Figurations of the family in fiction by Toni Morrison, John Updike, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth.

Abstract

My dissertation examines Toni Morrison's, John Updike's, James Baldwin's, and Philip Roth's attempts to depict the biological family in relation to a national, figurative family. These authors' particular value to the body of post-World War II American fiction lies in their various approaches to portraying individuals enmeshed in confining versions of both real and metaphorical families. By defining American masculinity in terms of black and white cultural responses to each other, to perceived threats to--and sometimes from--traditional social models, and to perceived institutional assaults on crucial segments of the family, Morrison, Updike, Baldwin and Roth portray a fictive America structurally defined by its attitudes towards the family. In Toni Morrison's early novels, her black male characters shape themselves primarily--if unconsciously--after a broader American cultural model of masculinity. I examine Morrison's critique of both the subtle effects of the hegemonic culture upon the construction of African-American maleness, and the profound danger of these effects to the black family. John Updike portrays in his four Rabbit novels a white masculinity crippled by terror of its own decline. The fearful Harry Angstrom responds by compulsively fleeing his responsibilities as a husband and father. Updike structures Harry not as an American Everyman, but as a strategically flawed character who represents white middle-class male anxiety forced to a hyperbolic extreme. James Baldwin furnished his novels and short fiction with families who thrive only if they recognize the urgent need to battle desperately for the psychological and social survival of their children, whom he represents as the most fully endangered of African Americans. I conclude by exploring the ways in which Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman distorts his own psyche. Through self-lacerating strategies he distances himself from the sensibilities and traditions--especially specifically ethnic ones--of his childhood home. The male protagonists, for each author, either refuse or cannot sustain essential familial bonding. Their loss is America's loss.