Conclusion Fiftiesness Revisited: Desperate Housewives on the Big Screen

Abstract

Much of the recent academic and critical work on memory and history assumes that we are in the grip of a cultural ‘memory crisis’. Traditional ‘macro’ sources of historical knowledge have become – post-Lyotard and post postmodernism – viewed as suspect grand narratives, often skewered towards maintaining existing power relations of gender, race and class. Yet the veracity of subjective accounts and lived experience has also been undermined by psychoanalytic approaches to memory. An increased attentiveness to the complex operations of the memory, particularly the subject’s capacity to suppress and repress unwelcome memories and to perpetually work over past material in the light of contemporary feelings and experiences, has cast doubt even over eye witness accounts. As I argued in the chapter on costume drama, literary historiographic metafictions address these contemporary concerns by integrating the critique of both broader socio-historical accounts and personal testimony into the very fabric of their narrative structures and strategies.