a rationale repeatedly used by lynch mobs, the actual

the motive was in most cases a perceived threat to white masculinity. Tom, for example,

presents an intellectual threat, particularly after he beats a white rival in a spelling bee,

but Avery Carter instead fabricates a story about Tom raping his sister. The Carter posse

is also motivated by Tills lynching and the protests that surround it, two events which

ignited the fury of local whites:

Boys mama in Chicago stirred things up with all the talk about justice. Talked to

northern newspapers, had Jet print photographs, got the eyes of the folk all over

the world trained on Leflore for that one hot minute. Then they all pulled out,

packed up the cameras left local niggers to hotstep across a bed of coals lit by

outsiders. Mamma couldnt speak the name Emmett Till, not even if the door was

bolted. Emmett got his the summer of fifty-five. Tom got his that next winter.

(183)

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In light of the anger, the local black community urges Toms mother to tell him to be

cautious, but she proclaims that her boy wasnt bout all that yassauh business (184).

Ironically, being about such yassauh business might be exactly how Toms Patterson

Street neighbors would have described him after he took on the arsonists case and

represented the firms interest on television; however, in the following episodes, one can

see that Tom chooses this path only after surviving the attempt on his life. He develops

the sense that he is being watched and a fear of rocking the boat because the Carter

brothers track and hunt him as if he were an animal. Although Tom eventually escapes

from the gang thanks to the stupidity and drunkenness of a Carter brother who loses the

rope, his outspoken mother instantly goes blind when the men come to tear Tom out of

her shack, and she commits suicide after he is taken by the Carters and their allies. They

pursue Tom and he escapes by a series of improbable featsoutrunning the entire band,

and then floating silently in a swamp evading the tens of white men searching for him. As

a result of what might be seen as his miraculous survival, Tom develops the conviction

that he was the savior, the messiah. He was the man burdened by God with the task of

finding the key and leading his people home to another land, remarkably similar to this

one atmospherically, where colored boys could strut their stuff if they chose without

risking murder (188).

In order to find that key, however, Tom feels that it is best to disguise oneself in

the very yassuh mentality his mother refused. When and where he will actually strut his

stuff remains unclear, except perhaps that, when he finally is appointed as a judge, he

feels above suspicion in the Crisp case. What is more prominent in the novel, however,

are mentions of his obsequiousness. In Leflore, Mabels father accuses him of trying to

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climb head first into the bossmans pocket (21) while Tom sees himself as

surreptitiously trying to improve the lives of African Americans. What so unnerves him

about the Crisps is that they lack the same bifurcated vision. In contrast to him, they feel

too secure:

Hed been watching the Crisps since the day they moved in and had deduced that

they were not fools. They were well aware of the surveillance teams. The curious

looks on the childrens faces as they rolled watermelons to the periphery of the

neighbors yard but not one foot farther informed him that the Crisp relatives had

been warned, as had his own son, of the eyes watching them behind brocade

curtains. Yet the Crisps, unfortunately, did not comprehend the unshakeable

complexity of living watched lives. They believed, simplistically, that Greenwich

air infused with the smell of their own barbeque could be a victory in itself; they

believed that twelve horny black nephews could be the punchline of a joke told to

a caucasian mailman, if one had enough cash in the bank. They were wrong. (180)

Tom of course feels that what he sees as the Crisps foolish sense of security is a threat to

his own attempt not to rock the boat.

Despite his horrific plot against the Crisps, the way in which his fears are linked

to his early life allows the reader some significant insight into his emotions and an

opportunity to feel some sympathy for him. However little understanding he has of his

childrens experience in Greenwich, for example, it is clear that he is deeply concerned

with protecting his son from the dangers he faced as a young man:

They werent among the throng. They were outlined in glitter on maps they would

never see and circled in photographs that they would not remember had ever been

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 snapped. The boy must be polite. He must do well in school. He must dress

neatly, bathe regularly, and keep elbows well below the tabletop. He had no

choice. The boy must learn from his fathers experience. He was wasting precious

years if he didnt. (179)

Tom is reacting to the sort of visibility he earned as a high achieverone that ultimately

led to his mothers death and his own near death. Tom feels he and the Crisps are

vulnerable and all the more so if they break at all with the expectations of Greenwich. As

Toms thoughts return to the fire in progress, it seems that Tom feels that he has finally

attained the invulnerability he sought because he is above suspicion for the fire and he is

a black man, taking a midnight stroll through a residential street in Greenwich, even

carrying a jug of gasoline, for Gods sake, and no sirens anywhere in the distance (180).

He walks confidently, with no fear he will be considered in the wrong place at the wrong

time. He has attained his goal; in fact, the fire inspector greets him cordially as he passes

by.

Toms fear, however, is more inescapable than conviction for such a crime. The

following scenes reveal that his attempt to refashion himself and to uphold the narrative

of the American Dream cannot enable him to outrun his past. He soon collapses under the

weight of his suppressed memories and guilt. Mabel, who stays close by him during his

recuperation, describes his body as if he was bracing for a punch (212). He also

repeatedly calls out for his long-dead mother (212). Moreover, the fact that these

memories are sparked by the arson suggests his willingness to commit arson to drive

away another African American family begins to open the door to memories of his own

victimization. If victimizing another evokes the memory of the violence he survived, it is

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possible that Toms sense of empathy has been restored and that he may no longer be

willing to sabotage others in order to secure his own position. In the final analysis,

however, this remains only a possibility.

The novel treats Toms recuperation with compassion. Mabel loses her

resentment against him and is filled with the profound love that characterized their early

years in Hamden and Lovejoy. As Tom wakes from his near coma, she laughs and cries

convulsively, Which shook her up a little bit, because she had never quite gotten to that

level about Tom before (213). They celebrate his recovery with a sort of youthful lan

rarely seen since their move to Greenwich: Later on into the night, shed found the MTV

channel and done her Sweet Potato, right there on the bed, with Tom admiring from his

pillow (213). She vows, She loved Tom Spader, period. She was going to fix him up,

try to bring him to a point where he had a little more love inside to work with (213).

Mabel intuitively knows Tom burned Ruths homewith her superior sense of smell she

can detect traces of the gasoline he used to ignite the fire on his hands despite his efforts

to hide the fire from his familybut she recognizes that he was driven by fear and

proposes that love will be an adequate counterweight to those fears.

Like Towelheads ending, however, this ending seems to ring false. First, Mabel

cannot predict what Ruths response would be if she learned of the arson and it is likely

the incident would become a major stumbling block to their budding friendship. Second,

while she recognizes that Tom Spader was terrified, she knows nothing about his past

prior to his mysterious arrival in Lovejoy (209). Will he reveal his past, or will she be

able to help him to recuperate without fully knowing his story? Lastly, it seems that while

Mabel achieves some agency by welcoming Ruth, in pledging to stand by Tom, she is in

338
fact putting aside a history in which he repeatedly directed her to act against her own

desires and interests. Even if Mabel is successful in rehabilitating Tom and even if Tom

grows more empathetic, there is little indication of how they will sustain their lives in

Greenwich should they stop courting the approval of their neighbors and Toms

colleagues and there is little indication that Mabel is ready to act independently of her

husband. Along with the childrens exodus from Greenwich, questions left unanswered

by the books final chapters suggest that the suburbs individualist culture takes a toll on

suburban pioneers who abandon families, communities, or political commitments in an

effort not to rock the boat.

Hilarys life suggests an alternate path. Hilary, like her siblings, leaves the

suburbs. Unlike Stormy and Tommytwo, however, Hilary becomes truly empowered. The

novel suggests that she achieves this power by crossing class boundaries in a more

meaningful and radical way than her mother and by coming to terms with her fathers

narrative of the America Dream more fully than either of her siblings. Like the other

Spader children, she suffers a crisis of identity growing up in suburban Connecticut.

Along with Stormy, she is isolated from African-American peers and quickly internalizes

the racism of her community and the broader culture. Whereas Stormy obsessively

criticizes her body, Hilary deflects her self-hatred onto other African-Americans. Like

her sister, she uses epithets derived from racist pseudo-science to describe other African-

Americans. In an argument with Stormy, Hilary calls her sister a "creepy black dweeb"

(86) and even describes herself as having grinned like a big goddamn ape at her brother

(85).

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 In sum, like sociologist Karyn R. Lacy's intervieweeswealthy African-

Americans living in suburban communitiesHilary emphasizes her middle-class status

and distances herself from poor African-Americans in order to confront a normative

image that posits middle-classness as the exclusive dominion of whites. For example, in

high school, Ellis records Hilary's thoughts on the students bussed to her school. She

feels ashamed when she encounters these students, and the novel implicitly suggests that

her descriptions of them are patterned on her fathers ideas about so-called "niggers." As

she describes the students, "They slunk around like baboons and segregated themselves in

the lunchroom. A lot of their parents were on welfare" (72). While her choice of words

exactly replicate the very stereotypes that were used to justify slavery and racism (that

those of African ancestry were subhuman) and resistance to integration (that African-

Americans preferred separate communities), the book suggests Hilarys response is

conditioned by a racist culture. Her words not only reflect her fathers idea that, since

America is a land of equal opportunity in which all those who are virtuous succeed while

those who are not fail, African-Americans disproportionate poverty is not a result of

racism but of a lack of merit. Her desire to distance herself from these students also

results from the fact that her teacher Mr. Dunn cannot seem to fathom that Hilary and the

other students do not live in the same community. When the buses pull up alongside the

school during last period, he attempts to excuse her to catch the bus.

Despite Mr. Dunns misguided and ultimately hurtful attempt at sensitivity, and

despite the fact that well-funded schools are traditionally thought to be one of the

foremost assets of suburban communities, the novel suggests that Hilarys Greenwich

high school does not offer a quality education in that it does nothing to help her or any

340
other student understand the history and legacy of slavery and discrimination. The

curriculum offers no mention of the role of race in American history, leaving Hilary with

few resources with which to confront the racism she experiences at the school. Hilary has

heard about lynching only from Sylvia Falcon. Thus, when Mr. Dunn leaves the room

and friend Dana leans forward and whispers, "You're Gonna Hang," in Hilary's ear,

Hilary is simply embarrassed by the attention. Although as younger child, Hilary heard

about lynching from the familys former maid Sylvia Falcon, she dismisses the

information because she has inherited a prejudice against the lower-middle class:

"Everybody knew maids lied. . . .White people never hung black people in the trees just

for being black. The maid was nuts" (74). Instead of responding actively to such insults,

Hilary does what she has learned to do: excel and move on. She is an all-American high-

school princess and cheerleader. Although she lives a life of great privilege and although

Greenwichs schools are considered desirable, they offer a distorted picture of American

history, effectively robbing Hilary of the chance to form a political consciousness.

While in college at Wellesley, Hilary learns African-American history for the first

time and morphs into a militant activist. In contrast to her father, whose chief worry is

that successful blacks are "outlined in glitter on maps they would never see" (179) and

thus that any suggestion of militancy, or even political engagement, could be disastrous,

Hilary makes herself extremely visible on campus by protesting ethnocentric lectures and

engaging in confrontations about race with fellow students. In addition, she works to

make racism visible by displaying evidence of the United States' history of racist

violence. She hangs a poster depicting white Southerners posed around the dead body of

a lynching victim:

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 they werent getting their prom shot taken, they were posed in a half-moon

around a black man they had just burnt on the ground like roasted game.

Brothermans mouth was studded with his own testicles, according to the

caption..Shed lost her last white so-called friend when she hung that picture.

(128-129)

Hilary's thoughts here juxtapose the prom, a metonym for her privileged suburban

adolescence, with the graphic poster. This clearly marks her transition from a politically

naive high school cheerleader to a full-fledged activist. Her bold actions alienate both her

white friends and her less politically-active African-American friends. After college, she

seeks an outlet for her activism in a circle of Boston professionals, including Ball Odell, a

childhood acquaintance from Hamden. Not long after joining the group, however, she

begins to question their sincerity and efficacy. She quickly notices that, while her

compatriots view themselves in the image of radical black activists, their meetings often

resemble a meat market. In addition, the groups' indecision and sexism and the members

tendency to judge one another harshly lead them to devolve into a caricature of

radicalism.

Hilary soon discovers a more ideal conduit for her political engagementher

teaching. Although her mother ends the book on a note of contentment, Hilary is the only

character to end the novel both content and wise. Mabel, attempting to hold fast to the

belief that Greenwich is the ultimate destination in her family's perilous climb to the top,

knows little about her children's real lives. She believes that Tommytwo is still enrolled

in college and Stormy is busy studying art history. While the connection Hilary will

experience with her third grade students is akin to her mother's new friendship with Ruth

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in that it is grounded in empathy, it is also more committed, and ultimately more

efficacious, than Mabel's newfound alliance with Ruth. Whereas her father advised the

family to distance themselves from poorer African-Americans and any habits and

thoughts that might be associated with them, Hilary discovers a connection with and a

compassion for her poor black and Latino/a students.

