{"id":6493,"date":"2025-01-07T14:02:33","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T20:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6493"},"modified":"2025-01-19T10:42:57","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T16:42:57","slug":"writer-suggests-updike-invented-brat-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/01\/07\/writer-suggests-updike-invented-brat-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer suggests Updike invented Brat culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Could John Updike be responsible for, or at least on the cutting edge of a cultural shift toward individualism? English columnist and writer Sarah Ditum<\/strong> was inclined to think so. Born roughly 50 years after Updike, Ditum wrote in <\/a>unHerd\u00a0<\/em>that Harry Angstrom’s problem was “the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man living in 1959, when John Updike’s novel\u00a0Rabbit, Run\u00a0<\/em>is set.” In the late 1950s, she wrote, “making the passage from youth to adulthood in your twenties was not merely possible\u2014it was compulsory. In a culture that was tentatively embracing personal freedom, (marriage, a job, and a first child at 23) could feel more like prison than possibility.”<\/p>\n

\"\"Ditum reminded readers of the impetus behind Updike’s writing of the novel: “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road\u00a0<\/em>came out in 1957, and without reading it, I resented its apparent injunction to cut loose;\u00a0Rabbit, Run\u00a0<\/em>was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American man goes on the road\u2014the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.”<\/p>\n

Rabbit’s run, Ditum suggested, was “less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass-media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when he gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show” and “Rabbit is appalled at the banality. . . . His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.”<\/p>\n

“It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side-product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realization. An age of personal freedom, carved against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. . . . Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.”<\/p>\n

Bottom line? “The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit\u2014”know yourself”\u2014becomes its inverse:\u00a0be knowable to the world.\u00a0<\/em>And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.”<\/p>\n

Read the whole essay.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Could John Updike be responsible for, or at least on the cutting edge of a cultural shift toward individualism? English columnist and writer Sarah Ditum was inclined to think so. Born roughly 50 years after Updike, Ditum wrote in unHerd\u00a0that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular","category-updike-in-context","category-updike-in-pop-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6495,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions\/6495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}