A literature of suspicion: Critiques of nineteen fifties ideals in the American roman noir

This dissertation analyzes dissident voices in 1950s America that found expression in marginal forms of fiction. I demonstrate that the political and intellectual climate of the decade limited the ways in which a novel could address social issues and still be accepted as literature. I detail how Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, and Philip K. Dick depict the disintegration of characters who don't fit into the small repertoire of identities the hegemonic discourse of Fifties America offers, who lack the freedom to live as outsiders or the insight to grasp what's being done to them. The ruthless social critiques that were central to these authors' agendas made it necessary for their work to appear outside of the mainstream. Highsmith's and Thompson's work appeared as crime novels; Dick's realistic stories of rage and despair among poor white urbanites, unlike his more optimistic science fiction novels, failed to find a publisher at all.;The dissertation uses resources from psychology and sociology as well as literary study to address the emotions and cognition of three hapless noir protagonists as they suffer from the mystification of class, identity, and gender. In Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, architect Guy Haines is driven to murder by a clever psychopath who exploits Guy's commitment to civil conduct and his shame at the prospect of not being able to meet 1950s standards for gentility and restraint. Thompson's A Hell of a Woman is narrated by salesman Frank Dillon, who wants simultaneously to attain the masculine ideals of a hard-boiled hero and those of a suburban family man: ill-equipped for either role, he falls into a downward spiral of resentment, violence, and self-destruction. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland features Al Miller, a struggling used-car dealer, who is realistically pessimistic about his prospects for success but who has enough faith in his era's standards that his poverty is a source of endless shame, which leads to his complete emotional collapse. I conclude by further discussing canonicity and celebrating the Literature of Suspicion as a laudable genre of protest fiction.