been a response to the evolving socioeconomic structure of a postindustrial culture, as detailed in such contemporary classics of sociology as David Riesman's
Most representative of the new conservatism of the postwar period were the collapse of radical politics and the reentrenchment of gender stereotypes. Throughout the first half of the century there had been strong support for various forms of socialism in America, and intellectualism and Marxism often went hand in hand. During the war, the intellectual support for Marxism and for Russian Communism was reinforced by the United States military alliance with the -485- Soviet Union against fascism. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a political disaffection with the Communist Party that had been growing since the late 1930s reached a head. In
Equally distressing were the losses in the movement toward women's rights. The first quarter of the century saw a slow but steady growth in equality between the sexes, largely focused on the issue of the vote. The war accelerated these advances by opening job opportunities for women. With the men called overseas, women were actively recruited to take their places on the job market, especially in munitions factories. At the war's end, however, women were forced out of their jobs to free positions for returning veterans. With this shift in economics came a shift in gender propaganda. During the war 'Rosie the Riveter' was a widely touted model for women's role in the defense effort. In the postwar period, however, the model reverted to the more traditional one of the housewife. Manual labor in particular was deemed unfeminine, a threat to women's supposedly delicate physiologies and to their domestic duties as mothers. Even those women not literally ousted from their wartime positions found the sudden redefinition of female excellence disorienting. This attempt to reinstitute the discarded cult of domesticity resulted in the creation of what Betty Friedan in 1963 called 'the feminine mystique,' a sociopsychological theory constructed to protect male access to power by restricting women's place to the home.
The conservative tone in politics and gender stereotyping was reinforced by the individualistic bias of the age's dominant intellectual -486- trends. Existentialism defined the generation's conception of self and society. Rebelling against traditional notions of authority, dogma, and political ideology, the existentialists spoke instead of an individual's 'being' in or 'engagement' with the world, in such European works of philosophy as Martin Heidegger's
A similar devaluation attended the popularization of the age's other great school of thought — the psychoanalytic movement, most closely associated with Sigmund Freud. Freud's insights into the unconscious and the anxieties attending creativity and sexual maturation were among the central enabling insights of modern culture. Yet the general conclusions drawn from his theories (frequently without close examination of the actual texts) often moved in directions antithetical to Freud's own. Slavish adherence to the specifics of any theory tends of course to distort its underlying truths. In the case of psychoanalysis, such distortions were intensified by its therapeutic dimension. In treating psychological abnormality, postwar therapists unintentionally supported the age's 'idolatry of the normal' — its fanatical pursuit of uniformity. Psychoanalytic practitioners were not always sensitized to problems of economic or social inequity. As a medical treatment available primarily to the wealthy, analysis tended to reinforce class distinctions. The psychiatric characterizations of certain group-specific problems — like 'housewife syndrome' or 'homosexual panic' — did not overcome the culture's discriminatory practices; they internalized them. Even apart from the excesses of specific postwar formulations, the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with the individual and the internal may have reinforced the age's more general tendency to divorce questions of personality from those of history and politics. -487-
The conservative character of society and thought was echoed in the academic community, especially in its conception of literary value. Truth was thought to be universal, the essential core that remained after the layers of cultural particularity were peeled away. Historians like Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter saw this universality in terms of 'consensus,' an optimistic vision of nationally shared goals. Literary scholars tended to speak more generally about 'reality,' 'culture,' or 'tradition.' Such accounts as
This general turn from politics was institutionalized in America in the school of New Criticism. Combining political conservatism with nostalgic agrarianism, the New Critics emphasized the separation between the social and the literary. Developing ideas implicit in earlier theories of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and E. M. Forster, such critics as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks saw literature as different in kind from scientific writing. Literary language was a multilayered one of paradox and ambiguity, more concerned with connotation than denotation. Literature, the New Critics argued, was eternal, to be studied apart from the social conditions and even authorial sensibilities that created it. Although the main focus of such criticism was on poetry and the English literary tradition, the influence of the New Critics on all scholarship of the postwar period cannot be overestimated. New critical values informed literary history, in René Wellek's famous distinction between the 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' characteristics of a text. In Americanist scholarship, New Criticism surfaced in the repeated claim that American literature was more romantic and less socially engaged than its European counterpart. American authors effected, in Richard Poirier's seminal phrase, a stylistic escape to 'a world elsewhere.'
The explicit ahistoricism and apoliticism of the New Critics was matched less obviously in the development of a new interdisciplinary study of Americanness. American literature had begun to be an object of scholarly work as early as the 1920s. Departments and programs in American literature were widely instituted in the academy in the 1930s and 1940s. After the war, however, the study of Americanness -488- began to cross departmental boundaries, especially those between literature and history — in such works as Henry Nash Smith's
Novelists reaching their intellectual maturity in the postwar period, then, faced a culture (and literary establishment) not predisposed to consider the novel as a product of social conditions, let alone as an instrument for social change. The tradition of socialist literature that had flourished during the previous two decades — and
