The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class [1 ed.] 0367442116, 9780367442118

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class
Part I History of the Intersections of Class
Chapter 1 Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender in Australian Indigenous Literature
Chapter 2 Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China
Chapter 3 Victorian Socialist Obituaries and the Politics of Cross-Class Community
Chapter 4 Social Class and Devastated Land in Yang Dantao’s Science Fiction
Chapter 5 New York Literature and Social Space: The Tenement and the Street
Chapter 6 Elena Ferrante’s Fiction of Problematized Providing and Protecting
Chapter 7 Dickens and Society: Can Dickens’s “Uppers” Change Their Minds?
Chapter 8 Songs of Synthesis: Poetics of Working-Class Revolt
Chapter 9 The Urban Spatiality of Street Literature
Chapter 10 Allegories of Proletarian Literature: Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the Depression Era
Chapter 11 Angry Young Men and the Loss of Empire
Part II Class in Literature: Intermittently (In)visible
Chapter 12 Race and Class as Catalysts for Obscuring a Novel
Chapter 13 Productive Disruption in the Working-Class Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman
Chapter 14 Rhetorical Voice and Class in Adichie’s “Subaltern” Fiction
Chapter 15 Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity
Chapter 16 The British Working-Class Bildungsroman during the Great Depression
Chapter 17 Enunciations and Avoidances of Capital and Class in Evolving Irish Theatre
Chapter 18 Class and Upper-Middle-Class Consciousness in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories
Chapter 19 Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers
Chapter 20 Social Class and Mental Health in Contemporary British Fiction
Chapter 21 Penny Fiction and Chartism: A Literature’s Exclusion from the Canon
Chapter 22 Abject Capitalism as the Sight of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Novels
Part III New Multifactor Trends in Literature Theory
Chapter 23 Ta-Nehisi Coates Demystifies American Class and Race Mythology
Chapter 24 Desiring Weird Bodies: Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf
Chapter 25 Oral Storytelling as a Transnational Aesthetic in the Industrial Novel
Chapter 26 Class, Race, and Social Stratification in British Theatre between the 1950s and 2000s
Chapter 27 Pecuniary Emulation, Anomie, and the Alleged Metropolitan Conversion of Sister Carrie
Chapter 28 Power and the Dialectics of Twentieth-Century Science Fiction
Chapter 29 The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction
Chapter 30 On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald
Chapter 31 Darwinian Ideas and Marxian Idealism in Austen, Twain, Yeats, Camus, and Ishiguro
Chapter 32 The “Metaholon” Method for Class-Based Literary Analysis
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND CLASS

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class offers a comprehensive and fresh assessment of the cultural impact of class in literature, analyzing various innovative, interdisciplinary approaches of textual analysis and intersections of literature, including class subjectivities, mental health, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, quantitative and scientific methods, and transnational perspectives in literary analysis. Utilizing these new methods and interdisciplinary maps from field-defining essayists, students will become aware of ways to bring these elusive texts into their own writing as one of the parallel perspectives through which to view literature. This volume will provide students with an insight into the history of the intersections of class, theory of class and invisibility in literature, and new trends in exploring class in literature. These multidimensional approaches to literature will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students becoming familiar with class analysis, and will offer seasoned scholars the most significant critical approaches in class studies. Gloria McMillan is Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation won the Florence Hemley Schneider Prize in Women’s Studies. She has taught college writing for over 27 years, has a number of produced plays (Universe Symphony, Pass the Ectoplasm), and has published a novel (The Blue Maroon Murder) and journal articles. She edited the multi-disciplinary essay collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars (2012).

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability Edited by Alice Hall The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, and W. Michelle Wang The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen Edited by Cheryl A.Wilson and Maria H. Frawley The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class Edited by Gloria McMillan For more information on this series, please visit: www​.r​​outle​​dge​.c​​om​/li​​terat​​ure​/s​​eries​​/RC44​​44

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND CLASS

Edited by Gloria McMillan

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Gloria McMillan to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-44211-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04294-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00835-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This text is gratefully dedicated to my mother, Gloria Houck Ptacek, and our contributing essayist, Aaron Barlow.

v

CONTENTS

List of Contributors x Acknowledgments xv Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class

1

PART I

History of the Intersections of Class

11

1 Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender in Australian Indigenous Literature Sarah Attfield

13

2 Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China Kacey Evilsizor

27

3 Victorian Socialist Obituaries and the Politics of Cross-Class Community Ingrid Hanson

38

4 Social Class and Devastated Land in Yang Dantao’s Science Fiction Hua Li

51

5 New York Literature and Social Space: The Tenement and the Street Adam R. McKee

63

6 Elena Ferrante’s Fiction of Problematized Providing and Protecting Cristina Migliaccio

77

7 Dickens and Society: Can Dickens’s “Uppers” Change Their Minds? Peter J. Ponzio

91

vii

Contents

8 Songs of Synthesis: Poetics of Working-Class Revolt Zara Richter

105

9 The Urban Spatiality of Street Literature Mattius Rischard

118

10 Allegories of Proletarian Literature: Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the Depression Era William Solomon 11 Angry Young Men and the Loss of Empire Stanley Wilkin

131 145

PART II

Class in Literature: Intermittently (In)visible

161

12 Race and Class as Catalysts for Obscuring a Novel Aaron Barlow

163

13 Productive Disruption in the Working-Class Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman Carrie Conners

176

14 Rhetorical Voice and Class in Adichie’s “Subaltern” Fiction Kristy Liles Crawley

189

15 Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity Germana Cubeta

202

16 The British Working-Class Bildungsroman during the Great Depression Charles Ferrall

220

17 Enunciations and Avoidances of Capital and Class in Evolving Irish Theatre Eamonn Jordan

233

18 Class and Upper-Middle-Class Consciousness in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories 247 Peter R. Kuch 19 Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers Heather Laird

259

20 Social Class and Mental Health in Contemporary British Fiction Simon Lee

269

viii

Contents

21 Penny Fiction and Chartism: A Literature’s Exclusion from the Canon Rebecca Nesvet

281

22 Abject Capitalism as the Sight of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Novels 293 Matthew L. Reznicek PART III

New Multifactor Trends in Literature Theory

307

23 Ta-Nehisi Coates Demystifies American Class and Race Mythology Marleen S. Barr

309

24 Desiring Weird Bodies: Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf Rebecca W. Boylan

321

25 Oral Storytelling as a Transnational Aesthetic in the Industrial Novel Erin Cheslow

333

26 Class, Race, and Social Stratification in British Theatre between the 1950s and 2000s Önder Çakırtaş

345

27 Pecuniary Emulation, Anomie, and the Alleged Metropolitan Conversion of Sister Carrie 359 Wendy Graham 28 Power and the Dialectics of Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Christopher Loughlin

372

29 The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction Patricia McManus

385

30 On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald Erik S. Roraback

398

31 Darwinian Ideas and Marxian Idealism in Austen, Twain,Yeats, Camus, and Ishiguro 412 Nancy Ann Watanabe 32 The “Metaholon” Method for Class-Based Literary Analysis Agnieszka M.Will

426

Index

445

ix

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Attfield is Lecturer in the School of Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research is focused on the representations of working-class experience in literature and in popular culture (film, TV, music, and the media). She is the founding editor of the Journal of Working-Class Studies. Sarah has a monograph forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan entitled Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in Contemporary World Cinema. Aaron Barlow taught English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY). He earned his PhD from the University of Iowa with a dissertation on Philip K. Dick and is the author of a number of books on digital media, film, and American culture. Barlow edited One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo, by returned Peace Corps volunteers. Barlow edited Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Note: Aaron Barlow died during this text’s creation. He will be sorely missed in our field. Marleen S. Barr teaches English at CUNY. She received the Science Fiction Research Association lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism award. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Her When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes the Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber is the first single-authored Trump short story collection. Rebecca W. Boylan teaches in Georgetown University’s Department of English, Washington DC. Her specializations include visual studies, truth theories, and gender and sexuality identities in nineteenth- through twenty-first-century British and global literature. 2020 publications: “Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread” in New Perspectives on Romantic Interactions, by the Jagiellonian University Press and “Saving Face: Nature’s Inversions in A Pair of Blue Eyes” by Warsaw University Press. Her current book project analyses Hardy and Woolf ’s WWI time perceptions. Önder Çakırtaş is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bingöl University, Turkey. His research areas include political drama, contemporary British drama, and psychological literature. His recent study “Pragmatism and Politics Intertwined: The West, the East, the Suez Crisis and the Inter/national Hegemony in James Graham’s Eden’s Empire” in Eastern and Western Synergies and Imaginations (ed. Katherine Kwong) was published by Brill. He is currently studying on a monograph about British Muslim theatre to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. x

List of Contributors

Erin Cheslow is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she explores the uses of oral form as a transnational aesthetic in the Victorian novel. She has spoken at a number of conferences on a diverse range of subjects, including Victorian literature, science fiction, and pedagogy. She is currently working to expand the reach of the humanities in her community through literature-focused, public-facing events in Central Illinois. Carrie Conners is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. A poet and scholar of poetry, she is the author of Luscious Struggle (BrickHouse Books), which was named a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist, and Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Recent American Poetry, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Bodega, Kestrel, Quiddity, RHINO, and The Monarch Review, among other publications. Kristy Liles Crawley is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a full-time member of the English faculty at Forsyth Technical Community College. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory, composition theory and pedagogy, nineteenth-century American literature and culture, material rhetoric, and spatial theory. Her research on ethnography and pedagogy has appeared in Prose Studies and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Germana Cubeta, PhD, is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Messina, Italy. Her research interests revolve around Dickens, travel writing, and the use of corpus linguistic tools for identifying meaning in literary texts. Her books include Dickens in Italia: uno studio linguistico computazionale di Pictures from Italy (2017) and Dickens and the Italians in Pictures from Italy, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan Pivot. Kacey Evilsizor is a doctoral student at the Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include Chinese and Persian literature during the Mongol Empire, literary theory, comparative literature, and literary history. She intends to write her dissertation on the literary history of the Mongol Empire. Charles Ferrall is Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington. His most recent book is British Literature in Transition: 1920–1940 (Cambridge UP, 2018), co-edited with Dougal McNeill. His other books include Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (CUP), Writing the General Strike (CUP), and Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 (Routledge), as well as books on Australian and New Zealand cultural history. He is currently editor of The Journal of New Zealand Literature. Wendy Graham is Professor and Chair of English at Vassar College. Her most recent book is Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia UP, 2017). She is working on a reframing of American Modernism through the lens of late-nineteenth-century novels and texts about cities. Ingrid Hanson is Lecturer in English at the University of Manchester, UK. She is author of William Morris and the Uses of Violence (Anthem Press, 2013) and co-editor of Poetry, Politics and Pictures: Culture and Identity in Europe 1840–1914 (Peter Lang, 2013). She has published essays and articles on Morris, masculinities, Victorian anti-war writing, utopian writing, and fin-de-siècle radical journalism. Her current project is a monograph on concepts of peace, personal, political, and ecological, from 1854 to 1919. Eamonn Jordan is Associate Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Ireland. His books include: The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997), Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (2010), From Leenane to LA:The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh (2014), The Theatre and Films of Conor xi

List of Contributors

McPherson: Conspicuous Communities (2019), and Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh (2020). Peter R. Kuch recently retired as the inaugural Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and has published widely on Irish and Australian literature, theatre, and film. His latest book, Irish Divorce/Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), has been lauded for recovering a history of Irish divorce that provides an illuminating context for reading Ulysses. He is currently engaged in writing a cultural history of the colonial performance of Irish theatre in Australia and New Zealand.​ Heather Laird is Lecturer in English at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include theories and practices of resistance, critical/radical historical frameworks, the intersection between class and gender, and Irish culture since the early nineteenth century. She is the author of Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920 (2005) and Commemoration (2018). She is an editor of “Síreacht: Longings for Another Ireland,” a series of short, topical, and provocative texts that critique “common-sense” assumptions and explore alternative ways of thinking and being. Simon Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University. He specializes in workingclass writing, specifically representations of working-class life in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British cultural production. He has published on authors such as John Osborne,Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, Nell Dunn, and Colin MacInnes. In addition to appearing in a number of journals and anthologies on working-class writing, he is also a contributor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Hua Li is Associate Professor of Chinese at Montana State University. She published her monograph Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times in 2011 and has also authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on various topics in contemporary Chinese fiction and cinema. Her new book Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press. Christopher Loughlin is a labor historian of modern Ireland and Britain. He is employed by the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, UK. His research is integrally interdisciplinary and combines techniques from anthropology, history, literary studies, political science, philosophy, and sociology. This work comprises fifth-wave Irish labor historiography and philosophy of Irish labor history. His work has been published by Labour History Review (UK) (Liverpool University Press), Cambridge University Press, and Palgrave Macmillan. Adam R. McKee is Assistant Professor of English and the Chairperson of the Department of English and Digital Media at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. He holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University and an MA and BA from Kent State University. His work has recently appeared in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies and the William Carlos Williams Review. His research focuses primarily on urban studies, the city in literature, and transnational modernism. Patricia McManus lectures in literary history at the University of Brighton, UK. She is a Marxist interested in the historicity and politics of the novel. Her research explores the work the novel does in the world, in particular how specific genres relate to class differences, and the use of the public as a substitute for a class-ridden world. She is the author of Critical Theory and Dystopia (MUP, 2021) Gloria McMillan is Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation won the Florence Hemley Schneider Prize in Women’s Studies. She has taught college writing for over 27 years, has a number of produced plays (Universe Symphony, Pass the Ectoplasm), and has published a novel (The Blue Maroon Murder) and journal articles. She edited the multi-disciplinary essay collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars (2013, McFarland.)

xii

List of Contributors

Cristina Migliaccio is Assistant Professor of English and Composition at CUNY Medgar Evers College. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and Italian diaspora studies, working-class culture studies, and digital humanities. Rebecca Nesvet is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Her current research on Victorian penny novelist and editor James Malcolm Rymer has been published in Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Network, Scholarly Editing: The Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, Notes and Queries, and elsewhere. In 2012, she won the International Conference on Romanticism’s Lore Metzger Prize. Peter J. Ponzio received a BA in English Literature from Loyola University of Chicago. He received an MA in Literature from Northwestern University and an MA and DA in Humanities from Harrison Middleton University. He currently teaches at Loyola University of Chicago and Harrison Middleton University. His newest book, Themes in Dickens, Seven Recurring Themes in the Writings, was published by McFarland Publishers. Matthew L. Reznicek is Assistant Professor of British and Irish Literature and Medical Humanities at Creighton University. His first monograph, The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists, was published by Clemson UP/Liverpool UP. His second monograph, Stages of Belonging: Irish Women Writers and European Opera, is under contract with SUNY Press. Zara Richter is a PhD Student at the George Washington University in Washington DC. Her research has been focused on new materialist approaches to disability and sexuality through queer studies and disability studies in twentieth-century American literature and media. Zara has authored the article “Mad Data” in American Quarterly and has received grant funding from the DC Oral History Collaborative for her work in oral history of psychiatric disability. Mattius Rischard is a PhD candidate, graduate assistant director of program research, and teaching associate in the University of Arizona writing program. He has written articles including “Significación: A Theory of Political Fashion in Chicano Counter-Culture” in Transverse: A Journal of Comparative Literature and “The Politics of Regressive Listening: Performance-as-Protest, Protestas-Performance” in The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies. His urban fiction and poetry have also been published in Persona magazine, and his first novel is forthcoming. Erik S. Roraback, Docent, teaches literature, theory, and cinema at Charles University, Prague, and cinema at the film academy FAMU also in Prague. He has published three books, The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, 2017), and The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life (Iff, 2018), as well as some 40 articles and book chapters. He is now preparing two books for publication. William Solomon is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and the author of Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge UP, 2002) as well as Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (U of Illinois P, 2014). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Black Humor and the Making of the Counterculture: Race, Madness, and American Literature in the 1960s. Nancy Ann Watanabe (PhD, Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington) is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Oklahoma, concurrently, Pacific Rim Research Professor of Literature, Cinema, and Media, University of Washington. Her MLA award-nominated books include African Heartbeat:Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Dynamics; Love Eclipsed: Joyce Carol Oates’s Faustian Moral Vision; and Beloved Image: The Drama of W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939. Her article “Carl Franklin’s Black Oedipus: Sophocles’s King Oedipus Adapted” is accepted for publication in Quarterly Review of Film and Video. xiii

List of Contributors

Stanley Wilkin was educated at King’s College London, UK, where he achieved a BA in Ancient History, and a year later an MA in Classical Civilization from Birkbeck College London University, UK. He studied psychotherapy at Birkbeck College and Middlesex University, UK, and studied for a PhD at Roehampton University, UK. He ran private colleges from 2002 in London and Africa, principally Nigeria, and set up colleges in Asia. He has written a number of books, for example The Power of Doctors in Liberal Societies. Agnieszka M. Will is an independent researcher, freelance translator, and copywriter in a German HR company. In 2008 she graduated in Translation Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, and in 2014 earned her PhD in Interpreting Studies from Heidelberg University, Germany. She is currently working on a postdoc thesis on language and gender in corporate communication.The preprint of her PhD thesis on verbal indirectness in dialogue interpreting is freely available on the website of Heidelberg University Library: http:​/​/arc​​hiv​.u​​b​.uni​​-heid​​elber​​g​.de/​​vollt​​ extse​​rv​er/​​22075​/.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, thanks to my husband Bob and son Chris, who put up with my distracted states and haphazard housekeeping. And thanks also to my late mother Gloria Ptacek, sister Holly Ptacek, and her wife Daun DePaul Ptacek for their encouragement, as caregivers, and for handling family matters. My late father, Edwin Ptacek, would be very happy that this book is appearing because he was a steel worker for over forty years. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class might never have happened if my dissertation faculty John and Tillie Warnock had not still remembered me and helped on this text. My dissertation advisor Tom Miller gave invaluable organizational suggestions. And thanks to University of Arizona Department of English Chair Aurelie Sheehan for helping to find our copy editors. Colleagues who contributed essays also aided our work with suggestions for revisions of the Introduction. These include Kacey Evilsizor, Wendy Graham, Mattius Rischard, Erik Roraback, and Nancy Watanabe. The librarians at the University of Arizona Main Library and ILL system were of great help and support in securing materials. Friends like Dennis Day, Sylvia Destombe, Aleida Gehrels, Marianne Kaestle, Alice Schlegel, and Eileen Weizenbaum provided tips and encouragement. My other sets of eyes and sharp youthful brains, Gianluca Avanzato,Violet Chabko, Dalia Ebeid, Kacey Evilsizor, and Mattius Rischard, prevented disasters of organization and style. Any remaining infelicities are mine alone. Our collection thanks the following publishers for their permission to reprint essays in part or entirely: Carrie Conners’s “‘Ping Ping Ping / I break things’: Productive Disruption in the WorkingClass Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman,” was first published in Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2018 of The Journal of Working-Class Studies. This essay is reprinted here with the permission of the editors. Some sections of Heather Laird’s “Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers” were published, in an earlier version, in Heather Laird, “Writing Working-Class Irish Women” in Michael Pierse (ed.), A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). The writer and editor are grateful to Michael Pierse and Cambridge University Press for permission to include this material here. Peter J. Ponzio’s “Society Unglued: Can Dickens’s ‘Uppers’ in Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations and Dombey Change Their Minds?” is reprinted from Themes in Dickens: Seven Recurring Concerns in the Writings © 2018 Peter J. Ponzio by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www​.mcfarlandbooks​.com. xv

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND CLASS

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class is envisioned to reveal new voices and analysis methods for both expected texts and those previously not considered “worthy” of study.We apologize for less coverage of Hispanics and issues of borderlands than we had planned. Two essayists had to drop late into our process due to COVID-era workloads and ability to make deadlines. Our text seeks to analyze class and literature of specific regions and historical eras whenever possible, to explore intersections of class and literature with other foci, primarily race and gender. We hope this collection’s focus on methods and new voices, as well as re-envisioning familiar and canonical texts, will prove interesting to a broad range of readers, from students to professionals in the field of literary studies. But first, comes our question. What is “class”? Is class a will-o’-the-wisp or even a granfalloon? In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut defines a granfalloon as part of the fictional religion Bokononism’s karasses or intentional spiritual groups. But a “granfalloon” is a “false karass.” A granfalloon is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless. Vonnegut cites a character named Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers (people born in the United States in the state of Indiana) as a prime example of a granfalloon. Fictional Hazel exclaims “We Hoosiers got to stick together” as she travels across the globe, delightedly discovering Hoosiers everywhere. Vonnegut’s narrator continues Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in the ways that God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokanon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows, and any nation, any time, anywhere. (“Cradle” 67) Hazel’s relentless search for “Hoosiers” challenges all of us to define “class.” Calling on stronger minds than my own, I consulted Northwestern University Sociologist Gary Fine, who suggested to me that what Wikipedia offered regarding “class” was as comprehensive as any other overview of this highly contentious, voluminous, multifaceted concept. There were a number of pointers to more authoritative texts and philosophers. Published definitions of social class reveal a plethora of conflicting and overlapping traits and attributes that may suggest to some that class is, in fact, a granfalloon. Yet the same may be said of all of sociology’s categories to some degree. Granfalloon 1

Introduction

or not, very real class struggles create pain in macro-level through full-scale armed conflicts. Microlevel class struggles go on daily, more or less peacefully, if annoyingly. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class assesses the cultural impact of class as indispensable to literary production and consumption by proposing new kinds of textual analysis that highlight disciplinary intersections, such as psychoanalytic, feminist, genderqueer, critical race theory, quantitative/qualitative, and scientific approaches, to name a few. Through parallax views offered by more than one factor and method, class reveals that it does not just exist in itself but is performed as a function of intersubjective relationships. Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Pierre Bourdieu, bell hooks, and others foresaw a subjective identity shot through with flogging from commercial media. How the person manages to wind through the maze of enticing, yet ever shifting, lures is what caused these pioneering theorists to look into the role that culture plays in class relations. The foundational social theorist Karl Marx knew a broad range of European literature and articulated literature’s connections to economic class relations. He and Charles Dickens walked England’s streets at the same time. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) were published within years of each other. Marx’s “spectre haunting Europe” that begins The Communist Manifesto may not have been directly inspired by Dickens, but an intertextual connection is possible. Marx directly cites Shakespeare in his text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as being perceptive enough to rise above capitalist exploitation and see its flaws. He uses the play Timon of Athens’s hermit protagonist who complains of the corrupting quality of gold and the baseness of gold’s power over class relationships, arguing Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. Ha, you gods! why this? what this, you gods? (Timon IV iii ll. 26–30) Marx did not cite these later lines but Timon’s monologue continues more colorfully that She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again. Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds Among the route of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature. (Timon IV iii ll. 39–44) The length of this diatribe shows that Shakespeare did, indeed, have issue with the mystical power of money over relations among humanity. In view of money’s devastating power to alter human affairs, the next theorist under discussion concludes there is no escape from this force that was and is “sucking all the air (or meaning) from the room” other than its own. How does money dominate meaning? asks theorist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel builds his model of the arts in a 1906 essay “Fashion.” While “fashion” may be adequately represented by two poles on an x-axis: (x) the individual vs. (y) the social dualities, literature may hold a third dimension (z for empathy) in between and crossing the y-axis. Simmel’s fashion paradigm may be partly applicable to literary form on the x-axis (individual and distinctive vs. common and widespread) but perhaps not totally congruent if there is a y-axis (say, texts that lack empathic characters on a spectrum through texts with empathic characters, as one example). The x- plus y-axes demonstrate that there may be more than two polar values of one category “literary texts” that may 2

Introduction

be not-easily reducible to the usual quantifiable class-level traits, later exhaustively catalogued by Pierre Bourdieu. Simmel, a founder along with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Max Weber (1864–1920) of modern sociology, has been gaining attention in recent times because he shows a more choiceoriented, individual view of industrialized urban class relations than was the case with Marx’s analysis. Simmel situates the social structure’s foundation in money, noting that money is no longer just a tool among the social classes in society, but money has transcended its characteristics of a tool. Further, money has now appropriated the center around which the economic system rotates, at which point it also takes the “role of an all-encompassing teleological circle,” a be-all and end-all meaning of society, similar, says Simmel, to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism (“On Culture” 70). He notes As money and transactions increase, the independence of an individual decreases as he or she is drawn into a holistic network of exchange governed by quantifiable monetary value. Paradoxically, this results in greater potential freedom of choice for the individual, as money can be deployed toward any possible goal, even if most people’s sheer lack of money renders that potential quite low much of the time. Money’s homogenizing nature encourages greater liberty and equality and melts away forms of feudalism and patronage, even as it minimizes exceptional, incommensurable achievements in art and love. (Simmel, “Money”) Simmel’s estimate is foundational because even a two-point perspective is good at establishing some kind of measure of a literary text with regard to class strata. But his prediction for art and incommensurable aspects of love is a prophecy that may hopefully be avoided, given that class is repeated performance and not yet as inevitable as the physical force of gravity. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) is a cultural theorist who refutes Kant’s aesthetic theory that “taste” adheres to any ideal reality, except as consensus among discourse communities of different social levels of society. Bourdieu catalogues the class underpinnings in all aspects of the arts, spanning the spectrum of high art (that favored by some of the wealthy and some of the highly educated), various middle-brow artistic tastes, through popular, mass media art. In surveys made in the late 1950s, Bourdieu traces the taste of his participants. Class and culture are tightly connected, because Culture is a stake like all social stakes, simultaneously presupposes and demands that one take part in the game and be taken in by it, and [take an] interest in culture, without which there is no race, no competition, [because competition] is produced by the very race and the competition it produces. (Bourdieu 250) The endless media, direct mailings, and telephone or text messaging that appeal to our “taste” all day every day are the commands to perform and to play this “game” of various class roles. For Bourdieu in Distinction, culture appears to be one genre of the “game” of class. For example, the owner of a commercial firm not selling cultural commodities (books, paintings, antiques), that is, such firms as grocers and clothing store owners, has “close to middle-brow taste” in art. Bourdieu concludes his middleblow assessment after analyzing significant conformist trends in this stratum of society in his own and others’ surveys from the 1950s through 1974.Thus, Bourdieu cites middle-brow taste as Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltz, and manual workers’ taste as liking pop singer Petula Clarke and the pop singer Georges Guétary (Distinction 263). The peak in cultural capital are the wealthy yet highly educated. They prefer Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, according to the chart of various correlates between education, profession, and cultural or artistic preferences (262). 3

Introduction

Bourdieu has created his concept of “habitus” as the physical embodiment of our various “tastes” and accumulated “cultural capital,” which extends to the arts, foods, media consumption, and attire among other social behaviors. Bourdieu also demonstrates along with Simmel that class is only maintained in life and in literature by active, repeated performances or, in this case, consumers’ choices. Bourdieu spends little time on the “habitus” of the literary audience in Distinction, his most exhaustive text on class and culture, compared to his detailed examinations of music, food, sport, or newspaper readership. His cited studies show that working-class readers tend to like “adventure stories and love stories,” while “political, philosophical, and art” texts are preferred by the culturally dominant group. “Historical narrative” texts are favored by the economically dominant (128–129), and Bourdieu once points out the link between cultural capital and rarity or obscurity of books (116). Literary taste is not Bourdieu’s main focus in Distinction, but rather the surveyed tastes in music and the visual arts industry. A more recent observer of class issues is bell hooks (birth name Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952) who vividly engages the daily experience of class in social constellations, locating her construction of “class” in its intersections with race and gender.While the previously discussed analysts of the problems of hierarchies of class have concentrated solely upon economics underpinning and reenacting class, bell hooks creates images from her life as an African American, making visible what has been covert in our inherited class and caste relations. [h]ooks’s keen observation of interwoven factors composing each person’s identity and performance in daily social situations comprises her method. In Where we Stand: Class Matters, hooks lists ways in which the needs of poor people are not met by assimilating into a high culture along with an upwardly mobile economic position, because so-called “upward mobility” alienates the top tier of African Americans from their previous communities. She also deplores the mass culture that has replaced the old culture of mutual support in older days of complete racial segregation in her native state of Kentucky and elsewhere. [h]ooks writes about the complex tension between treating the poor with dignity and the fear of shame that comes from being poor oneself, saying [o]n one hand, from a spiritual perspective, we were taught to think of the poor as the chosen ones, closer to the divine, ever worthy in the sight of God, but on the other hand, we knew that in the real world being poor was never considered a blessing. The fact that being poor was seen as a cause for shame prevented it from being an occasion for celebration. Solidarity with the poor was the gesture that intervened on shame. It was to be expressed not just by treating the poor well and with generosity but by living as simply as one could. (41) [b]ell hooks intends to expose a culture that is essentially opposed to what she considers true critical literacy and thought. Her refusal to take part in making judgments within a system that she sees as mystifying for those with less of Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” runs consistently through her works. [h]ooks’s theory of culture extends even to the format of her publications. [b]ell hooks, often controversially, omits end notes and works cited, arguing that for some readers, these are so frightening that these readers will not read a text that they are otherwise capable of understanding and utilizing. [h]ooks performs class by not giving in to the alienating codes and secret passwords of academia, though she also has written some texts using those academic standards. bell hooks refuses to align herself with standard literary criticism and has crafted a multifactorial vision regarding how class and hierarchies (along with race, gender, abilities, age, and more) permeate all aspects of culture, not only literary textual production and reception. Marx, Simmel, Bourdieu, and hooks analyze literature (“culture” in hooks’s case) via its intersection with social class, along with the other parts of human subjectivity. The next aspect of how 4

Introduction

the field came to its current state involves the questions of what forms of literary criticism have analyzed literature via class, and how institutional structure has incrementally changed the nature of teaching literature.

Is “Literature” a Vonnegutian Granfalloon? Beginning this text, I concluded that “class” was a vague concept, but now literature is showing itself to be possibly a granfalloon in nature, as well. In order to find a reliable definition, our scholarly habit is to consult an authority who can banish the ghost of “granfalloonness” from our target of analysis: literature. Gerald Graff has written a foundational history of literature in post-secondary universities in Britain and the United States. These early programs, Graff explains in Professing Literature, were founded in the nineteenth century upon shifting interpretations and refutations of classicism, oratory, rhetoric, philology, technical specialization, and Arnoldian humanism. In the infancy of the United States, only a few colleges existed. At Yale, literature was hardly mentioned, and English was studied like Greek.That is, English grammar was taught in the formal “blab school” method of the public schools of England, where each pupil stood to recite his daily required quota of ablative absolutes from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Homer’s Odyssey, and so on. Little of what we call literature entered the early Republic’s college classes. According to Henry Adams, college men resorted to pranks, rowdiness, and drinking outside class to relieve their alternating stress and boredom. The virtues of a classical education were touted while modern languages were deemed trifling until 1865, when poet-scholars like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell at Harvard led the way with classes in English and other modern languages. They veered sharply from the recitation of noun cases and conjugations of verbs, preferring to regale students with eloquent readings of their own and others’ poetry, sometimes overlooking exams as mere housekeeping issues. One element in common between both the “classical recitation” mode of teaching and the “literary lecture” method that came in at Harvard was the primary value placed upon oral reading, largely based upon Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Yale-educated Daniel Coit Gilman became the first president of Johns Hopkins to fashion the school primarily as a fully specialized research university. Gilman had been working as a fundraiser for Yale’s early and unimportant Sheffield School of Science, in an era when the classics ruled Yale and when science was an afterthought. The idea of the research university is by now so normalized that we forget this was a major bone of contention with the rhetorical and oral partisans on one hand and the techno-philologists on the other. “Literature only” defenders claimed that nit-picking analysis ruined students’ responses to literature, turning the art into a machine-like product to be parsed. The techno-philologists such as Gilman claimed that standards had been loose and “impressionist” until the literary researchers began to create order from chaos. The generalist Arnoldians, whose philosophy came from Matthew Arnold’s doctrine of “sweetness and light” espoused in Culture and Anarchy, believed culture came from the aristocratic class or, in this case, the American near approximations. Arnoldians did not imagine that those any farther down, including the working class, had much to do with creating the arts, though they must be allowed in and close enough to be awed and taught proper obeisance by culture. Neither was the new German model “research” professor much interested in his students, regardless of their class. He was not responsible for the success of his hearers. He is responsible only for the quality of his instruction. His duty begins and ends with himself … Conservatives like Noah Porter protested in vain that the main business of the professor was still “to educate the young,” and that “the American college is not designed primarily to promote the cause of 5

Introduction

s­ cience … by endowing posts in which men of learning and science may prosecute their researches, but to secure successful instruction for our youth.” (Graff 62) The new research professor was hardly a teacher at all. The research professor used a purely “banking method” of education.The students were empty vessels into whom the researcher’s knowledge was to be deposited. A one-way communication was the goal for research professors. The German intellectual “giants” model meant that truth no longer existed independent of cultural authorities’ weight. Of course, other literature professors working off the generalist playbook frequently complained that nit-picking scholarship took all the life from literary texts. Yet in the late nineteenth century there was another dimension that had not yet opened to debate. Whose texts were important enough to read? English or occasional Scottish (Robert Burns) or Irish (Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke) texts were the only English-language literary texts worth reading. The rule of “British only” was waning in American colleges and new universities. According to Graff, during World War I, professors in the United States began to think that they had to show some culture capable of standing up to Goethe, Schiller, and the rest of Germany’s cast of canonical writers. The United States needed a canon of its own. Meanwhile, Joel Spingarn of Columbia espoused an early US version of art for art’s sake, claiming that art needed no ethics and should be judged upon aesthetic merit alone. Formalism had an appeal in those World War I days when a professor was fired at Columbia for making anti-war speeches. James Holly Hanford of North Carolina edited a 1919 college anthology that declared the selections to be part of the march of the Anglo-Saxon mind from the early modern era to the present. The MLA tried to stay out of the war and issued statements against propaganda. In 1915, Jefferson Fletcher of Columbia asserted that both sides claimed Goethe. Wartime and post-war disruption of George Santayana’s “Genteel Tradition” marked the beginning of the widespread study of American literature in the United States.The 1920s saw new writing from the likes of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald begin to be studied. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s and the Great Depression, some college professors and critics analyzed writers such as Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy), and John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath).The popularity of Chicago poet Carl Sandburg’s poetry began to edge out T.S. Eliot’s, though to a different audience, much to the dismay of those holding prestigious chairs in East Coast literature departments, as well as critics for East Coast literary periodicals. The utility value of formalism and its method of “nothing outside the text” began to appeal to those who felt literature had strayed too far from its aesthetic moorings.Thus was born the movement, largely led by professors in the conservative southern United States, that came to be called the “new” criticism. By the time Vanderbilt-trained John Crowe Ransom’s manifesto called The New Criticism was published in 1941, his formalist style of “close reading” of texts was taking over large parts of the college map, emanating from Ransom’s home base of Kenyon College in Ohio. This form of teaching maintained a unilateral focus on the text itself, while throwing into perpetual darkness such aspects of reality as modernity, secularism, cities, industrial life, social problems of the day, and anything not directly in the culled list of suitable American and British writers. Ransom even tried to establish a party of agrarians in the southern United States, but that did not long endure. The opposing older schools of generalist “impressionism” could not compare to the “scientific” appeal of the New Criticism, with its metrics, keys to analysis, and even the beginnings of structuralism.

Post-War and French Theory Gerald Graff ’s catalogue of historic dates marking the forms of literature departments in American colleges does not deal with the synergistic relationship between the US and European cultural 6

Introduction

theory. For this, our search to define literature must include the British theorist Terry Eagleton’s 1983 text Literary Theory, based less upon institutional history than currents of thought about the project of reading and speaking literature. Most closed-door debates in college literature departments in the US continued at the level of who is “in” and who is “out,” how must they be read, and so on. But immediately after World War II, the devastation prompted some in Europe to question what astigmatism in all forms of society and its culture allowed the genocidal behaviors of that war. Initially, in the United States, the European theory was neither heard nor understood. French theorist Jacques Derrida, in his 1967 La Voix et le Phénomène (Speech and Phenomena), challenged Kenneth Burke’s “god terms” and any unassailable foundation or unimpeachable authority upon which meaning may be grounded, calling these terms “metaphysical.”The theorists in Europe saw what structuralism had made of the act of reading and studying whatever was currently deemed literature. Eagleton assesses the state of literary studies being that Literary studies, in other words, are a question of the signifier, not of the signified. Those employed to teach you this form of discourse will remember whether or not you were able to speak it proficiently long after they have forgotten what you have said. (Eagleton 201) The New Critical foundation of literary discourse prevents any real empowerment or voice other than the voice of the already powerful. Eagleton summarizes the structuralist project as having obscured the vital link between what is in a text and what goes on outside. The New Criticism’s cognitive disjuncture was not recognized as problematic in American literature programs until a few professors began to teach European theory in their classes. By the late 1960s, meanings favored by New Critical method practitioners and textbooks were only one parallax sighting of a text among other critical observations. Voices in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class take up where the New Critics left off, although using their textual close reading method. Unlike the original New Critics, we do not assume that we come to texts as blank slates. Since the arrival of reader response theory in the 1980s, we know that the reader brings a life of experiences to texts. Theorists such as Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Roland Barthes, among others, held out a new rhetorical balance between the writer and the reader. The discussion to follow will group our contributing essays by theme, rather than order of appearance. Ingrid Hanson’s essay “Victorian Socialist Obituaries and the Politics of Cross-Class Community” demonstrates, as Fish and others have noted, that reading and taking charge of texts by performing literary works orally serves to revise class stereotypes. Hanson also articulates how late-Victorian socialist obituaries created cross-class, international communities. Our researchers review contemporary and historical texts that do not conform to the corporate publishers’ niches or that challenge publishers’ and the readers’ class assumptions. Aaron Barlow’s essay “Race and Class as Catalysts for Obscuring a Novel” shows how a novel that interrogated race and class privilege in Brooklyn failed to find a publisher, although well-written and by Stanley Ellin, a popular writer. Rebecca Nesvet’s essay “Penny Fiction and Chartism: A Literature’s Exclusion from the Canon” follows the trail of the most widespread form of popular fiction of the nineteenth century, the “penny dreadful,” as this genre went from being despised to a prime indicator of how the broad public engaged with fiction that was relevant to their lives. Nesvet challenges the idea that style alone was the cause of the exclusion of penny fiction from the canon, rather these stories’ espousal of movements such as Chartism. Zara Richter traces the struggles of the 1950s and later Beat poets to find a niche wherein both their experimentally and politically conscious voices might be heard. In Richter’s analysis, “Songs of Synthesis: Poetics of Working-Class Revolt,” these poets had to navigate a course between critics who valorized either their poetic or satirical-and-political gifts, but usually not both. 7

Introduction

The New Historicism’s work of deconstructing traditional close reading to include rhetorical and historical situations has allowed adequate consideration of the conditions of textual production lacking in the purely formal “New Critical” methods. Reversing Franco Moretti’s claim that “unlike their bourgeois counterparts, young workers don’t enjoy that period of ease and selfformation that makes individual sociability and autonomous forms of expression possible,” in “The British Working-Class Bildungsroman during the Great Depression” Charles Ferrall makes the case that a working-class form of the bildungsroman or “coming of age novel” indeed exists. Critics have ignored the potential of working-class allegorical texts, according to William Solomon, who seeks to reverse this judgment against working-class writing in “Allegories of Proletarian Literature: Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the Depression Era.” In her essay “Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity” Germana Cubeta challenges the usual close reading of Charles Dickens to prove that his travel writing provided a fairer and more accurate portrait of Southern Italian peasants than had been the case via colocations of adjectives and word frequency counts. Peter J. Ponzio also challenges how Dickens is traditionally read and analyzed by stripping the veil from Victorian pretense and uncovering a massive display of economic inequity in his essay “Dickens and Society: Can Dickens’s ‘Uppers’ Change Their Minds?” Agnieszka M. Will takes up the challenge of closing the gap and applying Bourdieu’s theory to literature with her innovative essay “The ‘Metaholon’ Method for Class-Based Literary Analysis.” A “Metaholon” is a unit of Holonymy (in Greek ὅλον holon, “whole” and ὄνομα onoma, “name”), which is a semantic relation. Holonymy defines the relationship between a term denoting the whole and a term denoting a part of, or a member of, the whole. Using this linguistic method of category formation, Will is able to discover class relations in Polish literary texts specifically, but the method also works for other fiction in general. Our contributors take working-class or canonical literary texts and subject them to new methods of analysis. In her interrogation of the “normal” reading of dystopian fiction, Patricia McManus challenges the usual manner of “finding” the same elements comprising the dystopian genre in her essay “The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction.” Instead of the usual way of looking at trends in dystopian texts such as the film The Hunger Games in gender relations and the global environmental issue alone, McManus adds class to the mix. She argues in her close reading of various dystopian texts that the role of class and the division of labor has never been fully embodied in the dystopian genre. The analysis of Irish theatre has been so occupied with issues of class and nation-building that the entwined issue of gender has been neglected. This gap opens a space for both gender bias in the working-class Irish theatre itself and in the conventional close readings, according to Heather Laird’s essay, “Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers.” Part of the socio-historical situation is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus,” the socio-spatial range of action that characters and their writers inhabit. Mattius Rischard takes up urban “habitus” social mapping that puts distances of light-years between the “haves” and “have nots” in his essay “The Urban Spatiality of Street Literature,”which runs a discourse analysis of how people’s lives in the city are vivisected by globalized capitalism and its territorializing influences. Adam R. McKee grounds his essay “New York and Social Space: The Tenement and the Street” with Henri Lefebvre’s notion of social space and spatial production. McKee finds echoes of Lefebvre’s spatial theory in texts by Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and Anzia Yezierska of walls in the mind projected onto urban streets. Policing the habitus moves to New Zealand in Peter R. Kuch’s essay “Class and Upper-Middle-Class Consciousness in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories.” Issues of suburban spatiality predominate in many of Katherine Mansfield’s stories. The marks of class are not only upon people’s minds and bodies but can be literally drawn in the sand. In addition, Eamonn Jordan’s essay “Enunciations and Avoidances of Capital and Class in Evolving Irish Theatre” exposes how a concern with national geographical “habitus” eclipses economics in the Irish theatre. Jordan depicts “dramaturgical wealth loss, shaming, disdain or disparagement” functioning as ideological ruses that cover social inequalities, urban and rural spatial disparities, and impoverishments. 8

Introduction

Issues of colonialism and occupation of territories generate class hierarchies that form patterns across cultures.The British Empire, how class is stratified at home, and how class is stratified abroad have caused contradictions in the British class structure. In Erin Cheslow’s “Oral Storytelling as a Transnational Aesthetic in the Industrial Novel” those who are really disposable British subjects fantasize a faraway world of renewal and possibility. Sara Attfield’s essay “Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender in Australian Indigenous Literature” studies poverty’s effects across races in the writing of indigenous, working-class inhabitants in Australia. Stanley Wilkin explores the effect of the collapse of the British Empire on 1950s English playwrights in “Angry Young Men and the Loss of Empire.” A continuation of Wilkin’s class-based analysis, but with racial pressures added, is Önder Çakırtaş’s “Class, Race, and Social Stratification in British Theatre between the 1950s and 2000s.” Çakırtaş articulates how an adequate examination of one demographic factor in literature, class, easily becomes essentialized and obscures all the others. Class forms and co-exists with other factors in embodied identity. In “Ta-Nehesi Coates Demystifies American Class and Race Mythology,” Marleen S. Barr shows how a fluid reality is fixed by lies about tripartite classes in the southern United States. Cristina Migliaccio uses Marxist class analysis on the wildly popular quartet of novels by Elena Ferrante in her study “Elena Ferrante’s Fiction of Problematized Providing and Protecting.” The hallmark of Italian culture has historically been the husband’s ability to “provide and protect,” so now that this male role is economically eroded by globalization, how do today’s young women fare? Christopher Loughlin’s “Power and the Dialectics of Twentieth-Century Science Fiction” demonstrates how technology is undercutting the clear labor and management boundaries via adding the element of that which is non-human, but works at human jobs. Loughlin contends that the old Hegelian master-slave relationship is no longer sufficient to explain the continued co-existence of the three operative agents. Marking the change to a more global society, Nancy Ann Watanabe’s essay “Darwinian Ideas and Marxian Idealism in Austen, Twain, Yeats, Camus, and Ishiguro” highlights comparisons between class stratification in texts by an international array of eighteenth- through twentieth-century writers: Jane Austen, James M. Barrie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, and William Butler Yeats. Issues of globalism and the Western inability to see as “the other” sees are codified in canonized Western authors’ depictions of Africans reflecting the colonial dominant narrative. In response to these powerful stereotypes and depictions, Kristy Crawley shows in “Rhetorical Voice and Class in Adichie’s ‘Subaltern’ Fiction” how writer Adichie uses Ugwu indigenous voices. These Ugwu writers craft fully human characters who challenge theory by giving voice to Gayatri Spivak’s “subaltern.” Hua Li’s essay “Social Class and Devastated Land in Yang Dantao’s Science Fiction” explores class structures in a Chinese writer’s future of growing global environmental inequality and poisoning of the population of the “Uranium Tribe” by the “non-Uranium Tribe.” Economic pressures and “social capital” create a sense of self-worth based upon Karl Marx’s alienation theory. In a capitalist discursive framework, all other values are obliterated, according to Georg Simmel, an early twentieth-century heir of Marx’s ideas. In her essay “Pecuniary Emulation, Anomie, and the Alleged Metropolitan Conversion of Sister Carrie,” Wendy Graham reads Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to discover evidence, following Simmel’s theory of value, of how all values are eroded in favor of the exchange value of the commodified self. How capital’s exchange value can permeate the formal values of fiction is articulated in Erik S. Roraback’s essay “On Capital and Class with Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald.” Roraback uses Jacques Rancière’s concept of the sensible to tease out hints of a new form of interpersonal “uncapitalist” relationships in texts by Henri de Balzac, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But there are other ways in which class determines being in the world as the internalizing of humiliation. Kacey Evilsizor’s essay “Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China” also applies Jacques Rancière’s theories to the Yuan dynasty Chinese traditional drama, specifically Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics. Such an endeavor is extremely complicated, in that there are many pitfalls to assigning Western or European theories and ideas to Chinese literature. 9

Introduction

Psychological states are permeated with issues of class, so the saturated flow of thoughts and feelings being influenced by class and economic issues is unsurprisingly reflected in fiction. The toll of class-based hierarchies upon mental health is well-documented. Simon Lee analyzes “Social Class and Mental Health in Contemporary British Fiction.” In his reading of texts by Nell Dunn, Richard Millward, David Storey, and Alan Sillitoe, Lee unravels the mechanisms by which the powerful in society pathologize the poor via Marx’s theory of “immiseration” that analyzes how the poor person morphs into an unworthy self, manifested in an unworthy physical body. Employing Imogen Tyler’s theory of “social abjection” in “Abject Capitalism as the Sight of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Novels,” Matthew L. Reznicek details how the poor are literally thrown away (abjected) and excluded as unworthy selves through their proximity to disgusting, filthy conditions in nineteenth-century novels. Following this body-mind theme in which class marks not only physical bodies, but also the minds of humanity, the essays to follow explore how social class relates to psycho-sexual obsessive behaviors. Rebecca W. Boylan traces the effects of sexual obsession using Baudrillard’s theory of obsession with the commodity’s removing its self-referential meaning and giving way to the hyperreal in “Desiring Weird Bodies: Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf.” But not all women are snared by commodities and have their psychological states mediated by the bourgeois retail marketplace. By contrast, working-class women’s psychological states are often driven by the ways that their bodies are commodified in the labor marketplace. Carrie Conners analyzes three working-class poets who challenge the trope of the “hypersexualized working-class woman” in “Productive Disruption in the Working-Class Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman.” The writers hope that the essays in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class will shed light on some little-known or under-appreciated areas connecting literature to social relations and that these insights will aid students and professionals in the field.

Works Cited Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Whitestone et al., 1793. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. 11th ed., Routledge, 1984. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. U California P, 1969. ———. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Translated by David B. Allison. Northwestern UP, 1973. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. Electric Book Company, 2000. ProQuest eBook Central, https​:/​/eb​​ookce​​ntral​​ .proq​​uest.​​com​/l​​ib​/UA​​Z​/det​​ail​.a​​ction​​?do​cI​​D​=300​​8518. ———. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Economica, vol. 26, no. 104, 1959, pp. 379–379. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/2550890. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac.Yale UP, 2012. ProQuest eBook Central. ebook​​centr​​al​.pr​​oques​​t​.com​​/lib/​​uaz​/d​​etail​​.acti​​on​?do​​​cID​=3​​42086​​5. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Olson, Gary A. “bell hooks and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation.” Journal of Advanced Composition, vol. 14, no. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 1–19. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, 1957, pp. 541–558. JSTOR, www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/2773129. Accessed 18 July 2020. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020. Simmel, Georg, and ProQuest. The Philosophy of Money. Routledge, 2011. Simmel, Georg, et al. Simmel on Culture. SAGE Publications Ltd., 1998, p. 70. Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. Dell, 1963.

10

PART I

History of the Intersections of Class

1 INTERSECTIONS OF CLASS, RACE, AND GENDER IN AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS LITERATURE Sarah Attfield

This essay considers the ways in which Australian Indigenous writers reveal the intersections of class, race, and gender in their work. Before beginning it is important that I acknowledge my position: I am a white British immigrant living and working in Australia and therefore benefiting from the colonial structures that continue to disadvantage Indigenous people in Australia.Writing about Indigenous literature from a non-Indigenous perspective is potentially problematic due to the history of white people’s researching and writing about Indigenous people without acknowledging Indigenous people as creators of knowledge (Moreton-Robinson 331). Indigenous feminist scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson asserts that whiteness is “an epistemological a priori” (75), meaning that whiteness is taken as a norm and not interrogated—it is invisible (to white people), and white ways of knowing are used as the standard and therefore hold the power (Moreton-Robinson 75). Indigenous author and literature scholar Anita Heiss also suggests that it can be problematic for white people to write about Indigenous themes, but she relates this more to creative writing, and to white people choosing narratives centered on Indigenous stories that are not theirs to tell; however, she acknowledges that some white literary scholars have attempted to write about Indigenous literature in an inclusive manner (10). According to Maggie Nolan, if non-Indigenous scholars avoid engaging with Indigenous literature due to concerns of white hegemonic dominance there is a risk that Indigenous literature will be ignored by non-Indigenous scholars and not given the attention it deserves (38). I am conscious that I am writing about Indigenous literature from a white perspective, and I have used the works of Indigenous theorists to support my points where possible. I am also approaching this analysis from a working-class perspective due to my workingclass background. My class background and experience of growing up in social (subsidized) housing in a single-parent family reliant on social security mean that I have some understanding of aspects of Indigenous literature relating to economic hardship. While I have never experienced racism due to the privilege of my white skin and Anglo ethnicity, I do understand poverty and the resilience and resourcefulness that come with hardship and recognize the importance of community and solidarity. I should also clarify here the terminology I am using in this essay. I have decided to use “Indigenous” to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers—while there are some authors who refer to themselves as “Aboriginal” or “Torres Strait Islander,” others refer to themselves in relation to their specific tribal or language group such as Bundjalung (people from the northern coastal areas of New South Wales) for example or as Koori (which relates to Indigenous people from New South Wales and Victoria more generally), or Murri (which is a general term 13

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for Indigenous Queenslanders). Not all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people like the term “Indigenous” because it is sometimes considered too generic, but for the purposes of this essay it does serve as an umbrella term. I do acknowledge the huge diversity of Australian Indigenous culture in terms of languages spoken, cultural practices, country lived in, histories, and general everyday experiences as outlined by Heiss (21). I have maintained the term Aboriginal, though, when it occurs within direct quotations. My contention is that much Indigenous literature can be considered as (additionally) working-class literature. There are many commonalities between Australian Indigenous literature and working-class literature due to the classed experience of Indigenous Australians. The majority of Indigenous Australians are working class, and this is because of the discrimination meted out by the British colonial settlers. From the beginning of the British invasion and subsequent settlement, Indigenous Australians were relegated to the bottom of the social ladder. Because the British brought their class system to the colony, this translated to working-class status for Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians have not had access to methods of social mobility. There are significant gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in terms of educational opportunity for example, which has meant that only a small percentage of Indigenous people have had access to formal higher education, and therefore entry into middle-class professions. Most Indigenous Australians occupy working-class positions, and many Indigenous Australians experience poverty or financial hardship. Anne Brewster claims that Indigenous people have acknowledged the class solidarity shared between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous working-class people and the commonalities between Indigenous people and “poor whites” through, for example, the shared experience of poverty (6).While the specific experiences of Indigenous Australians need to be acknowledged, these class similarities are important. Heiss notes the specific oppression and discrimination faced by Indigenous Australians relates to the dispossession from land during colonial times, when Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands (Black Poetics 183). While Indigenous people resisted, there were massacres and outbreaks of European diseases (such as smallpox) that had a devastating impact on Indigenous communities. Another specific experience relates to the removal of children from Indigenous families (Black Poetics 187) for the purpose of assimilation into white culture (this continued until the 1960s). Children were taken to institutions to be trained as farm and domestic workers for white landowners and as domestic workers for rich white people in the cities. The children taken from their families form the Stolen Generations, and the surviving members continue to suffer from inter-generational trauma. Indigenous Australians are also more likely than non-Indigenous people to be incarcerated and to die in custody (Black Poetics 189). Indigenous Australians continue to face daily racism and discrimination. Indigenous and wider working-class literature also share similarities in terms of style such as use of pared-back, simple language that is usually steeped in the vernacular and contains slang and casual use of expletives, employing a “straightforward style of writing” (Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala 32) that is influenced by the “traditional oral language” (Gilbert, Inside Black Australia xix). This is working-class linguistic capital that might seem alien to middle-class readers used to works written in “standard English.” There is also a sense of working-class social capital with reference to activities and matters that might not be familiar to middle-class readers such as aspects of working-class culture (particularly some popular culture) and some cheap food items. Indigenous and wider working-class literature often refers to dealings with government agencies, particularly social security and unemployment services (Centrelink), which are also likely to be unfamiliar to middle-class readers. There are common themes such as work and unemployment, financial hardship, life in social housing or homelessness, community, brushes with the law and prison, as well as community, everyday life, and the small pleasures that people enjoy. Indigenous Australians have used literature as a method of speaking truth to power and to resist the colonial forces, and as a result, Indigenous literature is political both in terms 14

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of its content, but also because Indigenous Australians have been silenced and marginalized. Heiss and Minter explain that Indigenous people used “writing as a tool” (2) to communicate with the British colonial authorities and to express resistance and dissent. The first recorded text written by an Indigenous person in Australia is a letter to Governor Arthur Phillip in 1796 composed by Sydney man Bennelong (Heiss and Minter 1). Wheeler suggests that Australian Indigenous writing was largely ignored until the 1970s (37). Heiss (Black Poetics 181) points to the popularity of poetry among Indigenous Australians, and suggests that the form is conducive to political messages but is also seen as having “fewer restrictions” (181) for emerging writers who might not have had access to formal educations. Heiss states that poetry has remained popular with Indigenous writers into the twenty-first century and claims that much Indigenous poetry deals with issues relating to the continuing effects of colonization as well as “the politics of Aboriginal identity” (181). I am also suggesting that Indigenous literature in Australia demonstrates how race intersects with gender and class. According to Patricia Hill Collins, intersectionality is a critical social theory (Hill Collins 2) that posits that various types of discrimination “build on each other and work together” and are therefore not “mutually exclusive entities” (Hill Collins 13). As a result, race, gender, and class (and other forms of identity) do not lead to one type of discrimination or oppression, but operate in layers, adding further levels of discrimination. This explains why the feminism of white women has not always taken into consideration the ways in which women of color experience sexism and racism. It moreover elucidates why middle-class feminism does not necessarily accommodate the experiences of working-class women. Sexism is compounded by race, class, and other identity markers such as sexuality and body ability. The first collection of poetry by an Indigenous Australian was Kath Walker’s 1964 We Are Going (Heiss and Minter 40). Walker adopted her tribal name Oodgeroo Noonuccal in 1988, which was the year of the Australian Bicentenary—a year celebrated by white people and protested by Indigenous people and allies. Her change of name symbolized her commitment to the fight for Indigenous rights that she had led since the 1940s (Heiss and Minter 40). Noonuccal’s 1966 poem “No More Boomerang” illustrates the intersection of class and race oppression faced by Indigenous Australians. The poem largely relates to aspects of working-class life, both working-class culture and work. There is reference to white working-class culture of cinema going and the pub, but in negative contrast to the types of activities that Indigenous people may have engaged in prior to colonization, such as “corroboree” (a gathering of people for storytelling). The intersection with race and racism is evident in the line “Colour bar and beer” (line 4) which refers to the racist practice of white pub owners refusing Indigenous people entry into their pubs. Indigenous customers would be served alcohol through a kiosk and expected to drink away from the premises. The poem also refers to Indigenous people having to “track bosses” (line 13) instead of going out hunting and traveling by “bus to the job” (line 16) and working with tools to manufacture things for the white man rather than making things for community use. There are issues in the poem that relate to those faced by working-class people more widely, and the poem is therefore relatable to non-Indigenous working-class people. Heiss (Black Poetics 180) states that Noonuccal’s poetry was well-received by white readers at the time, and this points to the communality of experience in poems such as “No More Boomerang” while also illustrating the specific issues faced by Indigenous people as a result of colonization. The poem also shows that Indigenous Australians are likely to be working class through the references to working-class activities—there is no mention in the poem of Indigenous Australians engaging in white middle-class activities, from which they have generally been excluded (although I acknowledge here that there are middle-class Indigenous people in Australia). The aforementioned Bicentenary celebrations in 1988 were marked by Indigenous Australians with political protest and with an explosion of published collections such as Inside Black Australia (1988) which is an anthology of Indigenous poetry edited by Wiradjuri writer Kevin Gilbert 15

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and first-person memoir such as Bundjalung (northern coast of New South Wales) author Ruby Langford Ginibi’s 1988 autobiography Don’t Take Your Love to Town. The raising of awareness of the fight for Indigenous rights at this time was pivotal for Indigenous authors who were able to publish their writing and reach both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers. While Indigenous activists had always been fighting hard, the publicity around the Bicentenary created an opportunity for Indigenous voices to be amplified (Antor 207) and created some understanding among non-Indigenous people of the continuing ramifications of colonization. Inside Black Australia includes a number of poems that illustrate the working-class status of Indigenous Australians such as Charmaine Papertalk Green’s poem “Pension Day.” Papertalk Green grew up in rural Western Australia and experienced “apartheid oppression” in her youth (Gilbert, Inside Black Australia 73). Her poem “Pension Day” highlights the reality of people relying on government benefits to survive and who treat payday as an opportunity for some celebration as a restart to the month and the possibility of a decent feed and maybe some entertainment. The pension recipients in the poem (in Australia “pension” can refer to a variety of social security payments) “sit under the gumtrees / waiting for the Post Office to open” (lines 1–2). The narrator observes the recipients’ unspoken agreement that they will take their payment and head to the “club” (line 11), but the narrator does not cast judgment. The poem has a humorous tone as the narrator describes the routine nature of the situation—it is implied that the same happens every pension day. This use of humor is common among Indigenous creative works; as Anne Brewster states, Indigenous authors have “deployed humour across a range of literary … genres” (Gallows Humour 233). Indigenous authors use humor as a “political and cultural weapon” (Gallows Humour 235) to challenge colonial hegemony and to “critique whiteness” (Gallows Humour 235). Sometimes humor is used to soften the blow, and to make difficult issues or recounts of trauma more accessible for readers. Humor can also be used more forcefully—a funny scene or humorous line can make an upcoming confronting moment even starker and more powerful. Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town demonstrates the intersections of race, gender, and class. Her autobiography recounts her experiences with poverty, domestic violence, and racism and is written using a “conversational style” (Winch, par. 1). Brewster states that memoirs such as Ginibi’s are important because memory for Indigenous Australians is politically loaded and has a “cultural significance” that is very different to non-Indigenous people (Literary Formations 3). In this sense, there is more to Indigenous memoir than merely recalling an interesting and/or difficult life—the stories are also challenging the official, white versions of history that either omit Indigenous people, or remove aspects of history that are unpalatable to non-Indigenous people such as the reality of massacres and the Stolen Generations. Langford Ginibi’s book begins with a description of her early life on the “mission” and living in various bush camps due to her family’s reliance on seasonal and piece work. She describes this instability through her perspective as a child, when she was shielded from the problems faced by her parents until the night her mother left the family “When Dad came into the camp at night I asked a few times, ‘Where’s Mum?’ and he said ‘She’s gone. She won’t be back’” (6). Don’t Take Your Love to Town is also significant because it is a woman’s story—and it has been women who have borne the brunt of white brutality and racist government policies and actions. As Moreton-Robinson states, Indigenous women’s experiences are often very different to those of Indigenous men, due to the specifics of “embodiment,” the relationship with the country, and “ancestral creator beings” (Towards an Australian Indigenous 339). While there is no homogenous Indigenous women’s experience, Moreton-Robinson suggests that there is a common experience of “living in a society that deprecates us” (341). The impact on Indigenous women is recounted by Langford Ginibi, both in relation to her own experience, but also that of other women. From a young age, Langford Ginibi is expected to perform domestic tasks such as “the washing up” (8) as well as the gendered work of milking cows when living on farms and then working for wages 16

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“house-cleaning” and as a hotel chambermaid (39) from the age of fifteen. She falls pregnant at the age of sixteen, due to not knowing “the facts of life” (54), and eventually has nine children in total and experiences violence at the hands of her male partners such as the father of her first child who accuses her of cheating on him: On the way home I was pushing the pram with young Bill in it, and on the bush track which led over to the hill, he said, “Have you been running around on me, while I’m at work?” “What are you taking about Sam? I don’t know any one of those blokes, they’re your friends.” With that he knocked me to the ground and started to throttle me, the only way I could make him let go was to kick him in the groin. Bill was crying in the pram. I said, “You’re a mad jealous mongrel, I won’t put up with this kind of treatment, if you ever do that again I’ll leave you.” (58–59) Despite this violence, Langford Ginibi shows her determination to survive in order to look after her children and other members of her family and community, demonstrating the strength and resilience of Indigenous women. Michael Griffiths also points to the added layers of importance within Indigenous autobiography more generally, commenting that Indigenous authors writing memoirs are “not only literary figures engaged in a literary task of craft and composition. They are also active agents of community building, kinship restoration, the (re) construction of knowledge about region and community and the critique of colonialism” (63). When reading Ginibi’s autobiography from a working-class perspective, it is notable that there are several references to work in the book and she recalls the various occupations she and her partners held such as cleaning jobs, piece work, manual work, and various temporary and low-paid positions. Langford Ginibi also writes about the times she had to deal with welfare services and seek help from charities to feed, clothe, and house herself and her nine children: When we first moved into Ann Street, Surry Hills, we survived on my endowment and any casual work Lance could get, but it only covered food. I took the kids to the Smith Family to get outfitted and with eight of them we took up two fitting rooms. They got to know us well and we’d go home loaded up with brown paper parcels and cardboard boxes of tinned food. (113) It’s clear that Langford Ginibi’s life is led hand-to-mouth and periods of relative security are followed by homelessness and severe financial hardship. The good times are filled with small pleasures though such as taking “the kids swimming at Coogee” (114) (a beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs) and visiting a “favourite watering hole” (114) (a local pub). Politics is never far from the surface in Don’t Take Your Love to Town, and Langford Ginibi describes her encounters with racist individuals, institutions, and authority figures, as well as the development of her own political consciousness when she joins the Aboriginal Progressive Association and meets with well-known Indigenous activists such as Charlie Perkins: I’d heard about the Aboriginal Progressive Association and I decided to go to the meetings. Charlie Perkins was there … We elected Charlie Perkins spokesman … I was elected editor for our newspaper Churringa (meaning message stick). Ever since school and the long stories I’d wanted to do some writing, so I was happy. (115) 17

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This excerpt also points to the importance of grassroots political organizations for Indigenous people, and to the ways in which Indigenous people have used various forms of writing to promote and advance their campaigns for justice. Regardless of her difficult circumstances and interrupted schooling, Langford Ginibi utilizes the writing and storytelling skills she built both at school and through exposure to Indigenous oral storytellers. Langford Ginibi’s experiences as an Indigenous woman are different to those of most nonIndigenous people in relation to the time period she lived through, because Indigenous Australians did not have the same rights as other Australian citizens, and prior to 1962 did not have the right to vote.There are other issues that emerge in her autobiography—issues that Tara June Winch (herself, an Indigenous author) suggests are still pertinent to Indigenous Australians in the twenty-first century such as “Aboriginal incarceration rates, deaths in custody, ingrained social racism, and the innate feeling of isolation” (par. 11). Many of the issues faced by Langford Ginibi and her family are also due to their working-class status (keeping in mind that they are working class because they are Indigenous). The class system creates the economic conditions and the opportunities for Langford Ginibi to be exploited as a worker. Her race and gender add to the class discrimination, and she is triply oppressed as a result. However, some of her experiences are also relatable to non-Indigenous working-class Australians who have also faced economic hardship and needed to apply for government benefits or ask charities for assistance. Job insecurity is also a working-class issue in addition to low pay and hazardous working conditions. The lack of power in the workplace is something understood by most working-class people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous (acknowledging that white working-class people do possess white privilege). Another feature of Don’t Take Your Love to Town is Langford Ginibi’s allusions to popular culture—particularly music. She writes about enjoying live music at city pubs and her love of country music—arguably a traditionally working-class genre of music that features songs about hardship and struggle. Gay Breyley suggests that country music also includes tales of survival, resilience, and courage (20)—traits that are present throughout Langford Ginibi’s autobiography. The types of intersections that are present in Langford Ginibi’s work can also be seen in the work of other Indigenous authors. Poet, playwright, and Indigenous rights activist Kevin Gilbert produced several works from the 1970s until his death in the 1990s that demonstrate the intersections of class and race. Gilbert experienced incarceration and learned to read and write while in prison (Heiss and Minter 76). Prior to his incarceration he worked in various, mostly transitory and low-paid jobs such as “grape-picker … picked up scraps of copper wire … gathered empty softdrink bottles to buy bread” (Gilbert 186) and claims this struggle was not “just because times were hard, but because I was BLACK and the white man had taken my country from my people and kept me and my people as victims, as slaves” (186). Gilbert was a political writer who was committed to the fight for Indigenous rights and to advocating for Indigenous authors. He had also experienced interference from white editors who had made changes to his creative work without consulting him (Heiss and Minter 76) and therefore wanted to ensure that Indigenous Australians were in control of their creative work. The first written play by an Indigenous author was Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (written in 1968 and first performed in 1971). The play tells the story of Indigenous rural workers traveling to cherry orchards to bring in the harvest, and also addresses identity as the characters discuss their place in the white man’s society. Gilbert’s political consciousness is expressed in the play as the characters are politicized and aware of the racism and discrimination that have led to their statuses as itinerant workers facing hardship and trauma. In Gilbert’s 1990 poem “Redfern” the focus is on urban life. Redfern is an inner-city suburb of Sydney and until the 2010s it was the location of The Block—an area of Indigenous housing owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company. Redfern has been an Indigenous and working-class area, notorious in the eyes of outsiders for being “rough” and dangerous but seen as a tight-knit community by the residents. The area is also the location of one of the few high-rise social housing estates in Australia that has housed working-class people, the Northcott estate built in the 1960s. The Block has since been demolished to make way 18

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for a new development, and the Northcott estate has also been earmarked for private redevelopment, which will lead to the destruction of the current working-class community. In Gilbert’s poem Redfern is not the gentrified neighborhood of 2020; it is described in negative terms: In the savage streets of Redfern where the “cockatoo” and turk peer from the doors of porno dens while dealers do their work dicing out a score or two and wait with bated breath the coins or coppers to descend in thrills of sudden death (lines 1–8) There are sex workers on the streets and allusions to strip club owners paying bribes to the “vicesquad men” (line 15) which refers to the corruption in the NSW police force of the time.The poem also includes “the battler on the dole” (line 18)—an unemployed person trying to make ends meet. References are made to Black deaths in custody—the Indigenous people “who survived the night patrol” (line 19), presumably arrested the night before on the streets of Redfern and released without charge the following morning. There is a sense of squalor with vermin and a description of the suburb as a “ghetto” (line 25).There is also a rightful anger building in the area as Indigenous people get ready to fight back against oppression and racism—this readiness to resist becomes a coiled snake: In the savage streets of Redfern coils a Taipan poised to strike the fangs are readied, gleaming in the alley-ways at night (lines 37–40) These lines indicate the way in which Indigenous people in the area are refusing to accept the conditions of their existence and have agency and a willingness to challenge the colonial structures of oppression. This type of poem rejects the stereotype of Indigenous people as passive and acknowledges the importance of anger in fighting against discrimination. While many white poets have written about Sydney, there are very few published poems that have focused on working-class areas.The majority of non-Indigenous published poems about Sydney have been set in the gentrified city suburbs or middle-class beaches and harbor areas. While Kevin Gilbert’s poem “Redfern” paints a bleak picture of an inner-city suburb, a poem by his daughter, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, from 2001, focuses on labor exploitation but also includes an element of pride. “Let’s Get Physical” describes Indigenous workers being made to walk long distances by their boss in order to pick cotton: Let’s get physical The boss man cried as he started them off, on their walk for miles. In between rows they did walk. Backs bent, too tired to talk (lines 4–8) The workers pick the cotton to line the pockets of the white landowner, and the physicality of their work is expressed in “backs bent, too tired to talk” (line 8). Despite the discomfort and the 19

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toll the work takes on their bodies, the Indigenous workers retain their sense of pride and are completely aware of the conditions of their exploitation. The Indigenous workers in the poem are only concerned with providing for their families, and they refuse to allow the white man to reduce their humanity: Let’s get physical The white man cried, he doesn’t look to see the pride in the Blackman’s eyes (lines 26–28) The experiences of being removed from her family and raised in a government institution are expressed by Wiradjuri (Central New South Wales) poet Elizabeth Hodgson in her 2008 collection Skin Painting. Hodgson was taken from her mother and lived in a residential school and as a result was introduced to middle-class culture, particularly that of European literature, art, and classical music. Hodgson’s poems describe her memories of her working-class home in loving detail. In “Mr Cage can you imagine,” the narrator recalls the sounds of her family home: a world where the only music was the music of life; the percussion of the everyday? clanging of plates, the jangle of cutlery, utensils, swishing of the straw broom across the wooden floor (lines 1–4) Memories of joyful sounds—“empty beer bottles ringing” (line 5)—are interrupted by the narrator’s removal to the institution and the sudden absence of her mother’s voice: “A life without the sound of my mother” (line 13). The reference to Mr. Cage presumably relates to the composer’s work with silence in his avant-garde compositions, but for the poet, the silence is linked to her forced removal, and despite the appreciation she has developed for art and music, this particular silence has caused trauma. While the institution provided a middle-class education (at the expense of existing Indigenous knowledge), the home itself was not a comfortable middle-class environment and the children were housed in substandard accommodations, fed poorly, and expected to do chores, some of which involved strenuous labor. “This place that I know well” provides a sensory description of the home and describes its smells, tastes, sounds, and textures such as “toasted bread” (line 3) and “coke dust” (line 4) that causes irritation and sneezing: has many aspects— peace, stillness, warmth smells of toasted bread coke dust that makes me sneeze (lines 1–4) The poem includes images of “weevils in the flour bins” (line 8) and the chores that could be dangerous due to water that “scalded” (line 21) and cuts from kitchen utensils such as “potato peelers” (line 22) and broken crockery. The poem points to the hardship faced by the children in the home—conditions that are recognizable to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with experiences of living in such institutions in the 1950s and 1960s: This place of constant repetitions the same amount of bread sliced every day same amount of oats measured 20

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into the same pot— this place where you could set your body clock to work with the smells rising upwards and outwards (lines 9–16) The collection shows the impact of institutionalization on Indigenous children—the trauma of separation from family is permanent and flows into the poet’s adult life, leading her to self-destructive behaviors and a lifetime of mental illness. Skin Painting also incorporates the pleasures of everyday life and the happiness within some memories and the solace found in Indigenous identity and commonality of experience. In the last poem “I will not deliberately hurt you,” the final line of the collection proudly asserts “I am an / Aboriginal woman” (lines 35–36), which, like much Indigenous writing in Australia, points to determination, pride, resilience, and the importance of survival. The novels of Queensland Goorie (Koori) author Melissa Lucashenko are firmly rooted in Indigenous working-class experience and written with a “keen ear for dialogue and idiom” (Nolan 42). Lucashenko’s books are described by Nolan as dealing with “the interplay of identifications that cut across axes of gender, race, class, culture, sexuality, age, embodiment and spatial location” (42), which make her work ideal to explore in the context of intersectionality, particularly in terms of race, gender, and class. Lucashenko has published seven novels, and all have working-class characters as their central protagonists. Steam Pigs was published in 1997 and is about a young Indigenous woman who leaves her dysfunctional family home to work in a bar in the city and is described as a “confronting, innovative and unique novel that utilizes a working-class outer suburban setting to address crucial social issues” (O’Reilly 1). Killing Darcy followed in 1998 and is a young adult fiction that centers on a gay Koori teenager who is on parole and trying to reconnect with his family. In 2001 Lucashenko published Hard Yards which has a young white working-class protagonist who lives with an Indigenous family—the story also deals with issues such as Black deaths in custody. Lucashenko’s next novel was Too Flash (2002) and tells the tale of two teenage girls who become friends—one of the girls is Indigenous and middle-class and the other is white and working class.The book explores the ways in which they both experience discrimination and how class and race intersect. Two Much Lip is Lucashenko’s most recent novel (2019), and it centers on an Indigenous woman, Kerry Salter, who lives in the city (and is on the run from the police) and returns to her small town to say goodbye to her dying grandfather.The novel is written using colloquial language and includes some words in the Bundjalung language which represents the code-switching practiced by some Indigenous people who speak some indigenous languages, but mainly use English. The setting of the story is working class—Kerry’s family live in a small fibro house which is in a state of disrepair: It huddled beneath the spreading arms of a large leopard tree. Same old fibro walls. Same old iron roof with rust creeping into a few more panels each wet season. The lawn bore a lopsided Mohawk from where the mower had died or been stolen or where Ken had run out of the minimal motivation he’d had to begin with … Ken still hadn’t replaced the busted louvre beside the front door. More accurately, Kerry squinted, he’d replaced it with a strip of roughly hacked ply, and this had become a permanent memorial to the window his stubby had flown through upon discovering a $125 council parking fine in the mail. The offending Falcon stood in exactly the same spot Kerry had seen it last Christmas. Beside it another two old bombs kept the rusting XD company. (9–10) Kerry’s brother lives with their mother and he relies on welfare, and most of the people that Kerry knows are employed in working-class jobs. The family have constant dealings with Centrelink 21

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(the social security office) and must wait to buy things on “payday” (104). There are descriptions of the family living on “bread and chips” (119) until payday and spending the week before payday without proper food: the crew in Trinder mostly ate bread and chips when they ate at all. Meat was strictly for pay week, same as shop-bought grog and smokes were. Off-pay week was hungry week, sniffing around friends’ and rellos’ houses for someone who’d scored a food parcel, or a job, or had had a win at bingo. (119) Kerry remembers the times as a child when she would go to the local market with her brother and stand near the hotdog stand staring at the white people eating: When she heard German sausage, Kerry’s mouth had begun to water. As starving kids they had stood in front of the wagon with its sizzling pans, wishing they had the bungoo to do more than drool. Sometimes the wagon owner would sling them a burnt snag for free; occasionally tourists would take pity and offer to shout. (111) Kerry herself has been in prison, and her recent brush with the law (that has seen her girlfriend arrested and incarcerated) means she is now unemployed and effectively homeless. She has traveled home on a stolen motorbike. Kerry’s sister is missing; her other brother has a middle-class occupation and lives in the city. He still faces discrimination despite his class status due to being Indigenous and gay—he is not fully accepted into the middle-class gay culture of the city. There is conflict in the family which is mostly caused by their economic circumstances—the lack of money causes outbursts: “the family has been shorter than usual of both money and tucker. Tempers were fraying” (60). Lucashenko shows how poverty and economic hardship can lead to dysfunction within families and fracture relationships due to the stress of trying to make ends meet. Small details also demonstrate aspects of working-class culture such as the lack of food (or availability of only cheap, processed food) and the characters’ regular commentary on the various injustices that affect them such as the bosses being ready to reduce their workers’ pay and conditions at every opportunity: The first Coolangatta plane leaving for Sydney was high overhead, a bunch of suits yawning on their way south to screw the workers that little bit more. To them that hath, shall be given. (66) The story focuses on the Indigenous family, but Kerry is drawn to a local white man, and their connection is attributed to his experiences of growing up poor and forced to steal food to feed himself and his brother as a teenager: “I used to shoplift food when I was fifteen, sixteen,” Steve said, matter-of-factly. “Yeah, for thrills.” Kerry sniffed at the idea of white kids thinking they were all badass and shit. “Nah, cos we needed the bloody tucker! Mum thought we were down the beach but me and my brother’d be up the Burleigh Four Square stashing bacon down our daks.” (119) There is a sense here of class solidarity—Kerry has more in common with a white working-class person than an Indigenous middle-class woman. 22

Australian Indigenous Literature

As well as the everyday racism and discrimination faced by the family due to their race and class status, they also face legacies of dispossession from land, when their sacred ancestral land is put up for sale and earmarked for the building of a new prison. The family are then thrown into a fight to retain this land (which is where their ancestors have been laid to rest) and find themselves in battle with the local town mayor, real estate companies, and white people’s corruption: I’m here to tell you, Jim Buckley, that over my dead Bundjalung body will our land ever see a jail on it.That’s a sacred site, right there (thump). Our grandmothers are buried there (thump), our greatgrandfather is buried there (thump) and our Pop’s gonna be buried there too! (an extra loud thump) So I suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise had better stand up and clear off, right fucking now. Keep ya stinking jails off our land! (89) This important element of the story shows how despite the commonalities shared with white poor people in the town (in terms of economic hardship, poverty, etc.), Indigenous people experience specific issues around land rights due to colonial land theft and dispossession from land, that are not experienced by non-Indigenous working-class people. This chapter ends with a return to poetry and to some contemporary Indigenous poets. The issue of Black deaths in custody remains an urgent one and continues to claim the lives of Indigenous Australians. It is an important topic that also continues to interest Indigenous writers. Indigenous Australians are more likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to be incarcerated and are much more likely to die while in custody. Gilbert suggests that the reasons for the high incarceration rates are due to “the attitudes of a racist society, a government policy of discrimination and … a police force that has targeted a minority group with the approval and support of the government of the time” (Inside Black Australia, 124–125). The suspicious deaths of Indigenous people while in the custody of the police, either during arrest, in police station cells, or in prisons, continue to occur with many families trying to seek answers and justice for their loved ones. The experience of incarceration has featured in Indigenous poetry, notably in the works of Robert Walker who died in a western Australian prison at the age of twenty-five. Some of Walker’s poems about life inside and particularly in solitary confinement were published after his death and contain a poignancy due to his young age and the circumstances of his death. Yankunytjatjara (Western Desert Region) poet Ali Cobby Eckermann keeps the issue of Black deaths in custody in readers’ consciousness with her 2016 poem “Black Deaths in Custody” which describes a new prison built to accommodate a growing Indigenous prison population as she exclaims “despite the cost a new gaol has been built / the incarceration rates are trebling” (lines 1–2). The narrator is in the prison on official business, but once in a cell, the narrator feels the weight of the stories of deaths: all the stories I have ever heard stand silent in the space beside me—  a coil of rope is being pushed under the door of this cell (lines 13–16) As mentioned, this is an issue that disproportionally affects Indigenous people, and the Indigenous people likely to be incarcerated are working class. Criminality in this context is often due to crimes of necessity. People experiencing severe financial hardship might find that theft is the only way to provide essential needs. Or there are certain situations that lead to people making money via the informal economy, such as engaging in illegal sex work or dealing illicit drugs. Intergenerational trauma can lead to self-destructive behaviors such as self-medicating with alcohol or other drugs, and this in turn can result in criminal behavior and encounters with the police. Some Indigenous 23

Sarah Attfield

people have been arrested for drunken behavior in public and have ended up dying in police custody. It is a complex set of circumstances that is related to the impact of colonization, and Indigenous writers’ works respond to these circumstances in thoughtful ways and without judgment directed at Indigenous people (although judgment is definitely directed towards white people and colonial systems). Another contemporary poet is Mykaela Saunders who describes herself as ‘Koori, Lebanese, working-class, and queer’ (par. 1), and some of her recent poems illustrate these intersections. “For Cops Who Stalk Children on Houso Estates” was published in 2019 and uses a combination of working-class vernacular and formal English to convey the sentiment of working-class Indigenous people living in social housing who experience police harassment.While the children in the poem are not identified by race, the narrator’s mum provides the children with statements to take back to the police who are following them around the estate. The children use working-class slang: “Eeeeyah mum, get out here! this copper’s not leaving us alone!” (line 11)—they are worried that if neighbors see them talking to the police, they will get into trouble for being perceived snitches: dear mister cop, don’t come stand near us or we’ll get a flogging none of us want you here so please get away don’t ask who’s in our houses, talking to our parents (lines 1–4) Mum sends a colloquial command for the children to relay to the police, “IT’S NONE OF YA FUCKEN BUSINESS” (line 5), but her language becomes more formal and is written in uppercase letters and points to her understanding of the law and of her right to justice as an Indigenous person, “WHEN A LAW OF A STATE IS INCONSISTENT WITH A LAW OF HUMANITY / THE LATTER SHALL PREVAIL” (lines 6–7).While the poem has a humorous tone due to the incongruity of the mum’s comments compared to the situation, it also illustrates how Indigenous people are knowledgeable about rights and their position in relation to white authority. Indigenous people are experts on white ways, and much Indigenous creative writing demonstrates this knowledge, as the poem’s young narrator declares, “mum’s the law round here and she’s been studying your ways” (line 15). Saunders’s 2019 poem “Grandmother Ghosts” reflects on the Indigenous grandmother the narrator never met and speculates on the grandmother’s hardships and life of labor with little reward. Saunders describes her grandmother thus: Small brown woman, cheekbones look fist-proof in this sienna photo I carry Where she once walked these streets in her cheap leather shoes Flat sensible scraps scrimped together from the war effort (lines 5–7) And she describes her working life: She was not a lady who lunched She made the food, set the tables, and cleared them away But was never allowed to enjoy the fruits of her labour (lines 12–14) There are references to the grandmother’s “stolen wages” (line 27) which relate the practice of white employers not paying Indigenous workers, or only paying them in kind, rather than actual wages, despite the long hours worked. There are also lines that describe the violence that the grandmother was subjected to—physical and sexual violence—and there are allusions in the poem 24

Australian Indigenous Literature

to the rape of Indigenous women by white men and the children born as a result of rape: “He squats her womb with no invitation at all” (line 25).The imagery in the poem is graphic and speaks to the anger and indignation of Indigenous Australians when recalling the treatment of ancestors (and the ways in which inter-generational trauma operates). The works discussed in this chapter show the ways in which Indigenous writers explore and demonstrate the intersections (and co-creation) of race and gender with class. While the works exemplify the specific discrimination and oppressive experiences of Indigenous Australians, they also include elements that can be relatable to non-Indigenous working-class readers. The diversity of Indigenous lives comes across strongly in the creative works, but commonalities of experience are also threaded through. For Indigenous people, the commonalities are the impact of colonization and its continuing negative legacy. This is the reality of structural racism and the effects of intergenerational trauma. For Indigenous and non-Indigenous working-class readers, the commonalities might be the struggle to survive when facing unemployment and financial hardship, employer exploitation, insecure work, the difficulties of navigating the social security system, the class discrimination experienced in the form of judgment or snobbery, and the feeling of being ignored and the disempowerment that comes with inadequate representation. On a more positive note there is also the recognition of community, of family, and of the enjoyment to be found in working-class culture. Indigenous literature is empowering, inspiring, and does not hold back on showing how life is. Reading the work of Indigenous writers not only creates opportunities to discover class solidarity, but is essential for understanding Indigenous experience, for creating empathy in non-Indigenous readers, and for challenging stereotypical representations and ignorance of Indigenous life.

