Amicable Young Men? or, The Absence of Change: The (Re)Construction of Masculine Identities in Monica Dickens’s The Happy Prisoner (1946) and J.B. Priestley’s Three Men in New Suits (1945)

This paper examines representations of the tensions which arise between the promise of a greater equality in post-WWII Britain and the reality which awaited returning soldiers, alongside the issue of redefining male identity in wake of what Deborah Philips refers to as ‘the loss of a heroic masculinity’ (2006:22). It will explore how anxieties resulting from the inherent uncertainty within this particular structure of feeling, lead to representations of masculine identities which revert to nostalgic echoes of a more rigid pre-war class structure, thus demonstrating an absence of change, which would eventually serve as the impetus for the new and more challenging representations of working-class masculinity of the 1950s.