Breadwinning, Capitalism and the Absent/Present Father in the Works of Three Late 20th-Century

649 Pages·2017·2.94 MB·English

by  Nancy J. Hoch

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
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Nancy J. Hoch
Graduate Center, City University of New York
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ON THE THRESHOLD:

BREADWINNING, CAPITALISM AND THE ABSENT/PRESENT FATHER
IN THE WORKS OF THREE LATE 20TH-CENTURY U.S. NOVELISTS

by

NANCY J. HOCH

VOLUME I

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

2015
© 2015
Nancy J. Hoch
All Rights Reserved

ii
This manuscript has been read and accepted for the
Graduate Faculty in English to satisfy the dissertation
requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Jon-Christian Suggs

_______________ _____________________________
Date Chair of Examining Committee

Mario DiGangi

_______________ ______________________________
Date Executive Officer

Kandice Chuh

Barbara Katz Rothman
Supervisory Committee

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

iii
ABSTRACT

ON THE THRESHOLD:

BREADWINNING, CAPITALISM AND THE ABSENT/PRESENT FATHER
IN THE WORKS OF THREE LATE 20TH-CENTURY U.S. NOVELISTS

by

NANCY J. HOCH

ADVISER: PROFESSOR JON-CHRISTIAN SUGGS

As society industrialized in the nineteenth century and jobs moved outside the home, a
figure which I call the absent/present father began to make his appearance in American literature.
This figure, hovering physically or emotionally on the threshold of family life, never completely
present but never completely absent either, has filled the pages of fiction from that time until
recently when, as the U.S. becomes postindustrial, depictions of the absent/present father
decline.
Bringing a socio-economic as opposed to the usual psychological perspective to my close
readings of the fictional family, I explore the cultural work the absent/present father does in three
recent works as well as in novels from earlier periods, considering why this liminal figure arises
in the nineteenth century and how he changes through time. Of particular importance is why so
little attention has been paid by literary critics, including feminist critics, either to the
absent/present father or to the general subject of fatherhood.
I conclude that hidden within this figure who straddles the public/private divide is a
subversive narrative about capitalism, one that highlights its deleterious effects on families and
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communities. His hovering demeanor reflects the ambivalent relationship both fictional texts and
society have to this knowledge.
The three works I study— Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991), Junot Díaz's Drown
(1996) and John Updike's Rabbit series (1960-2000)—are members of a recent group of literary
works that, in paying close attention to this largely unexamined figure, are, like the liminal father
they depict, positioned on a threshold: they flesh out the story of the absent/present father just at
the moment when he begins to give way both in literature and in life to other, more diverse
depictions of fathers and fatherhood.
In these texts the father's behavior, a mixture of withdrawal and aggression, is tied to the
difficulties he experiences as a breadwinner crossing between the workplace and the home. For a
complicated set of reasons, including his masculinity training, he is silent about the wounds he
suffers in the larger world. These traumas surface in distorted form within the family.
Because class has been, until recently, a taboo subject in U.S. society, the father has
chiefly been viewed through the lens of gender. A hallmark of these recent novels is their refusal
to separate the domestic sphere from the socio-economic world. By drawing attention to the
injuries of class inflicted on fathers and families, these works offer an important revision to the
familiar story of the absent/present father.
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To work within the capitalist system is to wound oneself, and to forget,
not the wound, but how the wound was made.
—Richard Godden Fictions of Capital

If we forgive our fathers, what is left?
—Dick Lourie "Forgiving Our Fathers"

