| In early Cold War America, psychology's paradigm of mal/adjustment and its cohort, the narrative of normal development, became the hegemonic models for understanding/narrating human behavior, permeating both fiction and non-fiction narratives to a remarkable degree. In this project, reading various early Cold War texts through the paradigm of mal/adjustment provides me a way to supplement work already done on constructions of gender and/or patriotism in the early Cold War period, and to make connections across multiple genres and discourses from the 1950s. I examine atomic war novels, Hollywood films, home economics tracts, the stories of atomic spies, and the autobiographies of University of Southern California students, tracing the narrative of normal development and constructions of maladjustment, gender and patriotism throughout. In the 1950s, the paradigm of maladjustment became the rhetorical glue joining constructions of gender and patriotism, creating a mutually reinforcing relationship between them. To be truly American in the early Cold War, one had to be a married, properly adjusted masculine man or feminine woman. Straying outside of appropriate gender roles risked not only the health and happiness of the individual but that of his/her spouse and children as well. And, since maladjustment was viewed as a risk to national security, good mental hygiene was every American's patriotic duty. The paradigm of mal/adjustment and the narrative of normal development helped create a vision of America that was a sort of middle class, suburban utopia-in-the-making, with breadwinner husbands and homemaker wives raising wholesome, happy, well-adjusted children in democratic domestic bliss. By categorizing virtually all forms of deviant behavior (e.g. homosexuality, feminism, juvenile delinquency, communism), as manifestations of maladjustment, it encouraged Americans to police their own and their neighbors' behavior; and by successfully limiting the availability of other narratives by which Americans might understand their lived experiences, it helped to homogenize American society in the postwar years. |
