Life in the ‘Hood: Postwar Suburban Literature and Films

Abstract

This article examines the postwar suburb and its representation in literature and films, which shares responsibility with the housing boom for propagating the suburban myth, as Herbert Gans coined the term in his seminal sociological study, The Levittowners (1963), whereby ‘the suburbs were breeding a new set of Americans, as mass produced as the houses, driven into a never ending round of group activity ruled by the strictest conformity’ yet which also revolved around ‘a matriarchal family of domineering wives, absent husbands, and spoiled children, and with it, rising marital friction, adultery, divorce, drunkenness, and mental illness’ (xxviii). This myth, contradictory but enduring, was propagated by the competing sensibilities of business interests intent on selling the ‘suburbs-as-lifestyle’ and by urban intellectuals who located there all that they disdained about middlebrow culture. This suburban aesthetic has remained largely unaltered despite the radical changes that the suburbs themselves are now undergoing: the majority of all Americans, including immigrants and people in poverty, now live in the suburbs, rendering obsolete the notion of the suburbs as the exclusive playground of the white middle class. Recent suburban literature and films work within the suburban literary tradition yet point toward a new suburban aesthetic that reflects and renegotiates this changing, fraught landscape.