characters. While hardly a feminist reading, the novel's very willingness to single out women's experiences as qualitatively different from men's suggested a growing public awareness of women as a group. This awareness received its most sympathetic public statement with the publication the same year of poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar. Not published in America until 1971, Plath's moving account of her attempt to conform to traditional models, as taught by the woman's magazine where she was a teenage editor, and her ensuing mental breakdown was the decade's most detailed indictment of the psychological inadequacy of the age's assessment of women — and its most tragic.
Such preliminary statements of defiance stood as immediate antecedents to more explicitly feminist (in some cases lesbian) novels by such contemporary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Toni Morrison. Despite these courageous excep-505- tions, however, much postwar women's literature accepted uncritically the generation's gender stereotypes. This acquiescence need not be judged too severely. In her study of domesticity in the nineteenth century, Nancy Cott argued that conservative ideologies can have liberating social consequences. According to her famous play on words, the 'bonds of womanhood' that bound women to a repressive ideology of hearth and home also bound them together as women. It is in a similar light that we should read the domestic fiction of the postwar period. From its opening characterization of women as 'ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle,' Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956), the period's best-selling novel, seemed calculated to reaffirm every sexist stereotype of the generation. Yet its willingness to treat clinically such topics as abortion and menstruation marked its interest in naturalizing the then sensational topic of female sexuality. More subtly, its depiction of successful women at work belied its own tendency to represent women as ruled by emotions. Whatever its debts to the male-dominated traditions of regional literature and the revolt against the village, Peyton Place situated women at the economic foundation of the community as fully as at its emotional center.
Similar undercurrents of rebelliousness were seen in the period's workplace novels. Rona Jaffe's best-selling The Best of Everything (1958) characterized the career girl as someone merely marking time while waiting for the right man, without considering the role that employment discrimination and sexual double standards played in women's choice of marriage over career. Yet despite the book's conventional morality, its workplace setting implicitly returned to its characters some of the autonomy that their love lives denied them. However passive Jaffe made these women in their relations to men, she showed them savvy and assertive in handling their workload (and their bosses). In her heroine Caroline Bender, Jaffe offered a protofeminist revision of Theodore Dreiser's 'Sister' Caroline Meeber. Unlike her literary namesake, Jaffe's Caroline did not recite male writing, she edited it. And rather than succumbing to general transcendental longing as did Sister Carrie, Bender focused her dissatisfaction on the specifically female conflict between career and domesticity.
Even highly conventional literary treatments of the housewife -506- functioned unintentionally to increase female awareness. Shirley Jackson was best known for her gothic accounts of dysfunctional families in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and matricide in the short story The Lottery (1949). It was not surprising, then, that her comic account of her own family, Life Among the Savages (1953), should view skeptically the joys of suburban existence with four 'savage' children. But less well crafted works — like Jean Kerr's wisecracking Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957) and The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) — played as well a role in identity formation. All suburban novels reinforced clichés about the importance of the family and of the mother's role as nurturer and moral exemplar. Yet their comic tone established a conspiratorial relation to their audience. The author wrote not to indoctrinate readers but to dramatize experiences she assumed they shared with her as homemakers. Such narratives implied that commonplace domestic events — like measles, the car pool, or the selection of wallpaper — were worth an individual's attention. In so defining 'housewife' as a job (and subject of literature), these novels set the stage for Friedan's subsequent critique of society's evaluation of that job. Only after readers recognized they were housewives could they decide whether or not 'housewife' was something they wanted to be.
A comparable liberalizing function was served by male novels of environment that examined the morality of the marketplace and of suburbia. Max Shulman's Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (1957) and John McPartland's No Down Payment (1957) offered respectively parodic and earnest accounts of the sexual tensions resulting from the claustrophobia of modern suburban housing. Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite (1952) focused on the immorality of big business, while Sloan Wilson's more ambitious The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) represented the two worlds of Connecticut domesticity and Manhattan business as complementary threats to individual authenticity. None of these novels seriously challenged middle-class assumptions about the work ethic or the sexual division of labor. Even the most sensitive — Wilson's critique of the flannel business suit as 'the uniform of the day' — embodied the self- satisfaction of 1950s morality, complete with a crusading liberal judge. Yet like their female counterparts, these novels at least attended to the details of business and community life. Today Wilson's account seems less striking for -507- its final rejection of the organization man than for the implicitly loving precision with which it recorded the process of his depersonalization.
It is in the context of this popular tradition of the male novel of environment that one must view the work of two of the most honored authors of the period — John Cheever and John Updike. These writers have been attacked for their stylistic traditionalism and lack of interest in social issues, characteristics associated with The New Yorker, where both men first published much of their work. Yet the error lay less with the authors' material than with readers' tendency to read their WASP suburban characters as representative of some generalized American ideal. Cheever's Wapshot novels examined skeptically the very WASP privileges presupposed by the genre of the family saga. In The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), the frequent shifts in story line and the mythologizing tendency of the narrative voice called into question the reliability of any such unifying account. Its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (1964), less mythological and more focused on social issues and characters only indirectly related to the Wapshots, used global settings to reveal the provinciality of its characters. Cheever addressed explicitly the cultural specificity of his customary material in his revisionist Falconer (1977), where he presented sexual fulfillment through an idealized homosexual experience; evidently even his previous focus on straight love had been merely conventional, without meaning to affirm the normative quality of heterosexuality.
The same self-consciousness about his WASP identity increasingly informed the work of the highly prolific John Updike. Concerned like Cheever with the shallowness of modern life as evidenced in the commercialization of culture and the difficulty of marital relations, Updike differed from the older man in his sexual explicitness and his extended use of unifying symbolic patterns. After experimenting with mythological metaphors in The Centaur (1963), Updike constructed in Couples (1968) both an apotheosis of the suburban sex novel and its reductio ad absurdum. This intricate burlesque of novels like Peyton Place or No Down Payment not only used a more imaginative sensual language than its models but also hinted at the historical underpinnings of middle-class promiscuity in the Kennedy years. The social setting implicit in Couples became central in Updike's -508- masterpiece — the four books treating Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. The earliest, Rabbit Run (1960), seemed to present its protagonist's sexual crisis in the broadest existential terms. Yet with each subsequent reencounter — Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) — Rabbit's anxiety was more fully related to its temporal setting, and especially the conflict between middle-class Protestant mores and a society whose values lay elsewhere. Although occasionally the novels allowed Rabbit to pontificate on the general failure of America, at their best they used the peculiarity of Rabbit's cultural position to doubt the very existence of a single, homogeneous 'America.'
The issue of social change in the novel is a complex one, involving questions about the desirability and effectiveness of the novel as an agent of change, and even about the nature of change as such. The position of postwar literature in this debate is uncertain. It is nevertheless necessary to challenge the traditional view of such novels as apolitical and elitist. Most of these works did not have social reform as their primary goal. And in embracing the universalizing aesthetic criteria of the generation, postwar authors often left unexamined some of the discriminatory implications of middle-class liberalism. Yet the literatures of identity, especially minority literatures and the literature of environment, fostered a sense of group solidarity at odds with the pronounced
