How does time flow? One might simply answer: from the past to the present and to the future. Indeed, this is perhaps the most common conception of time, which is based on linear progression. In fact, such a conception is so common that one rarely thinks of other possibilities of the temporal movement. When we uncritically apply this idea to history, however, we miss out on the complex flows within culture. Conventional historicism relies on this linear temporality and perceives history as a “progress” from the primitive to the pre-modern and to the modern. In this regard, lifestyles and practices in the past are simply superseded and “improved” by more progressive modern conditions. The linear conception of time may be innocuous in itself, but conventional historicism has unwittingly created a modern myth in progress, including the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. With the notion of progress, tradition is relegated as ...
This essay, informed by scholarship on middlebrow culture, places Mary Lavin’s stories in the textual space of The New Yorker, reassessing the supposed ‘conservatism’ of her short fiction. Lavin’s literary fame has often been marred by her perceived conservative streaks – in terms of her literary sensibility and her gender politics. Lavin’s literary style is inclined to the realist mode, which appears to be old-fashioned in comparison with the experimentalist work of her modernist predecessors; moreover, her ideas of family and marriage largely adhere to established social mores, disconnecting her from the progressive feminist movement in the post-war years. This essay argues that both aspects of Lavin’s ‘conservatism’ should be radically reassessed by placing her stories in the context of The New Yorker and the magazine’s affiliation with middlebrow culture. Her seemingly conservative literary and gender views in fact register a critical attitude toward urban modernity and domestic ideals, which resonated with The New Yorker’s liberal, albeit complacent, middle-class readers. In particular, the essay reads Lavin’s island story ‘The Bridal Sheets’ as a critique of materialism; it also considers the symbolic currency of the widow figure in ‘In a Café’ vis-à-vis The New Yorker’s tepid gender politics in the mid-twentieth century.
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