At Home and on the Road: The Politics of Postwar Space in American Literature and Film

"At Home and on the Road" explores how the spatial dimensions of America's policy of domestic containment were revealed and reflected through post-World War II fiction and film.;Chapter One contextualizes how the nation's social and imaginative landscape dramatically altered with the rise of suburbia and vast freeway systems. Political discourse combined with print and visual media to teach Americans that to protect their capitalist democracy from communism, they must perform relatively narrow identities and behaviors, including white middle-class heteronormativity, Christian morality, and material consumption. The suburban home was both a symbol and site for these identities and behaviors. Cars supported Americans' physical and ideological retreat to the suburbs: in them, nuclear families fled threatened urban centers even while fathers commuted to the same cities.;But if domestic containment depended on representations of the home and car to disseminate its conservative policies, these same representations had the power to undermine such policies. Chapter Two explores how both film melodramas and film noir critique containment's relegation of women to the domestic sphere, through their characterization, irony, and mise-en-scene: the melodrama heroine usually returns home but as a silent prisoner; conversely, the femme fatale dies on the road but not before tasting freedom. Chapter Three considers literature's treatment of that which film could not make explicit: nonnormative sexualities, including lesbianism and pedophilia. A comparison between the road trips in The Price of Salt and Lolita reveals containment's conflation of all nonnormative sexualities and its privileging of white masculinity, even over concerns for national security. In its examination of historical and fictional works, Chapter Four highlights one realm which postwar culture rendered invisible: the African American experience of space. African Americans often had limited access to the suburbs and open road. Public and private battles contesting their delimited mobility anticipate the full civil rights movement.;This project explores the varied ways in which advertisements, film, literature, and nonfiction perpetuated domestic containment. However, these representations of the home and road changed Americans' experience of those actual places and provided Americans their own spaces to challenge containment's prejudices.