Suburbia Without Apology: Suburbanites on and off the Road in Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Its Cinematic Adaptation

Abstract

This article aims at teasing out the antisuburban sentiment as one of the most unexamined attitudes in American culture and bringing into legibility an as-yet-unexplored-face of the postwar suburbs. To that end, it examines Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and its cinematic adaptation through the lens of a deceptive mobility invested with remarkably durable symbolic meanings in American mythologies. The suburbs have functioned historically as a crucial gathering place for middle-class suburbanites, not only in the passive sense that they have ended up there but also in an active sense that the suburbs have helped them secure the belief in the fresh start and new beginning. Accordingly, one can identify a distinct way in which something peculiarly dislocated or unlocatable typifies the suburban experience of the American middle class, which reveals a liminal state of stasis fused with underlying imagined mobility. Both the novel and the movie may have succeeded in making themselves as the quintessential embodiment of the 1950s in chronicling the American way of life in the 1950s, but have never reached a point where the suburbanites’ deceptive mobility is utilized as a yet unrealized possibility of utopian energy in American myth of space. Scarcely constructing a scaffolding as a means toward effecting a critique of dominant cultural norms in the 1950s, the ambiguous ending not so much challenges the familiar image of mobile Americans but reproduces them. The Raths’ journey home is thus reinscribed at just the point it is supposed to end, without developing a new kind of roots to replace what they have left behind.