Despite her early activism, her disdain for those in poverty remains until she

stumbles upon a realization that all Americansher students, herself, her white peers,

and her parents, are "blocked" when it comes to understanding race. Hilary's discovery

occurs when she learns that the summer school curriculum insists that she teach the

children a lesson on Columbuss discovery of America, and Carlotta, a coworker from

a poor white family, defiantly files her nails and looks away when Hilary attempts to

discuss her resistance to teaching the lesson. Hilary rants, Not even financially stable,

that Carlotta had a mother living in a trailer home, but might as well be a pit bull, out

there protecting their precious status quo (197). Hilarys rage boils over into the

classroom, fueled not only by her debate with Carlotta, but also by the beliefs instilled in

her by her father so many years ago. Her childrens first task is to spell the word

discover. After several students fail to correctly spell the word, she begins to bubble

with anger: These kids were idiots. Not a child in the room could spell cat. An utter

embarrassment. Practically every third grader with pigment in the entire district was

enrolled in summer school, trying to make up the classes theyd already flunked at eight

years old (198). Rather than see her students as individuals who have in their young

lives already encountered enormous difficulties, she brands them as innately inferior

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idiots and implicitly attributes their inability to complete the lesson to their race or

pigment (198). These attitudes mimic her fathers dismissal of niggers.

It is only when Hilary has a sudden vision of a "vast-blue-green horizon dotted

with red brick fortresses that her mind opens to another possibility that the narrative

of colorblindness, which eclipses the importance of African-American history, both holds

back her pupils from a purposeful education and prevents the adults around herblack

and white alikefrom acknowledging that Americas violent past continues to effect the

present (198). In Hilarys vision, the blue green of the horizon evokes the horizon of

Columbuss Caribbean and the red brick traditional school houses. Instead of a tropical

paradise, however, the Caribbean is seen as a military outpost, while the brick houses

become fortresses that contain knowledge rather than schoolhouses that disseminate

knowledge. Hilarys revelation grows as she begins to understand that it is not only her

school that serves as one of these fortresses or defenders of the status quo but that all

American schools have somehow failed to grapple with the subject of race and the urgent

need for change.

Hilary suddenly sees that it is not the children but the education system that

remains the problem. She realizes, They were blocked. Their spelling function was

locked away behind thick walls (198). Her children suffer, she realizes, because the

school system only demands they ingest and regurgitate information and that often this

information bears little relevance or runs directly counter to their experience. As she

thinks further, she begins to understand that such a system of educationone which

discourages critical thinkingis instrumental in maintaining unequal race relations:

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 Shed made another grave mistake! Shed been wrong about white people all

these years! Hilary had to catch her balance against the desk. White people

werent demons. Repeat: not demons. They were . . . . stupid . . . blocked. Didnt

have the ability to perceive the complexities . . . missing the faculties of

comprehensionblind to the infinite permutations of their very own race

gameanother repercussion of slavery. . . . (198)

Schools, acting as fortresses that have contained rather than fostered knowledge about

American history, have created these blocked minds in their own walled images.

Hilary connects the insistence on rote knowledge and the promotion of the Great

Man theory of history that credits Columbus with the discovery of America to the

construction of the narrative of a colorblind society:

The curriculum guides insistence that Columbus Discovered America, this whole

walk in a straight line to the lunchroom, even this insane national mantra about

color-blindness and bootstraps wasnothing but desperate camouflagemasking

a.a mass psychological malfunction. (198-199)

This concept becomes implicitly linked to her fathers championing of the bootstraps

narrative. Hilarys ability to release herself from her fathers influence allows her to set

aside her own doubts about her students intrinsic worth. She realizes that her students

are not inferior but blocked (198). Despite her fathers apparent achievements, he too is

blocked because he refused to outwardly acknowledge that narratives of colorblindness

and bootstraps can be built only by walling away and hiding the role of race in Americas

history. Hilary begins to realize that her fathers insistence on a race-blind version of the

American Dream has taken its drastic toll on him because it exists in direct contrast to

345
reality. She thinks angrily about her neighborhoods lack of colorblindness and her

fathers desperate attempts to gain the neighbors approval through burning the Crisp

home:

Fire, Hilary barked through her mindtypical white-man tactics! Burned that

house to keep a black woman from buying it and every last cracker on Serendipity

Street probably knew exactly who did it, probably chipped in money for the

medal! No wonder Mabel sounded so hysterical over the phone! (199)

However, having defeated her own mental blocks, Hilary becomes empathetic toward her

family, her students, and even Carlotta: Hilary couldnt rile herself back up. There was

no anger left. It was gone. Just like that, just that easy. Shed been set free . . . .A tidal

wave of compassion nearly swept her off her feet" (199). By recognizing that her white

peers like Carlotta are blind to most of American history, that her family plays along

with a society that attempts to be colorblind, and that her childrens intelligence is

blocked by an educational system that denies their capacity for critical thinking and

punishes them for being unable to learn through its own deficient programs, Hilary gains

an even more profound peace than does her mother, who attempts small strategies of

resistance in order to cope with Greenwichs racism. Whereas Mabel steps off a platform

and is for the first time on stable ground, Hilary achieves something like a transcendental

experience.

Like Lauren Olamina in the Parable of the Sower, Hilary leaves the suburbs

behind and dismantles class boundaries. While Tom believes that keeping these

boundaries intact is key to his success and safety and that of his family, Hilary, who

crosses these boundaries, fares better in terms of mental well-being than any other

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Spader. Life in the suburbs is safer for Tommytwo than it was for Tom in the Jim Crow

South, but the younger man is still haunted by myths of rapacious black male sexuality to

the point that he himself becomes the victim of violence. He develops a hatred of his

father and his fathers insistence on upward mobility, which leads him to dismiss the

possibilityperhaps foolishly of finishing his college education. For Stormy, growing

up in a culture that defines beauty in terms of white standards is not made easier by life in

Greenwich, where she has virtually no African-American peers and is discouraged from

contesting the dominant culture. The only role models from whom she might gain an

intrinsic appreciation of her own beauty are her mother, whom she is well-aware, even at

the age of 13, is zonked out on prescription pills and the maid Sylvia, who is only with

the family a short time. As a result, she grows too appreciative of any accolades she

receives for her looks and becomes prey for men who exoticize her or offer her empty

promises of a lucrative modeling career.

While Mabels story demonstrates that it is possible to rediscover ties to one's past

and with African-American culture in the context of suburban life, her childrens stories

suggest that the suburb poses a great challenge to her children, perhaps because, unlike

Mabel, they have no roots to which to return. Neither does Tom attain peace or escape

racism by achieving the American Dream. Overall, however, it is still possible to see

Good Fences as offering a narrative about African-American suburbanization that stands

apart from the dire narrative of Linden Hills, which conflates materialism,

suburbanization, and a loss of cultural identity because although Tom remains consumed

by self-hatred, he is treated sympathetically. His near-death experience allows readers to

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see his quest for the endless accumulation of wealth and careful assimilation into the

white community as a quest to outrun a troubling past.

By reiterating familiar tropes of the suburbs (the sense of alienation, isolation and

conformity mapped onto the built environment) in the context of a story about an

African-American family, the novel suggests that such tropes can be used to describe

more than simple middle-class ennui. The sense of alienation, isolation, and dreadful

conformity felt by many seems to be exacerbated for these pioneers. The sense of

disappointment experienced by pioneers can be traced not to an excess of privilege but to

the ways in which they are subjected to racial discrimination and the pressure to uphold

and embody a colorblind narrative that suggests that all Americans have an equal chance

to succeed. In addition, the novel critiques pro-suburban discourse by demonstrating that

the Spader children, like Jasira in Towelhead or like Amy Dunn in Butlers Parable of the

Sower (discussed in the next chapter), do not always profit from the suburban

environment. The novel thus explores both the promises and the perils of suburban

pioneering in order to question the broader narrative of the American Dream.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Outside the Walls: Parable of the Sower and the End of the Suburban Middle Class

Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower (1998)142, like other texts discussed in Part

II of this dissertation, revises what scholar Robert Beuka calls the dystopian view of

the suburbs as a privatopia in order to comment upon issues germane to the lives of

women and ethnic or racial minorities in the United States; these issues include sexual

and labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and the formation and support of non-

traditional families. The novel, set in the years 2024 to 2027, begins in an already-

integrated gated community shared almost equally by whites, Latino/as and African

Americans. Narrated in a series of diary entries by Lauren Olamina, the texts teenaged

African American protagonist, the early sections of Parable describe a neighborhood in

the Los Angeles suburb of Rodeblo, California that fosters collective ties but cannot truly

protect its inhabitants from the escalating economic inequalities, rampant drug abuse, and

violence outside its walls. The novel is thus not fully immersed in either pro- or anti-

suburban discourse but, rather, makes a more nuanced critique of a type of community

activism that ends at the borders of relatively privileged suburbs like Rodeblo.

While recognizing its modestly successful residents understandable desire for

safety and economic security in a rapidly changing world, the text ultimately concludes

that new, more inclusive models of community must be forged in order to provide a

sustainable future. In other words, the text demonstrates that local communities such as

142
Parable of the Sower is followed by a sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998). This chapter does not
discuss Talents, which follows its protagonist Lauren and the ACORN community as they are ambushed
and captured by the government of uber-conservative US President Christopher Morpath Donner. Instead,
this chapter focuses on Sower, which ends with the establishment of an ACORN settlement on land
formerly belonging to Laurens husband Bankole. I choose this focus because Sower, by detailing how
Lauren moves from a suburban neighborhood toward a more inclusive model of community, is more
germane to the focus of this project.

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suburbs in general and gated communities in particular cannot position themselves as

defensive enclaves created to bolster residents middle-class status and to shield their

members against the pitfalls of an increasingly stratified global economy; rather, in order

to provide true safety, such communities must be proponents of global justice. Like

Towelhead, Butlers novel recirculates some common anti-suburban tropes. For example,

it depicts a neighborhood that understands itself as a respite from the outside world while

overlookingor being blind tocrimes within those borders. However, Parables

critique of the suburban middle class does not tread the familiar ground of satire.

Rodeblos residents are not all civically disengaged, socially conformist, racist, or single-

mindedly focused on upward mobility. Rather, in depicting the destruction of a flawed

but not thoroughly corrupt neighborhood, the novel foretells of a dystopian future in

which a struggling suburban middle class must risk its tenuous grasp on privilege for both

the greater good and for its own survival. The text suggests that Rodeblowhich is not

bereft of communal efforts but which limits these efforts to those designed to boost

individual neighborhoodswill not survive in a globalized world characterized by the

concentration of power in the hands of a few multinational corporations and their

government acolytes. Rather, such neighborhoods must be abandoned in favor of models

of community in which individuals seek to contribute to the collective economic good

rather than to the success of their individual family, neighborhood, or suburb. 143 The

novel thus sounds some familiar criticisms of the suburbs but goes beyond satire by

143
Critic John Stillman also characterizes Rodeblos ambitions as modest (5). I disagree, however, with
Stillmans analysis of the tone in which Parable describes Rodeblo in the opening chapters. Whereas he
sees the landscape as a scattering of small dystopias, collections of individuals and families increasingly
endangered by the outside world and blocks of fear and defensiveness in an inimical and threatening
world, I suggest that Laurens neighborhood, though misguided and unable to survive, is somewhat well-
intentioned (Stillman 9).

350
suggesting that suburbs and gated communities within those suburbs are doomed by the

very drive toward privatization they embody. In short, the neglect of government

regulation and of visionary political activism results in the concentration of wealth in the

hands of fewer and fewer individuals and corporations, which ultimately undermines the

middle class itself. When Rodeblo is destroyed, Lauren uses her own syncretic religion

Earthseed to accrue a band of followers (who also take the name Earthseed). These

followers range from escaped slaves and prostitutes to a former physician. At the end of

the novel, Earthseed members form ACORN, a rural, egalitarian, and agrarian

community. The names ACORN and Earthseed both imply the potential to germinate a

new society from one experimental utopian community.

