As he became more serenely virtuous, he became that much more unreasonably demanding of his family, turning the always-less-than-perfect Wally and Beaver into liars and cowards, and June into a nervous wreck. But that, if anything, made Ward a still greater terror. In later episodes, Beaver's writers smoothed out Ward's character a bit, making him less the dangerously flustered hothead and more the wise and just father. Can anyone doubt, though, the emotional damage his rantings and unfair accusations-let's name the evil: his emotional abuse-must have done to the boys? By television convention, Ward had to see the error of his ways, backing off and restoring the household's equilibrium before each show's conclusion. Rare was the episode in the early years that he contained his fury over his sons' misdeeds, sometimes real ones, often imagined. Ward: Much idealized as the archetypal swell Dad, the day-to-day burdens of fatherhood in fact overwhelmed Ward Cleaver. A close inspection reveals a familial purgatory worthy of Tennessee Williams-toned down for TV, certainly, but still consumed with rage, sexual turmoil and plain old mendacity. That is true, perhaps, but it misses the point: The retro charm of Leave It To Beaver is based exactly on its perceived deviation from the real world.īut nostalgia buffs should look a little more closely before embracing the Cleavers as the ideal family they never had (and can't hope to duplicate) because, when you penetrate the idyllic surface, it's hard to imagine anyone really wanting to be like Ward, June and the boys. The problem wasn't, as some critics have objected, that the Cleavers and their all-white hometown were too male, middle class and comfortably heterosexual to represent a legitimate idealization.
More incredibly, Beaver attained that mythic status even though something was dreadfully wrong in the supposedly ideal world of Mayfield, USA. The producers of this unassuming family sitcom could never have imagined that the Cleavers would one day become America's paradigm for the ideal middle-class family. Interesting Ideas: Leave it to Beaver LiesĬonsider the startling cultural triumph of Leave It To Beaver.
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