Restructuring The Divided House

John Updike,a contemporary American writer,is best known for his writings covering a wide range of issues about the contemporary America,including manners,life style,marriage,morality and other cultural and historical elements.Memories of the Ford Administration is a novel published in 1992.In this novel,Updike uses the narrator Alfred Clayton,who is a historian,to integrate history into Clayton’s memory,imagination and private experience.The most outstanding feature of this novel is that John Updike,the author,situates fictional characters in real cultural and historical circumstances and real historical figures in imagined but plausible circumstances and sets various elements and characters and events into interaction with each other.There are several relationships in this work,namely the engagement between James Buchanan and Ann Coleman,the North and the South in America,the marriage between Clayton and his wife Norma,and the relationship between the government and the people during Ford Era.To some extent,the above relationships can be described as family relationships,and all these relationships have experienced division in the form of wars,separation,etc.,so the above relationships are metaphorically referred to as divided “houses”.The author Updike uses these“divided” relationships to narrate the history during the Buchanan Era and the Ford Era.In Memories of the Ford Administration,Clayton,the historian,writes both real history and fictional history,and fills the gaps in history by imagination.In the process of writing,Clayton’s historical writing is impacted by his personal emotional crisis,and eventually forms the Memories of the Ford Administration.From the perspective of New Historicism,history is composed of discourses and therefore can be interpretations.This thesis aims to discuss how Clayton writes the history of Buchanan and Ford by his interpretations,and by doing so how he mixes his personal experience with the writing of history.Therefore,the central objective of this thesis is twofold,that is,how Clayton,the fictional character and historian,makes sense of the relationship between personal experience and history by means of historical records and imagination,and how John Updike,the author of the novel,arrives at an understanding of history,historical figures and historical events by exploring various relationships,both personal and public.On basis of the above analysis,a corresponding discussion will be carried out to see how the notion of “divided house”is restructured on both the personal level and the social level.