Fifties Ethnicities by Floreani Tracy;

Author:Floreani, Tracy; [Floreani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3408773
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Novelistic Interrogation

Like Valentino, the fictional character Rock Wagram is cast as a romantic lead at a significant moment in the history of national identity structuring, and his performances of gender and ethnicity are called into question by himself and others around him. Rock's story seems at first to be another enviable California story, a modern version of the “American Dream”: a handsome and charming nobody gets discovered by a Hollywood producer, is whisked away to LA, and made into a star overnight. In fact, this was the marketing strategy employed for Valentino, who was presented as the embodiment of the American Dream, an immigrant nobody who made it big Horatio Alger style.19 Rock Wagram demonstrates the ways in which novelistic discourse permits an enlightening ambivalence about the process of supposed assimilation and American success. Stylistically replicating those “violently contradictory tendencies” of Hollywood itself, the novel is characterized by disjointedness, movement, and fragmentation.

Because of the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity at this moment, Rock can enact the social mobility not available to a character like Maud Martha, as “Armenian” becomes a gradually less racialized identifier, a hazy middle-ground “exotic whiteness” that is marketable to the mainstream.20 The narrative begins with a major signifier of success in American postwar culture, as Rock speeds toward California in his new Cadillac. Travel in this car functions as the spine along which various flashbacks reveal the significant moments in Rock's adult life. This constant motion emphasizes the irony of Rock's situation, as the entire book reads as his quest to fix himself in relation to something (at various moments: family, ethnicity, nation, art). Also ironic is the fact that, while he is shown participating in ideals of American consumer culture, he uses this vehicle in a constant attempt to escape from the commercial success that has been created for him. In the year of the book's publication, the naming of a Cadillac would certainly invoke in readers an immediate understanding of the exchange value of this status symbol. The postwar years saw automotive production and its accompanying print and television advertisement almost double, solidifying the cult of the car.21 Rock avidly participates in this cult, protecting his car throughout the book to the extent that it is the only thing he has left by the novel's end. The Cadillac should signify only material success and prosperity within postwar America, but the car comes to function as the last thread in his identity in an unraveling celebrity image.

As a Californian and a movie star, his role is even more important; more than participant, he is a trendsetter. These first years of the new decade after the war signaled the upswing in economic progress and consumerism that would set the tone for the rest of the decade. California was seen as the locus for establishing the desired lifestyle across generations. Karal Ann Marling describes a receptiveness to all things new and West Coast in the visual media: “Perpetually sunny, easy and perfect, the new West Coast way of life soon became the American ideal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.