ACORN is in many ways the anti-suburb. First, while it does include a somewhat

stable membership, that membership is determined not by socio-economic status (as it is

in suburbs and gated communities) but by the willingness to contribute to a shared goal

of group survival. Its membersdrawn from the street poor as well as the middle

classesstrive to weather economic and environmental change by existing outside of an

exploitative late-capitalist system. As such, they form a society based around collective

modes of production rather than individualism and consumerism. Furthermore, unlike

suburban communities, ACORN is not a collection of loosely affiliated patriarchal

nuclear families. While families exist, the bonds between them are strong. There is no

suburban ethos of moral minimalismthe tendency to avoid conflict at all coststo

prevent one member from actively intervening to ensure anothers wellbeing. On the

contrary, the group works together to nurture both members biological children and the

orphaned children they rescue en route to Northern California. Strong bonds between

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families also serve as a deterrent to the exploitation of women that occurred in Rodbelo

and in other suburban communities studied in this section, in which neighbors turned a

blind eye to spousal and child abuse. The absence of such abuse is further ensured

because households are not male headed; power is shared equally between men and

women and the community itself is led by a woman. Thus while ACORN is rural and

isolated, it is not fortified by the type of impermeable social boundaries present in

Rodeblo. Lines between families and households are more fluid and lines between classes

(emblematized by Rodeblos walls) have disappeared. While, like Rodeblo, ACORN is in

many ways focused on ensuring its own survival, it no longer works in the interest of

defending its middle-class status. Rather, it builds solidarity between members of

different classes and seeks to work outside of the existing economy.

The juxtaposition of Rodeblo (a racially diverse but socially stratified suburb)

with ACORN (an equally racially diverse rural community free of socio-economic

distinctions) indicates that Parable does not herald the increasing diversity of the suburbs

as a move toward a more just society. While Parables walled and gated suburban

community is not a retreat for wealthy and upper-middle class whites, as are many of the

current-day neighborhoods studied by sociologists and historians, or as is the community

at the center of T.C. Boyles oft-studied novel Tortilla Curtain, and while the

discrimination that exists in this neighborhood pales in comparison to that experienced by

the Spaders or the Marouns, Butlers novel does not portray this integrated suburb as a

solution to racial disparities. The neighborhood in fact stands as a relative exception in a

world in which such disparities remain deeply entrenched, and it is only through efforts

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to eliminate all racial, social, and economic disparities that a truly inclusive society is

formed.

Parable of the Sower and the Gated Community

While the postwar suburbs alarmed social critics such as Lewis Mumford, who

saw in them the atomization and privatization of American culture and a decline of an

essential community ethos, recent scholars such as Edward Blakely and Mary Gail

Snyder, a team of planning scholars, and Setha Low, an ethnographer, have suggested

that gated communities are the culmination of the suburban impulse to retreat from the

public sphere. Residents of gated communities, they conclude, look for the same things

their traditional suburban ancestors did: an antidote to their fears of crime, a retreat from

racially and socio-economically diverse communities, and a way to secure and display

middle-class status. Both the Blakely/Snyder team and Low report that, despite actual

drops in the crime rate after the 1970s, gated communities boomed in the 1980s and

1990s, a time when the middle-class across the United States perceived themselves and

their neighborhoodssuburban and urban aliketo be in danger (Low 11). Those who

dwelled in gated communities were likely to cite their need for gated communities to

provide a safe and secure home in the face of a lack of other social alternatives, though

this need was based not in reality but rather on perceptions created by the moral panic

over urban crime (Low 11). It became increasingly common to feel that, For the home to

be safe, a lock on the door was not enough. The streets of the neighborhood around it and

the city and region of which it is a part should also be safe (Blakely and Snyder 29-30).

Given that the media routinely associated crime with the poor and people of color, the

gating movement became an extension of white flight; as minorities moved to the

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suburbs in increasing numbers, more whites moved out of the traditional suburbs into

exurbs or gated communities (Blakely and Snyder 16). Moreover, though no study has

provided conclusive evidence that walls, gates, or guards increase home values, as Low

states, Assurances that walls and gates maintain home values and provide some kind of

class status or distinction are heard by prospective buyers as a partial solution to

upholding their middle- or upper-middle-class position (21).

Like suburbanization itself, the rise in gatingperhaps representing the

apotheosis of suburbanizationhas dire consequences for society at large. Gated

communities concretize suburban plannings already-insular ethos and, even more so

than traditional suburbs, draw the resources of the wealthy and upper-middle class away

from the public sphere. As discussed in Chapter One of this section, suburbs both

emphasize the family home as their primary unit and privilege private life over public

life. As Low notes, the physical strategies of suburban planning craft an environment

conducive to these priorities. Houses are set back from public thoroughfares (the more

posh the development, the longer the minimum setback required) and set apart from one

another (again, greater distance is a favorable class marker) (57). In addition, Low cites

moral minimalismthe tendency of citizens to go to extreme measures to avoid conflict

by ignoring offensive behavior (or in extreme cases anonymously reporting such

behavior to authorities)as a factor that places emotional and social distance (as well as

physical distance) between households (65). Walls and gates, she proposes, not only

provide physical boundaries but are extensions of the suburbs long-standing tendency to

impose social boundaries between communities. The strenuous rules set by developers

reinforce the suburban tradition of moral minimalism by preventing most interpersonal

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conflicts about property before they begin and by resolving any conflicts which do arise

through a designated authority. This physical and social insularity, by extension, had a

fiscal and social impact at the municipal and regional level that affected the nation as a

whole in the 1990s. As Blakely and Snyder note, gating allows some citizens to secede

from the public contract, excluding others from sharing in their economic and social

privilege (3). By maintaining private street cleaning, maintenance, parks and pools, and

entertainment, The new developments can create a private world that need share little

with its neighbors or with the larger political system (Blakely and Snyder 8). The

privatization of such resources has led to arguments that residents should bear less of a

tax burden since they use fewer public amenities.

Parable of the Sower, The Secession of the Successful and Suburban Gated

Communities

The concentration of wealth and resources into the hands of a few was a

phenomenon not limited to gated communities. The deterioration of public infrastructure

that accompanied the spread of privatized amenities was often noted in the 1990s. Kathy

Knapp, a literary scholar who writes extensively on the suburbs in American literature,

notes in her work on T.C. Boyles Tortilla Curtain that political economist Robert Reich

sees gated communities as emblematizing a phenomenon he calls Secession of the

Successful (130). Reich describes the phenomenon as follows:

The secession is taking several forms. In many cities and towns, the

wealthy have in effect withdrawn their dollars from the support of public

spaces and institutions shared by all and dedicated the savings to their own

private services. As public parks and playgrounds deteriorate, there is a

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 proliferation of private health clubs, golf clubs, tennis clubs, skating clubs,

and every other type of recreational association in which costs are shared

among members . . . .Condominiums and the omnipresent residential

communities dun their members to undertake work that financially

strapped local governments can no longer afford to do wellmaintaining

roads, mending sidewalks, pruning trees, repairing street lights, cleaning

swimming pools, paying for lifeguards and, notably, hiring security guards

to protect life and property. (The number of private security guards in the

United States now exceeds the number of police officers.) (16).

Knapp also draws on Reichs idea that the secession of the successful into places like

gated communities and private clubs not only adds to the burden of struggling

communities by withdrawing tax dollars from public resources but also results in the

decline of civic and political engagement beyond the local level (131). Reich describes

this phenomenon in detail:

The renewed emphasis on "community" in American life has

justified and legitimized these economic enclaves. If generosity and

solidarity end at the border of similarly valued properties, then the most

fortunate can be virtuous citizens at little cost. Since most people in one

neighborhood or town are equally well off, there is no cause for a guilty

conscience. If inhabitants of another area are poorer, let them look to one

another. Why should we pay for their schools?

So the argument goes, without acknowledging that the critical

assumption has already been made: "we" and "they" belong to

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 fundamentally different communities. Through such reasoning, it has

become possible to maintain a self-image of generosity toward, and

solidarity with, one's "community" without bearing any responsibility to

"them" the other "community." (16)

While Reich cites the disparities generated by urban gentrification as well as those

apparent in wealthy suburbs, in her analysis of Boyles novel, Knapp highlights Reichs

point that gated communities are concrete evidence of the widespread phenomenon of

economic stratification and the privatization of once-public resources (Knapp 130). In the

novel she examines, this stratification and middle-class neighborhood activism aimed

at benefitting one particular community is evidenced in the extreme. White residents of

Arroyo Blanco crusade against the poor immigrants who populate the labor exchange just

outside their gates despite the fact that they depend on this immigrant labor to operate

their own homes and businesses. The activism they engage in is not only limited within

the borders of the community but also aims to erect physical fortifications of those

bordersfirst a gate and then a walland to police the Latino population through

neighborhood watches.

I would argue that while the modestly-middle class Rodeblo neighborhood in

Butlers novel does not represent the Secession of the Successful, it does to a degree

represent the withdrawal of the political and social capital from the larger public sphere.

While Boyles description of Arroyo Blanco resonates with those offered by Low and by

Blakely and Snyder and with the work of earlier theorists such as Lewis Mumford who

saw all suburbs as atomistic, Butlers Rodeblo is not a fortress of wealthy whites fleeing

an increasingly diverse suburbia. The multi-ethnic suburban neighborhood does bond

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together in the interest of educating young children, helping neighbors in need, and

defending one another. Unlike residents of Arroyo Blanco, who are fully representative

of the Secession of the Successful and who pursue the perpetrators of misdemeanors like

graffiti with a zealotry usually reserved for warfare, Rodeblos community members do

not subscribe to glamorized notions of vigilantism. In addition, their perceptions of

crime, unlike those of Arroyo Blancos residents, are not distorted, exaggerated, or born

of racism; the world outside their gates is indeed dangerous. While they differ from

residents of a typical gated community in this way, however, their community efforts,

like those which Reich describes, do tend to be inwardly focused. The efforts led by

Laurens father are by and for the residents of Rodeblo. Residents concern is limited to

their neighbors and little regard is given to the masses of people living in poverty outside

the gates. In addition, like suburban neighbors in Towelhead and Good Fences, Rodeblo

residents have little perspective on the problems of gender inequality and child abuse and

neglect in their own community. Finally, they share with residents of Arroyo Blanco the

inability to connect to their economic and social woes to the national and world political

climate, as discussed in the following section.

The Gated Community, the Drive for Security, and Global Slavery and

Environmental Destruction

Butlers portrayal of a gated suburban neighborhood deviates from dystopian

notions of suburbs and gated communities while allowing the book to offer a more

pointed critique not only of suburbia but also of middle-class values as a whole. Whereas

Towelhead and Good Fences confine themselves to the problems of adapting suburban

life to the needs of a diverse middle class, Parable of the Sower rejects a more integrated

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middle class as an end in itself. Outside the neighborhood walls of Rodeblo, vast

structural inequalities and gendered violence drive disproportionate numbers of African

Americans, Latinos, and Asians into chattel, debt, and sexual slavery. Because the

integrated composition and strong communal ties of this gated community are not

indicative of national and global politics, they are not enough to sustain its inhabitants

against the rising tide of economic destruction. The novel uses the gated suburban

neighborhood to examine race and place in a global context and ultimately demonstrates

that the middle class goals of personal security, family stability, and socioeconomic

mobility cannot be sustained as long as trends in the global economy continue to widen

the gap between the haves and the have-nots.144 For the residents of Rodeblo, gating and

community policing are not enough to keep the world at bay.

Moreover, despite the books status as speculative fiction, the world that the

Rodeblo citizens attempt to keep strongly resembles the world as it existed at the time

Butler wrote the novel. As Jerry Phillips has noted,

Butlers portrait of 21st century California combines empiricism with

speculation, extant facts and facts that are (possibly) in the making. . . .

But (and this is the crucial point) the future in toto is not yet with us and

might be avoided if we take the requisite actions. Butlers perspective

on historical time is authentically prophetic . . . . The true prophet does not

foretell an inevitable future, but warns of likely consequences should a

present course of action continue. (300)

144
While I have outlined my disagreements with Stillmans arguments, here I echo his proposition that To
rely on community or family produces equal frustration: neither traditional communities, based around
church and neighborhood, nor the nuclear family structure can respond effectively to corrosive and
destructive changes underway in the United States (18).

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Furthermore, Americas possible future as represented in Sower resembles conditions

already experienced around the globe. As Gregory Hampton writes, Lauren lives in a

not-so-distant future where capitalism and its materialistic mentality have transformed

America into a third-world nation eating itself away from the inside (67). The

conditions Hampton alludes toeconomic disparities, slavery, and environmental

destructionare the wages of a global economic order that benefits some nations and

peoples at the expense of others. Parable simply transports these realities to the United

States from the present third world, perhaps to make them more pressing for the reader.

