The American Family in Crisis: Socioeconomic Disintegration, Gender Dynamics, and Moral Collapse in Arthur Hailey's Airport
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69760/egjlle.2602011Keywords:
American family, Arthur Hailey, Airport, social realism, gender, literary analysis, domestic fiction, socioeconomic crisisAbstract
This article examines the representation of the American family in Arthur Hailey's novel Airport (1968) through the intersecting lenses of socioeconomic analysis, gender studies, and literary realism. Drawing on critical frameworks developed within American literary criticism and family sociology, the study investigates how Hailey deploys the dysfunctional family unit as both a narrative device and a vehicle for social critique. The analysis focuses on three principal axes of familial disintegration: economic marginalization and its psychological consequences, as evidenced in the Guerrero household; the corrosive effects of professional alienation and spousal incompatibility, as dramatized through the Bakersfeld marriages; and the redemptive function of loyal femininity as a counterweight to masculine crisis. The article argues that Hailey's realist aesthetics — grounded in meticulous social documentation and psychologically complex characterization — position Airport as a significant literary artifact of mid-twentieth-century American domestic fiction. By situating the novel within the broader tradition of American social realism and engaging with contemporary scholarship on family, gender, and literary form, this study demonstrates that Hailey's treatment of familial crisis constitutes a sustained, structurally embedded critique of post-war American society's failure to protect its most vulnerable members.
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