The Poetics of the American Suburbs

Jo Gill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137340238
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Constructing the Suburbs

The suburban housing developments that have dominated the popular imagination in the years since their post–World War II heyday are a recent manifestation of a phenomenon that is neither particularly new nor uniquely American. As a number of historians have shown, most notably Lewis Mumford in his classic The City in History and Kenneth T. Jackson in his still-unsurpassed Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, suburbia is a social, physical, economic, ideological, and, as this book will argue, cultural formation with long and variegated roots. This chapter maps key moments and factors in the construction of what we know as the postwar American suburbs; it begins with a broad historical overview, and then proceeds chronologically through to the middle of the twentieth century. The focus is initially on material pressures and changes (for example on the effects of housing shortages and road building) and then on the causes and consequence of ideological change (in terms of gender roles and racial segregation). Throughout, my interest is in poetry’s role in constructing and disseminating an experience and understanding of suburbia. As I will argue, poetry has been implicit from the outset in contemporary suburban discourse.

Part One: Pre–World War II Suburbs

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, architects and landscape designers such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Alexander Jackson Davis created what John Archer has called a “new American planning type, the romantic suburb” (“Country” 140).¹ Inspired, in part, by landscaped urban parks in England and aspiring to bring together the civilized and civilizing values of the American city and the aesthetic and moral virtues of the country, the picturesque or romantic suburb offered the promise of calm, stability, and order set amidst an uplifting pastoral backdrop.

For Downing, writing in his 1842 manifesto-cum-pattern book, Cottage Residences, or, a Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage-Villas, and their Gardens and Grounds. Adapted to North America, “rural homes and rural life” were beneficial both to the body and the soul: “how much happiness, how much pure pleasure, . . . in making the place dearest to our hearts a sunny spot where the social sympathies take shelter securely under the shadowy eaves . . . as if striving to shut out whatever of bitterness or strife may be found in the open highways of the world” (iii). His “Design 1: A Suburban Cottage for a Small Family,” situated on a 75 × 150 feet lot, comprises a ground floor parlor with pantry and book area; a kitchen and bedroom with four large, and one small (presumably staff) bedroom over. Throughout, simplicity and unity of design are emphasized. A garden, organized into vegetable and ornamental areas, is provided. Potential buyers are advised that “in the suburbs of a town or village, the more common kinds of vegetables may generally be purchased as cheaply as they can be raised by the inmates of such a cottage.” However, residents may like to grow their own for “satisfaction” (35–42). In Suburban Sketches (1871), William Dean Howells notes of his family’s relocation to the suburb of “Charlesbridge,” “We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as they ripened” (14). In these as in other contemporary accounts, the suburbs are figured as a new frontier—an Eden-like space ripe for development, a testing ground for pioneering traits of independence and self-reliance, and a locus for the consolidation of a highly gendered model of space and time.

Although early American suburbs were influenced by their European counterparts, they responded to a specifically American set of pressures and needs, ranging from the spiritual and aesthetic through the practical and technological to the social and ideological. Jackson dates the first planned American suburbs to the early decades of the eighteenth century when land developers began to sell residential lots within travelling range of the fast-growing cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. A more systematic process of suburbanization emerged from around 1815 and proliferated across the rest of that century (K. Jackson 13). Innovations in building, specifically the introduction of the “balloon frame” from around 1840 which allowed houses to be erected quickly and cheaply and with minimum craftsman input, facilitated standardization.²

Changes in transportation across the nineteenth century (including the introduction of omnibuses, steam railroads and horse cars) were as important as innovations in building techniques to the expansion of the suburbs and opened up whole new areas for affordable commutation (Stilgoe 129; Hayden, Building 23) even if, as Howells shows in his gently mocking Suburban Sketches, this was at the price of the commuter’s “imposture” and “discomfort” (13). Canny developers such as Olmsted and Vaux, anticipating the strategies deployed by road contractors, builders, and automobile lobbyists in the mid-twentieth century, drafted rail lines into their plans in order to ensure the success of their projects (Archer, “Country” 155). Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe confirm the efficacy of such ploys in their 1869 book The American Woman’s Home, or, Principles of Domestic Science; being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes: “Every head of a family should seek a soil and climate which will afford such opportunities [of “outdoor labor for all”]. Railroads, enabling men toiling in cities to rear families in the country, are on this account a special blessing” (24–5).

