“The texts in the After the Bomb period share a common purpose: to challenge the contextual values of their society.”
Following the unprecedented violence and destruction of World War Two, the ‘After the Bomb’ period prompted a reconstruction of not only infrastructure, but institutions, ideologies and systems. Consequently, texts of the era challenged and changed social, political and religious values with radical forms and ideas that provided new ways of thinking. Sylvia Plath’s confessional poems ‘The Applicant’ re-examined the female experience in America during the mid-20th century whilst Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Swedish art film Persona encompasses Surrealist aesthetics to critique the post-war value placed upon marriage. Another of Plath’s poems, ‘Fever 103’ and Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist play Waiting for Godot presents the lack of Christian compassion and questions the reliability of religion following the dropping of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1946 which fused worldwide tension and uncertainty. The mercurial play also promotes camaraderie and company as solace in light of widespread re-evaluation of religious and social institutions, as does Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1986 novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Both ‘The Applicant’ and Persona criticise and challenge the traditional notion that marriage is a social expectation and requirement for acceptance, which existed during the ATB period. In ‘The Applicant’, Plath highlights the issue with this view on marriage through her depiction of marriage as a three-way transaction involving two unwilling parties and society as the matchmaker. The didactic voice of society personified in the voice of the unseen ‘Interviewer’, “open your hand… Here is a hand to fill it”, appears omnipotent through its mutual objectification of both the man and woman, representing the ingrained social expectations that pervaded not only a woman’s identity as a wife, but a man’s identity as the carer for the wife. The woman is referred to with the derogatory “it” and objectified by sales jargon, “it is waterproof, shatterproof”, which reminisces the rising capitalist consumerist culture in the US. Likewise, the man is also treated as an automaton that equally has no choice in the marriage – “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” The tautology in the final line of the poem transforms the initial question “will you marry it?” into an order, which echoed New York Times journalist, Mary Cantwell’s comment “God knows what would be left if you waited until you were 25 or 26”, thus demonstrating the value for marriage during this time and the determining role marriage in defining a person’s identity and acceptance within 1950s America.
Bergman’s iconic thriller, Persona, similarly interrogates the institution of marriage through the disintegration of the principal characters, Alma and Elisabet’s serene ‘personas’. The globalised world of the ATB period prioritised normalisation and social reintegration over the effective treatment of significant ‘wounds’ caused by the war. For Alma, this ‘treatment’ was to further her career and marry her fiancé, whilst Elisabet’s manifests in a symbolic mutism. Elisabet’s inability to continue playing the ‘persona’ of the perfect mother, wife, and actress, comes from her sense of personal responsibility for the traumas of the war, indicated by a close up shot of her mortified reaction to historical footage of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk and photograph of a Warsaw ghetto. Her marriage breakdown contrasts with Alma’s desperate desire for a successful marriage, a juxtaposition which Bergman foregrounds in a surreal dream sequence where he superimposes the women's faces. Alma’s absorption of Elisabet’s ‘persona’ at the end of the film culminates in her surreal kiss with Elisabet’s husband, reflecting the abating worth of marriage due to the fluidity of identity and ‘personas’ in the changing world. Therefore, both Plath and Bergman’s subversive portrayals of the disintegration of marriage during the ATB period serves as their criticism of their society’s over-valuation of traditional customs such as marriage.
Religion as a cultural influence is challenged in Beckett’s Godot and Plath’s ‘Fever 103’, through the respective representation of the hypocrisy of Christianity and the ways its teachings failed its followers. Beckett’s play interprets religion as a totalising grand narrative but upon reconsideration of it’s inherent sanctimony, rejects religion thusly. The play centres on two characters, Vladimir ‘Gogo’ and Estragon ‘Didi’, who wait endlessly for the arrival of Godot. Immediately after Godot is first mentioned, Vladimir and Estragon reference the crucifixion of Christ, “one of the thieves were saved” and discuss the Evangelists’ four accounts of Christ’s death, of which only one mentions the salvation of the thief. The presentation of the irregularities in the accounts of Christianity serves as Beckett’s criticism of people’s blind faith in an unaccounted god-like being. Further, in Act 2, Pozzo is compared to Adam and Eve’s sons Cain and Abel, the scriptural origins of murder and guilt. This biblical reference not only suggests that the characters in the play represent the human race, but illustrate religion as a promulgator of crime, which furthers Beckett’s view of the imprudence of religious belief. Thus the dropping of the atomic bomb led to an intensified questioning of religion as revealed in nihilistic tensions of Godot.
