Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945 to Present by Emily A. Murphy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945 to Present by Emily A. Murphy Sarah M. Hedgecock Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945 to Present. By Emily A. Murphy. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. xiv + 263 pp. Cloth $114.95, paper $34.95. In Growing Up with America, Emily A. Murphy aims to demonstrate that during the Cold War, American literature transitioned from conceptualizing the nation as an innocent child to imagining it as a wiser, though potentially [End Page 513] rebellious, adolescent. She connects this development to larger global developments around America's newly prominent position on the world stage, proposing that such a position made the former American self-conceptualization as an innocent child more or less impossible. Importantly, she notes, "real children are not the subject of this book" (7). Rather, the book focuses on the idea of the child and adolescent, as understood by adults. This is ultimately a book of intellectual history that traces American literature from the end of World War II into the present using the idea of adolescence as a throughline. Whereas earlier generations of authors idealized American innocence in a way that promoted exceptionalism and isolationism, Murphy argues, the Cold War and the United States' new position as a world leader made that separateness impossible and caused scholars to encourage the country to "forgo its previous fetishization of innocence if it was ever to mature" (28). This, she claims, resulted in a cultural reorientation around the adolescent figuring out their independent place in the world. For evidence, Murphy turns to a variety of books published from the beginning of the Cold War through the early 2000s, mostly for adult audiences but featuring adolescents as either protagonists or otherwise central characters. Through these books—ranging from The Catcher in the Rye to Karen Russell's 2011 novel Swamplandia!—Murphy examines changing ideas of nationhood and of who belongs in the American family. Chapter 1 provides an overview of what Murphy calls the "beyond innocence debate" among American studies scholars, which was the catalyst, Murphy notes, for a broader reorientation of American intellectual culture around the adolescent as "a figure for radical reform of existing social structures" (15). From there, each chapter examines a different aspect of that adolescent potentiality. In Chapter 2, Murphy maintains that in the second half of the twentieth century, the "American Adam" myth of an innocent using the wilderness to break with his origins was reconfigured as an "American Eve" who must reconcile with her past in order to succeed in the future. Chapter 3 proposes that American literature from the Cold War on transitioned from a focus on virgin land to a transposition of that focus onto the virgin girl, with the twist that the latter narrative also emphasized the damage done to the virgin by those who idealize and exploit her. The fourth chapter explores changes in how adoption narratives—emphasizing interracial adoptions—brought to light considerations of who may be permitted to be a part of the American family. The final chapter looks at books about rebellious sons as a way to explore anxieties about the replacement of rural life with a world run by machines. This book is impressive in its scope and will be particularly interesting to scholars of American literature or post–World War II American history. [End Page 514] Murphy's emphasis on the literary turn from the figure of the white male child to a more diverse collection of adolescent characters provides a novel approach to material other scholars have also begun considering by approaching diversity through an age-oriented lens. Chapter 3, on the idea and ideal of the virgin girl, is particularly persuasive and may be worth assigning in upper-level literature courses alongside one or more of the novels it discusses. Although the book as a whole may be too dense for undergraduate readers, it makes an important argument that scholars in its multiple fields would do well to consider. Sarah M. Hedgecock Columbia University Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press