The family novel in North America from post-war to post-millennium [Elektronische Ressource] : a study in genre / vorgelegt von Kerstin Dell

Universität Trier
Fachbereich II
Anglistik/Amerikanistik
(Literaturwissenschaft)



The Family Novel in North America
from Post-War to Post-Millennium:
A Study in Genre






Schriftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde

Vorgelegt von:

Kerstin Dell, M.A., M.A.
Töpferstraße 41
54290 Trier
0651 / 9989597
Kerstin.Dell@gmx.de





Die Arbeit wurde betreut von:

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Klooß, Erstkorrektor
Prof. Dr. Gerd Hurm, Zweitkorrektor
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



I would like to express my gratitude to Bischöfliche Studienförderung Cusanuswerk
for supporting so generously the completion of this project.
Also, I am very much indebted to Jonathan Franzen
for kindly consenting to give me an interview.
I wish to thank my family and friends
for their encouragement and care.
Thanks to Dr. Christine Spies
for helpful proofreading.
Last but not least
I thank Martin
for his love.



3







To the memory of my father,
Hermann J. Dell,
who always believed in me. 4
TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction p. 5

II. Answering the Question: What Is a Family Novel? p. 17
2.1 Pride and Prejudice: The State of Criticism p. 17
2.2 Realism, Conflict, Decline? Ru’s Structuralist Taxonomy p. 26
2.3 (Re-) Defining the Family Novel p. 31

III. Parent Figures: Functions and Symbolic Potential p. 38
3.1 The Mother Figure in Fiction p. 38
3.2 The Father Figure in Fiction p. 44

p. 52IV. The Post-War Family Novel
4.1 The Fifties: Texts and Contexts p. 52
4.2 John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) p. 56
4.2.1 The Importance of Being a Wapshot: Heritage and Tradition p. 62
4.2.2 “The Iron Women in Their Summer Dresses”. p. 64
Mother Figures and Their Negative Potential
4.2.3 “All Gone with Dawn’s Early Light”. p. 80
The Legacy of the Father
4.2.4 Look Back in Anxiety: Talking about the New Generation p. 88
4.3 Synopsis: The Nostalgic Family Novel p. 95

p. 99V. The Postmodern Family Novel
5.1 Postmodern America: Texts and Contexts p. 99
5.2 Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) p. 110
5.2.1 The Postnuclear Patchwork Family: A Fearful Symmetry? p. 118
5.2.2 The Family (Novel) at the End of History p. 140
5.3 Synopsis: The Subversive Family Novel p. 150

p. 156 VI. The Fin de Millennium Family Novel
6.1 After Postmodernism p. 156
6.2 The Contemporary Family. Renegotiations of a Model p. 166
6.3 Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) p. 168
6.3.1 Enchanted Worlds: Corrective Constructions p. 171
6.3.2 Disenchanted Worlds: Constructive Corrections p. 189
6.3.3 The Return of Meaning p. 194
6.4 Synopsis: Reconstruction and the Family Novel p. 199

p. 203 VII. The Family Novel Then and Now: Trash, Trends, Traditions

p. 212 VIII. Bibliography

p. 226IX. Appendix
9.1 A Conversation with Jonathan Franzen p. 226
9.2 Zusammenfassung der Arbeit in deutscher Sprache p. 233
9.3 Erklärung über die verwendeten Hilfsmittel p. 239 5
I. INTRODUCTION

