Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Dokuz Eylül University FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON SOCIAL SCIENCES: SUSTAINIBILITY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION, İzmir, Türkiye, 22 Haziran - 24 Aralık 2022, ss.45-46
The transformative effects of industralization and economic growth
on rural values and suburban lifestyles during the 1960s and 1970s in
the social history of the U.S. have not only been studied extensively
by economists and social scientists but also been vividly portrayed in
works of fiction by numereous contemporary American novelists.
Joyce Carol Oates’s The Falls (2004) and John Updike’s Villages (2004)
are among those novels that showcase the dire impact of
professional greed and technological progress on the social, moral
and ecological modes of self-reliance in the local and natural
contexts. Published in the same year, both novels present family
histories extended over several decades, which simultaneously
reflect a panorama of the political instability and capitalist
expansionism in the national scale. This study aims to examine the
ways the main characters of the two novels tolerate changes and
moderate extremes to survive against the backdrop of such massive
social and cultural transformation. Both novels exhibit the communal
and individual exercises of concealing truth and covering up of
impending catastrophe, which inevitably end up in manifest
hypocrisy. Given through reminiscences and flashbacks, the two
novels demonstrate the decomposition of middle-class Americanfamily due to slackened sexual mores in the same parallel with the
industrial despoiling of nature. It is eventually argued in this study
that the microcosmic disintegration of family and idyllic uniformity,
through Gothic imaginary in The Falls and in the guise of bedroom
farce in Villages, mirrors the the temptations of power politics and
complexities of economic degeneration in the national macrocosm.
Keywords: Moderation, consumerism, industrialism, selfsubsistence,
suburban imaginary.