Some great works of art were inspired by the picket fence
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Version 0 of 1. Culture and the white picket fence always had a tricky relationship. The only cultural address where the fence really held sway was in television. Quite literally, in the credit sequences of Father Knows Best and Beulah, sitcoms of middle-class family life where the fences – they didn't exist around most suburban houses – can be glimpsed. Inside the houses lived middle-class perfection: a carefree existence, overwhelmingly white – Beulah was an African-American maid. Sandwiched between the adverts, the programmes were comprised of laugh track chuckles and a life lesson for the kids, one per episode. Absorbing them again in fits of nostalgia thanks to the miracle of YouTube, what is most striking about these programmes is not their shocking lack of ethnic diversity but the utter absence of fear about employment. Work is like oxygen and water, just the stuff of life, hardly worth remarking on. Beyond television, cultural workers never hugely believed in the white picket fence. The writers and artists who defined the high culture of the golden age of the American middle class in fact spent their lives demolishing the myths around the suburban home. Middle-class is an amorphous term in American life. Until recently everybody called themselves middle-class: assembly line workers, stockbrokers, garage mechanics and physicians. In its modern usage the term became conflated with the suburbs that were built in the first decades after the war. To be middle-class meant to own a home in the 'burbs. These new communities were meant to recreate the feel, if not the scale, of an earlier form of the American myth – the small town – where everyone is a good neighbour and lives an innocent, carefree life. Those who had made it through the Great Depression and the war were to be rewarded with an entry ticket to this Norman Rockwell fantasy. John Updike grew up in a for-real small town. He knew what they were like and he wasn't buying it. It's no surprise that we meet his greatest creation, Rabbit Angstrom, running from its suburban incarnation. Philip Roth's first success, Goodbye, Columbus, had the hero, lower-middle-class Neil Klugman, still living in Newark, crushed by upper-middle-class suburban Jewish princess Brenda Patimkin. John Cheever and Norman Mailer ripped the white picket fence apart. Joseph Heller's difficult masterpiece Something Happened is a dissection of the anxieties of white picket fence land – and the office job you have to take to pay the mortgage there. And it wasn't just men. Grace Metalious exposed its sexual hypocrisy in the bestselling Peyton Place. Sylvia Plath ran all the way to England and Ted Hughes's arms, but the Smith girl from suburban Boston never escaped its tentacles. There were no hedge fund managers in East Hampton when Jackson Pollock moved there after the war, just potato farmers and the remnants of a few gilded age families. The violent energy of his abstract canvasses are an intentional assault on the well-made, middle-class nostalgia of Rockwell. Mark Rothko hoped his murals for the Four Seasons, that restaurant for the aspirational middle-class, and those already rich, would "ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room". There are many reasons for these artists' opposition to the middle-class dream. They had been children in the Depression or earlier, and had seen the "dream" disappear once before. Some had been shot at for real during the war and seen friends die. That's a serious price to pay for a house in the suburbs. All had grown up reading the foundation text of American modern literature, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a brilliant sequence of stories about the darkness inside the white picket fences of a small Ohio town in the early 20th century. They had also read Sinclair Lewis's novels about the hypocrisies of Main Street. They understood that the advertising business was capitalism's version of Orwell's ministry of truth and the "middle-class dream" was no more than an ad campaign on behalf of the powers that be. The golden age of the American middle class came to an end with the counter-culture. From a distance of nearly 50 years it is possible to see that Dylan, and the other bands, the new writing and filmmaking, were an extension into different media of the criticism of white picket fence land. The falseness of the dream, for them, was revealed by the distance between the world of white picket fence sitcom that the postwar generation grew up watching in their newly built suburbs, and the reality of a nation where progressive politicians and civil rights workers got murdered and cities went up in flames every summer. Coda: today, economic security is something those under 20 cannot conceive of, like life before the internet. The one cultural continuity from that time when anyone could find a job and become middle-class is the sitcom. It has changed of course, there are no more white picket fences, there are gay parents and broken straight families, African Americans do not just serve dinner and dispense wisdom in the shows. The myth of the American middle-class dream still survives there, at least. |