The Literature of the Rust Belt Decline: Deindustrialization and the White Working Class in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Dean Bakopoulos' Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust

The deindustrialization of the United States and particularly of the Rust Belt, which began with the closures of the first factories by the end of the 1970s, left the U.S. working class in the middle of an economic and identity crisis. The erasure of manufacturing jobs, which followed the abandonment of factories, not only undermined the financial stability of the working class but also jeopardized the identity of the white working class of the United States: indeed, up until that moment, the factory had represented the main signifier around which white working-class identity had developed. Jesse Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), Dean Bakopoulos’ Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon (2005), and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) all represent different nuances of the phenomenon of deindustrialization in the American Rust Belt and attempt at providing a multi-faceted portrayal of the impact of factories’ closures on the working class by the beginning of the 1980s up until present days. This thesis aims at investigating how these three novels differently portray the experience that the working class had of deindustrialization, the disruption of white working-class identity as well as its process of re-definition. Particularly, after a brief historical and socio-economic introduction to American deindustrialization provided in the first chapter, the second chapter focuses on the critical reading of Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993). This chapter presents an analysis of how gender identity and queerness influenced the experience of the white working class, especially during the decades which preceded deindustrialization, the 1960s and 1970s, and those which saw its first repercussions. The third chapter provides an analysis of Bakopoulos’ novel Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon (2005) and takes into consideration the effects that factories’ closure had on the second generation which lived in the post-industrial Rust Belt. The critical reading of the novel highlights how new working-class generations were affected by a sense of nostalgia for their lost industrial origins and the dilemma they faced as regards the meaning of their working-class identity now that the factories and manufacturing jobs had disappeared. In the fourth chapter, an analysis of Meyer’s American Rust (2009) is provided; the chapter attempts at highlighting how the decay which affected the Rust Belt after factories were closed interested diverse aspects of the everyday life of the working class. Particularly, the chapter focuses on how such decay influenced the Rust Belt’s landscape and its inhabitants’ mindset, transformed their conception of justice and the judicial system, and re-defined the meaning of masculinity for the members of the white working class.