Appendix I have maintained the original Australian English spelling as it appears in direct quotes and in the titles of books or articles and proper nouns. A glossary of some of the terms that appear in the quotes follows: Social security and unemployment services offices. Local pub, possibly a Returned Soldiers League (RSL) that usually serves alcohol and food and hosts entertainment. Soft drink Soda. Battler Slang for someone experiencing hardship and trying to make ends meet. Dole Unemployment benefit. Fibro Fibrous cement sheet that contains asbestos—a common building material in Australia from the 1940s to the 1980s. Payday The day that social security payments are made. These used to be cash payments collected from the post office, but now they are made by direct deposit into bank accounts. Rellos Relatives. Bungoo Money. Tucker Food. Houso Slang term for a person who lives in housing commission (public housing). Police officer. Copper Centrelink Club

Works Cited Antor, Heinz. “Identity and Re-Assertion of Aboriginal Knowledge in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung.” Decolonising the Landscape: Indigenous Culture in Australia, edited by Beate Neumeier and Kay Shaffer, Brill, pp. 207–231.

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Sarah Attfield Brewster, Anne. “Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in the Nyungar Writer Alf Taylor’s Short Fiction.” Decolonising the Landscape: Indigenous Culture in Australia, edited by Beate Neumeier and Kay Shaffer, Brill, pp. 233–253. ———. Literary Formations: Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Globalism, Melbourne UP, 1995. Breyley, Gay. “Unfolding Australia’s Fan of Memory: Music in Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 28, no. 84, 2005, pp. 11–22. Cobby Eckerman, Ali. “Black Deaths in Custody.” Poetry, May 2016, Accessed 2 Mar. 2020, www​.p​​oetry​​found​​ ation​​.org/​​poetr​​ymaga​​zine/​​poems​​/8901​​6​/bla​​ck​-de​​aths-​​in​-cu​​stody​. Gilbert, Kevin. The Cherry Pickers, Burrambinga Books, 1988. ———. Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry, Penguin, 1988. ———. “Redfern.” The Blackside: People Are Legends and Other Poems, Hyland House, 1990, pp. 102–103. Griffiths, Michael R. “Indigenous Life Writing: Rethinking Poetics and Practice.” Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler, Boydell and Brewer Group, 2013, pp. 60–92. Heiss, Anita. “Black Poetics”. Meanjin, vol. 65, no. 1, 2006, pp. 180–191. ———. Dhuuluu-Yala to Talk Straight: Publishing Aboriginal Literature in Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003. Heiss, Anita and Peter Minter. Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, Allen and Unwin, 2008. Hill Collins, Patricia. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Duke UP, 2019. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2016. Hodgson, Elizabeth. Skin Painting, U of Queensland P, 2008. Langford Ginibi, Ruby. Don’t Take Your Love to Town, Penguin, 1988. Moreton-Robinson,Aileen.“Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory:A Methodological Tool.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 78, 2013, pp. 331–347. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004, pp. 75–88. Nolan, Maggie. “‘It’s all Migloo Crap to Me’: Identity Politics in Contemporary Indigenous Writing in Queensland.” Queensland Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, pp. 37–46. O’Reilly, Nathanael. “Exploring Indigenous Identity in Suburbia: Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 1–13. Reed-Gilbert, Kerry. “Let’s Get Physical.” Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, Allen and Unwin, 2008, pp. 206–207. Saunders, Mykaela. “For Cops Who Stalk Children on Houso Estates.” Cordite Poetry Review, Nov. 2019, Accessed 2 Mar. 2020, cordi​​te​.or​​g​.au/​​poetr​​y​/pea​​ch​/fo​​r​-cop​​s​-who​​-stal​​k​-chi​​ldren​​-on​-​h​​ouso-​​estat​​es/. ———. “Grandmother Ghosts.” Cordite Poetry Review, November 2019, Accessed 2 Mar. 2020, cordi​​te​.or​​g​.au/​​ poetr​​y​/dom​​estic​​/gran​​dmoth​​er​​-gh​​osts/​. Walker, Kath. “No More Boomerang.” Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, Allen and Unwin, 2008, pp. 9–10. ———. We Are Going, Jacaranda Press, 1964. Wheeler, Belinda. “Introduction:The Emerging Canon.” Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler, Boydell and Brewer Group, 2013, pp. 37–58. Winch, Tara June. “On ‘Don’t Take Your Love to Town,’ by Ruby Langford Ginibi.” Griffith Review, Apr. 2020. Accessed 2 Mar. 2020, www​.g​​r iffi​​threv​​iew​.c​​om​/do​​nt​-ta​​ke​-lo​​ve​-to​​wn​-ru​​by​-la​​ngfor​​d​-gin​​ibi/.

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2 CLASS SHIFTS IN YUAN DYNASTY CHINA Kacey Evilsizor

The intention of this paper is to explore the changing roles and definitions of social class in thirteenth-century China after the Mongol invasion through the literary analysis of Guan Hanqing’s Yuan dynasty drama The Injustice of Dou E. One’s social class in premodern China could often be determined by who was able to successfully secure a governmental or court position through the civil service examination system. As leadership in China changed, so too did this system and the social roles that the examinations made possible. While there are many ways one might analyze this phenomenon, there exists the possibility of looking at Yuan dynasty Chinese traditional drama through Jacques Rancière’s 2006 book The Politics of Aesthetics. Such an endeavor is quite complicated in that there are many pitfalls to assigning Western or European theories and ideas to Chinese literature. First of all, the figures in the Yuan dynasty theatre and the actual historical scholars that wrote these works predate Rancière’s conceptions of social roles and his work with Plato’s distribution of the sensible, and so great care must be taken in making a distinction between transhistoricity and ahistoricity. As such, modern scholarship is far removed from the immediacy of these works, a majority of which are no longer extant, and there are conflicting opinions among scholars as to the nature and origin of these literary texts. With that in mind, the object of this essay is not to find an exact “fit,” per se, between Rancière’s exploration of the distributions of the sensible and Yuan dynasty Chinese literature but rather to analyze how one’s understanding of this particular moment in Chinese literary history can be informed by a reading of Rancière. Secondly, there is a complex relationship that exists between Chinese literature and comparative literature, as there is the potential for “consequences” when one “puts the student of literary language in front of an intimidating object: China, the artwork whose medium is history” (Saussy 151). It is difficult even to define the term “history” here, particularly from a Western theoretical standpoint. Saussy gives the example of Hegel trying to draw comparisons between China and the West in a world historical framework: For Hegel the comparative problem lay in the phrase “world history;” for although China is quite clearly part of the world, he was not prepared to give it a place in history. Still, history has to describe it, and in describing China with bits of figurative language whose proper sense is to be sought elsewhere, history finds itself describing itself as China. The perspective gained at that point seems to be one from which the initial subject, history, is absent. (Saussy 187) 27

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The difficulty that Saussy is describing here extends beyond Hegel and history but is rather one that exists in every context in which one tries to take theories or terminology that come from one context and make them germane to literature or artwork or culture that comes from a different context entirely: one runs the risk of drawing inexact or flimsy parallels and thus doing both the theoretical works and the literary works a disservice. One must be particularly careful when employing Western literary theory in a comparative context. The global reach that Western theory has had enables it to appear universal, to bend the literature of other cultures to meet its norms. However, European or North American literary notions can provide an enlightening perspective on the literary traditions of the world, provided one does not let them do the disservice of overshadowing the cultural specificities and local significance of other texts. Chinese comparative literature is arguably a potent example of this potential for disservice. In China, formal study of comparative literature only began substantially to influence cultural discourse as recently as the late nineteenth century, in which it was seen as a means of modernizing Chinese culture. Yue Daiyun is a scholar of Chinese literature who was integral to the establishment of comparative literature as a discipline in China. In a collaboration with fellow literary scholar Zhang Hui, these two scholars frame the nascent stages of Chinese comparative literature as a battle of sorts, reflective of the era: “Since the intelligentsia of the period were intensely concerned with China’s national weakness in the face of imperialist encroachment, comparisons of Chinese with foreign cultural and literary traditions were at the center of cultural analysis” (Zhang and Yue 2). From the outset there is a political relationship at the heart of comparative analysis between Chinese and non-Chinese texts; this seems to be not purely an academic pursuit but literal comparisons of quality: who is weak and who is strong? Might one compare Chinese texts to their contemporaries from other cultures and find the Chinese texts to be somehow lacking or less-than? Along with political encroachment and interference from Western countries, there was the concern of cultural encroachment as well, that Chinese cultural contributions might be overshadowed by Western ones. This signifies a systematic difference in Western and Chinese approaches to comparative study. The Western approach comes from a more established, dominant field and therefore becomes the standard by which Chinese and other texts are measured. Comparative literature as a discipline has had two bursts of prevalence in Chinese academia, first from the 1920s to the 1950s and then from the 1970s to the 1990s. The first wave was characterized by literary and cultural conversations between China and India, Russia, and Europe, and Chinese scholars wrote of the incoming influence of Indian literature, particularly on Chinese Buddhists’ texts, and Russo-Soviet literature, especially in the field of political and revolutionary literature. The influence of Western literary texts was twofold: prominent artists and writers sought to “reform traditional values and practices” and so advocated for the importation and translation of Western thought and texts (Zhou and Tong 2). Secondly, it seems to be that scholars focused on the exportation and translation of Chinese texts abroad, particularly in England, and “a narrative of the formation of English literary knowledge about China … [that] explains the formations of rationalized historical processes in which changes in the English idea or image of China may be fully explained” (Zhou and Tong 3, 4). This can be read as either the show of strength and cultural dominance that nineteenth-century Chinese scholars wanted for their country or else as the idea that Chinese literature, and indeed any other literary tradition, exists in a larger context than just that of its historical time period or country of origin. After a large influx of Western literary theories began to flood into China in the 1980s,Yue Daiyun said that Chinese literature was now being viewed in the context of world literatures. I see this as a positive development because it allows for one to observe oneself as seen by the other … the culturally diverse society we live in requires us not only to acknowledge cultural relativism but also to see the need for communication between different cultures. (Yue 231, 238) 28

Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China

Despite what has come before and at the risk of drawing inaccurate parallels, there still seems to be something to be gained from drawing together two disparate objects and examining them in the same context.

Historical Background China was occupied by the Mongols, who established their own Chinese-style dynasty, called the Yuan (1271–1368). Theirs was the first dynasty in Chinese history to be established by non-native Chinese people and, as such, had a profound impact on Chinese culture, particularly literature. Public intellectuals and scholars suddenly found their relationship to literature changed by their new surroundings. The significance of the Yuan dynasty is also accentuated by its place in history. The Yuan dynasty followed the Tang and Song dynasties, which were two of the most culturally affluent periods in Chinese history; therefore, the Yuan is significant, not only in political history, but in cultural and intellectual history as well. The Tang dynasty (618–907) set a precedent for the importance of the intelligentsia. The dynasty was largely founded by aristocratic and literate families, which also helped to establish the connection between government and education. The founders of the Sui and Tang dynasties both claimed to be descended from Han noble families, and it was during the Tang dynasty that the civil service examination system began to stabilize and become what it was when the Mongols invaded. Additionally, not only was the Tang dynasty culturally affluent and known for its poetry, but it was also during this time that the literati began to move beyond writing on natural beauty and other traditional topics and began to also express their feelings. The apex of this poetic golden age was during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, who ruled from 685 to 762 ce and sought to build a strong and very stable China (Roberts 51, 63–65).The use of literature to express a writer’s feelings would also be significant during the Yuan dynasty. The Song dynasty also had a prominent literati class, although the character of the scholar evolved from one dynasty to the next: Early Tang scholars supposed that the normative models for writing, government, and behavior were contained in the cumulative cultural tradition … But by the late Song, thinkers had shifted their faith to the mind’s ability to arrive at true ideas about moral qualities inherent in the self and things. (Bol 3) These entrenched ideas about ways in which one behaves or thinks as a part of the intelligentsia began in the Sui dynasty, which was a short-lived dynasty that directly preceded the Tang, lasting from 581 to 618. During the Sui, the civil service examination, which mandated passing an elaborate examination as a prerequisite for service in a government position, was created.This generated a very Han Chinese-centric government because only those with the correct educational background and the money to pursue years of study had the opportunity to succeed in government careers. This was exactly the kind of Chinese social tradition that the Mongols, if they were going to succeed in ruling a unified China, needed to break down: there was a shift from medieval poetry and belles lettres on Tang-Song civil examinations to documentary and legal questions on Ming-Qing [dynasty] tests in light of the increasingly unified call by both literati and emperors for an end to the medieval regime of poetry as the educational measure of the literatus-official. (Elman 44) Because the Tang and Song dynasties were such culturally affluent dynasties, producing some of the most famous artwork and literature in all of Chinese history, this became the marker of 29

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an ­intellectual: familiarity with the so-called “regime” of Tang and Song poetry, as well as an ­understanding of the foundational historical texts of the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), the first cultural and historical golden age (Elman 489n79). When the Mongols invaded China, “the Mongols and their se-mu ‘outsiders’ initially never saw any need for ideological control or to use education to channel Han ‘insiders’ into acceptable career paths” (Elman 30). Under Mongol rule, a few Chinese officials were kept as advisors to Qubilai Qan, the founder of the dynasty. However, there was no need to have a government system that favored Han Chinese people, even if they were setting up a Chinese-style dynasty. Although Qubilai Qan did not want to acquiesce entirely to Chinese cultural practices by conducting his affairs in Chinese or abandoning his Mongolic cultural roots, he did want to be seen as the legitimate, divinely mandated heir to the Chinese throne and so wanted to be an enthusiastic patron of the arts as the Tang and Song Chinese emperors, such as Xuanzong, who preceded him had been (Rossabi 161–176). Qubilai Qan’s enthusiasm for Chinese culture, the advent of printing during the Song dynasty at a “moment when ever-widening sections of society sought to improve themselves by learning, or perhaps simply hoped to derive from reading the pleasure they had found in listening to tales, anecdotes and poetry” (Gernet 228), and the shifting social roles of would-be officials who were no longer able to get prestigious government jobs created a happy accident of sorts in literary history. There was a far-reaching social interest in literature, the ability to widely disseminate and preserve it through printing, and Han Chinese scholars without a civil service examination to take. There was suddenly an entire generation of scholar-writers who no longer had political aspirations and thus turned their attention to artistic pursuits: “One of the unforeseen benefits of political disenfranchisement under the Mongols was the cultural autonomy of Han Chinese literati and merchant elites” (Elman 30). This set the scene for the Yuan dynasty, which is largely referred to as a golden age in Chinese literature, particularly drama.Yuan drama is a direct extension of the forms of Chinese theatre that came before, but it existed in a social climate that was radically different from that of the Tang and the Song dynasties. They were still producing literature, but it had a different role to play in society, one of reflection on changing circumstances and a need to preserve a culture that was changing.

The Changing of Chinese Literature In the context of the flurry of historical circumstances that preceded the Mongol invasion and led to the breakdown of traditional Chinese ways of governance, it is important to look at the specific impact that such an upheaval might have had on the particulars of Chinese literature. It seems to be widely assumed that such historical circumstances would not give way to the golden age of theatre that did indeed occur during the Yuan dynasty: By a trick of historical perspective, Chinese classical drama (also called Yuan or Mongol theater) seems suddenly to appear on the literary horizon full grown. This complex, synthetic theater has a long history behind it, of course, but so many of the documents which should attest to it are lost that, when we discover the names of over a hundred playwright-composers and the titles of some five hundred plays which were mounted during the last fifty years of the thirteenth century, the effect is of a sudden aesthetic explosion at precisely the time it should least be expected. (Crump 3) What is specifically unique about Yuan drama is that there existed a phenomenon of writing about traditional Chinese circumstances that no longer existed in this new Mongol era. A common figure in classical Chinese literature is the ambitious scholar who must choose between staying with his family at home and traveling to the capital to sit the imperial examination. There are countless 30

Class Shifts in Yuan Dynasty China

stories, poems, and plays throughout Chinese literature that have this scholar character. During the Yuan dynasty, though, this literary character still exists even though the reality of such a figure largely does not, due to the elimination of the civil service examination and the influence of Mongol ways of governance. However, there are two primary differences between Yuan drama and the Chinese theater that came before: one is the language in which Yuan drama is written, and the other is the character traits of these still-existing scholar characters. According to Wang Guowei, the hallmark of Yuan drama is the naturalness of the language in which it is written. He states All literature is superior because of its naturalness, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Yuan drama … They simply wrote as the spirit moved them in order to amuse themselves and others. They did not think about the clumsiness of their plots … Because [the language] is so natural, it could address the political and social situations of the time. (Fei 107–108) Wang makes the argument that because Yuan dramatists were not very well educated, they did not concern themselves with precise literary style and tradition but rather just wrote as they desired. While this may be an oversimplification of the situation, as there is evidence that many dramatists were classically trained, the effect remains the same:Yuan dramatists had the opportunity to express this upheaval in their society through traditional literary means. There was another noticeable change in Chinese theatre during the Yuan: the plots and character tropes began to change. According to Wang, the tragic plays produced during the Yuan were “not written according to [the conventional formula] beginning with separation but ending with reunion, beginning with hardship but ending with good fortune” (Fei 107). Additionally, there is a change in the scholar figure featured in these plays. Many of the Yuan plays that are extant today and are known for their quality are the Southern drama, which has come to have a particular feature: the trope of the ungrateful scholar. This figure seems to have emerged for several reasons as The theme of the ungrateful scholar is generally coupled together with plays on the desire for freedom of choice in love and placed under the general category of marriage … the aims of education, the examination system, the misuse of position and power, and consequent destabilization of harmonious social relations are all bound up with the young scholar’s quest for success and prestige. (Llamas 75, 77) This trend in drama began during the Song dynasty and continued through the Yuan dynasty to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Even before the Mongols abolished the civil service examination, there was already social discontent regarding the government system and the tension between the state and the family in a scholar’s life.

A Case Study: Guan Hanqing’s Yuan-Era Play The Injustice to Dou E There is another function that seems to be served by the presence of the ungrateful scholar in Yuan drama: the scholar can be seen in direct contrast to another character trope in Chinese literature, that of the chaste widow. The more selfishly a scholar behaves, the more devoted the widow character seems. This is certainly true in Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E, which is one of the most famous extant plays from the Yuan dynasty, though the exact year it was written is unknown. In this text, the scholar Dou Tianzhang leaves his seven-year-old daughter Dou Duanyun with the elderly debt collector Madam Cai in order to pay off his debt and travel to sit the examination. While it may seem that Dou Tianzhang should be quite upset about his decision to abandon his 31

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daughter, if one closely examines the text one finds that there seem to be limitations to his sadness. Dou Tianzhang has certainly grieved over losing his daughter, but his language suggests that he is a selfish character who would not let his love for his daughter stand in the way of his ambitions. When the reader (or the audience, were this zaju to be performed) first meets Dou Tianzhang, he is bringing Dou Dunyuan to Madam Cai’s house, reciting, “In my belly I’ve tasted to the full every affair of the world, / In my fate I’ve not been the equal of anyone under heaven!” (West and Idema 9). In the reader’s first impression of Dou Tianzhang, he is complaining about his life up to this point. By saying that in his “belly” he has “tasted to the full,” he implies that what he is describing is more of a visceral feeling than the fleeting impression with which “taste” might usually be associated. He uses rather extreme language: he has tasted “to the full every affair in the world” (italics added); there is nothing he has yet to experience or with which he is not acquainted. What could be interpreted as his high opinion of himself as a scholar (he has experienced everything the world has to offer) is followed by a line that contrasts his feelings with his reality: “In my fate I’ve not been the equal of anyone under heaven!” (italics added). He is again using strong, unequivocal language to express that it is not his ability or intelligence that has kept him from achieving success but rather only his fate that has not been the equal of anyone, not one single person, in the world. His use of the word “anyone” contrasts with his use of “every” in the previous line. “Every” is inclusive, demonstrating the vast scope of his perceived experience and knowledge, while “anyone” is a somewhat more objective word that singles him out from the non-specific “anyone under heaven;” only he is not included in this category, those of a good fate. At the outset of the play, the reader can see the nature of Dou Tianzhang’s existence and his attitude about his social status. From here on, one would not be surprised to learn the lengths to which he might go in order to change his fate. Dou Tianzhang’s use of objective or definitive language to justify his actions continues when he is describing his life story in greater detail on his way to Madam Cai’s house. After a lifetime of study, his plans to be an official are changed when “before I could advance to seize either merit or fame my wife passed away, leaving me with this girl, whose childhood name is Duanyun” (10). He says that this obstacle presented itself before he “could” advance, before he had the chance to, which implies that it was assumed that he would advance. If another popular figure in Chinese literature, the learned yet failed scholar, is any indication, his successful examination results were by no means guaranteed, but Dou Tianzhang mentions them off-handedly as if they were. His use of the word “seize” is also striking here in that it is quite an aggressive word to be associated with good examination results; it shows Dou Tianzhang’s determination to obtain his goals and what he feels he has earned. It is also interesting that he makes the distinction that he could “seize either merit or fame” (italics added), as if they were mutually exclusive.While it would be worthwhile to earn his success (merit), he does not seem to care about the means by which he is successful (fame). One might expect him to say “merit and fame,” because both of these are included among the benefits of success, but Dou Tianzhang indicates that he is willing to settle for either, as long as he achieves a status that is tantamount to his ability. He then goes on to say that his wife passed away “leaving me with this girl.” He again reverts to very objective language: by characterizing Dou Duanyun as “this girl” he makes it sound as if she is a random girl to whom he has no connection but who has suddenly become his responsibility. He is frequently clear about referring to her as his daughter, but in this instance, when he is describing the obstacles that have impeded his career, he distances himself from her. By making light of his connection to her, he seeks to further justify his actions in abandoning her. Sixteen years later, Dou Tianzhang returns to Chu Prefecture in an imperial capacity and learns of the injustice done to his daughter: she has been falsely accused of poisoning her father-in-law and executed. Though Dou Tianzhang is clearly saddened by the circumstances, he still couches them in the effect they have on him. He says, “A white haired father is afflicted with pain and grief! / Wrongly slain and gone a young girl in her greening spring!” (34). He only says this after 32

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he has ascertained that his daughter was wrongly accused, and he still mentions his own feelings first. He does not actually mention how his daughter might have been feeling but rather how he is “afflicted.” There is also an interesting contrast of color in his recitation: the white of his hair which came about due to his worrying about his daughter and her “greening” spring which is representative of her youth; they are at opposite ends of a spectrum, representing the beginning of life and the trials that turn one’s hair white towards the end of it. He connects the two of them together despite their separation. Once he is sure that their good name can be restored, he closes the distance between them. Before he learns the truth about the injustice that was committed against his daughter, however, he immediately judges her for her alleged actions and is entirely willing to forget his sorrow over her situation. He says to her in absentia, “You have destroyed our ancestral name with shame and have dragged my pure name into it” (32). He immediately scolds her for her perceived offense and, in doing so, reiterates how her behavior affects him. He continually invokes the word “pure” to describe the situation: his name is pure and unchallengeable, and in his eyes, her actions have sullied it. When he first returns to Chu Prefecture, he says, “I am incorruptible, capable, pure, and upright, of the firmest and most unyielding integrity” (28). He introduces himself after his return in the same fashion as he did at the beginning of the play: he is aware of his own virtues and grounds his self-esteem entirely in this rank that suits his ability. Here, he again uses definitive language (“incorruptible” and “the firmest and most unyielding”) to describe his character. By characterizing his integrity as the most unyielding, he is again making a judgment, just as he did at the beginning of the play when in his “fate I’ve not been the equal of anyone under heaven.” There had not been a single other person, in his eyes, whose fate had been as undeservedly poor as his, but now that he has achieved what he set out to, there is not another person who does this job as well as he does. He is perfectly satisfied with his achievement, and only a crime as heinous as the one his daughter allegedly committed could sully his name. He twice uses the word “pure” to describe himself and his name. After he rectifies the injustice done to Dou E, he says, “Dou E’s sentence shall be changed, purity restored to her name” (35).The use of forms of the word “pure” is interesting here in that not only does the meaning contain the incorruptibility that Dou Tianzhang is striving to project, but there is also a measure of innocence or naivety with words such as “pure.” Those who are truly pure are often children or others who are naïve and inexperienced. For everything Dou Tianzhang has experienced (and he would be the first to say that it has been a lot), how can he then still be described as “pure”? Perhaps “pure” here is representative of his ignorance: he does not know the fate that has befallen his daughter, and he can judge unsullied and as harshly as he likes (“I behead first and memorialize the crime later!” (28)) because he does not think critically about the situation. “Pure” might be associated with someone who has not actually done anything. It is objectively difficult for human beings to remain pure once they pass childhood innocence, but Dou Tianzhang actively strives for it for both him and his daughter. It is not integrity or uprightness that is restored to Dou E’s name but purity instead. There is another extremely interesting moment as Dou Tianzhang is scolding Dou E: he says, “If I couldn’t control you, how can I control anyone else?” This seems to be telling about Dou Tianzhang as a character; he actively seeks control. Perhaps it was not love that caused him to grieve over the loss of his daughter but rather the loss of control over her. There is an intriguing minor character that emerges, Dou Tianzhang’s assistant Zhang Qian, whom he refers to as “my son” (31). Here the audience discovers that another figure has appeared that can fill the role of the obedient child for Dou Tianzhang. Before the reappearance of Dou E in ghost form, Dou Tianzhang says to Zhang Qian, “If I call you, then come; if I don’t, then don’t bother” (29). This is straightforward language, the tone that would accompany a superior giving orders to his assistant. This also tells the reader that he has control over Zhang Qian, which one might expect in this situation, yet it is the exact same control he was denied when he had to give Dou Dunyuan to Madam Cai; he could not control her life anymore. “My son” Zhang Qian has appeared, not only filling 33

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this role for Dou Tianzhang but doing so as a male child. The classic scholar figure torn between home life and imperial life may not have been so troubled had he known he could be rewarded with another, perhaps more filial, male child. While it is impossible to make the claim that Dou Tianzhang did not care for Dou E, and in fact there is evidence to the contrary, a close examination of his language throughout the play indicates that he might not have considered leaving her such a terrible dilemma. His strong, decisive language shows him to be an unwavering character who does not doubt his ability or achievement. He seems to think first of his career and his own feelings and second of his daughter. While he is sad to leave her, this sadness might have been in part due to his loss of control over her. In losing control over her, he regains control over the fate that was taken from him when his wife died. Dou Tianzhang is in effect willing to abandon Dou E twice throughout the play: his willingness to cast her aside when he thinks she has committed a crime is in fact quite similar to his initial abandonment of her in order to pay his debts and travel to the capital. Though he claims to have grieved over her to the point of his hair turning white, the passage of time also will turn one’s hair white: his fatherly devotion to his daughter continually takes a backseat to his devotion to his own achievements. Dou Tianzhang is the quintessential ungrateful scholar while his daughter is the chaste woman. It is not just Dou Tianzhang’s position as a scholar that makes him selfish, but the prestige and renown that being a scholar could have afforded him outweigh his desire to fulfill his traditional familial expectations. This play is a commentary on broken social structures and even though the scholar eventually reconciles with his daughter, who pays him a visit in ghost form, there is ripe social commentary on the changing nature of the family in society.

Rancière and the Dou Family As mentioned previously, it is a challenge to apply Western literary or political theory to nonWestern civilizations, yet it is quite enriching to consider together two seemingly disparate frames of reference. In this case, Jacques Rancière’s distributions of the sensible could inform a reader’s understanding of the tumultuous state of traditional Chinese social roles during the Yuan dynasty, particularly as seen in plays like The Injustice to Dou E. In The Politics of Aesthetics (2006), Rancière writes about three possible distributions of the sensible: the ethical regime of images, the representative regime of art, and the aesthetic regime of art. All three seem to outline ways in which both people and art play social roles or serve functions within a community and in which Rancière’s distributions do not adhere to Plato’s notion of the distribution of the sensible. While discussing these regimes, it is beneficial to consider how these regimes might apply to a Chinese context. The ethical regime of images predates the other two distributions and is in direct response to Plato’s discussion of simulacra. Plato, being an idealist, separates imitations from his ideal community because they are imitations as opposed to originals. However, Rancière includes simulacra in his regime because the most important facet for him is the purpose of the imitation, “the way in which the poem’s images provide the spectators, both children and adult citizens, with a certain education and fit in with the distribution of the city’s occupations … in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos” (Rancière 21). Rancière pairs together art and history because he sees productions and simulacra as a means of perpetuating the social order of a given community. The ethical regime of images seems to serve to perpetuate the status of those on the political stage and their role in their own political context. In Yuan dynasty drama, the purpose of the imitation is to illustrate what has changed: the play provides the audience with fodder for social commentary on the elite literati culture in Chinese society. Dou Tianzhang can be read as a social allegory, working for years towards a specific cultural aim and ultimately not necessarily achieving what he thought he would. The Chinese ethos has changed: Dou Tianzhang also could not obtain what he wanted if he were an actual historical figure because his context has changed. The social 34

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order that is being perpetuated is now one that does not allow for the existence of the previous long-standing social order. The representative regime of art speaks specifically to the literal artistic images that are produced in art and serve to depict people’s actions in a given society. Rancière notes that Plato did not write about art in specific but rather “arts, ways of doing and making” (ibid.). Rancière draws a connection here between art and arts by noting that the mimetic principle that produces imitations does not merely exist for the sake of making copies but “is first of all a pragmatic principle that isolates, within the general domain of the arts (ways of doing and making), certain forms of art that produce specific entities called imitations” (ibid.). Therefore, the representative regime of art not only determines what are acceptable imitations of an unattainable original but also how to best go about practically making such imitations, reinforcing the ways in which the ethical regime of images gives citizens an insight into their social roles. Rancière writes The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of lies … This is what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the forms of poetic mimesis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what images consist of and their end or purpose. (35–36) In the case of Yuan drama, the same representations exist as before and now serve a different function. If the literal artistic images in plays depict people’s actions in a given society, Dou Tianzhang and similar scholar characters represent not the literal scholar journeying to the capital to sit the imperial examination, rather the intelligentsia and dramatists that are using their artistic freedom to critique Mongol governance and the political upheaval of the era. For Aristotle, living beings are mimetic figures, and he thus accepts mimesis more readily than Plato, who postulated that artistic practices, and thus mimesis, “disturb the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces” (13). But how does this account for literature or theater as an activity in society? And what if the intention of artistic practices is to disturb the distribution of the sensible? The perception of literature has changed in this Chinese context: the function has become overtly political and one part of society, one social role still exists, but cannot serve the same function as before. The aesthetic regime of art endeavors to break down the hierarchical nature of the representative regime of art, which privileges visibility over other means of representation. This distribution reinforces the nature of art, as opposed to arts, and in doing so defies any need for specific criteria to govern the making of art. It achieves this “by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations” (23). This hypothetically dispenses with the hierarchy that would exist among people who serve different functions within the social order. Plato argues that artisans should not play a role in politics because their craft demands their full attention, yet the principles of the aesthetic regime of art equalize all ways of doing and making, despite their context. This speaks to Rancière’s concept of equality, which he does not define in the way one most often encounters, as the equitable distribution of rights and privileges to every citizen of a political unit, but rather as the subjectification of a political subject and the presupposition of the “police distribution of the sensible” (86). Policing is the act of perpetuating the distributions of the sensible, keeping each person in the context of their particular social role in the community. It is critical to bear in mind that Rancière is exploring these concepts in the context of a Western-style democracy. As such, there is not an accurate way to bring Rancière’s concept of equality to a Chinese context because there has never been a political democracy in China. However, it is possible that there was literary democracy. Rancière writes “literary equality is not simply the equality of the 35

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written word; it is a certain way in which equality can function that can tend to distance it from any form of political equality” (53). If there can be an equality among art’s possible subject matter that does not exist in politics, this seems to exist in Guan Hanqing’s work. While Dou Tianzhang and Dou E would not enjoy the same rights and status in a historical context, they can be seen as equally important in a literary context. He is the ungrateful scholar with power and prestige, yet the reader needs Dou E to be the counterbalance to Dou Tianzhang: her loyalty and his selfishness are brought into sharp focus by each other’s existence. Although the Chinese literature that was written still adheres to Rancière’s representative regime of art, the context has changed. In the new Yuan dynasty context, the ungrateful, ambitious scholar figure does not exist anymore because the Chinese literati do not have the same opportunities as before. The political situation in China at this point in time seems to be an example, much like the contemporary democratic context in which Rancière is writing, of a non-Platonic distribution of the sensible. The change in power relations has caused a shift in the determination of social roles.

Findings and Avenues for Future Research While it is stimulating to consider Chinese literature through the lens of Western or European literary theory, great care must be taken in doing so. To make tenuous or far-fetched comparisons would do both the original literature and the applied theory a disservice. The above Rancièrean intervention in a literary analysis of Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E only scratches the surface of what is possible in this field, though all comparative endeavors must be undertaken with an eye towards deepening our understanding of Yuan-era China by employing new theoretical applications rather than ascribing a modern, literary-critical viewpoint to premodern texts. Additionally, there are more avenues than just the premodern by which one could read Chinese literature through a theoretical Western perspective. For example, there are some scholars who argue that mimesis as a concept does not exist at all in Chinese literature: there is a notion of imitation, but a close look will reveal, however, that on most occasions these expressions are directed and limited to some particular details of a particular text; only a small number of them are aimed at denoting the general feature of a work; and none of them is meant to characterize the nature of literature as a whole. (Shi 14) While this is not necessarily universally accepted, Shi also notes that these kinds of misunderstandings of the Chinese notion of imitation only came to be in literary criticism after the introduction of Western literary theory in China. However, if one is to subscribe to Yue Daiyun’s way of thinking, one might see these new understandings and contexts of Chinese imitation as a positive attribute of the impact of Western thought on Chinese literature. Aside from mimesis, there are additional positive notions to be gleaned by applying non-Chinese literary theory to Chinese literature, specifically when it comes to social class. By taking a Rancièrean approach to the study of Chinese literature, one finds opportunities to examine social class, social theory, and the relationship between the state and its people that may not otherwise be possible. While some theorists criticize Western intervention in Chinese literature, others have already begun to find new avenues to explore classical Chinese works thanks to Western theory. For example, The Story of the Western Wing, also written during the Yuan dynasty (likely late thirteenth century), is one of the most popular novels in Chinese literary history. In addition to these laurels, it is also significant because it benefited greatly from the introduction of Marxist thought into Chinese culture because it gave scholars a fresh angle from which to analyze an already frequently analyzed work. For example, in the work is a well-to-do widow character who, in a post-1949 climate, can be deemed to represent class prejudice and hypocrisy, the evils the Chinese Communist Party was 36

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working to position themselves against. Additionally, the book is a shining example of the power of vernacular over refined language, another touchstone of Marx-influenced Chinese society (Idema 12). Despite the stance that one may have on the use of Western theory to analyze Chinese literature, it seems that if one thoughtfully considers the topic, there is much interesting analysis still yet to be done.

Works Cited Bol, Peter. “This Culture of Ours:” Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China. Stanford UP, 1994. Crump, J.I. Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan. University of Michigan Press, 1990. Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. University of California Press, 2000. Fei, Faye Chunfang. Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present. University of Michigan Press, 1999. Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250–1276. Stanford UP, 1962. Idema, Wilt. The Story of the Western Wing. University of California Press, 1995. Llamas, Regina. “Retribution, Revenge, and the Ungrateful Scholar in Early Chinese Southern Drama.” Asia Major, Third Series, vol. 20, no. 2, 2007, pp. 75–101. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum, 2006. Roberts, J.A.G. A History of China. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Rossabi, Morris. Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. University of California Press, 1988. Saussy, Haun. The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. Stanford UP, 1993. Shi, Liang. Reconstructing the Historical Discourse of Traditional Chinese Fiction. Chinese Studies, vol. 23, The Edward Mellen Press, 2002. West, Stephen H., and Wilt Idema. Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2010. Yue, Daiyun. Comparative Literature and China. Peking University Press, 2004. Zhang, Hui, and Daiyun Yue. “Comparative Literature in Chinese and an Interview with Yue.” Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 13, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1–11. Zhou, Xiaoyi, and Q.S. Tong. “Comparative Literature in China.” Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4, 2000, pp. 1–10.

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3 VICTORIAN SOCIALIST OBITUARIES AND THE POLITICS OF CROSS-CLASS COMMUNITY Ingrid Hanson

“All are invited to show sympathy with Mowbray” runs the invitation in the London-based socialist journal Commonweal to Mrs. Mary Mowbray’s April 1892 funeral in the East End of London. From individual stories like hers of poverty-induced death to the black-framed memorials for the executed Chicago anarchists in 1887 and advertisements for “beautiful” memorial cards for the deaths of striking Yorkshire miners, textual acts of public mourning are a central part of the narratives of working-class identity and working-class political significance in Victorian socialist newspapers. As Julie-Marie Strange persuasively demonstrates, “descriptive accounts of dying, death and funerals” by nineteenth-century working-class writers are “languages of loss in themselves” (25); so too late-Victorian invitations to funerals and announcements of death constitute, I suggest, languages of protest both personal and public, drawing attention to the relationship between these two through the politicized concept of sympathy. Rachel Ablow suggests that by the late nineteenth century sympathy as a ground of behavior in the public sphere had been overtaken by the dominant narratives of self-interest and progress associated with capitalism which pushed sympathy into the private, domestic, and feminine sphere (4).Yet its uses as an indication not only of political fellow-feeling and active communality in the socialist cause but also as the expression of an intrinsic association between people in different classes and different countries continue well into the 1890s in socialist writings. It is the mobilization by socialist newspapers of stories, images, and juxtapositions of personal feeling with collective, cross-class action in response to working-class deaths that I consider in this chapter. As Judith Butler suggests, “open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential” (Frames of War 39). In commemorating the dead both well-known and unknown, newspapers of the socialist and anarchist movements—still closely connected and overlapping in the 1880s and early 1890s—developed a narrative of meaningful death and collective grief that paradoxically relied on an assertion of the significance of class even in death while at the same time acknowledging and strengthening a network of cross-class and transnational sympathies. Butler’s account of the publicly constructed and unevenly distributed “grievability” of twenty-first-century deaths, in which some are seen as worthy of grief and others not even worthy of being “recognized,” describes aptly the situation in which late-Victorian socialist and anarcho-socialist newspapers intervened to make recognizable and grievable the deaths of the disregarded or over-regulated working class (Frames of War 13). Socialist newspapers made links between the personal, the national, and the transnational in order to emphasize the significance and the right to be recognized of working-class deaths and so of 38

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working-class people, working-class bodies and lives, and the cause of equality. The physical framing of death notices with thick black lines, conventional in Victorian mourning practice, here also signifies a particular political “frame,” to borrow the word used by Butler and borrowed in turn from Jacques Derrida, Erving Goffman, and Michel Callon (Frames of War 8) through which feeling is constructed and dominant capitalist ways of seeing challenged. Using Mary Mowbray’s funeral as the central thread of this essay, I make links to the other deaths associated with hers through implication or explicit comparison, suggesting that it is in part the layering of stories of death and invitations to express sympathy—that is, a recognition of an already existing bond—with both the dead and the living that gives resonance and political power to each individual story. The invitation, again and again, to active, personal as well as political sympathy that foregrounds class inequality while constellating it with interclass and international alliances insists on a framing of affective responses to death that centers, rather than looks at, the workingclass position. At the same it invites a response that is physically present, emotionally engaged, and communally demonstrated, a response that I suggest stands in contradistinction to capitalist modes of alienation. By the late nineteenth century mourning and funeral practices among the middle classes were increasingly remote from the bodies of the dead: as Pat Jalland notes, laying-out was beginning to be outsourced to nurses rather than family members and discussion of death with the ill or dying was frowned upon (211–212).The spaces of death were becoming professionalized. However, as Strange records, this alienation was slower to take hold among the working class, and a much closer familiarity with the dead ran through working-class culture (29–31). The socialist and anarchist communities of the late nineteenth century inhabit this working-class culture of intimacy with the dead and familiarity with death; they claim the processes of grief for political purposes while at the same time valuing the personal and private. They highlight in words, reports, memorials, and artwork as well as in ceremonies and practices not only the facts of death but its causes, inviting middle-class collaboration in the exposure of working-class suffering and its structural causes.

Sympathy and Solidarity Sympathy in Commonweal runs side by side with solidarity—a word the OED identifies as coming into common usage in English only in the 1840s and signifying a recognition of the interrelation of parts in a whole—locating itself in a tradition of radical shared ideals and corporeal community in contradistinction to contemporary uses of sympathy as a species of compassion. George Eliot’s much-discussed review essay of 1856, “The Natural History of German Life,” offers an account of the ways in which art depicting the working class generates “social sympathies,” contributing to the “linking of the higher classes with the lower” and “obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness” (145–146). Audrey Jaffe’s influential reading of Victorian fiction draws attention to just such a combination of the visual and the representational in the generation of sympathy to suggest that “what circulates in Victorian representations of sympathy … are social identities; in particular, middle-class identities” (9); by creating human sympathy, she suggests, Victorian writers overleap the inequalities of class in pursuit of an idea of common humanity accessible to individuals that is greater than these differences (15).The late-Victorian socialist formulation of sympathy in response to death works rather to demand identification that recognizes and challenges the inequalities of class identity, offering not a smoothing over of alienation but its exposure. It is not predicated either on the “dread” (8) or the desire (12) of being in the other’s place that Jaffe identifies but rather on shared recognition among the living of the inequalities made visible by their very disappearance for the deceased at the moment of death. Commonweal’s repeated deployment of sympathy as a politically generative response to death, something more active than condolence, is made evident in its uses as an exchange of political feeling between the living in the second edition of Commonweal, in March 1885, where it appears as 39

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a partner to solidarity. Sympathy occurs repeatedly in expressions of support in the “International Report” section of this fledgling publication: “of our sympathy and good will you may be sure” August Bebel writes from Germany; Sergius Stepniak describes how English socialists in Paris expressed “frank approbation and unconditional sympathy with the Russian socialists” and offers reciprocal feelings (“Record” 16). Karl Kautsky from Austria expresses, on his own behalf and that of his fellow Austrian socialists, “the sympathy we feel with the efforts of the Socialist League”; at the same time he notes that the more conscious the English socialists are that “they fight for the exploited of the whole world” and “the more resolutely they devote themselves to the thought of international solidarity, the greater will be the sympathy with which the whole proletariat will watch their struggle” (Record, 16). Later, this same kind of active sympathy is at work among and between workers: on the 9th of March 1889 the news columns report that a “monster meeting” of tradesmen and laborers was held in Phoenix Park, Dublin “to express sympathy with the seamen on strike” (“Seamen’s” 78). A large No Rent meeting in London’s Victoria Park, Commonweal reports in 1891, brought together “slum dwellers, aristocrats of Labour, and even the small middle class of the East End” to listen to talks about landlord injustice. After the meeting, “several working people, even of the better class, came to our comrades and expressed their hearty sympathy with the movement” (“N” 87). Cross-class sympathy is welcomed here, but its function seems not to assuage anxieties about injustice but to develop them, not to diminish the significance of class boundaries but to enable what Mary Fairclough calls, in her account of late eighteenth-century radical sympathy, “the transmission of unrest from person to person” (42). The inherent unrest of grief, in contrast with the restfulness of the grave “where there was no labour or sorrow, and no sweating,” as one of the funeral orations for Mary Mowbray has it, makes it particularly amenable to a partnership with this kind of generative sympathy (Parker). Indeed, Commonweal death notices work to highlight the “transmission of unrest” through their insistence on locating the deceased in networks of solidarity and suffering. On the 23rd of April 1892—in a paper that bears marks of the stress of producing it following the recent arrest of its editor, not least in an absence of page numbers—a brief cover-page announcement notes that “our comrade was the daughter of a French Communist, Joseph Benoist, and was born in Guernsey, Channel Islands, on May 12th, 1856, and died of consumption on April 19th, 1892, a victim to the brutal system of capitalism” (“Obituary”). Mowbray is located here in an international context of victimhood through the global reach of the “system of capitalism” and in a network of international activism through her father, many of whose compatriots attended her funeral. She is also located in a long line of British working-class deaths through avoidable poverty recorded in the newspaper: on the 26th of June 1886 a short news story tells of a weavers’ meeting in Padiham,Yorkshire, where one man noted that he had been attending his brother’s funeral that very day “and he was satisfied he had been killed by overtime and tyranny on the part of the employer” (”Capitalistic Theft” 102). On the 24th of October 1891, the paper carries an obituary for Fred Corkwell, an active anarchistcommunist member of the Leeds Socialist League who died aged twenty-six of consumption, “that fatal disease, ‘the product of Capitalism,’ as he called it” (Cores 134). The sympathy invited here is not only a personal, domestic emotion, then, but a response of fellow-feeling to an international structural injustice of which this death is just one piece of evidence. Commonweal carries a further, separate invitation two pages further along in the 23rd of April issue, addressed to “Comrades”—emphasizing political alliance—and “Friends,” highlighting the personal networks that ran alongside the political. It goes on to illuminate further the circumstances of Mary Mowbray’s death, setting it in the more specific context of the struggles of anarchists at the hands of the authorities: You have heard of the arrest of two good and true comrades, Mowbray and Nicholls.The death of Mowbray’s wife four hours before his arrest makes the occurrence quite tragic. (The Committee) 40

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The brevity of this announcement leaves the wording ambiguous so that it is possible to read both the death and the arrest as tragic in the light of the other. The notice uses the language of suffering and heroism in the service of social critique. Charles Mowbray, nominally the publisher of Commonweal at this point, and David Nicoll, its editor since 1890, had been arrested on a charge of incitement to murder because of an editorial in the paper on the 9th of April that year. The editorial arose from the conviction in 1891 of five anarchists in Walsall accused of manufacturing bombs and sentenced to long jail terms: ten years for three of them and five for two others. The article “Are These Men Fit to Live?” urged action against the Home Secretary, the high court judge Henry Hawkins, and Detective Inspector William Melville, who had been instrumental in the arrest and sentencing of the men. Mowbray, who distanced himself from the article and its sentiments, was acquitted within a month, and Nicoll, who had in fact written the article himself and who had consistently championed the Walsall anarchists and their cause, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The death notice signals a communal response to this communally significant loss. It goes on: “[T]he members of the International Workpeople’s Club … have decided to take in hand the funeral and to look after his family” (The Committee). Sympathy is enacted and it is invited from all, not “for” Mowbray’s husband Charles Mowbray, with the distance that might imply, but rather “with [him],” noting further that he “will be present in the custody of a policeman” (The Committee). The poignancy of his proposed attendance in the company of a police officer highlights the compounding of the personal by the political; it emphasizes the unwanted presence of police surveillance in the most intimate spaces of the lives of socialists and anarchists and offers an opportunity to combine personal condolence with political protest. In this it not only echoes numerous stories about the unwanted intervention of police at socialist and anarchist meetings in Britain, but also resonates specifically with an earlier story carried by Commonweal about the persistent and unwelcome presence of police and the state in the deaths as well as the lives of workers across Europe. In September 1885, a Commonweal news story by Eleanor Marx, one of the co-founders of the newspaper with William Morris, had detailed the strange story of the refusal of authorities in Barmen, Germany, to allow the funeral of a socialist over a technicality of timing. This prohibition resulted in the forcible confiscation of his body by police and city functionaries and culminated in the forced entry to the graveyard by a crowd of fellow socialists determined to hold the funeral regardless of regulations (“Germany”; see also Hanson 239–242). The struggle between the people and the authorities for the body of the dead in this most intimate and yet also most ritualized and public of scenarios, the funeral, is echoed here in the threat of police presence alongside Mowbray at his wife’s funeral. Ceremonies designed to allow the intensity of private feeling to find a place in public life, not least by the presence of sympathetic others, are threatened here by the incursion of an unsympathetic and impersonal structure of authority. The powerful private feelings associated with grief stand in contrast to the system and the regulation of capitalism in Mowbray’s funeral account. The crowds who attend, while orderly, and specifically urged to remain so by Mowbray, as Commonweal makes clear, are also organic and unpredictable. Like grief itself, or the bodies of the dead, crowds inherently threaten established borders and structures, as Mary Fairclough argues in discussing the disruptive sympathy of the previous century (21–47) and as Matthew Beaumont suggests in his work on the Paris Commune (473–475). On the 30th of April, a week after it published Mary Mowbray’s obituary, Commonweal carried an account of her funeral, framed as commendation of those who attended it and inspiration to those who did not, as well as an opportunity to further the cause of anarchist-communism. The funeral drew together processions from different parts of the capital—some of whom were held up by train delays—but the largest group gathered, with the family, at the International Workpeople’s Club at Berner Street, where two of the mourners took the opportunity to “inform the vast crowd of our principles from the club windows” (Parker). In this charged political moment 41

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it is not only anarchists whose feelings are heard, however, but also multifarious others, present and absent: “telegrams were also read from the various groups in distant parts of England, sympathising with Mowbray in his bereavement. People belonging to every branch of advanced thought were in attendance” (Parker).The story of the funeral is used to make Mary Mowbray herself visible and grievable but also to demonstrate the geographical and intellectual reach of the movement and its historical significance. Sympathy, then, is mobilized as an outworking of grief and loss in Commonweal’s accounts of death, an active expression of human connection and equality of condition in death that works to highlight inequalities in life. Rather than being governed by the specular, it rather emphasizes a physiological sense of connection. It has its roots in a recognition of corporeal and material conditions as Marx did in his critique of political economy, which counts “the most meagre form of life as the standard” (310). Marx argues, against the political economist, that “if you live only as an economic being, you must stint the gratification of your immediate senses, as by stinting yourself on food etc” (310). Not only this, though, you must also “spare yourself all sharing of general interest, all sympathy, all trust etc if you want to be economical” (310). Sympathy in Commonweal works against an idea of meager life and represents instead a sharing of needs, concerns, and suffering that refuses the separation of the physical and structural from the emotional.

Cross-Class Sympathies, Transitional Art, and the Socialist Death Narrative Mowbray’s funeral is explicitly linked, in the opening sentence of Commonweal’s report, to the earlier death of an even less public working-class figure: Since the cold December Sunday afternoon in 1887 when the combined Socialist and Radical parties laid to rest poor Alfred Linnell, who was murdered at Trafalgar Square by the police, no such sight has been seen in east London as that which was witnessed last Saturday afternoon. (Parker) Law-writer Alfred Linnell died of police-inflicted injuries following a Trafalgar Square demonstration of the unemployed on the 13th of November 1887, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. While spectacle is important in this account, rather than working to produce individual feelings, it demands of its reader a sympathetic response that works by inserting the individual into a wider historical image of the multifarious, cross-class, and international crowd. It is not the fruitless sympathy for the dead or a sense of the “dreary and endless melancholy” of the grave that Adam Smith (9) imagines which is invited in Commonweal’s report, but an appreciation of the injustice of this death and acts of kindness for the living. Like Mowbray’s death, Linnell’s is bound up with the presence of the police in working-class radical life. Like Mowbray, he leaves children who need caring for and a penniless partner. His family, like hers, is helped financially and in terms of the “transmission of unrest” (Parker) by the middle-class socialist, artist, and writer William Morris, who defrayed the five-hundred-pound costs of Charles Mowbray’s bail so that he could attend his wife’s funeral without the threatened police escort. It is to the uses of the visual and the verbal in the creation of sympathy for Linnell’s death that I turn in this section, before returning to Mowbray’s funeral. William Morris’s presence and financial contributions run through the stories of socialist deaths in this period, suggesting the possibility of cross-class alliances and friendships not reliant on philanthropy but on an active expression of the kind of sympathy that recurs in Commonweal. He contributed not only to the expenses of Linnell’s funeral, but also to its use in the martyrology of socialism: he spoke at the law-writer’s funeral, but also swiftly wrote a poem, “A Death Song,” published in a leaflet illustrated by Walter Crane, that could be sold to raise money for Linnell’s 42

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orphans while at the same time ensuring that this personal and familial moment of grief and need becomes part of the wider cause. The transhistorical resonances of the event are emphasized by Crane’s artwork, showing a policeman on horseback striking at the prostrate Linnell, who is being supported by others; there is an echo of illustrations of 1819’s Peterloo here as well as a reconstruction of the events of Bloody Sunday, so that these very memorial items bridge the personal and the political and link past and present. They act as a kind of political “transitional object,” to borrow Donald Winnicott’s terms, enabling supporters to hold onto the personal present while encouraging them to move beyond it into the sphere of the political in their understanding of and responses to this death (103–104). Bonnie Honig argues, synthesizing aspects of the thinking of Winnicott and Hannah Arendt, that “public objects may materially and symbolically transition us between private and public, and mediate our relations with others and with ourselves as subject and citizens” (38).This commemorative and practical work of art invites the personal and private emotional response of sympathy, demonstrated in financial support but also political anger. At the same time, the public standing of Morris and Crane, middle-class artists, ensures this story becomes well-known beyond radical circles. In a more complicated sign of the eventual freeze-framing of this story as material object as well as historical sign, the ephemeral leaflet eventually becomes a collector’s item. The structure and physical configuration of Linnell’s funeral, like Mowbray’s, becomes a matter of political importance. “A Death Song” begins with an affirmation of the power of the poor in which the funeral procession itself becomes an act of defiance: What cometh here from west to east a-wending? And who are these, the marchers stern and slow? We bear the message that the rich are sending Aback to those who bade them wake and know. (Alfred Linnell 8) Morris’s archaic forms—a-wending and aback—join this event to a history of people’s stories, evoking older linguistic traditions as well the ongoing struggle of the people. At the same time the a- prefix intensifies the sense of action on the part of the people, even as they process to the funeral. The last two lines of this first stanza, which function as a chorus in following stanzas, suggest something of the action of mass sympathy: “Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, / But one and all if they would dusk the day” (8).While Morris’s status as a middle-class poet meant he was unlikely to face the kinds of death Linnell or Mowbray suffered, his consistent partnership in the project of making visible, recognizable, and publicly grievable the lives of the working class as well as their deaths made this kind of poetic construction something more than mere words. It suggests the radical possibilities of sympathy translated into communal action and represented in words through a visual image of solidarity in the form of the self-regenerating crowd. By the final stanza of the poem, another metaphor has been added to suggest specifically how Linnell’s death, although apparently senseless, contributes to the cause: Here lies the sign that we shall break our prison; Amidst the storm he won a prisoner’s rest; But in the cloudy dawn the sun arisen Brings us our day of work to win the best. (Alfred Linnell 8) Just as John Berger argues that it is necessary to read a painting not only in its frame but also “at the level of what it refers to outside it” (94), so here death is not just itself but a “sign” of something larger. The poem invites mourners to connect Linnell’s dead body, present at the funeral and 43

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represented in word and image in the leaflet, with the dead bodies of workers, forming together a critique of their conditions. At the same time death is not in itself melancholy but restful, drawing attention, then, to the “prison” (Alfred Linnell 8) of the worker’s living conditions, from which he escapes in death. There is a communal “our” in the lines of Morris’s poem, which enfolds all those who mourn Linnell’s death, working class and middle class alike, into the political act of opposition implied by reading and buying the poem (Alfred Linnell 8). Sympathy may be invoked so that it can be converted into money, a move Jaffe (16) notes is common in Victorian fictional approaches to sympathy, but it is also invoked as an invitation to solidarity and an unsettling demand for further political action in the present moment for the sake of the future. Butler argues that “we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life” (Precarious Life 34). In the case of Linnell, it was not only his obituary but the associated acts of mourning of his life and celebration of his cause in public word and song that demonstrated his grievability and made him, as an individual as well as a representative of the working class, recognizable. His presence at the political demonstration that led to his death made him part of something larger than himself and conferred on him also recognition of political significance commonly denied to the working class. The public representation of Linnell’s death negotiates a complex political solidarity that is rooted not so much in class bonds as in the willingness for both middle-class and working-class socialists to challenge inequalities across classes while making use of middle-class access to privilege to do so.

Funeral Reportage and the Circulation of Sympathy Mary Mowbray’s death is made grievable both in its own right and because of the determined sympathy it generates across the radical political spectrum, evident in attendance at the funeral. At the same time the funeral itself becomes a “sign” as Morris describes Linnell’s (Alfred Linnell 8), of the enduring life and health of the politicized working class and its cause by generating interest and comment beyond its own circle, in this case in the mainstream press. That interest, where it expresses sympathy, is in turn fed back into Commonweal to enable readers to see the reach of their movement. W. B. Parker’s report of the funeral for Commonweal begins with the comparison to Linnell’s funeral and gives an account of the comparative size of Mowbray’s, in which “large crowds of people lined Commercial Road, and literally packed Berner Street from end to end” (Parker). After setting the scene, the writer hands over the account to the Pall Mall Gazette, reproducing the story verbatim from that popular though increasingly conservative metropolitan daily with the note that a large amount of space was given to the proceedings by the capitalist press, who were, on the whole, sympathetic on this occasion, although there was an amount of misrepresentation.The best account was that of “John Laws” in the Pall Mall Gazette, which we reprint. (Parker) John Law was the pseudonym of Margaret Harkness, middle-class socialist sympathizer and novelist whose work had been published by the PMG under its previous radical-liberal editor W. T. Stead in the 1880s and continued to feature in the early 1890s while the paper moved slowly to a more conservative position. The working-class-owned and -edited newspaper Commonweal borrows its account of the Mowbray funeral, then, from the observations of the middle-class press. The Pall Mall Gazette article does indeed offer a sympathetic account, guided by “an anarchist friend” (J.L. 1) and telling the tale of the funeral from the perspective of anarchists gathered in the club. In this way the writer can transgress the boundary between outside observer and inside sympathizer. The article begins 44

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by reporting an urgent conversation among Mowbray’s comrades, noting that if money was not produced to pay him, the undertaker would not even take the coffin as far as the grave; pleas for help are sent out and very quickly the reply comes back, “Morris has gone bail for him! Grand old Morris!” (J.L. 1). In these moments before the funeral procession begins, Law notes that the slogans on the wall of the clubroom include not only “no monopoly” and “no masters, no slaves” but also “no war”; this last slogan perhaps serves to challenge the prevalent contemporary depiction of anarchists as both suspiciously foreign and necessarily violent, an association particularly highlighted in recent work by Constance Bantman on the French anarchist presence in London (103–117). At the same time it works in tension with an unfinished conversation the article reports with a young man who responds to Law’s account of anarchism as peaceful, “the sort of thing Edward Carpenter advocates,” by defending the necessity of bombs as “the only weapons workers can use against governments” (J.L. 1). This snippet of conversation, interrupted significantly by the arrival of the Paris Communard Louise Michel, works to maintain unrest in the accounts of the funeral, leaving unanswered the question of which form of anarchism will in fact “come up” (J.L. 1). On reading a slogan on the wall averring “we would rather have your help than your money,” Law asks what kind of help the anarchists would like: “‘Well, sympathy and propaganda’ was the reply” (J.L. 1). The ghost of the anarchist debate about propaganda by deed or by word haunts this phrase and again disruptively links this moment to others in recent history, while affirming the connection of sympathy with action of one kind or another. When the funeral procession began, the PMG report notes, Mowbray and his family were in a carriage behind the hearse, paid for by the comrades and followed by a three-column procession of friends and supporters. As Julie-Marie Strange notes, “following a coffin was a simple but effective demonstration of neighbours’ sympathy with the bereaved” (122). At the same time, the presence of respectful standers-by as well as invited crowds was an indication of the social significance of the deceased: “Neighbours who came to watch funeral processions were not simply indulging their curiosity, they were expressing sympathy and (re)forging an idea of community” (122). Strange goes on to note that “participation in a cortège could also assume vague spiritual significance, the number of participants indicating a measure of the deceased’s ‘goodness’” (123). Here, however, the large crowds who attended Mrs. Mowbray’s funeral signify the importance of her death not in terms of her “goodness” but of the extent of communal power and anger. While Bantman suggests that the crowd came primarily to see well-known international anarchist figures such as Louise Michel (83), it seems equally likely that the combination of Mowbray’s historical associations, her current circumstances, and the poignant timing of her death galvanized widespread support across the socialist, anarchist, and European refugee communities. The PMG report stops with the beginning of the funeral procession and Commonweal picks up the story there in its own words, noting that the middle-class British secularist Touzeau Parris gave an address by the grave focusing on love: anarchists, he said, toiled “for the love of mankind; not for love of kings or those who rule, but the love of those who made the work of the world and beautified it” (Parker).The Pall Mall Gazette report of the event notes the singing of the Marseillaise as the procession sets off, while W. P. Parker’s completion of the story in Commonweal notes that the Marseillaise was sung at the graveside, as was William Morris’s rousing song,“No Master” (Parker). International solidarity in the cause of equality and national class solidarity are both present in these songs, staples of socialist and anarchist meetings. On the Commonweal page following this account of Mary Mowbray’s funeral is Walter Crane’s illustration, “Labour’s May Day,” showing workers across the world uniting around a globe bearing a banner that reads “Solidarity of Labour.” The significance of Mowbray’s position in the wider movement of radical politics, as well as contemporary anxieties about the threatening potential of crowds of anarchists and socialists is evident in the dissemination of news of the funeral in the mainstream press.Two stories in the Times of the 25th of April 1892 make mention of it, in widely different tones: an account of the funeral itself is coherent, dispassionate, and neutral in tone. It notes the police presence, the condemnation of 45

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police action by the mourners, the general peacefulness of the procession, and the emphasis on love by Parris Touzeau (“Anarchist Demonstration” 7).Yet two pages further on in the same newspaper is an article on planned May Day celebrations by anarchists that depicts them as rabble-rousers, bent on planning any “mischievous act” possible and engaging in “disorderly conduct” (“Untitled” 9). It links Mowbray’s funeral with these preparations, dismissing the event and its participants in a tone of lofty satirical disapproval. While Bantman makes mention of this article as evidence of “the alarm caused by the sheer sight of the companions” (87), the reality seems a little more complicated by the close proximity of two very different articles; there is, I suggest, some degree of sympathy in the first article, evident in its clear and meticulous recording of events.Yet its close proximity to the second article destabilizes its meanings. Both articles record that at the front of the procession were comrades carrying a banner bearing the words “Remember Chicago,” a reference to the recent arrest and execution of anarchist activists in that city. The satirical article stops at this and uses it to suggest it could serve as “a welltimed warning to the crowd about the fate of Anarchists of the more advanced practical sort” (“Untitled” 9); the first, however, in keeping with its careful recording, goes on to give the full text of the banner, taken from the last words of executed Chicago anarchist August Spies: “there will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today” (“Anarchist Demonstration” 7). This banner, not mentioned in the PMG report, functions as a transitional object of sorts, carrying the feelings of the wide range of British radicals and workers present at the funeral, as well as any sympathetic readers, from the private griefs and sympathies of one woman’s funeral to the wider political cause of inequality across the world. The banner and its reportage in the national press link Mowbray’s story specifically to stories of political martyrdom, represented most significantly in the fate of the Chicago anarchists, put to death the same month as Linnell died of his police-inflicted injuries in London.

