A.M. Homes's The Safety of Objects: People and Feelings as Objects in the American Suburban Home (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of History and Cultures

A.M. Homes’s 1990 collection of stories, The Safety of Objects, deals with the theme of life in the American suburbs, those residential areas where upper middle-class live in houses that project an idea of perfection and well-being. Homes’s stories, anyway, show a more miserable reality in which those families have become obsessed with things, not only as a symbol of their social status, but also as a substitute, or a surrogate, of feelings and familiar affection they do not feel anymore. The origin of these neighborhoods and their inner dynamics may be retraced looking back to the Cold War period, when the wide array of consumer goods represented the essence of American freedom and an outpost of security in a time of great incertitude. Moreover, as Stephanie Coontz maintains, consumerism does not only regard material goods, but also emotions and roles, and “our personal identities and most intimate relations”, so “we experience a blurring of the distinction between illusion and reality, people and goods, image and identity, self and surroundings” (176). The aim of my contribution is to highlight all the above-mentioned features of the suburbs’ population through some of Homes’s stories, showing how objects cause their greatest anxieties, elicit their truest feelings, and constitute, after all, the core of their very being. Keywords: A.M. Homes, Suburbs, Objects, Consumerism, U.S.A.