In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Fragmented Heroes, Female Others, and the Bomb Herbert Blau, looking back from 1964 at his twelve years with the San Francisco Actors Workshop, used a striking metaphor of containment to characterize the theater of the 1950s. It was, he said, “a carapace in which one secreted his fear and trembling, muffled his indignation, and relieved outrage by innocuous subjective ejaculations. If it wasn’t therapy, it wasn’t collective action either—which had gone out with the thirties.” Blau primarily blamed the threat of nuclear war for making human beings in the theater tremble, muffle, and relieve themselves like armored bugs. “What do you do about the Bomb? All questions coagulate in that,” he stated.1 Like strontium 90, the radioactive material from nuclear tests that worked its way into the food chain, even altering cows’ milk, the cultural fallout from nuclearism shaped significant components of the American theater of liberal containment in the early Cold War. Soon after General Thomas Farrell witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, he wrote: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful , stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. . . . It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved for The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.2 Many more would vicariously experience the majestic power and destructive force of the Bomb during the next twenty years, as newsreel coverage, magazine photos, sound recordings, film footage, and television broadcasts kept the threat of “doomsday” alive in the minds of cold war Americans. Farrell spoke of “witnessing” atomic power as others have spoken of witnessing divinity. Historians and critics have blamed the Bomb for a wide variety of developments in the second half of the twentieth century, ranging from postwar gender roles to the rise of postmodernism.3 While nuclear anxieties dislocated most cultural fields during the early Cold War and have maintained several tropes of cold war culture into the new millennium, adult male identity, national security, and American Christianity were the nearest to ground zero during the 1950s. The cultural impact of the nuclear blast on these fields derived from the paradoxical effects of the Bomb. General Farrell’s account takes up two contradictory points of view about the explosion. On the one hand, the general identifies with the universal power that could create such beauty and terror, even granting critical approval to the “lighting effects” of the Almighty. On the other hand, the general fears for his life, identifying himself as a “puny thing” about to be obliterated by an angry God jealous of His power. At one moment, he became God; at the next, he sought refuge in divine protection . Put another way, the general experienced a crisis in agency, a sudden loss of power that could only be recuperated when he transferred his potential for action from himself to a higher power. The American response to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima echoed Farrell’s deeply ambivalent reaction to the Bomb. Initial concern for the Japanese victims soon gave way to more universal, even theological awe and fear. “[One] forgets the effect on Japan,” stated the New York Herald Tribune, “as one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling.” For cultural arbiter Norman Cousins, the threat of atomic power loosed “primitive fear . . . filling the mind with primordial apprehension .” In the shadow of the Bomb, intoned Time, “all men were pygmies .” Life magazine, in contrast, celebrated “our Promethean ingenu200 Fragmented Heroes, Female Others, and the Bomb ity”; and Philip Wylie in Collier’s said that Americans “now own infinity and eternity.” “We have become the people physically most powerful on earth,” boasted Wylie.4 The cognitive ambivalence inspired by the Bomb played a significant role...

Share