A History of American Literature

678 The American Century: Literature since 1945

needs to reject all boundaries of family and island. In Lucy, a similarly acerbic

character, now aged 19, arrives in the United States from Antigua in 1967, just after

the island has received its independence from Great Britain. Working as an au pair

for a white family in New York City, she finds herself, as she puts it, wrapped “in the

mantle of a servant.” But her position, her origins in what she calls “the fringes of the

world,” and, not least, her keenly ironic intelligence enable her to cast a cold eye over

the generic American household she enters (Kincaid stresses the point by supplying

no family name). Observing a supposedly ideal American family from close up, she

becomes a witness to its destructive tensions and divisions. Eventually, she leaves her

job as au pair; her commitment to her fashioning of herself, she feels, requires her to

reject that life, just as, earlier, she had felt compelled to abandon an “ancestral past”

rooted in the “foul deed” of slavery. Selfhood is now seen as a process, the self as

contingent, constantly negotiable; and Lucy prepares to pursue that process in the

fluid, multicultural terrain of New York City, the ultimate metropolis. Lucy ends

with Lucy beginning to write her story in her diary, opening with her full name, Lucy

Josephine Potter. It is an apt expression of her newfound desire to take possession of

her own being, to trace its evolution as she passes through different contexts,

different cultures. “I understood that I was inventing myself,” she asserts. That is her

task, and her need, as she now sees it. Which is a task that links her, as Kincaid must

know, with many other travelers to and sojourners in the New World. Even in her

resistance to the orthodoxies of America, and cultural orthodoxies of any particular

kind, Lucy is making a very American choice.

Realism and its Discontents

Confronting the real, stretching the realistic in drama

The New York City in which Lucy decides to make her way is not just the ultimate

metropolis. For many years it has been the theatrical capital of America. Until around

the end of the 1950s it was even more localized than that. One street in particular,

Broadway, was synonymous with the American theater; and that street, together with

the side streets intersecting it, dominated the theatrical activity of the nation. The

fifteen years following World War II were, arguably, the high point of the Broadway

theater. During this period, not only were the late and posthumous plays of Eugene

O’Neill produced there. The finest plays of the two other greatest American

playwrights, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, appeared on Broadway. Influential

directors like Elia Kazan (1936–2004) practiced their craft in notable productions.

The Method school of acting was introduced and developed. Not only that, the major

achievements of the Broadway musical appeared. Prior to the 1940s, the most notable

musical was probably Show Boat (1927) because it took up serious themes, including

miscegenation, without trivializing or sentimentalizing them. The music was by

Jerome Kern (1895–1945). The lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960),

whose career charts the rise of the musical in the 1940s and 1950s. After working with

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