Across the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the suburbs were regarded as advantageous to spiritual, moral, and physical well-being (in Andrew Jackson Downing’s terms, they provided an escape from “whatever bitterness or strife may be found in the open highways of the world” (iii)). They were thought to offer health-bestowing benefits such as access to pleasant and elevating vistas and to space, light, and clean air. By contrast, the city came increasingly to be regarded as the site of immorality, vice, and contagion. In the years before zoning laws (first introduced at the turn of the century), the factories, slaughterhouses, stables, bars, brothels, and dosshouses of a thriving metropolis were often located alongside residential premises, producing various forms of pollution and a perceived threat to middle-class women and children.³ At a time of mass movement to American cities from an economically and politically troubled Europe, and of post-civil war flight from the southern states, migrant families were thought to pose a particular risk to the health and well-being of the existing urban population—a concern amplified by a growing apprehension of the germ theory of disease (Tomes 11, 111, 129).

The suburbs represented a sanctuary or “retreat” from all this (Mumford 550). Beecher and Beecher Stowe’s 1869 The American Woman’s Home recommends “suburban vicinities” because they “give space of ground for healthful outdoor occupation in the family service” (24). Newly built suburban cottages and estates were typically built on spacious lots with modern sanitation systems while newly formed railroad companies, in league with land developers, specifically advertised the suburbs as healthy locations (K. Jackson 36). Thus the planned nineteenth-century garden or streetcar suburbs, like the twentieth-century developments to which we will turn shortly, offered an apparently safe, uncontaminated enclave away from the racially, ethnically, and economically mixed cities.

Technological, agricultural, and social changes in the wake of the Civil War contributed to the reorganization of land, labor, and family life and placed a renewed emphasis on the private and domestic sphere as the proper locus of (middle-class) feminine activity and the fundamental—indeed natural and normalized—heart of the American way of life. In an age characterized by the “acceleration of industrialization” (Cordery 111) with its attendant demands both on the resources of the natural environment and on the time and energy of the (typically) male breadwinner, suburban homes set in rural or quasirural tranquility, and maintained by willing housewives, offered a welcome haven. Beecher and Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home, cited earlier, presents a guide to the “family state” and a manifesto for those white middle-class women whose role as nurturers and moral guardians was being newly recognized. The introduction to their book is explicit in its aims and in its belief in the importance of the home to the nation’s well-being:

It is the aim of this volume to elevate both the honor and the remuneration of all the employments that sustain the many difficult and sacred duties of the family state, and thus to render each department of woman’s true profession as much desired and respected as are the most honored professions of men. (13)⁴

In an equation that persisted through into the post–World War II period, investment in the home was regarded as akin to commitment to the nation. Where middle-class women did engage with community work outside the home during the closing decades of the nineteenth century (as arguably in the mid-twentieth century), this was perceived as a form of “municipal housekeeping,” or a way of “putting their piety, purity, and domesticity to work in the world around them” (Cordery 115). The security of the private suburban home was thought to guarantee the stability and longevity of the larger public domain. In the late nineteenth century, according to Stephanie Coontz, “building a comfortable home life was the most morally worthwhile act one could undertake” (109). We see this conflation of the private and the public, the ethical and the material in the representations of the twentieth-century suburbs we will go on to discuss. In both periods, one might note, there is an unacknowledged reliance on the labor of an underclass—black domestic servants, immigrant factory workers, agricultural laborers, and so on—whose role is silently and invisibly to sustain, at often minimal wages and with little-if-any employment protection, the middle-class suburban ideal (see Cordery 125ff). Even after the decline in the use of domestic servants in the twentieth century—a decline that is both facilitated by and stimulus for “the development of a specifically suburban type of architecture that combined the requirements for servantless domesticity with the ideal of independence and privacy” (K. Jackson 128)—the tacit support for a system that allows the privileged few to prosper at the cost of the economic exploitation of an invisible service class remained an issue.