Martyrs, Heroes, and Everyday Commemoration The Chicago anarchists come second only to the Commune of Paris in the hierarchy of radical late nineteenth-century accounts of sacrificial suffering, and the records of their deaths stand as a counterpoint to the two final individual deaths I consider in the constellation of martyrs and everyday heroes associated with Commonweal: those of the Leeds photographer and journalist, Tom Maguire, and William Morris. Chicago’s Haymarket eight, as they were also known, were far away, and their deaths, as represented in Commonweal, arose not simply as a matter of poverty and structural injustice but directly out of interventionist state violence, although in complicated and drawn-out circumstances. At a demonstration in Haymarket Street in Chicago on the 4th of May 1886 to protest against increased working hours and police brutality against striking workers, a bomb was thrown into the police ranks at the end of the peaceful protest; it was not clear who threw the bomb and socialist papers reported suspicions of police agents at work. Seven policemen were killed and as a result eight men were arrested, seven of whom were sentenced to death and one to transportation; of the eight, one killed himself painfully in prison, three pleaded for clemency and were granted it and four, who refused to plead, were eventually hanged on the 11th of November 1887, just two days before the London demonstration against unemployment that led to the death of Linnell. A Commonweal article of the 12th of November 1887 notes that the “quick sympathy shown by London workmen for the Chicago martyrs is a most significant sign of the increase of both solidarity and revolutionary feeling amongst the proletariat” (Wilson 307). That “quick sympathy,” with its suggestion of a speedy and living emotional response, demonstrated in petitions, letters, and protests on behalf of the condemned men, does not prevent their deaths, but works rather, this article suggests, to develop a virtuous circle of reinforced revolutionary feeling in those who act upon their sympathy. At the same time the deaths of the executed men, like the deaths of Paris 46

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Communards, serve to create an unfinished history of martyrdom, “an imagined community of martyrs, in a broader tradition of heroism and injustice” as Christoph de Spiegeleer notes (194), which creates a debt on the part of those left alive while also providing a framework for understanding other deaths. The Chicago anarchists are represented as martyrs in Commonweal not only because of the injustice done to them but also because, given the opportunity to plead for clemency, they refused and so became worldwide symbols of men who, as the 19th of November 1887 article notes twice, willingly “died for their belief ” (S. 369). Commonweal’s conventionally black-framed front-page notice of the death of five of the anarchists and the imprisonment of the others draws attention to their individuality, naming them one by one, but the news story that accompanies it, penned by the Russian revolutionary Stepniak, explicitly compares them with early Christian martyrs in Rome, adding that they died for “the only cause in which men can now be heroes and martyrs as of old” (S. 369). It goes on to outline the result of these deaths for its readers: to the resolute a new edge added to their stern hatred of class rule and its evil fruits; to the half-hearted a clear warning of the risk they run, a call to choose between unhonoured safety and the dangers of truth; to the dullard or dilettante a rude awakening to the harsh reality of the war we wage and the penalty that must be paid for taking part therein. (S. 369) There is a striking similarity in the suggested distribution of different kinds of affect with the statement of intent set out in Commonweal’s opening edition: “to awaken the sluggish, to strengthen the waverers, to instruct the seekers after truth” (“Introductory” 1). Not sorrow but strength of purpose, then, is invited in Stepniak’s account of the effect of these deaths; the focus is not sympathy for the men or their families so much as the effect, as though by physiological connection, on the reader.The geographical distance of the story allows it to function as a call to self-examination and commitment in the light of inspirational self-sacrifice. Closer to home, ideas of martyrdom or sainthood are specifically disavowed in the interests of drawing attention to the real conditions of life. It is the repeated losses of the young and poor that form the most urgent call to active sympathy across class boundaries in the socialist and anarchist press. Tom Maguire, socialist poet, journalist, editor, and photographer, was a Leeds-based member of the Socialist League who died in penury in 1895, aged twenty-nine. He was memorialized through the loving words of fellow socialists recorded in newspaper obituaries and in the introductions to two posthumous collections of his writings. Commonweal had closed for lack of funds by 1895, but Keir Hardie, leader of the Independent Labour Party, noted, in an article in the Labour Leader, that Maguire would be remembered both as a poet and because “all that he had and was were given freely to the service of the people” although “the reward, as usual, was a life of poverty and a premature grave.” He goes on to offer a private condolence, recognizing the personal, individual value of Maguire’s life, noting that he wishes to: “express my sincerest sympathy with his widowed mother in her great affliction” (Hardie 6). John Bruce Glasier, writing about Maguire in his introduction to the posthumously published Machine-Room Chants, specifically repudiates mythologizing frameworks for his death. Maguire was “in no wise a saint,” he notes, but instead “beloved, wholeheartedly beloved of his friends—a merit that saints have seldom or never attained” (Glasier 9). Maguire’s death is presented neither as pitiable nor heroic but its causes in poverty are unflinchingly presented. Glasier’s account, along with Hardie’s, highlights the necessity of bringing about a political state that might match with equalities in life the equality of feeling that is recognized in grief. Hardie’s article goes on to describe how “A portion of William Morris’s ‘A Dream of John Ball’ was read” by Alf Mattison, another Leeds socialist, again making the personal meaningful in the wider context of the suffering and death of workers across the ages with this use of Morris’s tale 47

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of the 1381 Peasants’ Uprising (Hardie 6). Like the singing of the Marseillaise at Mowbray’s funeral, this reading also makes the remembrance of the dead a part of the wider program of meetings and commemorations of the political movement: portions of “A Dream of John Ball” were read aloud for inspiration at other gatherings of socialists, as the Marseillaise was routinely sung. Morris himself sent a substantial two pounds for the support of Maguire’s widow, although he was not well enough to attend the funeral. Walter Crane designed and hand-painted a memorial card for Tom Maguire as he had done for Alfred Linnell, and as indeed was not uncommon among socialists in remembering the working-class dead (see “A Beautiful Memorial Card” 1). The interaction of middle-class sympathizers using their talents in the remembrance of the working-class dead serves as a microcosm of the equal future they imagined, in which each person would contribute their skills for the good of others. William Morris, firmly upper-middle-class, artist, poet, and writer, was at the center of this practically expressed capacity for what Leela Gandhi describes, in the context of anti-colonialism at work in late-Victorian socialism, as “the politics of friendship,” in which friendship is “the most comprehensive philosophical signifier for all those invisible affective gestures that refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation” (9–10). On Morris’s own death in October 1896, the Londonbased journal Justice ran two columns of obituaries and memorials. The column divisions on these pages are in thick black lines, and there is a note commenting that the editor has received “far more letters” than could be published: the conventional mourning frame points explicitly beyond itself to the wider significance of this death (“William Morris” 5).The front page of the same newspaper carried a black-framed advertisement for a “Public Meeting in Memory of William Morris” to be held on Tuesday the 13th of October, with a list of illustrious invited speakers including Edward Burne-Jones, the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin, Walter Crane, and the exiled Austrian socialist Andreas Scheu. Like Mary Mowbray’s funeral, Morris’s death provides an opportunity for the sympathetic gathering of local, national, and international radicals and generates speeches and poems of sympathy combined with calls to action. While the memorials for Morris are extensive, commensurate with his leading role in the socialist movement and founding role in the Socialist League and Hammersmith Socialist Society, as well as his support of and inspiration to others, they are not otherwise very different from the memorials for other socialists of his day. He is not accorded greater significance because of his fame as a writer, artist, and poet than those whose lives were less widely known. As the trade unionist John Leslie writes in his poem “A Proletarian’s Tribute”: Oh! noble singer—“wrath and hope and wonder” Arose, as soared your flight, and peal and peal Proclaimed through silver trump in tones of thunder, The Rights of Labour in the Commonweal. For this we love you, and for this revere you. (Leslie 5) Morris’s championing of the cause of the worker is offered to the readers of Justice as an inspiration for their own commitment. As he himself commented at the funeral of the Russian revolutionary, Stepniak, “feeling is more important than eloquence” (Burgess 5). It is Morris’s capacity for fellowfeeling and the actions as well as the stories that arose from it for which he is remembered. Socialist death notices, then, affirm the structural boundaries and borders between people of different classes while using the dissolutions of grief and sorrow to affirm the power of sympathy and solidarity between classes and nations, the capacity for what Gandhi calls, discussing Edward Carpenter, “radical kinship” (36), in the cause of justice. They draw on familiar conventions in presentation and in language, but rather than replacing the personal with the political, they make links between deep personal sympathy for the bereaved, sorrow for the many untimely deaths they 48

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record, and the uses of those deaths to drum up support for the greater cause of socialism and anarchism. They insist on making recognizable both the individual worker and the oppression of the working class. In this way the cause of socialism itself becomes associated not only with belief but with “structures of feeling,” to borrow Williams’s term, “operating in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity”—here in the processes of private and public mourning (64). The cause derives its power not only from demonstrations of its justice, but from the mobilization of specific emotions of loss and longing for structures of society that have not yet come into being, and of sympathy that foreshadows in action a state of society in which all are equal.

Works Cited “A Beautiful Memorial Card.” Justice, 4 Nov. 1898, p. 1. Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford UP, 2007. “Anarchist Demonstration in London.” The Times, 25 Apr. 1892, p. 7. Bantman, Constance. The French Anarchists in London 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. Liverpool UP, 2013. Beaumont, Matthew. “Cacotopianism, The Paris Commune, and England’s Anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870–1900.” ELH, vol. 73, no. 2, 2006, pp. 465–487. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 2008. Burgess, Joseph. “Sergius Stepniak.” Clarion, 4 Jan. 1896, p. 5. Butler, Judith. Frames of War:When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009. ———. Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence.Verso, 2004. The Committee. “Comrades and Friends.” Commonweal, Apr. 1892. Cores, George. “Death of a Leeds Comrade,” Commonweal, 24 Oct. 1891, p. 134. Crane, Walter. Tom Maguire. Glass Plate Slide. Brotherton Library Special Collections, University of Leeds, 1895. De Spiegeleer, Christoph. “The Blood of the Martyrs is the Seed of Progress: The Role of Martyrdom in Socialist Death Culture in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1880–1940.” Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying, vol. 19, no. 2, 2014, pp. 184–205. Eliot, George. “The Natural History of German Life.” The Essays of George Eliot, Sheppard, 1883, pp. 141–177. Fairclough, Mary. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture. Cambridge UP, 2013. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship. Duke, 2006. Glasier, John Bruce. “Tom Maguire.” Machine Room Chants: By the Late Tom Maguire, London: Labour Leader, 1895, pp. 9–10. Hanson, Ingrid. “Socialist Identity and the Poetry of European Revolution in Commonweal, 1885–1890.” Poetry, Politics and Pictures: Culture and Identity in Europe 1840–1914, edited by Ingrid Hanson, et al., Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 225–246. Hardie, Keir. “Tom Maguire.” Labour Leader, 16 Mar. 1895, p. 6. Honig, Bonnie. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Fordham UP, 2017. Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Cornell UP, 2000. Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford UP, 1996. J. L. “An Anarchist Funeral.” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 Apr. 1892, pp. 1–2. Leslie, John. “A Proletarian’s Funeral.” Justice, 10 Oct. 1896, p. 5. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1843–1844, vol. 3. Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 229–326. Marx Aveling, Eleanor. “Germany.” Commonweal, Sept. 1885, p. 83. ———. “Record of the International Movement.” Commonweal, Mar. 1885, pp. 15–16. Morris, William. “A Death Song.” Alfred Linnell: Killed in Trafalgar Square. Richard Lambert, 1887, pp. 5–8. ———. “Introductory.” Commonweal, Feb. 1885, p. 1. N. “No Rent Meeting in Victoria Park.” Commonweal, 1 Aug. 1891, p. 87. “Obituary.” Commonweal, 23 Apr. 1892. Parker, W.B. “Mrs Mowbray’s Funeral.” Commonweal, 30 Apr. 1892. S. “In Memoriam.” Commonweal, 19 Nov. 1887, p. 369. “Seamen’s Strike.” Commonweal, 9 Mar. 1889, p. 78. Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and on the Origins of Language. Henry G. Bohn, 1863. Strange, Julie-Marie. Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge UP, 2005. “Tom Maguire’s Funeral.” Labour Leader, 16 Mar. 1895, p. 9.

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Ingrid Hanson “Untitled.” The Times, 25 Apr. 1892, p. 9. “William Morris.” Justice, 10 Oct. 1896, p. 5. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution. Broadview Press, 2001. Wilson, C. “The Condemned Anarchists.” Commonweal, 12 Nov. 1887, p. 307. Winnicott, D. W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Reading Winnicott, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce, Routledge, 2011, pp. 99–126. W. S. “Capitalistic Theft and Brutality.” Commonweal, 26 June 1886, p. 102.

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4 SOCIAL CLASS AND DEVASTATED LAND IN YANG DANTAO’S SCIENCE FICTION Hua Li

This essay focuses on the Chinese science fiction writer Yang Dantao’s (b. 1970) short story “Uranium Flowers” (“You hua” 2004). My exegesis of the story highlights two analytical approaches. The first approach delves into the complex relations between a literary text, its ideology, and material production; the second approach explores how environmentalism can complicate class divisions. I will utilize Terry Eagleton’s Marxist materialist literary criticism and Rob Nixon’s environmental criticism to undertake these two analytical approaches. In addressing contemporary environmental injustice afflicted on third world countries, Nixon urges literary scholars to build a “creative bridgework between environmental literary studies and social science” (31). My exegesis of Yang’s story from both perspectives of Marxist material literary criticism and ecocriticism is one of these attempts. Yang Dantao only published science fiction during the years of 2002–2004, including “The First Kiss” (“Chuwen” 2002), “Destination” (“Guisu” 2002), “Sky Sound” (“Tian lai” 2002), “Who Am I” (“Wo shi shui” 2002), and “Uranium Flowers.” However, his short story “Uranium Flowers” is one of the first science fiction narratives in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that focuses solely on the dystopian world after a disastrous nuclear war, along with the politics surrounding nuclear power. The story relates how the human survivors of a disastrous nuclear war have split into two distinct ethnicities: the uranium tribe (you zu) and uranium-lacking tribe (qiong you zu). The bodies of people in the uranium tribe are replete with uranium. The uranium people view the differences within humankind as due more to class differences than to ethnic differences. They see themselves as a privileged class in comparison with members of the uranium-lacking tribe. They live a devout religious life, abstain from labor, and scorn the materialistic pursuits of the uranium-lacking tribe. They worship the File One God, who supposedly created the scriptures of the File One cult. The greatest honor for a member of the uranium tribe is to be chosen as a saint and to sacrifice oneself to God at the time of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Hoping to become precisely this sort of saint, the young protagonist Ata undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in hopes of meeting the File One God. After his arrival there, he gradually awakens to a nightmarish realization that his tribe amounts to nothing more than an expendable source of energy for the uranium-lacking tribe. The File One cult’s sacrificial rites turn out to have been a clever ruse concocted by a physicist from the uranium-lacking tribe who wrote the File One scriptures and founded its cult.The insidiously concealed aim of this devious cult has been to brainwash the uranium people into voluntarily offering up their uranium-laden bodies and thus their lives to the uranium-lacking people’s nuclear power station. Their sacrificial rite of throwing themselves 51

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upon an altar that is a fuel intake vat adds enriched uranium to the nuclear power reactor so as to generate more electricity for the uranium-lacking tribe to use. “Uranium Flowers” is an example of post-apocalyptic fiction. It reveals the author’s dystopian vision of how twisted human society might become after a nuclear war. Post-apocalyptic science fiction became popular in the West after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the ensuing Cold War nuclear weapons standoff between the US and the USSR during the 1950s and 1960s. In their seminal study of Western science fiction, Keith M. Booker and AnneMarie Thomas point out that given the Cold War political climate of the twenty or so years after World War II, it is not surprising that many of the most important science fiction works of the period dealt in one way or another with the possibility of nuclear holocaust and its aftermath. (“Apocalyptic” 52) For example, Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) describes “an agrarian, deeply technophobic society that develops after a nuclear war” ( Booker and Thomas, “Apocalyptic” 54). Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) has been acclaimed as “perhaps the most critically respected post-holocaust novel of the 1950s” because it “suggests an extremely dark and pessimistic vision of human civilization in a cyclic history” (Booker and Thomas, “Apocalyptic” 57). Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) is a satirical post-holocaust novel with utopian elements serving as a powerful social commentary on contemporary American society. Since the 1960s, “post-disaster fiction began to focus less on nuclear holocaust and more on the possible disastrous consequences” of more mundane dangers such as “pollution and overpopulation” (Booker and Thomas, “Apocalyptic” 60). For example, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966) is about the consequences of overpopulation; David Brin’s Earth (1961) deals with global environmental degradation; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future trilogy of Forty Days of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) explores the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. In addition to these works either directly depicting catastrophic nuclear war or the aftermath of the more mundane threats of environmental degradation and overpopulation, there are also some works dealing with socio-cultural problems such as language and class conflicts. For example, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) and Will Self ’s The Book of Dave (2006) are both about the devolved language of a post-apocalyptic England. In PRC science fiction, post-apocalyptic narratives lagged at least two decades behind Western science fiction. Due to its Cold War ideological framework, the Mao era (1949–1976) nuclear science focused solely upon nuclear bombs and other military applications such as nuclear-powered submarines; civilian applications such as nuclear power plants barely received any support. The PRC failed to build or even design a single nuclear power plant during the Mao era. In contrast, the post-Mao leadership under Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) implemented a much more balanced approach to nuclear science which saw the PRC design and build its first two nuclear power plants at Dayawan and Qinshan in the 1980s at the same time as maintaining its nuclear weapons program. This was the setting for fear of a nuclear disaster among the public and the appearance of this theme in PRC science fiction narratives in the 1980s. For example, in Zheng Wenguang’s novel about terraforming Descendant of Mars (Zhanshen de houyi 1984), a team of explorers from Earth speculates that an ancient Martian civilization once advanced to the stage of generating its electricity through nuclear fusion. However, the civilization declined due to changes in the natural environment, nuclear explosions, and war. Much like that ancient Martian civilization, the team of explorers also builds nuclear power stations on Mars to produce energy, but frigid cold fronts and violent windstorms sweep across Mars, and finally set off a nuclear explosion.The human colonists are thereby forced to retreat to their underground bunkers. In another example, Hai Zi’s Milky Way Award-winning narrative “The Remote Memory” (“Yaoyuan de jiyi” 1988) depicts the severe 52

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environmental degradation caused by nuclear pollution (Hai Zi 24–29). In the Chinese New Wave period, from the late 1990s to the early years of the twenty-first century, nuclear themes in PRC science fiction have been complicated by such elements as environmental justice and activism, social stratification, and class division. For example, there is one episode in Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning (Qiuzhuang shandian 2005) in which some extreme environmentalists hold some children hostage in a nuclear power plant in an attempt to force the government to shut down the plant (Liu 241–256). Yang Dantao’s first science fiction short story “Destination” (2002) portrays the fearful disasters that ensue from the irresponsible use of nuclear weapons in the near future. Although “Uranium Flowers” reveals the author’s interest in a post-apocalyptic world, the story is not a serious attempt to envision what life and society might be like in the aftermath of a disastrous nuclear war. Instead, the story employs a futuristic post-apocalyptical setting and its vision of alienated uranium people to explore the relationship between text and ideology, social class and material production, and environmental justice. Terry Eagleton has argued that a literary production can contribute to a given society’s general mode of production, and the society’s general ideology can metaphase into the literary text’s aesthetic ideology. My analysis of “Uranium Flowers” will demonstrate the applicability of Eagleton’s above-mentioned argument. In addition, I shall argue that the narratorial voice of “Uranium Flowers” also betrays the author’s suspicion that religion facilitates class exploitation through its scriptures and ritual practices.The uranium-lacking people’s exploitation of the uranium people as an expendable natural resource resembles an important issue in the contemporary world: developed countries’ exploitation of the natural resources in various developing countries and the negative environmental impact upon the people in these regions. As a result, “Uranium Flowers” critiques environmental injustice in the contemporary globalized world.

How Religion Can Obscure Ideology of Class and Materiality Literature has often functioned as an instrument of the party-state’s authority under Maoist rule in the PRC. As early as Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao advocated that writers should adopt the unadorned diction of workers, soldiers, and farmers, and write on behalf of the working class. This led to “language manipulation for the purpose of carrying out thought control and political persecution” (Feuerwerker 40). Many critical studies have explored the conflict-ridden yet reciprocal relationship between political power and literary legitimacy in the Chinese Communist Party-ruled PRC. In their book Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (1994), David Apter and Tony Saich describe how Mao used speeches, articles, discussions, and denunciation meetings to weave a sort of ideological and linguistic straitjacket for Chinese writers during the Yan’an period (1937–1949). By doing so, Mao gradually established a new type of political discourse and constructed his own version of history. In the first thirty years after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, “each political campaign, each moment of revolutionary history, produced its own mass of slogans and documents to recite and study” (Feuerwerker 43). This fact further reveals the Communist Party’s heightened recognition of the power of language. The literary works of the Mao era are not only replete with the everyday language of workers, soldiers, and farmers, but also include a considerable amount of formulaic and party-centered ideological rhetoric. Zhao Shuli’s series of stories set in farming villages,Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge 1958), and Hao Ran’s Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyang tian 1964–1966) and Golden Road (Jinguang dadao 1972–1974) exemplify this tendency. This fetish reached its summit during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when the citizenry of China “felt compelled to memorize, and thus internalize, ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong’ as the script for every aspect of life and thought” (Feuerwerker 44). It was not new for the Chinese populace to memorize quotations from influential people and even embed these lines in their own writings and daily utterances. One prominent example is that many pupils in pre-modern China were required to memorize Confucian classics such as Classic of Poetry (c. 771–475 bc) and 53

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Analects (c. 475–221 bc). By h ­ aving memorized these canonical texts line by line, the populace would frequently apply the moral implications of a given quotation to circumstances in their daily lives as a sort of normative or behavioral guideline.Traditionally, the major motivation behind this process of canonical citation was to elevate one’s moral self-awareness. However, during the Mao era, citations of quotations from Mao served the party-state’s imperatives for bureaucratic control and political terror. In contrast with a highly selective use of canonical Confucian citations in pre-modern times, Mao’s China witnessed the everyday and even ubiquitous quoting of Mao’s sayings. Mao’s quotations were forcefully drummed into the populace’s daily interactions. For example, a person buying pork during the Mao era would come in a store with an utterance like “‘Serve the people.’ Comrade, could I have two pounds of pork, please?” The store clerk would hand over the chunk of pork and say “‘A revolution is not a dinner party.’ That makes 1.85 yuan altogether” (Schoenhals 3). A customer who did not cite a saying from Mao’s quotations ran a serious risk of incurring accusations of disloyalty toward Mao. Mao’s pervasive control over the populace’s daily discourse thus exceeded by far the influence of Confucian classics on everyday conversations in pre-modern China. However, in the post-Mao era (1976–1983), many PRC writers have consciously tried to rid themselves of the fetters of Mao’s rhetoric and have deliberately differentiated their writings from party-centered literature by calling readers’ attention to the narrative process and to the ironic and twisted ideological language of the Mao era, such as in Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle (Zai xiyu zhong huhan 1991) and Wang Shuo’s novella Wild Beasts (Dongwu xiongmeng 1992). The close connection between ideology and literature during the Mao era is not only reflected in mainstream fiction, but also in science fiction. From the very beginning of science fiction’s introduction to China through translation during the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals often used it as a tool for spreading scientific knowledge and modern thought throughout China. In the Mao era, science fiction was utilized to popularize advanced science and technology among young readers, thereby helping them to transform themselves into new socialist people. In the post-Mao era, PRC science fiction responded to the Party’s imperative to focus on achieving the Four Modernizations of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology by the end of the twentieth century. In contrast, during the ongoing New Wave period (from the late 1990s to the present) of Chinese science fiction, some PRC science fiction writers have composed narratives that satirize the party-state’s rhetoric and ideology. For example, both Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnation of a Giant” (“Zhuansheng de juren” 2006) and Han Song’s novel Subway (Ditie 2011) question the PRC government’s strategy of fast economic development and write about “unlimited development and its disastrous effects,” or even “the disastrous transformation of the myth of development into a dystopian nightmare” (Song 93–94). Chan Koochung wrote the novel The Fat Years (Shengshi zhongguo 2013 2009) by “observing the PRC government’s response to the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 and its policy of imposing an authoritarian harmony on society” (Li 652). In the same vein, Yang Dantao’s “Uranium Flowers” deals with ideological control masked by manipulative religious dogma. In his imagined future,Yang makes a profound reflection on the relation between literary text, ideological control, religion, and material production. In his study of literary criticism and ideology,Terry Eagleton sets out the major constituents of a “Marxist theory of literature:”“General Mode of Production (GMP), Literary Mode of Production (LMP), General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI), Aesthetic Ideology (AI), and Text” (44). He illustrates the interlocking relationships among these constituents by using the example of coexistence of the “oral” LMP nurtured by the powerful intellectual caste of the filí and the written LMP developed by “amateur” producers in the sixth- and seventh-century Ireland. He argues that every literary text in some sense internalizes its social relations of production—that very text intimates by its very conventions the way it is to be consumed, encodes within itself 54

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its own ideology of how, by whom and for whom it was produced. Every text obliquely posits putative readers, defining its producibility in terms of a certain capacity for consumption. (48) When discussing the relationship between the literary mode of production and the general mode of production in developed capitalist social formations, he points out that LMP is a particular substructure of the GMP. “The LMP represents a specific division of labor determined by the character and stage of development of the GMP, becoming more specialized and diverse as the GMP develops” (Eagleton 49). “Uranium Flowers” complicates Eagleton’s argument by adding religious elements to the mix of literary production and society’s general production, along with making literary production crucial to general production.The story reveals that “the most significant relation of LMP to GMP is that of the LMP’s function in the reproduction and expansion of the GMP” (Eagleton 49). To examine this hypothesis, we will first look at the social setting of the story’s post-apocalyptic world. As the narrative begins, the catastrophic nuclear war is nothing more than a distant memory. The humans who survived that war have built a new civilization over the ashes of the past civilization. People living in high-radiation zones have adapted to their environment by developing immunity to fairly high levels of radiation. Their key staple foods include the flowers and roots of uranium trees, which are rich in both uranium and starch. In contrast, people living in low-radiation zones have evolved into uranium-lacking people who have no immunity to elevated levels of radiation. Moreover, the uranium-lacking people rely on a nuclear power station bequeathed to them by the previous civilization for their energy needs. Both ethnic groups have inherited the belligerent nature of the people from the extinct civilization and have thus entangled themselves in endless wars. After the uranium-lacking people win one of these wars, one of their physicists and a director of the National Research Institute named Dr. Strone predicts that their tribe will face a crisis of uranium depletion in the near future. Their uranium supply can continue to fuel their nuclear power station for another two hundred years at the most. However, they have not yet developed the technological wherewithal to extract fuel-grade uranium from uranium ore. Without electric power, they would no longer be able to survive in the harsh natural environment—nor would they stand a chance in future wars with the uranium people. Dr. Strone decides to discover a way to save his tribe from such a bitter fate. He soon concludes that uranium people themselves will be the uranium-lacking people’s only future source of uranium fuel within a couple of hundred years. The main problem for Dr. Strone is to find a way of persuading uranium people to voluntarily give up their bodies and lives to provide fuel for his own tribe’s nuclear power station. As mentioned above, Dr. Strone’s solution is to write and promote a piece of literary scripture for the uranium people entitled “File One,” which would lure them to donate their bodies as nuclear fuel in the guise of a sacred sacrifice. From this point on, the literary production of “File One” becomes a crucial part of the overall economic production within the uranium-lacking realm. As the producer of this sacred literary text, Dr. Strone occupies a key space within the social relations of his society’s general mode of production. As a physicist and the director of the National Research Institute, Dr. Strone is one of the “social functionaries occupying a legally enshrined, privileged status within the social formation, exercising extensive ideological influence over it” (Eagleton 50). Much as Eagleton describes the case of filí in early Ireland, we can observe a peculiarly visible homology between the social relations of LMP and GMP. Dr. Strone’s “function as [one of the] literary producers is effectively coterminous with [his] function within the social relations of [uranium-lacking society] as whole” (Eagleton 50). Dr. Strone is a professional ideologue for his society. Consequently, his authorial ideology is effectively homologous with the 55

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dominant ideology of his society at this historical juncture. Eagleton uses “general ideology” to refer to a dominant ideological formation, which is “constituted by a relatively coherent set of ‘discourses’ of values, representations, and beliefs realized in certain material apparatuses and related to the structures of material production” (54). He defines “authorial ideology” as “the effect of the author’s specific mode of biographical insertion into GI, a mode of insertion overdetermined by a series of distinct factors: social class, sex, nationality, religion, and geographical region” (58). In “Uranium Flowers,” the general ideology in the uranium-lacking society is to pursue a peaceful and affluent material life that depends upon an ample supply of uranium.The cornerstone of Dr. Strone’s authorial ideology is a tool for persuading uranium people to voluntarily supply uranium to the nuclear power station. Therefore, he infuses his literary text with his authorial ideology: he preaches that all respectable uranium people ought to pursue a spiritual life and ought to look down upon any uranium-lacking people who pursue worldly or materialistic goals instead. In this value system he designs for the uranium people, the latter no longer desire to fight against or even stand up to uranium-lacking people. Dr. Strone believes what he does is not only for the benefit of uranium-lacking people, but also for the entirety of humankind, because his File One ideology will result in an end to war between the two tribes. Once Dr. Strone has completed and manufactured his File One scripture, the uranium people become his target readership. The File One scripture brainwashes most of the uranium people to become willing to sacrifice themselves on an altar that transforms their bodies into uranium fuel for the nuclear power plant. In this process, Dr. Strone is not only the producer of the key literary text, but also functions as a unit of white-collar labor within the general productive apparatus in his society. In this way, the literary text of the File One scripture contributes to the energy production of the uranium-lacking tribe. Literary production has thus been integrated into the general mode of production as a specific branch of general commodity production. Uranium people who perform their sacrifices become a key part of the forces of general production. “Uranium Flowers” demonstrates how religion can function in a pattern of materialistic utilitarianism. In his study of science fiction and religion, Farah Mendlesohn comments on “the materialistic utilitarianism” of religion in Western science fiction narratives and indicates that many authors use religion as “the set dressing of alien theatres” (266). In many alien narratives, the advanced alien “displays religious belief ” at a surface level but has “encoded actual fact in ways which humans misunderstand” (Mendlesohn 266). For example, Martians use this tactic in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1960). Asimov and Heinlein “associate religion with the uncivilized in the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s” in “Nightfall” (1941) and Orphans of the Sky (1963) respectively (Mendlesohn 266). In such post-holocaust fiction as Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), “Science is recreated as religious ritual in a devastated America, and it is the ossification of liturgy which ensures the survival of knowledge, but the association of religion with intellectual degradation remains intact” (Mendlesohn 266). Some other works, such as Robert Heinlein’s novella If This Goes On— (1940) and John Barnes’s Sin of Origin (1988) and Mary Doria Russell’s Children of God (1998), also present religions and missionaries and convey an overriding message: “Religion is not only dangerous and misleading, but sentient beings are generally too weak-willed to reject it” (Mendlesohn 267). Similar to the above-mentioned Western science fiction narratives, “Uranium Flowers” also portrays religion as deceptive and utilitarian. Dr. Strone’s literary text is presented to the uranium people in the form of religious scripture. His ideology is inserted in the literary text and expressed in religious language. After reading Dr. Strone’s fake religious scripture, most uranium people start to believe in the holiness of sacrificing themselves on an altar near the nuclear power plant. The uranium tribe is solely ruled by a “sacred” text that is a mythical subterfuge. Religious ceremonies disguise the utilitarian nature of the uranium-related sacrifices. The uranium people 56

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come to believe that by living a simple, spiritual, and rustic way of life they will prove themselves superior to the uranium-lacking people. The uranium people also come to believe that the more time people use for improving their material life, the further they have departed from the truth and God. The uranium people’s production revolves around uranium flowers. They believe that uranium flowers are gifts from their File One God. The scriptures tell them that they are the chosen people of the File One God. God has supposedly bestowed upon them this homeland by the side of Spiral Lake—which has been contaminated by high levels of radiation. God also supposedly planted the first uranium tree that has flourished by the side of Spiral Lake. These uranium trees bring life and hope to the uranium people. The main purpose of their existence is to achieve an everlasting unity with God by means of sacrificing themselves. When uranium children turn into adults, they have an operation to remove part of their spine so that they will not grow any taller, which thus reduces their consumption of food and fabric. They despise the uranium-lacking people on account of the latter’s lack of religious belief. Uranium people believe that the uranium-lacking people live in eternal darkness on account of having no awareness of God’s existence. In addition, in contrast to many science fiction narratives that encode scientific knowledge into religion, the sort of religion described in this story is replete with anti-scientific thinking. According to the omniscient third-person narrator, scientific knowledge appears to be of no use to the uranium people. Though they believe their own level of intelligence far outstrips that of the uranium-lacking people, they despise the scientific and technological advances that the uraniumlacking people have achieved. They associate scientific knowledge with an extravagantly materialistic life. The only time uranium people sought after practical knowledge was when the two tribes were at war. After the File One religion arrives to dominate the life of their tribe, they no longer pursue knowledge. Therefore, in “Uranium Flowers,” “Religion is seen less as a mode of thought and more as a lack of thought” (Mendlesohn 266). The story takes a startling turn when Ata finally realizes that the uranium-lacking people have deceived the uranium people into sacrificing their lives in what emerges as Dr. Strone’s cruelly exploitative hoax. As a pious believer in the File One religion, Ata is eager to sacrifice himself to the God once he comes of age. As a youngster, he would have dreams that God was calling him to journey to the Holy Land. So even prior to the time for his coming-of-age ceremony, Ata embarks upon a journey to the Holy Land. Ata is accompanied by Afeng, a one-time Saint who is now a lunatic. When the two of them finally arrive in the Holy Land, Ata finds nothing but an abandoned research institute. After entering this abandoned institute and wandering around inside, Ata eventually has an encounter with God in the form of Dr. Strone’s skeleton. To Ata’s great surprise, Dr. Strone was never one of the uranium people as they had believed; he belonged to the uraniumlacking tribe. The map that had guided innumerable young uranium people to go to the Altar to sacrifice themselves to God turns out to be nothing other than the blueprint of the nuclear power plant. Finally awakened to Dr. Strone’s nefarious scheme, Ata exclaims: “They’ve been using us to generate electricity!” (Yang, “Uranium Flowers” 36). Ata only now finally realizes why Afeng had become insane upon his return from the Holy Land many years ago. Now that Afeng also understands how his uranium tribe has been brainwashed and utilized as fuel by the uranium-lacking physicist Strone, he decides to take revenge by walking into a crowd of the uranium-lacking people and detonating some powerful explosives that he has hidden in his clothing. The story ends with Ata still feeling numb from the shock of what he has learned about the uranium-lacking tribe’s nefarious scheme.

Environmental Justice This short story might remind some readers of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), in which the future world that the time-traveling protagonist visits houses two separate human ethnici57

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ties: “the passive and effete Eloi and the brutish and animalistic Morlocks, the former serving as food for the later” (Booker and Thomas, “H. G. Wells” 179). We can identify various similarities between “Uranium Flowers” and The Time Machine. The uranium people are like the Eloi who are indolent and peaceful; and uranium-lacking people are like the Morlocks who “retain some technological ability and are in general stronger and more energetic than the Eloi” (Booker and Thomas, “H. G. Wells” 180). Booker and Thomas read The Time Machine as the author’s comments on specific late Victorian era social issues such as colonialism, “social Darwinism,” and class differences (“H. G. Wells” 181). They indicate that the bifurcation of the human species in The Time Machine is “particularly related to the theories of ‘social Darwinism’” that Herbert Spencer propounded: “Human societies advance through a process of natural selection analogous to that attributed to plants and animals by Darwin” (“H. G. Wells” 181). More specifically, they argue that “The Time Machine can be read as a cautionary tale that warns of the potentially disastrous consequences of the growing gap between rich and poor that characterized Wells’ England” (“H. G. Wells” 183). This point is evident in the time-traveling protagonist’s conclusion that the bifurcation of humanity resulted from “the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the capitalist and the laborer” (Wells 48). In this vein, the Eloi can be seen as “the descendants of a ruling class that grow increasingly effete through exploitation of the labor of the class that eventually evolved into the Morlocks” (Booker and Thomas, “H. G. Wells” 182). “Uranium Flowers” presents similar class conflicts in which a seemingly privileged group is being sacrificed and consumed by the seemingly lower-status group. Just as Wells uses The Time Machine to comment on social problems in late Victorian era England,Yang Dantao utilizes a setting of the aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear war to provide a fresh perspective for critiquing environmental injustice for the poor in the contemporary globalized world. The rapid economic growth and excessive consumerism in the post-nuclear war setting of “Uranium Flowers” resemble the features of contemporary Chinese society. At the surface level, the story’s foregrounding of class divisions critiques China’s widening gap between the rich and the poor. Without the uranium people’s sacrifice of their lives, the uranium-lacking people would not enjoy such benefits of economic prosperity as an endless supply of electricity. This situation resembles the way that contemporary urban China’s economic prosperity rests to a significant degree on the backs of tens of millions of migrant workers from the relatively impoverished countryside. Many, if not most, of these migrant workers endure dangerous working conditions, including a toxic work environment and inadequate provisions for safeguarding workers’ health. In other words, untold millions of these workers are shortening their lives in order to prop up the PRC’s relative high rates of annual economic growth. In recent years, many PRC science fiction writers have addressed the widening class divisions that have accompanied the country’s rapid economic growth rates. Among them, the most notable is Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award-winning novella Folding Beijing (Beijing zhedie 2014). In this novella, Beijing has been divided into three time-spaces that are occupied by three distinct social classes: the laborers, the middle class, and the elite. The elite control the government, while the laborers provide basic services for the two more privileged classes by working in factories and recycling operations. Hao Jingfang emphasizes her novella’s connection to contemporary socio-political realities: “I don’t think of it as science fiction; I have not been writing about a visionary or nonexistent future” (“Tan xiaoshuo”). Another example of this type of PRC science fiction work is Chen Qiufan’s novel Waste Tide (Huangchao 2013). This novel examines contemporary China’s social stratification through the lenses of environmental degradation and posthumanism. In Waste Tide, the author explores the ways in which the PRC’s electronics recycling industry has resulted in damaging environmental and health conditions for both individual workers and their larger communities. This environmental theme is interwoven with profound socio-political and economic themes, such as poverty and social stratification caused by uneven economic development in 58

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China. Waste Tide specifically portrays a sort of slow-paced and long-term violence against workers in this industry and the communities in which they live. Reminiscent of Chen Qiufan’s environmentalist discourse in Waste Tide,Yang Dantao broaches issues of environmental justice. In “Uranium Flowers,” environmental degradation such as high levels of radiation after the nuclear war aggravates class divisions, leading to the bifurcation of humankind. The wealthier uranium-lacking tribe bamboozles the poorer uranium people in order to utilize them as human fodder to fuel the nuclear power plant. Yang’s story thus echoes what Rob Nixon calls “the environmentalism of the poor” and “slow violence” (Nixon 4). In his study of environmental degradation and its impact on humanity, especially the relatively disadvantaged social classes, Nixon explores the complex politics of ecological damage by means of the concepts of “environmentalism of the poor” and “slow violence.” By “slow violence,” he means “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and place, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). In his definition of slow violence, he emphasizes the “slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” caused by the “incremental and accretive” human activities during a relatively long period of time (2). These catastrophes include “climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation,” the aftermath of nuclear bomb explosions, “acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental” degradations (2). According to Nixon, it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence.Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives … It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalism of the poor. (4) In light of Nixon’s argument, we can see that Yang Dantao’s uranium people have been the victims of two kinds of slow violence. First, nuclear radiation appears to have affected them adversely.They have muddled through due to “adaptive survival” of nuclear wars in the distant past (Nixon 4). Their tolerance for high levels of radiation is a testimony of how “slow violence” has permanently changed them physically. When discussing the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Nixon borrowed the term foreign burden from a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. One coal miner named Dmytro who helped with the remediation work at the Chernobyl site described his body’s radiation load as a foreign burden. In other words, Dymtro was “harboring an alien, unnatural, and disquieting force within” (Nixon 50). Nixon further argues that a foreign burden is burdensome not just “in a somatic sense, but in a geo-temporal sense as well: his post-Soviet Ukrainian body remained under occupation by a Soviet-era catastrophe” (50). The concept of “foreign burden” offers an interesting perspective through which to examine the physical transformation of Yang’s uranium people. Similar to the post-Soviet Ukrainian, the uranium people’s bodies have remained occupied by fallout from the long-ago nuclear war; “attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements” (Nixon 7).The uranium people’s tolerance for high levels of radiation externalizes the slow violence of this radiation, and simultaneously calls other forms of transformation into question. Their transformation also exemplifies the dissolution of “the boundaries of [their] humanity through the slow, corrosive violence of environmental catastrophe” (Nixon 54). In conjuring forth the uranium people,Yang Dantao has created “a potent compression of disturbing, porous ambiguity, a figure whose transformation confounds the borders between the human and the post-human” (Nixon 55). The uranium people are not only the victims of radiation, but also the victims of another type of slow violence: they are further exploited as a natural resource by the uranium-lacking people. This is very similar to the way giant multinational oil corporations have been extracting oil in rela59

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tively impoverished African countries. Nixon discusses fossil fuel corporate practices as a variety of postcolonialism: Postcolonial studies at its most incisive remains, it seems to me, an invaluable critical presence in an era of resurgent imperialism, an era in which—sometimes through outright, unregulated plunder, sometimes under camouflage of developmental agendas—a neoliberal order has widened, with ruinous environmental repercussions, the gulf between the expanding classes of the super-rich and our planet’s 3 billion ultrapoor. (37) Nixon’s postcolonial discussion of contemporary environmental injustices sheds light on the uranium-lacking people’s exploitation of the uranium people. The uranium people have been “ruled” by uranium-lacking people through the File One scriptures. Though the uranium-lacking people have not invaded the uranium people’s territory due to its high levels of radiation, they nonetheless exploit the area’s natural resource and the bodies of the people. Uranium people have few material resources, and resemble the poorer classes as discussed in Nixon’s environmentalism of the poor. Meanwhile, “their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives” (Nixon 4). In this post-apocalyptic world of high levels of radiation, the uranium-lacking people function as the privileged class that enjoys abundant material resources and pursues rapid economic growth. The uranium-lacking tribe’s enviable condition of rapid economic growth contrasts strongly with the “slow erosion of environmental injustice” among the uranium people (Nixon 8). Extracting enough uranium for their nuclear power plant becomes a self-justifying ethic that inflicts slow violence on the uranium people. In the eyes of the uraniumlacking people, the sufferings of the uranium people are an acceptable cost of doing business. The uranium-lacking people’s exploitation of the uranium people also involves a connection between what Nixon calls “vernacular landscape” and “official landscape.” Nixon refers to “a vernacular landscape” as being “integral to the socio-environmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized—treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource” (17). In contrast, “an official landscape” amounts to the land marked on a map and written “in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental” (Nixon 17). Nixon offers World Bank official Lawrence Summers’s scheme to export rich-nation garbage and toxic wastes to Africa as an example to illustrate his concept of vernacular and official landscapes. He argues that “imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, serving webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased” (17). In Yang’s “Uranium Flowers,” the author simplifies the post-apocalyptic setting by causing it to contain only two regions. Uranium-lacking people inhabit the richer and less polluted territory, while the uranium people live in the vicinity of Spiral Lake and its high levels of radiation. For the uranium people, Spiral Lake is their “vernacular landscape,” which “is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features” (Nixon 17). In contrast, the uranium-lacking people view Spiral Lake as nothing more than a landscape from which they can endlessly extract the valuable raw materials, namely uranium, that will fuel their nuclear power plant. Spiral Lake thus becomes the “official landscape” in their strategic plan.They thereby impose their official landscape upon the uranium people’s vernacular landscape. Through the mask of religious belief, the uranium-lacking people have successfully “colonized” Spiral Lake and exploited its raw material of uranium. The uranium people are thus in a situation of “stationary displacement” (Nixon 19), a process intimately connected to the long-term socio-environmental damage inflicted on the uranium people and their descendants by means of slow violence. The uranium-lacking people’s excessive consumerism and militarism have motivated them to internalize profits and externalize risks not just in spatial terms but in temporal terms as well. 60

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A Final Look at the Important Issues in “Uranium Flowers” This seemingly simple text is surprisingly rich and complex in the extent to which it engages with important contemporary issues in China and beyond. Social change and power become projected onto the tensions between the uranium people and uranium-lacking people. In this story, the literary production of the File One contributes significantly to general production in the uranium-lacking tribe. If we view the post-apocalyptic human world as a social formation, energy is one of the most important products of this social formation. The text of File One turns its readers—uranium people—into a means of production. The villainous Dr. Strone’s scheme unfolds through a literary text which uranium people read as religious scripture. Sacrificial rituals of this insidious religion become part of the process of material production. In this way, this story illustrates the potentially earthshaking influence of a literary text. In addition, the class divisions in this story epitomize the widening gap between the rich and poor in contemporary China. The narrative reveals the author’s sympathy for migrant workers who have ventured to urban areas to work at grueling and often dangerous jobs that have proven instrumental in boosting the country’s rapid economic growth. This theme resonates with similar social criticism that readers encounter in Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing and Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide. Moreover, the narrative’s post-apocalyptic setting reveals the author’s concerns about nuclear weapons and militarism in the contemporary world. Most importantly, the author offers a profound reflection on environmental injustice, which is inseparable from class inequality. The uranium people have adapted to high levels of nuclear radiation and thereby become human fodder as fuel for a nuclear power plant. This fictional scenario takes aim at global environmental degradation while satirizing the way rich nations have often internalized industrial profits while externalizing environmental risks to poorer nations.Yang Dantao has adroitly utilized science fiction to call attention to these issues of environmental degradation, social injustice, and class inequality.

Works Cited Apter, David E. and Tony Saich. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic. Harvard UP, 1994. Booker, Keith M. and Anne-Marie Thomas. “Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.” The Science Fiction Handbook, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 53–64. ———. “H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895).” The Science Fiction Handbook, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 179–184. Chen, Qiufan. The Waste Tide. 2013. Translated by Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2019. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology.Verso, 1978. Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other” in Modern Chinese Literature. Stanford UP, 1998. Hai, Zi. “Yaoyuan de jiyi” [The Remote Memory]. Kexue wenyi [Literature and Art of Science], vol. 54, no. 5, 1988, pp. 25–29. Hao, Jingfang. “Folding Beijing.” 2014. Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2016, pp. 219–262. ———. “Tan xiaoshuo Beijing zhedie” [Talk about the novella Folding Beijing]. Luoxia xiaoshuo, 30 September 2016, www​.luoxia​.com​/zhedie​/42928​.htm. Li, Hua. “Chapter 40—Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction on the Rise: Anti-Authoritarianism and Dreams of Freedom.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link. Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 647–663. Liu, Cixin. Ball Lightning. 2005. Translated by Joel Martinsen. Tor Books, 2018. Mendlesohn, Farah. “Religion and Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 265–275. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Schoenhals, Michael. Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies. Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, U of California, 1992. Song, Mingwei. “Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 86–102.

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Hua Li Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Prometheus Books, 1998. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895. Penguin, 2005. Yang, Dantao. “Chu wen” [“The First Kiss”]. Kehuan shijie [Science Fiction World], vol. 190, no. 3, 2002, pp. 42–44. ———. “Gui su” [“Destination”]. Kehuan shijie [Science Fiction World], vol. 189, no. 2, 2002, pp. 2–12. ———. “Tian lai” [“Sky Sound”]. Kehuan shijie [Science Fiction World], vol. 190, no. 3, 2002, pp. 37–41. ———. “You hua” [“Uranium Flowers”]. Kehuan shijie [Science Fiction World], vol. 216, no. 5, 2004, pp. 30–37. ———. “Wo shi shui” [“Who Am I”]. Kehuan shijie [Science Fiction World], vol. 191, no. 4, 2002, pp. 26–34. Zheng, Wenguang. Zhanshen de houyi [Descendant of Mars]. Huacheng Publishing House, 1984.

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5 NEW YORK LITERATURE AND SOCIAL SPACE The Tenement and the Street Adam R. McKee

Capitalism is responsible for the formation of the modern Western city. Whether through the building of new spaces that serve the financial needs of the city such as the centralized financial districts in New York and London, through real estate development, or through the extensive gentrification of urban zones over the last few decades, capitalism’s alteration of space is a readily apparent phenomenon around the globe. However, the value of literary texts in the examination of how capitalism mediates the interaction between class and space in turn-of-the-century New York warrants further examination. The definition of space utilized throughout this chapter is drawn largely from the work of Henri Lefebvre and his notion of social space and spatial production. By drawing upon Lefebvre’s theories, this chapter will look at literary representations of social space and in particular the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side in Jacob Riis’s sociological study How the Other Half Lives (1891), Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), and Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers (1925). Reading these works in reference to Lefebvre and notions of how space and class work together illustrates the way that these spaces are latent with power and contain within them opportunities for resistance to the larger social order. Lefebvre’s notion of space begins with an understanding of space as a dynamic process that moves away from the longstanding notion of space as an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. Early in The Production of Space, Lefebvre argues that Social space will be revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space (as defined by the philosophers and mathematicians) on the one hand, and physical space (as defined by practico-sensory activity and the perception of “nature”) on the other. (27) He explains that his project seeks to show that such a social space is constituted neither by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data, nor by a void packed like a parcel with various contents, and that it is irreducible to a “form” imposed upon phenomena, upon things, upon physical materiality. (27)

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Spatiality, via Lefebvre, is the practice of examining the effects of spatial practices on the representational or “lived spaces” depicted in the experience of encountering New York City and the tenement. Lefebvre’s work is foundational to this examination because he provides a detailed account of power and capitalism’s effects on spatial production. The work of Lefebvre, and specifically his discussion of space within his most famous work The Production of Space (1974), is absolutely vital to an understanding of how space is affected by power and capitalism and therefore is uniquely positioned to enhance any reading of class, social space, and literature in the burgeoning New York metropole. Additionally, Lefebvre’s work makes an argument for why the period of discussion in this project is also of utmost importance. While Lefebvre is correct in asserting that “the state is consolidating on a world scale” (23) in the second half of the twentieth century, he also notes that this shift undoubtedly begins near the beginning of the twentieth century. Lefebvre links the painting of Pablo Picasso to this historical moment and rupture. However, he notes that the “spatial turn towards industrial/political economy” (80) began in the mid-nineteenth century, before “agrarian reforms and peasant revolutions reshaped the surface of the planet” (55) in the early twentieth century. The date of this transition is not exact, but in examining literature about New York City from around the turn of the century, it is clear that the massive changes in industry paired with the ever-increasing immigrant waves from Europe brought about new types of class antagonism and spatial experience documented in the literary fiction of the time, adding to the spatialized class conflicts that already existed in America. An understanding of Lefebvre’s spatial theories is important to an examination of how authors during this time of upheaval reacted to spatial alterations.This spatial rupture, and the birth of the world market, has implications for both urban studies and literature as the texts studied in this project reflect the ways in which social space is represented. Lefebvre’s theoretical scaffolding in The Production of Space can best be seen in his notion that “(social) space is a (social) product” (26), however, to condense Lefebvre’s theory to this single axiom would miss the way power operates throughout his reading of spatial production. Lefebvre states that one of his purposes in the study is to “show how space serves, and how hegemony makes use of it” (11), while declaring early in the text that “society as a whole continues in subjection to political practice—that is, to state power” (8). For Lefebvre it is important that, “[s]pace thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (26). “Space,” for Lefebvre, “commands bodies, prescribing and proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered. It is produced with this purpose in mind; this is its raison d’etre” (143). Lefebvre restates this position later in the text stating that there can be no question but that social space is the locus of prohibition, for it is shot through with both prohibitions and their counterparts, prescriptions. This fact, however, can most definitely not be made into the basis of an overall definition, for space is not only the space of “no,” it is also the space of the body, and hence the space of “yes,” of the affirmation of life. (201) The power of space that Lefebvre sees is intimately tied to capitalism and political space. Capitalism has changed the way the dominant society, or mode of production, creates the spaces it produces because, as he claims, “Space is what makes it possible for the economic to be integrated into the political” (321).This is what makes Lefebvre’s theoretical work of utmost importance for an understanding of power’s alteration of spaces in New York City (and additionally Paris and London) near the turn of the century. The texts examined here contain vivid demonstrations of the way power and space are intimately tied together. While a historical analysis of any number of spaces 64

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in New York during the time period would prove fruitful, the tenement house and the public space of the street analyzed in this essay through writers like Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and Anzia Yezierksa contain representations specific to these historic shifts in the way that diverse classes socially encounter turn-of-the-century urbanization.

How the Other Half Lives (1891) and the Origins of the Tenement Perhaps no work near the turn of the century had a more significant impact on the depiction of class in New York City than Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1891). This text is unquestionably the well-known treatment of the development of the tenement house in the slums of Manhattan. In the introduction to the text, Luc Sante states that the book is one of those unusual books that changes history in a material way, directly affecting the lives of millions of people. Jacob Riis wrote it for no other purpose than to call attention to the horrendous living conditions of the poor in New York City, and to insist on reform. (ix) Riis’s text starts off with an introduction of Riis’s general approach before transitioning into a discussion of the history of the tenement in New York City. The text begins Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. (5) before asserting that, “the boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tenements” (5). For Riis, the development of the tenement holds a significant place in the history of class stratification in New York City. Significantly, Riis sets the timeline for the visibility of this change. He writes that, It is ten years and over, now, since that line divided New York’s population evenly. To-day three-fourths of its people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. (5–6) Riis then sets out to critique those who are in positions of power who have perpetuated the conditions about which he photographs and writes. He says that neither legislation nor charity can cover the ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it, as far as it can now be undone. Homes must be built for the working masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be “good property” in the old, heartless sense. (7) Riis follows this introduction with the first chapter of the work “Genesis of the Tenement” which sets out to describe the history more completely. Riis argues that, “The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered” (9). Riis describes the conditions 65

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that brought about the birth of the modern tenement, emphasizing the population boom in the early to mid-nineteenth century in New York and the opportunistic exploitation of the increasing poor population in Manhattan. Riis states that “In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found” (9) and that “As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors” (9) which led to the partitioning of larger rooms into multiple small rooms oftentimes with no light or ventilation. These newly developed tenements would sometimes house a dozen families in a single flat. Andrew S. Dolkart also documents the rise and then continued restructuring of the New York tenement in “The Architecture and Development of New York City: Living Together.” Dolkart explains that exactly when the first tenement appeared isn’t known. Some historians have dated it back to the 1830s, others to the 1840s, but it’s clear that by the 1860s tenements—that is, buildings that we specifically built to house large numbers of poor families in the same structure with very few amenities—begin to appear in large numbers. (1) In particular, the tenements grew “primarily on the Lower East Side and in other neighborhoods of southern Manhattan, as more and more poor immigrants are arriving in New York City” (1). However, these buildings had very little legal oversight and it wasn’t until the 1860s that laws began to be put into place to help with safety and health concerns. The first major legal stride in tenement regulation come in 1867 following a report by the Council of Hygiene of the Citizen’s Association. This “Tenement-House Act of 1867” (Riis 17) “ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation—for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways” (17). Over time, the tenements become more regulated and more constraints were placed upon their construction, as Riis documents in How the Other Half Lives. However, additions to help assuage some of the health concerns, such as the advent of air-shafts, did little to change the overall character of these social spaces. As Riis writes, the era of the air-shaft has not solved the problem of housing the poor, but it has made good use of limited opportunities. Over the new houses sanitary law exercises full control. But the old remain. They cannot be summarily torn down, though in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared.The outrageous overcrowding, too, remains. It is characteristic of the tenements. Poverty, their badge and typical condition, invites-compels it. (19) While an examination of Riis’s text from a literary and journalistic standpoint is productive, for the sake of literary studies it is this description of the history of the tenement and the subsequent reception of Riis’s work that allow for an examination of the implications of the tenement as a social space, in accordance with the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre.

Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) Written at roughly the same time and depicting the same conditions as Riis’s work, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) tells the story of Maggie Johnson’s life in the Lower East Side tenement houses.The novel is interesting for a number of reasons related to depictions of class in the turn-of-the-century literature of New York City.The introduction to the novel, also written by Luc Sante, describes Crane’s importance in a developing Realism (and Naturalism) in the urban 66

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spaces of America. He writes, “A homegrown Realism, employing the American slums as its focus and subject, simply didn’t exist. The slums themselves were only just beginning to be discussed in a serious way” (xii). The focus of Crane’s text, the Lower East Side, was still largely Irish in ancestry and nurtured a lumpenproletarian style and customs in dissolution and vassalage that had been refined over a century. Most inhabitants weren’t recent immigrants struggling to adjust, but treadmill-bound victims of compounded hopelessness and inertia. (xiii–xiv) Sante also describes the way that the text was initially overlooked stating that “the original pseudonymous edition sold exactly two copies in the only bookstore that would handle it” (xv) before being more widely noticed after Crane’s successful publication of The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Upon its initial publication, Hamlin Garland in The Arena called the text, “the voice of the slums” (259) and said that His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragmented though it is. It is pictorial, graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before seen it written—crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality finding voice. (259) Garland continues that, “It is important because it voices the blind rebellion of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row. It creates the atmosphere of the jungles, where vice festers and crime passes gloomily by, where outlawed human nature rebels against God and man” (259). Though not widely read, Garland’s review of the novel illustrates the importance of Crane’s text to a detailed analysis of the New York slums and tenements. The novel itself begins not with a scene depicting the tenement house, but with a scene depicting the other important contact-zone in the slums: the street. The text itself is spatialized from beginning to end, and space is a primary preoccupation of Crane throughout. As Katrina Irving argues, “The subtitle, A Girl of the Streets, signals the text’s preoccupation with location” (33). The novel begins with a description of an encounter between children on the streets whose identities are stripped down to their respective locations. Crane writes, “A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him” (3). This young boy ends up being Jimmy, Maggie’s younger brother, and he is repeatedly depicted as a child and young man whose identity is intimately connected with these slum streets.The slum housing early in the novel is depicted as a place that is unable to “contain” these children. Crane writes that eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and gutter … In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles … A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels. (6) Much like the descriptions of the buildings in Riis and other commentators on the tenements, the mass of humanity in these spaces blurs (or almost erases entirely) the separation between the public and private spaces of the slums. 67

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This separation of spaces is further supported in the next section when Crane writes Jimmie and the old woman listened long in the hall. Above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal wailing of babies at night, the thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering. (10–11) The tenement is depicted as a space that is permeable both from the street and the other “inside” spaces. As Irving notes, “In Crane’s novel, the tenement dwellers’ depravity is evidenced … by their failure to remain corralled within the space of the tenement” (34). Additionally, “Historian Christine Stansell has written of the horror evoked in middle-class observers of tenement scenes by the failure of tenement dwellers to respect the division between ‘street’ and ‘home,’ their tendency to make the former an extension of the latter” (35). While these scenes of class convergence and shock aren’t only found in the city, Crane’s novel invokes these shocks as a way of examining the spaces of the modern city. Jimmie, in particular, is a character whose identity is connected to these spaces. Crane explains, Jimmie’s occupation for a long time was to stand on street-corners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets. On the corners he was in life and of life. The world was going on and he was there to perceive it. (15) Jimmie is depicted as the slum/street dweller par excellence throughout the text. However, it is his sister, Maggie, who is the main subject of Crane’s social investigation. Maggie Johnson, the titular character of the work, is immediately depicted as a somewhat odd fit in this space. The narrator states the girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of the tenement district, pretty girl. None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over it. When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt disguised her. (18) The figure of the woman, and particularly the immigrant woman, has had a very distinct relationship with the spaces of the home and in particular the spaces of the tenement. Irving writes that escaping that sequestration in the home that served to contain the sexually saturated female body, the immigrant woman’s free movement from the tenement to the larger urban space was seen as a refusal of the woman’s organic connection with the family space/life of the children, a flouting of the gendered division of space. (35) It is exactly this “gendered division of space” that makes Maggie such a compelling text from the perspective of an analysis of power and social space in the city. 68

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Early in the text, Maggie begins a relationship with her brother’s friend Pete. Pete, who works as a bartender outside of this slum neighborhood, has the lure of an upwardly mobile outsider to Maggie. Crane explains, Pete’s elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had money and manners. It was probably that he had a large acquaintance of pretty girls. He must have great sums of money to spend.To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. (23) Andrew Lawson writes extensively of the class mimicry in the text with special attention paid to vaudeville, organized charity, and prostitution. In his article, “Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane’s City,” Lawson argues that this image of Pete that Maggie aspires to is class mimicry. Lawson writes, “In Maggie, Pete displays what anthropologist Michael Taussig call the ‘mimetic faculty,’ the urge not just to ‘copy’ and ‘imitate,’ but to ‘yield into and become [the] Other” (597). Maggie herself attempts this mimicry when, “In order to impress Pete, Maggie spends a portion of her week’s pay from the collar and cuff factory in which she works ‘in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin,’ hanging the finished article ‘with infinite care’” (Lawson 599). Through her burgeoning relationship with Pete, Maggie is put into contact with another space of entertainment outside of the slums of the Lower East Side: the theatre. When Pete first takes Maggie to the show, “the nationalities of the Bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions” (25). The play that she sees with Pete gives way to a sort of imitation class mimicry, “In the finale she fell into some of the grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatre up-town, giving to the Bowery public the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (26). In Lawson’s argument, Vaudeville involves a process of class mimicry, in which the lower middle class purchase an aura of respectability, while the “respectable” middle-class spectator obtains a “therapeutic revitalization” (203). Both parties in this transaction “believe it their right and privilege to acquire something not really theirs,” released into a new, consumerist mentality. (601) As Maggie and Pete continue to attend shows, Crane depicts Maggie’s fascination with mobility and class. He writes Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked.The theatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory. (31–32) Maggie sees the stage as a place of class performance and the spectacle of upward mobility for the tenement dweller. Maggie’s dependence on Pete deepens in the following section when Crane writes that, Three weeks had passed since the girl had left home. The air of spaniel-like dependence had been magnified and showed its direct effect in the peculiar off-handedness and ease of Pete’s ways toward her. She followed Pete’s eyes with hers, anticipating with smiles gracious looks from him. (50) 69

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At this moment in the text, Nellie appears and Pete leaves Maggie at the club. Maggie returns home where the tenement once again displays a profound lack of private space: Through the open doors curious eyes stared in at Maggie. Children ventured into the room and ogled her, as if they formed the front row at a theatre. Women, without, bending toward each other and whispered, nodding their heads with airs of profound philosophy. A baby, overcome with curiosity concerning this object at which all were looking, sidled forward and touched her dress, cautiously, as if investigating a red-hot stove. (56) Here, Maggie herself becomes the spectacle acted out on stage: the Johnson’s small tenement apartment in full public view. Maggie is rejected by her brother and mother and, dejected, she leaves. Crane writes that, “As the girl passed down through the hall, she went before open doors framing more eyes strangely microscopic, and sending broad beams of inquisitive light into the darkness of her path” (57) before an old woman allows Maggie to stay with her for the night. At this point in the text, Maggie is confronted with the public space of the street as a flâneuse. In Crane’s text, the female “wanderer” in the city is immediately equated with prostitution. Crane writes, “Soon the girl discovered that if she walked with such apparent aimlessness, some men looked at her with calculating eyes. She quickened her step, frightened. As a protection, she adopted a demeanor of intentness as if going somewhere” (59). It is clear here that the female “idler” is out of place in the modern city unless she is a prostitute. The street as an urban contact zone in Maggie has a profoundly gendered element, just as it has a profoundly class element in the streets of Rum Alley. The narrative jumps forward at this point in the text with a description of Maggie’s current state and one of Crane’s most vivid descriptions of the modern city absent of the tenements of Maggie’s upbringing. He writes Two or three theaters emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements. Men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars to their ears. Women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the storm. People having been comparatively silent for two hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the glowing of the stage. (60) Here the theatre empties out into the street and, in a scene reminiscent of the way that the sounds of the tenement cannot be contained, the street is permeated by the sounds of the theatre, a zone that was once aspirational for Maggie, but now is exclusionary. Crane writes, A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces. (61) The girl, who is implied to be Maggie, looks for the men who are out of place in the city, aiming for a certain naivety in these cultural tourists. As she moves, “A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening” (61) again showing the ever-present spectacle of the city. At this point in the text, Maggie now confirms the suspicion that the female idler in the city (or flâneuse) is equated with the prostitute. As she continues her walk, she descends further away from 70

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the upper-class places of the city she once aspired to join. Crane writes that, “The girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants and saloons. She passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled” (61). As she looks for a customer, she moves further into the depths of the city. Crane depicts The girl went into the gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons. In front of one of these places, from whence came the sound of violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched features. (62) Her descent is completed as “She went into the blackness of the final block” (62). At this point Maggie finds a partner and they proceed to the edge of the river. Crane writes, “At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers” (63). Much like the earlier scenes in the tenements, this last section of Maggie’s wandering through the city is based not only on visual cues from Crane but also on the aural nature of the city’s public spaces. As Irving writes, “As prostitute, Maggie’s body becomes the site where the separation of public and private disintegrates, where the hitherto antithetical worlds of commerce and femininity become conflated” (38). The novel ends with the revelation to Jimmie and his mother that Maggie is dead and her downfall is complete.

Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) Several decades later, Jewish immigrant Anzia Yezierska would take the Lower East Side tenements as her subject matter conducive to a reading of social space and the tenement. For Yezierska, who in 1922 had her first book of short stories Hungry Hearts (1920) turned into a Hollywood film, the subject matter of her novels was always extremely personal. As Alice Kessler-Harris notes in the introduction to the novel, All six books Anzia Yezierska published between 1920 and 1932 are in some sense autobiographical, but none more so than Bread Givers. An immigrant, desperately poor and often hungry, Yezierska wrote realistic stories of Jewish immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side. (xxi) Yezierska, who had a close relationship with philosopher John Dewey in the late 1910s and early 1920s, became an important chronicler of life in this part of New York. Kessler-Harris writes that, “Her constant themes are the dirt and congestion of the tenement, the struggle against poverty, family, and tradition to break out of the ghetto, and then the searing recognition that her roots would always lie in the old world” (xxi). This act of writing was important to the developing sense of Yezierska’s immigrant identity, Bread Givers reveals the class-related and spatial elements present in the tenements of Yezierska’s life. The novel follows the life of Sara Smolinsky, a young girl coming of age in the New York tenements, with her fundamentalist father Reb, her mother Shenah, and her sisters Bessie, Mashah, and Fania.The novel opens with ten-year-old Sara living in the tenements on Hester Street in New York’s Lower East Side, reflecting on her sister’s (Bessie) inability to find work. The narrator relates that I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering 71

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for the rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world. (1) The level of poverty facing the Smolinsky family is described early in the novel, and Sara reflects that “It used to be my work to go out early, every morning, while it was yet dark, and hunt through ash cans for unburned pieces of coal, and search through empty lots for pieces of wood” (7). Sara refuses this work because it makes her feel like a “beggar and thief ” (7) whenever someone saw her. Early in the novel, Sara describes the family’s move to America and her father’s devout faith. When her mother tries to bring material items with her to America, Reb responds, What for will you need old feather beds? Don’t you know it’s always summer in America? And in the new golden country, where milk and honey flow free in the streets, you’ll have new golden dishes to cook in, and not weigh yourself down with your old pots and pans. But my books, my holy books always were, and always will be, the light of the world. You’ll see yet how all America will come to my feet to learn. (9) In fact, the one material possession that is described as having private status in the Smolinsky household is Reb’s books because “Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into Heaven because they were the wives and daughters of men. Women had no brains for the study of God’s Torah” (9). Reb Smolinsky keeps a room for his studies in the already cramped tenement. Much like the tenement depiction in Maggie, the tenement in Bread Givers is seen as a place that is both home and permeable, thoroughly disrupting the public/private split of the building, street, and home.When Shenah suggests renting a room for boarders, Reb counters by saying,“But where will I have quiet for my studies in this crowded kitchen? I have to be alone in a room to think with God” (13). Shenah responds, “Only millionaires can be alone in America” (13). Here, much like Maggie, privacy is a concept that is virtually non-existent in the tenements. The building’s spaces are permeable, and the street becomes a space of social contact for the characters in the texts. As the novel continues, the Smolinsky family sees themselves find more stability in stops and starts as the family finds work. One of the major plot points in the early parts of the novel is Reb’s interest in upward mobility without actually putting the work in himself. Rather, Reb tries to marry off each of his daughters into relationships that suit his needs and desires. When Bessie brings home Berel Bernstein in Chapter III, Reb responds by interrogating Berel about his religious observance and his income. Reb responds that, “Daughters like mine are not found in the gutter” (45) before suggesting that losing Bessie’s income would be more of a hindrance to his family’s finances than he could bear. In a sort of reverse dowry, Reb responds to Berel’s offer to take Bessie off his hands “without a cent” (47), by saying that, Taking her from my hands! Only girls who hang on their father’s neck for their eating and dressing, that the father has to pay dowry, to get rid of this burden. But Bessie brings me in every cent she earns. When a girl like mine leaves the house the father gets poorer, not richer. It’s not enough to take my Bessie without a dowry.You must pay me yet. (47) Berel refuses Reb’s propositions and tells Bessie, “I’ll get a wife for me, myself, and not one to hang a whole beggar family on my neck” (51). Berel refuses to support Reb by marrying his daugh72

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ter. The situation of his daughters being forced to bear the financial burden of the family and to neglect their own happiness is a repeated motif throughout the novel. When Jacob Novak seeks a relationship with Mashah, Reb refuses saying, “Didn’t I tell you once a man who plays the piano on the Sabbath, a man without religion, can’t be trusted?” (63). Morris Lipken, a poet, pursues Fania in Chapter V; Reb responds by saying “A writer, a poet you want for a husband? Those who sell papers at least earn something. But what earns a poet? Do you want starvation and beggary for the rest of your days?” (68). Fania pushes back against her father saying, “I’d rather have Lipkin and be poor, so long as I have the man I love” (69). When Reb pushes back, Sara speaks up to her father’s ideology for the first time in the novel. She says But didn’t you say that the poorest beggars are happier and freer than the rich? … You said that a poor man never has to be afraid of thieves or robbers. He can walk alone in the middle of the night and fear nobody. Poor people don’t need locks on their houses. They can leave their doors wide open, because nobody will come to steal poverty. (70) Refusing to see the contradiction in his ideology and feeding his desire to have someone support him and allow for a certain level of upward mobility, Reb decides to find his daughters proper husbands on his own terms. With this, Reb has married off his three eldest daughters for the sake of what he perceives to be personal gain and the appearance of upward mobility. Like the characters in Maggie upward mobility and class mimicry become obsessions for Reb, referring constantly throughout the early part of the text to the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. With the five hundred dollars Reb received from Zalmon, he decides to try to get a business of his own because, “In America, a man can get rich quick if he only has a head for business” (111). Reb sees an advertisement in the paper for a grocery store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and is conned into buying the store full of empty boxes and barrels of sawdust. While the move gives the family more space, leaving Shenah to lament that “it’s the first time since we came to America that we have a little light and air. When I look out of the window, it’s not into a black airshaft” (129–130), Sara lashes out and leaves her parent’s store to head back into the city, telling her father that, “You made the lives of the other children! I’m going to make my own life!” (138). When Sara leaves to be on her own, she decides to become a schoolteacher. For Sara, this is upward mobility beyond her wildest dreams. The novel states that, “It was like looking up to the top of the highest skyscraper while down in the gutter” (155). It is worth noting that Sara’s departure from the spaces of her family home (on Hester Street and in the store) and her entrance into the social and public spaces of the city mark a dramatic departure from the crowded space of family and into a different type of crowded space where some sort of solitude exists.When Sara eats at a bakery shortly after leaving her parents, the novel states, “I realized that I had yet never been alone since I was born. This was the first time I ate by myself, with silence and stillness for my company” (156). Shortly after this, Sara seeks out a room of her own, thinking “For the first time in my life I saw what a luxury it was for a poor girl to want to be alone in a room” (158). Just as she does earlier in the novel,Yezierska depicts privacy as a trait of those who are upwardly mobile. Sara thinks to herself, “Like a drowning person clinging to a rope, my tired body edged up to that door and clung to it. My hands clutched at the knob.The door was life. It was air” (159). However, it is important that this space is still a space marked by its poverty and dirt (emblematized by the window Sara tries unsuccessfully to clear and the space is still permeable to the sounds of the neighborhood and the building’s other tenants).Yezierska writes, Maybe it was the terrible racket that was muddling my brain. Phonographs and pianolas blared against each other. Voices gossiping and jabbering across the windows. Wailing children. The yowling shrieks of two alley cats. The shrill bark of a hungry pup. (164) 73

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Sara finally has a space that is her own, yet it is still a space that is something less than private. However, there is a strange sort of liminal space at play here in the novel. Noise clearly marks the spaces of poverty in the novel. Just as in Maggie, the sounds of the street permeate the spaces marked by poverty. However, Sara’s ambition and limited upward mobility allow her to be alone. This is a strange equation in the novel where privacy and being alone aren’t the same thing. Additionally, Sara sees the permeability of “home” spaces by the public as making them places of community and connection. After being on her own for only a short period of time, Sara thinks, I glanced at the boiling pot … I don’t have to share it with anyone … That’s what made it so hateful. A longing came over me for the old kitchen in Hester Street. Even in our worst poverty we sat around the table, together, like people. (173) At this point in the novel, her sisters Fania and Bessie show up, breaking Sara’s reflection on the Hester Street spaces. One of the most noticeable sections in the novel’s reflection on the spaces of New York comes when Sara leaves the city to go to school to become a teacher. Unlike Maggie, which offers some contact zones between the middle-class New Yorker and the tenement inhabitants, Bread Givers rarely does so outside of Sara’s trip to college. The chapter begins with Sara lamenting, That burning day when I got ready to leave New York and start out on my journey to college! I felt like Columbus starting out from the other end of the earth. I felt like the pilgrim fathers who had left their homeland and all their kin behind them and trailed out in search of the New World. (209) When Sara arrives, she thinks about the difference between the people she sees here and those in New York.Yezierska writes, “So these are the real Americans, I thought, thrilled by the lean, straight bearing of the passers-by.They had none of that terrible fight for break and rent that I always saw in New York people’s eyes” (211). For Sara, the space of the college is seen as outside of the povertyfilled spaces of the Lower East Side. She thinks, “All the young people I had ever seen were shut up in factories. But here were young girls and young men enjoying life, free from the worry for a living” (211). Sara graduates and heads back to New York “changed into a person” (237), and her return demonstrates the modest attainment of upward mobility that she so desperately craved in Hester Street. When Sara returns, the novel states “For the first time in my life, I knew the luxury of travelling in a Pullman. I even had my dinner in the dining car” (237). For the first time in her life, Sara has money; “The dark night of poverty was over. I had fought my way up into the sunshine of plenty” (238). She purchases herself a new suit and soon finds a place to live. Her ascension out of poverty is complete as “The world outside was so big and vast. Now I’ll have the leisure and the quiet to go on and on, higher and higher” (241; emphasis added). Some of the novel’s narrative here, while interesting in a number of ways including the generational and cultural disagreements between Sara and her father, doesn’t really speak to the spatial implications of Yezierska’s work, but Sara finds herself drawn back to the spaces of Hester Street after the death of her mother and her father’s marriage to Mrs. Feinstein. When Sara takes a teaching job, “The windows of my classroom faced the same crowded street where seventeen years ago I started out my career selling herring” (269). Sara is disillusioned by her new career, thinking it doesn’t live up to the expectations that she had for being a teacher when she was younger. However, Sara is drawn to the principal, Hugo Seelig. As Sara and Hugo’s relationship continues over the course of several months, the final chapter of 74

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the book comes full circle as Sara walks through the Lower East Side and reflects on the poverty and class implications of the tenement block: But as I walked along through Hester Street toward the Third Avenue L, my joy hurt like guilt. Lines upon lines of pushcart peddlers were crouching in the rain … Wasn’t there some way that I could divide my joy with these shivering pushcart peddlers, grubbing for pennies in the rain? I felt like Carnegie and Rockefeller trying to give away the millions they could not spend … I felt as if all the beauty of the world that ever was ached in me to pour itself out on the people around. I felt like the sun so afire with life that it can’t help but shine on the whole world—the just and the unjust alike. (281–282) Here, Sara obviously feels a connection with the people of Hester Street as she has found her upward mobility from the tenement. The novel ends with Sara reflecting that, “It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me” (297). Numerous scholars have read Yezierska’s novel as an examination of the class elements deployed for the emerging immigrant populations of the Lower East Side and the crowded living spaces they inhabited. Lori Jirousek’s essay “Ethnics and Ethnographers: Zora Neale Hurston and Anzia Yezierksa” reads the novel as an ethnographic text that examines a sort of liminal space between the burgeoning American immigrant culture (symbolized by Sara) and the old world (symbolized by Reb). Jirousek notes that, Novels such as Bread Givers (1925) and story collections such as Hungry Hearts (1920) reflect an auto-ethnographic eye detailing the religious, familial, and economic structures of the Eastern European Jew immigrant in ways that would share these cultural aspects much more effectively than the obscure government report Dewey’s team produced. (29) Susan Edmunds, in her reading of Yezierska’s work and labor politics, details the way in which Yezierska positions her fiction in Alexandra Kollontai’s radical feminism and Communism. Her essay states, I argue for the need to read Anzia Yezierska’s domestic novels of the 1920s in this double context. Uniformly set on the Lower East Side, all three novels—Salome of the Tenements (1923), Bread Givers (1925), and Arrogant Beggar (1927)—rework the Cinderella plot central to working girls’ labor culture along lines that resonate strongly with the revolutionary ideals of Kollontai and other Russian intellectuals. (406) As Edmunds explains, some scholars “fault Yezierska’s politics for being assimilationist at best. Finding no clear condemnation of capitalism in her fiction” (406). Of the three aforementioned novels, Edmunds writes that, Read one by one, the novels tell almost identical stories of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant working girl who struggles against all odds to achieve professional status and a lover who cherishes her work. Read together, they tell the story of a novyi byt—or a new everyday life—sprung up on the Lower East Side. (408) Edmunds notes that the very career that Sara ends up choosing is also a job that itself is often private work in the public sphere as a teacher. 75

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Concluding Views of Spatial Production Through the readings of Riis, Crane, and Yezierska’s texts, the tenement and the slum are readable, via Lefebvre, as socially constructed spaces. In fact, the spaces of the tenement (and those of the streets and public areas of the Lower East Side that permeate them) are class-based spaces par excellence in turn-of-the-century New York. The tenement, with its crowding and poverty, along with the skyscraper, marked by its separation and capitalist verticality, become the spaces in New York that most readily differentiate class. Nihad Farooq argues that Riis’s text accomplished its own distortion of public and private space in that, “The other half has made its way from the tenement into the private, domestic space of the white, middle-class American reader” (74). Riis, Crane, and Yezierska take readers into the “foreign territory” of the East Side (74), according to Farooq, where the space of the tenement becomes liminal.The tenement is somewhere in between “domestic and foreign, self and other, science and romance” (75). According to Farooq,Yezierska’s novel “likewise grapples with the difficulty of traversing the margins of tenement life and middle-class American life and of navigating the dual role of native informant and professional expert” (75). Yezierska’s other novels (notably Salome of the Tenements) also offer detailed readings of the displaced identity (both spatially and socially) of the Lower East Side immigrants and those inhabiting the overcrowded tenements. However, it is evident from reading Riis, Crane, and Yezierska in dialogue with Marxist geographers like Lefebvre that readings of the tenement (and surrounding street) produce significant representations of socially constructed spaces.

