Plastic Flowers: Overlooking Resource Scarcity in Postwar America

Abstract

This essay historicizes cultural and psychic economies in the postwar United States under the sign of material scarcity. It situates the proliferation of plastic flowers in domestic space within a context of bureaucratic anxieties surrounding natural resource scarcity, and trends toward ‘outdoor living’ that were an offshoot of the ideology of economic growth. Interrogating repeated, if relatively unexamined, invocations of ‘anxious’ suburban subjects in descriptions of postwar society, the essay suggests that plastic flowers shored up a sense of stability and permanence at a time when nuclear annihilation, Cold War paranoia, and population growth combined to render life uncertain and potentially unsustainable. The essay concludes by reflecting on how legacies of that epoch – and the fiction of permanence offered by plastic flowers – endure in contemporary fantasies of limitless progress.

Toward an anthropology of plastics

“…For instance, whilst plastic flowers were advertised for their durability and utilitarian qualities, they were also criticised for their superficiality and the refusal of normal cycles of growth and decay latent in their undying blooms (Meikle, 1995). Gutpa-Nigam’s historical analysis extends this ambiguity, contending that for some middle class white Americans plastic flowers brought into the suburban home generated a sense of stability set against a sense of a world-in-crises in the postwar period (2020). As our use of plastics have exponentially increased post 1950, in the period labelled by a number of scholars as the Great Acceleration (Morton, 2013), plastics have become implicated in wide-scale ecological destruction, global warming and violence both immediate and ‘incremental or accretive’ (Nixon, 2011) for humans and non-humans.…”