The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the consolidation of many of the principles established in the previous century, not least a suspicion of the city and an idealization of home ownership. Anxiety about the apparent threat to enshrined American ideals of self-determination and economic liberty posed by Bolshevik-influenced notions of shared ownership and communal living, coupled with the demands for continuing growth of a capitalist economy, led to a renewed emphasis on the advantages of suburban development. Archer cites Harding and Coolidge’s campaign “to make the single-family detached house the ideal of every family in America” (“Suburbia”15) while Becky Nicolaides quotes one developer, speaking in 1919: “It elevates a man to own a home. It gives a certain independence, a force of character that is obtained in no other way . . . Homes make patriots” (17).

Concomitantly, the boom years of the early 1920s heralded a new “culture of consumption” (Matthews 180). In this period, it has been argued, women in particular ceased to play the role of economic producers (working on the land, keeping poultry or other small livestock, canning and bottling produce) and became, instead, identified as consumers. The suburbs have been seen as simultaneously a cause and symptom of this process. In fact, in many pre–World War II suburbs, for example those established in California during the 1920s and 1930s, limited agricultural and livestock production continued to be a vital part of the economy (Nicolaides 12–38). More generally across the country in the opening decades of the twentieth century, it is not that women ceased to be productive, it is that the nature of that production changed. Women, particularly suburban women, became aligned with new processes and tasks—ones that required novel technological, administrative, and personal skills such as the ability to drive the family from home to railroad or school, to operate new appliances, and to provide educational, medical and emotional support to husband and children (Cowan 69–101). What suburban women produced at this time, then, were stable and functional family units. This role persisted, as we will see, into the postwar years where its inherent demands and contradictions become apparent in the poetry of Phyllis McGinley and Anne Sexton, amongst others.

Other important foundation stones for postwar suburban growth were also being laid at this time. The manufacture and sale of the Model T Ford from 1908 with its attendant promise of “liberation from the daily bondage of place” (Kunstler 86) proved seminal not least because it stimulated a powerful and long-lived road-building lobby. In 1910 some 200,000 automobiles were registered; by 1919 that figure had risen to six million, and by 1929 to 23 million. By the 1920s, traffic was sufficient to form the first “rushes” (Gowans 19, 18). “Sestina of the Fliv,” a poem by “H. G. F” collected in W. P. Adams’s 1926 light verse anthology The Conning Tower Book, registers the excitement and novelty of the moment. “Speaking of autos,” the poem opens, with an exaggeratedly casual air, before cataloguing the various different marques the speaker has tried. Only the “Lizzie,” (the “Tin Lizzie” or Model T. Ford) can cope with any conditions: “When mud’s deep and country roads are more / Like lakes than roads, the flivver beats them all” (Adams 47–8).

The spread of the automobile encouraged infill development between suburban areas that had hitherto been clustered around fixed streetcar, railway, and trolley bus routes (Stilgoe 275; K. Jackson 181).⁵ The enhancement of existing rail routes such as the electrification of the Hudson and Harlem lines into Westchester County from 1910, further stimulated suburbanization (Weigold 104). Taken together, the increased efficiency of railroads to and from the city and the new option of driving instead of walking to the commuter station allowed the suburbs to expand as never before.

The Depression and stock market crash of October 1929 affected the growth of the suburbs in numerous ways. In terms of the realignment of family life and of the relations of production and consumption noted above, the closing off of work-place alliances and the dissipation of the power of the unions consolidated a renewed focus on private family life (Cross 120). The economic collapse and natural disasters such as the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s prompted the newly dispossessed to settle in regions such as California which offered the hope of employment in agriculture, manufacturing, and other industries. Technological innovation, mechanization (such as the introduction of the Fordson Tractor from 1918), environmental pressure, and population change meant that single-family farming became economically unsustainable, rendering the land ripe for suburban development. In Westchester County where there had been 1528 farms in 1920, by 1929 only 428 remained (Weigold 110).

New Deal programs aimed at addressing housing need and at generating employment opportunities for construction and allied trades led to a number of crucial p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: The Song of the Suburbs
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index