| Dividing into five chapters, my dissertation “takes off” at a crucial year in both public and private memory. 1954 is the year my parents married and the year with which my dissertation begins its analysis of fifties culture. My dissertation links iconic fifties mobile poor whites to earlier and later versions of immobile “white trash.”; The first chapter examines how class intersects with fifties' discourses and present notions of “white trash.” The second and third chapters discuss images of gender in relation to fifties poor white mobility. I begin with Elvis Presley's emergence in 1954 as America's first white-trash icon, how he derives from and informs 1930s tenant-farm versions (such as Agee's sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell's Jeeter Lester) and other 1950s “mobile” male rebels: Mailer's “White Negro,” Brando, Dean, and Mitchum in Charles Laughton's terrifying Cold War allegory Night of the Hunter. I then examine the fifties ingenue/Cinderella figure. I link the fifties' most magnetic poor white heroine, Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's to period film ingenues. From poor white southern orphan to Hollywood starlet to New York call girl, Holly performs a variety of subject positions, suggesting class mobility's perilous genealogy as one that is celebrated by fifties film ingenues such as Audrey Hepburn (a Belgian WWII refugee). Holly, like many other ingenues, signifies the desire for a dislodged, undomesticated sexuality, but she is also a reminder of the consequences of such mobility for postwar women. From discussions of gender, the fourth chapter analyzes the relationship between fifties material and popular culture by focusing on the mobile home and popular trailer narratives such as Vincente Minnelli's film The Long, Long Trailer (1954). The mobile home is the late-twentieth-century's transitional object. Pulling its occupants forward with promises of infinite mobility and the simulation of single-family home-ownership, it figures an efficient postwar high Fordism. And yet, as a prototypical Post-Fordist object, it also signals the instability, flexibility and disposability that has come to characterize today's economy and its throwaway populations. A “failed” modernist housing, the trailer stands as the vanishing mediator between these two stages of twentieth-century capital. I conclude with a reflection on the dissertation's detours. |