While many reviewers have commented on the parallels between slavery as it is

represented in the novel and slavery as it occurred in the United States past, it is also

possible to see Butlers discussion of slavery in the context of modern-day global slavery.

Anti-slavery advocate Kevin Bales, co-founder and President of Free the Slaves,

estimates that there is a world population of 27 million slaves whose labor produces a

yearly profit of $13 billion (23). Bales suggests that the most common form of modern

slavery is debt slavery, in which A person pledges him- or her-self against a loan of

money, but the length and the nature of the service are not defined and the labor does not

reduce the original debt (20). Debt slavery, in contrast to the chattel slavery that existed

in the United States, does not entail the legal ownership of one human being by another

(20). Rather, in most forms of modern slavery, Ownership is not normally asserted, but

there is [emphasis mine] complete physical control of the bonded laborer (20). The use

or threat of violence is also essential to another type of slavery, contract slavery, which is

hidden begging a mask of fraudulent labor contracts . . . . These contracts have two main

uses for the slaveholderentrapment and concealment (24). In this type of slavery,

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fraudulent labor contracts are used to lure the poor into slavery. These same contracts are

then produced as evidence of a consensual labor agreement in the event that allegations

of slavery are investigated. Sexual slavery is a third common type of slavery. As Karen

Beeks, Founder and Director of Global Partnerships and sociologist Delila Amir,

Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University write, Victims of sex trafficking are forced

into prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, marriages, and the mail-order bride trade

(xi-xviii). All of these forms of slavery thrive upon disparities between rich nations and

poor nations and between the rich and poor within developing nations.

The process of globalization both engenders modern slavery and determines its

course. As Bales writes,

Although modernization can have good effects, bringing improvements in

health care and education, the concentration of land in the hands of an elite

and its use of land to produce cash crops for export have made the poor

more vulnerable. Because the political elites in the developing world focus

on economic growth, which is not just in their collective self-interest but

required by global financial institutions, little attention is paid to

sustainable livelihoods for the majority. So while the rich of the

developing world have grown richer, the poor have fewer and fewer

options. Amid the disruption of rapid social change, one of those options

is slavery. (13)

While the demands of global financial institutions render the poor vulnerable to slavery,

corporations, investors, and consumers in North America and Europe benefit from the

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production of goods by slaves. Bales writes that, while much of slaves labors benefit

local consumers,

slave-made goods reach into homes around the world. Carpets,

fireworks, jewelry, and metal goods made by slave labor, as well as grains,

sugar, and other goods harvested by slaves, are imported directly into

North America and Europe. In addition, large international corporations,

acting in ignorance through subsidiaries in the developing world, take

advantage of slave labor to improve their bottom line and increase the

dividends of slaveholders. (9)

As Beeks and Amir document, sex trafficking is also driven by imbalances of global

power:

Concomitantly, the economic resource gap between the rich and poor

countries and between categories of people in the same society, including

the gender gap, and the commoditization of sex organized by the sex

industry, creates the global phenomenon, not only of the sex industry, but

the commerce of women and children for the sex industry. The growing

gap between rich and poor countries such as Mexico, Vietnam, and

Nigeria and regions in South East Asia and the former Soviet Union

motivates people, including women, to migrate to enhance their chances

for a better life or to support their families. On the other hand, the surplus

of income in the rich countries supports the consumers side of the sex

industry in their own countries (including Italy, USA, and Israel) and the

global phenomenon of sex tourism. (xiii)

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In Butlers novel, the exploitation of the poor through debt slavery, chattel slavery, and

sexual slavery occurs in the United States. By posing this scenario, Butler not only calls

attention to the human cost of late capitalism but also suggests that, if the present course

continues, the U.S. and its people, particularly those already marginalized by virtue of

gender, class, and race, could suffer consequences similar to those felt globally.

Indeed, such a prophecy can be supported by the fact that the U.S. economy as

well as the world economy has been stratified as a result of global capitalism. Indeed,

though the U.S. consumers may benefit from the cheap goods, services, and resources

made available by the exploitation of labor (as well as slavery) worldwide, it is widely

noted that the yawning disparities in U.S. incomes are also a consequence of

globalization. Good wages for factory work, secured by union activism, have largely

disappeared as global corporations nation-hop looking for the next source of cheap labor.

Global producers have decamped not only from the U.S. but also from nations like

Singapore. Lost factory jobs in the U.S. were replaced not by other good-paying jobs, but

by low paying jobs in the retail and service sectors; thus, the middle class has shrunk and

the gap between the rich and poor widened. Communities of color have often been the

hardest-hit by these trends. African Americans, for example, had little time before this

stratification to reap the benefits of hard-won civil-rights gains; thus it has been difficulty

for many to secure, maintain, and transmit middle-class status.

Butlers extrapolation of present circumstances into the future also entails a

warning about impending environmental destruction. Presently, while environmental

awareness and efforts for conservation are increasing within the United States, relatively

little attention is paid to globalizations environmental effects on developing nations. The

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misuse of the environmental resources parallels the exploitation of human resources

under global capitalism:

Although exploitation can be found in previous forms of capitalism and

particularly colonialism, there is a new element to this in globalization as

there is a declining interest in looking after resources for future use since

production can move on and exploit another part of the world when one

area has been exhausted. (n 42)

While it is currently the case (as it was in 1993 when Butler wrote the novel) that the

United States consumes a far greater share of the worlds natural resources (such as water

and petroleum) per person than any other nation in the world, in Butlers novel, the U.S.

is no longer in a position to do so. Rather, Southern California is experiencing conditions

in which fuel is no longer available for travel (only corporations and the government own

vehicles) and water is scarce (it is peddled at a high mark up or stolen). Not

coincidentally, in Parable this depletion of resources is motivated by the unregulated will

of large corporations whose profits benefit only a few.

Parable of the Sower and Feminist Speculative Fiction

Laurens model of leadership typifies many of the traditions of feminist

speculative fiction, a genre in which Butler is one of the most lauded writers. Often

including works that can also be considered science fiction, the genre of speculative

fiction groups together texts whose plots reach outside the constraints of reality in order

to explore a possible future or past either on earth or in an alternate world. While it is a

field often associated in both criticism and the popular mind with male writers and

audiences, speculative fiction opens up a unique opportunity for theorizing feminist

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agency. As Maureen S. Barr writes, Because these writers are not hindered by the

constraints of patriarchal social reality, they can imagine presently impossible

possibilities for women (xi). 145 As Sarah Lefanu recognizes, writers such as Butler

work within and transform a genre in which racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes "are

still found distressingly often (88). Moreover, as an African American woman writer,

Butler creates heroines who often defy the conventions of speculative fiction by being

Black as well as female and sexually autonomous (Lefanu 25). According to Barr,

these possibilities include heroines who form communities, become heroes, and take

charge of their sexuality and who behave in a manner which is alienopposed,

estranged, repugnant, outsideto the concept of femininity (xvii). Parable of the

Sowers Lauren Olamina fits such definitions. Lauren founds a community and becomes

a hero using both self-defense skills and an unwavering sense of purpose, which, because

these characteristics vary so much from traditional depictions of femininity, might be

deemed unrealistic outside of the context of speculative fiction. The way in which

Lauren combines physical skills with empathy is common to many female speculative

fiction heroes. As Barr notes, swordswomen in speculative fiction combine feminine

nurturing characteristics with masculine heroic acts (97). Likewise, though she is not a

swordswoman, some of Laurens acts, such as rescuing women crushed by a collapsed

building or shooting a coyote about to eat a baby, fit within the traditional definition of

heroism, while her nurturing characteristics inform both these acts and her willingness to

shield orphans, families with small children, and runaway slaves who need the protection

of a large group. Furthermore, if one builds on Barrs analysis of another of Butlers

145
Most feminist analyses of speculative fiction emphasize this point. Sarah Lefanu, for example, writes
that Feminist Science fiction, then, is part of science fiction while struggling against it (5).

365
heroines, Mary in Mind of My Mind (1977), one could define Lauren as a womanist

heroine. While feminists heroines the model of male science fiction heroism, which is

defined by courage and physical strength, by often committing themselves only to the

cause of women, Womanist heroines, according to Barr, love men and are committed to

the survival of an entire people (63). Lauren fits this lineage because she is committed to

the survival of the poor and disenfranchised, be they men, women, or children. While

she is particularly empathetic to refugee mothers and women escaping from slavery, her

followers come to include Grayson Mora, a freed slave, male children such as Justin

Rohr, her neighbor Harry, and her soon-to-be husband, Bankole, a middle-aged former

doctor who commits himself to Lauren and her community.

Parable of the Sower and Empathy

Parable is a work of speculative fiction not only in that it describes a potential

future, but also in its use of a fictional medical condition, hyperempathy, as a conduit

through which to explore ways to navigate such a potential future and, by extension, the

books perilous present. Very early in the text, readers learn that Lauren suffers from

hyperempathy syndrome. As a result, Lauren literally feels others pain:

Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an organic delusional syndrome.

Big shit. It hurts, thats all I know. Thanks to Parateco, the small pill, the

Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my

birth killed her, Im crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesnt belong to me,

and that isnt real. But it hurts. (12)

While sharing physical sensation means that Lauren can enjoy the pleasure of both

herself and her partner during sex, on most occasions hyperempathy brings pain rather

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than pleasure. She is encouraged to hide her condition by her father. Not only is

hyperempathy a vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker; it also has the

potential to reveal to the world that Laurens mother was a drug addict and that Lauren

is damaged, which is not something he wants to boast about (12). This tactic of

avoidance is inculcated in Lauren; as she passes people suffering on the street, for

example, he tells her, You can beat this thing. You dont have to give into it (10). His

advice to her suggests that, in order to protect herself from hyperempathy, she has to

strengthen her will to survive in proportion to her empathetic feeling toward her fellow

human beings. 146

Her brother Keith also stresses her vulnerability in the face if those outside the

neighborhood walls and suggests she remains secure inside them: Out there, outside,

you wouldnt last a day. That hyperempathy shit of yours would bring you down even if

nobody touched you (110). Because she can literally feel the pain of any injury she

inflicts in self-defense, or any injury inflicted on another by a third party, the streets

outside her home are particularly treacherous. Unlike Keith and her father, however,

Lauren understands that hyperempathy could be an asset. After Keith is killed on the

streets, she asserts,

Its beyond me how one human being could do that to another. If

hyperemapthy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldnt

do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be

146
Laurens struggle to control or channel her hyperempathy is central to the novel. As Rebecca Wanzo
writes, In the Parable books, feeling right is difficult after the apocalypse. There is often no time to
mourn, and showing emotion or suffering makes people a target for others. Given these conditions, her
post-apocalyptic novel asks, how should one feel after the apocalypse. How can one feel? (77). While her
fathers solution is unsatisfactory to her, Lauren must find a way to transform her vulnerability into an
asset.

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 destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone elses pain, who

would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain? Ive never

thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but

the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people.

Failing that, I wish I could find other people who have it, and live among

them. A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all. (115)

Despite Laurens wish, only a limited number of people in the world share her condition.

Over the course of time, those who do not suffer from this condition often attempt attacks

on Lauren and she must either experience the pain she inflicts on them or kill them to

avoid the overwhelming effects of such pain. So while the experience of hyperempathy

might keep Lauren from offensively inflicting pain, the fact that defending herself forces

such physical pain upon her suggests that the condition cannot easily be deemed an

asset.147 Furthermore, Lauren risks absorbing too much pain from the world around her

and becoming paralyzed by this pain.

The risks inherent in living with hyperempathy are akin to the risks that

psychologist Martha Manning finds in being overly empathetic (57). Using an

example from the popular television series Star Trek, Manning notes that, When it

(empathy) happens at the total expense of self on a fairly consistent basis, a woman may

find herself closer to the role of Star Trek Empath than shed like (56). On the series, an

Empath can not only tune in to peoples pain but also heal it by absorbing it into

147
As Carla Escoda Agust notes, Laurens hyperempathy is a tool for tempering violence: The Earthseed
community will only use violence to defend itself, not to dominate. (356). As Lauren is disguised as a
man, Escoda Agust sees Lauren as redefining manhood by eliminating the need for dominance. In this
way, Laurens hyperempathy might be seen as transformative in and of itself: An apparent disability,
hyperempathy helps her re-define manhood and its approach to arms. If violence is allowed exclusively for
self-defense, manhood will cease to define itself in relation to domination (356).