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PREFACE

Like so many men of his generation, my father was an absent/present father. Born in
1920, he looked from the outside like a man on the road to middle-class success: handsome,
athletic, the president of his fraternity at college, graduated from medical school and married to
my mother by 23, a doctor by 25. Eight years later he was the father of three children and the
proud owner of a house in Westchester County from which he would commute to work at St.
Luke's Hospital in New York City until he retired. My father was a good provider and always, as
far as any of us knew, faithful to my mother.
Going through my parents' papers after we moved them out of their house and into an
Alzheimer's memory ward, I found a newspaper clipping from the 1950s with a picture of the
white clapboard house we lived in. The article was a puff piece about the young doctor and his
wife, their beautiful home and its furnishings. Though it was published in a local newspaper, the
article would have been equally at home in Life Magazine: it was straight out of that picture
perfect world of suburban happy endings.
Picture perfect, is, in some ways, how I remember my childhood. We lived on the edge
of town near the beautiful waters of Long Island Sound. I spent endless hours running through
the back woods with neighbor kids or sitting quietly by myself watching ducks take off and land
on secluded saltwater ponds. Inside the house, too, there were moments of happiness, but there
was also trouble, almost all of it centered on my father and his moods. He was volatile and
subject to outbursts of anger. Because we were never quite sure what might trigger them, we
learned to be cautious. Even so, there was always the danger of verbal or even physical abuse.
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I have early memories of him coming home from work and running to greet him. He
would lay me across the back of his neck in a "fireman's carry," his left hand clasping my arm
and leg together over his chest so that my body formed a necklace around his neck, his right
hand grabbing on to the imaginary ladder we were climbing down as he rescued me from the
fire. There were plenty of other good times as a family. We did a lot of camping and hiking and
there were long conversations at dinner about science or how something worked. Once, when I
had a lead role in the fifth grade play, he surprised me by showing up for the daytime
performance: he had taken off from work to be there.
The fact that he hadn’t told me he was going to attend the play was typical: he kept so
much to himself. The things I learned about him I learned obliquely, because it slipped out when
we were talking about something else or because my mother or one of the other relatives made a
comment that shed light on his past. If I asked him anything directly, he would often make a
joke or, what was even more painful, say something harsh to push me away, as if even a minor
revelation on his part might lead to something catastrophic. Whatever inner demons he was
wrestling with, they were too strong for him, for all of us.
Long after I left home, my Great Aunt Timmy, the last living relative who had known
him as an adolescent, told me that when my father first went to college, he went through a crisis
and that his father “had to go up there and straighten him out." The result of this father-and-son
meet up, according to Timmy, was that my father agreed to pursue a degree in medicine. Later
he would join his father in practice and they worked together as close as brothers until my
grandfather died at eighty.
He would have been happier working with his hands, Timmy told me. He was fascinated
with radios throughout his adolescence, working long hours in his room taking them apart,
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putting them together. It was the 1930s and radios were the exciting new thing on everyone's
minds. But it wasn't just radios. Cleaning out the garage after he died, I found a beautiful
wooden model of a sailboat he had made sometime in high school, complete with masts and
rigging. He was crazy about airplanes, too, and eventually got his flying license. Sunday
afternoon outings with my dad when I was little often involved going up to the local airport and
watching with him through the chain link fence to the airport as small planes took off and landed.
In the garage, I found his flight log and discovered that he stopped flying after my
grandfather died. I can only guess now at the reason. It's the kind of thing he never would have
shared, at least with me. And anyway, by then I had so internalized his reluctance to talk about
himself that the questions I might have thought to ask another person didn't even form
themselves in my mind when I was with him.
Looking back now, I can see that his desire to work with his hands, to tinker with radios
or cars or fix furnaces or whatever must have sent a cold chill down my grandfather's spine. It
must have seemed to my grandfather like my father was in danger of veering away from the path
of upward mobility the family was tirelessly plotting out of its immigrant past, that instead of
rising, my father was getting ready to go back down the class ladder.
He buckled down after that talk with his father and became a doctor. Still, any chance he
got he'd be out in the garage in his "dungarees" building something or taking something else
apart. This wasn’t just a professional man puttering in his “shop” as a way to feel more manly or
to get some alone time away from the wife and kids. My father really meant it. When he bought
a used bulldozer to help him build the home my parents eventually retired to—a house he built
every stitch of by himself, right down to lumbering the boards from the surrounding property—
he immediately took the thing apart. I remember looking out the kitchen window to see bulldozer
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