The problem here is not that novels and poems are not in fact tied to the politics of the world from which they emerge, but that Jurca can link Tarzan to the suburbs only by describing the novel in terms so general as to detract from the historical specificity of her argument in two ways. First, if the aspects of Tarzan upon which she concentrates are sufficient to show that the novel has something to do with the American suburb, then Robinson Crusoe (1719) can be shown to be about the anxieties of turn-of-the-century American suburbanites, too, since Crusoe manages not only to repulse dark-skinned people who, as Jurca might write, want to move into his neighborhood, but also to turn one of them into his live-in help -- his man Friday.
Second, if racism and white fear of being overrun by other races are the salient features of Tarzan, why does that suggest an analogy to white suburban Americans instead of, say, to white urban Americans? Perhaps more to the point, what about British imperialists in Africa (such as Tarzan's father), or American imperialists at work in the Philippines when Tarzan was published? These colonizers, after all, can be related to Burroughs' book a good deal less tortuously than can suburbanites. Ultimately, the connection upon which Jurca stakes her argument is more rhetorically than logically compelling: After Burroughs became rich and famous, he went into the real estate business by promoting Tarzana in Los Angeles -- like many such developments at the time, for whites only.
Jurca is on much firmer ground when discussing novels that depict a fear not of a threat from without, but within: the alleged tendency of the suburb to induce "middle-class suffering" that is revealed in novels like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Sinclair Lewis' dissection of middle-class conformity, Babbitt (1922). She shows that Updike and Cheever do not in fact deserve credit for inventing their characteristic mode of hand wringing. Less persuasive is her claim that this kind of hand wringing actually "empowers" middle-class readers. According to Jurca, many suburban novels confer on suburbanites an ennobling self-pity by endowing these basically comfortable folk with an artificial sense of victimhood. Her analysis of Babbitt, for example, culminates in the following claim: "The challenge of being middle class, for Lewis, is to enjoy the trap, not to escape it, to feel sorry for oneself as one struggles in and benefits from it." But if empowering the middle class is what it's all about, wouldn't it have been easier just to celebrate middle-class life and jettison the self-pity?
This question leads to another. Since Jurca wants to present the "ways of thinking about and representing the twentieth-century suburb and suburban house" in "various discourses," it is particularly striking that she does not even mention the "discourse" that established the most broadly disseminated image of the suburbs during the period she examines, namely that of 1950s television. If grim renderings a la Babbitt really served the white middle-class establishment so well, then why did we never see June Cleaver track down Ward to his love nest? Why weren't Princess and Bud discovered in an incestuous knot? What happened to the episode in which Ozzie and Harriet default on their mortgage? Jurca, who has written elsewhere about film, may indeed have some interesting answers to these questions, but she gives no hint of them here.
If Jurca's ideas about empowerment are not wholly convincing, how are we to account for the irrational scorn loaded upon the suburbs and those who choose to live in them? One possible cause might be a residual strain of puritanism in American culture, an itch to deride worldly comfort or success, especially when they are judged insufficiently "communal," and an attempt to promote "the assumption that affluence and misery are intertwined." This assumption, as Jurca amply demonstrates, has certainly empowered many writers of novels set in suburbia. When considered in these terms, however, White Diaspora itself, with its suspicion of suburbs as sites of inegalitarian privilege, seems to be of a piece with the novels it dissects.
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