Similarly, in ‘Fever 103’, Plath echoes the widespread re-evaluation of traditional Christian values in post-WW2 America. Her depiction of a delirious and frenzied fever, articulates a vision of the consequences of war. The Dantean imagery of Hell, “the tongues of hell are dull… as the triple tongues of dull, fat Cerberus”, along with the hallucinatory style of the poem, insinuates the speaker’s internal struggles to commit to, and submit to the teachings of a failed and now archaic institution. These tactile images of Hell are contrasted with symbols of purity in “acetylene Virgin… cherubs”, reinforcing the Church’s failure to protect its disciples ‘after the bomb’. Further, the parallelism with which she states, “your body hurts me, as the world hurts God” demonstrates the persona’s self-deification and affinity with God as a sufferer and sacrifice, echoing Plath’s existential crisis and anguish, which lead to her subsequent suicide. However, unlike Plath, the speaker ultimately ‘rises’ above the confusion of the world, “to paradise”. Whilst there is discomfort in Plath’s symbolic apotheosis at the end of the poem, the speaker expresses awareness of the sin that is permeating society and the fear and questioning of religion which epitomised the post-war period. Therefore, both Plath and Beckett critique the role and relevance of religious faith and contemplate the collapse of religious beliefs through their respective American and French perspectives.
Disappointment in the institution of marriage and of the validity of religious grand narratives precipitated a fundamental secular shift which transformed relationships and camaraderie into something to be relied upon in the ATB period. The symbiotic relationship between Estragon and Vladimir and the dependency of Pozzo and Lucky in Godot and the decorum between the prisoners in Ivan is indicative of this value of friendship. ‘Gogo’ and ‘Didi’s’ dependence on each other to provide distraction from the fractured world is portrayed in the repetitiveness of their comedic cross-talk routine, “You must be happy too”, “Happy about what?”, “To be back with me again”. Paralleling this relationship, Pozzo and Lucky also share a dependence on each other but unlike Estragon and Vladimir, their relationship is based on subjugation. The ironically named Lucky, who represents the working class, is characterised as dependent on Pozzo, who represents the aristocracy. Lucky, the oppressed, needs Pozzo, the oppressor, to provide direction and order, “Leave him in peace… Basket!” Reciprocating this dependency, Pozzo requires Lucky to serve him, “I'd very much like to sit down, but I don't quite know how to go about it”. Their mutual dependence on each other indicates the need for a functioning relationship between the top and bottom echelons of power especially during the ATB as society reverted back old ways of thinking in an attempt to gain stability and a sense of normalcy.
In the same way, Ivan presents camaraderie as vital to survival during the hopeless ATB period. Solzhenitsyn recounts the repressive anxiety of the Cold War period through the portrayal an “almost happy day” in a Gulag. Ivan and the members of Gang 104 work together to earn extra supplies to complete the arduous tasks assigned by the prison officials and prolong their survival in the prison. Solzhenitsyn uses the prison as a microcosm of the Soviet Union and renders the hostile prison environment and lingering threat of starvation in Ivan’s conversation with fellow “zek” Alyoshka, “our Lord commanded us to pray for our daily bread”. Alyoshka satirically elevates the prison officials to God, which foregrounds the power wielded by the guards, who are models of Stalin’s totalitarian leadership. The inmate’s dependence on each other which mirrors the relationships between Estragon on Vladimir and Pozzo’s and Lucky in Godot, illustrates the indispensability of camaraderie in the ATB period, whereby all these characters maintain their sanity and survive in the oppressive world through their meaningful relationships with others.
Ultimately, significant texts in the ATB period challenged the political, religious and social values of their era. Plath’s poems ‘Fever 103’ and ‘The Applicant’, Bergman’s Minimalist Thriller Persona, Beckett’s Absurdist play, Godot, as well as Solzhenitsyn’s novella, Ivan, all challenged the paradigms and institutions which dictated an individual’s livelihood in the ATB climate of Cold War anxiety and displacement. These texts respectively provided an American, Swedish, French and Russian representation of societies’ blind certainty and belief in the institution of marriage and religion, to convey the climate of denial, existentialism and rising value of camaraderie in the ATB period.