Behind Barriers, Living a Man's Life: Imperial Masculinity in Graham Greene's "The Basement Room" and The Fallen Idol

Abstract:Graham Greene's short story, "The Basement Room" (1936), and its later film adaptation, The Fallen Idol (1948), tell the story of how a young boy realizes the fallibility of his childhood hero. Although Greene has been lambasted as a middlebrow writer, his work offers an important critique of the lasting influence of imperial gender roles during the mid-twentieth century. Using the perspective of a young boy, the two works critique the Orwellian decent man as irrelevant and a façade for imperialism, insisting that the perpetuation of this form of middle-class English masculinity leads to individual alienation and self-destruction.