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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]