Works Cited Crane, Stephen. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings. Modern Library Paperbacks, 2001.  Dolkart, Andrew S. “The Architecture and Development of New York City: Living Together.” nycarchitecture​ .columbia​.e​du. Accessed on 20 Feb. 2020.  Edmunds, Susan. “Between Revolution and Reform: Anzia Yezierska’s Labor Politics.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 405–423. Farooq, Nihad M. “Of Science and Excess: Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, and the Modernist Turn in Immigrant Fiction.” American Studies, vol. 53, no. 4, 2014, pp. 73–94.  Garland, Hamlin. The Arena, June 1893, p. 259.  Irving, Katrina. “Gendered Space, Racialized Space: Nativism, The Immigrant Woman, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie.” College Literature, vol. 20, no. 3, Oct. 1993, pp. 30–43. Jirousek, Lori. “Ethnics and Ethnographers: Zora Neale Hurston and Anzia Yezierska.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol 29, no. 2, 2006. pp. 19–32.  Kessler-Harris, Alice. Introduction. Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska, 1925, 3rd ed, Persea Books, 2003, pp. xxi–xxxvi.  Lawson, Andrew. “Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane’s City.” American Literary History, vol. 16, no. 4, 2004, pp. 596–618. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1991. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. Penguin Books, 1997. Sante, Luc. Introduction. How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis, Penguin Books, 1997, pp. ix–xxii. ———. Introduction. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings, by Stephen Crane, 1893, 1st ed., Modern Library Paperbacks, 2001, pp. xi–xvi. Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. Persea Books, 2003.

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6 ELENA FERRANTE’S FICTION OF PROBLEMATIZED PROVIDING AND PROTECTING Cristina Migliaccio

“Ferrante fever” has emerged on the American landscape just as the class divide in our nation has reached an apex alongside the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements. The pseudonymous author’s four-book series, especially My Brilliant Friend, is set against the backdrop of post-WWII Naples, exposing a working-class culture endlessly on the periphery of progress and economic growth, but never quite there.The lives of the characters of Book I recall the precarious position of people in today’s Global South, countries Naples has more cultural resemblances to than many of its European neighbors. Ferrante’s first book centers on the struggle of the working-class poor to provide for and to protect themselves and their families. This struggle is further problematized for the various characters in the novel by their position in the fixed hierarchy of the small community of Rione Luzzatti, where they live. A Marxist reading of My Brilliant Friend is a relevant framework for understanding class disparity on a local and global level. For Marx, the type of labor one does directly informs her attitudes and interactions with other humans (Marx and Engels “Forms”). This is evidenced through the thorny occupational narratives of the characters in the novel. Just as immigrants from the Global South come to Naples today for hopes of a better future, the numbers of working-class poor that make up neighborhoods like Rione Luzzatti of My Brilliant Friend multiply. Cultural anthropologist Thomas Belmonte describes the unstable state of the lives of the working-class poor of Naples: “Although they may specialize as artisans, street vendors, repairman, [or] scavengers … they have no vital, sustaining role to play in the technical order of things … they are excluded, the outcasts, of antiquity and modernity alike” (139).The jobs of the working-class poor are unstable, their income unguaranteed. Problematized providing and protecting are a material reality characterized by the challenges faced in having insufficient or unstable means for sustaining and caring for workingclass peoples and their families (DeGenaro 183–184). This chapter analyzes the occupational narratives, material conditions, and complex struggles of Ferrante’s characters in My Brilliant Friend through the working-class framework of problematized providing and protecting.

Naples as a Problematic Place Place is a strong signifier of problematized provision and protection in the Neapolitan Novels. Rione Luzzatti, where the majority of the novels take place, is only 3.5 kilometers from the city of Naples, but it lacks the occupational dynamism of the big city, and embodies its peripheral status through the working-class families and limited number of businesses that have existed there since 77

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what seems to be the beginning of time. Both Naples and Rione Luzzatti are located geographically in the shadows of Mount Vesuvius. As one of the only volcanoes to have erupted in the century the novel is written, with one of the most densely populated perimeters in all of Europe, the imminent threat of Mount Vesuvius is symbolic of the combustible position of both Naples city and the nearby Rione. At the outset of the My Brilliant Friend, the stage is set for Rione as a volatile extension of Naples, where law and justice are glaringly absent. Naples has always been a city in crisis, a “panic city,” as a result of its vulnerability both to acute shocks (eruptions of Vesuvius, earthquakes, cholera outbreaks, the aerial bombings in 1943–4 by the Allies during World War II as supplemented by the ground-level devastation inflicted by German occupation) and chronic stresses (its endemic poverty, its congestion and traffic jams, its garbage crises and illegal toxic waste dumping, and, above all, its culture of violence that has come to be organized into a system by the Camorra. (D’Acierno and Pugliese 2) Rione Luzzatti is an extension of Naples’ crises, especially its political and economic corruption. Don Achille Carracci, loan shark and owner of the sole grocery store, controls the neighborhood and heads the clearly ordered hierarchy of workers in the community. The reign of Don Achille creates a hotbed for mistrust and fear, as anyone who counters him is likely to meet a tragic end, as evidenced by the fate of Alfredo Peluso, a carpenter in the community indebted to Achille. A cultural shift that reflects post-WWII progress slowly filters into Rione by the middle of My Brilliant Friend, infusing hope among its inhabitants. Elena Greco, the narrator and eldest daughter of the Greco family, describes the changes: Initiatives flourished in the whole neighborhood. A young dressmaker became a partner in the dry goods store … and the store expanded, aspiring to become a ladies’ clothing shop. The auto-repair shop … was trying, thanks to the son of the old owner … to get into motorcycles. In other words everything was quivering, arching upward as if to change its characteristics, not to be known by the accumulated hatreds, tensions, ugliness but, rather, to show a new face. (Ferrante 1303) The slow commercial changes in Rione Luzzatti reflect the slippery national incentives and efforts designed to revitalize Southern Italy with the establishment of a new Italian government and constitution post-WWII. The fragility of the new national government and the staffing of its regional outposts premised on clientelism, patronage, and misappropriation of funds creates a suspicion of a central government that never quite delivers on its promises to help the vulnerable, largely destitute people of the Mezzogiorno region of Italy. Italian scholar Pellegrino D’Acierno explains that Naples derives from decades of “highly flawed urban renewal schemes” dating back to 1884, which he dubs “sventramento” (gutting). These projects to renew and remodernize the city were “determined by the politics of self-interest and self-empowerment on the part of corrupt politicians colluding with unscrupulous real-estate speculators” (3).Though it changes alongside the rest of the nation, Rione Luzzatti also reflects the corruption of nearby Naples, modernization tainted by lawlessness. Though progress is seen and experienced by a few in the neighborhood (mainly those who already have wealth), much like the “underproletarians” cultural anthropologist Thomas Belmonte depicts in the working-class Naples of his seminal text, The Broken Fountain, the working-class people of Rione Luzzatti are “familiar with the parasitism and corruption of established bureaucratic power” and “prefer to cultivate their own, personalized networks of local credit, marketing and 78

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exchange” (Belmonte 140–141). This is how the neighborhood retains old ways of doing business, with the owners of the sole pastry-bar shop in the neighborhood—the Solaras family—replacing Don Achille’s position as loan shark after his death, and their adolescent sons, Michele and Marcello, bullying anyone who challenges them in the neighborhood. The landscape feels unsettling, threatening, especially for those characters coming of age in Book I, though they cannot always name why. Elena Greco describes the feeling: When I returned to the streets and to school, I felt that the space, too, had changed. It seemed to be chained between two dark poles … I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream. It was an enduring malaise, lasting perhaps years, beyond early adolescence. (Ferrante 625–631) The feelings of suffocation and futility Greco attempts to articulate at the beginning of Book I are endemic to life in Rione. “Here everything is dangerous” (Ferrante 2584) utters Lila Cerullo’s older brother Rino in the latter half of the book, illustrating that survival characterized by providing and protecting takes precedence over all other narratives in the Neapolitan Novels and casts an ominous shadow over the dreams of its inhabitants, especially the young people. The promise of nearby Naples to offer some escape and solace for the adolescent characters of Book I is tarnished by the lack of provision and protection they feel in Rione Luzzatti. On a seemingly enjoyable night out on the upper-class Via Chiaia of Naples, the tight-knit group of friends are as threatened (or perhaps more threatened) by the class divide they observe as they are by the dynamics of their hometown. Greco describes the moment: It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind. I was astonished. All the more so that, while I would have paused to examine at leisure dresses, shoes, the style of glasses if they wore glasses, they passed by without seeming to see me.They didn’t see any of the five of us. We were not perceptible. Or not interesting. (Ferrante 2477) The felt experience of invisibility and inequality is too much to bear, particularly for the young men in the group, Rino Cerullo and Pasquale Peluso. D’Acierno argues this sense of shame or scuorno, a “‘double consciousness’ upon Neapolitan self-identity [especially that of the workingclass poor]” drives “defensive Neapolitan identity politics” (D’Acierno and Pugliese 3). The night culminates in a vicious fight with an affluent boy Rino and Pasquale jeer at, who later rallies his friends for a physical reprisal. Here, an important inversion occurs—one that illustrates the shifting alliances that typify life in Rione through Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels—the Solaras brothers drive by and join the rumble, rescuing their neighborhood peers from a brutal end. This rare moment of solidarity between the rich and poor of the neighborhood signifies Rione Luzzatti as a problematic protective space, even if it is mostly foreboding for the teens up until this point. The message is resounding and foreshadows a complex material dynamic that evolves through the four books: even outside of the neighborhood, the more vulnerable citizens of Rione Luzzatti must rely on those more powerful in the hierarchy for protection. The scene ends with a metaphoric moment that illustrates how girls, in particular, become sacrificial lambs in this rocky political economy. Elena Cerullo, Carmela Peluso, and Lila Cerullo, who would never be permitted 79

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by their brothers or fathers to ride in the Solarases’ car (typically regarded as a vehicle for sexual exploitation), are quickly coerced to ride home with them “safely” after the violent brawl. Protective spaces do exist within Rione—school, the library, the church. These spaces are intended to offer refuge from material concerns and hardships, in their focus on ideology and spirituality. But even these are infiltrated by the power dynamics that dictate the neighborhood. Early on in Book I, Alfonso Peluso’s beating outside of the church following Sunday mass appears to be orchestrated as a spectacle that the perpetrator wants and knows all in the neighborhood will see and learn from: right in front of the Church of the Holy Family, right after Mass, Signor Peluso had started screaming furiously at Don Achille. Don Achille had left his [family], and, appearing for a moment in his most hair-raising form, had hurled himself at Peluso, picked him up, thrown him against a tree in the public gardens, and left him there, barely conscious, with blood coming out of innumerable wounds in his head and everywhere, and the poor man able to say merely: help. (Ferrante 346) Church, like school, and even the library, seemingly neutral places that might offer solace to the inhabitants of Rione, become spaces where the socio-economic hierarchy of the neighborhood is reified. In Book I, only Ischia is portrayed as a space where Elena Cerullo finds complete liberation and peace outside of the town. Interestingly, the space feels unproblematized and protective precisely because no one from the neighborhood is there with her: not her best friend Lila, not her parents, no one in her circle of working-class friends. The topography of Ischia, its stark contrast to the smoldering urban space of Rione, is itself largely responsible for the protection and healing Elena feels: The seawater and the sun rapidly erased the inflammation of the acne from my face. I burned, I darkened … gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. I liked everything. (Ferrante 2732–2738) Interestingly, it is the arrival of the Sarratore family at the summer home where Elena is employed, old neighbors from the neighborhood, that leads to the abrupt ending of her vacation and unspoiled feelings of comfort and protection. Donato Sarratore’s advances on fifteen-year-old Elena are symbolic of how precarious provision and protection are, especially for the female characters in Rione Luzzatti.

Friendship and Literacy Friendship, a protective gauze for most children and adolescents, is complicated by the economic and emotional scarcity people negotiate daily in Rione. Belmonte observes that “the working-class poor of Naples, confronted by the scarcity of resources, which they note, does not apply to society as a whole, [makes them] become skilled in arts of negative reciprocity” (142). Negative reciprocity or the “eye for an eye” mentality characterizes the political economy of Rione Luzzatti, and complicates the friendship the novel centers on, between Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo. A problematic scenario between the friends (one that foreshadows many to come) opens the prologue of My Brilliant Friend, aptly entitled “Eliminating All the Traces.” After sixty-six years, Lila Cerullo, Elena Greco’s childhood friend, has gone missing from the neighborhood, and according to her son Rino, cut herself out of pictures, taken all of her clothing, and erased any other evidence 80

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of herself. The narrator, Elena is indignant. She ends the prologue with resolve: “We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory” (Ferrante 203). Elena chooses to write her friend into being—an act of vindication, when clearly, Lila’s self-erasure is deliberate—but Elena’s writing is also paradoxically a recovery project that honors her friend’s life, and their friendship. As Book I progresses, another, perhaps more immediate exigence emerges for the words on the page: Elena’s struggle to articulate her own position in the complex friendship, but also to disentangle her personal experiences from those of Rafaella Cerullo’s, as a final act of self-protection and perhaps, departure from her birthplace. Friendship in Rione Luzzatti is predetermined by one’s class standing, and protection means fraternizing with those in one’s family and social class. For Lila and Elena, this means associating with Lila’s older brother Rino, a shoe cobbler, Enzo Scanno, the fruit seller, Pasquale Peluzzo, the construction worker, and his sister Carmela, Antonio Cappuccio, the mechanic, and his sister, Ada. Lila and Elena’s friendship, however, is premised on another feature: their shared love of school and learning. The two meet in the classroom, and Elena, or Lenu, as Lila calls her, is enthralled by Lila’s innate ability to grasp difficult concepts, but more than that she is mesmerized by Lila’s “absolute determination” (Ferrante 304). “Whether [Lila] was gripping the tricolor shaft of the pen or a stone or the handrail in the dark stairs, she communicated the idea that whatever came next … she would do without hesitation” (Ferrante 311). In contrast, Elena describes herself as “without conviction” (Ferrante 311), a feeling that counters the assurance she pronounces in the ending words of the prologue in My Brilliant Friend. The tone is set early on for a friendship that is protective in that it unifies the girls against the hardships of life in Rione. However, the dynamic of Lila and Elena’s relationship is also rooted and complicated by the contentious political economy of the neighborhood. Problematized protection—of their friendship from the forces outside of it—is a theme for the way the girls interact with one another from a very young age. Though Elena’s intrigue (and competitive spirit) with Lila might begin at school, their friendship evolves outside of school, where they “challenge each other, without ever saying a word, testing [one another’s] courage” (Ferrante 209). Play for Lila and Lenu is a way to displace some of the “terrors that [they] tasted every day” in Rione (Ferrante 265). When Lila decides to challenge Elena’s fears the first time, they exchange dolls by pushing Elena’s doll through the grates of a basement where the sinister Don Achille lives; the girls must face the most threatening figure in the neighborhood. This moment in My Brilliant Friend illustrates how even an innocuous childhood friendship is influenced by the Marxist view that cultures organize around the exploitations and reductions of class and that: “stratum specific patterns of behavior, feeling, and systemized thought … may … compensate for, and in some cases even protest the dehumanizing circumstances of life” (Belmonte 138). The girls’ undertaking to find their dolls and to confront the daunting Don Achille parallels the struggle of all of the working-class poor in Rione to protect themselves from the loan shark’s exploitation. Though a futile search for the dolls in the basement of the building convinces Lila they must approach Don Achille at home, the petrified Lenu admits to being there “only because [Lila] was” (Ferrante 232).While Lila is guided by a sense of “what [is] just and necessary” (Ferrante 239), the complex alliance relies on protection for Elena: “when I reached her, she gave me her hand.This gesture changed everything between us forever” (Ferrante 239) and reflects the ideology that fuels many of the adult relationships in the neighborhood. Literacy is, perhaps, the only protective ideological alternative Elena and Lila are exposed to beyond the world of Rione Luzzatti. Through the subjects taught to them and their relative successes in the classroom, both girls slowly begin to glimpse circumstances and ideas beyond the limited experiences they feel in their private lives. Learning fosters imagination and storytelling— a game which the two girls enjoy and excel at. Academic literacy offers an attendant language beyond the hopeless rhetoric of the neighborhood: “[a] world full of words that killed: croup, 81

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tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection” (Ferrante 291). Elena admires Lila’s linguistic dexterity, a skillset she is also proudly capable of: She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. But I also realized with pleasure that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily. (Ferrante 1602) Literacy is a form of agency and self-protection for Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco. As they progress toward the end of their elementary school years, however, the girls begin to co-opt the materialism of Rione and think about the ways they can monetize their academic knowledge: things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied, we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich.Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book. (Ferrante 814) Ironically, it is Don Achille who indirectly plants the idea that Elena and Lila can make money from publishing a book. When they approach the loan shark’s home at Lila’s insistence that he is the one who made the dolls disappear from the cellar, Don Achille is intrigued enough by the boldness of their accusation (something no adult in Rione Luzzatti would dare do) to reward them with money for new dolls.The book Elena and Lila choose to buy instead—Little Women—is a tale that symbolizes the material escape available to girls through school and literacy—a freedom that may be a possibility, but is still very much conditioned by Rione Luzzatti’s intersectional power dynamics. School, however, eventually problematizes the scant providence and protection the girls may feel in their home lives.Their elementary teacher, Maestra Oliviera, encourages payment for tutoring to prepare Elena and Lila for a high-stakes middle school entrance exam. The Cerullos are unwilling to make the financial sacrifice for their daughter. Eleven-year-old Lila is contemptuous and rebellious in the face of her father’s refusal to let her continue her studies, which leads him to throw her out of their second-story window in a fit of rage. Perhaps, no other moment in My Brilliant Friend illustrates the destructive effects of the political economy on the family unit in Rione, as this one. Kristen Lucas points out that “From an outsider’s perspective that takes for granted the ability to provide and protect, the choices of [working-class people can] seem almost incomprehensible” (DeGenaro 2675). However, problematized providing and protecting are the central issue around which Fernando Cerullo’s identity is formed and he makes his decisions, including the often violent ways he interacts with his children and his wife. The challenges of providing and protecting are never far from the minds of the families in Rione, and the costly path to education is perceived as an imminent threat to their ability to support the rest of the household. Like Lila, Elena is similarly threatened by Maestra Oliviera’s forcible intervention in her education, though her threat does not actualize in the way Lila’s does. Maestra Oliviera’s request for the Grecos to financially support Elena’s schooling agitates her parents. However, Mr. Greco’s exposure to occupations and lives beyond Rione Luzzatti in his job as a porter in Naples’s city hall make education a more believable pathway to upward mobility than it is for other members of the community. However, even his assent to support his daughter’s education is conditional: “‘Lenucia, do well with the teacher and we’ll let you go to school. But if you’re not good, if you’re not the best, Papa needs help and you’ll go to work’” (Ferrante 462). 82

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The promise of education for the working-class poor is not intellectual capital, but upward socioeconomic mobility. In a town where erratic bursts of violence disrupt harmony on a whim, and where, like Fernando Cerullo,“people often reached the point of disperazione [desperation]” (Ferrante 984), the collective imaginings for a better future granted through school offer temporary solace and protection for Lila and Elena, as does their friendship, at least in their elementary years. The comfort and escape of learning is consistently juxtaposed with the instability the girls feel outside of school: “We didn’t trust the light on the stones, on the buildings, on the scrubland beyond the neighborhood, of the people inside and outside their houses. We imagined dark corners, the feeling repressed but always close to exploding” (Ferrante 267). Lila’s inability to continue her education makes it appear as if she will never escape the dark corners of Rione. Though she is forbidden by her family to continue her education, Lila is determined to advance her own learning through whatever means necessary. She produces The Blue Fairy, a beautifully illustrated story, shortly after her father throws her out the window, and asks Elena to bring it to Signora Oliviero, perhaps as one last appeal for the teacher’s support in helping her to continue her education. When Oliviero is dismissive of Lila’s effort, Lila continues to take books out of the local library at an alarming pace in order to learn Latin, Greek, and the other subjects Elena must master to succeed in middle school. As the gatekeeper of literacy, Maestra Oliviero is a problematic signifier of providence and protection. She embodies the free will that so many women in Rione are denied as a single, financially independent working woman. She is also a conduit of providence and protection through school, one of the few places that may provide joy for children of the neighborhood. However, Oliviero’s classroom is hardly a safe space as described by Elena: “In those years I feared one thing: not being paired, in the hierarchy established by Maestra Olivero, with Lila; not to hear the teacher say proudly, Cerullo and Greco are the best” (Ferrante 480). Through consistent favoritism and competitions, Oliviero influences the students’ perceptions of themselves and of one another: “From first grade to fifth, [Lila] was … because of Maestra Oliviero, the most hated child in the school and the neighborhood” (Ferrante 486). Rather than offering the children equal opportunities to succeed, Oliviero is emblematic of education as “slanted to protect the interests of ruling class groups” (hooks 42). Her public shaming concretizes the stark contrast between those who have and have not in Rione, demonizing the working class. When Elena tries to understand why Maestra Oliviero will not read The Blue Fairy Lila worked so hard to create, she retorts: “Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?” “Yes, the people, the tribunes of the plebs are the Gracchi.” “The plebs are quite a nasty thing.” “Yes. And if one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself.” (Ferrante 825–832) Oliviero’s “education” problematizes the protection the girls (and other children of Rione) look to from adults and complicates the very epistemology of education as the project of an already broken state. Here, the “encouraging words” (Ferrante 468) Elena has relied on from the teacher since childhood turn menacing and also threaten her closest friendship, though young Elena may not realize it. It is no surprise that besides Elena, only the children of the more affluent families in the neighborhood are able to progress to middle and high school by the end of My Brilliant Friend. This moment in Book I not only foreshadows Lila’s disturbing fate at the end of the novel, but the “bourgeois colonization” (deRogatis 3064) Elena consistently experiences in the academic and intellectual circles she frequents as the four novels progress. 83

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Lila’s concept of intellectual, economic, and social currency, concepts tied directly to the problematized provision and protection she experiences, shifts from the values of Elena and Signora Oliviero, and becomes more closely aligned with the values of the neighborhood. Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of capital supports Lila’s shift in values. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu explains that though connected to and often derived from economic capital, social and cultural capital are the more ambiguous categories as they are often comprised of “invisible norms” of behavior. Social and cultural capital are typically connected to one’s aesthetic disposition and manifested in a person’s “taste”—such as one’s preference for certain types of music, food, and art. Other types of social and cultural capital might be reflected in physical appearance, gestures, and mannerisms. Class is therefore not only tied to money, but is a “set of actually usable resources and powers” (114) perpetuated by the forms of capital one embodies. Language operates as another form of the symbolic capital Bourdieu speaks of. It can be used as an instrument of power determining who speaks and who is silenced in a given context. Linguistic capital changes depending on contextual factors. The words of school, a form of social capital which Elena and Lila had delighted in, and a linguistic tie that characterizes their friendship apart from others in the neighborhood, are eventually replaced for Lila by the words of her father’s trade, which she throws herself into with abandon. Friendship is problematized by the intellectual and linguistic divide that emerges through Lila and Elena’s lived experiences, which, for the first time in their lives, are different. Lila is intent on helping Fernando’s business grow to the next level in line with the progress other small businesses in the neighborhood seem to be making. In mastering her father’s trade, she acquires a material capital Elena is cut off from at school: She talked to me about leather, uppers, leather-goods dealers, leather production, high heels and flat heels, about preparing the thread, about soles, and how the sole was applied, colored, and buffed. She used all those words of the trade as if they were magic and her father had learned them in an enchanted world. (Ferrante 1159) Though Elena is able to do the one thing Lila is desperate to be a part of, suddenly, “Middle school, Latin, the teachers, the books, the language of books seemed less evocative than the finish of a pair of shoes and that [depresses her]” (Ferrante 1191). The ideological concepts offered in school do not translate into the kind of material existence that is usable in Rione Luzzatti. This deflates Elena’s enthusiasm for the privileged path she is on and catalyzes the alienation she feels from Lila, and Rione throughout the Neapolitan Novels. Friendship and literacy—two mechanisms of protection in My Brilliant Friend—are problematized by the challenges of provision and protection Elena Greco and Rafaella Cerullo experience in their home lives. The “luxury of assumed providing and protecting is not available” (DeGenaro 2516) to their working-class families, and though children, the girls become actors in the production of survival. Comparative literature scholar Sarah Ropp coined the concept “survivorism” (1) as a type of “faux survival”—a portrayal of people “bootstrapping” their way beyond intersectional injustice through a positive attitude, grit, hard work, and other individual efforts. It is a symbolic strategy used to deny the collective cultural superstructures that create and sediment [working-class] victims’ raced/classed/gendered experiences to begin with. Ferrante juxtaposes Lila’s survivorism against Elena’s in Book I through the dynamics of their friendship and educational experiences.

Work and Invisible Labor Marx argues that materiality—the things we make in order to survive and how we go about producing them—conditions our lives (Marx, Contribution). As stated earlier in this chapter, his theory 84

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posits that society is organized by the economic base or forces of production in a culture. For Marx, the base shapes every other part of society or the superstructure, which includes institutions such as the army, police, legal system, and ideological structures like schools, religion, family, and the media. For Marx, the superstructure functions as ideology—ways of thinking that reflect class behavior— what many of us take for granted as normal. The base and superstructure are interdependent social constructs which shape human interaction. Marx’s materiality and cultural theorist Dana Cloud’s assertion that “class remains a significant social marker that has associated with it distinct material conditions, namely, challenges to members’ ability to provide and protect” (DeGenaro 2504) explain how work signifies and shapes the lives and characters of Rione Luzzatti. Before the first pages of the Prologue of My Brilliant Friend, an Index of Characters lists the families of the neighborhood. Near each family’s name is an epitaph that references the job the head of household performs. The Cerullo family is “the shoemaker’s family,” the Greco family is “the porter’s family,” the Scanno family is “the fruit and vegetable seller’s family,” etc.There are two family references where the “job title” does not follow the family name. The first is the Caracci family, which is followed by “Don Achille’s family,” and the second is the Cappuccio family which is followed by “the mad woman’s family” (Ferrante 107). The list is emblematic of the problematized providing and protecting that shape all four of the Neapolitan Novels. What happens when work or the economic means of production define a place, a community, and the families therein? The Index of Characters creates a pre-prologue to Book I that conflates work with identity in Rione Luzzatti. “The shoemaker’s family” functions as an interchangeable name for the Cerullo family, a form of identification as important, if not more important than the family name.The other micro narrative that emerges in the Index of Characters which foreshadows problematic provision and protection is the hierarchy of the neighborhood. For example, the Carracci family’s nickname, the only one listed by the father’s name, “Don Achille’s family” indicates that name (not occupation) is enough to qualify the family without further definition, signifying power and patriarchy (Ferrante 118). Problematic providence and protection are further complicated by the patriarchal dynamics of Rione, as evidenced through the “the mad widow’s family” label given to the Cappuccio family. The label relegates the Cappuccios, particularly the women in the family, to the bottom of the pecking order in Rione Luzzatti. Melina Cappuccio’s “madness” is a stigma assigned to her (and perhaps adopted by her deliberately, as a protective mechanism) by the men, women, and children of Rione. Because she is widowed, but also because she is unemployed, her ability to provide for and protect herself and her family is problematized. The term “mad” ironically indexes the only household in Rione Luzzatti headed by a woman. The label foregrounds the subordinate position of all women in My Brilliant Friend and their unacknowledged, unpaid labor. Melina’s madness is, in fact, symbolic of the collective anger and madness the women of Rione embody due to the silencing and physical violence enacted upon them by their husbands, brothers, and fathers. As a young child, Elena tries to make sense of the feminine fury: I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end. (Ferrante 355) 85

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The women of My Brilliant Friend “[reveal] the way in which class intersects with other identities and allegiances … resulting in … knowledge that insists upon the specificity and complexities of working-class experience, which political, historical, and sociological accounts often erase” (Clark and Hubble 224). Work defines families, and the type of work one does is typically passed down from fathers to their sons. This problematizes provision and protection in the family, as children function beyond the household as employees. In Rione Luzzatti, where most children do not continue school beyond their elementary years, economic interests intertwined with roles of parenting problematize family dynamics by pitting children and parents against one another as workers and employees. Rino Cerullo is entrapped by his status as the first male son in his father’s household, presumed to take over the family shoe business without choice. He is roped into the business as a child and fights to help his sister, Lila, advance in her education so she can avoid a similar fate: Rino protected [Lila].When the subject of the admissions test came up, quarrels exploded continuously between him and his father. Rino was about sixteen at the time, he was a very excitable boy and had started a battle to be paid for the work he did. His reasoning was: I get up at six; I come to the shop and work till eight at night; I want a salary. But those words outraged his father and his mother. Rino had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, why did he want money? His job was to help the family, not impoverish it. (Ferrante 786) Much like that of the women, the labor of children in Rione Luzzatti is assumed, unpaid, and taken for granted. Furthermore the exploitation of children at work by their own parents reifies Marx’s premise that economic structures or the base of society determine all of the other legal, and political superstructures in a society, including the family unit. In the case of Rione, Rino’s peers like Pasquale Peluso, whose father is imprisoned, and Antonio Cappuccio, whose father dies, have more freedom to choose a profession, and perhaps to avoid the exploitation Rino experiences through no wages, though they lack the “protection” of a traditional family structure and a male head of household. Kristen Lucas explains that “the sources of problematized providing and protecting come from insufficient wages or lack of benefits, the instability of employment in the industry or of the industry itself; or from the perception of insufficient wages or unstable employment” (DeGenaro 184). Fernando Cerullo embodies the anxiety of never becoming economically stable. In a rare moment of vulnerability, Fernando shares the stressors of supporting a large family when Stefano Carracci offers him a financial partnership that might help him turn his small cobbler shop into a shoe factory: He said that his mistake had been to marry Nunzia, who had weak hands and no wish to work, but if he had married Ines, a flame of his youth who had been a great worker, he would in time have had a business all his own. (Ferrante 3241) Fernando’s words illustrate how love and marriage are politicized by the economy of Rione. In his alliance with Stefano, Fernando is operating through the “constrained choices” (DeGenaro 189) he has to grow his business, a choice that foreshadows dire consequences, especially for his daughter Lila.

Love, Problematized Familial love, friendship love, love of home, and community are all problematized by the dire necessities of providing and protecting in My Brilliant Friend. Women are especially vulnerable to 86

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the gendered political economy of the neighborhood. Social hierarchies in Rione Luzzatti are determined by the work one performs, and family dynamics are dictated by challenges to providing and protecting. Friendships are determined by one’s class standing in the neighborhood, a position that is negotiable only by the more affluent. Lila’s love of learning quickly transfers to a passionate investment in her father’s business, driven by her love for her older brother, Rino. Though ethnographer Belmonte notes that the Neapolitan working poor “confronted by scarcity of opportunities … become resigned, to preserve their sanity” (142), Rino is intent on exceeding the class standing of his family, at the expense of his sanity. Rino has been an ardent protector of Lila since she was a child and advocates for her to continue schooling, albeit at a trade school, even after her father prohibits her from the academic trajectory Elena is afforded by her family. Rino’s childhood is aborted at ten years old when he is enlisted by Fernando to work in the cobbler shop. Lila, aware of her sixteen-year-old brother’s increasing feelings of frustration and entrapment, embarks on a journey to design and create a pair of shoes that will help her brother revolutionize the small family business.Though Rino “found it unjust to work as hard as his father and not receive a cent,” Fernando insists Rino’s learning is compensation enough (Ferrante 786–793). Lila enlists to help the family cobbler shop, adopting the ideology that “to become truly rich you need a business” (Ferrante 1420). She shows Elena “shoes that she [wants] to make with her brother, both men’s and women’s.They were beautiful designs … [but Fernando reminds her that] to actually do things takes time and money” (Ferrante 1406–1413), neither of which the Cerullos have. Lila’s dream for a Cerullo Shoe Factory is rooted in the desire to provide for and protect her family, but is also a means of protecting herself from the physical exploitation she sees poor girls in the neighborhood are susceptible to. She explains her logic to Elena: “And you know why [the Solaras brothers] acted the way they did with Ada?” “No.” “Because Ada doesn’t have a father, her brother Antonio counts for nothing, and she helps Melina clean the stairs of the buildings.” As a result, either we, too, had to make money, more than the Solaras, or, to protect ourselves against the brothers, we had to do them serious harm. (Ferrante 1441) Money is understood not only to be a mechanism necessary for survival in Rione Luzzatti, but doubly important for women’s protection. The reader is horrified when Rino shows up at the Cerullo home one night with Marcello Solaras as the dinner guest. In his increasing fantasy of a Cerullo factory, fueled by a shoe model he and Lila create from her drawing, Rino becomes increasingly impatient for production and the wealth he assumes will come with it. The aforementioned regional gang fight in Naples, where the Solarases emerge as protectors of Rino and Pasquale, turns into an unsteady alliance between Rino and Marcello that the latter exploits for personal gain. The loving sibling relationship Rino and Lila have is problematized by the increasing pressure Rino feels to rival those more financially successful than he is in the neighborhood. He begins to interpret Lila’s precision in making the shoes as another roadblock to his rags to riches zeal: “He reproached Lila because she first encouraged him and then discouraged him. He shouted that he wouldn’t stay forever in that wretched place to be his father’s servant and watch others get rich” (Ferrante 2092). Lila begins to realize that Rino is slipping into madness, a fact that her father notices as well. At a local New Year’s Eve celebration, designed to be lighthearted and fun, her brother morphs into a ruthless competitor, hurling angry insults at the Solaras brothers whose fireworks rival the Caracci spectacle Rino is a part of: Rino had lost his usual outline, she now had a brother without boundaries, from whom something irreparable might emerge. In that smile, in that gaze she saw something 87

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unbearably wretched, the more unbearable the more she loved her brother, and felt the need to stay beside him to help him and be helped. (Ferrante 2308) The dissolution of boundaries in this scene is symbolic of the demise of the coveted sibling relationship Rino and Lila have had since childhood, and indeed, of the devaluation of Lila by her entire family. Lila, too, feels what she ascribes to her brother and describes later in the series as “smarginatura”—a foreboding sense of feeling unprotected. Marx might explain Rino’s “smarginatura” as the moment he lets his true nature be overtaken by the politics of Rione. Andrew Collier explains this disconnect in Marx: A Beginner’s Guide: “It is not the nature of humans to be egoistic; it is their nature to be egoistic in a society where getting your neighbor’s job or undercutting your neighbor’s business is necessary to make a living” (Marx and Davis 30). This moment of realization for Lila ends her career in the family business, and she devotes herself to helping Nunzia at home, wanting nothing to do with Rino’s cruel desperation for riches. Lila’s feelings of unprotectedness escalate as Fernando and Rino succumb to the seduction of Marcello’s feigned interest in the family business: It was clear that he had invited himself … then [he] started to praise the need for progress … he began to praise the idea of making new shoes. And from that moment he began to look at Lila as if in praising the energy of the generations he was praising her in particular. (Ferrante 2609) Marcello embodies the cunning or “la furbizia” (144) that cultural anthropologist Thomas Belmonte notes is a key component to survival in Neapolitan neighborhoods like Rione Luzzatti. “Cunning … is a stance which is maintained toward society as a whole, not only toward members of other classes but equally toward one’s neighbor’s, kinsmen, and friends” (144). Lila, who has refused Marcello’s declarations of love up until this point, is outraged at her family’s acquiescence to him. At Marcello’s request to see the innovative shoes that Lila and Rino have labored endlessly to create, Lila refuses and runs out of their home with the shoes so no one can find them. Ironically, the shoes Lila creates become a central symbol of her oppression, an object used in negotiating not only the family business, but her body and future. This moment illustrates the dangers that Marx cautions emerge when the worker (in this case Lila) is alienated from the object of her production (the shoes).When Rino coerces Marcello to look at the innovative shoes, Marcello predictably shows disinterest but uses the moment to offer the shop owner a proposal for Lila’s hand in marriage instead, though she is only fourteen years of age. Despite the cunning baseness of Marcello’s proposal, Fernando and Nunzia agree that Lila should consent pending “a long engagement at home” (Ferrante 2681). Lila’s understanding that her parents once again prioritize their material concerns (their hopes that the Solarases will bring the family financial stability) over her well-being prompts the impulse to self-harm: “rather than be engaged to Marcello Solara and marry him she would go and drown herself in the pond” (Ferrante 2681). Though she doesn’t execute this through Marcello’s courtship, she does decide to entertain the interest of the wellto-do grocer, Stefano Carracci, as a way to escape from Marcello and the imposition of her parents. Lila’s decision to consider and ultimately accept Stefano Carracci’s proposal of engagement is a way to protect herself from an arranged marriage to Marcello and in direct response to the political economy of her household, a circumstance that leaves her no other choice given her lack of education, employment opportunities, and pathways out of Rione Luzzatti. Stefano, like Marcello, is aware of the innovative shoes through Rino’s boasting. Lila, aware of his romantic interest, implores him to buy them as a way to redirect the sale Fernando and Rino want to make to Marcello. Stefano surprises her by not only purchasing the shoes, but all of the designs Lila produced two years before. Though she tells Stefano “Marcello tried in every possible way to buy 88

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me but no one is going to buy me” (Ferrante 3187), she admits to Elena that her flirtations with Stefano are designed to free her and her family from the grip of the Solarases. When Elena asks: “You would become engaged to Stefano just to get Marcello out of your house?” she barely pauses before responding “yes” (Ferrante 3206). Lila becomes a pawn in another series of patriarchal economic transactions, this time of her own choosing.When Stefano decides to invest and expand the Cerullo shoe shop, Marcello is upended as her fiancé. Rino energetically shifts alliances, illustrating the precarious nature of friendship in Rione Luzzatti, where money and work trump all other signifiers of attachment. Lila and Stefano begin a public courtship that embodies materiality or “solid” reflections of prosperity that are interpreted as an affront by many in the neighborhood, particularly Lila and Elena’s working-class circle of friends. “In the days and months, she became a young girl who imitated the models in fashion magazines … When you saw her she gave off a glow that seemed a violent slap in the face of the poverty of the neighborhood” (Ferrante 3492). Elena alone feels the fragility of Lila’s performance: “I looked at her … and … I knew—and perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again” (Ferrante 3511). As her marriage to Stefano nears, and he unexpectedly requests that the elder Solarases be the speechmakers at their wedding, Lila too, begins to suspect Stefano’s devotion and feel the weight of her decision: “Do you think I’m making a mistake?” she asks Elena on the day of the wedding, imploring her friend in the same breath to persevere in school against all odds: “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls” (Ferrante 4167). Both the question and the invocation to Elena ring of the disillusionment that ends Book I. The spectacle of the wedding confirms for Elena, that: “The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts” (Ferrante 4412). The lesson at the end of Book I is that money, and materialism (and the necessary alliances that foster the two) trump love, friendship, and family ties in Rione Luzzatti, and that men govern the rules of the fraught political economy. The brutal evidence of her husband’s strategic position in the dynamics of the neighborhood, to prioritize and protect his business dealings over their relationship, mark the end of the marriage for Lila the moment she witnesses Marcello Solaras appear, wearing the shoes Stefano purchased as a sworn symbol of his love for Lila.

Coda “Writing about class demands a particular kind of writing, a tone and approach that cannot be comfortably reconciled with the depersonalized conventions” (Medhurst 27). Elena Ferrante’s visceral characterization in My Brilliant Friend and the rest of the Neapolitan Quartet is a timely and poignant reminder that problematized providing and protecting as a condition of the working-class poor is not exclusive to one place, time period, or group of people. Working-class struggles are increasingly pervasive and intersectional in nature, especially in light of widespread globalization fueled by neoliberal policies, technology, and a burgeoning service economy. Now more than ever, the luxurious assumptions of providing and protecting are available to a privileged few. The occupational narratives of the men and women in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and those of the pursuant three novels in the series force the reader to pay attention to the fact that the inability to provide for and protect oneself or one’s family is not a private shame or personal deficiency that must be borne in silence, but a material condition that calls for systemic cultural change.

Works Cited Belmonte, Thomas, et al. The Broken Fountain. Twenty-Fifth Anniversary edition, Columbia UP, 2005. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Tony Bennett. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1st ed., Routledge, 2015.

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Cristina Migliaccio Clarke, Ben, and Nick Hubble, editors. Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice. Kindle Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Cloud, Dana L. “Laboring under the Sign of the New: Cultural Studies, Organizational Communication, and the Fallacy of the New Economy.” Management Communication Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 2001, pp. 268–278. D’Acierno, Pellegrino, and Stanislao G. Pugliese, editors. Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun. 1st ed., Fordham UP, 2018. DeGenaro, William, editor. Who Says?: Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community. 1st ed., U of Pittsburgh P, 2007. Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein, 1st ed., Europa Editions, 2012. hooks, bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. 1st ed., Routledge, 2000. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Maurice Dobb, Intl Pub, 1979. Marx, Karl, and Richard A. Davis. Marx: Early Political Writings. Edited by Joseph J. O’Malley, Cambridge UP, 1994. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Forms of Intercourse.” The German Ideology. Kindle ed. Edited by James Caulfield. 2016. Location 671. “Materiality, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Oxford English Dictionary, www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/114928. Accessed 30 June 2020. Medhurst, Andy. “If Anywhere: Class Identification and Cultural Studies Academics.” Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, edited by Sally Munt, Bloomsbury Academic, 2000, pp. 19–35. Rogatis, Tiziana de. Elena Ferrante’s Key Words. Translated by Will Schutt, Europa Editions, 2019. Sarah, Ropp. Troubling Survivorism in The Bluest Eye. no. 2, 2019, pp. 132–52.

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7 DICKENS AND SOCIETY Can Dickens’s “Uppers” Change Their Minds? Peter J. Ponzio

During the late Victorian Era, Dickens’s writings declined in popularity as critics lamented what they considered the maudlin sentimentality and melodramatic plot twists in his novels. As the twentieth century progressed, Dickens’s works gained renewed favor with critics who focused on his use of pacing, plot structure, character development, psychological insights, and his work on social reform. This paper will explore Dickens’s disdain for organized religions which neglected the needs of the faithful, the prevalence of a misguided philanthropy which focused on the needs of those in remote locales while ignoring the pressing needs of those at home, the notion that money was a panacea for all the ills of Victorian society, the establishment of a bureaucracy that did not exist to assist those in need but to perpetuate its own ends, and the rigid class system which emphasized money as a measure of human worth. Dickens’s concern with the social values of Victorian society began in the 1840s. By the time he finished David Copperfield in 1850 he was ready to embark on the writing of his greatest novels. He chose the themes for these novels carefully and wished to make a statement about the state of Victorian society and what he perceived to be its shortcomings. By the time he began work on Little Dorrit, his frustration with the state of affairs in England had reached a boiling point. In a letter to Austen Layard written on the 10th of April 1855 he expressed his wish that the people of England would array themselves peacefully, but in vast numbers, against a system they know to be rotten altogether—make themselves heard like the Sea, all round the Island—I for one would be in such a movement, heart and soul. (SL 42–43) Dickens’s ire was stirred by a society which placed great emphasis on misguided philanthropic endeavors, hypocritical religious practices, and the reliance on money as a social panacea and a measure of the worth of individuals. His dislike of Parliament increased as he realized that there was little interest in that quarter in relieving the ills that were rampant in society. Edgar Johnson summarizes Dickens’s views on the social system prevalent in Victorian society in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph: More and more, in fact, he found himself deeply and bitterly skeptical of the whole system of respectable attitudes and conventional beliefs that cemented all of society into a monolithic structure stubbornly resistant to significant change. He derided the 91

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pompous self-assurance of the aristocracy and hated the cold-hearted selfishness of the men of wealth. He despised the subservient snobbery of the middle class, which was “nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper.” He was contemptuous of the corruption and inefficiency of the Government and bitter over the brutal workings of an economic system that condemned the masses of the people to ignorance, suffering, and squalor. (I: 858)

Misguided Philanthropy The notion of philanthropic causes which concerned themselves with distant lands while ignoring the plight of the poor in England was particularly galling to Dickens. For Dickens, it was more important to address the poor educational systems, unsanitary conditions in London, and the squalid working conditions of the factories and workhouses than to be concerned with the “telescopic philanthropy” of a Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. Upon making the acquaintance of Esther, Guppy, Richard, and Ada, Mrs. Jellyby declaimed about the importance of her mission in aiding the natives of Africa: you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies, and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola Gha, on the left bank of the Niger. (BH 38) That estimable lady, whose sole concern was the aid of the inhabitants of Borrioboola Gha (a fictional state located in Africa), was at the same time completely insensible of the welfare of her own children. The introduction of Esther Summerson, Mr. Guppy, Richard Carstone, and Ada Clare to Mrs. Jellyby was punctuated by the discovery that one of the Jellyby children, Peepy, managed to get his head lodged in one of the railings surrounding the entrance to the Jellyby domicile. Another of the children managed to fall down a stairway leading to the same entrance, a total of seven stairs; neither of these incidents aroused the least bit of concern in the breast of Mrs. Jellyby who was at the time immersed in her efforts on behalf of the Borrioboola Ghanians. But Mrs. Jellyby’s project never advanced and she continued her correspondence to no avail. Nor did she ever pay attention in the least to her neglected children, causing her oldest daughter, Caddy, to exclaim: “I wish Africa was dead!” (BH 44). In the next chapter of the novel, Esther Summerson attempts to upbraid Caddy Jellyby, intimating that she should be more cognizant of her duty as a child, when Caddy exclaims: O! don’t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where’s Ma’s duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it’s much more their affair than mine. (49) Dickens is at his finest here—using satire to point out Mrs. Jellyby’s, and by extension all those who practice a similar form of philanthropy, obsession with projects that seek to provide education, a fair living, and sanitary conditions in a distant part of the world while neglecting to provide the same conditions at home or to provide basic care to their own children. 92

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The juxtaposition of “telescopic philanthropy” and the needs of the residents of London is made more pronounced by the suit of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Chancery Court. Embroiled in the heart of the suit is a property known as “Tom-All-Alones,” where contagion and plague are bred, where people live in abject poverty, and where light itself seems to be reticent to penetrate. “TomAll-Alones” is therefore the visible manifestation of the workings of “telescopic philanthropy,” a place the residents of Borrioboola Gha would be loath to enter. But the number of philanthropic personages in Bleak House is not limited to Mrs. Jellyby. As Esther and Ada began to help Mr. Jarndyce with his correspondence, they discovered that he was petitioned for money from all sides, and were astonished that: the great object of the lives of nearly all of his correspondents appeared to be to form themselves into committees for getting in and laying out money. The ladies were as desperate as the gentlemen; indeed, I think they were even more so. They threw themselves into committees in the most impassioned manner, and collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite extraordinary … They wanted everything.They wanted wearing apparel, they wanted linen rags, they wanted money, they wanted coals, they wanted soup, they wanted interest, they wanted autographs, they wanted flannel, they wanted whatever Mr. Jarndyce had—or had not. Their objects were as various as their demands. They were going to raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old buildings, they were going to establish in a picturesque building (engraving of proposed West Elevation attached) the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys; they were going to give a testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby. (BH 100) Into the midst of this collected multitude strode Mrs. Pardiggle, whom Dickens portrays as being possessed of a “rapacious benevolence.” She was an associate of Mrs. Jellyby, and she, like Mrs. Jellyby, presided over a tribe of children. Each of Mrs. Pardiggle’s children practiced a form of her own brand of “telescopic philanthropy.” One of the children donated his funds to a band of Tockahoopoo Indians; another to the Great National Smithers Testimonial; the next to the fund for Superannuated Widows; the youngest enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, whose mission was to eliminate the use of “tobacco in any form.” Esther, upon meeting Mrs. Pardiggle and the little practitioners of “rapacious benevolence,” remarked that: We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazen and shrivelled—though they were certainly that too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopoo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown.The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the infant Bonds of Joy; who was stolidly and evenly miserable. (BH 101) One imagines Dickens grinding his pen into the paper on which he wrote as he enumerates the ridiculous and wasteful practices of these misguided philanthropists. Not only were these philanthropists ignoring the intolerable conditions which existed in England for those less fortunate, they were coercing their children into endorsing their own misguided charitable efforts.

Failure of Organized Religion Dickens’s disdain for these moralizing but ineffectual philanthropists is matched by his loathing of organized religion, which professed to obey the teachings of Jesus with regard to the poor and less 93

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fortunate but which in reality was too often intent on making life pleasant for the practitioners of the various religious institutions. In a letter to David Macrae, a United Presbyterian Minister, sent in 1861, Dickens replied to Macrae’s charge that he did not provide Christian guidance in his novels. Dickens, in his response, referred to his attempt to inculcate the teachings of the New Testament in his novels and objected to the use of the Bible to justify men’s actions: I have so strong an objection to mere professions of religion, and to the audacious interposition of vain and ignorant men between the sublime simplicity of the New Testament and the general human mind to which our Saviour addressed it, that I urge that objection as strongly and as positively as I can. In my experience, true practical Christianity has been very much obstructed by the conceit against which I protest … With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of the teachings of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings of the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament: all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving. (SL 364) There are two characters in his novels who stand in stark contrast to Dickens’s belief in embodying the principles of Jesus and who are meant to portray the antithesis of Christian virtue: the Reverend Chadband in Bleak House, and Mrs. Clenham in Little Dorrit. The reader is acquainted with the Reverend Chadband in Chapter 19 of the novel, when, during the course of the long vacation in Chancery Court, Mr. Snagsby, a law-stationer, holds a get-together at his house. Mr. Chadband is introduced as follows: The expected guests are rather select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband, and no more. From Mr. Chadband’s being much given to describe himself, both verbally and in writing, as a vessel, he is occasionally mistaken by strangers for a gentleman connected with navigation; but he is, as he expresses it “in the ministry.” Mr. Chadband is attached to no particular denomination. (BH 258–259) Dickens goes on to write that Mr. Chadband “is rather a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork, remarkably well” (BH 259). Continuing in his description of the good Reverend, Dickens relates that “Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system” (BH 260). The sarcasm is piled on thickly in these passages: Mr. Chadband is a “vessel,” which is ordinarily meant to denote a person filled with the presence of grace; in the case of the yellow Mr. Chadband, his vessel is filled with train oil and foodstuffs. Rather than wielding his virtue as a weapon against the wages of sin, the Reverend Mr. Chadband wields the knife and fork, the better to suffuse his body with the comestibles he favors. The meal at Snagsby’s is interrupted by a constable, who delivers Jo, a poor street sweeper in the vicinity of “Tom-All-Alones,” into Mr. Snagsby’s custody. Jo, the illiterate orphan, is clearly out of his element in Snagsby’s house and under the best of circumstances, barely able to eke out a living sweeping the filthy, disease-plagued streets of Tom-All-Alones. Mr. Chadband, having finished his dinner and being a paragon of morality, delivers an impromptu speech meant to suffuse Jo with a sense of his own place in society: “My friends” says Chadband, “we have partaken, in moderation” (which was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned), “of the comforts which have been provided 94

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for us. May this house live upon the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it advance, may it proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we partaken of anything else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken? Of spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual profit? My young friend, stand forth!” Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the eloquent Chadband, with evident doubts of his intentions. “My young friend,” says Chadband, “you are to us a pearl, you are to us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why, my young friend?” “I don’t know,” replies Jo. “I don’t know nothink.” “My young friend,” says Chadband, “it is because you know nothing that you are to us a gem and jewel. For what are you, my young friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A fish of the sea or river? No.You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post or a pillar.” (BH 267–268) Chadband’s words to Jo are a mockery of the Gospel of Matthew. As a religious man, Chadband should be aware of the meaning of this passage. Instead, he perverts its meaning with his references to foodstuffs which he consumes while at the same time making Jo, who should be the beneficiary of his kindness, feel uncomfortable. Chadband does not really care for Jo, although he apostrophizes him as a creature of God. Jo is left to wander the desolate streets of “Tom-All-Alones” and eventually dies of a pestilence that sweeps through the section of town mired in the Chancery Court case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. Chadband acts as a symbol of all that is wrong with organized religion in Victorian society, a religion that prided itself on implementing the message of the New Testament on behalf of the poor and less fortunate but ignored the spirit of that message which was to assuage the sufferings of the poor. He also acts as a symbol of the materialism that pervades Victorian society; a consumerism that is manifest in his insatiable appetite and his comparison to a steam engine that requires constant oiling to function properly. Chadband is the embodiment of what Carlyle terms the “Mechanical Age” in “Signs of the Times,” and his religion “is found, on inquiry, to be altogether an earthly contrivance” (7). If Chadband is the symbol of the failure of organized religion to implement Christian virtue, then Mrs. Clenham is the symbol of all that is wrong with attempting to impose the harshness of the Old Testament onto Victorian society. Dickens describes Mrs. Clenham’s religion in the following passage: Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven. (LD 24) She is a woman for whom vengeance is more important than love, her will more important than that of her Creator.The words Dickens uses to describe her all resonate with those contained in the 95

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darkest passages of the Old Testament: cursing, vengeance, retribution, destruction. The tower of stone that is referenced in the passage is meant to remind the reader of the Tower of Babel and is a foreshadowing of the fate of Mrs. Clenham’s house, which at the end of the novel, comes crashing down, just as the Tower of Babel crashed in Genesis. The depth of Mrs. Clenham’s belief in a rigid system of vengeance, a system in which there is no shred of compassion, becomes apparent in a meeting with the villain Blandois and Mr. Flintwinch, who is a partner of Mrs. Clenham’s. The meeting was arranged by Blandois in preparation for an attempt to blackmail Mrs. Clenham with secrets about her past. During the meeting, Blandois reminds Mrs. Clenham of a family motto which appears on a watch given to her by her late husband; the motto reads “Do Not Forget.” Mrs. Clenham gathers herself up and replies as follows to Blandois: No, sir, I do not forget.To lead a life as monotonous as mine has been during many years, is not the way to forget. To lead a life of self-correction is not the way to forget. To be sensible of having (as we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) offenses to expiate and peace to make, does not justify the desire to forget. Therefore I have long dismissed it, and I neither forget nor wish to forget … I will say this much: that I shape my course by pilots, strictly by proved and tried pilots, under whom I cannot be shipwrecked—can not be—and that if I were unmindful of the admonition conveyed in those three letters [DNF, or do not forget], I should not be half as chastened as I am. (LD 182) Mrs. Clenham invokes Adam as the father of the race and the originator of sin, forgetting that man was unable to redeem himself in the eyes of God and required Jesus to expiate man’s sin.The pilots she refers to are ostensibly the Old Testament prophets but once again, she forgets that their prime purpose was to remind the children of Israel to adhere to the Lord’s commandments, at times when they abandoned those commandments. In the Christian tradition, the prophets paved the way for the coming of Jesus who instituted a new commandment: to love thy neighbor. Later in the novel, when Blandois is ready to spring his trap on Mrs. Clenham, she offers a glimpse into her childhood, a glimpse of the mind of a tortured woman whose repression has blighted everything around her: “Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us—these were the themes of my childhood” (LD 394). Her comment that repression is wholesome indicates that she does not understand the nature of repression; in reality, repression is not wholesome and leads to serious psychological problems. This comment also suggests that she is not aware of the workings of her own psyche, for she has attempted to suppress any sympathetic human feeling and instead focus on the emotions of revenge and hatred. Her vitriol is saved for her husband, a man who turned away from her and sought love in another source, a source that provided him with a son, Arthur Clenham, and whose secret birth was source of the trap set by Blandois. Mrs. Clenham’s secret, finally disclosed, allows her to reveal the true nature of her anger: a husband who spurned her, a child not her own. As a result of this suppressed rage, she dares to dictate to God, to invoke His power to punish those who have opposed her; she has overturned the order of creation and has set herself up as a rival to her creator. Her pride is an echo of that of Lucifer who also set himself up as a rival to God. In the characters of Chadband and Mrs. Clenham, Dickens exposes the hypocrisy of a social system that on the one hand attempts to promote Christian virtue and on the other hand does not attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the less fortunate members of society. For Dickens, the qualities of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion outweigh all the invective and cant surrounding organized religion in Victorian society. 96

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Money as a Panacea for Society’s Ills Added to the list of social pretensions despised by Dickens is the notion that money is a panacea for all that is wrong with society. Dickens detested the men of business who cared nothing for the arts and “fancy,” or imagination, but who measured everything in terms of gain and profit. In a letter to Douglas Jerrold dated the 3rd of May 1843, Dickens comments on a dinner he attended which marked the seventh anniversary of the founding of the Charterhouse Square Infirmary: Oh heaven, if you could have been with me at a Hospital Dinner last Monday! There were men there—your City aristocracy—who made such speeches, and expressed such sentiments, as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle—and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the Power of Purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation, since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at. It was perfectly overwhelming. (SL 118) The letter conveys Dickens’s detestation of such events and the need for an ostentatious display of wealth which was felt by so many in polite society. Dickens draws a picture of such a gentleman in the person of Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit. Dickens is not content to merely scorn Mr. Merdle as he does the “City aristocracy” in his letter to Jerrold but emphasizes that viewing money as an end in itself, as a lifelong goal, leads to a sort of moral emptiness: All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul. (LD 282) If money was pursued long enough, moral emptiness ultimately turned into contagion, as the lust for money spread through the populace: That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere … As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr. Merdle. Nobody, as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the greatest that had appeared. (LD 290) The Merdle contagion spread to every district in town, from the Circumlocution Office to Bleeding Heart Yard, and infected everyone with the same effect: the desire for profit and easy money. Ultimately, Merdle was found out for what he was: a fraud; the narrator discloses that 97

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every servile worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal, would have done better to worship the Devil point-blank … For by that time it was known that the late Mr. Merdle’s complaint had been simply Forgery and Robbery. (LD 362) In these passages, Dickens makes it clear that the pursuit of money for its own sake leads to no good. As if the example of Mr. Merdle was not enough to convince his readers that money, by itself, cannot cure the ills of society, Dickens’s later works, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, hammer home the point so that it cannot be missed by even the most casual reader. In Great Expectations, Pip is embarrassed by Joe Gargery, a man who labors honestly for his money and who provides the moral compass for the novel. Joe is the antithesis of everything Victorian society stands for: he is self-sacrificing, honest, kind, and humble; and yet, he is rejected by Pip as being too rustic, and therefore, not gentlemanly. Pip’s idea of a gentleman is based upon the external trappings of dress, custom, and social grace. Joe possesses none of these qualities yet in his manly love for Pip is the embodiment of true gentility, as Philip Hobsbaum notes: “The true gentleman is not recognized by varnish; certainly Joe has none. Instead, he has a deep consideration for others. More, he has his place in the world, and fulfills it admirably” (235). Pip eventually learns Joe’s true worth, but that appreciation comes at a cost. It is only after Pip realizes the effort that his real benefactor, Magwitch, went through in an attempt to transform Pip from a blacksmith’s apprentice into a gentleman, that Pip experiences an epiphany. Magwitch ultimately loses his fortune by returning to England under penalty of death, a return motivated solely by his sense of gratitude for a kindness performed by a younger Pip. Magwitch also sees that his dream of transforming Pip into a gentleman was unsuccessful but he does not lose hope that somehow, Pip may become a true gentleman. It is only after Pip nurses Magwitch and performs true service without the prospect of recompense that Pip attains his place in the world, a sense of belonging that is not defined by money. At the end of the novel, Pip is chastened, a changed man. It is only by renouncing his goal of becoming a moneyed gentleman and man of substance that Pip discovers Joe’s worth and his own place in society. By the time he wrote his last complete novel, Dickens’s vision of wealth as a transformative force in society reached its nadir. In Our Mutual Friend, wealth is symbolized by the dust piles of the Harmon fortune. Lest the reader think that dust was merely a collection of dirt, Dickens makes the point that the dust piles were composed of bones, rubbish, ordure, and decayed forms of every variety. Here, the garbage of human life was transformed into wealth, but it was a wealth that all aspired to but few would be fain to touch. Edgar Johnson notes the irony inherent in the image of the dust heap as both a source of wealth and a source of revulsion: The image of wealth as filth, the supreme goal of nineteenth-century society as dust and ordure, gave a deep and savage irony to Dickens’s hatred for its governing values … Ultimately the dust-heaps are magnified into an all-embracing metaphor of mistaken endeavor directed to the piling up rubbish, mounds marking the dust and ashes of buried aspiration. (II: 1030–1031) The dust heap is not the only means of making a living that is repulsive; Lizzie Hexam and her father, Jesse, act as watermen on the Thames, a euphemism for persons who make their living dragging dead bodies out of the river and retrieving valuables from the bodies or from selling the bodies for medical purposes. Here again, the concept of making money from human remains is seen as an indictment of a society that would sanction such methods, that would degrade the individual by forcing him/her to resort to such means to earn a living. Philip Hobsbaum comments on the notion of society in Our Mutual Friend, when he writes: “Our Mutual Friend remains a trenchant 98

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attack upon that part of the System that most subjugates the needs of the individual: Money, and especially money for its own sake, the wrong use of money” (244). In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens notes that wealth is derived from the very items men discard: the dust, bones, and refuse that are unwanted are transformed into wealth. Ultimately, the very bodies that men occupied in life are transformed after their death into a livelihood for other men. To Dickens, the ultimate end-game of a consumer-driven society is that the society feeds upon itself and that its cast-off garbage becomes more valuable once it is discarded. This is irony raised to the level of social invective—an indictment of the principle that money is an end in itself. There is a common theme that runs through each of the subjects leading to a breakdown in society, according to Dickens; they are sanctioned, or at least tolerated, by the government. In a speech delivered at the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane on the 27th of June 1857, Dickens outlined his views on Parliament to those gathered for the occasion: I have not the least hesitation in saying that I have the smallest amount of faith in the House of Commons at present existing … I will merely put it to the experience of everybody here, whether the House of Commons is not occasionally a little hard of hearing, a little dim of sight, a little slow of understanding, and whether, in short, it is not in a sufficiently invalided state to require close watching, and the occasional application of sharp stimulants; and whether it is not capable of considerable improvement? I believe that, in order to preserve it in a state of real usefulness and independence, the people must be very watchful and very jealous of it; and it must have its memory jogged; and be kept awake when it happens to have taken too much Ministerial narcotic; it must be trotted about, and must be bustled and pinched in a friendly way, as is the usage in such cases. (SP 57–58)

Non-Functioning Bureaucracy In Little Dorrit, he paints a picture of a system so derelict in its duties, so ossified in its structure, so caught up in its own self-importance, that it seems to exist for the sole purpose of conducting a business whose motto is “How not to do it.” This venerable institution is known as the Circumlocution Office—literally the talking in circles office. Run by the Barnacle family, it is set up along the lines of a hereditary monarchy, complete with its own royalty and lines of succession. Like a poorly run monarchy, the spoils of government are distributed amongst the Barnacles, with little provision made for the public welfare: “Thus the Barnacles were all over the world, in every direction—despatch-boxing the compass … on which there was nothing (except mischief) to be done and anything to be pocketed, it was perfectly feasible to assemble a good many Barnacles” (LD 203). Dickens begins Chapter 10, Book 1, by describing the Circumlocution Office: The Circumlocution Office is (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. (LD 52) Dickens’s description of the functioning of the Circumlocution Office does not improve throughout the course of the novel; in fact, even the titular heads of government seem powerless to act contrary to the wishes of this august body: 99

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It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. (52–53) A similar state of affairs exists in Bleak House, but in this novel, the non-functioning governmental body is the Chancery Court. As the novel opens, the reader is greeted with an unflattering view of the Chancery Court: The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in the High Court of Chancery. (BH 4) Later in the novel, when Esther, Richard, and Ada have been introduced to their new home, Bleak House, Mr. John Jarndyce explains to Esther the basis of the case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce and the workings of the Chancery Court: The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a Will, and the trusts under a Will—or it was, once. It’s about nothing but Costs, now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away. (BH 95) Here again is an institution running like some great perpetual motion machine. There is no rhyme or reason in the mechanism; it is built to run its course, indifferent to the needs of the people it was formed to serve. In the words of Horace Skimpole, the irresponsible friend to Mr. Jarndyce, “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent,” and so does the Chancery Court. The indifference of the Court eventually wears on the petitioners: there are no beneficiaries in the Jarndyce case; the money has been squandered by court costs and lawyers’ fees. The harmless, addled Miss Flite awaits a judgment on the “Day of Judgment,” and conflates a biblical resolution of justice with her long, drawn-out, Chancery case. In her despair, she has named her birds as her Chancery case has dragged on. At the beginning of the case, the names of the birds are filled with optimism: “Hope, Joy,Youth, Peace, Rest, Life” but as the case progresses, her hope for a settlement gives way to hopelessness, which is reflected in the names of her birds: “Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach” (BH 199). “The System! I am told, on all hands, it’s the system,” exclaims Mr. Gridley. It is a system which Dickens detests, a system which values social standing, wealth, and appearances and manifests disdain for the individual, the worker, and the poor. It is a system which places an honest man, like Mr. Gridley, in prison for questioning why the system no longer serves the people. It is a system Dickens experienced first-hand in Marshalsea Prison, and later witnessed as a law clerk. It is a system he reported on as a Parliamentary reporter, where much was said, but little actually was done or changed. It was a system that ran like a perpetual motion machine, but which accomplished 100

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nothing. It was a system which endorsed “telescopic philanthropy” while it neglected its own poor. It was a system that provided lip service to the notions of charity promulgated in the New Testament but failed to put those charitable notions into practice. It was a system that fed on its own waste, that valued human life at its end more than it valued the living man. It is a system that remains in place to the present day.

Rigid Class Distinctions In Dombey and Son, Dickens concentrates on the theme of arbitrary class distinctions, as well as the notion that money and materialism are more important than love and human relationships. His plan for Dombey and Son would explore the theme of societal ills and would focus, initially, on the figure of Paul Dombey, Sr., who was introduced to the reader early in the book: The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and the moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them: A.D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei—and Son. (D&S 2) This is the nexus of the book, the valuation of everyone and everything on the basis of their worth, not as human beings, but as commodities to be bought or sold. Indeed, the notion of trading in commodities extends to Mr. Dombey’s wife who died giving birth to Paul; Mr. Dombey, at her death, expressed great sorrow for her loss, believing that: “he would find a something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household possessions, which was well worth the having, and could not be lost without sincere regret” (D&S 5); one wonders if he would have given as much thought to the breaking of a plate. In Mr. Dombey’s eyes, money is all important; it forms the basis of every connection in society and defines a person’s place within society. Love and sympathy have no place in a society governed by money; people are merely extensions of one’s possessions, like a plate or furniture. Mr. Dombey’s views about the value of money point to an outward manifestation of its power—honor, fear, respect, admiration—it is never to be used to effect good. In the novel, Dickens paints Edith Skewton (later the second Mrs. Dombey) and Mr. Carker the Manager as parasites. Both prey upon Dombey, and in the end, abandon him for other prospects. Edith is a complex character who openly resents her mother for attempting to secure a favorable marriage for her and tells Dombey that she will not love him. In the following scene, prior to her marriage to Mr. Dombey, mother and daughter argue over the life Mrs. Skewton has arranged for her daughter: “Look at me,” she said, “who have never known what it is to have an honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when children play; and married in my youth—an old age of design—to one for whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him—a judgment on you! Well deserved!—and tell me what has been my life for ten years since.” (D&S 394) The themes in the novel are well represented in this scene: the valuing of money before everything else; the lack of love; the predatory, mercenary quality of mother and daughter; the poor parenting that Dickens was to return to in his novels. Dickens makes it clear that this is just the sort of 101

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woman that Dombey should marry: a woman who does not love him, is adept at appearing fair when in fact, she is foul; a woman who at the same time loathes herself for what she is doing. In Edith Skewton, Dombey has met his match. Mr. Carker the Manager—his name and position are intertwined and inseparable—is another of the parasitic creatures in the novel. Dickens introduces Mr. Carker the Manager, in Chapter 22, portraying the man at work: The general action of a man so engaged—pausing to look over a bundle of papers in hand, dealing them round in various positions, taking up another bundle and examining its contents with knitted brows and pursed-out lips—dealing, and sorting, and pondering by turns—would easily suggest some whimsical resemblance to a player at cards.The face of Mr. Carker the Manager was in good keeping with such a fancy. It was the face of a man who studied his play, warily: who made himself master of all the strong and weak points of the game: who registered the cards in his mind as they fell about him, knew exactly what was on them, what they missed, and what they made: who was crafty to find out what the other players held, and who never betrayed his own hand. (D&S 298) Mr. Carker the Manager, like Mrs. Skewton, is a scheming, predatory creature. He is Dombey’s right hand and although he is allowed free rein in the office, he is never admitted into the social circles in which Dombey moves, and is, as a result, jealous of Mr. Dombey’s possessions, including his second wife. Mr. Carker’s jealousy causes him to seduce Mrs. Dombey, but she is playing a game of her own. Mr. Dombey, blissfully unaware of the attentions of his underling for both his money and wife, continues in his own secluded world, grieving for the loss of his other self in the form of his son and believing that the world is indeed meant for the firm of Dombey and Son to exploit as a matter of right. But Mr. Dombey goes further than this; in his pride and arrogance and in an attempt to force his wife to his will, he appoints Mr. Carker the Manager as a mediator between Mrs. Dombey and himself: “Mrs. Dombey has expressed various opinions,” said Mr. Dombey, with majestic coldness and indifference, “in which I do not participate, and which I am not inclined to discuss, or to recall. I made Mrs. Dombey acquainted, some time since, as I have already told you, with certain points of domestic deference and submission on which I felt it necessary to insist. I failed to convince Mrs. Dombey of the expediency of her immediately altering her conduct in those respects, with a view to her own peace and welfare, and my dignity; and I informed Mrs. Dombey that if I should find it necessary to object or remonstrate again, I should express my opinion to her through yourself, my confidential agent.” (D&S 595) Edith’s resentment of Mr. Dombey leads her to run away to Dijon, France, with Mr. Carker the Manager. She does this, not to please Mr. Carker, as he believes but in order to shame Mr. Dombey. At their meeting at an apartment in France, Mrs. Dombey informs Mr. Carker the Manager of her true nature, and of her position in society, a position which she does not covet. It forms the basis for her rejection of her husband, and of Mr. Carker himself: “I am a woman,” she said, confronting him steadfastly, “who from her very childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected, put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it has been paraded and vended to enhance my value, 102

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as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends, have looked on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for a pet dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been myself. You know this, and you know that my fame with it is worthless to me.” (D&S 760–761) The speech by Mrs. Dombey ties up several of the themes of the novel: the lack of love and respect for other human beings; the mercenary quality of Victorian society; the notion that value lies not within a person but in the external trappings of a person that can be used as a commodity; the lack of proper parental love and respect for children. The novel winds down inexorably to an unhappy conclusion for the three principles in the game they play. Mr. Carker the Manager is pursued by his employer, Mr. Dombey, for the damage done to the firm of Dombey and Son and secondarily for the seduction of his wife. After a series of chases involving Mr. Dombey and Mr. Carker, the latter is killed by a speeding train.The firm of Dombey and Son sinks into ruin through a series of bad moves orchestrated by Mr. Carker before abandoning the firm and Mr. Dombey is left bankrupt and alone. He is eventually helped by one of his former employees and a portion of his funds are restored to help him live, although at a greatly reduced standard of living. His daughter Florence, once banished from his sight, cares for him in his old age. Edith, with her cousin Feenix, moves to Italy but not before attempting to make some small show of reconciliation to Mr. Dombey for the love of Florence. In this, his first novel to successfully integrate an overarching theme that was to permeate the entire work, Dickens chose to show how pride, along with commercialization and lack of love or human interaction, led to a corrupt society. That society is portrayed as being more concerned with outward appearances than with inner character, with viewing people as commodities to be consumed, than as unique individuals, worthy of respect and love. It is a society that is sharply divided into two groups: those who are wealthy and privileged, and those who are forced to rely on their cunning, servility, or ruthlessness to achieve their living in a society dominated by those more powerful than they. Jane Smiley comments on Dickens’s view of society in his mature novels as follows: “Dickens’s social vision is formed by the recognition that in the world around him there are few bonds of social responsibility or generous humanity linking class to class or individual to individual” (54). Dickens was still relatively young when he wrote this novel. He still believed, as he did through the writing of David Copperfield, that good works and individual effort could transform society and the world. As he matured, his belief in good works remained, but his hope that they could transform society no longer existed.

Abbreviations Used in This Chapter BH Bleak House D&S Dombey and Son LD Little Dorrit SL Selected Letters of Charles Dickens SP Speeches Literary and Social

Works Cited Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times.” Victorian Prose. Ed. Roe, Frederick William. New York: The Ronald Press, 1947. 5–18.

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Peter J. Ponzio Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. The Modern Library Classics. Modern Library Paperback Edition ed. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. .———. Dombey and Son. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens. Oxford UP, 1989. ———. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 1996. ———. Little Dorrit. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Adler, Mortimer J. Vol. 47. 60 vols. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007. ———. The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Oxford UP, 2012. ———. Speeches: Literary and Social. Quiet Vision Publishing, 2003. Holy Bible, King James Version. Ed. Scrivener, F.H.A. Zondervan, 2002. Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph.Vol. I. II vols. Simon and Schuster, 1952. Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens a Life. Penguin Group, 2002.