When Jonathan Franzen’s third novel The Corrections was published on September 10, 2001,
it became an immediate success. Reviewers have even gone so far as to claim that the
publication of Franzen’s novel had an impact on America’s cultural landscape considered
equally enormous as, on a political level, the dreadful events that only one day later left the
1nation in terror and grief . Regardless of the question whether such a comparison is justified
or not, it cannot be denied that Franzen’s third novel has indeed caused an astonishing echo.
Celebrated by the academic community as well as by reviewers, The Corrections was soon
2called the first masterpiece of the twenty-first century . As New York City dramatist Donald
Margukies remarked, one could hardly attend an East coast dinner in the weeks and months
following the publication of Franzen’s novel without noticing the fervent discussions about it
(Marshall, n.p.). The majority of reviewers praise the novel for its complex structure, its
engaging portrayal of characters, its wittiness and its keen observation of the everyday
intricacies of contemporary American life. The chorus of the praisers and acclaimers also
points repeatedly to the company in which the book is held to be – a company that includes
internationally acclaimed novelists ranging from Thomas Mann to Salman Rushdie or Don
DeLillo.
Such applause for a family novel is not the norm. Considering the fact that Franzen’s
third work is a perfect example of a family novel, the praise is rather surprising. Generally
speaking, the genre of the family novel has been traditionally regarded as trivial by literary
critics. There are numerous scholars whose treatises on family novels are nothing short of
condescending. Their criticism ranges from the widespread association of the family novel
3with the superficial and mundane to the very specific wish that the family novel go to hell .
The family novel, often (and unjustifiably) associated with the domestic novel, has been
derided by critics for the past couple of decades. An astonishing number of scholars and
critics have attacked it for lacking the necessary pinch of social criticism. In their opinion,
family novels are full of predictable characters and deal with average and smallish problems

1 As Elena Lappin writes in the German weekly Die Zeit: “Zwei Ereignisse erschütterten Amerika im Herbst
2001: die Verheerungen des 11. September und die Veröffentlichung eines Romans von Jonathan Franzen mit
dem Titel The Corrections. Es mag hart klingen, beides in einem Atemzug zu nennen. Aber der Roman wühlte
das Land auf wie ein Erdbeben und legte entlang klar definierter, aber lange verborgener Verwerfungslinien sein
rohes Innenleben frei”, Die Zeit 24 (6. 6. 2002) 53.
2 E.g. by John Marshall in “Meteoric Success a Novel Experience for Author Jonathan Franzen”, The Seattle
Post, http://seattlepi/nwsource.com/books/41634_franzeno6.shtml (acc. 11 Oct. 2002).
3 W. J. Keith, “To Hell with the Family: An Open Letter to the New Quarterly”, Special Issue: Family Fictions.
The New Quarterly 1/2 (1987): 320-24. 6
in a domestic, often pastoral, environment. Their general assumption - if not prejudice - is that
the conflicts in these novels are petty and the scope restricted to the immediate familial
surroundings, i.e. the house, the neighborhood, the village, the small town. Celebrated family
sagas of high aesthetic quality, e.g. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, have been regarded in
terms of the famous exception that proves the rule. The surprisingly meager number of works
on the family novel can thus be seen as a direct consequence of the generally shared negative
attitude towards this genre.
Despite academia’s disregard of the family novel, its manifold exemplars have always
met with the significant interest of the reading public. Leaving aside for a moment the
possible reasons for this continuous public approval, an explanation of academia’s low
opinion of family novels includes formal as well as thematic aspects. Especially in the past
few decades critics have tended to appreciate a certain radicalism of style that family novels
generally were assumed not to offer. Secondly, a novel concentrating on family life was not
only thought of as being restricted to the domestic sphere, but also as displaying merely
regionalist features, a combination considered traditionalist by modernist or postmodernist
critics. Frank Lentricchia’s essay on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (a book to which The
4Corrections has been compared frequently ) is a striking example of the almost arrogant
stance academia has taken towards the more “traditional” family novel. Disregarding the fact
that White Noise is also a family novel, albeit a postmodern one, Lentricchia praises it as the
longed-for deviation from the domestic fiction of, e.g., Bobbie Ann Mason or Frederick
Barthelme. According to Lentricchia, such novels, which he sees as limited, have developed
parallel to a stable socio-political situation in the US:
So American novelists and critics first look sentimentally to the other Americas, where (so
it goes) the good luck of fearsome situations of social crisis encourages a major literature;
then look ruefully to home, where (so it goes) the comfort of our stability requires a minor,
apolitical, domestic fiction of the triumphs and agonies of private individuals operating in
“the private sector” of Raymond Carver and Anne Tyler, the modesty of small, good
things: fiction all but labeled “No expense of intellect required. To be applied in eternal
crises of the heart only.” Unlike these new regionalists of and for the Reagan eighties,
DeLillo offers us no myth of political virginity preserved, no “individuals” who are not
5expression