Rabbit Angstrom to Frank Bascombe: Troubled masculinity in contemporary American realism

Martin J Whitehead, Purdue University

Abstract

As a genre, American literary realism has historically taken a back seat to more critically attractive theoretical movements and organizational rubrics, such as Modernism and Postmodernism. Critiques like Amy Kaplan's Marxist indictment of class representations in the fiction of William Dean Howells have contributed to an overall contentment with the idea that realism had lost its significance in American literary culture. Other critics and historians, like Robert Rebein and Gordon Hutner, have argued that the revival of the short story and the minimalist movement in the eighties spurred a concurrent revival in realism. In fact, American realism never went away, and its quiet evolution has culminated in a form of contemporary realism that resists the dismissive critiques of earlier forms. America has continued to read realist novels throughout the last century and into this one, and the cultural impact of this practice needs to be acknowledged and examined. In an effort to establish some parameters for the specific category of contemporary realism, I begin with an examination of Howells's arguments about the function and operation of realism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Realism must now respond to a more evolved readership, hence Howells's edict is even more imperative today—the realist novel must provide explorations of possible moral responses rather than limited didactic representations. Given the similarities between characters like Silas Lapham, George Babbitt, and Rabbit Angstrom, a pattern emerges of male characters being faced with their own moral shortcomings. Examining this pattern leads to an understanding of the cultural role and utility of the contemporary realist novel. Beginning with Updike's Rabbit, Run, each chapter undertakes a close reading of one or more novels. Particular attention is paid here to the ways in which masculine identity is constructed through capitalistic pressures, underscoring how specific social spaces operate in both the novel as a form and in the real world experiences of the reader. Subsequent chapters examine novels by Richard Ford, Phillip Roth and Chang-rae Lee, and finally, Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler. The function and durability of contemporary realism is demonstrated through an examination of characters that exhibit particular difficulty in establishing acceptable or socially useful masculine identities.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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