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8 SONGS OF SYNTHESIS Poetics of Working-Class Revolt Zara Richter

In Diane di Prima’s (1934–2011) “October” and Gary Snyder’s (b. 1930) “Night Highway Ninety-Nine,” observations of the ways of everyday working-class survival as well as spontaneous discontent are brought up and interwoven through Beat literary stylistic devices of surrealist automatism, spiritualist rhythm, and post-pastoral environmental consciousness. Merging a working-class studies approach to a new materialist ontology, this essay will utilize Badiou’s concept of event and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to recognize the imprint of old left historical memory in portrayals of everyday existence of the working-class present in Beat poetry. The historical memory gathered by Beat poets is characterized here as “old left” due to their entrenchment in the historical struggles of early twentieth-century leftist organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the anti-war movement before they became fused directly with the specifically identity-oriented stylings of 1960s and 1970s social movement contexts. Snyder and di Prima’s poetry, both produced in the era of Beat emergence (1950s–1970s), in the case of Snyder, as well as in the era of post-Beat cultural production (1980–present) in the case of di Prima, does the important work of sewing together new left (post-1960s leftist) ideas with old leftist values such as social realism from Georg Lukács. Connections present in the multiplicity of dialects and styles mixed together in Beat poetry do the important work of building bridges between turn-of-the-century, class struggle-oriented leftist history and more recent aspects of leftism emphasizing identity and subjectivity as well as identity formations present in contemporary intellectual fads and forms of working-class resistance. These more recent varieties of working-class resistance connect to specific ideologies, such as those of feminism, environmentalism, and disability or queerness. This essay brings in a series of Marxist theorists who can be most closely identified with a materialist response to the poststructuralist influence upon the Marxism of thinkers like Slavoj Žižek, Louis Althusser, and Gilles Deleuze. In bringing working-class literary scholarship back to the materiality of music and time and voice, it becomes possible to evade the textual focus of Lacanian and post-Lacanian Marxists who give up on an economically and historically materialist and dialectical approach to phenomena both in literary texts and undergoing representation in such texts. I hope to use the universal materiality of music and time as a touchstone shared product of capitalism as well as a product of the economic, historical, and ontological process of history. This material product can be felt by the working-class people described of di Prima/Snyder, as well as felt by the authors themselves. Finally, informed readers of Beat poetry such as my students, and the broader public can access this process. 105

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To advance an understanding and articulation of Beat poetry as the resonance of major historical events and actions via materialist Marxian literary critics Bakhtin and Bourdieu, the effort here is to reveal the poetic styles of the twentieth century as deeply dependent on working-class media such as protests and folk songs. Establishing a genealogy between the countercultural literary scene of the twentieth century and real parts of the experience of everyday loggers, parents, and protesting students allows Marxian literary analysis to return to its roots in the viscera of the working class upon which materialism dictates that all of culture rests. Restoring the importance of workingclass experience as a primal poetic atom enables a turn away from the tendency to treat meaning as an accident of structure. Instead the literary medium contains real experiences of the working class that may be far removed from their subordinated haunting of the artistic medium in a more formalistic late modernist writer such as Eliot or Fitzgerald. Beat poetry offers a crucial point for the elaboration of the experiences of the working class in the mid-twentieth century, because the Beats prided themselves upon wandering around countercultural venues, willing to meet any manner of person who crossed their paths. Thus, the observational aspect of the Beat literary archive is revealed as a very real benefit of the pop culture fame of some Beat writers among a hippie and popular folk music crowd in the 1960s and 1970s. The working-class voices that pepper Beat poetry, no doubt, arrived amid this series of Beat travels and wanderings to become part of the Beat portrayal of the major settings or backdrops in their work.

Finding the Beat(s): Historical Locations of the Beat Generation The Beat Generation’s trajectory as a literary movement became prominent in America in the middle of the 1950s.William S. Burroughs’s Junky released in 1953 and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road released in 1957 are staple Beat classics that helped to put the movement on the map. Lesser-known texts, such as Joyce Johnson’s novel Come and Join the Dance in 1962 as well as Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play “Dutchman,” did not get published until the early 1960s but were definitely formative of the movement. These texts were concocted in the heady moment of the repressive McCarthyist 1950s that had also inspired Kerouac and Burroughs. I mention Burroughs and Kerouac not because they are central topics of analysis for this essay but because they are standards of the Beat subgenre against which Diane di Prima’s “October” and Gary Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-Nine” can be understood. Di Prima and Snyder epitomize the ecological sensibility, the earnestness, and the spiritual spontaneity of the entire Beat genre but unlike standards of the movement like Kerouac and Burroughs, neither di Prima nor Snyder have been appropriately celebrated. Additionally, some of the work from less successful Beat writers would not be produced or celebrated until an era which might be dubbed “post-Beat,” i.e., extending into the twenty-first century. Di Prima’s poem used in this article, “October,” is one of such poems: technically composed after the end of the formal Beat era, but still embedded with the energy and style of the original literary movement, as well as being a piece with all of the Beat stylistic and thematic centerpieces; this poem is intact up to fifty years after the Beat zenith of writing productivity. What these texts hold is a series of frozen memories of the Great Depression and the years after. All these writers as children lived through that deprived historical moment and retained memories of working-class resistance in the same period. Baraka, Snyder, and di Prima remembered radical social movements such as the Communist Party, the Wobblies or Industrial Workers of the World and other American leftist organizing efforts. As noted in the study “Wealth, Income, and Power,” these social and cultural movements were brewing because of the immense dispossession of the working class barely beginning at the time of publication but accelerating after 1980, driven by an eagerly condensing old-money upper class that allowed run-away stock trading to destroy the common people (Domhoff). 106

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Working-Class Survival: The Poetic Habitus of Automatic Cacophonies and Spatial/Temporal Fields In working-class studies, an effort is made to engage in a sort of sophisticated worker’s inquiry into the experience of the working-class person to ask historical and political questions, as well as descriptive questions about literature. Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” or “practical sense” (66), which has parallels in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “habitual body” (84) and Marshall McLuhan’s notion of “sensorium” (340), philosophically and phenomenologically explores the core of working-class consciousness as an accumulation of sensed details in the body. To expand Bourdieu’s thought with a specifically auditory and linguistic dimension, I introduce Bakhtin to consider how the voices of the sub-working class or what Marx calls the “lumpenproletarian” or “refugee serf ” (44) become permanent fixtures in working-class consciousness and become undetachable from the field-setting wherein worker awareness resides. Lumpenproletarian workers are construed as workers deemed by society or their own capacity to have negative labor value and thus are only used for labor in conditions of capitalist crisis, wherein their bodies become sacrificed for maximum perceived value at an accelerated rate compared to their usual rate in moments of capitalist boom. Conversely, the capitalist strata assimilated a small number of subjects missing here in order to threaten class milieus with greater presumed labor value in what is known as the reserve army of labor. Naturally, for this essay, the two parts of class consciousness in the mundane world are a relation to a geographic and temporal environmental field and an internalization of the ghostly voices of the lumpenproletarians (which Marx chooses to focus on instead of German idealists in The German Ideology), whose voices blend into the background of the Beat setting.

Spatial and Temporal Poetic Fields: Ceremonial Months and Transitory Roads What unites di Prima and Snyder’s poetry is that their political discontent only emerges out of the mass of the spatio-temporal horizon that contextualizes the forms of everyday life that each poem captures. In the case of di Prima’s poem, the temporal-natural category of the autumn season is that encompassing the horizon of habitual life and, in the case of Snyder’s poem, it is Snyder’s personal observations of real people on his celebrated highway that may be theorized similarly via the spatio-temporal horizon, which epitomizes the poem’s refrain and namesake. Di Prima’s season and Snyder’s highway are the sites of a series of retained voices and of lived moments spilling from the poem’s speakers. It is just this situatedness in inertia or the situatedness in a given juncture between destinations in time or space that embody the poem’s meaning. For this analysis, field theory, borrowed from gestalt social psychology and from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, is extremely valuable. As sociologist John Levi Martin writes in his rough outline of the broad ideas of field theory from gestalt psychology and Bourdieu’s sociology, field theory is inherited from scientific studies of fluid dynamics to describe how given settings extend broad social conditions that both translate external events and enculturate actors to develop specific sensibilities. The specific set of sensibilities cultivated in actors by a given environment is known to Bourdieu as a habitus. The night highway setting of Snyder’s poem and the “October” setting of di Prima’s writing together name each of their poetic products but also name the broad set of uniform conditions in which the poetic voices in each of their writings appear.

Di Prima’s Ceremonial Month The lines below show the uniting poetic devices of the time and transit infrastructure: It’s October—the month the veil grows thin &   this entire world 107

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becomes threshold   w/ angels (or daemon) sitting on either side.  October when death is a fait accompli.  October you herald November, when no one struggles    anymore. (ll. 12–18) In this stanza, the month of October is taken up outside of the revolutionary context it is given in the rest of the poem. In these passages, October does not signify an October of revolutions but the October or autumnal season of European non-Judeo-Christian folk associations. October as a month when associated with neopaganism’s aims to invoke the popular cultural Western tradition of Halloween in a knowing nod to the passage of time in accordance with holiday celebration and religious custom. In placing the October of the poem’s namesake in its ritualized context as an infrastructure of temporal awareness, di Prima acknowledges the temporal container as having a meaning in the banal context of its livedness as part of the habitus of the working class. In conjuring up the October in its function as a myth of modern Western society, di Prima brings the place of October in its ritual and popular cultural association into poetic form such that its more revolutionary meanings might be placed next to its pagan and folk knowledge associations with holidays like Dia de Los Muertos, Halloween, Samhain, All Saints’ Day, and other holidays. The ritual connection of October becomes a major part of what di Prima’s poem “October” intends to play with: to fidget the month container out of its blander associations and into a historical resonance as a time of universal rupture in the normal functioning of economy and appearance.

Snyder’s Transitory Highway Geography Similarly, Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-Nine,” instead of using the transitivity of temporal containers, embraces the ever-motile life of hitchhikers on the highway. In one of the more picturesque stanzas of the poem Snyder gives us a picture of the road in motion: Junction US 40 and Highway Ninety-Nine Trucks, trucks   roll by kicking up dust—dead flowers— sixteen speeds forward windows open (ll. 383–389) The road is a place of stories and a space of news that travels fast and of the intermingling of people, especially among hitchhiking communities. Snyder takes on the use of the road as a place to exchange breaths and stories when he conjures the easily imagined scene of trucks speeding by flower beds along a dusty road. As with di Prima’s folk knowledge-infused holiday understanding of the month of October, Snyder’s placement of the highway is obsessed with its motion along other landmarks—Highway 99 intersects with junction US 40 and with human-arranged bits of natural beauty that become intermeshed with the roaring of machines of transit. Like the banal location of the month of October at a cross-section of working-class life where the seasonal excitement over holidays like Halloween predominates, the location of Snyder’s poetic exposition in the rough and tumble place of transit and interconnection evokes Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt,” defamiliarized because it is a well-known space easily imagined. However, this familiarity, thrown into poetic historical rhapsody, allows the resistant message of the poetry to resonate from a new angle. 108

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Automatist Heteroglossias: Lumpenproletarian Vocal Disruptions as Embodiments of Road/Month Habitus In both di Prima and Snyder, a refrain is what introduces the revolutionary idea into a world otherwise routine in its transitiveness. For both poets, the refrain seems to come from outside of the monologic poetic literary voice and seems instead to be voiced by more minor others. Here I draw from Russian formalist literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia or multi-voicedness to understand how di Prima’s “October” takes on the voices and perspectives of children and oppressed people and how Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-Nine” borrows the voices of homeless wanderers. These voices are manifestations of the sensibility of the fields of being from which they emerge. Snyder’s vagabond voices are personifications of the road itself and of the transit terrains of late modern capitalist life for the working class. Di Prima’s children and racialized voices are manifestations of her notion of the field of being that is the month of October.These voices are not mechanical expressions of some sentient quality of the road or month itself, but instead these voices are manifestations of the general effect of transitiveness and ceremoniality, both of which are major parts of both the road and October month as fields of being through which the American working class must pass. I denote here the voices of children and homeless as lumpenproletarian because both are seen within the alienated value-assessing gaze of capitalism as improper workers who must be corrected and thus in an extended position of transitive separation from value as a worker or laborer. “Heteroglossia” is used to consider how these voices have an independent character but ultimately become part of the poetic storytelling style that portrays working-class life as beset by ghosts of those less fortunate. In Bakhtin’s Dialogical Imagination, the literary critic tries to convince his readers that poetry is entirely composed of the author’s own voice, but while making this point, Bakhtin mentions that when heteroglossia does enter the poetic dialogue, it comes into existence through the independent capacities of objects present in the poetic tongue and in what Bakhtin would call “low poetic genres” or forms of poetry he associates with comedy and satire (287). Both di Prima and Snyder generically and via their craft allow the presence of heteroglossia in their poetry; the former by giving the child and the latter by giving the hitchhiker personalities and independence from the singularity of the poetic voice that narrates the setting and refrains of the poem. They are able to do so thanks to the independent capacities of certain words to evoke histories or to evoke the subjectivity of individual experiences outside of the poet’s immediate knowledge as well as through the satirical or critical mode of Beat poetic politics which excels in presenting the world in its chaos and silliness.

Voices of the Road In Snyder’s epic of the West Coast highway, “Night Highway Ninety-Nine,” his poetic voice internalizes the voices and descriptions of the working-class wanderers and hitchhikers along the highway. Snyder’s poem remembers several working-class people who travel the highway such as an ex-logger, an Alaskan woodsman, and a sawmill worker; he fills his poem with the authentic experiences communicated in their stories. In section four, the poem pauses to describe several travelers and contextualize them with given stops along the highway: Ex-logger selling skidder cable wants to get to San Francisco fed and drunk Eugene

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Guy just back from Alaska—don’t like the States, there’s too much law Sutherlin Sawmill worker, young guy thinking of going to Eureka for redwood logging later in the year Dillard (ll. 256–267) The list of personalities noticed along the road in Snyder’s highway poem signifies the sense of interwovenness of different realities and stations that one gets in social gathering spaces and moments along any transit line. The voices speak to different sources of knowledge and rumor: the function of the highway is to unite travelers from many different destinations along one route of transference that leads to many different places. Later in this essay, the highway will be featured as a source of traveler voice, which is how Snyder’s paean to the dream and end of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is hidden. Traveler voices are also a source of the daily conditions or habitus of worker life—all contain bits of estrangement and bits of hope—the transitway or crossroads is a place that many come for transformation but also in sometimes mistaken flight. The Alaskan complains about the differences between the frontier land and the central continent. A petit bourgeois climber dreams of booze and a young worker searches for more work. All of these lives on the edge signify both how the hitchhiker life on the highway is a constant intermixture between lives of various class locations and how class aspirations arise on this road. In the sensibility of the worker passing through hitchhiker lands on the highway, all such voices are present and arrive inexorably attached to the location of their arrival, which Snyder notes between the stanzas in a kind of refrain.

Voices of October Early in the poem about October, the schoolyard memories of the writer and reader are generalized through conjuring a hint of October as experienced by schoolchildren: Goodbye, September! Goodbye Back To School! New ugly clothes, crisp socks & notebooks, sharpened pencils (ll. 8–10) This section of the poem is conjured specifically in order to contextualize the ceremonialized pagan understanding of the fall month in terms of its experience by children and also as narrated by mass media and mass culture. References are made to the compulsoriness of schooling, seasonal patterns of purchasing, and compelled readiness as part of both parenting and the experience of childhood. In remembering children, there is a material feminist double move of both remembering reproductive labor of readying children which is normatively forgotten within poetic calculus that opts for the austerity of the mythological and figurative but also of the uneasiness of the schooled child in a system projecting normative conformity in order to aspire toward greater long-term labor value. In remembering the working-class experience of domestic labors of childbearing and remembering the working-class experience of childhood conformity pressures, di Prima’s poem depicts the sensibility of the working class through the near-constant presence of invisible care labor. In presenting the dual labors of the caregiver and cared for in poetic phrases juxtaposed with 110

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resistant expressions that remember the history of working-class revolutions, there is an implicit inclusive impulse in the “October” poem which makes it valuable as an artifact that remembers the daily life of the American post-war working class while also remembering moments of resistance and historical voices of resistance that have gone forgotten. Derrida’s notion of iterability/citationality conveys how textualities stick in the collective consciousness by way of their repetitiveness in language circulation. Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” defines iterability as the repeatable function of language that enables it to transcend specific contexts of address or as Derrida explains in the Alan Bass translation “the possibility of repeating, and therefore of identifying, marks is implied in every code, making of it a communicable, transmittable, decipherable grid that is iterable” (315). My reading of Bakhtin in this essay allows me to take the poststructuralist notions of iterability and citationality and see them instead in a new materialist perspective turned toward oral and embodied memory as no longer limited by text or citation or numerical iteration and instead oriented around voice-memory and memories of voices such as di Prima’s poetic memory of the revolutionary and quotidian voices of October. In di Prima’s “October,” the iterability of other voices in her poem is represented in its text through italics. Throughout the text of the poem, quoted words in italics happen at the edge of stanzas in non-italic style so as to emphasize the displacement of historical voices.Though this section has lingered on how the domestic others, namely, children have their voices preserved in the content of this poem, the form of heteroglossia that remembers historical moments of resistance also contains the metaphysical lumpenproletarian of the historical dead or historical forgotten.This is, however, the focus of the next section.

Historical Memories in Rhythm The historical voices that appear in di Prima’s “October” and Snyder’s “Night Highway NinetyNine” do not appear separately from the rhythm scheme during di Prima’s move into italicized cited historical voices present at the end of poem lines and during Snyder’s memories given in hitchhiker-voice retell the contextual details. The rhythm is kept constant by the resonating memory of history as symbolic of the traumatic way in which historical memory is held in the body, especially under conditions of Cold War McCarthyist censorship. Additionally, these tertiary voices extend out of the capacities of voices beyond the poets’ direct knowledge: instead, they are embedded in the field of their description, being either voices of the road or voices of October.

The Synthesis of Heteroglossia, Rhythm, and Revolutionary History The Beat movement in literature was always embedded in a project of synthesizing revolutions. The revolutions of Beat poetry lie both in their evocation of historic resistance movements like the Wobblies, the Bolshevik revolution, and the civil rights movement as well as anti-apartheid struggle. These historical moments are expressed through an embrace of rhythm and voice instead of a return to fixation on language and print above all else. The Beats formed this method by rediscovering ancient spiritual movements like Buddhism and Judaism, with additional political and social aesthetic innovations, such as the French aesthetic tradition of surrealism, that of Lyotard’s “bricolage,” and of Derrida’s concept of “iterability” that the former both draw from. Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossia” is just a different understanding of Lyotard’s bricolage applied to the narration rather than theme.Thus, it traverses both the formalist style of literary criticism, which categorized genre according to one or more arguments about the nature of linguistic and narrative form, and the postmodern style of literary criticism, which uses aesthetic devices to transgress ideological and categorical limitations. Thus Bakhtinian post-formalism is better suited to address Beat poetic innovations since Beat poetics use surrealism of voice to return poetry to a working-class voice. Such surrealist themes try to offer a rejoinder to reality and restore collective imagination from the 111

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alienation of techno-modern rationality, but through a move to what Havelock might understand as primary orality or primary voice. In imbricating revolutionary potential into the spoken power of verse but also leaving the published text as a cryptogram that with careful reading leads back to their oral performance of the poetry, the Beats combine the media revolution invoked by the radio industry of their childhood with the aesthetic revolution of French poetic and political irony.

Political History in Rhythm: Sound as Memory Device The presence of political history in rhythmic poetry is not coincidental. Rhythm is a container for memory of collective trauma via reconnecting the reader with their body through the oral resonance of the enunciation. Relying on Frances Yates’s history of memory scholarship, the mystical tradition of Lullism of the fifteenth century used kabbalah incantations to internalize a memory of the stars and the mapped connection to one another (208). This use of oral verse set a precedent for the future use of poetry to internalize the voices of the oppressed by Beat poets. Similarly, oralist literary thinker Walter Ong argued for the existence of “primary orality” or a pure oralist voice untouched by either textuality or secondary media like television, internet, and radio (11–13). Ong’s identification of a primary literary voice helps us to understand how the voice aspect of poetry had become debased by early modern-to-contemporary technologies. Taking Yates and Ong’s accounts together, it may be possible to pose that contemporary literature has become too oriented toward objects ranging from text to television that limit the mystical and memory-related possibilities. Drawing on the Derridean and Lacanian critiques of subject and object binaries in language, it may be entertained that egocentric and logocentric language, through divorcing the intellectual facilities from the body via a move into the symbolic realm, desensitizes the body to historical memories held more potently in the form of sound and orality.The return to rhythm unlocks collective trauma memories of broken resistance movements more effectively because it synthesizes language with the body in order to unlock the political histories latent in the genetic history of the flesh and actualizes the materiality of historical struggles held in language.

Voices of Civil Rights, Anti-Apartheid, Bolshevik Revolution, and AntiVietnam Student Struggle and Occupy Wall Street in “October” In the first stanza of di Prima’s “October” and the last three stanzas, italicized words interrupt stylistically the unified authorial voice of the rest of the poem. It may be speculated quite reasonably that these italicized words are not so much voices as the words of songs. The first italicized phrase “we shall overcome” is sung not only by Pete Seeger but also by blues and jazz musicians. But due to an engagement with the content of the poem and the choices of these song lyrics, I will push for a reading of these phrases as perhaps intentionally being used because of their double meaning as both protest chants or protest statements as well as folk songs and the spiritual songs of the enslaved. The protest chants cited by di Prima in “October” speak the common refusal of ever-repeating new demands of capital for greater sacrifice either in their origin in the slave spirituals of earlier American histories or in the mouths of working- and middle-class youths in the American mid-century resistant to the call that they too sacrifice their lives like their fathers did in military struggle for American imperial global hegemony. The italicized phrases in di Prima do not have to be merely song lyrics but can be recognized as folk song lyrics and protest chants at the same time, which would only magnify their resistant potential within an analysis of song and rhythm as a memory device as they would hold both memories of sonic harmony and very real protests. In the context of the title of the poem, the italicized song/protest chant is undoubtedly carrying not just one history of protest in it, but at least an entire century of October wars and October protests, known or experienced by di Prima. The first italicized lyric/chant “we shall overcome” is a song, as I already mentioned, sung by Pete Seeger but also famously sung in numerous anti-war 112

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and pro-civil rights protests throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when di Prima lived. The italicized lines that get repeated by the end of the poem “aint gonna study / aint gonna study war no more” were sung in the anti-Vietnam war protests also but are also lyrics from the slave spiritual “Down by the Riverside” sung not only by Seeger and those in the folk music genre but also by Nat King Cole, Louie Armstrong, and several other jazz, gospel, and blues musicians. Contextualized with October, these lyrics of protest songs conjure not one single history but multiple histories. “October,” the title of the poem, is the month of the eponymously named Soviet October Revolution that happened during World War I. October of 1967 was also the time of the famous student protest of the Vietnam war in which students placed flowers in the barrels of rifles which was also documented by Beat novelist Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. October was also the month of the Million Worker March against the Iraq War in 2002 and the initial occupation of Wall Street in 2010 by the Occupy Wall Street movement which brought the language of 1% and 99% to mass awareness and use. Which history did di Prima speak to in the use of these other chants/songs? And why is she seemingly in dialogue with these voices throughout the poem? I argue she dialogues with these voices because these are the musical vestiges of traumatic memories which haunt the poet during the month of October.These are the ghostly voices of unrest and discontent and outrage which are not confined to a single historical event, remembering multiple histories of struggle on the outer edges of the routine habit and ceremonial qualities of the seasonal/temporal field that is October. Di Prima dialogues with the memory of song lyrics that haunt her everyday American workingclass life, the potentials and pasts of struggle, of resistance, and of insurgency in everyday life. In the first stanza, di Prima contextualizes the first lyric “we shall overcome” and seemingly debates it: Too many times back in the day sang we shall Overcome & of course we shan’t. Shall Not. That’s just more puritan BS Not overcome. & Nobody needs to But we still try—or I do. I struggle To get it right (ll. 1–7) In the first stanza of “October,” di Prima finds herself in spirited dialogue between her poet’s narration and a displaced voice from past songs that vaguely impels her to “overcome.” Di Prima’s first stanza repeats each line heavily by alternating between short punctuated three- and four-syllable lines seemingly arguing with the remembered chant-song. In “October,” di Prima begins by resisting the compulsion to overcome, in a seeming blues or jazz rhythm: tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-taptap. But she ends in agreement with the far-off protest chant and folk song that some effort must be made. The duel ends in a resolution which accepts the “we” and the “shall” but puts the mode into question and seems to be unsettled by the war-like imagery of “overcoming,” while remaining more at home with struggle. The initial stanza of di Prima’s poetic refusal of the colonialist demand for defense is complemented by the end of her poem where her attempt to settle down to a ballgame is interrupted by the second song lyric/protest chant. This chant seemingly reacts to a body stepping onto a plane with the refrain “aint gonna study war.” In this second moment, as in the first memory, di Prima’s non-italicized text seemingly argues with the italicized musical voice of history. Against her struggle to focus on the ballgame, her voice ceases to contradict the musical lyric of history. She goes from her initial dialogic refusal of the ought of overcoming to reacting with “you know I can’t” to the first line of “aint gonna study war.” The poem ends with “aint gonna study war no more” 113

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from the spiritual of the enslaved contradicting the compulsoriness of the overcoming, saying “aint gonna study war at home or in the field” and then the “aint gonna” becomes juxtaposed with “overcome,” and her poem becomes a conjoining of historical refusals with the last few song lyrics repeated in syllable patterns of three, two, one and then two, two, two.

Remembering the Repression of the IWW in the NW through Off-Rhythmic Hobo-Voices Where Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-Nine” finds its memory of political history is in a set of stanzas located in the second section of the poem describing the visionary dreams and repression of the revolutionary anarchist trade union the Industrial Workers of the World. Since Snyder’s highway poem is very spatially oriented, each stanza has a city location next to it in the right margin, with the first stanzas mentioning the IWW or Wobblies being adjacent to Everett and the next mention in the following stanza being adjacent to Seattle, the site of a major IWW-led general strike in 1919. What is also notable is the memory of the IWW contained in a mix of thoughts of police repression and visionary hope present in the music of guitar. The first stanza to mention the historic revolutionary organization remembers a violent scene: The sheriff ’s posse stood in double rows flogged the naked Wobblies down with stalks of Devil’s Club & run them out of town (ll. 58–61) And a second stanza just following the direct naming of the organization briefly mentions an anarchist slogan probably dearly held by their members as well as a musical instrument possibly used to sing folk music or to sing from the Wobbly songbook itself: A night of the long poem and the mined guitar … “Forming the new society within the shell of the old” mess of tincan camps and littered roads (ll. 78–82) Further in the same section once more the Wobblies are mentioned but only in terms of the shock that Wobblies were still present in the McCarthy era by a ranger: Marys Corner, turn for Mt. Rainer —once caught a ride at night for Portland here Five Mexicans, ask me “chip in on the gas” I never was more broke and down got fired that day by the USA (the District Ranger up at Packwood thought the Wobblies had been dead for    forty years but the FBI smelled treason     —my red beard (ll. 147–156) 114

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These three stanzas reference the intertwined presence of the Industrial Workers of the World in Snyder’s own life but also in the radical memories and histories of the northwest Oregon region itself. Snyder’s own personal history with the Wobblies and his persecution as well as the general persecution of the IWW for their leftist politics in the US during the first half of the twentieth century are omnipresent in these verses.That two out of three of the mentions of Wobblies in Snyder’s poem have more to do with their eventual demise and repression during the 1910s and 1950s is a tribute, however, to the potency of the vision which is reduced to a slogan and to a faint reference to folk music in the one scene in the poem: in it, the Wobblies amount to something more than an arcane political association. Namely, it suggests a commitment to the prefigural dimension of anarchism—of creating alternate structures that would self-sustain in dormancy until a critical or key moment of emergence—but juxtaposes these long-term hopes with the working-class trappings within which their horizon is thought, epitomized by “tincan camps and littered roads” showing the ultimate imperfection of the leftist political structure which hope was cast around. But what remains in these depictions is the ultimate imperviousness of the teleological imperative even in the face of resounding police and state repression and even despite its austere working-class trappings. Snyder’s mention of the IWW is meaningful in at least two ways: in finding anarchist unionism implacably embedded in the folk sensibilities of the northwest despite visible (and continuing during the McCarthy era) police repression and in the dialectical juxtaposition of the folk guitar and the working-class lifeworld against the short memories of the ranger and brute force of the police that punished Wobblies in Oregon and forced Snyder to lose his job as a park ranger.The dialectical formation of the event and the song against the inertia of the situation is a theme brought out by Badiou in Being and Event. In Badiou’s analysis, the place of song and the memory of the unnamed event of the IWW emergence in the 1910s in the Pacific Northwest region signify the power of the evental, and the police violence as well as the Sherriff ’s surprise at the omnipresence of supposedly extinct political organizations shows the stasis of the momentary as a constant movement of recidivism or amnesia that constantly reconstitutes the capitalist presentism of discipline in the face of the radical uprising that remains forever resonant in folk memory. The evental for Badiou is the quality imbued in a given site (the working class, art, and science are all sites offered up as examples by Badiou) that positions that site toward the occurrence of an event, but Badiou is quick to caution that a site is only retroactively evental; it is only knowable as positioned toward an event in the historical context of the event occurring (179). Thus the state of discontent is the evental quality that exists as a spiritual background in the history of the Pacific Northwest. It is only the tipping of discontent against the inertia of the situation of capitalist stasis that resulted in the IWW’s emergence. The evental quality is something of a theory of creativity, as improvisation also has an evental quality in that it appears when the background conditions are right, but it cannot be predetermined. The appearance of the IWW as an event of working-class unity is carried forward in the symbol of the folk guitar that harkens back to the IWW songbook whose radical music might have been introduced to those of Snyder’s generation from folk music heroes such as Woody Guthrie. Improvisation is also held by Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty as synthesizing technological histories with bodily willfulness.

Conclusion: Poetics of Revolutionary Memory as Dialectical Synthesis of Form and Context In Lukács’s dialectical approach to literary study, Theory of the Novel, the protagonist who ventures to the resolution of tensions is always acting out the narrative mechanics of class struggle, yet Lukács’s theory of literary class in realism does not comment upon the poetics of working-class memory.To advance a new realist interpretation that fuses phenomenology of perceptual data with historical and locational context, the self-signifying poetic narrator pantomimes teleological moves 115

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toward class struggle through the processual dramas of that narratorial voice.The data of perceptual description that dots the poem—such as its references to music and location—must then be fused with a historical vantage point. Only in the fusion of the perceptual and evental with the historic, does the unacknowledged narratorial poetic voice signify a larger vision or processual transfer point historically, politically, and culturally. In such a reading, all poetry is comprised of descriptive/ allusive conflict between its descriptive language and the specificity of its memory of the historical world. More to the point, only in the thematic binding that is embodied in proletarian action is this conflict set to rest and as such the poetic journey resolves and the process of class struggle yields to a thematic or hermeneutical affirmation of subjectivity. In Marxian style, it is the affirmation of the proletarian or the minor which brings the conflict between context and transcendent expressiveness to rest. The study and form of poetry are an engagement with a literary hybrid form that emerged with the attempt to textually represent the more ancestral form of communication that is rhythm and song. In the transmission of text that carries a cadence, the poet evokes the primal iterability and motion that animate all of sound and thus captures the spirit or geist of animacy. In the interplay of vibration over language, the poet calls back to that original repetition of heartbeat and footstep that is the source of all energy of labor and active being. In invoking the primary orality of musically interspersed sound and silence, Beat poets like di Prima and Snyder affirm the transcendental medium of sound and repetition in voice while calling for a revolt against the ways in which these unitary fabrics of memory and of life become divided by calendars and become policed by nationalisms. Di Prima’s “October” is partly about the grating of the constancy of the advance of time against the unsatisfaction of political desires and worker hopes. Snyder’s poem is about the transitive space of worker flight and its concentration of lost desires and dreams divided into a shared vein of travel and memory that is Highway 99 on the US West Coast. Thus these poems are about the signification of concentrated livelihoods hidden in limited devices of existence in capitalism such as calendars, songs, and highways but which carry a subconscious dreamscape of potentials which go unemancipated. We have seen di Prima and Snyder’s poetry concretize the uprising potential of lumpenproletarian lower voices through poetry that embraces the transitory and rhythmic temporal and sensory contours of working-class experiences that arrest us and rouse us, instead of giving way to the nihilism and anhedonia of word play. We have seen both di Prima and Snyder in their poetic achievements entertain a cycle of process and struggle as they observe the pull of time and history upon revolutionary memory and vision.That these poems are about the interplay of opposing thematic elements and their resolution with hermeneutics of transitivity is an argument for a tactical approach to the interstitial conflicts that mark the varying reckonings of perceptive truths about the materiality of being with more historical recognitions of how those perceptual forms have come to settle in their specific incarnation as a result of such historical battles. Truly, the dialectical conflict between context and legacy in literary work comes to rest through poetic affirmations of the proletarian medium expressed in the quotidian worlds of folk music and daily routines.

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham, Bloomsbury, 2017. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Emerson, Caryl and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice, Stanford UP, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc, translated by Alan Bass, Northwestern UP, 1988, pp. 1–23. Di Prima, Diane. “October.” The Poetry Deal, City Lights Foundation, 2014. Domhoff, G. William. "Wealth, Income, and Power.” Who Rules America? U of So. Cal. whoru​​lesam​​erica​​.ucsc​​ .edu/​​power​​/weal​​t​h​.ht​​ml. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

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Songs of Synthesis Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971. Martin, John Levi. “What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 109, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–49. Marx, Karl and Frederic Engels. The German Ideology. Prometheus Books, 2011. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge, 2005. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man. McGraw Hill, 1964. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. Routledge, 2012. Snyder, Gary. “Night Highway Ninety-Nine.” The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Classics, 2006. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. U of Chicago P, 2001.

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9 THE URBAN SPATIALITY OF STREET LITERATURE Mattius Rischard

As an aesthetic phenomenon that makes meaning of space and place, the urban novel contains some of the most valuable representations of rapid development and decay in metropolitan areas, their social hierarchies, and the forces of capital underpinning the spatial hermeneutics of landscapes striated by American cities. These geopolitical striations are distinguished from their merely geological counterpart by the human violence required to “territorialize” and concretize their limits and “divisible boundaries” (Deleuze and Guattari 382).Where urban planners strategize how to further the grid of urbanization over an ever-increasing flow of goods and people, the state’s intended striations are resisted or undercut by the tactics of those who struggle to navigate such an unevenly developed and exploitative city environment, people who inscribe their own meaning of street life and urban space in what the state would brand graffiti and criminal texts. This counterhermeneutic to reading the city through the capitalist logic of urban planning and the biopolitical discourse of sociology is sorely needed for an intersectional analysis of class, race, and gender relations in political geography. While popular urban novels have been radically devalued by the academy and industry critics in the past, I am arguing that the political value of an aesthetic movement is always contingent on what Jacques Ranciére terms the “literarity” of a genre or aesthetic—i.e., its relative ability to disturb the existing circuits of words, meanings, and places of enunciation over language that are traditionally intended to establish the communal order of a hegemonic cultural production and political authority through a normalized sensibility (39–40). Literarity is thus the democratic character of language dependent on the distribution of literacy and authorship that cannot be contained by authority, which is made possible by the excessive social utility of language to those without democratic representation. By focusing on works of popular street literature from the end of the Civil Rights Era to the present, especially those that circumvented traditional capitalist publication, production, and circulation practices yet find mass appeal with urban, working-class readers of color, this chapter aims to rethink these textual constructions of urban space and their impact on cultural production by and for the city-dweller who is historically marginalized in aesthetic or political discussions of literature, but who nevertheless consumes, writes, and distributes their experience of the street. I am asking whether the street novel can offer any tools for livable alternatives to increasing levels of social domination in the deindustrialized spaces of the contemporary American political topography. Essentially, I investigate the ways in which street novelists represent and interrogate the discursive/semiotic strategies of pandering, peddling, passing, and preaching in urban space, and the textual tactics of producing a “vernacular architecture” (hooks 149) suitable to constructing 118

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autonomy in the city. I will outline how street literature is composed through discursive motifs of urban survival and a richness of context-specific verbal tactics found predominantly in African American cultural tactics for rhetorically (and often playfully) exploiting the differences between denotative and connotative meanings of signs, or what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “signifyin(g)” (52), that compensate for the oppressive social relations and cycles of exploitation/exchange maintained through spatialized inequality. These motifs can be physically understood as a vernacular architecture of the city, as well as an aesthetic rendering of psychosocial experience Henri Lefebvre conceives as “representational space” or “lived space” (38–39), which I argue is delimited by urban spatial practices developed to facilitate elite classes desiring simultaneous pleasures of secured enclosure and liberated mobility. The power of authorizing the knowledge and practices associated with a place—what bell hooks terms “the politics of property” (146)—correlates with one’s ability to enact these pleasures. “Passing” through urban environments to access the surplus capital of the city (and the accompanying pleasures of enclosure and mobility created by such disposable incomes and property ownership) is conditioned by Western strategies of power encoded through a semiotic triangulation of race-, gender-, and class-inflected spatial practice. Indeed, narratives of urban space across prominent street novelists such as Robert Beck and Sister Souljah must contend with tactics of “passing” to achieve a semblance of discursive control over the politics of property. Reading the genre through Lefebvre’s concept of lived space and hooks’s vernacular architecture in relation to the politics of property will better explain how everyday tactics of pandering, peddling, and preaching are related to (resisting) control over the passing of urban bodies through bounds of class, race, and gender to account for the ways in which those issues are represented over the last two generations of street novelists, typified by Beck in the post-civil rights period, and Souljah in the post-war on drugs and war on crime period. In addition to demonstrating the repetition in signifyin(g) these tropes, these authors also help to account for the differences in strategies articulated across time, gender, class, and sociopolitical topography as the political landscape of American urban space shifts to offer new possibilities and new tactics for cultural activities. Despite having a substantial literarity through circulation and quotation in urban subcultures, Robert Beck’s oeuvre has rarely been recognized within academia as a formal object of aesthetic and political study. He lived on the South Side during the Chicago Renaissance at the same time as Richard Wright, but his pimp stylizations were considered too violent for the movement. However, any comparison between the aggression of Beck’s panderers and Bigger Thomas of Native Son (1940) undermines this assertion. Beck attended Tuskegee within a semester of Ralph Ellison, but his writing reflects a turn towards naturalism and realism that was found by critics to be inconsistent with Ellison’s “high” modernist symbolism. And yet, what could be more “naturalist” than a nameless Black radical being locked away in the conclusion to Invisible Man (1952)? Beck admired and attempted to imitate James Baldwin’s style, but Beck’s sheer criminality as a public figure and his unforgiving portrayals of city living alienated him from Baldwin’s intelligentsia within the Négritude Movement. By the 1970s, Beck’s depictions of pimping were out of taste for an African American public animated by feminist variants of Black Power, such as rediscovering the diasporic scholarship of Zora Neale Hurston, and celebrating the historic critiques of Toni Morrison. Beck’s Mafioso publisher Holloway House never supplied him the means to rise above the status of pulp fiction during his lifetime, as shown in Professor Justin Gifford’s literary history, Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (2013), and Professor Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players (2018). Thus, Beck remained primarily in circulation among the under-commons of African American cultural studies. And yet, his novels have arguably sold more copies than any other African American author, largely through such urban sites as bodega newsracks, independent booksellers, barbershops, and prisons. On one hand, Beck astutely perceived the circuits of desiring and exchange enabled by the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomically codified encounter of the American urban; on the other, leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” and the Black Arts 119

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Movement distanced themselves from his hyper-masculine jive and his unrelenting portrayals of street life, which the Black cultural vanguard saw as an impediment to their discursive search for an aesthetic autonomy that promoted Black sociocultural respectability. It is interesting that African American intellectuals would accuse street authors of complicity with Euroamerican middle-class stereotypes about Black urban living, while at the same time facilitating the embourgeoisement of Black literary taste. Regardless of the tensions found in literary criticism about street writers and their political and pedagogical value, there is an analytic gap between the academic conceptions of Robert Beck and his work’s impact on the signifyin(g) practices of African American urban culture as well as other migratory assemblages that have interfaced with hip-hop stylizations in conceiving their rights to the city’s services and spaces. This dissonance between Beck’s academic reputation and the actual complexities of his work is rooted in the generic qualities of street fiction itself: (1) it is produced by authors who preach an empirical “experience” of the street via their choices of narrative and aesthetic that connect their criminalistic portrayals to a highly politicized vein of industrial realism/naturalism in Anglophone literature echoing rhetorical elements of the vagabond heroes glorified by broadsheets in the early modern period, the early picaresque novels of Britain’s industrialization, the rise of the Transatlantic penny dreadful/pulp market, the urban muckraking of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, or Jacob Riis, and the American detective novels of the hard-boiled tradition that sought to articulate a corrupted vision of the urban underbelly; (2) it is rarely published or circulated by the mainstream culture industry or even by niche publishing houses who supported the Black Arts Movement (BAM), but instead relies on pseudo-criminal enterprises of exploitative pulp production (e.g., Beck’s publisher Holloway House was connected to the Mafia and notoriously underpaid its contracted authors to write about “the Black Experience”) or, more recently, on the technologies of self-publishing and promotion, where best-sellers are typically re-published once large-scale publishers buy them up; and (3) street fiction establishes tropes of ethically ambiguous urban survival, which are predicated upon navigating marginalized ways of desiring and exchange in spaces marked by the spatial striations associated with the rationalized political economy of racial/gendered capitalism.These radical forms of passing through the white, Western city inevitably necessitate signifyin(g) creative and often criminalized resistances in the vernacular architecture that counter the politics of property imposed through the logic of urban planning and the strategy of the state. I recognize that, as a white male intellectual speaking on the triangulation of Marxist, racial, and gendered analytics of urban class geography and literature, I risk reproducing the colonial discursive practices Spivak questions, such as the subaltern subject being studied by Western academia without their true consent to the colonial project narrated upon their social context. I am writing about those who are never permitted to speak in the Occidental Academe, but nevertheless objectified in discourse. Thus, if one cannot speak for themselves or their constituents, there is no possibility for the kind of representational politics that predicate Western “freedom.” I fear reproducing the coloniality of Marx’s logic regarding those outside of the bourgeoisie–proletariat binary of Western Modernity, which Said uses as an epigraph to Orientalism: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (1). However, I am not interested in being a white man speaking only to white men about minoritarian people through our own culturally privileged representations, as exemplified in the case of the British ban on sati in India for Spivak (96–98) or via Orientalism as a power-calculus “integral of the West” for Said (2).Thus, the most productive methods available to one in my position for offering radical postcolonial critique should focus on problems of re-presentation (cultural) and representation (political) to explicate new understandings of social classes producing their own stories, rather than merely reproduce the reading of subjects conducive to Western historical projects that help maintain an oversimplified interpretation of the capital–labor binary in (white/male) class antagonism at the expense of minoritarian narratives. Recognizing these hegemonic practices of literary criticism and art history in the academy in order to avoid replicating them, I argue that classical political economy is wholly inadequate for 120

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understanding urbanized “assemblage economies” (e.g., pandering, peddling, and preaching) in the ghetto, and how their circuits of exchange are codified in street literature. These informal, semiotic economies were first established to support those marginalized through the colonial exploitation/ expropriation (what Marx terms the “primitive accumulation” in Capital, vol. 1, Chapter 31) that provided the wealth and labor constituting the economic tension between classes of bourgeois/ proletarian white men in the first place. Among marginalized forms of sociality represented in the street novel, white hegemony attempts to inhibit liminal assemblages from developing cohesive revolts against the capitalist class. Working people in these spaces tend to have the labor/capital conflict filtered through politicians and other preacher-types, who implicate the conflict in their social decision-making power and the oblique diatribes of activist characters like Sister Souljah’s depiction of herself in the novel The Coldest Winter Ever (2005). Rather, the majority of characters are engaged in struggles for security and mobility among themselves, against the whites who profit from most urban striations of space, and against the state that represents those interests in city development. Thus, many marginal assemblages organize work via public spaces, familial workshops, and households that more closely resemble migrant bands operating through kin ties rather than industrialized unions. This arrangement allows members to collectively survive despite extremely low wages for any individual task. A household may have members doing agriculture work in home gardens, urban commodity production (both licit and illicit), sweatshop-style labor, or other exploitations (e.g., sex work, trafficking, etc.) across spaces as diverse as the street corner, the poolhall, the tavern, the back alley, the prison, and the barber-shop. As short- and long-term migration increases, some families might grow to occupy a city-block or other interconnected dwellings. However, the security of dwellings is complicated by the predatory investment and mortgage/ rent practices in segregated urban housing, causing rent gaps to explode while housing structures themselves are often left in a decrepit state. The necessity of “passing” becomes more obvious in the privileged access to waged work, which remains low-pay and stratified by gender and race. Urban minorities supply the majority of military recruits and incarcerated persons to the Euromerican state while “passing” ethnic middlemen (e.g., politicians, landlords, temp agencies, and real estate developers) broker the remaining local labor and the gangs through structures of patronage. As a result, competitive wages and longterm work are only available to members of the assemblage who can pass as a trustworthy body to white patriarchal capitalism or its intermediaries; indeed, the urban system of uneven development and the spatialization of social injustice is predicated on the selective poverty of the workers, as well as the fact that those in need of work must constantly outnumber the available opportunities to maintain the labor surplus that keeps wages low.Varieties of this urban labor could be redefined in the ghetto as hustling, dealing, gangbanging, pimping, homemaking, or migrant work, etc. Most of the economic activities caught up in the discourses of pandering, peddling, preaching, and passing take place outside the formal legal structures assumed by bourgeois conceptions of political economy and are thus not accounted for in the national GDP. New forms of urban resistance to the colluding forces of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism must assume novel cultural positions from which to formulate their politics. In most instances the struggle over economic and cultural resources has created conflicts and patronage structures within and between kin-like groups—many of them organized into female-oriented family structures or hypermasculine warbands/gangs, from whence comes the “African Village” structure of urban communities coined by Black Lives Matter. The distinctiveness of this urbanized economy is in the way it organizes the non-bourgeois, but also non-proletarian, sociability to structure a variety of uneven processes/sites of production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction. As a result, segregated urban development creates culturally distinct spatial arrangements of common identity, integrated with each other and yet dispersed across multiple scales, ranging from the city (e.g., the “Black Belt” in Chicago), to the nation (e.g., the “Great Migration” of African Americans across the United States), or the globe (e.g., the African Diaspora as a result of colonial slave trading). It 121

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is important to understand how the urban is being constituted in the underdeveloped regions as assemblages—i.e., as diffuse forms of cultural centrality, spatial-temporal de/re/territorializing, and socioeconomic connectivity—that establish new ways of identifying with and aestheticizing street life. There are significant political connotations behind the aesthetic choices made in representing rapid development in urban spaces, social hierarchies, and forces of capital that striate the cityscapes serving as the setting of the street novel. By the early twentieth century, particular strategies for monitoring, restricting, and controlling the movement of urban residents such as advances in fencing/concrete and structural security, police routes, grid planning, curfews, plans for motorways, zoning laws, and public services had become fundamental to institutional hegemony, producing new positions from which politically and socioeconomically marginalized subjects can represent themselves. These representations must be defined within the spatial-temporal context specific to the coding of bodies and techniques of social marginalization. To understand why the aforementioned symbolic economies (pandering, peddling, preaching, and passing) recur in signifyin(g) across the generations of street novelists typified by Robert Beck and Sister Souljah, respectively, it is necessary to explicate how the politics of property are related to (resisting) control over the movement of urban bodies and to discuss the ways in which those issues are represented and interrogated by the vernacular architecture of these novelists, while accounting for how the patterns of representing space change over time. Beck’s narratives played an integral part in the diversification of urban Black culture, but the novel Shetani’s Sister (2015), which Beck chose to hide with Mrs. Beck from his abusive publisher, was only posthumously published in 2015. He focused his considerable linguistic powers on urban characters that struggle against the representatives of racialized policing through economic appeals to castrated sexuality. The story of the pimp-sorcerer “Master Shetani’s” rise to power and his downfall at the hands of the morbidly alcoholic Detective Russell Rucker is replete with moments of uncanny mimesis—of mirroring the traumas that constitute interdependent, yet highly fragmented subjectivities implicated in the criminalization of Black spatial practice. In a racial caste society that precludes the option to resist or find refuge from interpellation by demanding cultural assimilation to white supremacy, Beck especially draws upon Du Bois’s concept of racial “twoness” from The Souls of Black Folk (8) to create a final narrative that critiques the negative glamour of the pimp as a form of capitalistic, hyper-masculine self-fashioning intended to reclaim urban property through spectacles of rugged individualism in the lived spaces of historical trauma. Beck’s characters are portrayed in various states of psychological crises that produce doubleconsciousness through a shattering of desire and restructuring of lack; that is, they are driven to assert the best versions of themselves (i.e., their “ego ideal”) in order to “refind” their connection to pure being—a pleasure psychoanalytic theory designates as jouissance. The paradox involved here is that the resources to find one’s way towards the enjoyment of pleasure, property, and purpose along the lines of self-actualization have been hopelessly commodified and exclusively encoded, such that the structuring of desire around white/phallic values of capital impairs the ability of working-class people, women, and African Americans to identify with the symbolic structuring of space itself that requires State-legitimized capital to populate it with the fantasies of being that facilitate desire and pleasure. Given the subject “cannot recognize himself ” except “by alienating himself ” in the desire and image of the Other, the subject naturally aims their “aggressiveness” toward the racial other in an effort to “refind” themselves “by abolishing the ego’s alter ego” (Lacan, On the Name 24). This alter ego, experienced in the “extremity of intimacy that is at the same time excluded” (Lacan, Triumph of Religion 16) is what the racial Other comes to personify for the raced subject, such that the racial Other stands as “the locus of the decoy” (On the Name 71) in the form of the object that embodies a fantasy of what is essentially lost to the subject. Lacan argues that “a solid hatred is addressed to being” (Encore 99) in suffering such lack that pervades the lived spaces of Beck’s 122

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pimps and police who vie for control over women and drugs as the objects of racialized fantasies for maintaining capitalistic-phallic power. How do fantasies of capitalist power specific to racial slavery and patriarchal systems of sociopolitical and psychic containment shape the spaces inhabited by Beck’s depictions of Black pimping? Fanon claims that the Oedipal complex was absent in the majority of West Indian Black males, primarily because the African patriarch that imposes its symbolic Law on the family is replaced with the white nation’s paternal image (Fanon 117). In his memoir The Naked Soul of Iceburg Slim (1971), Beck commented on the libidinous socioeconomic fantasy that drives the pimp: The cities was like the plantations down South. Jeffing Uncle Toms still did all the white man’s hard and filthy work. Those slick Nigger heroes bawled like crumb crushers. They saw the white man just like on the plantations still ramming it into the finest black broads. The broads were stupid squares. They still freaked for free with the white man. They wasn’t hip to the scratch in their hot black asses. Those first Nigger pimps started hipping the dumb bitches to the gold mines between their legs. They hipped them to stick their mitts out for the white man’s scratch. The first Nigger pimps and sure-shot gamblers was the only Nigger big shots in the country.They wore fine threads and had blooded horses. Those pimps were black geniuses. They wrote that skull book on pimping. (194–195) Beck’s re-articulation of the patriarchal myth preaches a gospel of psychic economies where the Black feminine body is commodified between racial patriarchies in the city. The desire to be master, king, and father of the female subjects against the usurped, white patriarchy resonates with Beck’s portrayal, where pimps recognize their anti-hero Shetani (Swahili for “Satan”) as “King Shetani, the cleanest player in the Apple!” (Beck 9). His opening chapter begins with a mob of children dusting of his car, or “mobile castle,” for a hefty tip (5).The pimp’s “stable” of women (10), his “thronelike chair of royal-purple velour” (10), his “blazing arsenal of jewelry” (36), “pimp-people finery” (7), and his “castlelike mansion” (140) create a parodied space of postmodern lordship that also bears conscious traces of the capitalist who self-fashions a new identity through an economic and aesthetic assemblage for enslaving and commodifying the female body. Shetani demands social respectability to validate his racial twoness through the ruthless acquisition of wealth without assimilating into white spaces of education or politics. In this way, he honors his beloved “blueblack West Indian father” with his voodoo-tinged pandering, while disgracing the image of his hated “green-eyed Irish mother” that he encounters in part of his reflection (10). He keeps a collection of West Indian resurrection and zombification rituals on his shelf, as if to instantiate the Symbolic Law representing his father’s culture. He also finds pleasure in sexually simulating the dominance of slavery in an attempt to master its trauma, whipping his women (13) and locking them in cages when they disobey (64). In order to succeed as a pimp, Shetani believes he must be recognized via spectacle and performativity as the preeminent source of pandering authority. Yet because it is an untenable identity, the pimp’s spectacle of power must be constantly re-inscribed. The history of racial segregation offers structure for refocusing the antagonism toward social alienation toward the privileged occupants of white patriarchy’s lived space—an alienation continuously heightened by exploitation that must be escaped to achieve jouissance. To cope with alienation, Shetani fantasizes about diasporic ventures in sunny, unrestrained settings as a release from the spatial containment of the East Coast: “Shit, we all deserve to live and hustle in the sunshine for a change, like rich suckers, in a fucking mansion in the hills” (11). “I’m sick of New York’s winters, and there are several niggers I’m gonna waste if I stay there. Shit, I just need a base on the coast” (43). Mistaken for someone unimportant by a pair of Black Floridians who rear-end him in the opening scene, he cannot accept the threat to his identity signified by the damage to car or his other possessions. Almost immediately, “he decided to kill the pair” (7). He holds the gun to 123

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their windshield while he waits to confirm, in his narcissistic obsession, that those who wronged him know why he is killing them before they die, and that he can have the pleasure of seeing them acquiesce to his phallic power and pimp identity. He realizes after executing them with their faces pressed together that the men are uncannily similar—twins, in fact. To Shetani, the killing was a necessary act to achieve his fantasies of dominance, but also inadequate for coping with threats to his being, as it inevitably recalls the traces of his own “twoness.” Other sites, such as his view of the Harlem projects “where he had picked up his heavy baggage of inner pain and hatred of women” (14) invoke visions of his mother beating his twin sister and himself, causing their father to commit suicide, and eventually falling to her death at Shetani’s hands. Shetani establishes his vernacular architecture in a web of symbolic property: slaves are branded with his mark, dependent on his heroin, shadowed by his men at all times, and surrounded by paintings and mirrors reflecting his likeness. Thus, he employs psychoactive substances, “his mirrored ho-trap” (13), and significations of his power to communicate his ethos to the marginalized street folk he cajoles into his employment. At first glance in his mirror, Shetani “finger-stroked a widow’s peak that slashed down across the ebony forehead of his ugly-handsome face. He gazed hypnotically into his strange eyes, burning like green lasers in their deep sockets. He adored his unforgettable face” (13). The aesthetic grants him a special power: “the mesmeric pull and fascination it had held for the platoons of young whores who had humped their hearts out in the street so he could afford to live like a prince for the past twenty-five years” (13). While he revels in the glorification of masculine self-image, it also reminds him of his colonial roots and his implication in the oppression of others: Caribbean and American, Irish and African—an exemplar of double consciousness. In these mirrored moments Shetani cannot help but recall his orphaned childhood in a series of abusive foster homes in Harlem, and the constitutive moment when he was dubbed Master Shetani: The attendants lifted the alcoholic victim, a middle-aged African immigrant, onto a stretcher. She suddenly opened her eyes and stared up into the apparently unearthly face of Albert Spires, awash in fire-red light. She recoiled in terror and jumped from the stretcher. She fled into the night screaming, “Shetani! Shetani!” (9) He takes pleasure in how the current reflection lives up to the African moniker, and how his mythic image demands both respect and fear. By claiming the invincible identity of a supernatural force of evil, he maintains his psychological hold on his stable: “His compelling eyes fixed on the face of each girl with deep, probing intensity. He did this to reinforce their conviction that he could read their minds” (10). Shetani enhances his mysticism by refusing to let women touch him without permission, making it a privilege to have physical contact. Even his semen takes on a sacramental aura as a prized “nectar” for his hookers, or a sign of masculine strength that must be stored up through periods of “dick fasting” (43). Shetani’s voodoo sorcery is also his downfall, when it guides him to believe that the hooker Maxine’s uncanny resemblance to his sister indicates her resurrection: Green fire flared from her slitted eyes. Shetani, a fanatical reincarnation buff, barely suppressed a gasp … She was Tuta Spires! Anxiety jolted him. He had to find a way to get her off the street without blowing his career and rep as king of pimps. (12) Losing Tuta was the blow that shattered Albert’s semblance of an identity and reassembled it as Shetani; it is Maxine’s untimely death at the hands of Detective Rucker, the Hollywood anti124

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hooker vice squad leader, that sets him on the path towards yet another shattering moment of self-annihilation. Pursuing access to being (jouissance) designates a loss suffered by all subjects through entrance into the symbolic order delimited by patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The white male hero in Beck’s novel also copes with the fundamental alienation brought on by exclusionary and privileged individualism through the use of Oedipal racial fantasies, becoming a subject that accesses being (jouissance) through the castration of degenerate sexualities (such as miscegenation and the sexual exchange of prostitutes) considered deviant under the Symbolic Law. Simply put, he gets off by ensuring that criminals cannot do the same. Thus, both pimps and police are implicated in a psychosocial dependence on their racial Other to establish a mythic, superior relation to being. Russell Rucker’s lived space is defined by control, castration, and containment of prostitution in Hollywood. Ruck takes joy in the denial of pleasure to tricks and pimps, “smiling in satisfaction to see frustrated johns cruising the hooker-free boulevard” (1). His first conflict with the pimp Big Cat Jackson over the arrest of his prostitute Pee Wee Smith is made biblical to enhance its significance for the Detective: “A Black Goliath, ashimmer in a white silk suit and big-brim pimp hat, jumped into the street” (2) to face him. After killing the pimp, the detective goes home to his ancestral residence in the suburbs of West Hollywood, “a quiet, tree-filled street of well-kept houses,” juxtaposed in his memory against the hooker sprawl of East Hollywood and gangs of South Central where he conducts his investigations. White, middle-class lived space is haunted by loss intimately linked to projections of trauma both received and inflicted by the inheritor of ill-begotten privilege.The Detective “stepped inside the shadow-haunted house, and loneliness assaulted him” (Beck 3). Rucker’s attractive home is rendered in an unsettling, yet familiar experience, as Freud articulated in “The Uncanny” (1919), where the reminders of loss invoke repressed memories to manifest as disturbing psychic doubles in an endless repetition. Traumatic material, while difficult to cope with, involves a negation or criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double.There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed. (Freud 389) Ghosts brought on by signifying smells, objects, and sounds around Rucker’s house leave him affectively paralyzed, keeping his space frozen in a neurotic reiteration of traumatizing lack: His father’s voice and laughter rung through the house like a baritone bell. Remembering his mother’s tender, loving care and dulcet lullabies when he was a child misted his eyes. He left the kitchen … He almost reeled in the lingering fragrance of Shalimar. Nora, his wife, had loved the perfume, before cancer snatched her from his arms forever, five years before. (Beck 3–4) Shetani and Ruck are initially shattered by losing loved ones to a mixture of time, cancer, and inadequate medical treatment. Tuta received little preventative care in Harlem, while Rucker’s brother—a Christian Scientist—is denied access to life-saving treatments by the church. Race war in South Central disciplined Ruck against the Black Other and brought him closer to his deceased wife in comparison—i.e., she was his home against fear and the unheimlich. “Hair-raising shifts on the robbery detail in the deadly 77th District, in South Central L.A” (4) also brought him closer to his partner Leo, and through him Opal—his newly widowed lover—in a relation sanctioned by white patriarchy and found through familial ties to those who oppress the street’s sexual economy. Shetani is forever struggling to be recognized as a respectable subject against a discriminatory real125

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ity, and the inadequacy of this struggle is psychically exhausting. In Tuta’s resurrection, he sees a double of the being that was once possible in his childhood, before becoming the “Satan dressed in a suit of fire” (140). Like Ruck, he looks to his beloved’s doppelganger to re-find jouissance beyond his substance dependencies, his racial hatred, and his castrated desiring. Beck’s double-consciousness of the desires structuring the white bourgeois family and the pimp’s stable reveals how they are mutually forged out of policing urban neighborhoods and racialized illicit economies. Haunted by the eternal recurrence of objects indicating the lack in his family, Rucker copes with alcohol and reiterative dreams of pimps humiliating him as a fantasy for legitimizing his participation in his self-alienation and the alienation of the racial Other. Shetani is also poisoning himself with heroin and cocaine, spurring himself to further visions of misogyny and murder to cope with trauma’s eternal reiteration. As per Nietzsche, the “eternal return” is found in trauma’s psychic space as a “demon” who reminds the subject that they will have to live “the heaviest burden … This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” (The Gay Science sec. 341). The ultimate psychosocial result of policing the Other within the racial/gendered context of white patriarchy’s lived space is the hollowing out or poisoning of the alienated subject among both white and Black bodies. Ruck is constantly aggravating an ulcer he developed in the 77th Division through the stresses involved in policing Shetani’s stable. For him, the liquor that exacerbates it is a reminder of the incessant return of Nietzsche’s demon:“As he picked up the bottle, he heard it gurgle like a demon’s chuckle” (Beck 4). Shetani too is undone by a last-ditch heroin deal, during which Rucker, in an ulcer-induced haze of pain, ambushes the pimp. Although Shetani has been shot, his doubles multiply around Rucker, surrounding Ruck with a “Blackness” that becomes both un-killable and unassimilable into his code (192). Beck’s ending calls attention to the psychic interdependence underlying white masculine obsessions with containment, and mobilized Black masculine resistance constructed through the same underlying tension with jouissance. There cannot be a “genealogy” of street literature in an evolutionary sense, given that “genetic” families are not necessarily the sole criterion of kinship in representations of urban space: gangs, lovers, migrants in convergent diasporas, ethnic tribes, foster homes, godparents, and distant relatives are also families. However, if Beck has been recognized as the “godfather” of street literature, then Sister Souljah is undoubtedly its “godmother.” Indeed, Walter Mosely recognized her as “an Emile Zola of the hip-hop generation,” who has “written a naturalist novel of a world without redemption” (Souljah ii). She enters the literary business at a particularly disenchanted sociopolitical moment. Beck’s latent belief in the power of collective place-making enabled by the terri​toria​ lity-​turne​d-civ​il-ri​ghts-​advoc​acy of the Black Panthers,Young Lords, and other turf gangs caught up in the anti-nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s had dissipated in the urban literary imaginary that had to contend with the internal minoritarian critiques of women and queer folks as well as the external pressures of a reactionary Black middle class, a disapproving academic apparatus, and the renewed white backlash of a capitalist state invigorated by the war on drugs and narratives of urban decay that supported a refined coloniality of spatial inequality in the city. The development of a globalized political economy worsened the inequities in social relationships between the ghettos/barrios and their proprietors who stood to profit from deindustrialization and the new economic vulnerabilities it would create among marginal urbanites as land speculation, discriminatory housing/lending policy, economic deregulation, the dissolution of labor unions, and the outsourcing of work became the norm throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Sister Souljah revitalized the connection between street lit and political activism at the same time that she was reforming the means of production for the genre. She entered the literary scene as self-publishing was becoming a viable method of popularizing oneself in print and via the burgeoning internet. Along with a contemporary class of hip-hop literati including Omar Tyree, Saul Williams, and Teri Woods, she established a marketing strategy through hip-hop collaborations that soon became the new model of urban literary promotion that was free not only from the bourgeois 126

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standards of printing creative works, but also the radical exploitation of African American authors like Robert Beck at the hands of mafioso Blaxploitation pulp publishers following the Holloway House tradition. Self-publishing enabled street lit to be produced on its own aesthetic terms, while the works that became financially successful could be repackaged and sold to large-scale publishers (especially Simon and Schuster) without subjugating them to a complete transformation by their middle-class copyeditors. Yet her narrative style had to contend with the intersection of literary postmodernism and Black urban aesthetic critiques that have been highlighted in different ways by Madhu Dubey and Kenneth Warren. Dubey demonstrates in Signs and Cities (2003) that African American literature and postmodernism, as aesthetic movements, are both increasingly concerned with the artificiality of the connection between urban socioeconomic crisis and its hypermediated representations in the specious semiotic economies of a deindustrialized cultural superstructure. Going further,Warren claims that African American literature began in the Reconstruction period and ended in the Civil Rights Era with the dissolution of aesthetically unified political interests in a Black Power movement and the growing urban diversity of Black lifestyles, class antagonisms, and gendered tensions that lead to a deep cynicism regarding the actual coherence of a racialized social justice endeavor in the aptly titled What Was African American Literature? (2011). These concerns over the accuracy of representing Blackness are encapsulated in the urban vernacular of “Realness”—i.e., that which makes a person of color a “legit” ghetto-dweller qualified to speak on urban inequality. Writing through the crack epidemic and the war on drugs, in circumstances of intense suspicion about the culture industry’s ability to represent ghettoized characters in a productive way, Sister Souljah successfully resolves the relationship between “Realness”—the demand for verisimilitude in ghetto representation—and the political activism to which she is committed. By inserting herself as the fictional antagonist to the Sudanese refug​ee-tu​r ned-​drug-​enfor​cer-t​urned​-barb​ er Midnight and the daughter of a Brooklyn crime lord Winter Santiaga in The Coldest Winter Ever, Souljah is able to maintain a dual relationship with both supportive and skeptical readers. The narrative structure is designed to allow for (dis)identification with a ghetto character who wears her style and attitude like armor and a Black Muslim who leaves the game for an activist lifestyle, while opening up the possibility of authentic critique around the systemic problems with gendered and racialized urban socioeconomic oppression through the character of Souljah, the Harlem-based public speaker. Souljah’s debut novel The Coldest Winter Ever is both an expansive bildungsroman and a literati manifesto, with nearly twice the major characters of Beck’s average crime fiction, and a decisive position on the cultural work to be performed by the hip-hop intelligentsia: make texts that use the popularity of hip-hop to make a community profit, but also aesthetically invite the reader to question why the world is operating under the current politics of property, and why their reaction to it might be an acceptance of wrongdoing, a rejection of activism, or other unspoken features of the urban imaginary that maintain an unjust lived space. The story centers around Winter’s coming-of-age in the streets of Harlem after she loses the childhood riches provided by her father due to his incarceration (90–94), which plunges her mother into an eventually lethal crack addiction (363), her younger sisters (objectified through the names “Lexus,” “Porsche,” and “Mercedes”) taken by Child Services (105), and places her in the care of state at the satirically named “House of Success” women’s shelter (180). Ironically, it is the state that initially finances and protects her father (and thus her lifestyle) through reciprocal bribery, just as the state quickly replaces him with a rival gang led by a man known as “Bullet” once Santiaga becomes too expensive (358). Winter quickly escapes custody and lives briefly with Sister Souljah, who is always taking wayward Black girls into her Harlem brownstone (237). The educative moments she shares with Souljah are not enough to convince her to reform the manipulative habits of conning and seducing people to fulfill the cosmetic, narcotic, and sexual desires instilled by her parents and peers, so she becomes a paramour to the up-and-coming traffickers of the new gangs while abandoning her quest to find 127

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her family or Midnight, her father’s enforcer and childhood love interest. Like Santiaga, Midnight had also been incarcerated but significantly changed his lifestyle, as explained in the epistolary sequence between him and Souljah, who became his pen-pal after finding him reading Hadith at Columbia (328–340). Souljah had rejected his advances so that he might change his ways, which had the eventual effect of distancing him from the drug game. As Midnight heals from an endlessly traumatic ordeal culminating in a prison gang-rape, Souljah’s inspirational letters help him to reconcile his masculinity with positive economic pursuits in a stable family life on the outside. Midnight’s refusal of Winter, while highlighting the need for social reform that Souljah is trying to make, leads Winter into the arms of Bullet and inevitable incarceration as an accomplice, because she found no solace in her broken family or her long-lost love interest (402). The differing outcomes for Winter and Midnight via their encounters with Souljah emphasize the determinative cultural role of the Black littérateur in building the urban imaginary from which productive social action can follow.Winter begins the novel with a diatribe against Souljah’s preaching in the media, claiming that only a “real” ghetto girl can tell the story (1). Midnight slaps Winter’s hand away from the radio when Souljah speaks (38), turns up the volume when she talks about the reclamation of responsible Black masculinity (51), and keeps fliers of his pen-pal’s public appearances (68). When Winter comes to stay with Souljah, she envies that the activist meets regularly with hip-hop celebrities to organize charity concerts financing churchwork and AIDS benefits (255). She is also amazed that someone as influential as the Ivy-League lecturer Souljah could struggle with her weight and sense of fashion, and the difficulty of relating to female inmates when speaking in the HIV quarantine wing of Riker’s prison (262). The power of these moments derives from the personal battles that the author herself is reflecting upon via her character, as she has done in her prior memoir No Disrespect (1994). Interestingly, her satirical self-criticism demonstrates a consciousness of her own difficulties relating to skeptical ghetto dwellers that makes her authentic activism against the manipulation of Black youth by gangs and the state even more rhetorically effective. Beck and Souljah craft some similar spaces for connecting circuits of power and exchange. In Beck’s Mama Black Widow (1969), the light-skinned drag queen Otis Tilson is allowed to be mugged and raped by a bouncer in South Chicago after the police realize “Tilly” is not a white woman (26), while in Souljah’s novel Winter is followed around a Manhattan department store, only to be taken under a bogus shoplifting charge to be molested by the security staff (230–234). Both are denied public protection: one is misread in terms of gender and race, and the other is misread in terms of class, yet both are violated by the deliberate misreading. This feigned naivety of the real conditions of exploitation exerted over urban spatiality through class, gender, and racial difference is where the two author’s critiques converge to highlight the willful ignorance that rhetorically supports the cruelty of American-style predatory freedoms, the illusion of individualism, and the brutality required to maintain the uneven urban accumulation of surplus wealth, pleasure, and power. At the same time, these authors radically differ in terms of how they express the “politics of property” delimiting the spatial practices of working-class people in minoritarian neighborhoods. For bell hooks, these politics are considerations of “not only who owns the space but the relationship between power and cultural production” (146). Vernacular architecture—for hooks these are places created or customized by folk with no professional or university training in design—is a cultural practice of questioning the politics of property imposed by the state strategy, the landlord’s law, or the proprietary and architectural limits placed on space. “The absence of material privilege did not mean that poor and working-class black folks did not think about space while lack of material privilege limited what could be done with one’s surroundings, it was nevertheless possible to make changes” (148). This position enables her to explicate a genealogy of Black spatial practice and aesthetic established in sharecroppers’ shacks of the rural south, and the ways that these resistant modes of architectural and interior design make their way into the vernacular architecture of 128

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Black working-class urban spaces. However, I would disagree in part with her claim that urban and public housing “brought an end to” working class opportunities to re-imagine their spaces (150). It is true that urban standardized living units typified by the monolithic Brewster-Douglass towers in Detroit or the Frederick Douglass Houses in Manhattan seem to impose a structural homogeneity that restricts one’s ability to completely fabricate something autonomous and unique like the southern shack, but they also yield new tactics for interior design that can undermine the state or capitalist-imposed strategy of managing space along racial and class-based limits. Hooks herself highlights the possibility when she states earlier in the essay that often, exploited or oppressed groups of people who are compelled by economic circumstance to share small living quarters … view the world right outside their housing structure as liminal space where they can stretch the limits of their desire and imagination. (149) For instance, the beautification of front-facing windows and the addition of porches on southern shacks for visiting and settin’ in the yards of relatives (given that the shack interiors were too small to accommodate) that hooks mentions could be traced through the urban spatial practices of exchange in rowhouses, duplexes, and other housing projects such as the rehabilitated and reintegrated Sunnyside housing in East Chicago, Indiana, or the community gardens of the predominantly African American and immigrant neighborhoods Greenmount West and Brentwood in Baltimore where crowded parks, block parties, barbershops, and corner stores demonstrate how informal and temporary occupation of pseudo-contiguous spaces can build new forms of community around the divisions imposed by logics of the permanent housing. Both Beck and Sister Souljah make the urban distinction in Black vernacular architecture clear, albeit in uniquely classed and gendered ways. Beck satirizes how Shetani can use his material privilege to escape the politics of property in purchasing mansions and apartment complexes for his stable of prostitutes, styling them with self-glorifying iconography according to his own desires— i.e., what Deleuze might call a “desiring production” of space. In contrast, Souljah’s characters are incredibly sensitive to the politics of property in their architectural vernacular:Winter is constantly critiquing the taste of others whose interior design does not measure up to her father’s customized apartment in the Brooklyn Projects—Souljah jokes “maybe you need to be an interior decorator” (269)—and Midnight keeps his room sparsely populated with Islamic symbolism and books by Sun Tzu, Karl Evanzz, and Franz Fanon (67), while the scholar-activist Souljah decorates her Harlem brownstone with a Pan-Africanist “elephant tusk” aesthetic, a massive library, and a pile of junk-food next to a stationary bicycle (269)—i.e., what Deleuze might call a “social production” of space. Beck’s universe laments the narcissistic dream-world that Black men of illicit privilege impose on their spaces, while Souljah’s emphasizes the diversity of spatial approaches to cultural resistance necessitated by the urbanization of Diaspora. In closing, the purpose of this paper was not to demonstrate that urban readers of color respond to these books as essential strategies that are representational of their lives, but rather to emphasize how street fictions engage readers on a variety of affective and cognitive levels that warrant deeper aesthetic consideration as a medium of cultural production and sociopolitical orientation than previously afforded in the academy. Focusing on whether a reader lives up to the aesthetic presented in sensational representations of urban decay—i.e., whether or not the novels are truly mimetic of some stereotypical ghetto conditions—conceals the deeper questions about what kind of work these representations can perform as art. While imagery of urban ruins “challenges the idea of the capitalist state as effective protector of its citizens and source of progress and rationality,” it also poses the question: “how our declining cities may be reclaimed and reimagined as part of an egalitarian society” that meet the basic needs of the populace, grant opportunities for self-actualization, and reciprocate with their natural environment (Apel 17). Devaluing the exploitation of the drug129

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trafficking and pimping games, challenging youth to develop their talents into sustainable trades, redesigning reciprocal race and gender relations, reconceiving the meaning of sociocultural resistance: such are the possibilities opened up by street literature for crafting a grounded disposition toward political realities contending with urban spatial injustice.This literature, like the graffiti that poaches proprietary space on walls where it has no permission to exist, inscribes a gaze representing the street-level perspective of urban living that has been unauthorized and often criminalized by the authoritarian classes who believe they are entitled to the city. These texts state that they are looking back at the hegemonizing and evaluative gaze of the proprietary class and reflect a subjectivity no less nuanced than theirs, distinguished only by the power to name, categorize, and evaluate the urban other.

