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THE DOMESTIC FANTASTIC: POSTWAR AMERICAN FICTION FROM BRADBURY TO PLATH By ANDREA E. KRAFFT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 1 © 2015 Andrea E. Krafft 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my dissertation director, Marsha Bryant, for her feedback, assistance, and unceasing encouragement as I completed this project. I also thank Susan Hegeman, Stephanie A. Smith, and Trysh Travis for their support and guidance over the past two years as members of my dissertation committee. I could have not completed this project without the additional support of my partner, my sister, and my parents, who have always encouraged my pursuits, academic and otherwise. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................. 3 ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 7 Postwar Studies: A Critical Review ........................................................................ 10 Understanding the Fantastic: Some Definitions ..................................................... 16 Chapter Abstracts .................................................................................................. 22 2 “SHRUNK TO THE COZY WALLS OF THE HOME”: AMERICAN WOMEN’S GOTHIC VISIONS OF DOMESTICITY .................................................................. 28 Postwar Comediennes: Mediating Gothic Domesticity With Laughter .................... 30 “A Visit”: The Lovely House As Labyrinth ............................................................... 33 The Haunting of Hill House: The Cost of Romanticizing Domesticity ..................... 37 Hangsaman and The Bell Jar: Negotiating Friedan’s “Schizophrenic Split” ............ 45 Conclusion: No Way Out? ..................................................................................... 55 3 “LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY”: EMBODIED APPLIANCES, HOMES OF TOMORROW, AND THE DREAM OF SCIENCE-FICTIONAL HOUSEWORK ...... 58 “Family Magician”: The Fantasy of Domestic Witchcraft ........................................ 60 “I Sing the Body Electric!”: Embodying the Personal Appliance ............................. 66 The Stepford Wives: Electrifying the Housewife .................................................... 74 “The Heat Death of the Universe” and “There Will Come Soft Rains”: (De)Personal(izing) Appliances .......................................................................... 80 Conclusion: Can We Live Better Electrically? ........................................................ 86 4 TELEVISED AND TRANSPORTED: DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES AND THE MECHANIZATION OF MASCULINITY .................................................................. 88 “The Enormous Radio”: Disruptive Frequencies .................................................... 90 Fahrenheit 451: Simulated Families, Burning Houses ........................................... 93 “Duel” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”: Matheson’s Immobilized Passengers ..... 107 “The Taxpayer,” “R is for Rocket,” and “The Rocket”: Bradbury’s Astro-nots ....... 108 “The Five-Forty-Eight” and “The Swimmer”: Cheever’s Conquered Commuters .. 110 Breakfast of Champions: Automotive and Automated Apocalypse ....................... 114 Conclusion: “A New Day Dawning For You” ........................................................ 120 5 MURDEROUS, MONSTROUS, AND MUTATED CHILDREN IN THE TIME OF DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK AND THE CHILD-CENTERED FAMILY ....................... 122 4 “The Veldt” and “Zero Hour”: They Came From Inner Space ............................... 124 Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons: Shirley Jackson’s Mundane Monsters .......................................................................................................... 131 “Tomorrow’s Child”: Bringing Up (Interdimensional) Baby.................................... 136 “The Small Assassin” and “A Stroke of Good Fortune”: The Murderer in the Cradle .............................................................................................................. 143 Conclusion: “It’s a Good Life” .............................................................................. 150 6 CODA: THE DOMESTIC FANTASTIC IN CONTEMPORARY FILM AND TELEVISION ....................................................................................................... 152 Pleasantville: The Parodic Domestic Fantastic .................................................... 153 American Horror Story: The Modern Gothic ......................................................... 157 Ex Machina: The Robotic Domestic Fantastic ...................................................... 161 Poltergeist and Looper: The Child-Centered Domestic Fantastic ......................... 163 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Apocalyptic Domestic Fantastic ........................... 165 Tomorrowland: The Utopic Domestic Fantastic ................................................... 167 Conclusion: Brave New (Domestic) Worlds ......................................................... 170 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................ 173 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......................................................................................... 193 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE DOMESTIC FANTASTIC: POSTWAR AMERICAN FICTION FROM BRADBURY TO PLATH By Andrea E. Krafft August 2015 Chair: Marsha Bryant Major: English This project studies how American writers after World War II adopted the tropes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (which I broadly term as speculative fiction) in order to lay bare the warped nature of the postwar home and family. I focus on writers including but not limited to Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, and Sylvia Plath, who marketed their works to homebound readerships and whose blending of the mundane and the strange resulted in an emergent genre that I call the domestic fantastic. For example, Bradbury, a foundational figure of American science fiction, not only published in McCall’s but also opens The Martian Chronicles with the narrative of a depressed Martian housewife. Such intersections between the earthly and the otherworldly demonstrate the essentially domestic concerns of writers who are too-often excluded from the canon of postwar American literature. We can even find strains of the domestic fantastic in the work of canonical mainstays such as John Cheever and Sylvia Plath, in the visual culture of advertisements, and in the works of cultural commentators such as Betty Friedan and Benjamin Spock. By bringing outer space into the realm of inner space, authors from Bradbury to Plath challenge the reigning narrative that postwar domesticity was a site of normativity and cultural consensus. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION While we might expect Ray Bradbury’s tales of a glorious space age to take us into the uncharted territories of the future, he often brings us back down to earth, into familiar and domestic spaces. Indeed, Gary K. Wolfe characterizes Bradbury as a writer of “essentially Earthbound fictions,” given that he focuses on the social impact of technology (37). For example, like many seminal texts of postwar science fiction, Bradbury’s most famous work, The Martian Chronicles (1950) begins with a positive vision of technological power, lyrically celebrating how a rocket ship bound for Mars creates “summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts” (“Summer” 2). At this moment, Bradbury focuses neither on the mechanics of the exhausts nor on the ambitions of the rocket’s passengers, but rather views this giant leap for mankind through a mundane lens. For him, the sublime wondrousness of the rocket stems from how it melts the wintry landscape of a small town that is adjacent to the launch, as children and housewives prepare themselves for a “rocket summer” (which is the title of the story that begins The Martian Chronicles; Bradbury, “Summer” 1). Just as he inflects interplanetary travel through the perspectives of earthbound citizens, Bradbury describes the inhabitants of the red planet in strangely familiar and familial terms, beginning with the unexpected figure of the lonely Martian housewife. Our first glimpse of Martians occurs in “Ylla,” a story whose eponymous character spends her time cleaning “with handfuls of magnetic dust” and yearning for a life beyond the home (2). Ylla dreams of a handsome pilot arriving on Mars in a “silver craft, long and alien,” hoping that he might whisk her away “back to his planet” (Bradbury, “Ylla” 5, 11). Her romantic fantasy turns out to be a telepathic prediction about the first Earthlings to visit 7 Mars, whom her husband murders in a jealous rage. The astronauts of the second expedition also collide with the Martian domestic, as the first alien they meet is a disgruntled Martian housewife who yells at them for tracking mud on her clean floor. Bradbury thus begins his most famous exploration of outer space by focusing on the violent dramas of inner space, firmly situating his work within the landscape of American postwar domesticity. The Martian Chronicles illustrates