after slacking off...

I discover in part what the appeal of suburbia is... and I don't understand it. Part of the appeal of suburbia is the security and status that is provides. People move to the suburbs because it is safer than cities, close to nature without being part of it, and living there means that you are a part of the leisure class. Your family makes enough money that the mother can stay at home and take care of the children.

But there is also dissatisfaction and isolation. Though the suburbs provide the sense of community, sidewalks connecting one house to the other, it lacks a central meeting place, a market, a church, from which the neighborhood emanates from. This also promotes feelings of isolation.

In AMST we are now reading The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which follows the life of a man in 1950's suburbia. His life could not be more depressing. After serving in the war he took a position with a charity organization and bought a house in a nice neighborhood. Now he is dissatisfied with his lot in life and wants to get a better paying job so that he and his family can get out of the middle class mire. A film that also illustrates the need to escape middle class suburbia is Revolutionary Road. Like in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit this family is stuck in a house that has come to represent everything that they wanted to stay away from in their youth. The father is trying desperately to support his family and find happiness in his life and is failing horribly, while the wife sits at home and thinks about everything their lives should have been.

This is suburbia. Or perhaps it is suburbia as it was. Now that generations have lived in suburbs and not small towns or villages, we don't know what we are missing. It is normal for us to not know who our neighbors are and for us to travel twenty minutes or more to go to the grocery store. But are we happy? and do we still suffer from the melancholy of those first suburbanites?

Dream Life in Suburbia?

I started reading in Building Suburbia for this class and was struck by a passage in the first few pages.

"...suburbia is the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift."

As I read this passage I was reminded of a musical number from Little Shop of Horrors. In this sequence Audrey, after a date with her abusive boyfriend, contemplates her dream. Opening a magazine to a picture of a 1960's era ranch house with a large front yard and picket fence, she sings about living "Somewhere that's Green".

This green space is not a farm in the country, but a house in a prefab neighborhood in suburbia. Audrey's dream is to have tupperwear parties and eat frozen dinners in front of the TV, in other words be a suburban housewife.

What is the appeal of suburbia? Why does everyone want to move there? While these are all questions I'm sure we will cover in class I can't help but wonder. What do the suburbs have that no one else does?

It seems to me that the suburbs are a status symbol. To live there is to not have to work in a factory or toil away on a farm. Even if you commute to the city from the suburbs it shows that you have the money and time to do so. In the suburbs mother's have time to throw tupperwear parties and husbands make enough money to support the family.

My theory is that the suburbs represent easy living and a sense of nostalgia. After we have read more of our text I'll let you know how correct I am....