Clearing the air: Representations of weather and natural disaster in American fiction and film

This study attempts to distinguish between various types of weather narratives, exploring the ways in which diverse representations of climate, weather and natural disaster have played key roles in shaping perceptions of national and personal identity, as well as impressions of “normalcy” and “deviance” in American culture. The study concentrates on the period from approximately 1930 to 1950 because these years generated significant changes in how weather was understood, characterized and experienced by the majority of Americans. In particular, these decades marked the modernization of weather and the formation of a national weather consciousness, developments propelled by the era's environmental and economic devastations, mass media explosions, global power shifts, climatological and biological inquiries and meteorological innovations produced during World War II. The study argues that atmospheric ruptures have typically been associated with social ruptures and that the cultural forces that prevail over the discourses of the atmosphere often reassert themselves in those very same discourses when actively challenged; thus, “weather” itself is a cultural barometer, and its anxieties and survival strategies are identifiable in everything from advertisements to radio broadcasts to government propaganda posters to United States Weather Bureau maps. Readings of novels such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Richard Wright's Native Son and films such as John Ford's The Hurricane and John Huston's Key Largo are placed into their cultural contexts through an investigation of their interplay with narratives of ecology, climatology, criminology, cartography, meteorology, geography and eugenics. The study looks at the way sensory experiences of the atmosphere have been racially and behaviorally coded, primarily through mainstream media narratives that associate “aberrant” bodies and behaviors with violent weather events, and the way marginalized voices have recognized and responded to the phenomenon of climate control as social control.