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herself (56). Like Lauren, however, the Empaths ability to understand risks absorbing

too much pain, something that could ultimately result in death (56). Laurens continued

survival and her effectiveness, while they do not necessitate doing away with empathy,

do necessitate mitigating hyperempathy. She cannot be so willing to absorb pain that she

does not defend herself. On the other hand, as the book makes clear, the tactic of looking

away and becoming completely insular, which is suggested by her father, is simply not

possible for her because she is acutely attuned to others. This ability to absorb and

experience others physical pain, however, is not transformative in itself. Lauren must be

able to take that understanding of pain (be it of physical pain or a shared emotional

experience) and transform it into action. 148 As Manning concludes in her work on

mothers and daughters, the capacity for empathy fails to be enough; the ability to

know and carry out actions that arise out of empathy must accompany emotion (40).

Lauren, who has a tendency toward hyperempathy, creates a community not by taking on

others pain and risking paralysis but by a series of empathetic actions. As she flees to

Northern California, she welcomes the downtrodden into her community despite potential

148
Rebecca Wanzo also recognizes the limits of empathy in her article Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable
of Postmodern Sentimentality:
Lauren Olamina materially represents a liberals bleeding heartempathy causes her physical
pain. . . . Olamina argues for the possibility that hyperempathy can serve a political and moral
good; as a sharer of other peoples emotions, she recognizes the ethical possibilities of pain. But
Octavia Butlers texts presents an atypical slant on sentimental logic, for while Olamina presents
the premise that empathyspecifically feeling badcan serve a political and social good, she
never argues that her hyperempathy syndrome can ensure political progress. To accomplish her
political goals, Olamina displaces the centrality of feelings in politics and develops a liberation
theology that revolves around change instead of empathy or feeling. (74)
While Wanzos argument makes the important point that empathy alone cannot ensure progress or political
change, I would add to that argument by emphasizing that empathy remains important. Laurens capacity
for empathy often leads her to persuade other followers of Earthseed to take a risk in inviting new members
to join. On the other hand, some critics, such as Gregory Hampton, go too far in suggesting Laurens
hyperempathy is the main component of her leadership ability: Laurens hyperempathy allows her to value
life and its pleasures in a way that is both profound and prophetic. She is able to feel the pleasure and pain
of anyone who is in her presence and therefore becomes attached and physically responsible for the bodies
of her followers and enemies (68). While I agree that her hyperempathy influences her approach to
violence, what is crucial is her capacity to act as well as feel.

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risks. Although these followers often present liabilities in terms of their trustworthiness

or ability to contribute to the group, Lauren discovers their hidden strengths which in turn

strengthen Earthseed.

The Dissolution of Suburban Community and the Formation of Post-Suburban

Community in Parable of the Sower

At its outset, the novel describes the state of Southern California as one that

necessitates the use of neighborhood patrols and a community wall. While unfortunately

the poor outside the walls have not mobilized any concerted political action, their

explosive resentment against the rich results in widespread looting and arson. It is thus

possible to see the actions of the residents of Rodeblo, unlike the subjects studied by

Blakely and Snyder and by Low, as other than attempting to protect and privatize an

extravagant existence or as walling themselves up against an unlikely threat. Rather,

unlike the suburban communities studied by Blakely and Snyder and Low, Rodeblo, a

barely middle-class suburb, is fighting for survival.149 Lauren encapsulates this idea when

she muses that it is Crazy to live without a wall to protect you (10). While such words

might seem tragically jaundiced when coming from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old, they

force the reader to recognize the severity of the political and economic tensions present in

her world. Lauren tells the reader that she, her family, and her neighbors rarely step

outside of the gates: None of us goes out to school any more. Adults get nervous about

kids going outside (7). She worries about her father, who leaves home to work at least

once a week (7). Even attending church services is unsafe. Her fathers church had

been slept in by the homeless, robbed, and vandalized several times, until someone

149
Blakely and Snyder do study some urban neighborhoods that have blockaded themselves. In terms of
class, the Rodeblo neighborhood more closely resembles these neighborhoods that it does a gated suburban
enclave.

370
poured gasoline in and around it and burned it down, killing the homeless men and

women sleeping inside (8). So her father begins to hold services at his home. Trips to

church outside the walls are reserved for special occasions, such as baptisms, which are

held at other congregations buildings. Widespread use of a drug called pyro

contributes to the epidemic of arsons. Pyro makes watching the leaping, changing

patterns of fire a better, more intense, longer-lasting high than sex, promoting users to

set fires to achieve a high (144). Pyro addicts are known as Paints because, as Laurens

street-savvy brother Keith tells her, they paint their skin green or blue or yellow,

crafting an intimidating appearance and persona (110). They not only set buildings on fire

but also sometimes grab a rich guy and set him on fire (111). While the current work of

social scientists often depicts residents of gated communities as subscribing to a

hyperbolic view of the threats posed by crime, Laurens descriptions make it clear that

true threats of arson and murder exist in Rodeblo.

Laurens early observations of other gated and ungated communities also

reinforce for the reader a sense that walls are commonplace defenses rather than

unwarranted luxuries or the outgrowth of upper-middle class paranoia. For example,

early in the novel, Laurens father, a pastor and de-facto leader of the community, leads a

group of neighborhood teens outside the neighborhoods gate for target practice; the teens

are learning to use guns so that they can participate in communal defense. While a vision

of a band of teens learning to shoot guns from a pastor may indeed be shocking, Laurens

account makes it clear that their efforts, like the wall that encloses their community, are

consonant with the threats that surround them:

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 A lot of our ride was along one neighborhood wall after another some a

block long, some two blocks, some five . . . . Up toward the hills there

were walled estatesone big house and a lot of shack little dependencies

where the servants lived. (Butler 9)

Through her observations of the contrast between walled estates and small dependencies,

Lauren betrays the sense that walled neighborhoods like hers are positioned precariously

on the edge of the widening gap between rich and poor, which threatens to erase the

middle class and bring a return of a feudal order. While Blakely, Snyder, and Boyle

depict gated communities as alarmist retreats from public life reserved only for elites, the

efforts that Laurens community makes in the name of self-defense are made more

sympathetic by her depiction of the desperate state of those who live in unwalled

territories:

In fact we passed a couple of neighborhoods so poor that their walls were

made up of uncounted rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there

were the pitiful unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were

trashedburned, vandalized, infested with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked

children. (Butler 10)

The poor are in such a state of desperation that they attack not the walled estates but any

vulnerable community, in order to both express their anger and find provisions of food,

clothing, and water. By making clear that Laurens neighborhood is one of the few that is

able to sustain a modestly middle-class lifestyle, the text deliberately distances itself and

its setting from the common criticisms aimed at contemporary gated communities.

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 Furthermore, while for some academics contemporary gated communities

subscribe to an ethos of protecting and providing for its members at the price of

neglecting outsiders, Parable of the Sower initially indicates that this somewhat

exclusionary practice is necessitated by the harsh realities of the world at large. Rodeblo

residents do not withhold aid to the poor outside the gates due to avarice; while they

know the need of those on the streets is great, they also know there are very real risks to

extending oneself. When on this same excursion Lauren sees a rape victim among these

ruins, a naked woman, stumbling along, dazed, maybe hurt, sure to attract dangerous

attention unless she could steal some clothing, she wishes we could have given her

something; however, she understands that helping someone outside the walls will leave

her vulnerable (Butler 10). She remembers a cautionary tale told by her parents, who

stopped to help an injured woman once, and the guy who had injured her jumped out

from behind a wall and almost killed them, and reconsiders her desire to help (Butler

10). Lauren is not insensitive to suffering, but she has been trained to place survival first.

These early episodes distinguish the civically engaged but precariously positioned

residents of her gated neighborhood, including Lauren herself, from the reclusive

inhabitants often depicted in other fiction and scholarship about gated communities.

Although the book will later critique Rodeblo, the neighbors efforts toward self-

preservation are depicted in such a way that the readers are able to sympathize with even

the harshest measures these characters take to ensure their survival.

The violence against which Laurens community shields itself is both fueled and

compounded by the scarcity of natural resources. While at the time the book was written

the U.S. largely fulfilled its voracious appetite for natural resources untrammeled by

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difficulty, smaller and poorer nations were already suffering the consequences of

irresponsible resource extraction by multinational corporations aided by liberalized trade

and business regulations. In Butlers prophetic vision, the U.S. has liberalized its own

economic and environmental laws to such an extent that it too has little recourse against

the wills of powerful corporations who wish to monopolize available resources to the

detriment of private citizens. One reason for the widespread violence is that food, water,

and paying jobs are scarce. Early in the novel, Lauren hears of the growing incidents of

the murder of water peddlers (18). Water is a resource that has been depleted by careless

overconsumption and global warming. Blocks of burned buildings remain vacant as a

result of arson because no one would waste water trying to put such fires out (18).

Bathing is so rare that cleanliness makes a person a target outside the walls: Youre

supposed to be dirty now. If youre clean, you make a target of yourself. People think

youre showing off, trying to be better than they are (18). Gasoline is also a rare

resource and cars have virtually disappeared. Lauren tells the reader that, except for

arsonists and the rich, most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a

gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being

cannibalized for metal and plastic (18). The walls of the neighborhood thus protect not

only the residents themselves but also their homes from arson and their water supply and

fruit trees from theft. In addition, because travel is difficult, it is more practical for

residents to attempt to fill all of their needs within the community.

By detailing the hazardous state of Laurens world, the book distinguishes the

residents of Rodeblo from the mental picture of wealthy enclaves like Arroyo Blanco that

would spring to most readers minds at the mention of gated communities. At the same

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time, the initial sympathetic portrayal of the residents of Rodeblo ultimately lays the

ground for the books most radical claim. Specifically, by tracing the erosion and

eventual collapse of Rodeblo and Laurens formation of a new, more inclusive

community, the book makes clear that, although Rodeblo residents fears are not

unfounded and their lifestyles are not extravagant, the measures they take to survive

walling themselves in and caring for their ownare insufficient. In Reichs terms, they

attempt to secede from the world around them and such secession does nothing to address

the structural problems that eventually lead to the collapse of their neighborhood along

with so many others like it. A more inclusive definition of communityone that

eschews the suburbs ethos of privatizationis necessary. The book demonstrates that

only a model in which empathetic action is undertaken on behalf of allthe

disenfranchised as well as the middle classcan adequately address a world in which the

concentration of wealth in the hands of a few threatens the safety and livelihood of most

residents on the planet. The novel eases into this criticism by showing that by and large

Rodeblo residents do not make the connection between conditions in their own

neighborhood and conditions around the globe.

While she is young, paradoxically, Lauren is perhaps more aware of global

conditions than her family and her neighbors. For instance, several neighborhood families

support the election of right-wing candidate Charles Morpeth Donner for president. In

his campaign, Donner vows to suspend overly restrictive minimum wage,

environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on

homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board (27).

Terms such as adequate are left undefined by the law. Unlike most of the adults,

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Lauren foresees correctly that the law is less an economic incentive or a program to help

the homeless than it is a carte blanche for worker exploitation. In addition, as I will

discuss later, unlike her friend Johanna, whose family is moving to the corporate town of

Olivara place where they will exchange their labor for subsistence livingLauren

believes that the security promised by company towns is bait that lures the unsuspecting

into contract or debt slavery.

While adults cling to the old ways, believing in the ultimate return of a more just

economic system, Lauren begins to foresee disaster. While her father, unlike most of the

adults in Rodeblo, is skeptical enough to question Donners motives, he ultimately clings

to his faith in God rather than attempt to counter prevailing political trends. Lauren, on

the other hand, sees the state of the world as a reason to question God and abandon belief

in traditional religion. She is particularly dismayed that global environmental destruction

disproportionately affects the poor. Upon learning of a flood in Mexico, she asks:

And how many people has it hurt? How many are going to starve later

because of destroyed crops? Thats nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are

the street poor who have nowhere to go and who dont hear the warnings

until its too late for their feet to take them to safety. Wheres safety for

them anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? (15)

Her point of view reflects a schism with her father. While she recognizes his role in

helping the community, she does not believe a better future is coming:

Were almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us,

more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward

to. One way or another, well all be poor some day. The adults say things

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 will get better, but they never have. How will Godmy fathers God

behave toward us when were poor? (15)

Lauren cannot abide by her fathers refusal to confront thoroughly the conditions outside

the gates. As she says of him later in the text, My father has blind spots . . . . Hes the

best person I know, but even he has blind spots (57). Just as he counseled her to defeat

her hyperempathy by not dwelling on the conditions of those who live outside the walls,

he champions a faith that offers no way to combat such suffering and counsels

acceptance, suggesting that to question the existence of such suffering would be to

question God. Lauren, by contrast, both acknowledges that this suffering is inevitable and

refuses to accept her fathers solutions. Her fathers God, she says, is characterized in the

book of Job, in which God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one

has any right to question what he does with any of it (16). Lauren, who has a deep

capacity for empathy and cannot turn away from suffering, cannot accept such a God.

