| The prevalence of alternative family structures in contemporary American fiction is significant given the increasingly contentious debate in recent decades about what constitutes a "family" and how families should function. Although it is widely believed that the modern family is under siege, some social historians point to the fluidity and elasticity of this most fundamental societal institution and refute the commonly held assumption that the family is or should be a stable or uniform structure.; This dissertation examines alternative families in the novels of John Updike, John Irving, Alice Walker, and E. L. Doctorow. John Updike intends Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux to serve as a defense of mainstream American values even as his careful rendition of life within the contemporary American family uncovers a sobering sense of ennui and unhappiness. He exaggerates the cost of "running" from the traditional nuclear family: the bizarre and implausible alternative family in Rabbit Redux is a reification of the fears and prejudices of white, middle class Americans in the late 1960's. Irving's The World According to Garp depicts a series of struggles between traditional and nontraditional families. These oppositions collapse after a terrible accident precipitated, in part, by Garp's overbearing paternalism. He restructures his family, creating an extended household that blends the best elements of the familial options in the novel. Garp's "world" is a new family. The alternative families in Alice Walker's The Color Purple are central to her utopian project of reclaiming and redeeming abusive men and abused women. Walker offers an African-American institution--the extended family--as a potential model for a new American family. E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime both promotes and undermines the "melting-pot" ideal of a national family. If America is a family, then lasting social change is possible only if the structure, composition, and operation of individual American households are altered. Doctorow's new American family--situated simultaneously in the past and the future--is a testament both to the cost of ethnic strife throughout our history and the promise of a reconciliation that may yet be achieved. |