Works Cited Apel, Dora. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline. Rutgers UP, 2015. Beck, Robert. Mama Black Widow. Cash Money Content, 2013. ———. Shetani’s Sister.Vintage, 2015. ———. The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim: Robert Beck’s Real Story. Simon and Schuster, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U of Minnesota P, 1987. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford UP, 2007. Fanon, Franz. Black Faces,White Masks. Grove Press, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny [1919].” In Sigmund Freud, the Collected Papers, Translated by Alix Strachey, Hogarth, 1933, pp. 368–407. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 2014. Gifford, Justin. Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing. Temple UP, 2013. hooks, bell. “Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice.” In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, The New Press, 1995, pp. 145–151. Lacan, Jacques. On the Names-of-the-Father. Polity Press, 2013. ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore. Norton, 1998. ———. The Triumph of Religion. Polity Press, 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978. Sister, Souljah (Lisa Williamson). The Coldest Winter Ever. Simon and Schuster, 2005. Smith, B. H. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Harvard UP, 1988. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Columbia UP, 1993.

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10 ALLEGORIES OF PROLETARIAN LITERATURE Boyden, Bontemps, and Halper in the Depression Era William Solomon

Allegory had a bad reputation amongst the Marxist intelligentsia in Europe in the 1930s. Walter Benjamin remained the singular exception to this rule in that, having first pursued the topic at length in the second half of The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), he planned to devote a division of his Arcades Project to a critical analysis of Charles Baudelaire as an allegorist. However, Benjamin’s untimely death prevented this enterprise from reaching fruition. A more historically representative stance toward allegory can be found in a study drafted in the second half of the decade by his friend and critical interlocutor: Theodor Adorno. Indeed, the latter’s In Search of Wagner (1952) makes a strong case for allegory as a manifestation of the regressive, if not protofascist dimensions of the composer’s style in which “[nothing] is unambiguous” (33). Scholars have unwittingly indicated as much, Adorno declares, when in their commentaries they give the leitmotivs in his music “a definite name, rather like the inscriptions that provide the key to the allegorical pictures to which they are attached” (35). Worse, allegory “brings the apparent movement of Wagner’s work to a dead standstill,” thereby reducing the properly temporal flow of his preferred artistic medium to the kind of non-narrative spatiality one associates with painting. “Allegorical rigidity has infected the motiv like a disease. The gesture becomes frozen as a picture of what it expresses.” In addition to tearing the “veil of continuous progress” in Wagner’s work, the technique also marks his failure to do justice to the emotional nuances of his dramatis personae.The allegorical leitmotivs are “miniature pictures,” photographic snapshots, “and their supposed psychological variations involve only a change of lighting. They remain more loyal than they imagine … to the idee fixe, and it is their inflexibility that sets limits to or even negates the psychological dynamism” (35). The imagery of sickness and petrification, of obsession and corpse-like immobility, recalls Benjamin’s treatise on the Trauerspiel, suggesting in turn that Adorno’s aesthetic formulations were written with his mentor’s contrasting ideas in mind. It would seem then that embedded within the famous realist-modernist controversy of the era was a more covertly articulated debate about the political value of allegory in relation to the class struggle. Unfortunately, the premature truncation of this dialogue prevented it from producing any major theoretical conclusions; and one looks in vain for further discussion of the issue in the period. The Proletarian Moment, James F. Murphy’s comprehensive survey of the American version of the realist/modernist conflict, confirms that few commentators in this country managed between the wars to overcome the widespread “revulsion from allegory” (Jameson 20). Neither adherents of 131

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nineteenth-century narrative models (such as Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, and Granville Hicks), most of whom were associated with the Communist Party organ the New Masses, nor proponents of formal innovation (such as William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and James T. Farrell), who tended to be part of the Partisan Review crowd, seriously considered the possibility of rehabilitating the more venerable rhetorical mode—which is to say allegory remained the un-thought of this polemically circumscribed theoretical skirmish, perhaps because of the way in which its revival would have complicated the idea both sides had agreed upon of history as an irreversibly forward-moving process. Whether vociferously affirming the enduring virtues of mimetic methods or endorsing an experimental break with tradition in the name of creative or stylistic originality, Depression-era critics perpetuated the institutionally determined silence on the possible productivity of reaching back into the literary past to advance towards the future. Since that time, little has changed as evidenced by two recent summary assessments of the cultural phenomenon under investigation. In restricting his general definition of proletarian literature to a “persistent chronicle of the uneven experiences of the working class under capitalism” (4), Bill V. Mullen all but eliminates the possibility of contemplating the enigmatic compositional maneuvers of allegorically oriented writers. Lawrence Hanley does use the term on two occasions in his fine account of US proletarian fiction in the 1930s; but he does so only to register in passing an isolated component of individual texts. Thus Thomas Bell’s All Brides Are Beautiful (1936) is said to contain an “allegory of the proletarian author” (243), and Meridel LeSueur’s The Girl (1939; 1978) is declared to be an “allegory of class and culture” (243). Michael Denning’s chapter “The Tenement Thinking: Ghetto Pastoral” in The Cultural Front (1996) is one of the few places where a cultural historian employs a relatively developed concept of allegory while seeking to conceptualize leftwing fiction in the 1930s in a positive manner. Indeed, what he calls the ghetto pastoral is “less a form of realism than a species of allegory” (249); and as such it stands as the most important generic creation of the proletarian literary movement, one that combines—however incongruously—traits of naturalism (the Depression-era revival of which Alfred Kazin recounted in On Native Grounds [1942]) together with elements of the pastoral (linked to proletarian literature by William Empson in the first chapter of Some Versions of the Pastoral [1935]). A rhetorical blend of the rural and the urban, country and city, the ghetto pastoral also incorporates elements of the gothic (provocatively applied to proletarian literature by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel [1960]).Tales of terror featuring scenes of sensationalized violence, the ghetto pastorals were generated by ethnic and racial minorities from the milieus they depicted in their episodic fictions. In emphasizing “the plebian” origins of the cultural intervention in question, Denning ingeniously avoids one of the perpetual obstacles to a convincingly coherent critical account of proletarian literature as a sociopolitical enterprise: the fact that many if not most of the books typically classified as proletarian novels have been the output of middleclass intellectuals ideologically aligned with disenfranchised persons but positioned quite differently in society from those they sought to represent sympathetically. This stumbling block vanishes when one concentrates exclusively on the predominantly autobiographical fictions produced by individuals who could claim to belong to the marginalized communities about which they spoke. Cases in point include Michael Gold (Jews Without Money [1930]), Pietro di Donato (Christ in Concrete [1937]), and Richard Wright (Lawd Today! [1963]), as well as Tillie Olsen (Yonnondio: From the Thirties [1974]), all of whom are said to have abandoned in their respective works the constraints of realism. Powerless to imagine a rational solution to the predicament of everyday life in a brutal environment, such writers chose “allegory—the world of magic spells and enchanted places” (Denning 249). As his qualification of allegory implies, Denning both assimilates allegory to the oral tradition of storytelling and analyzes it as a form of wish fulfillment, as a compensatory escape from a dissatisfying existence in the world. In what follows, I do not adhere to Denning’s view of allegory; but I will take his concern with this rhetorical category as the impetus to revisit radical literature of the Depression era from the 132

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critical perspective the term makes available.The first half of the present essay examines two novels located at the edges of the proletarian movement, both of which deliberately made use of an allegorical technique to carry out their respective projects: Polly Boyden’s The Pink Egg (1942), a late contribution to the field and one that has been almost completely forgotten; and Arna Bontemps’s relatively better-known Black Thunder (1936), a novel that deceptively disguises itself as a historical account of a nineteenth-century slave revolt. The second half of the discussion, though dealing with another obscure narrative fiction, Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), shifts the emphasis slightly away from the use of allegorical techniques to sketch out the possibility of a Marxist hermeneutics capable of doing justice to the material conditions of literary production in the period. Here allegorical interpretation (allegoresis) emerges as much from the commentator’s labors as it does from the work of the novelist, as the product of a critical reading as much as the result of a creative act of writing (Jameson 43). In the end, we may reach a point where John Dos Passos’s seemingly incongruous description (admittedly long after the Depression-era project’s completion) of the U.S.A. trilogy as an essentially allegorical enterprise begins to make sense. “I am sure,” he stated in a 1967 address titled “What Makes a Novelist,” that the great narrative painting of the thirteen and fourteen hundreds profoundly influenced my idea of how to tell a story in words … when we looked … at Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel the intensity of their homely narrative was immensely heightened by the feeling that perhaps … Giotto’s gospel tales might be the last thing we would experience on this earth. (269)

Allegory in The Pink Egg and Black Thunder At the end of the proletarian moment in American literary history, Polly Boyden, “a wealthy Cape Cod housewife with a strong social conscience,” published The Pink Egg, a book that Jerre Mangione recalls in The Dream and the Deal (1972) as being “perhaps the oddest of all the proletarian novels” (44). What made this work so peculiar, as a contemporaneous review in the New York Times noted, was that it reached back to Greek antiquity, to the “days of Aesop and Aristophanes,” for its formal technique (Moffett 23). Following her predecessors, who had drawn upon “the bird and animal kingdoms … for fables through which human truths might be brought home and social and political satire might find utterance” (23), the aptly named author distributes the assorted speaking roles in her comic allegory to various avian species. Foregoing any claims to be reflecting the visible world accurately, The Pink Egg employs several of the conventional motifs of more orthodox proletarian fictions, though it does so while featuring an exclusively feathered cast of characters. With the polemical debates about the virtues or limitations of realist representational methods a thing of the (not too distant) past, Boyden abandons all pretense to imitative accuracy in favor of an indirect mode of storytelling, albeit one easily deciphered by any reader possessed of a passing familiarity with the central issues of Depression-era labor struggles. An amusing anomaly, the book manages to add a new twist to the traditional notion of a leftwing literary undertaking. Its eccentric formal strategy is hinted at in its prefatory materials. The epigraph, derived from Henry David Thoreau’s journal, praises “The robin” for its capacity to sing “with power like a bird of great faith who sees the bright future through the dark present to reassure the race of man.” The prophetic power the American Transcendentalist attributes to the musical creature will soon acquire a political resonance when it becomes apparent that the reference is to the hero of the novel, one Roderick Robin. The latter’s radicalization is prefigured by his emergence from the titular pink egg, but it is his shock and dismay at the brutal treatment of a new friend—an Irish sparrow named Patrick—by the local Bluejays that initiates Roderick’s conversion to the cause of 133

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working-class emancipation. (Patrick is arrested and incarcerated in mailbox jail for the crime of frolicking in a birdbath with the well-to-do orchard birds.) Correlatively, where one would expect a list of the dramatic personae, Boyden inserts a set of quotations—two from the illustrated magazine Bird Lore, one from an ornithological study, and three more passages from Thoreau’s writings. Only retroactively will the significance of the cited fragments become evident; for instance, Frank M. Chapman’s assessment of an island as “an ideal place for fowl of land and water—a place of peace and plenty” is subsequently revealed to be an evaluation of “Sparrow Island,” an obvious allusion to the Soviet Union, envisioned as a worker’s paradise. Alerted by the semantic vagueness of these selections, readers realize that they will be required to expend some interpretive energy to comprehend the intended meanings of the text. Appearing in print three years before George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), Boyden’s fiction shares with its canonical successor a rhetorical turn to the non-human for its allegorical “agents” (Fletcher 25); yet the ideological orientations of the two texts are antithetical. Whereas the English writer’s barnyard fable, its ambiguities notwithstanding, is an anti-Stalinist undertaking, the American novelist’s enterprise indicates her continuing faith in Communist-led causes. This is apparent in Chapter X of Pink Egg where a Bohemian Chatterer gives a party that doubles as a Party gathering. Sammy Sparrow, the organizer of the meeting, explains to those in attendance (his “fellow-birds”) that its purpose is to determine “‘the role of Halfway Hollow [an enclave of radicalized intellectuals] in the redistribution of the appleseed harvest’” (99). The working-class Sparrows have spontaneously prepared themselves to descend on the orchards and fight to improve their conditions of existence, and “Leaders are rapidly soaring from the ranks” (99). Still, such mass actions require further guidance. As Sammy puts it: “‘We are kept very busy pointing out the direction they [the emergent revolutionary heroes] must lead their indignant followers, which, of course, is towards the future’” (99). For the Last Heath Hen (probably the closest thing in the text to an autobiographical surrogate for the author), the best way to achieve this goal is to engage in cultural activities; “‘We’ve got to sharpen our beaks … until they are sharper than apple-axes.Then we must carve little songs with our beaks and sing them in orchard and meadow and wildwood’” (100). A Hermit Thrush volunteers to compose, with the help of his “ladylove,” a ballad about Sparrow Island and “sing it through Sparrow towns” (100).The excitement spreads, and the artistically talented Benny Barnowl is implored “to write incendiary songs and distribute them among the vines and branches” (102). He agrees to stamp his tunes on maple leaflets, but leaves the latter task to others, declaring he is no Carrier Pigeon. Much of The Pink Egg concerns the political education of Roderick, the novel in this sense constituting an allegorical variant of the realist form of the Depression-era proletarian bildungsroman, which Barbara Foley examines in Radical Representations (1993). Even as a fledgling, Roderick was willing to speak out against conventional wisdom. Infuriated by the reactionary attitudes of the members of the Silverleaf Poplar Club, the young robin challenges the elder banqueters to join him in an attempt to rescue Patrick from his mailbox prison. He is summarily tossed out, but his father privately condones his behavior, secretly admiring his son as “a game bird [who] flies against the wind” (38). Shortly thereafter, Robin visits Vineville, to him a “more real” (38) town where the other half live—the Sparrow working-class community—authentically.What he observes there are the dire effects of socioeconomic inequity on immigrant families. Raised in overcrowded slums amidst extreme poverty, it is “no wonder” the chicks are “cantankerous and whiny” (54). He now understands “why so many eggs were shoved out of the nest, smashing on the flagstones beneath, a sad testimony to the large egg mortality in Vineville” (55). Moreover, those who manage to survive such a harsh environment are sent off “to work all day long in the gnat factory” as soon as they can fly (55). Roderick next learns how systematic the exploitation of the bird masses is in an industrialized world. As the more knowledgeable Sammy Sparrow explains to his disciple, the Sparrows are excluded from the appleseed collecting process via the widespread public dissemination of the notion of scarcity: all the other “‘birds of the air’” are told that if the Sparrows are allowed to share 134

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in “‘the harvest there would not be nearly enough to go around’” (78). Consequently, the Sparrows must earn their food “‘by canning gnats’” and grasshoppers in factories utilizing “‘the speed-up and stretch-out’” modes of production; and any troublemakers are punished by the Bluejays, whose salaries are paid by the capitalist Sparrowhawks. Enlightened, Roderick “whistles” in amazement that the manipulative hawks “‘certainly seem to have put something over on the rest of the birds,’” a conclusion of which his mentor approves: “‘you said a beakful’” (79). A convert to the movement, Roderick finds he must still persuade the other radicalized birds that he is a true class traitor. Calling his motives into question, several have denounced him as a thrill-seeking opportunist, a dabbler in social activism who should not be included in the delegation heading off to the Metropolitan Museum Roof for the upcoming demonstration. Allowed to attend, he delivers a rousing and well-received speech. His confidence boosted, he courageously participates in the victorious fight in the orchard, thereby realizing the embryonic potential (of heroic Redness) embedded in his pink shell. The plot then takes a surprising twist. Previously, Roderick had fallen in love with Ruby Robin, who has flown off to Sparrow Island to experience firsthand the glories of a post-revolutionary society. Robin is now ready to join Ruby in this utopian space.Though the trip across the ocean is long and risky (due to a storm), the exhausted protagonist finally arrives at his destination, as indicated by the flashing light of the Light-house operated by the mysterious God-like entity known as “the Human Being.” Overwhelmed by the desire to “bathe his wings forever in the full force of the light” (231)—“[a]ll his soul, all his mind waited for the deluge of light and then basked in it for an ecstatic, terrible instant” (232)—the dazzled creature yearns to grasp the fascinating shapes he detects moving within the frustratingly intermittent body of light: “Why didn’t the Human Being make the light shine steadily? Why must it revolve, dragging darkness after it, obscuring the vision, baffling the bird?” (232). Desperate to see and secure the Truth of existence, he tragically smashes into the ball of brightness, abruptly ending his life and the novel (233).The political fable thus concludes with a pedagogical warning to ontologically oriented, would-be philosophers; the cautionary moral of the story is: don’t be a birdbrain. Keep your eyes focused on practical (socioeconomic) matters and leave metaphysical (as well as ornithological) speculation to the Transcendentalists. Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder Gabriel’s Revolt:Virginia, 1800 (1936) is the only other proletarian novel in the Depression era to rely on allegorical diction in as sustained a manner as The Pink Egg. (Christ in Concrete personifies labor as “Job,” but this abstraction remains an intermittent gesture in the novel [Stevens 159].) Bontemps’s investment in allegory, in contrast to Boyden’s, involves a historical dimension. Whereas her compositional gambit was to modify a narrative topos located in the present (the process whereby a middle-class individual in the Depression era becomes aware of the ethical virtues and emotional rewards of participating in the labor movement), his rhetorical strategy was predicated on the notion that events in a past epoch might furnish a means of reflecting upon the current state of affairs. Black Thunder consistently alludes to (the potential for) African American militancy in the 1930s while literally recounting a nineteenth-century slave rebellion. The question the text asks is: “Can reference to an insurrection in this country inspired by the French and Haitian Revolutions explain what is going to happen after the overthrow of the government in Russia?” Might black people in the US be the new Bolsheviks? The introduction to the 1968 edition of Black Thunder retroactively makes apparent that the epistemological basis for Bontemps’s proposal was a theory of history as non-linear repetition, as the return of an African American will to liberation. The opening sentences of the introduction read: “Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum” (xxi). The latter trope, the thought of which occurred to him “first in Watts in 1934” (xxi), guided the construction of the book. As Bontemps puts it, “I had lived long enough to become aware of intricate patterns of recurrence, in my own experience and in the history I had been exploring with almost frightening attention” (xxi). Declaring that he “suspects” he had been preoccupied with these patterns when composing one of the first scenes in the book, Bontemps adds that it was his research into slave insurrections 135

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that enabled him “to see in them a possible metaphor of turbulence to come” (xxii). Bontemps then became convinced that it was the “boldness and inspired daring” of Gabriel’s attempt at self-emancipation (as opposed to Demark Vesey’s as well as Nat Turner’s) that supplied the “most unmistakable equivalent of the yearning” he felt and “imagined to be general” (xxvii). The author therefore selected this manifestation of “the desperate need for freedom” (xxvi) as the subject matter of Black Thunder. Bontemps remained in 1968 disappointed that his prospective audience in the 1930s was not “in a mood to hear a tale of volcanic rumblings among angry blacks” (xxiii). From his current vantage point, he perceives that frustrations within the minority community were dormant at that earlier date and this limited the reception of the book.The fact that the disenfranchised in the Depression era had not reached the “end of patience” allowed his first readers to neglect the supplementary significance Bontemps incorporated into Black Thunder. They failed to register that it was designed to explain the present via reference to the past because they were not yet adequately infuriated. In contrast, the interpretive imperative informing the literary project was crucial to its emotionally fraught author. Existing in a condition of affective intensity throughout the period, he aimed to ease the tension he felt by figuring out what the immediate future would bring. The recent trial in Alabama of the Scottsboro boys for rape had been upsetting in that it revealed the persistence of the terrors he hoped to escape by fleeing New York after the collapse of the Harlem Renaissance. If he “was, frankly” still “running scared” (xxv), comparative historiography might supply him with a cognitive way to ease his panicky state of mind. In Black Thunder, the use of an anachronistic vocabulary is the means of generating textual allusions to Depression-era political conflicts. Though the terms “the masses” and “the proletariat” were in circulation at the end of the eighteenth century, they acquire, as book one (titled “Jacobins”) unfolds, a properly Marxist connotation. A case in point is the conversation between a printer (M. Creuzot) who has emigrated with his family from France and a white Philadelphian named Alexander Biddenhurst, both of whom support the tenets of the Third Estate. According to Biddenhurst, the fight must spread geographically for recent triumphs to prove themselves sustainable: You had the filthy nobles in France. Here we have the planter aristocrats. We have the merchants, the poor whites, the free blacks, the slaves—classes, classes, classes … I tell you, M. Creuzot, the whole world must know that these are not natural distinctions but artificial ones. Liberty, equality and fraternity will have to be won for the poor and weak everywhere if your own revolution is to be permanent. It is for us to awaken the masses. (21) The two men are joined by a dancing master who reads out loud the title of an anonymously penned, anti-Federalist manifesto (Slavery and the Rights of Man) which the pessimistic Creuzot dismisses as “‘[m]ore of that stuff intended to incite the proletariat’” (36). Correlatively, at the end of Chapter 17, Biddenhurst (perhaps channeling Bontemps’s outlook on his own milieu) thinks to himself “there was a definite foment among the masses in this state.The revolution of the American proletariat would soon be something more than an idle dream” (76). Equally telling is an internal monologue in which the perpetually nervous printer reflects on the capacity of the conservative media to take the dissemination of subversive ideas as an opportunity to denounce the opposing party of Thomas Jefferson (here a stand in for Franklin Roosevelt) “as inclining very radically toward the left”: No Federalist paper, wishing to win votes missed an opportunity to hurl the anathema of that dreaded word Jacobin into the air. They didn’t bother to analyze or define it carefully. They were glad to have the public catch the misleading implications they had succeeded 136

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in putting into the term: redistribution of wealth, snatching of private property, elevation of the blacks, equality, immediate and compulsory miscegenation. (65) Bontemps’s contemporaneous readers could have recognized such passages as applicable to presentday circumstances and gone on to translate Jacobin as Communist whenever the former term appeared in the text. Bontemps’s aim in invoking Depression-era forms of radicalism while depicting a slave rebellion in the Age of Enlightenment was in part to forestall predictable accusations that analogous events in the later period were the result of outside influence—hence the attention he pays to the autonomous nature of Gabriel and his co-conspirators decision to strike back against their oppressors. It is true that upon overhearing the aforementioned exchange between Cruezot and Biddenhurst, Gabriel is fascinated, and no doubt inspired, by their use of “words for things that had been in his mind, things that he didn’t know had names. Liberty, equality, frater—it was a strange music” (21). These unfamiliar words make only a minor contribution to Gabriel’s aspirations; and after the insurrection goes awry due to inclement weather and he is captured, Gabriel frustrates his interrogators’ efforts to get him to admit others advised or rather manipulated him, insisting he conceived the plan himself. “[Y]ou have a fine chance to let the court know if you have been made the tool of foreign agitators. If there were white men who talked to you, encouraged—” That sounded foolish to Gabriel. “White mens?” “Yes, men talking about equality, setting the poor against the rich, the blacks against their masters, things like that.” … “I tell you [Gabriel responds]. I been studying about freedom a heap, me.” (210) The question remains as to why Boyden and Bontemps alone chose to employ allegorical tactics in contrast to their peers and in defiance of the prevailing critical doctrine. The best explanation for Boyden’s “Aesop language” (a phrase I take from Fletcher’s Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode [1964]) is an aesthetic one. Given that the proletarian novel was by the end of the 1930s a highly conventionalized paradigm, one to which readers had become habitually acclimated, she felt compelled to sharpen perceptual awareness on the role of radicalized intellectuals in the labor struggle. Her way of doing so was to defamiliarize the still urgent political matter. The figural detour through bird imagery, the use of animals where one would expect human beings, was a rhetorical tactic designed to estrange the emotional complexities of committing oneself to the fight for socioeconomic equality. (It is worth noting in this regard that in “Art as Device” (1917) the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky turns to the portions of Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” (1886) narrated by a horse to illustrate how the formal technique functions. The animal’s lack of understanding of private property in effect de-automatizes the reader’s tendency to (mis)take the legal concept as the natural state of things.) The motivation for Bontemps’s historical allegory is more elusive, yet one feasible reason is an authorial wariness of persecution. While the writer was not living in a country where an authoritarian government had assumed “full control of the means of communication” (Fletcher 326), he seems to have intuited the intimidating power of censorship and made the rhetorical decision to circumvent possible reprisals by expressing his concerns about the present covertly in terms of the past. The desire to evade danger while still articulating dissenting opinions led Bontemps to deploy a rhetorical tactic of deliberate ambiguity, one he hoped might enable him to “perform the miracle of speaking in a publication to a minority, while being silent to 137

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the majority of his readers” (Strauss 25). Writing between the lines, addressing himself “not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only” capable of discerning the meaning the book conveyed surreptitiously, was a way for Bontemps to avoid victimization (Strauss 25). In the 1968 introduction discussed above, Bontemps describes an ultimatum delivered to him by the head of the school where he was teaching in Northern Alabama while working on the manuscript for Black Thunder; he would be fired if he did not publicly reject the protest movements of the day. Burning “most of the books” in his small library would accomplish this task, since in his boss’s estimation they were too “race-conscious and provocative” (xxviii). Though “too horrified to speak,” Bontemps “swallowed … [his] indignation” and finished out the term before leaving for Los Angeles. Equally pertinent is the thematic treatment in the novel of the two disgraced individuals who disclose the secret plot. Envious of those given more responsible roles in the uprising, Pharoah reports what he knows to the authorities. He is then shunned by the other members of the minority community and ends up in a tree, barking insanely like a dog. The domestic servant, Old Ben, then confesses to his master, who then brings Ben to court to testify, though he later denies having done so (“I ain’t named no names” [138]). To distinguish himself from a despicable coward like Ben, Bontemps had to write in a way that simultaneously hid and revealed the truth of black desire, of the shared willingness of the abused folk to die in “combat for a common cause” (169).

Allegoresis and Union Square A novel is a commodity … All you need to feel good about your work is to turn out the best commodity you can, play the luxury market and to hell with doubt. (John Dos Passos 1932) In Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the 1960s (1989), David E. James elaborates a materialist hermeneutics predicated on the difference between dominant and alternative modes of cultural production. Building on ideas set forth by Walter Benjamin in “The Author as Producer,” an address he delivered in Paris in 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, James argues that “[i]n cases of ideological dissent or social contestation,” it is generally the case that a given artwork “not only speaks of what it is, it speaks of what it is not, it speaks of its other” (12). Encoded in the text itself, either thematically or at the level of technique, is an account of its position in relation to competing practices. Union Square (1933), the first novel Albert Halper managed with his literary agent’s help to get accepted for publication (after two rejections) by a solid firm (Viking Press), provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate the value of adopting such an interpretive method, one in which the critical reader takes responsibility for the additional layers of signification located in the object of analysis. At first glance, Union Square is a typical city novel that blends a realistic portrayal of everyday life in a metropolitan locale together with a modernist regard for the multitude of subjective perspectives available to the myriad inhabitants of this milieu. The book for the most part consists of a straightforward reproduction of a recognizable urban environment, while filtering its depiction through the partial points of view of those who experience it directly. Juxtaposing the itineraries of assorted individuals as they struggle to make their way through this realm, the narrative enables the reader to obtain a comprehensive or totalizing understanding of social existence in a particular place at a specific moment in time: a neighborhood in New York City in the early years of the Great Depression. Union Square in this light is a successor to John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), which may well have furnished Halper with the template for his at first glance non-allegorical representational endeavor (Butts 2011). However, this sensible first impression of Halper’s fiction can be complicated if one pays attention to the way in which it constitutes itself as a critical survey of its numerous competitors in the overall field of cultural production in the early 1930s. 138

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The most glaring rivals the novel remarks upon are the pulp materials currently in wide ­circulation. These are what one major character, Jason Wheeler,“ex-poet and ex-communist, pot-boiler writer for the cheap sex-story magazines,” feels compelled to produce alone in his apartment (10). Perpetually broke, and in the throes of alcoholism, he can’t bear what he is doing but has resigned himself to it as a necessary condition of his survival. To pay the rent and other bills, much less continue eating, Jason must in a sense prostitute himself, banging out on his typewriter erotically titillating tales that in truth disgust him and betray his literary gift. Since the poetry journals are “non-paying” (55), he has stopped contributing to them, though turning a profit as a supplier of material to the culture industry has not proved to be as simple a task as he might have hoped. Rejection letters arrive frequently in the mail, and even provisional acceptances require additional effort. “‘You have failed to make the heroine as warm and alluring as you have done before for us” (55), one editor informs him; “‘See if you can’t send us a yarn as good as your last one, ‘What She Told Him on Their Wedding Night.’ That was a corker,’” the editor also adds (55).Weariness rather than excitement is the mood in which he customarily finds himself working. “He sat before the silent machine and began whipping up his mind, trying to cook up a red-hot plot. A sluggish feeling flowed through his brain. He hated his hack work with every drop of blood in his body” (56). Fortunately, a glimpse out the window at a decidedly unattractive “old gouty woman” doing her laundry enables him to swing “into action” (56). Whirling around, facing the keys again, he started hammering for all he was worth, his grey eyes hard and fixed upon the paper, the muscles of his jaw set grimly. He pounded out the first page of copy in record time: “It was a cold, raw, windy day on Riverside Drive and as pretty Patricia Manning turned into Seventy-Fifth Street the frolicsome breezes blew her Parisian dress about playfully.” (57) Though based on an actual person—Halper’s friend Kenneth Fearing (Barnard 46)—the depiction of him as a self-loathing pornographer serves in this narrative context as a way to show that spiritual and artistic degeneracy are the likely consequences of catering to the prurient demands of the commercial marketplace. Jason’s friend and admirer Leon Fisher, a talented painter, occupies the other end of the cultural spectrum. Having quit his day job at an engraving house, Leon is thus to some extent free to work at home on his art (though he also puts in a good deal of time trying to pull Jason out of his funk). His efforts are rewarded when his portrait of a young female neighbor (Celia, who is in love with him, though he fails to notice this) is accepted for an annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania National Academy. Insofar as the making of money plays no part in Leon’s creative labors, he stands as the epitome of artistic integrity, and one might therefore assume that the novelist wishes to align himself with this figure. But the problem of political activism complicates the matter, in the process indicating that the binary opposition between art and mass culture fails to map sufficiently the plurality of heterogeneous practices constituting the general field of production at the time— a field most profitably conceptualized as a complex system of relations irreducible to categorical bifurcation (James 22). (Halper also details the myriad popular entertainments the neighborhood makes available: “At ten o’clock most of the movie houses opened up, greeting the citizenry with a burst of electric lights;” while down the street “the barker from the burlesk show” swings “into action” [49]; elsewhere jazzband music blasts out of “radio stores” [107]; on Fourteenth Street there is a vaudeville house that puts on “a good three-and-a-half-hour show” [163] followed by a gangster film; and lastly he recapitulates at great length a Broadway play, a three-act tragedy filled with clichés and that “half-sold to the movie people … looks like a real money-maker all around” [236–240; ellipses mine]). Both Jason and Leon are entangled in leftwing politics, albeit in antithetical ways. The other reason Leon has left his position at the engravers is that he wants to use his drawing skill to make 139

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p­ osters for the Communist Party. This is a dubious decision that leads to a disastrous preoccupation with a buxom blonde comrade (who keeps him on a string while maintaining an affair with Jose, a manly Party member from Mexico). In contrast, Jason, despite his lingering reputation as one of the most promising radical poets of his generation, has developed a fierce antipathy to the organized Left (though not necessarily to the cause as such). So, if Leon vaguely suggests the feasibility of maintaining an involvement in artistic and political spheres, Jason has abandoned both before the narrative has begun.Together the two characters—one optimistic, the other in despair—shed considerable light on the predicament Halper found himself wrestling with at the outset of his career as a novelist. The pivotal scene in this regard takes place at a condemned tenement house on the East Side nicknamed the Kremlin because in addition to offering quarters to “young painters, writers, and musicians” it functions as an afterhours gathering spot for leftwing artists. Having just attended a mass meeting at a local hall, which concluded with a rousing because heartfelt speech by a miner “turned agitator among his own people” (275), Jason and Leon arrive at the Kremlin as a proletarian poetry recital is getting underway. Because he remains prestigious in such circles, Jason’s opinion on what he has just heard is solicited. Much to the audience’s dismay, he delivers a fierce diatribe, castigating the would-be “‘proletarian’” writers as presumptuous, wannabe workers with no sense of literary craftsmanship: Think you, O comrades, that because you have aligned yourselves with the communist movement that instantly all your work becomes proletarian and stems from the masses? Think you, O comrades, that because you have memorized a few Marxist slogans, such as opportunism, capitalism, Leninism, the proletarian state, revolutionary, petty bourgeoisie, and few other catchwords that automatically you become heralds of a new “worker’s” “art”? (286) Jason then appeals to the authenticity of militant workers battling against “‘starvation and exploitation and eviction,’” his point being that his interlocutors are mere “‘bohemians,’” who believe “‘in free love and freedom’” yet have no idea of what is genuinely at stake in the movement (287). When they react to his “‘destructive criticism’” and propose that they are helping to make “‘the masses class-consciousness,’” he scoffs at their defense and declares their poetry to be meritless, second-rate “‘bilge’” that has zero impact on the “‘factory hand[s] … farmer[s] … [and] white-collar slave[s]’” to whom it is ostensibly addressed. Nor does he spare himself, for if they are all verbose “‘poseurs’” (292) he admits to being “‘a parasite of the lowest order’” (289). The ambitious task Halper has set himself becomes legible in this aggressive confrontation between the (ex)poet in crisis and his would-be proletarian successors. In staging this dispute, the novelist indirectly conveys the delicate burden of his literary project: to maintain both his artistic and political integrity while pursuing a commercially viable enterprise. He announces his own aspiration by having his fictive character (Jason) formulate the facile nature of what currently passes for radical literature and by having him register in his actions the demoralizing effect of capitulating completely to the dictates of the culture industry. To differentiate himself from these negative extremes, the novelist as artist must be neither apolitical nor overly political; correlatively his work should be consumable but not too much so. Halper himself provided evidence for this assertion in retrospect. Good-bye Union Square: A Writer’s Memoir of the Thirties (1970) recalls the difficult balancing act he felt compelled to perform during the decade. Incensed whenever his work was classified as proletarian, he realized that those who employed the exasperating term were gesturing, if haphazardly, toward a dimension of his literary endeavor: [W]hy did I always rebel when the label “proletarian writer” was pasted on my work? It was merely a convenience for uncritical and thoughtless people to catalogue me, as well 140

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as others, wasn’t it? If my work was good, what was the harm? Still, I remained wary of the label, with its cheap, easy connotations, and sensed it would have only a fleeting and dubious vogue. Yet the Depression, somehow, was my time. Deny it or not, it was coloring my writing strongly. Though irritation and anger often gripped me as shallow and frequently dishonest pronouncements emanating from the left, theirs was the prime potent voice raised during the thirties. And I could not ignore the impact their repeated shouts and emotional appeals for change had upon me, and other young writers.The left’s thrust was insistent, a campaign gaining momentum. Combatant or spectator, it was useless to tell myself I could insulate my work from its influence. (88) Predictably, Halper’s thematic articulation in Union Square of his suspicion of the Communist Party and its cultural agenda infuriated the official arbiters of the proletarian literature movement. Whereas the book was praised by the mainstream press, Michael Gold savaged it in a review for the New Masses, disparaging it as “an utter bourgeois sham” (137). Halper’s agent found the critical attack to be “almost traumatic” and lamented the inclusion of the party scene in question as the cause of Gold’s vitriol (137).Yet Viking was not disturbed by Gold’s “blast,” feeling that from a business perspective the controversy would probably help sales, which it did. Indeed, to his surprise, the young writer soon found himself to be financially “an anomaly—in the depths of the Depression I was moderately affluent” (149). I have yet to mention, however, the most remarkable feature of Union Square—one that alters the rhetorical status of the text in ways germane to the present inquiry. The novel opens with a two-page excerpt from the manuscript of one James Nicholson, “a demented printer, student of philosophy, worshiper of Roman culture … who goes around scattering cards printed from oldfashioned type from his basement quarters on Thirteenth Street” (5). Seemingly a fragment of a narrative set in distant antiquity, its composition is dated October 1931, “on a day when the communists demonstrated and were dispersed by the police” (3). The first line of the passage perplexingly names Union Square as “surrounded on all sides by mountains” (5), the Alps to the north, the Caucasus to the east, the Urals in the west, and the Ozarks southward. “Through the passes and steep canyons” in the far-off distance “swarm, all day long, Finns, and Tartars, Poles, and Italians” armed with “old hammerlock pistols and shiny, deadly heavy-handled knives” (5). This descriptive long shot (in cinematic terms) then swoops down into the valley nestled within the mountain range, which has, we are now informed, become over time a barren “land of waste and doom” (6). After this excerpt of an otherwise inaccessible epic, the narrative begins in a realistic register with a totalizing descriptive overview of the post-riot NYC locale. Nicholson appears to be a lunatic to those who observe him scurrying around the neighborhood. A Serbian café owner finds him to be “a bit nuts,” though acknowledges “he makes fine signs” (27); and a cop on the beat recognizes the character as “a little geezer with a few screws loose” (45). Convinced that “men are made for war” not peace and well versed in military strategy under Caesar, Nicholson spends his spare time in his basement dwelling. His bookcase contains a “well thumbed” copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his desk is covered with “stacks of paper and folios of manuscripts” that lie scattered (69), and the “cracked little printer” (66) is now “writing a historical document” (69), a multi-volume composition excerpts of which intermittently appear as chapter headnotes. Their pertinence to the main narrative remains enigmatic until late in Union Square. Midway through the novel we are provided with another clue as to the elusive relevance of the manuscript materials with regard to present sociopolitical circumstances. Conversing with the café owner about battle tactics, Nicholson explains that in Justinian’s time the Roman legions devised a “frontal formation” that would allow them to surround their enemies. He then states that though this method requires a good deal of training insofar as it constitutes a “united front,” it is “the best 141

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thing” (216; emphasis mine). That this reference to the classical phalanx is meant to resonate as an allusion to coalition building in modernity is confirmed during the novel’s climactic scene. As an initially peaceful mass demonstration devolves into chaos, orators shout out “fiery slogans” such as “Workers of the world unite” (349). Nightstick-wielding police, many on horseback, descend on the crowd and brutally assault the marchers. Witnessing the pandemonium first-hand, Nicholson dashes home, locks his door “against the world,” sits “down and [writes] like fury” (349). Here Halper inserts a selection from the fifth volume of his expanding manuscript. This one describes shield-bearing Romans “in shock formation, spears in their right fists,” snarling and pawing lion cubs by their side, advancing upon a group of frightened shepherds and their flock (350).The ensuing slaughter is unmistakably the deranged printer’s wildly figural version of the street violence occurring nearby. Its epic veneer notwithstanding, then, Nicholson’s multi-volume manuscript is at least quasiallegorical in that, like the main narrative, it too is telling a story that culminates in an awful event (the spine of a recently fired warehouse worker is crushed in the melee).Yet, whereas the main narrative that constitutes the bulk of the text does so in a familiarly imitative manner, the fragmentary manuscript abandons verisimilitude in favor of an exaggeratedly tropological method of representation. And here it is the latter that deserves empirical pride of place, for in terms of observational proximity to the historical disaster, Nicholson was there first. He was the one who saw what was happening with his own eyes and rushed home to put it down in words before the main narrator. The more or less literal realist semblance is thus logically derived from the allegorical one. The mirror image has in effect been superimposed on top of a hallucination, or rather placed over a set of referentially aberrant signifiers, only a few of which remain visible either outside the mirror’s frame or through the cracks in its reflective surface. Union Square is a textual palimpsest only the upper layer of which depicts a recognizable version of urban modernity and in so doing adheres to what we may call the realism principle. In this fashion, Halper correlates allegory with the rhetorical freedom a domestic or independent mode of literary production makes available. Because he operates beyond the confines of the publishing industry, Nicholson can compose as he chooses; his autonomy grants him considerable artistic license, allowing him not to have to worry about prevailing tastes, stylistic conventions, etc. Halper’s elegant blend of realism and modernism in turn emerges as a compromise, as a concession to the relatively standardized form of the commodity novel. That the printer is mad would seem to mark his cultural endeavor as a pathological one, his literary transgression the result of a diseased mind. But Halper complicates this easy dismissal by locating the deviant and delirious reaction as the source or origin of the normal or sane report (the only one suitable for distribution in a capitalist setting). The final glimpse we get of the printer definitely confirms his lunacy; yet it also registers the fact that his perceptual proximity to the event is closer than that of the more lucid realist narrator. Picking up a metal printer’s rule … [he] began fiddling his left arm crazily, as if that limb were a violin. Then he made sure the door was locked, sat down at the desk, pulled his chair up close, and wrote that Rome was burning. (370) This is an oddly self-reflexive scene of writing in that it delineates the composition of an allegorical original that its realist copy will for the most part obliterate.

Conclusion: Back to U.S.A. The fractured formal structure of Union Square suggests that one reason why there was so little allegory in the Depression era was that the publishing industry mandated as a condition of manuscript 142

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acceptance that aspiring young novelists embrace more realist approaches (with modernist modifications occasionally tolerated). From this point of view, it was the mode of literary production that in the last instance determined how writers might choose to write. Conversely, Union Square (in conjunction with The Pink Egg and Black Thunder) puts us in a position to perceive what was arguably there all along but hiding in plain sight: the centrality of allegory to the radical art of one of the most prestigious American novelists of the period, one whose high profile granted him the rare opportunity to write in almost any way he wanted. That John Dos Passos was a significant figure in the literary arena throughout the 1930s is a commonplace.Yet the extent to which an impulse toward allegory informed his project in the U.S.A. trilogy has been insufficiently appreciated. Of the four “devices” that constitute the experimental text, the biographies have been repeatedly praised as masterpieces of mimetic rigor. However, the referential reliability of these purportedly literal portraits notwithstanding, the biographies are in truth miniature allegories designed to convey ethical or moral messages as in medieval religious iconography. As Paul De Man put it in his essay on modernism, “The more realistic and pictorial they become, the more abstract they are, the slighter the residue of meaning that would exist outside their specificity as mere language and significant” (160). The historical personages in question are exhibited in these textual displays as good or evil role models, as exemplars of heroism or villainy, as the saints and sinners of early twentieth-century American life. As mentioned above, Dos Passos himself eventually confirmed that this was his rhetorical priority in U.S.A., albeit several decades after the initial publication of the novels. I would propose as well that further critical interpretation (allegoresis) could show that U.S.A. allegorizes its position in the general field of cultural production. For one function of the “Camera Eyes” and the “Newsreels” is to mark (negatively) the relationship of the novelistic enterprise to lyric poetry and mass media materials (popular songs, tabloid journalism, etc.) respectively. U.S.A. speaks of itself in terms of its others, by declaring its difference from, or rather by establishing its critical superiority to, competing practices. As he put it elsewhere, “Writing for money is as silly as writing for self-expression … [t]he pulp writer of today writes for a meal ticket” (“Introduction” 147). Notably, it was irony—the conceptual complement to allegory—that in the Newsreels served as a means of contesting the ideologically coercive force of adjacent discourses, thus paving the way for the politically provocative use of collage/montage (or cut-and-paste) techniques in many proletarian novels. But the crucial takeaway for my purposes is that what appeared at the start to be a minor aspect of radical writing in the Depression era—the deployment of allegorical strategies—stands revealed in the end to have been a pivotal component of one of the epoch’s major literary achievements.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. In Search of Wagner. Trans. Rodney Livingstone,Verso, 2005. Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression & The Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge UP, 1995. Black, Joel D. “Allegory Unveiled.” Poetics Today, vol. 4, no. 1, 1983, pp. 109–126. Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt:Virginia, 1800. Beacon Press, 1992. Boyden, Polly. The Pink Egg. Pamet Press, 1942. Butts, J. J. “Missed Connections:The Collective Novel and the Metropolis.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, digit​​alhum​​aniti​​es​.or​​g​:808​​1​/dhq​​/vol/​​5​/2​/0​​00092​​/0​000​​92​.ht​​ml. Accessed 25 Jan. 2020. De Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd Rev. Edition. U of Minnesota P, 1983, pp. 142–65. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front:The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century.Verso, 1996. Dos Passos, John. “Introduction to Three Soldiers.” John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, edited by Donald Pizer, Wayne State UP, 1988, pp. 146–48. ———. “What Makes a Novelist?” John Dos Passos:The Major Nonfictional Prose, edited by Donald Pizer,Wayne State UP, 1988, pp. 268–275. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory:The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Cornell UP, 1993. Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Duke UP, 1993.

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William Solomon Halper, Albert. Good-bye Union Square: A Writer’s Memoir of the Thirties. Quadrangle, 1970. ———. Union Square.Viking Press, 1933. Hanley, Lawrence. “Proletarian Literature Fiction and the Predicaments of Class Culture.” A History of Working Class Literature, edited by Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter, Cambridge UP, pp. 232–248, doi:10.1017/9781316216439. Accessed 28 Jan. 2020. James, David. E. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton UP, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology.Verso, 2019. Levecq, Christine. “Philosophies of History in Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder.” Obsidian III, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall/ Winter 2000, pp. 111–130. Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal:The Federal Writers Project, 1935–1943. Syracuse UP, 1996. Mills, Nathaniel. “African American Historical Writing in the Depression.” The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s, edited by William Solomon, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 180–198. Moffett, Anita. “Rebellious Robin: The Pink Egg.” New York Times, 5 Apr. 1942, Section B, p. 23. Mullen, Bill V. “Proletarian Literature Reconsidered.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Literature, pp. 3–30, doi:1​ 0.109​3/acr​efore​/9780​19020​1098.​013.2​36. Accessed 28 Jan. 2020. Murphy, James F. The Proletarian Moment:The Controversy Over Leftism in Literature. Illinois Press, 1991. Shklovsky,Viktor. “Art as Device.”Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Stevens, Jason. “Reckoning with Christianity.” American Literature in Transition 1930–1940, edited by Ichiro Takayashi, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 153–176. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. U of Chicago P, 1952.

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11 ANGRY YOUNG MEN AND THE LOSS OF EMPIRE Stanley Wilkin

The Angry Young Men of 1950s English literature reached maturity during a period of extreme political and social disturbance, and, at the time their first works were published or staged, the British Empire was in rapid decline. Colonies were breaking away and declaring independence. In Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Keith Lowe demonstrates how population displacement was still an issue in Europe (1). Stanley Woolpert describes, in The Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India, how India’s freedom from Britain caused Muslim massacres by Hindus and Hindus by Muslims (1). France was engaged in wars within its empire as that too collapsed, while in the Far East, Indo-China, and Indonesia, and, as Alexander and Keiger describe in France and the Algerian War, 1954–1962: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy, both France and the Netherlands faced military defeat against nationalist forces (2). The Cold War had begun and nuclear weapons by the early 1950s had already started to dominate people’s fears. Peoples of the disappearing empire began arriving in Britain, to stay. In Britain, the Labour Party had assumed power in 1945 and reconstructed British society within a cradle-to-grave welfare system through the National Health Service implemented in 1948, entitling everyone to free health care, free dentistry, eye checks, and spectacles, with dole extended to pay for family care when the father was unemployed. In 1951, wartime rationing ended and there was an increased supply of food and clothes for ordinary people to buy. Extensive council housing was introduced to replace the working-class homes bombed into ugly ruins, allowing for cheaper rents, and stability of tenure and thereby greater spending power of the average family. These and other factors created greater national wealth by the mid-1950s, especially for young men.

Pierre Bourdieu and Literature The Angry Young Men, except for John Osborne, barely responded to the loss of empire, while all ignored most of the important events of the time. Dan Rebellato comments on his web page on how strange this was at a time of “nuclear proliferation, a cold war, apartheid, radical segregation and more (‘Introduction’).” Such global concerns, but more importantly for this group of British writers the breaking up of the British Empire and the effects of colonialism, are best viewed within Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts on the nature and effects of literature. Bourdieu in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field considers whether literature inhabits an autonomous state or replicates social dispositions, subject to complex social engagement. He states: 145

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This obliges us to raise more particularly than usual the problem of “realism” and of the “referent” of literary discourse. What indeed is this discourse which speaks of the social or psychological world as if it did not speak of it; which cannot speak of this world except on condition that it only speak of it as if it did not speak of it, that is, in a form which performs, for the author and the reader, a denegation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) of what it expresses. And should we not ask ourselves if work on form is not what makes possible the partial anamnesis of deep and repressed structures, if, in a word, the writer most preoccupied with formal research such as Flaubert, and so many others after him—is not actually driven to act as a medium of those structures (social or psychological), which then achieve objectification, passing through him and his work on inductive words, “conductive bodies” but also more or less opaque screens? (Bourdieu 3) The expression of the age, the loss of empire, and the effects of colonialism are understood here through Bourdieu and Sayad’s early ideas on French colonialism which they note, reflecting on colonialism itself, has its own internal necessity and logic resulting in “contradictions of reality,” which on decolonization “leaves shameful ghosts of the dead colonialism” (“Rules” 470). Although ruling colonialists function within a caste system, within colonialism based on racism, castes or class may experience fluidity with power remaining with the dominant group (445). In British colonialism, the dominant caste remained constant within colonized societies and the home society. The strategies and habitus (engrained and practiced individual and group responses) of the British colonial caste were a reflection not simply of racism but the British class system. According to Bourdieu, class, caste, and race can be understood within The Logic of Practice Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a point of view on the action, and who, putting into the object the principles of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interaction were purely symbolic exchanges. (Bourdieu 52) Like colonized Africans and Indians, the British working class were considered inferior by members of the ruling class. The above can be understood through positions, habitus, and stances within Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (72). Bourdieu determines habitus to be conditionings, or points of acculturalization, ways of behaving, or “a social class (in itself)—a class of identical or similar conditions of existence and conditionings—and a class of biological individuals having the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions common to products of the same conditionings” (59). These are inbuilt for generational wealth, poverty, character, and stance inherent within disposition. The literature of the Angry Young Men considers dispositions within structures defined as character developed upon structured situations. The Angry Young Men produced literature that restructured character in relational societal constructs to their time and recent past. Bourdieu holds that literature illuminates its era, producing a greater or different understanding than that provided by accumulating facts (xviii). The experiences considered here are loss of empire, working-class education processes that exceeded this period, and the intellectual and literary ambition of otherwise disadvantaged youths assuming the entitlement of what was seen as a failed political class, and the effects of colonialism on the colonizers. Within these investigations will be considered Bourdieu’s generational and class-influenced “partial anamnesis of deep and repressed structures” and the writers’ denial of their roles as mediums, which he details in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (4). 146

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The Angry Young Men Issues of disposition, social positions, and stances are clear within Colin Wilson’s statement in The Outsider Twenty Years On. Somehow, Osborne and I were supposed to prove that England was full of brilliantly talented young men who couldn’t make any headway in the System, and were forced to go it alone. We were supposed to be the representative voices of this vast army of outsiders and angry young men who were rising up to overthrow the Establishment. (Wilson 10) A working-class intellectual and philosopher, he was one of the first writers to be designated an “Angry Young Man.” The above dissociation or occupation of a separate habitus was dramatized and understood through a new rendition of male character in a relationship to society. Their characters exhibited an unconnected quality to their society, a rootless connection to work, homes, and relationships coupled with a rejection of the values of previous generations and British (normally rendered as English) society of the time. As Wilson also noted, they are the first working-class writers functioning as a loosely connected if identifiable group (9). They are no longer prepared, for example, to suffer rule by an upper middle-class elite and hypocritical churchmen, the latter evident in Jimmy Porter’s attack in Look Back in Anger (1956) on established personalities.

Literature and Habitus: What Cannot Be Spoken of in Bourdieu’s Thought Associated with the above, the effects of colonialism on the generation of the Angry Young Men will be considered through Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus, domination by force, and his contention that colonization was a system producing hybrid cultures that affected both. Bourdieu considered that colonization involved seeing colonized cultures as original but inferior through the perspective of the colonizer and restructured in their image (460). Edward Said claims that E.M. Forster in Passage to India (1924) rejects Indian concerns with political sovereignty, stressing only British sovereignty (204). Forster’s concern was of localism, the creation of an England far from home. Forster occupied a separate habitus from the Indian groups he mixed with throughout his time in India. John Osborne identifies a dissociation within the ex-rulers that indicates the hybrid culture indicated by Bourdieu and Sayad (446). Colonel Redfern, Jimmy Porter’s father-in-law in Look Back in Anger, and one of the British colonizers, remarks: COLONEL REDFERN:  I

loved it, all of it. At the time, it looked like going on forever. When I think of it now, it seems like a dream. Those long cool evenings up in the hills, everything purple and golden.Your mother and I were so happy then. It seemed as though we had everything we could ever want. I think the last day the sun shone was when that dirty little train steamed out of that crowded, suffocating Indian station, and the battalion band playing for all it was worth. I knew in my heart it was all over then. Everything. (Osborne 83)

The silence of British (identified as mainly English) writers on colonialism meets Bourdieu and Sayad’s understanding of the inability to express social consequences of political actions (446). The Angry Young Men writers were members of an educated working class who had not yet acquired a place in British or English society that corresponded to their abilities. Also, the boys and young men of the 1930s, when the Angry Young Men generation were growing up, were informed by popular culture, comic books, and British films obsessed with imperialism and empire 147

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(Richards 150).Victorian novels such as those of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines presented Africans to the youths of the Victorian era until the 1960s as directed by magic and consumed by the ­supernatural denizens of an inferior, backward culture: I saw one case containing four dozen of champagne smashed all to bits and there was the champagne fizzing and boiling about in the bottom of the dirty cargo-boat. It was a wicked waste, and so evidently the Kaffirs in the boat thought, for they found a couple of unbroken bottles, and knocking the tops off drank the contents. But they had not allowed for the expansion caused by the fizz in the wine, and feeling themselves swelling, rolled about in the bottom of the boat, calling out that the good liquor was “tagati” (bewitched). I spoke to them from the vessel, and told them it was a white man’s strongest medicine and they were as good as dead men. (Rider Haggard 10) Champagne, a symbol of Western sophistication, is misunderstood by the Africans who also cannot handle its simple effects. They are portrayed as superstitious, comical, and inferior. India played a considerable role in the public imagination and its loss would have affected the British population’s relationship with the rest of the world, compensated for by narratives of British self-sacrifice and fortitude during World War II based on upper-class models. The colonization of India, Africa, and the Pacific was internalized by the working class, for example, as nationalist tropes of individual importance (Richards 151). The loss of empire for the Angry Young Men novelists and playwrights was perhaps too painful to record. They echo the conclusion of Fredric Jameson that by omitting the empire and its gradual loss they have internalized it and given that loss a distinctive place in their art. Representations of Asians and Africans structured the racism that has pervaded European culture (51).

John Osborne John Osborne was considered the most important of the Angry Young Men. His 1956 play Look Back in Anger, from which the group appellation originated, introduced a new voice into English culture. His vocal, insolent, aggressive, and rebellious Jimmy Porter, the overwhelmingly central figure of the play around which the other characters orbit, can initially be seen three years before in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down. An original habitus, structured on education and deprivation, had suddenly emerged. Within the play, Jimmy Porter’s relationship with his upper-class wife and her family are crucial to Jimmy’s understanding of the world, each occupying a different habitus. Osborne created a discourse on the English character, emphasizing its differences from previous generations and writers. He changed British theatre by staging Look Back in Anger within a seedy, impoverished environment and with a disagreeable central character in Jimmy Porter. Although Jimmy Porter rants about establishment figures of the time, his real concern seems to be the disappearance of a glorious past. Working class and educated, devoid, according to Harper and Porter, of the identity of deference, Jimmy seems to have no clear future, which he may blame on the disappearance of England’s past (1). Osborne’s plays are riven with nostalgia, providing the literary background to the 1950s identity shift in the building of a post-imperial Britain according to Savage and Savage (215). The strategies and practices demonstrated by Bourdieu structure Jimmy’s character, fitting in with Wilson’s concept of normal and abnormal, the integrated and the un-integrated into society. Jimmy Porter occupies a different class and habitus to most of the other characters, expressing opposition to them. His strategies lean towards both the lack of opportunity and the impossibility of fitting into society. Look Back in Anger concerns Porter’s relationship with the ruling class, privilege, and power but also how being English (not British) can now be defined. The language Porter 148

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uses is that of challenge, reflective of a privileged past, of a new general lack of deference employed against the establishment that had won a war but lost a future, yet which part of him wants to belong to as indicated by the passion of his rejection. Nandi Bhatia notes the contradiction that Jimmy Porter, although he attacks the old imperialist signifiers, feels a sympathy, indeed nostalgia for the imperialist past and its certainties. Bernard F. Dukore describes the Porter apartment as representing the new grey environment of the welfare state, grubby furniture, newspapers strewn on the floor, ironing boards in the middle of the room, and speaking in an idiom common to the age (3–4). Colin Wilson’s circumstances when he was published and gained celebrity were similar. The play opens with Jimmy, Alison, his wife, and Cliff, his Welsh flatmate. Alison is in the background ironing and although she appears to be the butt of Jimmy’s aggressive comments is the one in control. Performed on stage, the audience’s eyes are constantly on Alison who seems to be Jimmy’s captive, although she may also be his captor. Her strategies of control emanate from her class. Does Jimmy represent the colonies, acquiring the education of their once masters, and colonizing the old colonizers? The action takes place in the Midlands, the provinces, exampling Bourdieu and Sayad’s understanding of a hybrid culture (446). Jimmy’s environment, his prominent books in the background, and his initial speeches proclaim him a working-class intellectual. Jimmy smokes a pipe, the prop of an older generation and one employed by upper-class pilots during the war, reflecting again Bourdieu’s hybrid culture and its impact on colonizers. His presence confirms contradiction. He reads and remarks on the “posh” high-brow Sunday newspapers read by establishment figures, pointing out an article on novels, some of which are written in French and perhaps further connecting him with Wilson who wrote mainly about French authors. The strategies and practices of Jimmy’s specific group of intellectuals within a specific generation are in touch with the identity, practices, and strategies of other cultures. JIMMY: Oh,

yes. There’s a Vaughn Williams. Well, that’s something, anyway. Something strong, something simple, something English. I suppose people like me aren’t supposed to be patriotic. Somebody said—what was it—we get our cooking from Paris (that’s a laugh), our politics from Moscow, and our morals from Port Said. (Osborne 5)

In the beginning, Jimmy’s attacks range over Alison’s upper-class father, Colonel Redfern, representing the lost empire, and the role of Alison’s gender and class in the empire as he sneers at Alison, referencing in his invective Alison’s class, the class of her family, and in essence the failure of their class with regard to the loss of empire: JIMMY: Well, she

can talk, can’t she? You can talk, can’t you? You can express an opinion? Or does The White Woman’s Burden make it impossible to think? (Osborne 2)

The allusion to the White Woman’s Burden places British colonialism as the responsibility of the British upper class who had the maternal responsibility for their less civilized colonies while raising doubt concerning upper-class intelligence.The habitus of racism described by Bourdieu and Sayad presents itself through the sense of superiority of the dominant class (460).The contempt for upper middle-class intelligence, in defense of the above attitudes, can be later seen in Lucky Jim’s attitude towards his superiors in Kingsley Amis’s book of the same name. Jimmy adopts the stance of belonging to a hybrid culture of old-fashioned patriotism and generational cosmopolitanism. Comparing his group to those of the Britain (or England) of the slowly disappearing empire he pivots his own specific group within a liminal existence: 149

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hate to admit it, but I think I understand daddy after he came back from India, after all those years away. The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All homemade cakes and croquet, bright ideas, Always the same picture: high summer, the longhot days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. What a romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. (Osborne 5–6)

Jimmy identifies with an England at the widest and greatest point of the empire, but it is an England of the rich and entitled, not the poor suffering in slums who might have provided the armies that enforced rule in the empire for little reward. He then acknowledges that his generation exists in an “American Age,” which he too represents, again within a hybrid culture, a culturally colonized country (Osborne 6). For Jimmy, it is the colonized condition that he resents that came after the loss of British prestige. It does not occur to Jimmy or John Osborne that Britain did the same to others. The habitus of loss embedded in the past is expressed through nostalgia and envy in Osborne’s work. The loss of the empire and English power is expressed through individual alienation from the disconnected present. The context of locality, the creation of an England or Home within India or Africa for example, was the creation of difference and separation that formed English identity after the loss of empire or as the different states broke away, reaffirming the identity of Englishness as a preferred state in itself (George 1). The habitus of detachment from the pre-war generation and intellectual concern with individual importance overcomes the habitus of cultural centrality. Colin Wilson married into the middle class while towards the end of his active career Osborne aped the style of an Edwardian artist and gentleman. The marriage of Alison and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger is both a wish and portend. Osborne’s autobiographies express in their titles, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman, alone his connection to pre-war decades and rejection of his own more utilitarian times. Osborne eventually searched for identity within English upper middle-class society of the past, while Kingsley Amis became a member of the Garrick Club in London which accepted only gentlemen, like all London clubs an advertisement for Britain’s imperial past and Victorian and Edwardian ideals. The same writer when young had introduced in Lucky Jim a character who disrupted the high towers of traditional culture, but also rejected all hints of foreignness. The location of England as Home in colonized countries had enabled a specific form of nationalism that reflected attitudes within different parts of the empire (Darwin 7).

Colonel Redfern, Jimmy Porter, a Land Adrift The African and Indian parts of the empire fed into British views of its racial and cultural superiority expressed by its elite colonialist class seen in the attitude of Alison’s family and the rebellious lower-class “rabble” before them (Osborne 59). India was a direct expression of Britain’s imperial might; many of Britain’s imperial rituals were taken from India, while African colonialism expressed European racial superiority based upon technological innovation and a selective understanding of history. The hybrid culture, understood by Bourdieu and Sayad, can be seen as altering India and Britain (446). A sense of natural superiority embedded itself not only in the middle and upper classes who benefited directly from colonialism, but also in the ordinary man and woman often expressed through racism. Bourdieu’s understanding of dominated cultures reconstructed through the colonizer’s prism can be seen here (Bourdieu and Sayad 445–446). Colonel Redfern belongs to the artificial and completed habitus of Anglo-India, a hybrid world located in the past. Colonel Redfern inhabits the rules or practices of class and his disposition connects to the superiority of even mediocre Englishmen and their power over others within the practices of racism. In Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu writes: 150

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Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle presented to an observer who takes up “a point of view” on the action, who stands back so as to observe it and, transferring into the object the principles of his relation to the object, conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone, in which all interactions actions are reduced to symbolic exchanges.This point of view is the one afforded by high positions in the social structure, from which the social world appears as a representation (in the sense of idealist philosophy but also as used in painting or theatre) and practices are no more than “executions,” stage parts, performances or scores, or the implementing of plans. (Bourdieu 96) The habitus of the Colonel can be seen through his class, sense of superiority, military background, and his power, in relation to both India, where he felt fulfilled, and England that no longer has relevance for him. His practice is connected to India, or the hybrid India where he lived and related to. Colonialism’s impact is seen through the dominant power and force of the colonialist, Colonel Redfern. Jimmy’s relationship to the Colonel is detailed through his sarcasm and aggression towards him, his practice formed through Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus of lower-class strategies (Outline 81). Referencing his mother-in-law, Jimmy makes her into an Indian and African inhabitant of the colonies, demonstrating the underlying racism of his approach and his generational practices: JIMMY: 

She’s as rough as a night in a Bombay brothel and as tough as a matelot’s arms. She’s probably in the cistern now (kicks cistern) can you ‘ear me mother (Sits on it beats down as if on bongo drums). Just about get her in there. Let me give you an example of this lady’s tactics. You may notice that I happen to wear my hair rather long. Now, if my wife is honest, or concerned enough to explain, she could tell you that this is not due to any dark, unnatural instincts I possess, but because (a) I can usually think of better things than a haircut to spend two bob on, and (b) I prefer long hair. But that obvious, innocent explanation did not appeal to Mummy at all. (Osborne 60)

The employment of Bombay as a place of licentious sexual behavior places it in a distant but known other, a place in India of darkness and disreputable behavior where Englishmen can do as they wish, but also a country where his disapproving in-laws lived for most of their lives. It can be placed alongside Colonel Redfern’s “dirty, little train that steamed out of the crowded, suffocating Indian station” (Osborne 83). It brings together the Colonel’s luxurious life with other supposed Indian activities, reflecting Jimmy’s habitus of the underprivileged intellectual. In both, the idea of India as a place to be exploited reflects dominance through power as well as the Occidental perception of India as inferior.These can be seen as within the practices of racism occasioned through books, film, and songs. The reference to Jimmy’s mother-in-law sitting on the toilet as resembling “bongo drums” (Osborne 60) places her in an imagined African jungle. Class and generational conflict are evident in the habitation of different vocabularies and Jimmy’s sarcasm directed towards his in-laws. Both the lower classes and colonized occupy the same inferior position. Colonialism affects the colonized subject, the colonizer, and the practices of control, force, and racism. In all realms of existence, at all levels of experience, one finds the same successive or simultaneous contradictions, the same ambiguities. The patterns of behaviour and the economic ethos imported by colonization coexist inside of each subject. (Bourdieu and Sayad 464) 151

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Harold Pinter: Literature of Colonizers and Colonization The above is embodied in Harold Pinter’s first staged play The Room (1957), a one- act play concerned with the lower class and the effects of British colonies on this class. Pinter’s writing places him within “The Theatre of the Absurd” established by Martin Esslin, which includes Samuel Beckett and Ionescu. Full of menace and anxiety, Pinter’s political commentary focuses on abuses of power, particularly by the West, engaging with the effects of colonialism on Britain (Ngesam 110–127). His plays often end with an individual’s physical or psychic annihilation, usually in the face of unspecified forces.The sense of extreme alienation in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1954), Amis’s class alienation, Osborne’s alienation of the individual reach existentialist intensity in Pinter. Pinter shares with each the claustrophobic environment; his plays are often contained within a single, squalid room or self-contained boarding house into which the outside world menacingly intrudes. In Pinter’s world, England has been reduced to tiny proportions, representing the glorious days of empire in its death throes. As in Look Back in Anger, victim and aggressor play out their dramas in small, dilapidated rooms with a purpose of mutual annihilation. The audience can never be fully certain that the outside world exists. In Pinter everyone is the Other (Cohn 55–68). Characters are routinely alienated from their own pasts.

The Room The Room was first performed in 1957 and analyzed here through Bourdieu’s concepts of colonial domination as an act of force, the creation of hybrid cultures, and how important emotions and perceptions cannot be expressed. The attitudes formed by Britain because of the colonization of other peoples, both remote and strange, remain unrecognized or misunderstood even in the present day, but within The Room are portrayed through withdrawal, fear, and paranoia. Strategies of racism are constructed upon repressed guilt, referencing the colonialist strategies that developed racism (Bourdieu and Sayad 463). Bourdieu’s concepts of practices structured on societal and personality development are evident in the fears expressed by Rose, her cultural background, and limited vocabulary consequent to colonialism. The Room (1957) opens on a scene similar to Look Back in Anger, although while Jimmy and Alison are young, a middle-aged couple inhabit the stage here symbolizing the end of an era rather than the beginning of one.They represent the remnants of empire. In Osborne’s play, Jimmy Porter exists in a world personified by his flat to which he invites people to his flat to consume those people. The British condition in both Look Back in Anger and The Room is reduced to one room, or at best a boarding house shared by strangers and enveloped by darkness. Where in Osborne the room is full of feeling, in Pinter it is full of what is unsaid. The Room is entirely domestic, if again claustrophobic. It contains the minutiae of life, as examined by Bourdieu through stances and practices (Outline 72). Rose cooks breakfast, Bert sits at a table apparently reading a magazine, but otherwise static. The dialogue is spoken entirely by Rose and often her words sound ominous, referring to the outside world as threatening: ROSE.  That’s

right.You eat that.You’ll need it.You can feel it in here. Still, the room keeps warm. It’s better than the basement, anyway. She butters the bread. I don’t know how they live down there. It’s asking for trouble. Go on Eat it up. It will do you good. (Pinter 91)

The couple are clearly working- or lower class, and although their living conditions indicate poverty, Rose fears the basement where living conditions are worse. Although she appears to fear 152

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everything outside the room, the basement strongly signifies the colonial past and present. That is where foreign people live. Sitting back in her chair while Bert eats, she remarks: “I’ve never seen who it is. Who is it? Who lives down there?” (Pinter 92). She continues talking about the basement and referring to people who moved in there after they left; these also left and someone else has moved in. There has been immense change situated on the basement. Rose (92) mentions how the basement’s walls “are running” and how better off they now are: “ROSE. It’s good you were up here. It’s good you were not down there in the basement” (Pinter 93). She remarks strangely as if they lived separate lives and were not married. It sounds as if she lived in the basement but escaped from there. ROSE.  Those

walls would have finished you off. I don’t know who lives there now. Whoever it is, they’re taking a big chance. Maybe they’re foreigners. (Pinter 93)

While Rose and Bert’s room, although small and dingy, shows how Britain or England has shrunk, nearby the foreigners, the colonized or once colonized, remain hidden from view. For those in the room, or for Rose at least, the outside world has become frightening. The outside world has changed as it has for Colonel Redfern. Mr. Kidd, their landlord, appears and in the small talk that follows, he tells Rose that their room was once his bedroom (Pinter 97). Everywhere is change, everyone moves around. After Mr. Kidd and Bert leave too, a young couple, the Sands, appear outside the room door. Mrs. Sands tells Rose that they were just walking up the stairs when she caught them, looking for the landlord (Pinter 101). Mrs. Sands tells Rose that they went to the basement, which seemed damp and was not lit. A man they could not see called to them from the basement (Pinter 107). Enquiring from the unseen man if there were any vacancies in the house, the disembodied voice of the room’s occupant tells them Rose and Bert’s room is free. When Mr. Kidd returns, he denies telling anyone the room is vacant but then, clearly upset, talks about the man in the basement, whom, he says, will not leave him alone. He insists on speaking to Rose and although at first Rose refuses, Mr. Kidd cajoles Rose into meeting the man (109–110). Riley, the man downstairs, is a blind black man. When he tells Rose his name, she becomes agitated and starts to insult him, suggesting he is a beggar wanting something from her. This can be constructed within Bourdieu’s habitus of colonial dominance, the fear of the demands of past colonies. It also denotes a fear of the recent colonial past (113). ROSE.  Oh, those

customers. They come in here and stink the place out. After a handout. I know all about it. And as for you saying you know me, what liberty is that? Telling my landlord too. Upsetting my landlord.What do you think you’re up to? We’re settled down here, cosy, quiet, and our landlord thinks the world of us, we’re his favourite tenants, and you come in and drive him up the wall, and drag my name into it.What do you mean by dragging my name into it, and my husband’s name? How did you know what our name was? (Pinter 113)

The language is aggressive but constructed around simple clauses preventing the development of relationships and intimacy. The vocabulary is limited, if direct. Riley tells her he has a message for her. This information merely increases Rose’s belligerence towards the blind old man (114). Standing firm, Riley tells her he has a message from her father. He calls her Sal, not Rose. Hearing the name, she begins to panic again, and Riley then tells her that he is her father and he wants her to come home. Bert returning from his drive at first ignores Riley and speaks only to his wife, describing his drive as if he had been making love roughly to a woman, revealing his sadistic nature—that of the slave owner and slave trader: 153

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I caned her along. She was good.Then I got back. I could see the road all right.There was no cars. One there was. He wouldn’t move. I bumped him. I got my road. I had all my way. There again and back. They shoved out of it. I kept on the straight. There was no mixing it. Not with her. She was good. She went with me. She don’t mix it with me. I use my hand. Like that. I get hold of her. I go where I go. She took me there. She brought me back. (Pinter 116)

Pinter implies that Bert has been sexually controlling Rose or Sal, and this can be symbolic of Bourdieu’s concept of colonial dominance and violence (Language 68–69). Bert suddenly appears to notice Riley, goes into a rage, and kills him. Rose suddenly becomes blind herself. Ishan Gairola (15–18) views Rose’s blindness according to links with her dead father, her authentic self, revealed by her true past, and her mental deterioration. This aligns with Bourdieu’s system of thought, whereby Bert expresses the working-class Englishman’s identity with colonialism and his superiority over the inhabitants of the empire. Rose’s authentic self is her colonial origins (Bourdieu and Sayad 466–478). Her colonial self is embedded in the boarding house, which perhaps represents the United Kingdom. The mutual dependency of Rose/Sal and Bert symbolizes that of the United Kingdom and the colonies, whereby the colonies are not yet able to forge their own identity, constructing instead hybrid lives within Britain itself in the manner of Colonel Redfern in India and Britain. Riley too is strongly attached to Britain, awaiting his own death in a reconstruction of the past. Rose and Bert represent colonizer and colonized within the hybrid cultures constructed by colonization, the tableaux of Rose with the Sands representing Rose’s and Bert’s past, with Riley a continuous reference to Rose’s true origins. Bert’s sadism references the habitus of colonialism, the black man’s political demands and identity permanently erased. Riley attempts to remind Rose of the country’s need to assume responsibility for that past. The play encapsulates Bourdieu and Sayad’s concept of a hybrid culture, and Bert’s violence towards Riley is an attempt to retain sadistic strategies and practices, the habitus of racism (449). Pinter talked of what is not said, or what is not being said, and the need for interpretation in a similar fashion to Beckett and the unearthed meaning of words explored by Marc Silverstein (11–16). In these aspects, it conforms to Bourdieu’s ideas of unexpressed actualities (Rules XVIII, XX, 3), in this case, the effects of colonialism on British society. Pinter’s construction of his plays as political metaphors is an attempt to reconstruct the national psyche after the loss of empire by integrating the migrating peoples into Britain from the empire, an act of guilt and memory as well as an attempt to hold onto ancient glories (Woodroffe 498). This is a play of secrets, where those matters not spoken of, the slavery and colonization of black people, are hidden away in the farthest part of the building. Throughout the play they call to us, now blinded by their colonizers closing their eyes to what they perpetuated. Bert calls Riley “Lice,” before killing him (Pinter 116). The Notting Hill Race Riots, simmering for years, occurred in 1958, exhibiting in their violence Bert’s attitudes.

