"What's happened to the American dream?"

I apologize for the Watchmen quote, but I thought of that scene repeatedly when reading Kathleen Stewart's A Space on the Side of the Road. The response to the posed question is, "It came true. You're lookin' at it," and in the prologue to Stewart's study of West Virginia, she stated that the narrative space under scrutiny "stands as a kind of back talk to 'America's' mythic claims to realism, progress, and order" (3). These places are where the American dream has slowly decayed into fragments and then these fragments have been stitched together again backward and sideways from the original order. I can see immediately where that level of decay causes discomfort for many people, because seeing the nostalgic rural ideal of power and progress (red barn, white fence, fat cows, apple pie) which is still commonly seen as the quintessential American dream fall so far short of pristine calls into question many core values. There are still recognizable traces from the original "ideals of kinship, neighborliness, and Christianity" (46) but they're altered by the very real evidence in a small town that these values are not universal and timeless. Nothing is set into stone.

"Men are not naturally good husbands or providers but 'by nature' given to drinking and fighting and running the roads. They get turned around in middle age in sudden Christian conversion... and their testimony dwells on their wild days, performing a poetics in which, they say, people have to 'get all the way down' before they can 'see'" (186).

This is where faith has to turn to when the original ideals, the American Dream, did not run the course expected. If it brought them to a place so "got down", then the belief is that there must be hardship before there can be a reward.



One of my independent projects during my undergraduate years was a collection of both images and prose with the subject of rural decay. I spent every summer in Vermont when I was young and I went to college in Ohio, so the sight of cars or tractors or barns or houses that just seemed to have been left to rot when they stopped functioning like they were supposed to. When I was little, I thought the rotten barn across from my great-grandmother's house was magical. I had nightmares about the roof caving in and killing me but I couldn't stop running across the street to explore inside despite my fear.

My project explored the definition of function in object, if a house could stop being a house when one wall fell down, two walls, cracks appeared in the ceiling, the chimney fell off. Did people give things function through use or was the seemingly bombed out husk with one window still a house? Thus, I empathize greatly with Stewart's reference to "dread and desire" (118) and connect it directly to the aesthetic of decay present in the place she has chosen and the places I witness. We don't like to think of where our Dream will end up, of our favorite things or people rotting, even if it's inevitable.

-Caitlin