Contained yet Affective: A Cultural Study on Young Rebels in 1950s America
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This paper examines the written text of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” and the cinematic text of Fred Sears’ 1955 film Teen-Age Crime Wave, both concerning the American 1950s. Through a critical analysis of these contemporary cultural artifacts, this paper focuses on the social milieu of the fifties with regard to how it eventually evolved into a powerful political culture that dictated the public policy, personal behavior and political values of the American family in the fifties. Ultimately, this study contemplates the early years of the Cold War as an affective decade that stored the endogenic energy of resistance, diversity, and subversion, and helped its full boom in the 1960s. The United States of the 1950s recognized the importance of family stability, economic affluence, and military strength in its quest to achieve superiority over the Soviet Union. It thus engaged the Cold War imperatives to realize the domestic ideals of a nuclear family: a white, heterosexual, middle-class unit of smiling parents and docile children living in suburbia. Yet, the normalization of the nuclear family, an institution already showing signs of strain in the late 1950s, was happening at a time when the divorce rate and juvenile delinquency were both on the rise. American society was already turbulent in the 1950s and was troubled by the rise of the teenage rebellion that eventually birthed the outsider or counterculture of the Beat generation of the 1960s. As a result, this paper investigates the way the Cold War-oriented social ethos of a homebound familial ideology in an era of containment, affluence, and conformity came to incubate the potential that was realized in the decade known as the seismic sixties. This study thus helps grasp the extent to which the domestic version of containment in the fifties could unfold to shape a new formality in the postwar American way of life.
Abstract
This paper examines the written text of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” and the cinematic text of Fred Sears’ 1955 film Teen-Age Crime Wave, both concerning the American 1950s. Through a critical analysis of these contemporary cultural artifacts, this paper focuses on the social milieu of the fifties with regard to how it eventually evolved into a powerful political culture that dictated the public policy, personal behavior and political values of the American family in the fifties. Ultimately, this study contemplates the early years of the Cold War as an affective decade that stored the endogenic energy of resistance, diversity, and subversion, and helped its full boom in the 1960s. The United States of the 1950s recognized the importance of family stability, economic affluence, and military strength in its quest to achieve superiority over the Soviet Union. It thus engaged the Cold War imperatives to realize the domestic ideals of a nuclear family: a white, heterosexual, middle-class unit of smiling parents and docile children living in suburbia. Yet, the normalization of the nuclear family, an institution already showing signs of strain in the late 1950s, was happening at a time when the divorce rate and juvenile delinquency were both on the rise. American society was already turbulent in the 1950s and was troubled by the rise of the teenage rebellion that eventually birthed the outsider or counterculture of the Beat generation of the 1960s. As a result, this paper investigates the way the Cold War-oriented social ethos of a homebound familial ideology in an era of containment, affluence, and conformity came to incubate the potential that was realized in the decade known as the seismic sixties. This study thus helps grasp the extent to which the domestic version of containment in the fifties could unfold to shape a new formality in the postwar American way of life.
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