Resumen determinación del análisis financiero

The textual response to this shift in the scale and source of resistance to middlebrow social criticism was to look inward—culture, postwar conventional wisdom dictated, was nothing more than the sum of individuals and their attitudes. One of the bestselling books

between 1940 and 1960 was a nonfiction work from Prentice-Hall by minister Norman Vincent Peale. Its title has since become a regular turn of phrase in American vernacular: The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). The New York Times enlisted a fellow clergyman to summarize Peale’s

thesis thusly: “There is no problem, difficulty, or defeat . . . that cannot be overcome by faith, positive thinking, and prayer to God” (Stephenson). Millions of Americans made Peale a significant public figure for this claim, buying his books, tuning in to his radio broadcast, and attending his talks. Like FDR’s insistence that the “American people” would “win” something unspecified through “righteous might” in his post-Pearl Harbor address, and like Fredrick Melcher’s complementary post-Pearl Harbor vow to “steadfast[ness]” in his own industry, Peale preached that Americans could and would control their fate and their culture simply by resolving to think well of themselves and their own individual lives. This, Peale argued, was true “power.” The popularity of Peale’s position, the appeal of his particular blend of the language of psychology and science with religious platitudes, exemplifies the dominant dogmas of public discourse in mid-century America. Meanwhile, the vicious backlash against his work, which his critics saw as symptomatic of a larger cultural problem—what some called the “cult of reassurance” (“Apostle”)—is likewise representative of the larger battle that was played out in American print culture over the concepts of happy, moral, normal American living.

Anna Creadick seems to be describing much the same type of emotional discipline and maintenance as Peale in her phrase “mental hygiene” (145) in Perfectly Average— at the heart of the broader “post-World War II focus on normality” as an aspirational goal. Creadick draws on Julien Carter’s Heart of Whiteness, whose timeline is a bit earlier and for whom “normal” is a prominent but less central keyword—anticipated by chapter 4’s Mary Roberts Rinehart, who is

quick to assure her readers that crime fiction is not for the “sub-normal.” Heart of Whiteness identifies many of the same concepts covered in Perfectly Average as they were in their nascent development pre- and post-World War I, and spotlights their lasting effect specifically on race relations in the US. Carter argues that the “sex panic” Creadick discusses was negotiated partially through the management of other signifiers of normality, especially whiteness and middle-class economic status. Both scholars use the Natural History

anthropological/sociological project of Normman (Norm-man) and Norma, two models of the thoroughly normal American developed by researchers and circulated in Natural History in 1945, as a case study. The statues of Norma and Normman, originally revealed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, “embodied the triumphant progress of the years between 1890 and 1940,”

according to Julien Carter: they supposedly represented the statistical average of all Americans, in stature as well as their hypothetical likes and dislikes. The two figures’ youth, athletic builds, and whiteness makes their universality seem suspect, however, and their presentation as male and female complements to one another implies a heteronormative sexuality. Far from a benign summary of the actual demography of American society, Norma and Normman stood as representations of one vision of ideal average Americans—as Carter puts it, Norma and Normman “construct[ed] and t[aught] white racial meanings” and “normal sexuality”

simultaneously and “without appearing to do so” (2).

The paradox inherent in the postwar curation of the normal—a word which is supposed to be merely descriptive of what is usual—as aspirational. In the case of Norma and Norman, normal was extraordinary; a later search for an actual human female that resembled Norma returned zero results. But its standard governed much of American pop culture in midcentury

America. Taken together, Creadick’s and Carter’s studies suggest that the obsession with normality mounted in the early twentieth century, culminated with World War II and its

aftermath, and leveled off with the assassination of JFK in 1963. By the 1940s, there was nothing more desirable to Americans than being normal. Yet the fact of normality’s ubiquity as an individual and cultural goal reveals the postwar revision of normal’s definition: it wasn’t a matter of objective averageness but a state of being only achieved through great effort—

including regulation of one’s emotional health (via “positive thinking” among other methods), and the hard work which was thought to be the key for upward class mobility.

The paradox inherent in what normality meant in midcentury America prompted further contradictions in how it, as a concept, was received. For, as Creadick points out, disillusionment with the concept of the normal was as typical as the concept itself: Creadick’s ad. Pop- and print-cultural conversations seemed to be continuously prescribing the standards of normality on the one hand while continuously calling them into question on the other. Indeed, along with the rise of institutional and cultural sanctioning of normality came the rise of specific types of resistance, particularly on normality’s most volatile front: gender and sexuality. As chapter 4 discussed, the antigay McCarthy era saw a rise in lesbian publishing; as Canaday notes in The Straight State, antihomosexual legislation did little to prevent homosexual relationships (and, in

a nice parallel, she further observes that the written confessions of military women pleading guilty to the crime of lesbianism tended to read like pulp novels).

But middlebrow writing, and middlebrow feminism in particular, with its trademark blend of affirmation and critique, was uniquely suited to carry out the cycle of definition and destabilization that Creadick and Carter attribute to the midcentury notion of normal. What

presented as “antisociality” in Highsmith’s work emerged in Smith, Petry, McCarthy, and Wolff’s as a more cynical iteration of the “ruthless humanitarianism” of Ferber, Hurst, Cather, and Fauset, wherein the grisly murder, freak-accidental death, or other destruction of a patriarch is the culmination rather than the impetus of the story.