| In its most basic sense, suburbia can be defined as a community of residential and commercial structures lying within commuting distance of a central city. In American suburban fiction, however, suburbia emerges as something far more complex than a mere physical environment. To the authors of suburban fiction, suburbia implies a state of mind, a set of values, sometimes even a spiritual condition; it exists in the psyche and in the imagination as well as in reality. It goes without saying that suburbia has offered writers a useful lens through which to examine the manners and mores of the American middle-class; more important, however, suburbia has served as a vehicle through which generations of writers have struggled to define, celebrate, and suggest the ultimate elusiveness of, the "American Dream."; It has often been stated that suburban works tend to carry nearly, if not entirely, identical attitudes and prejudices about the suburban milieu---namely, that it is conservative, tacky, stifling, and petty. This dissertation looks at suburbia from a variety of perspectives: that of its earliest writers---Frederick Cozzens, William Dean Howells, and Sinclair Lewis---who struggle to locate suburbia in the tradition of pastoral; its "classic" writers---John Cheever, Peter DeVries, and John Updike---who use the suburban setting in their attempt to come to terms with what they perceive as the loss of spiritual values in post-World War II America; its female writers---Shirley Jackson, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and others---who lament the depoliticization, disempowerment, and general anomie of women in suburbia; and its minority writers---Philip Roth, Gloria Naylor, Gish Jen, among others---whose characters struggle to be "real Americans" in post-World War II communities founded on a racist ethic of exclusion. What ultimately emerges is that, far from being identical or nearly identical in their perspectives, American writers take vastly different positions on suburbia, positions that are deeply rooted in notions of class, gender, and ethnicity. Looked at together, these positions form a much richer and more nuanced suburban critique than has previously been perceived. |