Instead, she asks, What if that is all wrong? What if God is something else altogether?

(16). Through Earthseed, Lauren articulates her own definition of God (16).

Lauren defines her own God in a way that, with the exception of a few slight

similarities, stands in contrast with her fathers concept of a Christian God.150 In her first

150
Several scholars depict Lauren as a Christ figure. Donna Spalding Androlle, for example, writes that,
in formulating Earthseed, Lauren proposes the theocracy on which the future should be built, and reminds
her converts of the value of Christs example. (121). I agree that Laurens eventual inclusion of destitute
families into her Earthseed following seems to echo some of Jesus teachings and actions as recounted in
the New Testament. At the same time, however, it is clear that she rejects Christianity as it is practiced by
her communitya Christianity which centers on an omnipotent God and in which responsibility for ones
neighbor is limited to a single, literal neighborhood. Laying aside Laurens rejection of an omnipotent
God, some scholars, like Kimberly Ruffin, emphasize Laurens similarity to Jesus Christ: Using the
parable in scribal and oral modes, both Lauren and Jesus of Nazareth are teacher-leaders of a radical
message that promises to upset old beliefs (93).

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formal iteration of Earthseed, she defines her own God in a way that reflects the

phenomena taking place around her. This definition begins her Book of Earthseed,

God is Power

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

And yet, God is Pliable

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is change. (25)

This short list of definitions encapsulates the philosophy that Lauren will set into action

over the course of the book. Just as her father views the Christian God as powerful, so too

does Lauren believe that her God, change, is powerful and even irresistible (25). In

contrast to the Christian God, however, Laurens God is also pliable (25). While, like

the Christian, Laurens God is not strictly a benevolent God (she says My God doesnt

love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all), she does not see any reason to

despair (25). Rather, she emphasizes Gods pliability and insists that God exists to be

shaped" (25). In doing so, she leaves the path to human agency openthe path that will

prompt her to take empathetic actions in order to shape change. Change thus may include

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continuing environmental degradation, economic desperation, violence, and natural

disasters; however, change may also be shaped by other human actions that dictate the

responses to these devastating changes and positively shape the future.

While, in his attempt to survive, Laurens father looks to God and to a model of

community service, the book indicates that such a vision of political action, though

perhaps more progressive than that found in most gated communities, is inherently

flawed because it does not extend beyond neighborhood borders. Certainly, Lauren does

first learn to serve others through her community. Through the leadership of Laurens

father and stepmother Cory, a former professor turned local teacher, 151 Rodeblo citizens

provide free food and clothing when a neighbor is robbed, hold ersatz church services in

the Olamina home, and create a local school to compensate for the unavailability of

public education. While critics of gated communities like Low and Blakely and Snyder

paint the gating movement as both a symptom and a cause of the growing tendency to

privatize formerly public services, the residents of Rodeblo, faced with services that have

already collapsed, do join together to provide those services. Furthermore, while in the

novel the outside world regards interracial relationships with suspicion, by and large the

neighborhood retains both diversity and harmony. Speaking of the group of children that

Pastor Olamina regularly escorts for target practice, Lauren says,

The Garfields and the Balters are white, and the rest of us are black. That

can be dangerous these days. On the street, people are expected to fear and

hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful,

151
There are so few jobs remaining in the world outside the world and commuting to such jobs entails such
a risk that Cory is not able to obtain a viable paid position.

379
 people stared but they let us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to

play those kinds of games. (Butler 36)

While one elderly neighbor, Mrs. Sims, disdains Laurens father and stepmother (who is

Latina) for their interracial relationship, on the whole, the neighborhood, unlike Boyles

Arroyo Blanco. However, while the community defies common criticisms of gated

communities, the text ultimately points to the need for an even more inclusive model. By

showing the neighborhoods ultimate destruction, the text concludes that, unless patterns

of communal cooperation and racial integration are expanded beyond a select middle

class, there will be no racial justice or economic security. In doing so, it sounds the same

warning bell as Reich, who warned that the brand of community activism in which

participants concern and monetary investment are limited to a community of people with

similar social and economic backgrounds could further stratify the American socio-

political landscape.

Even before the ultimate destruction of the neighborhood by the forces outside the

gate, the novels chronicle of the neighborhoods demise begins to indicate that any

attempt at a retreat from the unstable political realities of the outside world is doomed to

fail. The community wall, for example, is unable to address crime within the

neighborhood. Several episodes that precede the destruction of Laurens community

illustrate both that the wall is permeable and that it cannot protect inhabitants from crimes

initiated inside the gates. When Laurens brother Keith runs away to join a drug-dealing

gang, for example, Laurens diary entries record that some of the proceeds from his

criminal activity are brought back inside the wall to fund the familys living expenses.

Though Pastor Olamina beats him for returning home wearing clothing one could only

380
buy with the enormous proceeds of illegal activity, Laurens stepmother CoryKeiths

motheraccepts his offer of drug money because the family, like many in the

neighborhood, is growing desperate in its attempts to acquire basic necessities. Corys

use of the money suggests a symbiotic, rather than an oppositional relationship, between

the violent world outside the gates and the community within the gates.152

In addition, while Rodeblo residents are accustomed to thinking of the world in

binary termsas divided between those inside and those outside the gates, from an early

age Lauren has an acute sense that danger can come from within Rodeblo as well as from

without. She writes in her diary, According to my father, the big city is a carcass

covered with too many maggots. I think hes right, though not all the maggots are in LA.

Theyre here too (9). Pastor Olaminas description of Los Angeles resounds with

hyperbolic media depictions of cities as loci of decay and crime and depicts the urban

poor as maggots who both cause this decay and benefit from it. Lauren, however, is

critical of this construct, suggesting that drawing a city/suburb dichotomy eclipses local

crimes (9). Her descriptions of the neighborhood frame it not as a refuge from crime but

rather as a place that ignores crime because it is ruled by a culture of moral minimalism.

When a twelve-year old girl, Tracy Dunn, is raped by her uncle and later bears his child,

Lauren tells readers that the rape goes unpunished because the uncle was a big, blond,

handsome guy, funny and bright and well-liked (33). Because the girls uncle is an adult

and a member of the community, his actions were not monitored by those inside the wall.

As Tracys daughter Amy grows up in the neighborhood, Lauren attempts to rectify the

neighborhoods neglect of the girl by looking after her, but, at the age of only three years

152
As Gregory Hampton stresses, this episode emphasizes that The wall is more of a filter than the
impenetrable fortress that the community members would have it embody (61).

381
old, Amy is killed by a stray bullet from outside the gate. Unmissed when she wandered

away from home, she is found by a neighborhood boy. While in a literal and limited

sense the responsibility for Amys death lies outside the neighborhood walls, the text

suggests that the communitywhich overlooked the crime against Tracy as well as the

need to nurture Amyis also culpable in her death. As Laurens assessment of Tracy

Dunns rape and Amy Dunns death shows, she is particularly aware that the

neighborhoods distorted emphasis on threats to its safety and security emanating from

outside the walls amplifies a culture of avoidance and can work to bring specific harm to

girls.

These episodes demonstrate that the neighborhood activism that takes place inside

Rodeblo not only fails to address economic disparities between those inside and those

outside the walls, but also fails to address gender disparities that exist both within and

beyond its borders. The neighborhoods culture of avoidance keeps residents from

intervening to help the wives of Richard Moss, a patriarchal polygamist. As Lauren

explains, Moss claims that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of

women, fathers of as many children as possible. Hes an engineer for one of the

commercial water companies, so he can afford to pick up beautiful, young homeless

women and live with them in polygamous relationships (37). Just as Tracys Uncle

Derek is protected by his insider status, popularity and good looks, Richard Moss,

because he is financially successful, attracts little scrutiny. He is among a number of

middle-class men who prove theyre men by having a lot of wives in temporary or

permanent relationships (37). He retains absolute control over his wives. While some

middle-class women, like Laurens stepmother Cory, hold advanced degrees and while

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Lauren is encouraged to read, lead her peers, and develop the ability to defend herself, the

novel demonstrates repeatedly that poor women and girls are systematically exploited.

Thus, the novel demonstrates that, while rape and sexual slavery predominate in the

world at large, it is little consolation that life inside the gates (or life inside the middle

and upper-middle class) is better for a select few women and girls. Furthermore, the

communitys conception of itself as a refuge from the outside world is flawed given that

sexual exploitation thrives within the neighborhood as well as outside it. Critic Lawrence

Stillman says succinctly, Even in calm times each family looks inward, concerned with

its own members; the families are not close enough to assist their neighbor's children, nor

can they prevent one man from enslaving his four wives (women he has purchased) and

his children (19). The neighborhood both ignores the world outside its borders and fails

to meet the needs of children and foster equality for women.

As robberies mounted from outside the walls begin to escalate, Lauren,

foreshadowing her role as spiritual and political leader, attempts to warn others that

Rodeblos way of life is no longer sustainable. Her initial idea (radical in and of itself) is

that community members are safer outside the neighborhood gates than within them. In

one episode, she suggests to her friend Joanne Garfield that the two run North because

Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are rumored to be less violent than

Southern California. Joanne, however, reiterates her hope of going with her family to

Olivara newly developed company town which, in return for an abdication of personal

rights, promises to allow residents a modicum of economic stability and physical

security. Frightened by Laurens suggestion, Joanne tells her parents of Laurens plans to

run away and Pastor Olamina then chastises Lauren for alarming Joanne. He suggests that

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she take a more moderate approach to the impending dangers by teaching the community

about self-defense and wilderness survival techniques without making definite plans to

leave the neighborhood. Pastor Olaminas emphasis on defense and survival indicates

that he recognizes the neighborhoods instability, but his refusal to endorse Laurens

strategy of leaving implies that he chooses to distance himself psychologically from such

an awareness. 153 Lauren, recognizing the improbability of her fathers wish that the

impending crises will go away by magic, rejects his wishful thinking along with

Joannes solution of a compromised life in Olivar (Butler 58). Her rejection of both these

reactions to the changes taking place in Robeblo emblematizes her nascent Earthseed

philosophy, which embodies the knowledge her father lacks (that change is inevitable) as

well as the knowledge that Joanna lacks (that individuals can positively shape this

change). As Lauren writes,

From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from

Buddhisms insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results

from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (to

everything there is a season. . . . .), change is part of life, of existence, of

common wisdom. But I dont believe were dealing with all that that

means. We havent even begun to deal with it. (Butler 26)

For Lauren and for Earthseed, change can be for the good or it can be menacing, as is the

case with the changes facing her neighborhood, but it is unavoidable. In posing God as

153
As Angela Warfield suggests, Pastor Olamina and other adults in the community are hesitant to face the
reality of the impending collapse of the neighborhood (and perhaps the nation) because they nostalgically
remember a time before this chaos: The elders dogmatic and life-denying attachment to a past-present
effectively disables them, whereas Lauren, unplagued and unencumbered by the memory her parents and
leaders share, is able to cast-off the damaging illusions of the past and to focus on the possibilities that the
future holds (67). Madhu Dubey concurs, noting that, Lauren's aspiration to seed herself away from the
shadow of home and family signals her readiness to relinquish available mirages of stability and to embrace
drastic change and rupture if these are the only means to future survival and growth (109).

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change but suggesting that human beings can shape that change, Lauren creates the

spiritual foundation for an alternative to denying the process of change or securing

oneself in a fortified company town like Olivar in order to survive that change. She

asserts not only that the unstoppable force of change acts on humans, but also that

humans enact change.154

To shape change in a meaningful way will take more than the modest

neighborhood activism engaged in by her father. His denial ultimately costs him his life;

the rest of the community falls shortly after his death. While Lauren has long been

forming her Earthseed philosophy, it is ultimately tested and put into practice when it

becomes necessaryRodeblo begins to crumble and then quickly falls apart. First, the

robberies discussed earlier begin and then escalate. In response to the increasingly

insecure environment, Laurens stepmother begs her father to move to Olivar. He refuses

and is abducted and killed when he leaves the neighborhood for work one day. Continued

arson and robbery follow his death until an ambush of arsonists and looters finally

destroys the neighborhood for good. In comparison to the ways gated communities are

routinely depicted, Laurens community is admirable, but the destruction of the

neighborhood demonstrates the novels recognition, sensed precociously by Lauren, that

no community can truly flourish by fashioning itself as a protective enclave.

