Advertising, Masculinity, and the American Postmodern Novel
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 Mad Men of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, and the American Postmodern Novel Jennifer Chancellor The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1505 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] MAD MEN OF LETTERS: ADVERTISING, MASCULINITY, AND THE AMERICAN POSTMODERN NOVEL by JENNIFER CHANCELLOR A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 Chancellor ii © 2016 JENNIFER CHANCELLOR All Rights Reserved Chancellor iii Mad Men of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, and the American Postmodern Novel by Jennifer Chancellor This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________ __________________________________________ Date Marc Dolan Chair of Examining Committee ______________________ __________________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Marc Dolan Gerhard Joseph Eric Lott THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Chancellor iv ABSTRACT Mad Men of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, and the American Postmodern Novel by Jennifer Chancellor Advisor: Marc Dolan In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of the emerging corporatized masculinity and its cultural conditions of production (Hutcheon 2). In contrast, as I will iterate in my conclusion, contemporaneous American postmodernists outside of the typical demographic, such as Ishmael Reed and Kathy Acker, express different concerns in their own contributions to the genre. Chancellor v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Since this dissertation is largely about influences on a genre, I would be remiss if I did not name the influences on my own work. My supervisor, Marc Dolan, helped me take an idea conceived in his 1950s culture seminar and elevate it into something that begged to be investigated in a larger project. I am thankful not only for his helpful conceptual and stylistic feedback, but also his hands-off advising style, since I am hard enough on myself not to need micromanagement by anyone else. In addition, I wish to thank my other committee members, Gerhard Joseph and Eric Lott, who also offered invaluable advice and support. Special thanks to Professor Lott for stepping in late in the game, after a previous committee member was unable to continue. I am also indebted to the Leon Levy Center for Biography for financial support while I completed the dissertation, and to Michael Gately, Gary Giddins, and the 2015-16 cohort of Leon Levy Center Fellows for their vital interdisciplinary perspectives. In all of these instances, I am grateful to have worked with scholars who are as kind and engaging as they are brilliant. There are, of course, a great number of people from all stages of my academic life who have enabled me to complete my doctorate. At Texas A&M University, where I received my bachelor’s, Douglas Brooks and Victoria Rosner convinced me that I had what it takes to pursue graduate studies in English and encouraged my doing so in New York, an adventure that lasted, all told, eleven wonderful years. Chuck Taylor nurtured my first major research project, my undergraduate thesis on the amalgamation of Buddhist and Catholic teachings in the writings of Jack Kerouac, and once at New York University, where I studied for my master’s, John Maynard and Shireen Patel guided my work on the Beats in a more theoretical direction, culminating in a master’s thesis that investigated what I referred to as “subversive consumption” in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. After arriving at the Graduate Center, I found a new passion for the work of Chancellor vi other midcentury writers and critical methodologies, inspired by courses with Ammiel Alcalay, Morris Dickstein, Marc Dolan, and Nancy K. Miller, and by working directly with Hildegard Hoeller in preparation for my second exam. Because my scholarship is inextricable from my pedagogy regardless of what courses I am teaching, I must also express my appreciation here for my colleagues and students at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and for my coworkers and fellow Writing Across the Curriculum Fellows at Bronx Community College. I am especially obliged to Margaret Barrow, my mentor at BMCC, and Kathrynn DiTommaso and Julia Miele Rodas, my “bosses” at BCC, whom I regard as both role models and dear friends. Speaking of friends, I could never have made it through this process without the support of many close friends both within and outside of the Graduate Center community. There are far too many to name, but Sadarah Bowe, Ashley Ingersoll, Svetlana Jović, and Erin McAllister, as well as my Doctoral Students’ Council and CUNY Adjunct Project colleagues, collectively kept me (relatively) sane and confident in my ability to succeed in the task at hand. Finally, I would never have begun this process—and certainly would not have completed it—were it not for the unwavering love and support from my incredible parents; my sister, Tommye; and last, but certainly not least, my cat, Ariel, who has served as my devoted research assistant for 14 years and counting. Chancellor 1 Introduction: Falling Men The television series Mad Men, an award-winning drama about the Golden Age of American advertising, is chock full of iconic images from the period: print ads and logos, costumes and hairstyles. Yet one of the most memorable parts of the program, which ran for seven seasons on the AMC network, is actually from the show’s opening credits. A faceless, black-and-white, suit-clad silhouette arrives in an anonymous office, briefcase in hand. The scene dissolves around him, and he plummets rapidly from the high-rise building past endless, colorful billboards. Images of women loom particularly large, appearing almost menacing next to the comparatively tiny tumbling figure. He does not hit the ground, as far as we can tell, but instead ends the sequence sitting pensively, cigarette in hand, with his back to the viewer. For fans of Mad Men, the symbolism seems clear: Don Draper and his fellow executives at the agency are striving for success in their careers yet struggling in their personal lives—with infidelity, insecurity, and identity crises, among other issues—and women, while facing rampant sexism in and outside of the workplace, are viewed as an ever-increasing threat by their male counterparts. But the fact that the falling promotions man’s work surrounds him as he plunges toward the ground suggests another source for his apparent downfall, one in which the fruits of his labor are at fault. It is in the tension between these two interpretations of what was plaguing white, middle-class men of this time—the few decades after World War II that Jameson refers to as the “brief ‘American century’” (xx)—that I wish to begin my investigation.1 This dissertation is not about Mad Men, though the show does serve as a compact and visually evocative introduction to the problem with which I am concerned: the widespread cultural feeling that white, middle-class men in the postwar period—despite not only maintaining their traditional race and gender privileges, but also accumulating unprecedented wealth—were Chancellor 2 in an alarming state of collective decline. As indicated above in my reading of the opening credits to Matthew Wiener’s program, contemporary sources frequently laid the blame at women’s feet for the deterioration of midcentury masculinity. The biggest proponent of this view was probably Philip Wylie, who filled popular magazines with articles bearing such telling titles as “Mom’s to Blame” (1950) and “The Womanization of America” (1958). According to Wylie, who was only the most venomous of many professional postwar misogynists, women dominated men in nearly every way: they ruled the home with an iron (if well-manicured) fist, forced men to work jobs they hated, and did nothing all day but spend their husbands’ hard-earned money. Look, a general interest magazine of the era read by men and women alike, published a series of articles in 1958 asking in regard to American men, “Why Do Women Dominate Him?” and alleging that the answer to the question, “Why Does He Work So Hard?”, was to support his wife’s shopping habits. Popular television shows such as Bewitched painted a picture of men’s oppression softened by humor, but the message remained more or less the same. For most twenty-first century readers, the narrative related above seems utterly ridiculous, yet as these artifacts exhibit, it pervaded post–World War II popular culture. As suggested above, however, there is an alternate explanation for the alleged deterioration of American masculinity in this period, one that traces it to those in the promotional professions, and it is this line of reasoning with which I am primarily concerned in this dissertation. As in the former case, there are a variety of texts from the age that attest to advertising and its allied fields as detrimental to men.