Kingsley Amis Kingsley Amis published Lucky Jim in 1954, depicting a disaffected character like Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, unable to settle down in post-war Britain. Lucky Jim, a graduate of a provincial university, is further up the class ladder but feels alienated, effecting episodes of quiet terrorism on his workplace and work colleagues. He feels out of place amongst the academic elite he has joined, all of whom come from the British upper middle class, educated in public schools like Eton and alumni of Oxbridge colleges. Amis taught at Swansea University between 1948 and 1961, and later at Cambridge, which he hated. Amis’s literary environment is wider than Osborne’s, but equally provincial and claustrophobic. Lucky Jim is less socially passive than Jimmy Porter and John Wain’s 154

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earlier character in Hurry on Down, in which the archetype for Lucky Jim, Jimmy Porter, and Colin Wilson’s disaffected, and similarly aimless, working-class intellectual is first found. Like Osbourne’s characters, Amis’s Lucky Jim is caught up in the habitus of class conflict (Bourdieu Logic 58–59). Celebrity status arrived almost immediately for the discussed authors. To Amis’s annoyance, the press positioned him amongst the Angry Young Men alongside Osborne and Wilson. Kingsley Amis was born in a lower middle-class home, went to a good London school and, unlike the others here, studied on a scholarship and achieved a BA in literature at Oxford—an accomplishment then for someone of his background—and remained at Oxford to study for a B.Litt. degree, his thesis failing. Nevertheless, he moved into a career as a lecturer seemingly unperturbed by his deemed intellectual shortcomings. His seeming failure at the highest levels and his championing of middlebrow ideas and literature may have resulted from this episode but also indicated his practice of rejection of upper-class academics. He later gained a fellowship at Peterhouse College Cambridge. Jim Dixon (Lucky Jim) is a comic character, and the novel, according to David Lodge, presents campus life for the first time in British fiction. Lodge places the novel with Waugh, Wodehouse, Dickens, and Fielding, presenting, as Amis does, largely middle-class environments seemingly at odds with Osborne’s seedy rooms in poor, working-class districts.There are connections, nevertheless. In Osborne, the middle and upper classes come into Jimmy Porter’s working-class environment and are required to adjust to that environment. Lucky Jim comes from a lower middle-class background and is attempting to adjust to an upper middle-class environment. Their practices and strategies are structured within different and opposing class structures (Bourdieu, Outline 81). The upper middle-class characteristics of superiority, privilege, and entitlement conflict with workingclass practices of resentment, inferiority, and self-assertion. While Jimmy Porter tames the upper class who enter his environment, Jim Dixon fails to adjust and enters a less threatening upper middle-class environment at the end of the novel. Dixon rolls and recoils from one small social disaster to another, emphasizing his lower social origins, and spends most of his energy covering up his often drunken, subversive, if trivial exploits.The lack of genuine effectiveness of both characters is notable, which suggests colonial inferiority (Bourdieu and Sayad 449) before traditional Western learning. Amis’s approach to the novel has been called traditional or conservative. He later avowed a relationship with Tory satire related to the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the empire. He ignored, or appears to, the empire and the colonies, showing no concern for the political issues of his time (Fallis 65). Although he wrote stylish prose, his achievement lies with his characters and their resonances for the period in which they were written—often respectable and debauched at the same time, practicing middle-class (James 38) respectability but acting and feeling like imposters. Lucky Jim was at the time of its publication seen as a mirror of England, the educated lowerclass man in a traditional society and at odds with it. The alienation of young intellectuals in British society of the mid-1950s, the feeling of being perpetual Outsiders, can be understood through their higher levels of education, noted by Colin Wilson, compared to their parents, their correspondingly low position in society, and relative lack of opportunities to fit their ambitions (9). Positions of influence and power were retained by upper- and middle-class public school–educated young men. Public schoolboys from Oxbridge ran the British Broadcasting Corporation, made up most of the MPs in Parliament, operated major companies, and held important academic posts in the new provincial universities. To progress, working-class intelligent men (women remain largely objects) need to assume the dispositions of upper middle-class men (Bourdieu, Outline 81–82). This can cause discomfort, dismay, and conflict as when Lucky Jim is faced with a verbose senior lecturer and head of department. Welch was talking yet again about his concert. How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No.Then how? As usual Dixon shelved this question, telling himself that what mattered was that this man 155

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had decisive power over his future, at any rate until the next four or five weeks were up. Until then he must try to make Welch like him, and one way of doing that was, he supposed, to be present and conscious while Welch talked about concerts. (Amis 8) Lucky Jim’s strategy is to be like the upper classes who determined his future, seeing their academic positions as due to entitlement or class, indeed consequence of birth, not ability (Bourdieu, Rules 10). Dixon’s habitus encompassed a lower class, his habitation of a different culture to Welch, whose outlook was built upon access to power through his entitled birth. That class was formed in reference to the control or colonization by their group of other peoples as well as the British lower classes. While the Angry Young Men consistently attack their supposed social superiors, they also want to be them as they struggle within a hierarchy that struggles against them. The structures or practices of the class they inhabit work against them. The practices of Osborne and Amis correspond at this point as the result of embedded structures of colonialism and casual racism. In Osborne, it was directed towards India, in Amis towards Africans. Their colonially based racism was constructed on the cartoon strips in children’s comics and stories they grew up with where Africans were regularly depicted as savages with bones through their noses who lived in grass huts. Lucky Jim says nothing about loss of empire, except for the introduction of a lower middle-class intellectual amongst the older, entrenched generation in the same way that Colin Wilson’s nostalgia and greater focus on Europe allow him not to grapple with major national issues (McDermott 1). Reminding Welch that they had arranged for Dixon to come to tea, an awkward moment that would lead to an acknowledgment of Lucky Jim within the elite university group, Lucky Jim describes Welch who had been flicking water from his hands, a movement he now arrested. He looked like an African savage being shown a simple conjuring trick. (Amis 12) The practices of colonialism, with Africans occupying the lowest level in a colonialist hierarchy, are employed with descriptions of supposedly witless African behavior in a failure to acknowledge the position of Dixon in the class structure of England. Like Riley, he is one of the colonized who has entered the world of his colonizers. Africans are presented within a habitus of simple mindedness when confronted by the technical superiority of the colonials; Welch considered them as different and inferior. Colonial constructs inhabit all the positions. Lucky Jim teaches medieval literature, a subject he has no enthusiasm for and does not appear suited to. This indicates his irreverence (stance) for the culture he is attempting to be part of. Early in the novel he goes to Welch’s house for a weekend of art singing medieval songs. The books on this subject bear odd names in ancient Briton or Welsh, such as Cwmrhydyceirw (81). Jimmy Dixon and the others around him have entered another world of greater ethnic purity. His weekend is like entering another earlier England with singing, salon music, an England separate from the world of busy van drivers and immigration he has come from. Medieval studies, the Middle Ages, are an escape it seems from: “The Hydrogen Bomb, the South African Government, Chian Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself ” (Amis 87). Or rather after studying the Middle Ages the above horrors become less worrying by comparison. Lucky Jim gets drunk during the weekend, alienating nearly everyone, and setting his bed alight when he begins smoking while drunk. As events move on and Lucky Jim returns to the Welchs’ home the professor’s wife confronts him over the minor destruction he wrought there, complaining that 156

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“I’m waiting for an answer, Mr Dixon.” The Englishwoman in her seemed, for the moment, to have forged well ahead of the Western European. (Amis 181) As with Osborne, Amis perceives Englishness as a separate and superior quality made up of specific practices and strategies. Within that construct of Englishness lies the solid differences of class, whereby in a confrontation between Lucky Jim and Bertrand Welch, the son of his superior, those differences are expressed forcibly. Jimmy exclaims: You think that just because you are tall and you can put paint on canvas you’re a sort of demi-god. It wouldn’t be so bad if you really were. But you’re not: you’re a twister and a snob and a bully and a fool. (Amis 208) Jim points out that Bertrand considers himself a great lover, but he is unnerved by Jimmy’s competition over Christine, his girlfriend, perplexing because he views Jimmy as no more than a louse (Amis 208). This resonates with Bert’s description of Riley in Pinter’s The Room and demonstrates how the lower classes and colonized peoples were connected in the gaze of the ruling or colonizing class. Only the colonized were and are subjected to racism based on color of skin and culture. As in Look Back in Anger, invective is employed against others and defined in animal metaphors, thereby distancing. Such strategies were employed within the positioning of class difference, which seems part of Jimmy Dixon’s personality in his interactions with his peers and superiors based on a “boredom-coefficient” (Amis 215) and pretentions of his class superiors. Gore-Urquhart, a fellow lecturer, responds later by enquiring about Dixon’s background. Dixon replies telling Gore-Urquhart that he was from the “Local Grammar School” (Amis 215), educational facilities aspired to by poor students. A cultural and class clash is evident with different practices involved. Not only were lecturers then from the upper middle classes, educated at private schools (and still often are), lecturers from grammar schools were unusual although increasingly evident in provincial universities. Lecturers from grammar schools were from lower middle-class backgrounds and looked down on even when they assumed the strategies of the upper middle class (see above). Throughout the novel there are elements of undeclared warfare between the two classes in a similar fashion to Jimmy Porter and his wife’s friends and family, the practices and strategies of each evident when employed against the other in a replication of colonizers and colonized in reference to the empire.

Conclusion The “Angry Young Men” writers avoided the loss of empire and forgot British imperialism, or appeared to, through positioning themselves with the upper classes in strategies of acceptance and rejection. Racism surfaces in their language when considering colonial peoples, shaped by locality. Of those writers considered here, only Pinter appears to inhabit a position with few if any racist overtones, but his work is subject, unlike Osborne and Amis, to numerous opposing interpretations. Within each nevertheless, the experience, practices, and strategies of colonialism are embedded in their interactions with others, especially those of a different class. Colonialism alters the culture of the colonialized country, but also changes the culture of the colonializing group (Bourdieu and Sayad 464). The above can be noted in each writer’s positioning of their characters within working-class or lower middle-class upbringings, environments that are subject to change and in which they no 157

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longer fit (The Room) or cannot fit (Look Back in Anger and Lucky Jim). Their approach to their environments is constructed through class habitus depicted as opposed to the class habitus of others around them. Pushing and pulling strategies are evident between the rising class represented by Jimmy Porter and Lucky Jim and the upper class they meet. In Look Back in Anger it is the family and friends of Jimmy’s wife, Alison; in Lucky Jim, it is the hostilities expressed through the habitus and strategies of class entitlement. In The Room it is the outside environment from which the occupants of the room hide and their relationship with the past and the old colonies that intrude through the character of Riley. Each class shares similar attitudes towards colonized peoples, seeing them through practices of difference and of Asian and African cultural inferiority. Colonel Redfern, Jimmy, and Lucky Jim each employ the same language for English people of a different class which they use for Africans and Indians, and comparing both groups to insects is commonplace (Amis 208, Pinter). Jimmy Porter looks down on Alison’s parents, comparing their character faults to the imagined shameless behavior of Indians or Africans based on fantasies of sexually promiscuous Asians and primitive African natives taken from the novels of Rider Haggard and films of the time. Each writer is concerned with societal change and with changes in individual male character as a response to often unexpressed change surrounding the loss of empire. The social mobility of Lucky Jim and Jimmy Porter can be considered alongside the fractured society of The Room in which the effects of colonialism are beginning to be felt. They each represent a turning point in British society as it became a second-class power again, one culturally colonized by the United States.

Works Cited Alexander, M. and J. F.V. Keiger ed. France and the Algerian War, 1954–1962: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy. Routledge, 2013. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. Penguin, 1993. Bhatia, Nandi. Anger, Nostalgia and the End of Empire: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Modern Drama, vol. 42, no. 3, 1999, 391–402. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Harvard UP, 1991. ———. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Trans. Richard Nice. California UP, 1977. ———. The Logic of Practice, Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford UP, 1990. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford UP, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. Colonial Rule and Cultural Sabir Ethnography. 2004: 5:445, eth.sagepub. con/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/445. Accessed 14 Feb. 2020. Cohn, Ruby. “The World of Harold Pinter.” The Tulane Drama Review. 1962. MIT Press. Darwin, John. Britain and Decolonisation:The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World. Macmillan International Higher Education. 1988. Dukore, Bernard F. Harold Pinter. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2016. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Edward Arnold, UK. 1924 Gairola, Ishan. Depiction of Existential Anxiety in Harold Pinter’s “The Room.” International Journal of Linguistics and Literature. (IJLL), vol. 6, no. 5, 2017, 15–18. George, Rosemary M. The Politics of Home: Post-Colonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Literature. Cambridge UP. 1996. Haggard, Rider H. Cassell and Company Ltd. London, Paris, New York, Toronto and Melbourne, 1902. Harper, S. and V. Porter. British Cinema in the 1950s:The Decline of Deference. Oxford UP, 2003. James, Andrew. Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience. McGills-Queens UP. 2013. Jameson, Fredric. Modernism and Imperialism. U of Minnesota P, 1990:51. Lowe, Keith. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Penguin, 2012. McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. Springer, 1989. Ngesam, Eugene. A Broken Compass: Modern Leadership in the Plays of Samuel Becket and Harold Pinter. Alizes, 2005. Osborne, John. A Better Class of Person. UHR Books, 1981. ———. Almost a Gentleman, 1955–1966. Faber and Faber, 1992. ———. Look Back in Anger in Plays: One. Faber and Faber, 1993, Pinter, Harold. The Room. London French, 1960.

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Angry Young Men and the Loss of Empire Rebellato, Dan. British Library UK Website. www​.b​​l​.uk/​​20th-​​centu​​ry​-li​​terat​​ure​/a​​rticl​​es​/an​​-intr​​oduct​​ion​-t​​o​ -loo​​k​-bac​​k​-in-​​anger​. Accessed 14 Feb. 2020. ———. 1956  and All That:The Making of Modern British Drama. Routledge, 2002. Richards, Jeffrey. Boy’s Own Empire. Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s. Manchester UP, 1986. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism.Vintage, 1994. Savage, Michael and Mike Savage. Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940s: The Politics of Method. Oxford UP, 2010. Silverstein, Marc. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. Bucknell UP, 1993. Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Secker and Warburg, 1953. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider:Twenty Years On. Diversion Books, 2014. Wolpert, Stanley. The Shameful Flight:The Last Years of the British Empire in India. Oxford UP, 2009. Woodroffe, Graham. Taking Care of the “Coloureds”: The Political Metaphors of Harold Pinter’s “The Caretakers.” Theatre Journals, vol. 40, no. 4, Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, 498–508.

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PART II

Class in Literature Intermittently (In)visible

12 RACE AND CLASS AS CATALYSTS FOR OBSCURING A NOVEL Aaron Barlow

Suspense/mystery master Stanley Ellin’s first novel, Dreadful Summit (published in 1948), is the narrative of a single day by a working-class teenager. In mid-text, Ellin deliberately erodes reader sympathy with his narrator by showing his unexamined racism in an encounter with a fictional version of Billie Holliday: She was smiling and was even more beautiful than when she was singing. I just had to tell her how I felt because that’s how it was. I knew I had to and I knew she would like it, and I said, “You’re the most wonderful singer in the whole world and you’re so beautiful even if you are a nigger,” … She was mad about it all right, because she pulled away all of a sudden so I almost fell down again, and then she spit right where my necktie was showing. (Ch. 11) Ellin, from a working-class background himself, understood the racism of those who might believe they ‘haven’t a racist bone in their body’ even while speaking and acting in a racist manner. Later in his career, though, the subtlety of this understanding would get him into trouble with publishers as Ellin tried to examine more thoroughly the attitude he had used so briefly in furthering his first novel’s progress. More generally, and continuing a pattern that would develop in his novels, in his last three (Star Light, Star Bright, The Dark Fantastic, and Very Old Money), Ellin (who died in 1986 at age sixtynine) gave us a number of characters who seem to rise or fall through American class structure: a schoolteacher who has become a chauffeur, a child of the Florida swamps who makes herself into an art expert; a working-class Italian from Bath Beach, Brooklyn, transformed into a Midtown Manhattan sophisticate; a “Shantytown, Arizona” kid who evolves into a major movie star and wife of a billionaire with a New England lineage; and an African-American whose mother works as a maid but who has dreams of an acting career that she is striving to fulfill. One of these novels, The Dark Fantastic, also contains a man whose outward appearance is that of a cultured and liberal urban college professor, one raised to that position. Inside, though, is someone who has turned into the kind of bitter, violent racist and misogynist usually and sloppily associated with rural ignorance whose views, he claims, rest in his fellows as much as in him, describing them as, “my liberal colleagues who, in the privacy of their locked bedrooms, must have cursed the day while they publicly rejoiced in” (Ellin, The Dark Fantastic 130) the rising power of minorities. This professor is the opposite of expectation, of progress, even of the American dream. He also seems to 163

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be the opposite of the narrator of Dreadful Summit, though their attitudes on race prove much the same—one of the points of the later novel. Random House, Ellin’s longtime publisher, refused to issue The Dark Fantastic, finding its subject matter, according to publisher Otto Penzler and to Ellin himself, unsuitable for the American reading public—or for, at least, the genre readers who normally bought Ellin’s books. The surface reason for the rejection was the racism of that college professor, one of the three main characters of the novel. The deeper reason has to do with class attitudes in 1948 and even today. After ten subsequent rejections, a frustrated Ellin turned the manuscript over to Penzler, proprietor of the Mysterious Press, who brought it out. Readers did not react as negatively to the novel as publishers had. Perhaps they knew more about appearance and reality, as well as about class and race problems, than book editors gave them credit for. Penzler had published Ellin’s The Specialty of the House and Other Stories in 1979, the year of Star Light, Star Bright, Ellin’s previous novel. Reasonably successful, the novel had introduced detective John Milano and was meant to be the first of a series. The Dark Fantastic continued with Milano; Ellin expected Robert Loomis, his editor at Random House (and one of the most respected editors in the country), to gladly take it on. He refused, starting the string of rejections. Though Penzler had been publishing story collections since 1976, his was still a shoestring operation. A former sportswriter who now owned a bookshop dedicated to mystery and suspense, he had broken into the genre as an editor/historian and had never before published a novel. The Mysterious Press was then, he says, a “one-man operation.” Penzler ran the press out of the Mysterious Bookshop on 56th Street in Manhattan. As a small, struggling publisher, Penzler was willing to take chances that a large publisher might avoid. Penzler did not care that one of the two narrators (the only first-person one) is an out-and-out racist or that the book deals with child sexual abuse, an interracial relationship, and the questions of class hatred that intertwine with racism. He had faith both in the author and in the readers of the genre. He felt that the book had merit and that readers of the genre would recognize that the one narrator was no one to admire, but that this did not affect the quality of the book—its subsequent success proved him right. Still, the standard assumption among publishers clearly had been that the book was, because of partial narrator Charles Witter Kirwan, simply too racist—and that his racism reflected on the author.This was nonsensical. Ellin, a Quaker, was involved on a personal and daily level in bridging racial barriers. Contrary to what so many publishers saw, the novel is an attempt to bring Ellin’s cultural and political beliefs into his fiction.To do this, he wanted to create a racist villain to accent his points about race and class. He did it all too well. Ellin’s greater motive was ignored at the time: the novel, with its attack on liberal establishment attitudes, likely offended editors’ sense of class and assumptions about attitudes within differing American class strata. Fans of the American mystery/suspense genre were still often imagined to be uneducated and unsophisticated—and, more than likely, racist. The refusing editors also may have seen the novel as what it was, as a not-so-subtle attack on their own class. Ellin ripped away the veneer of open-armed inclusivity from one of their own, that college professor with an impeccable liberal lineage. He shows the seething hatreds that can lie hidden and unrecognized, beneath. The results of the book’s publication were positive. “[I]t looks as though The Mysterious Press may have in The Dark Fantastic what Shakespeare and Company had in Ulysses,” commented Derrick Murdoch for The Globe and Mail. That may be overstating the case, but the success of Ellin’s novel did start a process that saw the Mysterious Press quickly become a major force in mystery/suspense publishing and Penzler one of the most recognizable figures in the genre outside of the authors themselves. The genre’s readers, apparently, had more sense and discernment about the content of works in the genre than did the major publishers who dabbled in it—and were not 164

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put off by implicit attacks on attitudes of the northeastern liberal elite. Penzler, who started out as a fan from the Bronx, was well aware of what readers’ attitudes were and had already been taking advantage of them, publishing his story collections in well-designed volumes printed on acidfree archival paper, showing respect for the material that readers appreciated. Taking on The Dark Fantastic, from his standpoint within the genre, was a logical step. Ellin placed a good deal of the action of his novel on a block not unlike the one where he had lived for much of his adult life, Clarkson Avenue between Rogers and Bedford Avenues in the part of Flatbush, Brooklyn, just southeast of Prospect Park. He lived there (alternating with Miami) for more than thirty years, moving there before “white flight” changed its composition to predominately African-American. Originally from working-class Bath Beach (also in Brooklyn), Ellin had seen the culture, class, and racial mix of the borough shift, and he used the changes as the specific background and motivation for this novel which, though receiving slightly uneven reviews, managed to sell well enough to warrant a paperback edition. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Ellin continues to be read and is championed by the likes of respected literary novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose own The Fortress of Solitude deals, though in different fashion, with some of the same themes as The Dark Fantastic and is also set, in part, in 1980s Brooklyn. But The Dark Fantastic itself is now all but ignored. Why? “The Dark Fantastic would be unlikely to find a publisher today. [sic] very unlikely!” So wrote Penzler in a recent email. Have things changed so little? Why would that still be true, even though the cultural climate is quite different, and the world of publishing has changed dramatically? Maybe today’s “influencers” are a little different from those of the early 1980s. Or perhaps the racist narrator is extremely hard to stomach in any era. Though these are both likely, class conflict is also as much a factor today as in the 1980s and probably it, too, makes some turn away. Maybe, though, the reason the novel is ignored is quite a bit more pedestrian. Maybe the book is simply pedestrian, a feeble effort. Perhaps Kirkus Review was right in calling out the novel’s “so-so quality.” Probably not. Given the precision of Ellin’s prose in general and that much worse fiction regularly sees print, dismissal of the book for “so-so quality” was probably a smokescreen generated by discomfort over the racist narrator. “Quality” is one of George Orwell’s “meaningless words,” “used in a consciously dishonest way.That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different” (257). They are used to deflect, not to enlighten. Possibly, reaction to the novel, then and now, is complicated by the Milanos’ interracial relationship, which is the second narrative strand’s focus, though claiming so may require a stretch. Today, such relationships are even more pedestrian than in the 1980s, but were common enough even then. True, the interplay between the two characters when they are still lovers-to-be can easily be misinterpreted by careless readers, but that seems an unlikely reason for dismissing the entire novel. When the first paperback edition by Berkley Press appeared in 1985, Clarence Petersen of The Chicago Tribune characterized the book as “a terrific psychological suspense story, and well-written.” This was already the majority opinion. Though it would soon be forgotten, the book was initially well received by mystery/suspense reviewers. Challenging class assumptions about racial attitudes, probably the real cause of the turning away from the novel by publishers and its current neglect, sets this novel apart not only from most others in its genre but even more generally. This aspect of The Dark Fantastic makes it worthy of more note today than it gets. Paradoxically, this reduces even contemporary willingness to grapple with it. America in the age of Trump is, in many ways, the America of Kirwan come to life. Our currently amplified racial, class, and sexual divides magnify (and sometimes normalize) the attitudes and actions of people like Kirwan who, at the time of the novel’s composition, would have been an unusual outlier. “One of the things everyone avoids talking about is the feeling of whites watching a world ending,” said Ellin to Clarence Petersen about Kirwan’s attitude soon after the 165

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novel’s publication. “It’s not justification, but there is a reason for every act, including the maddest.” Today, Kirwan, whose attitudes were generally hidden away in the 1980s, can be seen in thousands of social-media posts spreading racial fearmongering and fragility even among the professoriate, who endlessly debate the use of politically correct racial and ethnic terms as evidenced by the Inside Higher Ed Letters to the Editor forum threads demanding that writers “don’t demean all ‘Karens’ and ‘Chads’” for their implicit biases (Hodges), or decrying the “intimidation and revisionism of the currently in vogue ‘cancel-culture’ generation” (Williams). This new social climate makes Kirwan’s hatreds, in retrospect, more frightening and off-putting than they were at the time. If the novel made many liberal establishment people jittery in the early 1980s, the mushrooming of racial and class animosity over the past few years, to say nothing of the #MeToo movement, could make his persona positively frightening today. Ellin was writing truths through fiction that are too uncomfortable for many liberal and urban Americans to face even three decades and more after its creation. Perhaps this discomfort, and not just the racism and antisemitism shown in the novel, should have been explored more fully at the time. Certainly, it needs exploring now. Books like this one need to be brought to the forefront, not conveniently forgotten. But that rarely happens. The refusal to examine liberal racial culpability, avoided as strongly by liberals as cats refusing to look into their own eyes in mirrors, has led to a great deal of disdain from those not sharing superficial liberal beliefs in inclusivity. It has led to almost comical gyrations and is responsible, in part, for today’s attestation by some liberals of being “woke,” a phrase taken from African-American activists that, for whites, has come to mean public affirmation and appreciation of difference— along with recognition of the history and impact of racial (and other) divides and oppressions. The contemporary AltRight laughs at the white fragility of the “cancel culture” debated in social media (see Williams) and responds by making up its own vocabulary—in part to parody liberal aversion to the words of racism, but also to give themselves deniability when accused of racism themselves. Its members appreciate this irony as they use their new words to fly under the social-media censorship radar. Kirwan, too, replaces a racist word with one of his own choice, “bulanga,” taken from Norman Douglas’s now-forgotten bestseller of 1917, South Wind. Like Kirwan, Douglas was a pedophile (James), one who sees people, as they move further south toward the equator, as more and more depraved. It would be foolish to put too much importance on South Wind in looking at The Dark Fantastic, but it is a book Kirwan’s father might have read in the army in France. It also contains a line describing a woman as “certain of her criminality and profoundly convinced of her moral rectitude” (389), a woman who has just committed murder. The line could apply to Kirwan himself, an irony he would have appreciated. Milano stands in deliberate contrast to Kirwan. He was created by Ellin for his previous novel, Star Light, Star Bright, a standard detective story, though one without a murder until close to the end and with an unusual twist after that. Milano was raised in working-class Bath Beach at the southern edge of Brooklyn and attended New Utrecht High School, just as Ellin was and did. Unlike his creator, who graduated from Brooklyn College, Milano attended Fordham but did not graduate (as we learn in The Dark Fantastic). To understand The Dark Fantastic, it helps to know something about Ellin’s own background and about how he saw himself (and was seen) within the mystery/suspense genre and the more rarified “literary” community to which he aspired. Milano, though, common background aside, is not really a stand-in for the author. That role is played in Star Light, Star Bright by the character Scott Rountree, a novelist married (as Ellin was) to a smart, quick-on-the-uptake editor. Ellin uses Rountree to make gentle fun of himself and to praise his wife, at one point pointing to “Belle Rountree and her Scottie bringing up the rear” (171). Ellin does not completely pattern Rountree after himself, depicting him as a respected novelist who makes little money. Ellin, on the other hand, was not known in literary circles, though he 166

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made a good living from his writing. One of the stories he enjoyed telling concerning his own position in the literary world was how, in 1969, New York Times literary critic John Leonard had decided to make a suspense writer popular among the literati. His choice came down to two, both of whom were strong writers, Ellin and Kenneth Millar (who wrote as Ross Macdonald). He ended up choosing Macdonald, leading the writer to a level of fame and fortune—and acceptance in the literary world—that Ellin would never match. Leonard describes the almost cavalier decision he and a Newsweek reporter made to promote Macdonald: We dilated on the thesis that Ross Macdonald had, quite consciously, married Freud to the detective story; that this was a worthy union; that not enough people were aware of it—his books sold modestly in hardcover and were only sporadically available in paperback—and attention should be paid. As a new Lew Archer novel, The Goodbye Look, was to be published in May, it was up to us to seize the moment. (60) Leonard’s choice of Macdonald instead of Ellin for his experiment certainly had various elements, none stemming from relative quality. Perhaps it was the psychology but, more likely, it was simply that Macdonald had a novel forthcoming. Ellin’s previous book, the Edgar-nominated The Valentine Estate, had appeared a year earlier and his next, The Bind, was not slated for publication until 1970. Another element may be that Leonard found he had more in common with Millar than with Ellin. Millar was a native of Leonard’s own Southern California and had a PhD in literature. In class terms, the two had a stronger tie that Leonard did with the writer from working-class Brooklyn, a borough then disdained by self-respecting Manhattanites and employees of The New York Times. Perhaps Leonard thought that Millar, in person, would be more acceptable than Ellin to the New York literary elite. In his article about promoting Macdonald written for Esquire six years later, Leonard goes out of his way to show mystery/suspense writers as every bit as erudite as the sophisticated Manhattanite—and fails to mention Ellin at all. Though he was made comfortable by his books and the movies and television shows they spawned, Ellin never broke through the barriers keeping him from a broader audience and greater appreciation. With few exceptions, his American hardboiled mystery/suspense genre could not, at the time, shake off its own working-class origins. Outside of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who were beginning to break into academic circles, its works were not yet considered alongside the putatively “literary.” Many critics and readers still imagined genre writing as nothing more than the home of the hack, a fact that sheds light on Belle Rountree and Milano’s discussion of her husband Scott and on Ellin’s own attitude brought to the soon-to-come The Dark Fantastic: “He’s dealt with very respectfully in literary circles. Real literary circles. And a hack doesn’t take years of sweat to write a novel. In thirteen years he’s written five of them, working full time.” “And a movie script.” “He put everything into it, just the way he does with his novels. He couldn’t be a hack if he tried.” “And that’s how you want it?” “That is damn well how I want it. When The New York Review of Books defines him as an authentic talent and gives him two full pages—” (118–119) Ellin worked much that same way and was worthy of such recognition. It hurt that he didn’t have it, but he could still make fun of himself as, in the person of Rountree, a pretentious writer hacking away at a screenplay though he still sees himself as something better. At the same time, he had no 167

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reason to pull punches when examining the liberal elite of America who ignored him, his criticism cutting close to the bone. Though a delightful read, Star Light, Star Bright does nothing to push the boundaries of the genre or to move its author beyond it. Recognizing this, Ellin may have wanted to do something more in his next book while continuing to participate in the genre in order to utilize his connection to the audience that had embraced him. He found an ingenious way to do this when he began laying out The Dark Fantastic, creating a structure that would eventually lead Philippe Van Rjndt, writing in The New York Times, to call this new novel one “that transcends its own genre” (BR 16), which, of course, was just what Ellin wanted. The omniscient, third-person narration of the bulk of the book fits the genre mold quite nicely—and the character Milano, with his working-class background and current sophistication, also meets genre expectations. The other part of the book, though, interspersed with the standard narration (and beginning the book), is a “transcription” of thirteen cassette tapes.They constitute a type almost unknown at the time Ellin was writing but that has, over the past few years, become a distinct genre of its own, the mass-murderer/terrorist confessional manifesto. Ellin’s inspiration for the manifesto may have been “Son of Sam” murderer David Berkowitz who, during his killing spree in the mid-1970s, began leaving taunting letters for the police that gathered great publicity. Not until the “Unabomber Manifesto” was published in 1995, however, did such documents begin to appear with regularity in relation to lone-wolf terrorist and massmurder attacks. So, in the early 1980s when Ellin was working on this book, the idea of recordings like Kirwan’s would probably have seemed almost preposterous—another of the likely reasons Random House and other publishers concocted for passing on the book. Sensational crimes like the Berkowitz spree were all over the press in the early 1980s. New York was particularly beset by violence. Racial divides, which would reach their 1980s height in New York with the “Central Park 5” case 1989 followed by the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, riots of 1991, vibrated down the avenues dividing almost every neighborhood. Brooklyn had yet to begin to experience its renaissance; most people outside of New York at the time associated the borough with the Welcome Back, Kotter imagery of chaotic subways, dilapidated classrooms, and threatening streets. Whites of the ascending working class had begun fleeing Brooklyn after World War II and the movement was still continuing, though many of the neighborhoods on the southern edge of the borough, including Bath Beach, were still determinedly ethnic (generally Italian, Irish, and reformed Jewish) and working-class—though Coney Island, with its array of government-project housing, was now almost completely African-American. Neighborhoods like East New York and Red Hook were seen, by those outside of them, as disaster areas. Williamsburg, now the center of hipster Brooklyn, was predominately Hasidic in its west (it still is) and Puerto Rican in its east (no longer). Patrician Brooklyn Heights remained as it always had been, and Park Slope was a decade into its long, slow process of gentrification, a small sign of what was to come. But most of Brooklyn was physically in decline, its housing stock neglected and deteriorating. Just four years after publication of The Dark Fantastic, Crown Heights landlord Morris Gross was sentenced to live in one of his own apartments, so bad were conditions. The building, on Sterling Street between Nostrand and New York Avenues, sits just a dozen blocks from where Ellin had lived (Terry 1). Spike Lee’s 1989 film set in nearby Bed-Stuy, Do the Right Thing, also features a white man in an increasingly African-American environment. Many older, white-owned businesses in Brooklyn had a difficult time adjusting to their new customer base, and landlords were finding that rent-control and related regulations were making adequate maintenance on their buildings more expensive than possible returns justified—a situation that Kirwan found himself in. At the end of The Dark Fantastic, a police official, Detective-Inspector Price, is shown the thirteen tapes that comprise the transcribed “manifesto” chapters of the novel. After listening to the first one, he turns to Milano, who had pointed them out to him: 168

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Price nodded at the cassettes. “That could be the longest suicide note in the Guinness book. And no matter how long they are, the bottom line is always the same. Nobody loves me so I’ll kill myself and then you’ll be sorry.” “They don’t all try to take along a building full of people though.” “No, they don’t. But this could put that idea into a lot of fucked-up brains. A lot of them. Because what we’ve got here, friend, is a great big media event. Happy days for the newspapers and TV from here to Hong Kong. And these fucking tapes will be the cherry on top of the sundae.” Price shook his head. “Crazy people. Crazy world.” (305) Today, the “fact” of Kirwan’s narrative would not be seen as particularly outrageous or unusual, though his graphic depictions of his acts of sexual abuse of a fifteen-year-old teenager probably would not appear in a “real” one. However, his desire for that media circus which, he believes (incorrectly, as Price informs Milano), will not only make him famous but his estate rich, certainly would. Perhaps, though, this is secondary to Kirwan, just as our contemporary mass murderers convince themselves it is to them. They all share a nasty, nearly apocalyptic vision: “Destruction of life on any such scale will be a lesson burned deep into the public consciousness. An instantaneous, raging, fiery course of study in the social history of this time and this place” (6). This line could have come from any twenty-first-century terrorist. Ellin does everything he can to make this villain loathsome but still understandable, which probably formed the gist of why publishers rejected The Dark Fantastic. From the novel’s opening page, Kirwan comes off as despicable; his words, his self-justification, are often difficult to read for they strike too close to home with many white Americans, particularly those of the liberal establishment. Complicating the problem is that, in the twenty-first century, he is just too believable, making the novel even more problematic today than it was to the minds of the editors who rejected it. Kirwan, who Ellin draws as a liberal college professor of the World War II generation, had been an advocate of the open admissions instituted by the City University of New York in the early 1970s. He provided support for African-American students not only generally but personally. During the “white flight” from Brooklyn after the war, he stayed put and interacted positively with his new neighbors and tenants—he owns the apartment building next to the house he inherited along with it. He is not an “other” to the liberal, northeastern upper class but is one of them. He is, in fact, more: he seems to have lived his life as an exemplar of the “good” white person. This probably horrified publishers, for Kirwan, behind his veneer or inclusivity, is not only a full-blown racist of the worst kind but a virulent antisemite, given that the only whites left in the building he wants to blow up are a “pair of malignant, whining old Jews” (19). He is an elitist, hating the lifestyles of people from the lower classes, people who he conflates with “ethnics.” Making matters worse, his hatred is combined with abusive sexual attraction and generalized blame of others for what he sees as the failures around him, failures that would otherwise have to be placed on himself and all of the others of a liberal establishment insisting on seeing itself as a force for good. By using a patrician college professor as the racist villain, Ellin extends racist attitudes toward blacks into the white, liberal, upper class. People there do not want to face this, not even as a hypothetical. The upper classes never want to be shown as the equivalent of what they imagine those below them to be. Ellin tries to make them see it. Ellin does soften his not-so-subtle attack on the racism and, indeed, classism, of the liberal establishment through the actions and attractions of Milano, whose political and social beliefs are never clearly established but who certainly is a success story in the eyes of the American elite he now operates among. Rising from ethnic Brooklyn to Central Park South, taking on all of the manners and graces of New York’s upper crust, Milano is now every inch the rich, cosmopolitan New Yorker. But, using Milano to point out that there is, at least, a minimal American meritocracy 169

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does not offer enough solace to mollify those who felt that Ellin has accused them of racism and a predatory elitism. Nor is it enough to show that Milano also can find African-Americans sexually attractive but, as opposed to Kirwan, in positive fashion. The mutual spark between him and Christine Bailey is clear from the first time they meet. She is a woman much younger than he (but who is, unlike her younger sister Lorena, an adult) who grew up in the apartment building Kirwan owns and who is on her own upward climb, working in a Midtown art gallery and appearing in an “off-offBroadway” show at night. The two have a great deal to negotiate, in terms of both race and class, before their relationship can be consummated. Their work on it is detailed through conversations in the novel such as this snippet: “No papa.” Christine’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Just what it sounds like. What do you think?” “You ask me, man, I think it sounds like oh sure papa took off long ago. You know how these blackie papas are. Love ’em and leave ’em and let Welfare do the mopping up. So it’s just another of these black mama families I’m walking in on.” Milano ran through astonishment and outrage. (86) When Milano introduces Bailey to a woman who could help her acting career, Bailey returns from a private interview with this person who, in Milano’s estimation, could not care less about race: “Your friend thinks I’m a high-class hooker.” “She said that?” “No. But she let it be known. You don’t come right out with things like that to a high-class hooker.You just let it be known how you rate them.” “Or,” said Milano, “is it possible that’s your reading of her?” “Oh, shit. Look, you really want to be educated, Johnny? Then listen close. This is not the first time it happened to me with people that color. Want to know why? Because I am a real foxy lady. Great-looking and with a lot of style. And very black.” “For chrissake,” Milano protested, but she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. (204) As the fact of their relationship is more important to the novel than its genesis, Ellin doesn’t spend too much time on the attraction itself, concentrating instead on the racial assumptions that need to be immediately negotiated if the relationship is to move forward, assumptions and discussion that contrast sharply (and necessarily) with Kirwan’s abuse of Chris Bailey’s teen-aged sister. Near Ellin’s apartment on Clarkson Avenue was an old Victorian house next to an apartment building built during the Great Depression, a building that had not been well maintained for some years. It was the combination (and juxtaposition) of house (which is no longer there) and apartment building that inspired The Dark Fantastic. Ellin probably imagined, with reason, that the lot the house was on was once much larger, that it probably had included the land under the apartment building. Ellin may have imagined a man in the house, one who had seen all the changes in the neighborhood since his youth in, say, the 1920s. What if this person were descended from centuries of Brooklyn residents, even from the original Dutch? How would he have adapted to the workingclass Irish, the Italians, and, now, the African-Americans who, in waves, colonized the neighborhood as the older white population abandoned it for the new suburbs and prices fell? He could not have stayed there himself without at least a veneer of welcome, of seeming, at least, to cheer 170

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on new and struggling populations. But would that be all? Could there be, underneath it, growing resentment toward the “invaders”? How might that manifest itself? What if he owned the building next door and it had, in fact, been built on the family yard? What if that building, because of rent regulations, now consistently lost him money? Ellin continued to expand on this imagined biography, one which Kirwan outlines in the novel: My father. Henry Witter. Sorry. Too much of a blank there. A lieutenant in the infantry during the First World War—a volunteer—he died of influenza in a hospital in Brest in 1918. Survived combat in the Argonne campaign. Died of influenza. I was five years old the last time I ever saw him. I have a favorable memory of him. I don’t know if it’s accurate… But his replacement in my life A different story. Daniel Kirwan, stepfather. Daniel Kirwan, born Roman Catholic, became a devoted Protestant. Devoted, remember. I did not say devout. Devoted to the Witter house, to the Witter Packard which he proudly drove to church each Sunday, to the Witter money, and possibly—as much as he could squeeze out that kind of devotion—to my widowed mother whom he married two years after my father’s death. Stupid. Burly red-faced, red-haired Hibernian, loud in his affections, his good intentions, his stupidity. (99–100) Even as a child, Kirwan recognized class and its implications and used it as part of his evaluation of worth and intelligence. His early life was dominated by his patrician, slowly-going-broke grandfather and his ambitious, formerly working-class stepfather. It was the stepfather who, after constant badgering of the grandfather, got the apartment building constructed, the first on the block, opening the door (in young Kirwan’s mind) to the decline of the block over the next fifty years. Ellin clearly knew that many who seemed to share his liberal beliefs on the surface shied away from proving them through action and now saw he had a way of addressing that. Many of those Brooklyn whites who fled the influx of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and others claimed beliefs in equality and inclusivity. Their actions, however, had proved otherwise. What if, Ellin must have wondered as he created Kirwan, one person of this type with skin-deep beliefs had stayed, had tried to live his self-proclaimed beliefs? What could trip his real nature into view? Cancer, impending financial ruin, and frustrated sexual yearnings: these would do it, says Ellin through this book. Coming from a liberal tradition, Kirwan was not allowed to vent the frustrations he saw as the neighborhood changed. Not then. Throughout most of his life, of course, he had to batten down his growing array of resentments. Unable to attend Princeton, as his ancestors had, because of losses the family sustained in the 1929 stock-market crash, he enrolled in “Borough College” (a thinly disguised Brooklyn College) and, under the influence of his amateur-historian grandfather, eventually went on to grad school. After service in demolition during World War II, Kirwan returned to Borough College as a history professor himself. During the late 1960s move to open admissions at the City University of New York (CUNY) of which Borough College is assumed to be a part, Kirwan became an active supporter of the African-American students who had forced the change and were now themselves changing CUNY. A kindly presence in the neighborhood, Kirwan wrote letters of recommendation for young people on the block, including Christine Bailey when she was applying for admission to the High School of Performing Arts. He married late, a woman who worked at the college, and saw her through a fatal battle with cancer. He had recently retired as an associate professor, an 171

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unusually low rank for someone who had served so long, and without emeritus status, a signal that things were not as right at his job as he might have one believe.Though it remains unstated, part of Kirwan’s anger probably stems from his own lack of notable success in his chosen field. The changes Kirwan lived through were those of American culture in general over his lifetime, though brought down to his small, Brooklyn perspective. Nell Irwin Painter describes the broad sweep of the early part of this: The change from 1920s hysteria to 1940s cultural pluralism occurred simultaneously in politics and in culture. As the Irish experience had illustrated, voting played a crucial role in the making of Americans out of the despised race of Celts. Though now snuggled into the Nordic race fold, Irish Americans continued to face discrimination as Catholics. But their difference no longer seemed as intrinsic and permanent as when they were disdained as members of the Celtic race. (346) To Kirwan, they did continue to seem “intrinsic and permanent” though, superficially, he acted as though he believed otherwise. He loved and disliked the Irish—that much is clear from his relationship with his stepfather—though he would prefer that they had never come around. His attitude towards African-Americans who followed is much more complicated and enshrouds his feeling for all of the ethnicities he had encountered earlier. Laced with desire and self-loathing, it is an externalization of his feelings about himself. Kirwan is battling cancer; the fact sparks him to plan the destruction of the building next door as his way out (he planned on dying in the explosion) and as his first and final expression of the hatreds that had been building for so long. He knows he has little time left and, not wanting to place himself in the hands of the medical profession that had failed his wife, has decided on other action. Physical pain allows him to let loose his pent-up racism and disgust for the lower classes. The decorum he had been raised to exhibit now serves no purpose, though retaining it provides cover for his two planned outrages, the sexual abuse of young Lorena and the destruction of the apartment building and the lives of all inside. Publishers probably felt they could not promote the depiction of a garden-variety liberal bearing such noxious desires and plans behind his pleasant, one-of-us face. The racism underneath is as virulent as any in liberal imaginings of the Deep South and it strips away the northerners’ smug superiority. The sexual abuse, too, is something the northern liberal elite for a long time associated with dilapidated trailer parks and not their own kind. Today, the idea that nice, gray-haired successful men could engage in the sexual abuse of young women has been forced into American consciousness by things like the Jeffrey Epstein case, which has startling parallels to Kirwan: The Miami prosecutors concluded, according to U.S. attorney’s office records, that Epstein, working through his female assistants, “would recruit underage females to travel to his home in Palm Beach to engage in lewd conduct in exchange for money … Some went there as much as 100 times or more. Some of the women’s conduct was limited to performing a topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself. For other women, the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse.” (Fisher et al.) Though Epstein’s actions are magnified and seem to lack the racial element, the parallel with Kirwan is clear. The “they” of this sort of event turns out to be “we,” something hard to accept from under the class and racial armor worn by so many Americans. To drive home the point about 172

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the true impact of what Kirwan has done, Ellin has the seemingly willing Lorena Bailey eventually react with physical revulsion to what has happened to her. Like Kirwan and Epstein, Donald Trump is also a New Yorker and, one would assume, shares New York inclusivity. But, again, like Kirwan, he hosts racial insecurities and animosities. His, though, bubble up more frequently, as they did on the 14th of July 2019 when he tweeted, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” when referring to Congresspeople of color in the opposition party. Claims of lack of racial bias rarely are proven by what comes from within. Though it may seem that The Dark Fantastic could become a favorite of the AltRight, Ellin has constructed it in such a way that it has to become as distasteful to them as to the liberals who rejected it over thirty years ago. In deliberate contrast to Kirwan, the working-class-raised Milano is able to cast racism from his inside as well as out. Both narrators find African-American women deeply attractive, but the college professor expresses this libido through the power imbalance of child sexual abuse while the detective approaches his desired with respect and negotiation. This inversion deliberately turns “normal” American class assumptions imagined by the liberal upper classes on their heads. Ellin, through his contrast between the two characters, is countering (and perhaps even manipulating) the vision of the New Englander’s ideal American expressed by Richard Hofstadter in AntiIntellectualism in American Life: As a rule, the genteel reformers were born in the Northeast—mainly in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania … Morally and intellectually these men were the heirs of New England, and for the most part as heirs by descent. They carried on the philosophical concerns of Unitarianism and transcendentalism, the moral animus of Puritanism, the crusading heritage of the free-soil movement, the New England reverence for education and intellectualism, the Yankee passion for public duty and civic reform … [Their] capacity for disinterested service was founded upon financial security and firm family traditions. The genteel reformers were not usually very rich, but they were almost invariably well-to-do. Hardly any were self-made men from obscure or povertystricken homes; they were the sons of established merchants and manufacturers, lawyers, clergymen, physicians, educators, editors, journalists, and publishers, and they followed their fathers into business and the professions. (175) Just as this passage describes Kirwan (on the surface), it also describes many at the publishing houses Ellin submitted his manuscripts to. Making matters worse (in terms of possible publisher acceptance), Ellin has Kirwan attack liberalism directly when explaining why he is, even on recognizing his own racism, unable to use certain derogatory terms: I can’t. In the mind, yes. Not for the public record.Why? Because—and there’s something almost comical about it—much as I’ve come to detest the stupidity and self-destructiveness of liberalism, social and political, I have been lobotomized by liberalism. Conditioned like a Pavlovian dog to wince at the sound of a racial epithet. (20) How could liberals, especially those with any doubt at all about their own deep commitment to their ideals, not wince as they read this passage in The Dark Fantastic? Rarely comfortable talking about race (or class, for that matter) except as something to be examined from afar, many in the American elite have never done the work necessary for finding comfort with their own feel173

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ings—feelings they have examined superficially, if at all—about race and class. It is easy to ascertain this even today. WNYC, New York City’s National Public Radio station, produced a show in 2019 called “Talking to White Kids About Race and Racism,” based on the supposition that white Americans still do not know how to express their feelings about race. Kirwan dismisses the attitudes behind such projects, which he would see as hypocritical and burying the truth: Love thy roaches. One line. Systemic sweet-scented liberal duplicity. (62) African-Americans are simply the latest in a long line of more and more sub-human (to Kirwan’s warped mind) invaders into his life. The first was that stepfather who adopted him (giving him a new last name) as a lever in his struggle for familial dominance against his father-in-law (Kirwan’s grandfather). This Irishman dropped his Catholic religion so that he could blend in with his new family. But he remained, to his stepson, an interloper—like all those people, other Irish, then Italian, Jewish, and African-American who came after. None of them could meet the standards set by the estimable Witter clan who name adorns “Witter Avenue.” Kirwan never sees himself as an iconoclast. Like contemporary terrorists, he imagines his action can lead others with similar feelings to emulate him, stating “This is not a case history, doctors.This is—and you must forgive my use of an archaic, dirty, despicable phrase—a social history” (61). His assumption is that those like him in background also harbor feelings akin to his, even if they will not admit to them. One assumes he would even extend this to his sexual desire for underage black women. Lorena, seduced by money, first, to do filing work for Kirwan in the nude and, second, after some different occasions of this, to perform fellatio, initially spends this new money on frills for herself and treats for her friends. But she eventually breaks down into physical revulsion manifested by continual vomiting leading to a state approaching catatonia. Who, one would like to ask Kirwan, is the real roach? One of the things Kirwan had been unable to do, perhaps because of his emotionally disjointed relationship with his stepfather, was to expand the category of what we now call “whiteness.” Instead, with each new group coming onto the block (and with the growing distance in physical appearance), the rubber bands holding his surface acceptance to his inner turmoil simply stretched, finally snapping when his cancer was diagnosed. Painter ends her The History of White People as follows: The fundamental black/white binary endures, even though the category of whiteness— or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness—effectively expands. As before, the black poor remain outside the concept of the American as an “alien race” of “degenerate families.” A multicultural middle class may diversify the suburbs and college campuses, but the face of poor, segregated inner cities remains black. For quite some time, many observers have held that money and interracial sex would solve the race problem, and, indeed, in some cases, they have. Nonetheless, poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness, driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior. (396) Written nearly thirty years after The Dark Fantastic, these lines confirm the continuing importance of the issues Ellin grapples with. Yet, for the most part, they continue to be issues ignored in the United States—even in the age of Trump, when they are being thrust into our faces. The Dark Fantastic still makes people uncomfortable and it will, until we begin to face the racism, classism, and sexual deviancy present in even the “best” of us. We should read it and talk about 174

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it. Perhaps, we can even begin to address the question of change in racial attitudes over the past three decades, determining whether they are real. Or, as Krugman claims, if Trump is any indication, we are all mired in racial attitudes that have not changed since the 1980s.

Works Cited Bump, Phillip. “The Problem with Trump’s Revolutionary War Airports Isn’t the Airports.” The Washington Post, 5 July 2019. “The Dark Fantastic.” Kirkus Reviews, 27 June 1983. www​.k​​irkus​​revie​​ws​.co​​m​/boo​​k​-rev​​iews/​​stanl​​ey​-el​​lin​-7​​/ the-​​dark-​​fanta​​stic/​. Douglas, Norman. South Wind. Dodd and Mead, 1928. Ellin, Stanley. Conversation with Aaron Barlow, Circa 1982.Verified by Otto Penzler, 29 June 2019. ———. The Dark Fantastic (The John Milano Mysteries Book 2). The Mysterious Press, 1983. ———. Dreadful Summit. The Mysterious Press, 2014. Ebook. ———. Star Light, Star Bright (The John Milano Mysteries Book 1). Random House, 1979. ———. Very Old Money. Arbor House, 1985. Fisher, Marc, Devlin Barrett and Kimberly Kindy. “The Pressure on a Prosecutor: How Epstein’s Wealth and Power Steered Acosta Toward Lenient Deal.” The Washington Post, 21 July 2019. Hodges, Karen. “Letters to the Editor: Don’t Demean All Karens and Chads.” Inside Higher Ed, 13 July 2020, www​.i​​nside​​highe​​red​.c​​om​/vi​​ews​/2​​020​/0​​7​/13/​​reade​​r​-cri​​ticiz​​es​-au​​thor-​​assum​​ing​-a​​ll​-ka​​rens-​​and​-c​​hads-​​ are​-m​​orall​​y​-inf​​erior​​-lett​​er. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. James, Jamie. “‘South Wind,’ a Strange Literary Best-Seller, a Hundred Years Later.” The New Yorker, 21 June 2017. Lee, Spike, dir. Do the Right Thing. Universal. 1989. Leonard, John. “I Care Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” Esquire, Aug. 1975, pp. 60–61, 120. Murdoch, Derrick. “It’s A Crime: How Crime’s Grand Master Spooked the Big Publishers.” The Globe and Mail (Canada), 3 Sep. 1983. Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, vol. 13, no. 76, 1946, pp. 252–265. Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton, 2011. Penzler, Otto. “Interview by Aaron Barlow.” 29 June 2019. Telephone Interview. ———. “Stan Ellin’s ‘The Dark Fantastic.’” Received by Aaron Barlow, 29 June 2019. Email Interview. Petersen, Clarence. “The Dark Fantastic by Stanley Ellin.” The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1985. chica​​gotri​​bune.​​ com​/n​​ews​/c​​t​-xpm​​-1985​​-10​-2​​0​-850​​31106​​​82​-st​​ory​.h​​tml. @realDonaldTrump (Donald Trump). “…and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how…” Twitter, 14 July 2019. twitt​​er​.co​​m​/rea​​lDona​​ldTru​​mp​/st​​atus/​​11503​​81395​​​07800​​0643.​ “Talking to White Kids About Race and Racism.” Specials. National Public Radio, 29 May 2019. Terry, Don. “Found in Contempt, A Landlord Begins a Term in His Building.” The New York Times, 13 Feb. 1988. Van Rjndt, Philippe. The New York Times, 11, Sep. 1983, p. BR16. Print. Williams, Lachlan. “Letters to the Editor: In Defense of Millard Fillmore.” Inside Higher Ed, 5 Aug. 2020, www​ .i​​nside​​highe​​red​.c​​om​/vi​​ews​/2​​020​/0​​8​/05/​​lette​​r​-def​​ends-​​milla​​rd​-fi​​llmor​e

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13 PRODUCTIVE DISRUPTION IN THE WORKING-CLASS POETRY OF JAN BEATTY, SANDRA CISNEROS, AND WANDA COLEMAN Carrie Conners

In January 2018 the satirical news show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee featured a segment about media coverage of the American working class. It emphasized that media coverage since the 2016 US presidential election has disproportionately focused on the lives and concerns of white male industrial workers despite the fact that the working class is much more diverse, in terms of gender, race, and job type. In the segment, Bee failed to find any working-class people to interview in a bar because the workers, all white male industrial laborers, were already being interviewed by members of the media. After this failed attempt, Bee was taken to a room full of working-class folks who were not already bombarded with interview requests, all women and people of color. Their conversation, though funny, highlighted serious issues that these workers face, including quality of life matters and real economic anxiety, not the coded “economic anxiety” that came to stand in for racism and xenophobia during the 2016 US presidential election. Bee cheekily concluded that these media-neglected women and minority workers need a Bruce Springsteen-esque anthem to garner the attention of the mainstream media. The proposed solution, though hilarious and obviously in jest, seemed a bit futile. There have already been numerous hit songs about working-class women and people of color, including Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” and The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” yet the media and cultural imagination still overwhelmingly link the label of working-class to white male industrial workers. Thanks to the work of scholars, including Paul Lauter and Janet Zandy, working-class women poets have not been as neglected as the women workers in Bee’s segment. But contemporary working-class women poets still have not garnered the critical attention and treatment that they merit. Scholarship on recent American working-class poetry written by male poets, such as Philip Levine, still outpaces that focused on their female colleagues. To address this disparity, in this article I will explore how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of several contemporary American women poets, specifically Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. I chose to analyze the work of these poets, each from a different geographical and racial background, in order to highlight the richness and diversity of American women’s contemporary working-class poetry. Despite these differences in background, there are many commonalities to be found in their poetry. Their work shares a sense of defiance and resistance, created by destructive and/or violent imagery, imagery of labor, and explicit depictions of sexuality. The proletarian poets who saw art 176

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as a weapon spring to mind when reading their poems. Proletarian poets believed that literature should be used to change people’s minds. Cary Nelson, discussing poetry written between 1910 and 1945, much of it proletarian, claims that the poetry “[h]ad the power to help people not only come to understand the material conditions of their existence but also to envision ways of changing them” (Nelson 124). Similarly, the work of Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman seeks to explore and represent the lives of the working class and to alter others’ conceptions of workingclass women and working-class women writers. Their work enacts the disruption necessary to carve out a space for themselves as writers, which sometimes involves pushing back against the expectations of their working-class communities and often requires breaking down barriers in the writing establishment. They resist the scripts assigned to working-class women. Part of this resistance is an insistence on physical, often sexual, pleasure. This celebration of sexual pleasure runs counter to societal expectations of women’s behavior; emphasizes that their bodies are their own, not just vessels for work or objects of pleasure for men; and resists the numbing effects of capitalism.

Solidarity: Backgrounds and Connections Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman began regularly publishing poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. In the same time period, many influential volumes of poetry that explored working-class lives appeared, including Philip Levine’s National Book Award-winning What Work Is (1991); Jim Daniels’s Punching Out (1990) and M-80 (1993); and Jeanne Bryner’s Blind Horse (1999). Several critics offer hypotheses about why the 1980s and 1990s in particular saw such robust representation of American working-class poetry. In Inside Jobs: Essays on the New Work Writing, Tom Wayman cites “increased access to post-secondary education since World War II” as one reason for the uptick in working-class poetry (Wayman 24). As Jim Daniels, a poet who frequently writes about workingclass issues and lives, points out in his essay,“Work Poetry and Working-Class Poetry:The Zip Code of the Heart,” several presses and literary journals dedicated to publishing poetry of work emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, including Bottom Dog Press and Blue Collar Review (Daniels 115–116). I would add to this list of possible reasons for the increase in publication of working-class poetry during that time period, economic shifts that affected the working class—including deindustrialization, the rise of the service economy, and the weakening of unions. Criticism of Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s “trickle-down economics” and how it squeezed the US middle and working classes also augmented cultural awareness of working-class issues and impelled writers to voice these concerns and represent the lives of people dealing with these realities. The emphasis on the working class during this time period can be seen in other sectors, such as the entertainment industry, which saw the television sitcom Roseanne near the top of the ratings for the late 1980s and the better part of the 1990s; successful films including Do the Right Thing, 9 to 5, and Silkwood; and numerous hit songs by musicians including Tracy Chapman, Dolly Parton, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, John Mellencamp, and Bruce Springsteen. Sandra Cisneros, Jan Beatty, and Wanda Coleman directly identify as workers and as writers committed to representing the working class. In the author biographies from some of their books, in addition to emphasizing their writing accolades, their self-descriptions include a litany of other jobs. On her webpage, Cisneros describes herself as “an activist poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist and artist. Writing for over 50 years, her work explores the lives of the working-class.” Her 1995 volume of poetry, Loose Woman, mentions that “[s]he has worked as a teacher of high school drop-outs, a poet-in-the-schools, a college recruiter, an arts administrator, and most recently as a visiting writer at a number of universities around the country.” Beatty’s author description in her 1995 book Mad River indicates that she “has held jobs as a welfare caseworker, a rape counselor, and a nurse’s aide. She has worked in maximum security prisons, hoagie huts, burger joints, jazz clubs, and diners.” Wanda Coleman’s author description in her 1998 book, Bathwater Wine, includes the following: “As a struggling young welfare mother, she was determined to become a writer. She has 177

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worked as a medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist, and scriptwriter.” Including these jobs in literary biographies next to their awards and fellowships shows how these writers value work. These inclusions also emphasize that these writers had to work in order to support their literary production. They want this fact to be known because it shows the material conditions affecting working-class writers, specifically working-class women writers. These lists show respect for other people working those jobs, that their labor and societal contributions should be respected, and also that people working in those jobs are more than those jobs. The medical secretary or diner server has interests beyond their position and might also be a poet or an artist. Listing the jobs also emphasizes that people who work in those jobs should be represented in poetry, in art. Workers’ lives are valuable, interesting, and important. Jan Beatty is a Pittsburgh poet who, as we can see in the epigraph from her 2002 text, Boneshaker, links her recurrent poetic subject of working-class life with the act of poetic creation: “What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is the wind, what is it?” Although Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons might not immediately conjure associations of working-class life, in the context of Beatty’s work—the poem that opens the book is titled “Machine Shop of Love”—Stein’s words evoke the industrial settings, sexuality, and electricity that pervade her poems. She frequently writes about her own working experiences and those of others, as we can see from a small sampling of her poems’ titles: “A Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don’t Waste My Time,” “Cruising with the Check-out Girls,” “The Waitress Angels Speak to Me in a Vision,” and “My Father Teaches Me Solidarity.” In “Sticking It to the Man,” Beatty’s respect for other working-class women is conveyed in the description of one of the poem’s subjects, a bank teller: Lateeka’s working, my favorite teller— she’s got wild nail art & fire red/ feather extensions … Lateeka & I always talk hair & makeup, she’s in school for accounting. (The Switching/Yard 58) Beatty’s speaker knows details of the bank teller’s life and her aspirations and has a friendly relationship with her, which starkly contrasts with the impatient man in line behind the speaker who shouts about the wait and storms out of the bank. This is just one example of care for other working-class people in Beatty’s poems, which even show concern for difficult working-class customers in poems describing work as a waitress, including the eponymous woman in “Louise” who inexplicably wants “a cheeseburger with no cheese,” not “a hamburger” (Boneshaker 31). This sense of sympathy probably stems from recognition that these people also had to face the difficult situations that Beatty describes in “I Knew I Wasn’t Poor,” deciding whether to “buy tampons or birth control pills,” combating hunger by hoarding leftovers from rich restaurant customers instead of tossing the food, and foregoing insurance for a car (Jackknife 41). The speaker’s solutions to these problems aren’t always legal (shoplifting) or wise “thr[owing] parking tickets in / the backseat with a flurry,” but instead of feeling “shame,” the speaker feels “accomplishment” for figuring out “how to live” in difficult circumstances, just as Lateeka, Louise, and other working-class women have to do (Jackknife 41). Born in Chicago, growing up there and in Mexico in a working-class family, later living in San Antonio, Sandra Cisneros explores the lives of working-class people, frequently Chicanas, in her poetry. As we see in Beatty’s work, Cisneros also connects laboring with writing. In the titular poem from her 1995 collection Loose Woman, Cisneros’s speaker declares: 178

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I am the woman of myth and bullshit. (True. I authored some of it.) I built my little house of ill repute. Brick by brick. Labored, loved and masoned it. (Loose Woman 112) Playfully using terminology of construction, the speaker depicts her identity formation, as a woman and a writer, as an act of physical labor. The epigraph by Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, another independent woman artist, from her 1987 volume, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, echoes that stanza’s casting of artistic creation as work: “I can live alone and I love to work.” She gives a voice to those workers, especially working-class Chicana women, underrepresented in literature, and categorizes her own writing as work. In this way she is not apart from the working class but a part of it; her work is to represent their lives. In “Las Girlfriends,” a poem that depicts snapshots of the lives of the speaker’s working-class friends, we see this solidarity enacted in the opening stanza: Tip the barmaid in tight jeans. She’s my friend. Been to hell and back again. I’ve been there too. (Loose Woman 105) The speaker implores the reader to treat her friend well and pay her for her work, acknowledging that they have both lived through tough times. At this point, the speaker’s command seems directed at a generic reader, but the first word of the second stanza, “Girlfriend,” reveals that the speaker is addressing a specific reader, a girlfriend, a woman, or a person who identifies and sympathizes with women, who can relate to the speaker’s contention that, though she “believe[s] in Gandhi,” “some nights nothing says it / quite precise like a Lone Star / cracked on someone’s head” (Loose Woman 105). Other girlfriends are introduced in the poem, their often-violent transgressions detailed or hinted at, such as “Little Rose of San Antone,” “the queen bee of kick-nalga,” of whom the speaker advises, “When you go out with her, / don’t wear your good clothes” (Loose Woman 106). The speaker includes her own act of violence when she “kicked a cowboy in the butt / who made a grab for Terry’s ass,” claiming “it was all / of Texas I was kicking, / and all our asses on the line” (Loose Woman 105). These acts of violence are not characterized as isolated events, but connected, each one performed in defense of all the girlfriends and the trauma that they are made to endure, being harassed on the job and on their leisure time, treated as if they are servants or objects for others’ pleasure. At the end of the poem, someone declares of the girlfriends, “Ya’ll wicked mean,” but the speaker denies it, characterizes the outbursts as something deeper than meanness: I tell you, nights like these, something bubbles from the tips of our pointy boots to the top of our coyote yowl. (Loose Woman 106) The girlfriends’ frustration and anger are ever-present; they keep it to a simmer until something sets them off to cause it to “bubble” over. It’s a shared state of existence, difficult to endure, that Cisneros acknowledges and honors. 179

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Wanda Coleman lived and worked in Los Angeles and made her experiences and those of others who lived there the subjects of her poems. Although Coleman wrote drama and fiction, the fact that so much of her writing takes the form of poetry is not by chance; as Jarvis McInnis points out, she predominantly wrote poetry because she could do so in the brief spaces of time between her various jobs and responsibilities, including waiting tables, typing, and caring for her children (McInnis 190–191). Much of Coleman’s work explores the intersections of gender, race, and class, as we can see in “South Central Los Angeles Death Trip, 1982,” a poem from her collection, Mercurochrome, that presents a series of individuals’ encounters with police violence. Each section emphasizes the victim’s gender, race, and work to create a picture of each individual’s life—such as the 8 1/2-months-pregnant woman who “had just gotten home from working / the register at the club and her feet were / killing her” (Mercurochrome 144)—and to emphasize that poor and working-class minorities, particularly African-Americans, are too often the victims of police violence. In addition to their on-the-job and life struggles, Coleman shows the difficulties of finding work for working-class women of color. In “Job Hunter,” from her 1987 volume Heavy Daughter Blues, Coleman casts the speaker as an outlaw in a western, the job interview a “showdown” (Heavy Daughter Blues 18).The speaker stresses that, as an interviewee, she must combat the racial prejudice of the bosses, typically white men. The speaker wonders “what’s it about me that frightens these dough-flesh / desk-riders? Something outlaw” (Heavy Daughter Blues 18). Although the speaker claims her undoing in a second interview is due to “the sheriff,” “an IBM executive” typewriter that “shoots 120 words per secretary” and is “too fast for [her],” the poem shows that the real killer is the racial discrimination that ends the interviewee’s chances before the interview even begins, leading to the speaker’s rejection or “death,” which Coleman characterizes as “an elevator on its way / down to the lobby” (Heavy Daughter Blues 18).The poetry of all three writers conveys a sense of solidarity among others through shared experiences and represents a community of workingclass people, a feature common to working-class writing observed by critics including Paul Lauter, Janet Zandy, and Karen Kovacik (Lauter 65; Zandy 11; Kovacik 35). Beyond showing solidarity with working-class people in their poetry, Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman have repeatedly shown solidarity with each other. Beatty cites both Cisneros and Coleman as influences, as people “who gave me permission to write through their writing” (Interview). Beatty had Cisneros as a guest on her long-running radio show, Prosody, and in her 2013 book, The Switching/Yard, she has a poem titled “Reading Wanda Coleman on the California Zephyr,” which includes the lines, “Iowa needs some Wanda Coleman, someone who’s / not afraid to say it hard” (25), high praise from a writer whose most recent collection of new and selected poems, Jackknife, begins with the dedication, “for women everywhere / who are told to be nice / and to shut up—.” Coleman wrote a poem, “Thunderhead,” in Mercurochrome based on Cisneros’s “Cloud” in Loose Woman. Cisneros and Coleman have written blurbs for Beatty’s books. Of Beatty’s 2002 book, Boneshaker, Cisneros writes: “Wild girl fire” is what Jan Beatty calls it, “that white-hot tearing” that ignites into art or self-destruction. Poetry against all odds. Poetry as the death-defying act. Poetry as the wild choice for a girl running reckless from the working class. Between odd jobs and odd loves, Beatty writes from the tender heart without flinching. Beatty’s 2008 Red Sugar inspired Coleman to claim: Having mastered the art of fury, Jan Beatty does not merely write a poem, she wrenches it into being, slaps it on the page, applies the flames of her passions, then gentles it into the sweating fleshy sweetness of childhood hungers, longings inspired by loneliness or loss, starkly erotic yearnings—all served in deliciously monstrous proportions, to be savored like a long slow French, that perfect tongue of a kiss that sets the soul on throb. 180

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These assessments of Beatty’s work are equally applicable to the poetry of Cisneros and Coleman. Theirs, too, is a poetry that “ignites,” “wrenches,” and “gentles.” A “wild choice” “to be savored.”

Isolation and Marginalization Working-class women with creative aspirations face many obstacles, even in comparison to working-class men. The difference can be seen in Philip Levine’s award-winning poetry volume that focuses on working-class lives, What Work Is. In the collection, we see working-class people with artistic ambitions, but they are often male. For example, the speaker’s brother in the volume’s titular poem works the night shift at the Cadillac factory and spends his days studying German so that he can sing Wagner (Levine 18). Smart, creative working-class women are depicted differently in the book. About a female classmate in “Coming of Age in Michigan,” described as “a skinny whiz in Math and English,” Levine’s speaker states, Noel Baker did not become a famous woman: it was too late to enter the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, too early for her to become the governor of Michigan, which hardly makes you famous. (Levine 66) The options left to Noel Baker to achieve success in the late 1940s during which the poem is set are spare. Playing on her last name, which she shares with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby, Levine’s speaker deems Noel Baker too late to be represented in such literature, let alone as possessing the option of penning literature like Fitzgerald or Levine himself, despite her English skills. At the time, as Levine’s speaker notes, opportunities in politics for women were also rare. Levine captures the difficulties that women faced in the contrasting lines “boys growing into men” and “girls fighting to be people” (Levine 67). While boys face growing pains, girls must struggle to be recognized as humans. Near the poem’s conclusion, the speaker recalls seeing Noel Baker again years later “talking too much and too loudly” in a liquor store, suggesting that these gendered societal limitations drove her to alcoholism. Although the poetry of Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman often depicts events that occurred later than the 1940s of Levine’s poem, it frequently describes the difficult position of working-class women poets, recalling the frustrations experienced by Noel Baker. To become poets, workingclass women writers often defy familial and social expectations, creating a sense of isolation from people they love. They also face resistance from the writing establishment, one that is overwhelmingly middle- and upper-class and publishes male writers with far greater frequency, leaving them marginalized. On top of it all, they must balance the economic pressures that accompany workingclass life with the time and energy required for poetic production. In Beatty’s “My Father Teaches Me to Dream,” a poem that captures a lecture from her late father, a working-class Pittsburgh man, in his voice, the speaker declares “all this other stuff you’re looking for— / it ain’t there. / Work is work” (Boneshaker 25). His sentiment echoes Levine’s thought of Noel Baker: that she had limited options in life, that work isn’t something that fulfills one’s dreams or passions. The poem conveys the familial tensions that many working-class writers experience. To pursue a career that differs from those of the family creates confusion, rifts. Some of this tension may stem from a place of protection, not wanting the budding writer to face rejection from those who may see her as an outsider because of her class. Some of the resistance may result from the conflict between the concept of work as one’s passion and work as a means to an end. Beatty’s father’s conception of work acts as a coping mechanism for him, as a way to get through the experience of work that doesn’t fulfill him. Obviously, Beatty chose another path and turned 181

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words dissuading her from pursuing something other than unfulfilling labor into art, simultaneously legitimizing her voice, her stories, and the voice and story of her father. But that path is one that often results in a distancing from family members, creating a sense of isolation which is compounded by the feelings of isolation that are inherent to working-class identity. Indeed, when Beatty describes her difficult customer Louise, mentioned earlier, she claims, “I know her faded rose blouse and lumpy / wool skirt say: working class: apart” (Boneshaker 32). In the prefatory poem to the rerelease of her 1987 volume My Wicked Wicked Ways, Cisneros depicts her decision to be a poet as one not offered to her, as a crime that she committed to escape her limited options that resembled those of Levine’s Noel Baker: My first felony—I took up with poetry. For this penalty, the rice burned. Mother warned I’d never wife Wife? A woman like me whose choice was rolling pin or factory. An absurd vice, this wicked wanton writer’s life. (My Wicked Wicked Ways x) Cisneros eschewed domestic labor represented by the rolling pin and physical labor as a factory worker, but, interestingly, her casting off of these options is described using a verb that conjures the factory: “Winched the door with poetry and fled. / For good. And grieved I’d gone / when I was so alone” (My Wicked Wicked Ways x). That Cisneros “winched the door with poetry” suggests that she does not leave the working-class behind when she departs to become a writer. Her poetry is her work. Despite this connection, it was a struggle to carve out a new option, one that brought a sense of loneliness and pain. In her poetry Wanda Coleman expresses the difficulties of her writing life as an African-American working mother and often stresses the differences between her experience as an artist and those of other poets with different, more privileged, subject positions and material conditions. In one section of Mercurochrome, “Retro Rogue Anthology,” in the words of Malin Pereira from her article on that section, “Coleman supplants, corrects, appreciates, extends, and critiques many of the poems in a 1969 anthology titled The Contemporary Poets: American Poetry Since 1940, edited by Mark Strand, as well as other poems by recognized poets of the modern period” (Pereira). Pereira’s article focuses on how Coleman’s poems claim a space in the American poetic canon, but the poems also emphasize the challenges and realities of a working African-American woman poet. In one poem after Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” titled “Supermarket Surfer,” Coleman’s speaker is not shopping for images like Ginsberg’s was, but more mundane “pudding and citrus-free hand lotion,” does not find Whitman in her 2am shopping trip, declares “hang ten toward checkout is a certainty,” while Ginsberg’s speaker somehow never passes the cashier (Mercurochrome 194; Ginsberg 182–183). Coleman concludes the poem on a more solitary, somber note than that of Ginsberg’s: the only Walt here is Disney the pork chops are killing me i am a nobody angel my heart is a frozen delicacy. (Mercurochrome 194) Although, as Pereira also observes, there is unmistakable reverence for Ginsberg and his poetry in Coleman’s poem, Coleman stresses the differences between the material conditions she experi182

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ences and the ones that Ginsberg did (Pereira). Hers offers lackluster goods and does not end by communing with a poet mentor. It takes care to emphasize the material concerns that keep her grocery shopping thoughts more down to earth than Ginsberg’s. Also, as we’ve seen in Beatty’s and Cisneros’s poems, there is a sense of isolation here.The speaker doesn’t feel the immediate connection with writers past and present or with other shoppers in the store.