As discussed earlier, Laurens Earthseed philosophy, while incorporating and

applying lessons learned in Rodeblo, leaves behind much of what she knows to pursue

those values in radical forms. While Rodeblos response to global poverty and

154
Stillman argues, As a guiding religion, she does not look to institutional Christianity; rather, she creates
her own religion or worldview that accepts the inevitability of change and stresses the need to be active and
influence how that change occurs (23).

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environmental destruction was a collective effort to provide defense, food, water, and

education for those living inside the gates, Lauren will extend her empathetic reach to

help ensure the survival of a more diverse group of people. While she clearly loved her

father and admired his concern for others and cooperative ethos, she senses early on that

she not only should but that she leave behind much of what she knows to pursue these

values in more radical forms. It is the Paints' complete destruction of Rodeblo that

pushes her philosophy into action. Once the walls fall, she must connect with those on the

outsideeven those once considered to be enemies. In the midst of the chaos of the

burning neighborhood, for example, Lauren experiences a burst of empathy for the

scavengers that is motivated by her own memories of her siblings and parents. She

describes a father and son combing through the wreckage and investigating the corpses of

the dead Paints and Rodeblo residents in order to find salvageable goods:

I stepped over the green face [of the dead Paint] and went into the carcass

of our home. The other thieves looked at me, but none of them said

anything. One pair, I noticed, was a man with a small boy. The man was

dressing the boy in a pair of my brother Gregorys jeans. The jeans were

much too big, but the man belted them and rolled them up.

. . . . The man with the child came over to scavenge beside me, and

somehow, perhaps because of the child, because this stranger in his filthy

rags was someones father too, I didnt mind. The little boy watched the

two of us, his small brown face expressionless. He did look a little like

Gregory. (Butler 159-160)

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In the smoldering rubble of her home, having no inkling of whether her family is alive or

dead, she is able to recognize the common need for survival that links these scavengers to

her own family. 155

In this way, she links the family-centered ethos of the past to a possible way of

forming a new, more expansive cooperative ethos. Though this incident gives her a

glimpse of the desperation experienced by those who live on the streets, and though she

recognizes herself as among them, she initially is hesitant to leave behind her old

communitys ways. She first attempts to create a community consisting exclusively of her

neighbors. As she says, I am one of the street poor, now. Not as poor as some, but

homeless, alone, full of books and ignorant of reality. Unless I meet someone from the

neighborhood, theres no one I can afford to trust. No one to back me up (Butler 156).

She knows that the inevitable has come and figures herself as one of the poor, yet her first

allies, Harry Balter and Zahra Moss, are indeed from the neighborhood. Harry is the

cousin and boyfriend of her friend Joanna and Zahra is the youngest wife of Richard

Moss. While Lauren is worried about attracting attention by accompanying an interracial

couple, she ultimately decides to allow them to become a part of her concerted effort to

survive; however, she disguises herself as a man so that she and Zahra can assume the

identity of an African American couple travelling with Harry, a white friend. In donning

the guise of a man, Lauren decreases the groups vulnerability. Her androgynous status

puts her in line with womanist speculative fictionshe defends her tribe physically

155
Lauren has four brothers at the opening of the book: Bennet, Gregory, Keith, and Marcus. After the fire,
it is assumed that Bennet, Gregory, and Marcus have been killed in the violence. As the sequel Parable of
the Talents reveals, only Marcus remains alive. Several critics note that the destruction of Laurens
neighborhood by the Paints forces her to abandon not only middle-class values such as stability and stasis
but the structures of family as well. As Jenkins notes, The Parable of the Sower does not believe in the
value of domesticity and Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, trace a forced abandonment of kin-
based exclusive familial structures (331).

387
but reserves violence for self-defense, while at the same time demonstrating those

traditionally feminine qualities of nurturance and empathy needed to connect to and heal

the constituency of refugees that will form her new community. The community that

ultimately formsthe Earthseed communitywill indeed look and live differently than

the Rodeblo community

While Laurens first alliance is largely a safe oneshe joins forces with two

people she already knowsmost refugees the trio meets and incorporates into their

community are from radically different backgrounds. These refugees range from runaway

slaves to a dispossessed doctor, from orphaned toddlers to former prostitutes. Lauren

takes from her home in Rodeblo an ethic of civic responsibility; but, as she forms

Earthseed in her travels to Northern California, she applies this ethic in a more inclusive

manner. The walls that Rodeblo had erected for its own survival have come down, and

therefore Lauren must find a way to survive outside these walls. She deduces quickly

that, while the surviving neighbors number only three, greater strength is to be found in

greater numbers. Of the followers she accumulates on her journey, only Bankole, the

older doctor who becomes her husband, was previously a member of the middle class.

Even though he is well dressed and she finds him attractive, she worries about whether or

not he wasnt just a handsome thief (243). When she extends trust to him, he proves to

be a worthy ally who invites the group to settle on a plot of land in the North that belongs

to his sister and her family. His inclusion is typical of a pattern in the novel: Lauren and

the other members are wary, their empathy overcomes their wariness, they invite the

newcomer, and they find to their surprise that they have gained a valuable asset. Laurens

other followers all possess seeming liabilities. Many of these members are those

388
accustomed to scavenging and stealing in order to survive, and their inclusion in the

groups brings both needed skills and potential risks. Lauren must use discernment and

believes that the benefits her community extendssafety and shared sustenancewill

induce a fierce loyalty among these followers. By doing so, she and the rest of Earthseed

form a truly inclusive community without regard to race, class, age, or personal history.
156

The first family that joins Laurens group is a multiracial family; Lauren takes an

interest in them because she sees in them a reflection of the interracial relationships

common among her generation in Rodeblo. While the integration of her previous

community provides inspiration, she extends that communitys cooperative ethos to

desperately poor families who may have been considered outsiders by Rodeblo residents.

The first such family, Travis and Natividad Douglas and their son Dominic, also called

Domingo, lived as servants in conditions that closely resembled the slavery of the

antebellum South,

All of them together. They had been a black man, a Hispanic-looking

woman, and a baby who managed to look a little like both of them. In a

few more years, a lot of families back in the neighborhood would have

looked like that. And as Zahra had once observed, mixed couples catch

hell out here. (Butler 203)

Though memories of her racially diverse community trigger her empathy for the couple

and their son, Laurens decision to act upon that empathy is a deliberate decision to

ignore her late fathers warnings about the dangers of empathy. The couple are strangers

156
As Stillman argues, In choosing community members she does not exclude based on race, gender, or
other ascribed characteristics, nor does she rely only on nuclear families, from the start she includes diverse
individuals and family units (22-23)

389
and their loyalty has not been proven. Her decision to include them is both strategic and

empathetic. By incorporating the family, the group will double in number. Laurens

ability to win their loyalty is not guaranteed, but it is likely because, as she tells Zahra

and Harry, They need us more than we need them (207). At the same time, her

empathy for the family leads her to risk her life for them. She begins her relationship with

the family by allowing them to follow her group at a close distance. Then one night,

when wild dogs attempt to steal Domingo from his parents and eat him, Lauren earns

their gratitude and loyalty by shooting one of the dogs. She does so although she knows

that, due to her hyperempathy, killing the dog will cause her enormous pain (209). 157

Like Bankole, this family brings assets to the group. From this family, Lauren

learns more about the conditions of the poor, which both strengthens her determination to

reach Northern California and encourages her to welcome more refugees to Earthseed.

Travis and Natividad tell her that they lived in arrangements closely resembling the

slavery that plagued the American South before the Civil War. Travis, whose mother was

a live-in servant, was raised under an autocratic master who forbade him to learn to read.

His mother, however, educated him with books borrowed covertly from the masters

library, and the masters wife kindly did not divulge the secret to her husband. This same

mistress encouraged Traviss marriage to Natividad, who was also a maid at the home.

The two ran away and risked death on the streets with their son because their master

made sexual advances toward Natividad. 158 As Lauren reflects on their condition, she

157
Stillman comments on the strategic advantages of this tactic: She [Lauren] takes the initiative by
making offers: by offering food to the hungry, by extension of specific altruistic assistance to others, e.g.
shooting a dog attacking them or tripping a thief stealing their water; and by the promise of improved
protections (24).
158
The sexual exploitation of female slaves affects a good number of the followers Lauren accumulates. As
Patricia Melzer writes Butler depicts the sexual violence against women as a weapon of social control by
terror regimes (39). Here, this terror regime is a political and economic system representing the apotheosis

390
thinks, How many other people were less luckyunable to escape the masters attention

or gain the mistresss sympathies? (219). Her conviction about the need for an

alternative means of survival that does not require dependence on the caprices of the

wealthy grows with her awareness of the extreme abuses of power that characterize the

working conditions faced by refugees such as Travis and Natividad.

While other new members pose a slightly greater risk to the community because

of their history of life on the streets, Lauren is willing to offer these members the benefits

of the community in return for their loyalty. In addition, while the Rodeblo

neighborhood, ruled by a culture of avoidance, did nothing to prevent the exploitation of

women either inside or outside the gates, this nascent community offers the strength of its

numbers, resources, and weaponry to women, who, like Natividad, are escaping sexual

exploitation and who, like sisters Allie and Jill Gilchrest, are escaping from forced

prostitution. The group rescues Allie and Jill, ages 24 and 25 respectively. Like

Domingos rescue, their rescue entails considerable danger; they are found trapped under

a collapsed building. Group members, led by the example of Laurens empathy, risk their

lives in entering the building. In spite of this, Allie and Jills value as allies is not

immediately apparent. For example, a lifetime of abuse has left Jill with a burning anger.

This anger leads her to confront Lauren, whose authoritative manner she finds off-

of the free market, an unregulated system in which employers can enforce their will without fear of
repercussions and in which they reap the benefits of their employees need for security and sustenance. As
Sandra Govan writes, Given acute social dislocation and civic dysfunction, with means (powerful
aggregate industrial interests lacking government oversight), motive (profit, control of assets or resources
and their distribution), and opportunity (weakened or absent federal and state regulatory authority and a
massive unprotected and unorganized labor pool), the poor and the vulnerable could easily be subjected to a
quasi-slavery system (255). As was the case in the antebellum era, slavery is accompanied by systematic
rape and sexual exploitation. Laurens community, unlike Rodeblo addresses the sexual exploitation of
women by acknowledging its existence and creating an alternative means of survival in which dependence
on abusive slave masters for employment and sustenance is no longer necessary. As Clara Escoda Agust
notes, in Parable, the majority of victims of sexual slavery and exploitation are women of color (352).
The Gilchrest sisters, who are Caucasian, form the only exception to this rule; their abuse was perpetrated
by their father rather than a slave master.

391
putting. Jill immediately responds to Laurens invitation to join Earthseed with the

conviction that religion is dog shit and asks her, Do we have to join your cult if we

travel with you? (238). Lauren, though she is empathetic to Jill and Allie, delivers an

outspoken response: If you travel with us, and theres trouble, you stand by us, stand

with us. Now will you do that or not? (238). While Allie and Jill accept this offer,

Lauren continues to be wary of Jill. She asks herself, How much of that apparent

hostility of hers was real, and how much might be due to her pain? Was she going to be

more trouble than she was worth?(Butler 238) Yet with Allie and Jill as with other

homeless persons to whom Lauren extends the invitation of membership, seeming

liabilities always reveal potential assets. The sisters determination to run away from their

father, for example, leads Lauren to believe that the sisters might turn out to be worth

something in the groups struggle for survival (239).

While the community in Rodeblo protected only some of its children and wholly

ignored the needs of children outside their gates, the Earthseed community nurtures

children both within and between biological families. While some followers, like Travis

and Natividad, come with children in tow, other children join the group as orphans. In

fact, while her value as an ally is initially in question, Allie Gilchrest plays an important

role by helping the group to raise Justin Rohr, a three-year old orphan the group finds

crying beside his deceased mother.159 As Jill explains, Allies own son was murdered by

her father. The relationship between Allie and Justin stands as a clear contrast to the

relationship those in the Rodeblo community had with Amy Dunn. While Amy was not

literally orphaned, she suffered from her mothers neglect and the communitys general

159
The characters concern for children and for other members of the group is noted by Joan Gordon, who
writes that Running, she [Lauren] gathers a community of others who believe in empathy and survival
through cooperation (46).

