“Bringing the War Home:” the role of family in the home front during the American war in Vietnam

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing how two women writers of the “Vietnam Generation,” Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Anne Phillips, explored the role played by the traditional hegemonic American family in the social and political conditionings for the war in their respective novels In Country and Machine Dreams. Though both writers are highly critical of the hegemonic nuclear family, Phillips explores the family structure that led to the war in Vietnam while Mason tackles the family structure that emerged after the war. On the one hand, they charge the bi-parental, patriarchal nuclear family structure with being one of the institutions that socialized children in the discourses that led to the war in Vietnam. On the other, its inflexible structure makes the traditional family unable to take into its fold the divergent models of masculinity that the war generated: a generation of American men who lost the war and for whom the family they had gone all the way to Vietnam to defend no longer offered sanctuary.