Home is the hunter: Representations of returning World War II veterans and the reconstruction of masculinity, 1944-1951.

Abstract

Popular culture narratives about World War II veterans produced between 1944 and 1951 were significant interventions in a postwar debate about the nature, function and value of masculinity. The soldier moving from the hypermasculine battlefield to the home and the workplace was a trope for exploring the problematic relation of traditional masculine values to a modern domestic society of bureaucratic work and companionate marriage. Demobilization narratives must be read against the background of a masculinity in crisis both from large-scale changes in social organization and the wartime challenges to women's traditional positions. Popular culture works are deeply involved in the construction and reconstruction of gender, attempting to reforge the meaning and valuation of gender categories through combining and opposing terms already charged with social significance. Masculinity was (and is) contested terrain, and a cultural work's attempt to stake out that terrain is a political maneuver. The dissertation focuses on three broad, although not homogeneous, categories of demobilization narratives: (1) the hypermasculinist story, found in men's pulp adventure magazines, films noir and detective novels, of the vet returning to purify a corrupted, feminized home front; (2) the domestic story, found in radio soap operas, romance novels and melodramatic films, of the vet destroyed by war who must be reintegrated into the world of romance and family; (3) the syncretist story, found in many genres and in works that cross genres, that attempts to fashion a new masculinity incorporating both domesticity and violence, both community and individualism. This final construction became the hegemonic masculine ideology of the 1950s, an era committed to both the cold warrior and the family man. Yet examination of these syncretist texts reveals the internal tensions and contradictions in the postwar gender system that would erupt in the upheavals of the 1960s.