DO NOT Leave Your Homes

Taking its critical cue from notions of a United States “containment culture,” developed by Alan Nadel and Elaine Tyler May, this article locates Judith Merril’s atomic war novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950), in early Cold War political contexts. Contrary to readings that see Gladys, Merril’s protagonist, as liberated by her experiences, it argues that the text shows how she remains compromised by the domestic culture that has produced her. Indeed, the scenario of atomic attack is a device that exposes the effects of prevailing domestic ideologies and their origins in the geopolitics of the early Cold War. The suburban home emerges not as a place of retreat from the uncertainties of a newly nuclear and threatening world, but as a crucible in which contemporary anxieties can only be imperfectly contained

Archaeology · Cold war · Crucible (geodemography · Economic history · Geopolitics · Hearth · Ideology · Nuclear weapon · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Demography · History · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• Family, Gender, and Society in 1950s American Fiction of Nuclear Apocalypse

  Open Access•Richard A Schwartz•The Journal of American Culture•2006

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• The debate over nuclear refuge

  David Seed•Cold War History•2003

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• The American Family Home, 1800-1960

  Open Access•Michael Ann Williams, Clifford Edward Clark•Western Folklore•1988

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• Nuclear Holocausts

  Paul Boyer, Paul D Boyer et al.•Technology and Culture•1989

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