392
denial of her paternity. Only Lauren, a then-15 year old girl with little power to care for

Amy consistently, showed any interest in the girl, who eventually died as an indirect

result of neglect. In contrast, Allie cares for Justin as she would her own child and the

Earthseed community supports her in this effort. Lauren recognizes their relationship as

emblematic of the ethic of the Earthseed community. She tells Jill that Allies

relationship with the boy will help her recuperate from her recent traumas. Taking care

of other people can be a good cure for nightmares like yours and maybe hers, Lauren

says, speaking in part from her own experience (257). While the residents of Rodeblo

lived amidst a nightmare and while they took care of one another in a limited sense, they

tried to protect themselves by turning away from that nightmare and by limiting their

empathetic response to a select group of insiders. Earthseed stresses caring for others,

regardless of their background.

Whereas the Rodeblo neighborhood may have been inclusive in terms of race, it

remained exclusive in terms of class. Lauren was one of the few residents of the

neighborhood to give much thought to the conditions of those living outside of the gates;

the remainder of the community focused their energies on protecting themselves from the

poor masses outside. While this may be somewhat understandable since theft was one of

the only means by which those on the street could survive, Lauren proves by inviting two

new families of runaway slaves to join her group that, by extending trust and protection

to the worlds have-nots, her nascent community can not only gain valuable allies

needed in the struggle for survival but also work to ameliorate the conditions that make

the world so fearsome. Among these have-nots are Emery Tanaka Solis and her

daughter, Tori, who sneak into their camp at night and sleep near the group for

393
protection. Their stealth strategy unsettles many members of the group, who suspect they

may be treacherous. Emery appeals to the group to spare their lives, but some, like

Travis, are suspicious, suggesting the two may be scouts for a gang (285). Lauren,

however, leads the group into trusting the pair because Emerys care for her child is

apparent. Lauren convinces the group that she [Emery] wants the kid to live. I think

shed put up with a lot for the kids sake and her prediction is confirmed when Emery

reveals that she escaped slavery with her daughter (286).

Emerys tale of their former lives gives readers and Lauren alike an idea of what

awaits families like the Garfields in company towns like Olivar. Emery and her late

husband worked for a company who paid wages in company scrip and coerced workers

into debt slavery by charging high prices for goods at their stores. Furthermore,

According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave

an employer to whom they owed money (288). As debt slaves, Emery and her husband

could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be disciplined if they failed to

meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without

their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them

(288). Emerys husband dies and her two younger children are sold away from her, which

prompts her to escape with Tori. The second pair of ex-slaves to join the group is another

parent, father Grayson Mora, and his daughter, Doe, who is befriended by Tori on the

road. Lauren recognizes from the pairs wariness of others, Graysons odd

tentativeness and Does tendency to crouch in a fetal position when she is afraid, that the

two are former slaves (291).

394
 Lauren and Bankole agree that the four ex-slaves, who are used to fending for

themselves on the streets, present the possible threat of theft, but they also conclude that

by extending trust and protection they can gain valuable allies. As Bankole tells her,

Theyre . . . odd. They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our

packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things

starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if

the adults stay, it will be for the childrens sake. If we take it easy on the

children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us. (292)

Lauren agrees, adding that the new allies bring a formidable asset to the group: Ill tell

you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one

will fight harder to keep it (293). Whereas residents of Rodeblo like the Garfields

willingly sold themselves into near-slavery in company towns because they were focused

on their individual survival and because they feared the streets, Laurens efforts show

that, by offering freedom to those escaping slavery, her community gains the strength of

determined fighters. With the addition of these two families, Lauren and Bankole

recognize that the group has become more than a band of refugees; it has become the

embodiment of a movement for social justice. Lauren calls the group the crew of a

modern underground railroad (292). By embracing collective rather than individualistic

goals, the group not only achieves but also exceeds its mission of survival. 160 The group

allows a number of its followers to escape from slavery or near slavery and allows almost

all of its members to survive the terror of the streets. It unfortunately loses one member,

160
Noting the fact that Lauren leads many people North and out of slavery, critic Govan compares her to
Harriet Tubman (248). Sandra Govan catalogues the similarities between Parable of the Sower and slave
narratives, including the way in which it documents the brutality of slave masters and the prevalence of
separating slave families, emphasizes the need to educate slaves, and focuses on the escape of slaves into
Northern states (252-253).

395
Jill, who dies in protecting Tori and Doe from a potential abductor, an act that symbolizes

the groups overall commitment to providing a community free of the exploitation of

women and girls.

This group, which like Rodeblo values communal defense and provides for itself

collectively, but which, unlike Rodeblo, includes members from various classes and

backgrounds, hopes to establish a new, utopian Earthseed community in Northern

California, where Bankoles sister and her family live on a farm. This is a chance to

establish a static, physical community that, while it plans to defend itself from attackers,

does not reinforce its boundaries with barriers designed to exclude the poor. When they

arrive in Northern California, they find that they cannot recreate the life they once knew.

The group has heard that social and environmental conditions in the North are more

stable and many members hope to find employment. When the group reaches the

promised land of the North, however, they find conditions there only a marginal

improvement from those in Southern California; they are not protected by the police and

paid work is almost impossible to obtain. The farm belonging to Bankoles sister has

been decimated by attackers. Neither she nor her family survived the attack and nothing

remains of the grounds save a few charred planks sticking up from the rubble, some

leaning against others; and a tall brick chimney, standing black and solitary like a

tombstone in a picture of an old-style graveyard (314). When Bankole reports his

familys death to the police The deputies all but ignored Bankoles story and his

questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing.They searched him and

took the cash he was carrying. Fees for police services, they said (316). The corruption

of the police prompts Earthseed members to bury their valuables. While the sense of

396
security they hoped for is not available, they know that their numbers will make them

stronger than a single family.

Like security, the paid work Harry and others hoped to find is non-existent. In

light of this, it becomes clear that, not only are other middle-class social norms untenable,

but wage earning is no longer a possibility. While this may be viewed as another of the

groups many obstacles, it also allows Earthseed members to find a way to live outside an

exploitative economic system. The group perseveres with optimism, deciding that they

will need to find new ways of making a living and securing themselves. The new

community is tempered by an awareness of the outside world that was absent in Rodeblo.

Whereas Rodeblo residents thought they could assure their safety Lauren acknowledges,

Its dangerous, sure, but, hell, its dangerous everywhere . . . . (319). Although

Bankoles sister and brother-in-law and their three children were too small a family to

defend themselvesZahra reasons that It would have been too hard on just two grown

people to try to sit up and watch for half the night each the groups numbers offer

them the strength to spot and fend off potential intruders (320). While Bankole said his

brother-in-law once found work after locals trusted he was not a scavenger looking for an

opportunity to commit a crime, he concludes that any serious money we make here will

come from the land (320). By becoming self-governing and by producing what they

consume, the group creates an alternative to the laissez-faire system that precipitated the

destruction of Rodeblo. Figuring the village as a seed of a new way of life that may grow

and expand to include other communities, Lauren names the community ACORN. While

this new communal order is a choice born of necessity, Allie welcomes the task and the

sense of renewal it brings: I want to build something, too, she says, I never had a

397
chance to build anything before (322). Living as a prostitute, she was found crushed

under a building at the opening of the book. Here, at the close of the book, she is a

founding member of ACORN and is building something new from this destruction. Only

Harry, who was accustomed to a life of relative comfort in Rodeblo, seems to yearn for a

return to the way things used to be. He wants a private home for himself and Zahra: I

want something of my own. Land, a home, maybe a store or a small farm . . . . Something

thats mine. This land is Bankoles (322). He dreams of recuperating the patriarchal,

middle class nuclear family that is at the center of suburban life. Yet, when Emery tells

him that the only job available to him may be that of slave driver, he quickly changes his

mind. The past is irretrievable and perhaps undesirable. The traditional family home the

group journeyed to, like the Rodeblo neighborhood, has been destroyed by fire; the group

builds on this site, but it is guided by a new vision of a self-sustaining, inclusive

community.

This new beginning demonstrates that the values of Earthseed are in most ways

diametrically opposed to the posture of defensive privatization that has often been used to

characterize the suburbs and gated communities in much academic scholarship. While

Earthseeds ACORN settlement is a low-density, relatively isolated community, it is not,

like the suburb of Rodeblo, one that attempts to isolate itself from the public sphere. It

plans to defend itself against attackers, but it does not metaphorically or physically wall

itself off from a social reality in which debt slavery, chattel slavery, and economic

exploitation are common. Rather, it poses an alternative to such a reality. Whereas

Rodeblo encouraged moderate community activism aimed at preserving the status quo for

its middle class residents, for ACORN, neither race nor socio-economic status define

398
membership. The Earthseed religion and the ACORN are open to all who agree to share

in the groups efforts for survival; one need not even believe in Earthseed in order to

travel and ultimately settle with the group. By refusing to sustain divides between the

haves and have-nots, or between insiders and outsiders, by acknowledging the

deterioration of the nations political and economic systems, by creating a just strategy

for survival, and by establishing a refuge for those fleeing from these systems and the

many forms of exploitation engendered by them, Earthseed and ACORN offer an

alternative to the untenable model of community found in Rodeblo. While it is important

to remember that Rodeblo itself only partly resembles the suburban gated communities so

often critiqued today, the community as it is practiced by Lauren and her followers is far

more inclusive.

Furthermore, the family structure of the ACORN community differs radically

from that of Rodeblo and other suburban communities discussed in this project. For

example, in Rodeblo, while some collective efforts existed, an ethos of moral minimalism

established distance between familieseven to the extent that spousal and child abuse

was quietly ignored. ACORN offers a cooperative structure conducive to the prevention

and healing from such abuse. By working the farmland as a group, ACORN offers its

women members an alternative to working for exploitative bosses or marrying abusive

partners in order to survive. Earthseed and the rural community it founds, ACORN, are

also communities that care for both adopted children and the biological children of its

member families collectively. Members are prepared to sacrifice their lives for any child

in the group, whereas in suburban Rodeblo Amy Dunn perished as the indirect result of

399
moral minimalism; everyone realized she was neglected, but out of custom, no one

interfered in the private affairs of the neighborhood families.

The novels implications for the broader study of literature set in the suburbs are

numerous. The books ambivalent portrayal of Rodeblo stands in sharp contrast to

decidedly anti-suburban satires like American Beauty and against T.C. Boyles Tortilla

Curtain, which pillories gated communities. Instead, the novel is aligned with the more

nuanced critique of racially-integrated suburbs offered in Towelhead and Good Fences.

Like Towelheads Charming Gates and Greenwichs Good Fences, Rodeblo is ruled by a

culture of moral minimalism that prevents decisive action to counter threats against

women and girls. At the same time, like those novels, Parable also shows that suburbs

can be home to empathetic actions and strong bonds between neighbors. Just as Melina

Hines and her husband Gil work on Jasiras behalf and Mabel Spader welcomes neighbor

Ruth Crisp despite class differences, Laurens father and stepmother spend much of their

time protecting their neighborhood and serving the needs of its families and children.

Yet, in Parable as in the other two novels, such actions have little to no potential to

remake either race relations or the suburbs on a broader scale. In Towelhead, the coalition

of neighbors who come together to support Jasira is led by a white family, leaving open

the question of the extent of the suburbs moves toward multiculturalism. In Good

Fences, Ruth and Mabel are able to draw comfort from their relationship, but Mabels

commitment toward inclusivity is not shared by her white neighbors. Despite Mabels

relief at the end of the novel, she and Ruth remain marginalized. In Parable of the Sower,

the physical divisions that delineate the boundaries of suburban communities and gated

neighborhoods, the economic boundaries that separate classes, and the social divisions

400
that cordon off the nuclear family from another prove unsustainable. While Rodeblo is

not the suburb of the American Nightmare, it does not survive the novel. A new,

collective, agrarian model takes its place and the importance of class distinctions and the

patriarchal nuclear familytwo defining factors of a neighborhood like Rodeblo

decline.

While recent scholars in suburban studies have stressed that suburbs are becoming

more diverse and are finally extending the benefits of suburbia to those previously shut

out of these benefits, Parable suggests that integrated neighborhoods do not equate with

social justice. Rather, it suggests that even a racially diverse community can sustain and

even reinforce social inequality if it does not address broader economic divides and the

realities of gender, economic, and racial disparities in the national and global context.

The novel sounds an alarm that the world is in dire need of change; the drive toward

privatization, it suggests, has already gone too far. Hope exists, but building a true

community has real costs. Bankole loses the only surviving members of his family; Jill

dies in defense of two of the groups children; and Laurens initial impetus to form the

Earthseed collective resulted from the death of her entire family and most of her

neighbors. While the book makes the greatest claim for the power of (formerly)

suburban womans agency in the person of Lauren Olamina, who harnesses the power of

empathy while stepping outside traditionally feminine roles, it suggests that the suburbs

themselves must be left behind.

401
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