Embodied Resistance Work’s effects on the body are addressed by all three writers, as we can see in Coleman’s “Identifying Marks,” a poem that lists the physical marks on the speaker’s body, most of which can be attributed to the stresses of a life as a working-class woman writer. These include the writing-related finger callus from “pencils & pens held too firmly”; “assorted dark splotches” from “stasis dermatitis,” caused by “acute and/or / chronic stress”; pregnancy stretch marks; multiple scars from fights with lovers including a “puffy right lip” from a “drunk Louisianan boyfriend who stole ten dollars from purse”; a spot under an eye from a “severe skin eruption following employer’s threat to fire / & sudden unexpected return of estranged second husband”; and finally, “shadows circling eyes,” undoubtedly resulting from the stress that all of these mark-leaving experiences caused (Heavy Daughter Blues 198). Beatty emphasizes how working-class women’s bodies are commodified in the workplace. In “The Waitress Angels Speak to Me in a Vision,” the waitress speaker describes “4:00 am flashbacks of men / trying to put their hands on me, regulars / who think they own me,” showing how sexual harassment haunts victims (Boneshaker 55). In “Shooter” the speaker dreams of shooting multiple men who harassed her on the job, including a customer who “asked about [her] ‘hole,’” a “cook who grabbed me from behind in the restaurant kitchen,” a “boss who gave [her] a ride home wanted a blow job / pushed [her] head down,” and a “restaurant manager who told [her] to grow a thicker skin & wear a skimpy uniform” (Red Sugar 14). This imagined revenge violence recalls Cisneros’s speaker’s actual violent act in “Las Girlfriends” when she kicks a man in the butt because he tried to grab her friend’s. Yet, in the poetry of all three writers, the body of the woman speaker is most often described in terms of her own physical pleasure. Part of this reveling in pleasure seems to push against notions of “the good girl,” as we see in the titles of Cisneros’s poetry collections, Loose Woman and My Wicked Wicked Ways, but there is also an element of reclamation in the descriptions of pleasure, claiming their bodies, the experience of inhabiting their bodies, as their own, not as objects to give men pleasure or as vessels to perform work to uphold capitalist society. This reclamation and celebration of sexuality is particularly significant because of the pejorative ways that working-class women’s sexuality has been stereotyped, often as promiscuous and lacking moral standards. The “classy vs. trashy” dichotomy frequently employed when describing women’s sexuality illustrates this stereotype as does research that suggests a class dimension in the phenomenon of slut-shaming. Racist stereotypes and religion-based cultural norms further impact the expression of sexuality for many working-class women of color. Instead of self-repressing by avoiding the subject of sexuality in their poetry or trying to combat these stereotypes with reactionary portrayals of chastity or purity, Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman assert sexual agency in a way that underscores working-class women’s personal autonomy. Cisneros’s poems unapologetically celebrate sexuality and pleasure, as we see in the speaker’s self-description in “Loose Woman”: “Rowdy. Indulgent to excess. / My sin and success— / I think of me to gluttony” (Loose Woman 113). In “Christ You Delight Me,” the title playfully, subversively blending sex and religion, the speaker revels in the memory of encounters with a lover and declares that, despite being away from the lover, she has to “hunker / My cunt close to the earth, / This little pendulum of mine / Ringing, ringing, ringing” (Loose Woman 133). Boldly owning her indulgences, Cisneros asserts her body as her own while flouting traditional expectations of 183

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womanhood, including passivity and chastity, especially pronounced in Latino/a culture. As Laura Paz describes in her article analyzing Cisneros’s prose: The traditionally “proper” role of a Mexican woman is to be submissive to the male figures in her life, to be sexually inactive, and to take care of the home and children. A woman who breaks out of these constraints is someone who is considered a whore—a woman whom men will use for sex but will never marry … [Cisneros] employs such archetypes not to instruct girls on how to behave properly, but rather to question society’s construction of them, and in turn, a Mexicana’s sexuality. (Paz 12) Cisneros’s speaker in “Loose Woman” does not conform to these archetypes, nor is she a woman who is being used by anyone. She acts on her own desires as she sees fit, defining her own identity. Racist historical narratives characterized African-American women as hypersexualized. According to several theorists, efforts by African-American women to combat these harmful stereotypes, including the promotion of Victorian morals, eventually led to “a ‘politics of silence’ by black women on the issue of their sexuality” (Hammonds). Angela Y. Davis identifies AfricanAmerican women blues singers, figures that she links to the working-class, as positive, independent models of black female sexuality. Davis characterizes the blues singers as “emphatic examples of black female independence” who “assert[] their right to be respected … as truly independent human beings with vividly articulated sexual desires” (Davis 20).Wanda Coleman frequently references and invokes women blues singers in her poetry, including Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues 1969” when the speaker claims, “i haven’t been conceived yet / haven’t been born / yet Lady Holiday is singing my blues” (Ostinato Vamps 11). And, notably, Coleman’s depictions of sexuality recall the sexual agency that Davis identifies in the blues women’s songs, as we can see in “To an Interloper.” Coleman’s speaker tells the interloper who wants to romance her “you are a foreigner here. / this is my skin” (Mercurochrome 143), asserting her agency and independence. The speaker explains, “the heat that cracks and dries your consciousness / is my breath on my lover’s chest. you have no claim here,” simultaneously acknowledging her desirability and denying the interloper access to her body (Mercurochrome 143).The speaker commands respect from others while celebrating her sexuality. By actively seeking pleasure, the poets’ speakers resist a numb existence, which the stresses of working-class life, compounded by the stresses of being a woman or a woman of color in a patriarchal society plagued by racism, can lead to. Kathi Weeks describes the connection between the American work ethic and prizing of heterosexual marital monogamy under US capitalism: One of the most persistent elements of the work ethic over the course of US history is its valorization of self-control in the face of the temptations and what Daniel Rodgers characterizes as a faith in the “sanitizing effects of constant labor” (1978, 123, 12). This same productivist asceticism, which was designed to encourage work discipline and thrift, has also served to animate the ideal of heterosexual marital monogamy. (Weeks 164–165) Weeks also unpacks the gendered uses of the word “tramp”; a male tramp challenges the American work ethic and a female tramp poses a threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage (Weeks 165).The portrayals of sexual pleasure in the poets’ work then, most describing sex outside of marriage or not defining the nature of the relationships between lovers, resist the confines of capitalism in addition to challenging gender and cultural norms. In “Ostinato Vamp,” the speaker, who claims that she is “the daughter of earthquakes / dissonant and disruptive,” is a threat to capitalist society in many ways (Ostinato Vamps 32). Indeed, 184

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one definition of the word “vamp” is “a woman who uses her charm or wiles to seduce and exploit men,” a more cunning version of the female tramp Weeks describes (Merriam Webster). The speaker repeatedly claims that she stole, a true offense to the capitalist system, “from god-slinging hypocrites,” “shysters given / judgeships, panderers governing media, sanctioned gamblers,” among other figures who abuse the system of capitalism for their own gain (Ostinato Vamps 32). Coleman’s refrain of “i stole” is particularly clever as the titular words “ostinato” and “vamp” both refer to a repeated musical phrase, a defining characteristic of the blues and jazz. “Ostinato” has etymological connections to “obstinate,” which is apt since persistence is required to combat those who use their money and power to oppress (Merriam Webster). Later, the speaker describes herself and her lover as “ready to fornicate,” but in the next line a parenthetical describing the drudgery of work appears instead of a description of their sexual encounter, implying that the sex itself is an escape from “a bad season spent chained to a filing cabinet / bosses like dogs barking for important files / the rain of empty talk riving the intellect” (Ostinato Vamps 32). This act of sexual pleasure is a form of rebellion against the limitations of work as well as a return to and reclamation of the body and the mind, a celebration of, as the speaker puts it in the poem’s ending, “[her] splendid rock-and-roll” (Ostinato Vamps 32). Two poems in Beatty’s Boneshaker that depict the speaker reveling in sexual pleasure involve speeding away from her job (waitress in “Going Deep for Jesus” and cashier in “Speaking Corvette”) in/on a vehicle (motorcycle and corvette, respectively) with a love interest, both working-class men. The poems depict the jobs and certain realities of the speakers’ lives, including a “run-down apartment” and her mother’s house, as things to escape from, things that stifle pleasure. In “Going Deep for Jesus,” the speaker even wants to forget her name. Sex is something that helps the speaker, as she wryly describes, “come / back to my self ” (Boneshaker 7). Sex is a way to become in tune with herself and her body. The speaker “decided god and orgasm / were the same thing” and that “if god were here, she’d shove down / like a two-stroke in a rainstorm, she’d let it fly” (Boneshaker 8).These moments of physical pleasure, orgasm, and speeding down a road on a motorcycle are figured as transcendent, and though the speaker longs to escape her job and her material conditions, she doesn’t long to escape Pittsburgh, the place where she is from. The speaker characterizes sex as an attempt “to shotgun a moment, to split open / our lives until / we were the mills, we were the fire” (Boneshaker 8).The speaker longs to embody the spirit and energy of the place; she just wishes that her life in that place afforded her a better-quality existence.

Carving a Space All three poets express the need for boldness, invoke images of aggression, destruction, or violence when describing the process of writing and claiming a space in the writing community. Coleman writes about the difficulty for women writers to be considered equals by male peers in “Poetry Lesson Number One.” The speaker describes a group of male writers who hang out at a café and notes that “[n]o / women were / allowed at that table unless being schemed upon, or of / exceptional beauty” (Heavy Daughter Blues 15). The speaker “boldly intruded” on their group and gave them poems of hers to read, which impressed one of the poets so much that he declared, “‘You are a writer, young / lady. As good a / writer as a man!’” (Heavy Daughter Blues 15). And though the nineteen-year-old speaker is elated by the praise, she goes home “glowing in the dark,” as the gender discrimination that women writers face is stressed even in his attempt to compliment the speaker (Heavy Daughter Blues 15). In “Obituary,” a poem modeled after Denise Levertov’s “The Springtime,” Coleman’s speaker laments unread poets, those that are excluded from the writing establishment. She links their unheard verses with the demands of work: “the gut-rending / sound of cogs grinding and poets / felled silent” (Mercurochrome 207). Reworking Levertov’s closing lines: “The rabbits / will bare their teeth at / the spring moon” (Levertov 82), Coleman imagines a future, aggressive act of 185

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the true yet unread poets, revolutionary and defiant: “eking out a space at the mean / end of time. They will bare their / teeth and spring at the moon” (Mercurochrome 207). As Pereira notes, Coleman transforms Levertov’s “spring,” an adjective describing the moon, referencing a season, into an active verb, indicating the struggle necessary for the ignored poets to have their voices heard (Pereira). In “Loose Woman,” Cisneros casts the poet-speaker as an outlaw, indeed as “la desperada, mostwanted public enemy. / My happy picture grinning from the wall” (Loose Woman 114). She does not conform to traditional notions of womanhood and aligns herself with rebellious figures of the past, including witches. Words are figured as weapons to combat those who disapprove of her life choices. When the angry “mob” arrives, “they wobble like gin” when the speaker “open[s] [her] mouth” (Loose Woman 112). Although the poem is a diatribe against limiting societal expectations of women, it can also be read as an ars poetica. The disapproving “they” of the poem can be interpreted as patriarchal culture, but it can also be seen as the writing establishment from which Cisneros feels estranged. In this context, the poem’s closing lines “Ping! Ping! Ping! / I break things” show her mission as a writer to break down barriers (Loose Woman 115). Beatty expresses her exasperation with the poetry establishment several times in her body of work, including “Shooter” in which the speaker fantasizes about shooting, among other men, “the famous poet who said there are no great women writers” (Red Sugar 14). In the epistolary poem, “Dear American Poetry,” from her 2013 book, The Switching/Yard, Beatty expresses frustration with the homogeneity of the influential annual anthology, Best American Poetry: “I see you’re publishing: / straightman/straightman/white white white how / nice,” and declares “I’m bored to death” (The Switching/Yard 46). Beatty responds to this boredom with sexually aggressive claims, “your sonnet is impotent / and I / have a hard-on,” and declares “I was once fucked by an intellectual in iambic pentameter: / my hand was better, and more responsive” (The Switching/Yard 46). Although a hilarious take-down, Beatty’s suggestive lines undercut the “best” in the title Best American Poetry. That poetry just doesn’t do it for her; it’s certainly not the best she’s ever had. And, although her “hand” is an obvious reference to masturbation, it can also be read as her work penned by her own hand. She sees her work as superior, more “alive.” Ironically, two years after Beatty’s “Dear American Poetry” was first published in Court Green (Trigilio & Trinidad), another of Beatty’s poems “Youngest Known Savior” was included in Best American Poetry 2013 (Duhamel & Lehman). It is true that changing attitudes and feminist agitation opened more doors to women writers, but to this day women face more difficulty in the publishing industry. Economic conditions, class biases, and racial discrimination compound those struggles. Karen Kovacik explores these struggles in her article, “Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance.” She points out that certain practices in the poetry world, including constraining critical (often binary) categorization, keep these poems and poets on the outskirts. She points out the relevance of working-class women’s poetry in the current economy: “Surely, in a so-called ‘postindustrial’ economy like ours, pink-collar poetry deserves a literary category of its own and a criticism alert to its aims” (Kovacik 34). Although I agree with Kovacik’s sentiment that working-class women’s poetry deserves greater recognition and critical attention, I resist the term “pink-collar” since it invokes gendered stereotypes that working-class women writers reject. The term is too limiting, especially as it often refers to service work, a category of labor that now comprises the majority of the working-class jobs in the United States, jobs held by people of all genders. In an interview with Mary Kate Azcuy, Jan Beatty expresses concern about her poetry being categorized and claims that in “poetryland … labels are used mercilessly to oppress” (Interview). Like Beatty, I am hesitant to assign more labels to working-class women poets. I would not like to see them pigeonholed or further marginalized. Instead, thinking back to Samantha Bee’s segment on neglected members of the working class, it would be preferable to see more attention paid to their work so that when the subject of working-class poetry is broached, readers and critics think of poetry written by women as readily as they do poetry written by men. 186

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As Beatty, Cisneros, and Coleman have repeatedly demonstrated in their poetry, working-class experiences and perspectives enrich art. It is lamentable how the working-class is exploited, disrespected, and, especially in the case of working-class women and people of color, too-often ignored. This mistreatment and neglect harm our society as a whole and narrow our worldview. In light of the 2016 presidential election, scholars who study working-class issues are planning more conferences and producing more publications, journalists are penning more think pieces. Because of the misleading over-coverage of working-class white men that is out of scale with reality, scholars and journalists need to consciously balance their coverage and focus their attention on working-class women and people of color, not only out of a sense of fairness or to more accurately represent society, but also because we all have so much to gain from their perspectives.

Works Cited Beatty, Jan. Boneshaker. U of Pittsburgh P, 2002. ———. Interview with Mary Kate Azcuy. heartjournalonline​.co​m. 2013. ———. Jackknife: New and Selected Poems. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017. ———. Mad River. U of Pittsburgh P, 1996. ———. Red Sugar. U of Pittsburgh P, 2008. ———. The Switching/Yard. U of Pittsburgh P, 2013. Bee, Samantha, creator. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Randy and Pam’s Quality Entertainment and Warner Bros. Television Distribution, 2018. Cisneros, Sandra. Loose Woman.Vintage, 1995. ———. My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems.Vintage, 2015. ———. “About Sandra Cisneros.” www​.sandracisneros​.com. Accessed 20 Jan. 2018. Coleman, Wanda. Bathwater Wine. Black Sparrow Press, 1998. ———. Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories 1968–1986. Black Sparrow Press, 1987. ———. Mercurochrome. Black Sparrow Press, 2001. ———. Ostinato Vamps. U of Pittsburgh P, 2003. Daniels, Jim. “Work Poetry and Working-Class Poetry: The Zip Code of the Heart.” New Working-class Studies, edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, ILR Press, 2005. pp. 113–136. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Pantheon Books, 1998. Duhamel, Denise, and David Lehman, editors. Best American Poetry 2013. Scribner, 2013. Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised, edited by Donald Allen and G.F. Butterick, Grove Press, 1982, pp. 182–183. Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 2–3, 1994, pp. 126–155. MLA International Bibliography, link.​​gale.​​com​ /a​​pps​/d​​oc​/N2​​81116​​2445/​​MLA​?u​​=cuny​​_cent​​ralof​​f​&sid​​=MLA​&xid​=d5bc28b7. Accessed 5 June 2018. Kovacik, Karen.“Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric:The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance.” NWSA Journal: National Women’s Studies Association Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2001, pp. 22–39. MLA International Bibliography, link.​​galeg​​roup.​​com​.r​​pa​.la​​guard​​ia​.ed​​u​:204​​8​/app​​s​/doc​​/N281​​23063​​90​/ML​​A​?u​=c​​uny​_c​​entra​​ l​off​&sid​=MLA​&xid​=4364e14c. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018. Lauter, Paul. “Working-Class Women’s Literature: An Introduction to Study.” Radical Teacher, vol. 100, 2014, pp. 62–76. Levertov, Denise. Collected Earlier Poems, 1940–1960. New Directions, 1979. Levine, Philip. What Work Is. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. McInnis, Jarvis C. “Writing around the Edges: A Praise Song for Wanda Coleman.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 189–193. MLA International Bibliography, link.​​galeg​​ roup.​​com​.r​​pa​.la​​guard​​ia​.ed​​u​:204​​8​/app​​s​/doc​​/N281​​28068​​83​/ML​​A​?u​=c​​uny​_c​​entra​​l​off​&sid​=MLA​&xid​ =f627ef67. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945. U of Wisconsin P, 1989. “Ostinato.” Merriam​-Webster​.com​. Merriam–Webster, 2018. www​.m​​erria​​m​-web​​ster.​​com​/d​​ictio​​nary/​​ostin​​ato. Accessed 6 June 2018. Paz, Laura. “Nobody’s Mother and Nobody’s Wife.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. 6, no. 4, 2008, pp. 11–27. EBSCOhost, mail.​​lagcc​​.cuny​​.edu/​​viplo​​gin​/d​​efaul​​t​.asp​​x​?red​​irect​​=http​:/​/se​​ arch.​​ebsco​​host.​​com​.r​​pa​.la​​guard​​ia​.ed​​u​:204​​8​/log​​in​.as​​px​?di​​rect=​​true​&d​b​=sih​&AN​=34570061​&site​=ehost​ -live. Accessed 6 June 2018.

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Carrie Conners Pereira, Malin. “A Seat at the Front of the Bus of American Poetry: Wanda Coleman’s ‘Retro Rogue Anthology’ in Mercurochrome.” Hecate, vol. 40, no. 1, 2014, pp. 97+. Literature Resource Center, go​ .ga​​legro​​up​.co​​m​.rpa​​.lagu​​ardia​​.edu:​​2048/​​ps​/i.​​do​?p=​​GLS​&sw​=w​&u​=cuny​_laguardia​&v​=2​.1​&it​=r​&id​ =GALE​%7CA425902471​&asid​=19b​​be7d​df46​cc11​d45e​753a​d611db81d. Accessed 26 June 2017. Trigilio, Tony, and David Trinidad, editors. Court Green, vol. 8, 2011. “Vamp.” Merriam​-Webster​.com​. Merriam–Webster, 2018, www​.merriam​-webster​.com​/dictionary​/vamp. Accessed 28 Mar. 2018. Wayman, Tom. Inside Jobs: Essays on the New Work Writing. Harbour, 1983. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke, 2011. Zandy, Janet. Calling Home:Working-Class Women’s Writings, An Anthology. Rutgers UP, 1990.

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14 RHETORICAL VOICE AND CLASS IN ADICHIE’S “SUBALTERN” FICTION Kristy Liles Crawley

“Nobody taught me about the war in school. It is a part of our history that we like to pretend never existed, that we hide, as if hiding it will make it go away, which of course it doesn’t” (Adichie, “African ‘Authenticity’” 53). Inspired by the prevailing silence during the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970) and the silence which has endured long after the war, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie crafts the fictional work, Half of a Yellow Sun, to give voice to the Biafrans who have suffered in silence and to ignite conversations today about the forgotten war. The prevailing international and personal silences in Adichie’s work underscore the question Gayatri Spivak posed in her 1988 work, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” According to Spivak, silence emerges from “epistemic violence,” a means of “constitut[ing] the colonial subject as Other” and engaging in the “asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity” (27–28). Privileged groups or individuals present the subaltern as a homogenous group. By denying the subaltern’s subjectivity, the privileged group’s negative representations silence the subalterns’ diverse voices and render them invisible. Applied to Half of a Yellow Sun, epistemic violence occupies a prominent place in Western media’s limited representations of Biafrans as uneducated savages with loose morals. Despite privileged groups’ attempts to silence the subaltern, rhetoric assists the subaltern in speaking, for it acts as a tool for resisting oppression and improving social status. Overall, my argument acknowledges the importance of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” while it calls attention to Aristotle’s conception of invention and available means in the context of Half of a Yellow Sun as I argue that Ugwu, an Igbo houseboy, utilizes his rhetorical agency to improve his social position as he breaks through a profound personal and international silence. Ugwu “invent[s] a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible” (Ritchie and Ronald xvii). He utilizes his available means to gain access to literacy, a tool for improving his social standing and writing his way into visibility. In the first section, “Rising Higher through Rhetorical Education: Preparing the Subaltern to Speak,” I trace Ugwu’s rhetorical education, a pathway to social mobility and visibility. The second section, “Silence and Invisibility,” focuses on the international and personal silences that render the subaltern invisible. Prior to the concluding remarks, in the penultimate section, “Rhetorical Visibility: Breaking the Silence,” I argue that Ugwu’s rhetorical voice coupled with his improved social status pierces an oppressive silence by dismantling stereotypes and rendering the subaltern, the Biafrans, visible.

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Rising Higher through Rhetorical Education: Preparing the Subaltern to Speak I now turn to examine rhetoric as a vehicle for the subaltern to speak. While Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” one must consider how this definition applies to the subaltern (24). In recent years, feminist rhetoricians have further interrogated the concept of “available means” to explore the means women as well as other subaltern groups use to persuade. By focusing on available means, feminist scholars Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald note, “The discovery of available means was for Aristotle an act of invention that always assumed the right to speak in the first place and, even prior to that, assumed the right to personhood and self-representation” (xvii). Subaltern groups lack the right to speak and the right to personhood and self-representation. In order to speak, the subaltern’s available means becomes intertwined with invention as it is applied in feminist studies: “The act of invention for women, then, begins in a different place from Aristotle’s conception of invention: women must first invent a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible as persons” (Ritchie and Ronald xvii). Like women, other subaltern groups utilize their available means to invent ways to speak. With the aforementioned definitions in mind, I trace the steps in Ugwu’s rhetorical education to highlight the empowering process of developing his rhetorical voice to speak as a subaltern. Literacy serves as Ugwu’s first step in developing a voice and rising higher socially. Being from a poor village, Ugwu knows only a few English words when he begins his job as a houseboy for Odenigbo in a university community. Along Ugwu’s literacy journey, Odenigbo serves as a literacy sponsor, for he sends Ugwu to the local primary school, provides reading material, and engages in conversations related to his learning. As a literacy sponsor, Odenigbo fulfills the role Deborah Brandt clearly describes in “Sponsors of Literacy”: usually richer, more knowledgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite. They lend their resources or credibility to the sponsored but also stand to gain benefits from their success, whether by direct repayment or, indirectly, by credit of association (166). In return for Ugwu’s service as a houseboy, Odenigbo provides an ideal environment for Ugwu’s rhetorical education. Each week university professors convene in Odenigbo’s living room to converse and debate critical topics related to oppression, war, and resistance. Ugwu observes their gestures, tone, positions, and examples. Although he is not an active participant in discussions, the professors’ discussions ignite Ugwu’s desire to develop his voice. Early on he envisions himself as one of them: Late at night, after Master was in bed, Ugwu would sit on the same chair and imagine himself speaking swift English, talking to rapt imaginary guests, using words like decolonize and pan-African, molding his voice after Master’s, and he would shift and shift until he too was on the edge of the chair. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 25) His fantasy reveals that he is learning about ethos and audience. In his current uneducated state, he is aware that he does not possess the rhetorical tools to capture an audience’s attention. He ponders how to speak and hold listeners’ attention. To captivate audience members like Odenigbo, Ugwu acknowledges that an advanced English vocabulary coupled with the right tone and gestures transforms one into an authoritative speaker. In addition to Ugwu’s rhetorical education in the home, Ugwu receives a formal education. Odenigbo clearly understands that learning English as well as receiving a formal education assists the subaltern in developing a rhetorical voice. He states, “Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 13). As Ugwu develops his English vocabulary, he begins to understand exploitation and resistance through reading Odenigbo’s journals, listening in on his conversations with fellow academics, and conversing with him. Under Odenigbo’s tutelage, Ugwu develops rhetorical strategies for 190

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s­ucceeding in school while resisting oppression. To sharpen Ugwu’s understanding of audience, Odenigbo explains, They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger.That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Park’s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 13–14) Ugwu’s rhetorical awareness allows him to shape his message based on his audience. For a school created by colonizers, Ugwu rhetorically forms his test answers to give credit to white men for their supposed discoveries in Nigeria. His rhetorically manipulated answers enable him to progress in school while he studies Nigeria’s history through Odenigbo’s books which are free of whitewashed narratives. Odenigbo’s lesson aligns with Spivak’s desire to “offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (25). By understanding that two histories exist, Ugwu comprehends the need for resistance, the need for the subaltern to tell their unique individual stories. Ugwu’s rhetorical education sets the stage for him to teach and later write his own history. During the Nigeria-Biafra War, Ugwu’s rhetorical education empowers him to teach. Ugwu agrees with Olanna, a fellow teacher and Odenigbo’s wife, when she describes their teaching goals: We have to make sure that when the war is over, they will all fit back easily into regular school.We will teach them to speak perfect English and Igbo, like His Excellency.We will teach them pride in our great nation. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 366) Ugwu rhetorically shapes the next generation as he persuades the children that Igbo is just as important to learn as English. Developing pride in one’s own country is just as important as studying British history. His voice is no longer silenced in his community. Although he continues in his role as a houseboy for Odenigbo’s family, his new teaching role signifies his progress in transforming his social status. Ugwu’s education and new teaching position are not the only indicators of his upward mobility. His manners, etiquette, dress, hygiene, and lifestyle mark his mobility.When Ugwu visits his family, he imagines they will be impressed with “his English, his new shirt, his knowledge of sandwiches and running tap water, his scented powder” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 109). Ugwu’s clean shirt, fresh-scented body, and new foods made with little labor starkly contrast with his lower-class family’s mud hut without electricity or running water.Their living conditions explain their body odor as well as their arduous meal preparations. Aside from physical differences separating Ugwu from his family and former self, his English and manners come from his schooling and striving to be more like Odenigbo, a sophisticated academic with a dedication to resisting oppression. Becoming more like the resistant Odenigbo, Ugwu turns to reading as a rhetorical strategy for building his voice, a tool that he will eventually use to combat oppression. During his time as a soldier, Ugwu reads a copy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Garnering ethos and pathos from his personal experience as a former slave, Douglass’s work as a public speaker and writer attests to how the subaltern can employ their available means to persuade an audience. Douglass’s narrative acts as model text for Ugwu, for Douglass’s story encompasses his literacy journey. Literacy serves as a tool for mobility and empowers Douglass to tell the world through speech and writing about his life as a slave in order to persuade audience members that slavery needs to be abolished. Like Douglass, Ugwu’s ethos originates from his personal experience and allows him to speak to the world in his book, The World Was Silent When We Died. After being conscripted, his ­military 191

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experience in Biafra’s armed forces provides him with insight into the Biafrans’ suffering. Observing death, rape, destruction, and starvation, as a soldier, Ugwu internally absorbs the misery and frustration of being invisible and feeling insignificant. His emotional and physical injuries confirm his authority to write about the Nigeria-Biafra War. Gaining a new level of respect from Odenigbo and his colleagues, Ugwu’s new status emerges: “Ugwu was no longer just Ugwu, he was now one of ‘our boys’; he had fought for the cause” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 499). As a war veteran and a developing academic with plans to attend the university, as Olanna had promised, Ugwu’s voice emerges as one of authority. In writing, he argues that his experience as well as his peers’ wartime experiences will not be forgotten.

Silence and Invisibility Prior to focusing on the Ugwu’s use of rhetoric to give voice to the subaltern through his writing, it is worthwhile to examine the subaltern’s silence and invisibility. Adichie emphasizes subalterns’ silence and invisibility to Westerners and Nigerians during the war. Due to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the media in the United States focused little attention on the events of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Although fictional, Adichie’s novel provides examples of American journalists’ interests related to the Nigeria-Biafra War. While death looms large in Biafra, Biafrans’ voices cannot be heard in America. The American journalists reveal their ignorance. One journalist states, “Is it possible to see where the Biafran soldiers shot the Italian oil worker?” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 462). The American journalist fails to acknowledge that “[t]housands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 462). The fact that the American journalist questions if there is anything new concerning the Italian oil worker’s story illustrates American citizens’ lack of knowledge about the Biafrans’ suffering. Multiple newspaper articles focused on the death of one white man sadly replace the numerous articles that could be written about Biafrans. Thus, the Biafrans’ voices never reach America, and sadly the American journalists do not seem sincere in their attempts to address the tragedy of Biafra. Instead Western journalists appear as voyeurs as they comment on the people they pass as they travel to their destination. One journalist notices a group of children roasting rats and exclaims, “Oh, my God,” followed by, “Niggers are never choosy about what they eat” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 463). As the journalist looks on in disgust, unaware that people are dying of starvation each day, he can never imagine what it would be like to be thankful for any type of food.With intrigue and disgust, he exits the car, gives the children candy and snaps a photograph of them, and proceeds to tell Richard, “I want to see the real Biafrans” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 464). He assumes that the real Biafrans do not look anything like these children. However, these children are Biafrans. Perhaps, he was so naïve as to believe that the food from relief planes actually reached the Biafrans. In reality, air raids prevented the Biafrans from getting their food supplies. While it may be true that the journalist’s knowledge consists of only what the American news covers, now that he is in Biafra, he has the opportunity to break the silence and share with his fellow Americans information about starvation and air raids. Instead, the journalist seems more interested in investigating the rumors he has heard: “I hear there’s a lot of free sex here. But the girls have some kind of sexually transmitted disease? The Bonny disease? You guys have to be careful so you don’t take anything back home” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 463). Instead of making the most of his time and creating newsworthy stories to take back to the United States, he plans to take advantage of the indigenous women. Thus, he, like many other journalists, allows the silence to continue. The United States remains ignorant of the unacceptable living conditions of the people. 192

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Without a clear picture of Biafrans and their living conditions, the United States citizens cling to stereotypes. In “African ‘Authenticity’ and the Biafran Experience,” Adichie describes the longstanding stereotypes about Africa: Unfortunately, however, the stereotypes in the West about Black Africa are anything but benign. Africa has a long history of being maligned. Racism, the idea of the black race as inferior to the white race, and even the construction of race itself as a biological and social reality, was of course used by Western Europeans to justify slavery and later to justify colonialism. (Adichie, “African ‘Authenticity’” 43) In connection to Adichie’s description of the West’s African stereotypes, the journalist envisions a lawless and primitive society where Westerners may photograph exotic people, make judgments about their food, and enjoy free sex with the women. His aforementioned assumptions and his use of the derogatory term “nigger” allow readers to recognize the false sense of superiority he feels in his encounters with Biafrans (Adiche, Half of a Yellow Sun 463). Stereotypes derived from silence and ignorance keep the subaltern’s suffering from coming to light. Similarly, a pervading silence makes Biafrans’ suffering invisible to Nigerians. Many of the Nigerian civilians, like American civilians, remain ignorant of the living conditions of the Biafrans during the war. The Biafrans suffer in silence while Nigerians continue to live a life that closely resembles life before the war. For instance, while Olanna’s family and Ugwu are on the verge of starvation, Mohammed continues to improve his polo game. In a letter to Olanna he writes, “I am well and know you and Odenigbo must be too” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 472). Olanna’s family and Ugwu are not even close to being well. In fact, they live in fear as they hear about the deaths of their family members and neighbors. With dismay, they watch as children’s stomachs swell and their hair falls out. Death surrounds them. Yet, one may think that it is natural for warring nations to avoid communicating with their enemies. In fact, traditional Igbo society imposes silence between community members and offending members of society during peace time: Collective or group silence is a very effective means of social control in traditional Igbo society, where silence can be used as a sanction against the deviations of members of a village community. This is done by passing a law which makes it punishable by some stipulated penalties for any member of the village to greet, accept greetings, and/or be aided by the deviant. This extreme measure is resorted to when all other measures adopted to bring the offender to repentance and submission to the will of the people have failed. (Nwoye 188) Therefore, if traditional Igbo society imposes silence on unrepentant offenders during peace time, it seems reasonable that silence between two warring parties would be expected during war time. However, during a civil war, war separates family members and friends, but their desire to sustain their previous relationships still lingers. Mohammed’s friendship with Olanna prompts him to write to her and send gifts. Although he has good intentions when sending a kind note and gifts, the silence which fosters his ignorance of the Biafrans’ living conditions enrages Olanna and further deepens their separation: Mohammed’s letter incensed her; it insulted her reality. But he could not possibly know that they had no salt and Odenigbo drank kai-kai every day and Ugwu was conscripted and she had sold her wig. He could not possibly know.Yet she felt angry that the patterns 193

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of his old life remained in place, so unquestionably in place that he could write to her about his polo game. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 472) The Biafrans’ poverty goes unrecognized by even their family members and friends. Unable to communicate their intense poverty, Biafrans struggle to cope with death. Olanna gathers enough strength to tell Odenigbo about the vaguely familiar clothes on the headless bodies in the yard, the still-twitchy fingers on Uncle Mbaezi’s hand, the rolled-back eyes of the child’s head in the calabash and the odd skin tone—a flat, sallow gray, like a poorly wiped blackboard—of all the corpses that lay in the yard. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 196) Olanna’s description of her uncle’s yard contains vivid specific details. These shocking and grotesque details of gray skin and severed heads allow readers to see that this traumatic scene is so deeply etched into Olanna’s memory that she can recall the details and replay the event in her mind. After sharing the traumatic experience with Odenigbo, silence overcomes her: “Speaking was a labor. When her parents and Kainene visited she did not say much; it was Odenigbo who told them what she had seen” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 197). The trauma nearly paralyzes her speech just as it paralyzes her legs. Doctor Patel claims that her “inability to walk was psychological” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 197). The psychological trauma manifests itself in hindering the physical functions of speech and walking. Overall, “Olanna exhibits classic characteristics of the traumatized in her struggle and inability to discuss the past” (Novak 33). Also, it is worth noting that soon after the death of a loved one, silence seems natural. In traditional Igbo society, the grieving family members remain silent as well as the sympathizers: Customarily, bereaved persons are avoided for some days following the death of a family member. About four days after the death it is deemed appropriate to visit them. Sympathizers walk in, go straight to the bereaved, stand before them for a short time, then find a seat somewhere among some other mourners and join them awhile in mutual silence.When they have stayed long enough, they again approach the bereaved, repeat the process of showing themselves to them, and take their leave as silently as they came in. Although no word has been spoken, quite a bit has been communicated. (Nwoye 186) Unlike the Igbo sympathizers in the passage above, Olanna’s family members want to know what happened to their family members. Their family members’ unexpected deaths and their concern for Olanna allow them to bypass the rituals of silence. However, for Olanna, considering her state of shock, it is easier to slip into silence not only as a way of coping with the horror by not having to tell the story of her encounters with the dead bodies but also as a way of grieving.

Rhetorical Visibility: Breaking the Silence To pierce the silence and make the subaltern visible, Ugwu goes beyond recounting the events in the Nigeria-Biafra War in his book, The World Was Silent When We Died. Although readers do not have access to Ugwu’s complete text, he articulates that his writing will give voice to the voiceless, meaning the subaltern: he wrote about Aunty Arize’s anonymous death in Kano and about Olana losing the use of her legs, about Okeoma’s smart-fitting army uniform and Professor Ekwenugo’s 194

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bandaged hands. He wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 498) Ugwu’s snapshots of Biafrans, hunger, war, and death mirror the events Adichie unfolds in Half of a Yellow Sun. Empowered by his rhetorical education and his identity as a veteran and teacher, Ugwu, like Adichie, humanizes Biafrans and counters stereotypes and misconceptions in his book. As Ugwu humanizes the subaltern in his work, he acknowledges silence as a crippling force. The fact that Ugwu decides to use the title The World Was Silent When We Died highlights silence’s deadly consequences while spotlighting the world’s indifference to Biafrans’ suffering. He borrows the book’s title from Richard, a Caucasian man, after acknowledging that it is not Richard’s responsibility to write about the war. By taking possession of the title, he takes on the responsibility of telling his own story as well as others’ stories. As opposed to the whitewashed history he learned in school, his story conveys events from a true Biafran’s point of view. Based on Ugwu’s and his fellow Biafrans’ experiences, which are aligned with Adichie’s novel, Ugwu’s work dismisses Westerners’ stereotypes and misconceptions as well as breaking the dangerous silence through telling stories about their suffering.

Combatting Immoral Stereotypes Unlike Westerners’ depictions of Biafran women with loose morals, Ugwu’s book provides an opening for humanizing Biafran women by depicting them as caring mothers and victims. For example, as a mother, Olanna frequently avoids communicating her worst fears, attempts to protect her family, and tries to construct a semblance of a normal family home life during a time of war. Mothers like Olanna use silence as a coping mechanism. As a mother, Olanna remains silent about her fears. She fears that Baby’s contact with the neighborhood kids will result in Baby imitating the children’s accents, coming in contact with fleas, or suffering from a disease. However, on the other hand, she does not want to stunt Baby’s growth as a person. She wants Baby to be a normal child with friends. She cannot isolate Baby and hover over her forever. Perhaps, her fears overwhelm her to the point of not wanting to give Baby a name. At one point, Kainene encourages Olanna to name Baby Chiamaka, meaning “God is beautiful” (Adichie, Purple Hibiscus). Kainene’s suggested name implies Olanna will honor God while recognizing the child as a beautiful gift God gives them in the midst of war’s ugliness. Olanna chooses to accept Baby, a child from Odenigbo’s one-night affair with Amala, as a precious gift, for she immediately assumes her role as mother soon after Baby’s birth. Despite Kainene’s suggestion, Olanna does not announce any intentions for naming Baby in the near future. In seeing death all around her, Olanna may fear that naming Baby will only add an additional layer of attachment. Possibly, Olanna continues to call her daughter Baby in an attempt to keep her as innocent and childlike as possible in the dangerous environment where children die young and are even raped. Her reluctance to name Baby also coincides with traditional Igbo society’s ritual which causes mothers to delay in naming their children: Another ritual in which silence is mandatory is the Ichu iyi nwa (literally “going to the stream for a baby”) ritual, which is the concluding part of the naming ceremony that takes place on the 28th day after a child is born. In this ritual, the mother of the new baby, accompanied by a young girl acting as a maid, takes a ritual trip to a stream, carrying a clay bowl. On her way to the stream and back to perform the ritual cleansing after childbirth, she is forbidden to speak to anyone. People who meet her tease her profusely, but she must not speak. (Nwoye 187) 195

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Considering that the ritual involves a child’s biological mother, Olanna cannot participate.Although the text does not provide any evidence to suggest that Olanna delays in naming the child due to her inability to perform the ritual, Olanna’s ties to Igbo society at least make her aware of the fact that children are not immediately named. Of course, with Baby, she has waited well beyond the twenty-eighth day after her birth to name her. Due to the difficult circumstances of war in upsetting the ordinary routines of life and the unusual circumstances of Baby’s birth, it seems natural that some rituals may be allowed to lapse or to be modified. Furthermore, making Biafran women’s suffering visible involves communicating their position as victims instead of seducers. For instance, Olanna and Kainene express their disgust for their father’s parties. Kainene shares her father’s intentions with Olanna: “Daddy literally pulled me away from the veranda, so we could leave you alone with the good cabinet minister” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 44). By leaving Olanna alone with the cabinet minister and affording him the opportunity to make sexual advances, her father hopes in turn to strengthen his political and financial standing in the community. His daughter serves as bait. It is an exchange of political favors and sexual favors. Although both daughters express their disapproval of the parties in private, they continue to attend the parties and keep their silence in public. The parties also serve as a means of matching their daughters with wealthy bachelors. At one point, Kainene compares the parties to a meat market: They [the market in Balogun] display slabs of meat on tables, and you are supposed to grope and feel and then decide which you want. My sister and I are meat. We are here so that suitable bachelors will make the kill. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 73) With Olanna’s beauty, she escapes the meat market when she moves away to Nsukka to join Odenigbo. However, Kainene, who sees herself as the less attractive daughter, silently and dutifully “shows up to the parties when her parents ask and allows photographers to take her picture” (De La Cruz-Guzmán 48). Adichie illustrates that daughters from all classes are expected to engage in sexual activity for the good of their families. Eberechi, a lower-class young woman, describes how her parents insisted that she sleep with an army officer in order to help her brother. Ugwu recalls, “She told him about her parents’ pushing her into the army officer’s room” and later Eberechi states, “He helped us. He put my brother in essential services in the army” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 369). In her story, she does not mention any resistance. The fact that she uses the word “pushes” mirrors Olanna’s father’s insistence on leaving her alone with the cabinet minister. Olanna and Eberechi’s silence indicates their powerlessness and desire to fulfill their duties as daughters in order to maintain close family ties. Of course, fathers are not the only male figures that provoke silence from young women as they expect their daughters to be obedient. Odenigbo’s power as an educated man and son of Amala’s employer makes it difficult for Amala to refuse to sleep with him. Desiring grandchildren and hoping to end Odenigbo’s relationship with Olanna, Odenigbo’s mother, according to Ugwu, uses “medicine” to push Odenigbo “into the arms of this common slip of a girl” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 299). Regardless of whether or not Mama uses medicine to bring the two together, Amala clearly does not have the ability to reject him. Even as Olanna looks at Amala, she pities Amala instead of hating her because she realizes that Amala “had not even considered that she could say no. Odenigbo made a drunken pass and she submitted willingly and promptly: He was the master, he spoke English, he had a car. It was the way it should be” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 313). Olanna, being accustomed to her father using her to improve his business prospects, understands that Amala did not have a choice.With Olanna and Amala’s acceptance of silence, they acknowledge to be true what Cheryl Glenn so clearly asserts in Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence:“The 196

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silencer dominates the silenced, once again gendering the conditions of speaking and silence” (41). Adichie’s use of silence in female characters from varying social classes emphasizes that in maledominated cultures, it seems natural for women to silently obey. In addition to the mothers’ silences, Adichie focuses on the silence of women who are victims of violence. The most memorable silencing occurs after Ugwu and his fellow soldiers steal a car from civilians and drive to a local bar. Following several glasses of gin, the soldiers gang rape the barmaid. After sobbing and pleading, the girl resorts to silence. Amongst the chaos and the cheering soldiers, Ugwu takes his turn. He clearly remembers the look on the girl’s face, for by this point the traumatic experience has robbed her of her dignity and words: “She stared back at him with a calm hate” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 458). The barmaid’s eerie silence and look of hate linger in Ugwu’s memory. At this point, because readers have become attached to Ugwu’s character, as they have witnessed his good deeds and growth, readers may attempt to excuse his behavior and say, “boys will be boys,” which “implies that males are biologically determined to behave in certain ways toward women” (Clair 39). However, this excuse does not suffice. Also, readers cannot claim that Ugwu’s participation in the rape is a military tactic: “the soldiers are located in Biafra, raping one of their own, with none of the strategic purpose of abjection, marking, and pollution attributed to many sexual war crimes” (qtd. in Norridge 26). Instead, Ugwu participates in raping the girl because he fears the reactions of his fellow soldiers. He fears that they will see him as weak. He will no longer be part of his group if he attempts to stop the rape, so he continues what Albert C. Gunther describes as the spiral of silence: In the spiral of silence people are afraid to speak up because of a fear of social isolation, isolation that might follow the voicing of an unpopular view. It is a self-protective mechanism meant to avoid social sanctions and also shelter one’s own opinions, and ego, from the disapproval of others. (149) Ugwu engages in a self-protective silence when he is in the presence of his fellow soldiers as he fears their rejection. Interestingly, the same self-protecting silence exists after the rape because he knows that his friends and family will disapprove of his actions. Shame and silence continue to build in the novel. His shame intensifies and his decision to remain silent solidifies as he is surrounded by stories of rape. Kainene reveals Urenwa, a small girl in their community, is pregnant and Father Marcel is the father of her child. In utter disbelief and disgust, Kainene explains, “He fucks most of them before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here!” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 499). Ugwu is unable to muster a response to Kainene’s anger at a supposed man of faith taking advantage of starving children by exchanging food for sex. Kainene’s story causes him to become speechless as he reflects on his role in the gang rape: Ugwu felt stained and unworthy as he went about his new duties … He wondered what Kainene would say, what she would do to him, feel about him, if she ever knew about the girl in the bar. She would loathe him. So would Olanna. So would Eberechi. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 499) Acknowledging his guilt and imagining the angry reactions of the women he loves most, he can only be silent. He has no one to listen to his confession. He must silently carry the shame which reaches its peak when he discovers that his sister has been raped and beaten by five men. Once again, he must silently listen to another rape story, but this one is the most painful, for it involves his own sister. It gives the girl in the bar a humanlike quality, for she is someone’s daughter and perhaps someone’s sister. 197

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Combatting Savage Stereotype Like the stereotypes related to women’s loose morals, the stereotypes related to savages pervade the Western world as they envision savages eating lizards instead of academics struggling for stability. Ugwu’s relationship to Odenigbo’s academic social circle provides material for exposing the intellectuals’ suffering and silence. During the war, Odenigbo and his colleagues’ voices are silenced. They no longer have the time to passionately engage in intellectual discussions and debates. Their research comes to a standstill, for they quickly vacate their homes at the university and leave behind their writing to seek a safe place. Olanna notes the change in Odenigbo: His drinking in Nsukka—his auburn, finely refined brandy—had sharpened his mind, distilled his ideas and his confidence so that he sat in the living room and talked and talked and everybody listened. This drinking here silenced him. It made him retreat into himself and look out at the world with bleary weary eyes. And this made her furious. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 477) Prior to the war, Odenigbo’s authoritative intellectual voice commands respect and attention from his fellow colleagues. The hunger, fear, starvation, and lack of intellectual stimulation transform Odenigbo’s character to one who lives in an uncertain world, a world where his voice lacks weight and authority, for he struggles to support his family. His animated intellectual debates seem pointless in comparison to keeping his family safe. When Odenigbo returns with his family to Nsukka University, he discovers a pile of burned books. In the pile, he picks through charred research papers and old tests. The charred papers represent the government’s attempt to silence the intellectuals’ voices. “The Nigerian soldiers, they had heard, did not like people who looked like intellectuals” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 518). The government, perhaps, feared that the intellectuals would impede the process of reunification after the war. After all, Odenigbo and his colleagues were Biafrans at one time. The Nigerian government will silence Odenigbo and his colleagues. As the ending of the novel suggests, “[t]he collection of individuals brought together by the new university at Nsukka has been permanently dispersed by the novel’s end, and the dispersal does not seem to be replaced by anything but grief ” (Highfield 272). In addition to the Nsukka intellectuals, the war silenced so many unknown voices. “[H]ow many potential writers, thinkers, and artists were prematurely silenced by death, shocked into speechlessness by the sight of atrocities, or never given the chance to develop their talents?” (Highfield 272). Similarly, the government deemed powerful women a threat and attempted to silence their voices. Kainene, although a woman in a patriarchal society, possesses a masculine figure and the power of successful businessman: “Kainene looked even thinner next to Olanna, almost androgynous, her tight maxi outlining the boyishness of her hips” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 75). On a similar note, Kainene’s father states that Kainene is like a son. In his conversation with Chief Okonji, Kainene’s father mentions that she will “oversee everything in the east, the factories and our new oil interests” (Adiche, Half of a Yellow Sun 39). In this conversation, he remarks, “Kainene is not just like a son, she is like two” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 39). Kainene’s androgynous appearance and her identity as a powerful Biafran businesswoman in a male-dominated society make her an ideal target for the Nigerians. Fearless Kainene wants to help provide for her family by trading with the Nigerian women. Throughout the novel, she continues to conduct business during the war, so her attempt to trade with the Nigerian women seems harmless.Yet, when the war is over, the Nigerian soldiers assume control and destroy anything that may interfere with the unity of Nigeria. Kainene, a powerful Biafran, refuses to be viewed as a helpless, powerless woman. Hence, the Nigerian government would see her being like a powerful man who is a threat to the new government. The fact that she is bold enough to trade with the 198

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enemy during war time, perhaps, prompts the Nigerians to think about what else this powerful, wealthy woman is capable of doing. The Nigerian government strips Kainene of her house in Port Harcourt and possibly takes her life. The new government will now be able to take over the factories and oil. Therefore, the new government profits from Kainene’s disappearance. However, the characters in the novel recognize that when they lose Kainene they have lost more than a loved one; they have lost a “voice of honesty and frankness” (Highfield 267). “Kainene represents communication in the novel. Her ability to speak across lines of class, ethnicity, and gender only increases as things become more dire. She turns from profiteering off the war to helping those who will not survive it” (Highfield 268). In a world where the voices of intellectuals have been suppressed and the government’s voice serves as a propaganda machine, the silencing of Kainene’s frankness sends her loved ones into a downward spiral. As a powerful businesswoman, she communicated with people from many facets of society and served as the voice of truth. Olanna and her family as well as Richard seek shelter at Kainene’s house and depend on Kainene for advice and protection.

Concluding Remarks Ugwu’s The World Was Silent When We Died breaks through a profound personal and international silence by dismissing Westerners’ stereotypes while recognizing the Biafrans’ suffering. Although Ugwu is a fictional character and writer, he represents writers like Adichie and Chinua Achebe who have a vested interest in capturing the experiences of Biafrans and Nigerians for future generations. Ugwu’s rhetorical education and his wartime experience become his available means for improving his social status and speaking to the world as a subaltern writer. To establish visibility and invent a way to speak, Ugwu utilizes rhetoric as a tool for resistance. He refuses to allow the war to be forgotten and the Biafrans’ suffering to remain invisible to the world.To move away from stereotypes and partially human portraits of Africans created by Western authors, subaltern authors must tell their own stories, for even authors with good intentions, as Adichie notes, often rely on stereotypes: Even the more serious books which I read later, those with well-meaning intentions, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)—essentially about the evils of colonialism— did not have a single African character portrayed as fully human. A more recent antiimperial book which castigates European evils in Africa, Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1995) still manages not to depict a single human African. There are many other examples. Africans become dispensable; Africans don’t matter, not even in narratives ostensibly about Africa. (Adichie, “African ‘Authenticity’” 44) With anti-imperial works by authors like Conrad and Lindqvist being widely read by Western readers, it is not surprising that Westerners picture Africans to be like the African characters in famous works. Unfortunately, their reality, meaning Africans’ true identities and lives, remains hidden. The canonized Western authors’ depictions of Africans become real in the minds of readers. In light of these powerful stereotypes and depictions, Adichie illustrates through Ugwu indigenous writers’ potential for creating fully human characters by giving voice to the subaltern. Although Ugwu speaks on behalf of himself and others through writing, he maintains his subaltern status while speaking. His subaltern identity refutes Spivak’s claim that the subaltern “cannot speak” and the inference that one cannot maintain a subaltern identity if one is heard (28). At first glance, it appears that Ugwu sheds his subaltern identity through social mobility. His social mobility is made possible through literacy sponsors, education, military service, and 199

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employment and allows him to transition from a voiceless native living in poverty to a writer who utilizes his voice to draw attention to Biafrans’ suffering. However, Ugwu never discards his subaltern identity, an identity Spivak’s claims is “irretrievably heterogenous” (26). The heterogenous nature of the subaltern underscores the varying levels of power among subaltern groups. Despite Ugwu’s improved social status, his intersectional identity as an African residing in a war-torn country and a developing scholar who is still serving Odenigbo’s family highlights his subaltern status. As a subaltern writer, Ugwu never discloses the success or failure of his book. In terms of being heard, Adichie’s readers never discover whether Ugwu’s writing remains in his local community or reaches an international audience. Whether heard by an international or local audience, Ugwu’s voice competes with Western voices. Although a marginalized voice among the many Western writers’ voices, Ugwu’s voice contains ethos derived from his experience as an actual participant in the Nigeria-Biafra War. His ethos within his own community rivals Westerners’ attempts to suppress subaltern voices. To speak as a subaltern, Ugwu speaks through his book comprised of a subversive narrative that brings to mind my earlier discussion of Odenigbo’s warning about history in school: They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger.That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Park’s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park. (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 13–14) Later Odenigbo shows Ugwu Nigerian authors’ historical works and demands that he read them. Like the Western world’s account of the discovery of the River Niger, the Western world’s stories surrounding the Nigeria-Biafra War circulate, but Ugwu’s voice provides Nigerians and the world with a counternarrative, a narrative free of whitewashed history. As a subaltern, Ugwu speaks; however, his subaltern status signifies his inability to speak unencumbered, for there will always be competing histories. Ugwu’s voice reaches those willing to peel off the layers of Westerners’ history to hear the subaltern voices disclosing their own authentic history.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “African ‘Authenticity’ and the Biafran Experience.” Transition, vol. 99, 2008, pp. 42–53. ———. Half of a Yellow Sun. Anchor Books, 2006. ———. Purple Hibiscus. E-book, Algonquin Books, 2012. Aristotle. “Book I.” Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Robert, Random House, 1984, pp. 19–90. Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165–185. Clair, Robin Patric. Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities. State U of New York P, 1998. De La Cruz-Guzmán, Marlene. “Trauma and Narrativity in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: Privileging Indigenous Knowledge in Writing the Biafran War.” African Intellectuals and Decolonization, edited by Nicholas M. Creary, Ohio UP, 2012, pp. 37–65. Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Gunther, Albert C. “The Intersection of Third-Person Effect and Spiral of Silence.” The Spiral of Silence: New Perspectives on Communication and Public Opinion, edited by Wolfgang Donsbach et al., Routledge, 2014, pp. 145–152. Highfield, Jonathan. “Obscured by History: Language, Culture, and Conflict in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.” Critical Insights: Cultural Encounters, edited by Nicholas Birns, Salem P, 2013, pp. 262–280. Norridge, Zoe. “Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 18–39.

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Voice and Class in Adichie’s Fiction Novak, Amy. “Who Speaks? Who Listens:The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 40, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 31–51. Nwoye, Gregory O. “Eloquent Silence Among the Igbo in Nigeria.” Perspectives on Silence, edited by Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike, Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1985, pp. 185–191. Ritchie, Joy S., and Kate Ronald. Introduction. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), U of Pittsburgh P, 2001, pp. xv–xxxi. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 24–28.

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15 DICKENS’S FAIRNESS IN DESCRIBING ITALIAN COMPLEXITY Germana Cubeta

Dickens’s literary merits gave him popularity, but his ability to depict the polyphonic aspects of humanity certainly played a major role in his continued aesthetic and political impact. In his career as a novelist, journalist, and travel writer, the author was highly concerned with the heteroglossic nature of social relationships; he was a sharp observer who looked at the world aslant and reimagined places and characters along the dialogic axes of class and culture. This paper aims to bring under critical scrutiny Dickens’s view of Italy as it appears in Pictures from Italy (1846). A corpus methodology alongside the intersectional lens of social class and cultural “otherness” will help us to understand the writer’s interpretation of Italian culture and his intention to present multidimensionality and heterogeneity that were often made invisible by other travelers’ single-axis category representations. In English travel narratives, depictions of Italy and the Italians were usually grounded on old prejudices and stereotypes; the representation of “the other” often took the form of a series of clichéd images that did not render the cultural and social variety of the Italians. Only a few voices tried to go beyond and feature them differently, and Dickens offered his personal contribution. This analysis draws on the idea that the integration of linguistics and literature may shed light on the meaning of literary texts; in this regard, corpora can provide relevant opportunities and therefore broaden the interpretative scope of stylistic analysis. In an interdisciplinary perspective, then, a corpus linguistics analysis and intersectional theories will demonstrate that in Pictures from Italy, Dickens’s language builds social identities and denounces political oppression. In the travel book, Dickens distances himself from his countrymen and blames them for their inability to go beyond the pre-digested experiences set forth by tourist guides. On the contrary, he does not show interest in the beaten tracks of tourism nor in the “rites of art appreciation” (Leroy, 2013 132), but expresses his concern for “the other.” The present analysis will claim that Pictures from Italy reveals Dickens’s dialogic view of Italy and displays a construction of a value system that formulates relational principles of integration and solidarity among the Italians.

Aims and Methodology Corpus Approach My corpus approach using an interdisciplinary method has helped to explore the author’s construction of alterity and investigate the relationship between body, culture, and class. 202

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Drawing on Mahlberg (Mahlberg, 2013 42–43), the first step in carrying out this research was the creation of two corpora, one made up of Pictures from Italy and the other of Dickens’s oeuvre (see Table 15.1). All texts have been retrieved from Project Gutenberg, which provides a free online library in computer-readable format. The corpora contain approximately 4.6 million words and have been processed with the aid of WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012). The second stage of the quantitative analysis was to compare Pictures from Italy to the reference corpus as from large collections of texts may emerge patterns in the way events are named. Quantitative and qualitative research has helped to clarify how discourses on events are created. By contextualizing the travel book in comparison to Dickens’s domestic fiction, the unusual frequency of “people” emerged as the software identified this noun as a keyword. The corpus was then queried, revealing that the Italians, according to van Leeuwen’s definition of social actors (van Leeuwen, 1996 32–70), are at the center of the narration. Furthermore, a collocation analysis and extensive concordance reading not only helped to show the author’s focus on the Italians, but also displayed how their cultural identities are shaped through language. Drawing on systemic-functional grammar, language was analyzed according to context, which demonstrated its functions in the structure of the book. According to Leech’s theory (Leech, 1985 45–48), the style was measured in terms of deviations, either higher or lower, from the norm.What emerged was that the travel book exhibits an unusual frequency of the noun “people” with respect to Dickens’s oeuvre, and that this noun is even more frequent than terms related to cities, monuments, and works of art.The observation of recurring linguistic patterns on a comparative basis was only one side of the coin in this corpus analysis. As a direct relation between statistical deviance and stylistic significance has not yet been established, the integration of qualitative analysis was therefore essential to clarify the mechanisms which govern style and shed light on the meanings (Mahlberg, 2013 175). The triangulation of findings with the broader contextualization of critical studies on the travelogue thus has led to a deeper understanding of the writer’s view of the Italians.

Table 15.1 Reference Corpus A Christmas Carol A Tale of Two Cities American Notes for General Circulation Barnaby Rudge Bleak House David Copperfield Dombey and Son Great Expectations Hard Times Little Dorrit Martin Chuzzelewit Nicholas Nickleby Oliver Twist Our Mutual Friend Sketches by Boz The Battle of Life The Chimes The Cricket of the Hearth The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Old Curiosity Shop The Pickwick Papers

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Findings: “People” Drawing on Bondi and Scott’s method of quantifying keywords against a reference corpus, it emerged that the noun “people” is almost twice as likely to appear in Pictures from Italy as in the rest of Dickens’s works; it exhibits 121 occurrences (see Table 15.2) and shows a positive keyness of 84.58%. This term thus expresses a pivotal concept, and, building on Sinclair’s interpretation of the Firthian concept of contextual meaning according to which words enter “into meaningful relations with other words around them” (Sinclair, 2004 25), its relationship with other words was explored.The analysis of collocation networks has clarified lexical connections in a wider discourse in Dickens regarding the Italians. Collocates of words are part of a complex network of semantic relationships and unfold meaning and semantic structure. The unusual frequency of this noun was a starting point for investigating the writer’s intention of focusing on the Italians and depicting their cultural complexity. It has offered new cues which contrast with previous interpretations of this work that instead deny Dickens’s authentic interest in the Italians. In this regard, the linguistic evidence works against critics such as Flint, who claims that: “certainly, he does not appear to interrelate with Italians, other than guides and inn-keepers” (Flint, 1998 xxiii). From comparing texts, I noticed that in Pictures from Italy, Dickens attempts to feature a society where the Italians are not background figures, as they were in other travel books (Cubeta, 2017 125–126), but are at the center of his investigation. He not only presents them in a system of opposition compared to the British but explores their nature. The analysis collocations to the left of the noun “people” has shed light on many aspects; one of them is the various use of adjectives, including: “joyful,” “poor,” “ugly,” “sad,” “balanced,” “vital,” “intelligent,” and “dirty.” Dickens praises their positive features—“they are very kind and honest”—and points out their “very lively and fresh way.” He exalts their good humor and sociability, their outgoing characters, intelligence, and good attitude. He claims that some of them are “very relaxed,” “very good-natured,” “very conversational,” and “good-humored,” and in particular, he seems to appreciate the “very balanced, courteous and industrious” temperament of the Genoese, whom he knows better as he stayed long in this city. Dickens explores their human dimension and highlights their strengths and weaknesses. In The Reader’s Passport, the writer declares that the book is not going to offer any “grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country” (5).This claim, however, is controversial, as in the book, he investigates the reasons that have led the Italians to the contemporary state of decay: “years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit, fomented by petty princes to whom union was destruction and division strength” (187). The writer’s attitude towards the Italians appears different from that of other travelers who were usually shocked by their misery and dirtiness and kept their distance. Dickens observes poverty but goes further. He appreciates their dignity and exalts their positive sides despite appearances. He suggests that the reader should look beyond appearances.

Personal Pronouns, Male and Female Nouns in Pictures from Italy Starting from the unusual frequency of the noun “people,” and from the observation of the adjectives, other data helped to elaborate upon the writer’s view of the Italians. Personal pronouns as well as class and gender nouns contributed to clarifying how he outlined various strata of society (see Table 15.3). The computational research displayed that “he” and “they” exhibit a higher percentage of occurrence in Pictures from Italy compared to the reference corpus, while “she” exhibits a lower one. The higher frequency of the male pronoun “he,” compared to “she,” may depend on various conditions. As a traveler in Italy, it is likely that Dickens was more in contact with couriers, vetturini, and valets 204

Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity Table 15.2 People is universal among the common people. A child is left anywhere without you are good-humoured to the people about you, and speak pleasantly are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their the commonest of the Neapolitan people: and between them and the platform, the coupe had discharged two people, and had only one passenger inside—a mons his earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing rawings by schoolboys; everything to people and restore the ancient cities, in the fanc passage for themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of kind of teacher of the people, and to entertain a just respect both for kind of tribune of the people, appointed on their behalf to see that all of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a greater or less degree, great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista, which and fluttering merchandise. The country people are grouped about, with their clean baskets bad odours, but where the people are industrious and money-getting. tourists stay there; and the people are nearly all connected, in one way or in grim Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live and walk about; describe the monuments to the people—at all events he was doing so; and with other carriages, or with people at the lower windows; and the spectators at the great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone with her little hand; other people at the windows, fishing for is goaded to desperation. Two people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had of the Saviour, until then. People began to drop off. The this young minister of fortune. People begin to inquire his age, death of all the ancient people born and bred there, were and was covered with exulting people (but never before), became imperious, on a public street where people came and went all day. a faded aspect. The common people came out in their gayest an undulating flat (as you know), where few people can live; and where, for in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and all and dash it out; other people climbing up into carriages, to bayonets and shining sabres. The people closed round nearer, on the flank of the brought out faint, as if at least fifty people could be accommodated in her impious, and ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and When the better kind of people die, or are at the included an immense number of people divided into small parties; each party chan found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; narrow as any thoroughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed the roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every little city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling, at certain unlucky times, bestows his benediction on the people, from the balcony in front lamp out: horribly frightening the people further down, and throwing the of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round the pulpit, and a whirl of carriages and people, had some stray sense of from the one, and few people had yet begun to run raven, welcoming the peasants. These people have a miserable appearance, and straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people; having on our left a dreary long stick, thrust among the people here and there, and vigilantly (Continued)

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Germana Cubeta Table 15.2 (Continued) People Custom-house, we found the people here had TAKEN THE MEASURE than they would let the people in (as they do at Bologna) considers it too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his lips than the same sort of people in England, I say no bedside of weak and nervous people in extremity, accompanied by a and having a great many people in it. The place into indecent splashing down of dead people in so many wells, is we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would their gayest dresses; the richer people in their smartest vehicles; Cardinals with scarcely any show of people in them; and the Arno, quiet, and unlike houses with people in them, that the greater them has at least six people inside, four in front, four race, without going over the people, is more than I can alive, and undevoured by the people, is one of the enigmas neglect. Novelty, pleasant to most people, is particularly delightful, I think, that has held so many people. It is a legacy to were burning, and a few people kneeling, and under which is lamps dimly burning; the selfsame people kneeling here and there; turned cloud. There were not many people lingering about; and these were tortoise. He loitered as the people loitered, that they might gratify you only want medicine. Few people lounge in the barbers’ shops; whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether, such a scene money. The majority were country-people, male and female. There were them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised worth a hundred days; and people may be seen kissing it a table, at which thirty people might dine easily, and a in our tenderness towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and this curtain, some twenty people nearest to it, in their Modena took away from the people of Bologna in the fourteenth century, very well; unlike the common people of Italy generally, who (with an old tower) which the people of Modena took away from were crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking in the morning, all the people of the village are waiting natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were to be covered with holiday people. Outside the public-houses were parties ill-will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people (quite strangers to them) in the streets at mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do everything else) devout legs, tripped up other people’s by the dozen. There was a great that is, to extinguish other people’s candles, and to keep his the time, I thought, when people should look down into its was buried there. “The poor people, Signore,” he said, with a shrug Piazza del Popolo, and some people sit in temporary galleries in of a back lane, where people sit upon the ground and a moderate computation, a hundred people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, a slowly moving crowd of people: talking to each other: staring f the fierce and cruel Roman people. The Italian face changes as wars of the old Florentine people. The prison is hard by, (Continued)

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Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity Table 15.2 (Continued) People interrupted by a crowd of people. There are portraits innumerable, by A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are! All beggars; but with pity for the poor people. They look: when we stand with a great crowd of people (three-fourths of them English) for an hour the churches, calling on the people to pray for the criminal’s in the speed of different people, too. Some got on as if very ground on which its people trod. It is the most the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight score or two of melancholy people walking up and down the open to all classes of people) was the Pope washing the performing, feeble tapers were burning, people were kneeling in all directions and spectral. It was no matter that the people were not yet out of bed; for if pelting of sugar-plums; and people were packing and cramming into of Jews, where those extraordinary people were sitting outside their shops, One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at least! Yet there was ample Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which had come off to whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting themselves round her bed. Among the people who drop into St. Peter’s at their hopelessly round the corner, the people who had come out of the church to connection with the lottery. Certain people who have a talent for him along, he blessed the people with the mystic sign; and the time among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleasant inte to fall in, so many people would play upon the numbers attached to suc

de place, which were occupations held by men.Yet in Pictures from Italy, the writer describes various types of women; he dwells on their physical aspect and attempts to distinguish different classes, from the hard-faced washerwomen to the elegant ladies traveling in carriages. Dickens captures each detail and represents them intent on caring for their children or attending religious services. His complex view is also evident in the choice to describe them in a system of opposition within categories: from “good-tempered, obliging, and industrious” women who “sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s heads” (47) to “well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans” (29). According to Ward, in his fictional works, Dickens’s representation of women is “sentimental, sexist, patriarchal and derogatory” (Ward, 1983 37); in Pictures from Italy, his treatment of their role is not straightforward. He features women who belong to different classes; he depicts them realistically; he claims that they are “not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the women, being the churches and the public walks” (46); he features “the Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and ditch” (47). Italian women belong to various social categories; the writer here too tends to differentiate them and describes their human and social specificity. Dickens offers a very heterogeneous fresco of Italian women; he catches their strength and notices their unhappiness. Dickens’s interest in the Italians, however, never makes him lose sight of his cultural coordinates. The relevant frequency of occurrences of “we” and “they” suggests, at a discursive level, the writer’s distance from Italy—“Images of otherness and difference usually seek to keep ‘the other’ in its place” (McAllister, 2009 37). The generic category “they” includes social and human types, while Dickens explores social assets and personalities. The analysis of nouns related to class informs us that in fiction and travel writing, the percentage of male nouns referring to the upper classes is higher than that referring to lower ones. Building on the idea that in Victorian times, the nouns “gentleman” and “gentlewomen” were usually related to 207

Germana Cubeta Table 15.3 Personal Pronouns, Male and Female Nouns in Pictures from Italy We He They You People Man Men She Lady Women Crowd Gentleman Ladies Boy Children Mr Gentlemen Mrs Person Population Prisoners Bambino Child Friars Persons Baby Servants Sir Lord Merchants Porter

341 311 297 125 120 100 55 47 39 36 31 28 19 19 18 11 10 9 8 8 8 7 7 7 7 6 6 6 5 5 5

people’s manners more than class, it has been assumed that in Pictures from Italy, they refer to Italians from all classes; I also noticed that the noun “ladies” prevails over “women.”These semantic preferences would confirm Dickens’s fondness for the Italians and his attempt to restore their dignity, despite their living conditions appearing to be now poor and degraded.

Gestures In Pictures from Italy, the representation of the Italians is multi-layered; bodies and gestures are connected to their cultural identity and personality. In the nineteenth century, the popular version of Italians in circulation had established an iconography, emblematic representations which could be repeated or alluded to as a taxonomy, building up a complex map of discourses about Italy (McAllister, 2009 19). Italian people were usually given a marginal role and were even considered inappropriate if compared to the greatness of the cities and landscapes. In Pictures from Italy, their heterogeneity and human dimension, instead, are explored at different layers; the multiplicity of Italians featured affords an opportunity for a social commentary. Dickens subverts the general construction of primitive people, closer to nature and instinctive, and depicts them as “a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tempered” (187). 208

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In Dickens’s fiction, once the reader knows what a character looks like, he also knows a great deal about him; the character is what he appears to be (McMaster, 1987 4). In Pictures from Italy, physiognomy and sketching techniques help the writer to interpret the untold and explore transnational identities. He presents “country,” “rich,” “poor,” and people of “all classes,” where reality and historical background appear in the text without ever dissolving into one another.The concept of otherness is expressed through complexity and not as a homogeneous national culture (Bhabha, 1990 5). An extensive reading of the corpus has helped us to cross-examine linguistic data and has shed light on Dickens’s interest in the Italians. In the account of a journey by coach from Genoa towards Parma and Piacenza, he focuses on his travel companions, leaving out landscape descriptions. He presents: “a very old priest,” “a young Jesuit,” “a provincial Avvocato,” “a gentleman,” “two people,” “a monstrous ugly Tuscan,” and “the driver” (62). He is familiar with irony and hyperboles and uses them to highlight “an uncommon and singular sheen” on an Italian gentleman’s nose or to feature “a monstrous ugly Tuscan with a great purple moustache” (62). In Pictures from Italy, the Italians exhibit distinctive features which turn them into memorable characters. Dickens displays a travel companion’s conversational attitude and good humor and portrays some priests conventionally, as carrying breviaries, and unconventionally, as having cramps and yelling. As he does in his narrative works, he tries to capture nuances of their human nature. Their social role is usually counterbalanced by their features or flaws; exaggeration and grotesque sketching, however, reveal only superficial traits that Dickens undercuts by attempting to show something more about them. In company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his companion—who carried their breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black stocking and his black knee-shorts, that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia’s closet, only it was visible on both legs—a provincial Avvocato; and a gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular sheen upon it, which I never observed in the human subject before … To mend the matter, the old priest was troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts of the company; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity. This disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of conversation. Finding, in the afternoon, that the coupe had discharged two people, and had only one passenger inside—a monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great purple moustache, of which no man could see the ends when he had his hat on—I took advantage of its better accommodation, and in company with this gentleman (who was very conversational and good-humoured) travelled on. (62) Dickens’s representation of the Italians exhibits a consonance between appearance and essence that pertains more usually to the visual rather than the verbal arts—“Faces, clothes, carriages, cabs tell a story about something else, some inner reality that is accessible only by this language of appearances” (McMaster, 1987 4).The author offers a composite portrait which tends to emphasize their integrity, hard work, and effort. He embraces a complex society where priests, provincial avvocatos, and gentlemen (62) are juxtaposed with “the Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs” (47) and “the dirtiest of children (who) play with their impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters” (65). What distinguishes Dickens’s portrayal from that of other travelers, however, is not only his concern regarding their social despair but his faith in their possible rebirth. The main force of the book is a process of reintegration and affirmation of “a noble people (who) may be, one day, raised up from these ashes” (187). In Pictures from Italy, bodies and gestures are a highly satisfactory language where words by themselves do not avail; they are embedded with culture and express class and status. 209

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Dickens’s picture of the guide at the cemetery of Bologna is an example of how non-verbal language expresses culture and class. The cicerone who shows him the plot of grass where five of his children are buried appears a dignified presence in Pictures from Italy (Sadrin, 1999 133). His body language, comprised of emblems, deictics, and space markers (Korte, 1997 47), expresses his class and his feelings. “The poor people, Signore,” he said, with a shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at me—for he always went on a little before and took off his hat to introduce every new monument. “Only the poor, Signore! It’s very cheerful. It’s very lively. How green it is, how cool! It’s like a meadow! There are five,”—holding up all the fingers of his right hand to express the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it be within the compass of his ten fingers—“there are five of my little children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the right. Well! Thanks to God! It’s very cheerful. How green it is, how cool it is! It’s quite a meadow! “He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him, took a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made a little bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a subject, and partly in memory of the children and of his favourite saint. It was as unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow, as ever man made. Immediately afterward he took his hat off altogether, and begged to introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his teeth shone brighter than before. (70) The description of the guide highlights the relationship between his gestures and social role. Dickens claims that his way of using fingers and taking snuff is typical of every cicerone in Italy. The writer interprets his gestures from a transcultural perspective; he states that the man’s shrug expresses his resignation to life and his gaze indicates his attention to the impact that his words have had on the speaker. In the book, gestures matter at various levels. The author, for example, features a group of peasant women washing clothes in public tanks.Their act of washing is symbolic; it is a claim of revenge for the “Fall of mankind.” They are placed at the lowest level of the social ladder and express their rage against their miserable living conditions. The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when they are clean. The custom is to lay the wet linen which is being operated upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat wooden mallet.This they do, as furiously as if they were revenging themselves on dress in general for being connected with the Fall of Mankind. (47) Each gesture seems to have a specific cultural connotation in the book. The bodies of the Italians become a vehicle not only to explore their culture but also to highlight their social and human heterogeneity.

Hands Dickens realizes that the combination of hand movements and language in the meaning-making process is at the basis of the Italians’ communication. In the book, the process of signification, however, is not a mechanical connection and requires effort from the interpreter. The quantitative research has displayed that the noun “hands” occurs fifty-four times (see Table 15.4), and a qualitative inquiry has helped to deepen a reading of Dickens’s use of body 210

Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity Table 15.4 “Hands” in Pictures from Italy He marks what portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or four, or five fingers; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many fingers, as will make the exact balance. Most of the apothecaries’ shops are great lounging-places. Here, grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together, passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking, drowsily and sparingly, about the News. But the apothecary’s has its group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their hands folded over the tops of their sticks. His little hands outside the coverlet. Sustaining an uninterrupted conversation with all hands. His hands were twined in his hair immediately. The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went loitering off, carrying his hat in his hand that he might the better trail up the ends of his disheveled moustache. He had a great rod in his hand. They loitered about with these for some time, under their arms like walking-sticks, or in their hands like truncheons. Their shouts: the clapping of their hands. Others, with their hats off, at a carriage-door, humbly beseeching some kind-hearted lady to oblige them with a light for a cigar, and when she is in the fullness of doubt whether to comply or no, blowing out the candle she is guarding so tenderly with her little hand. Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, pointing in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping their hands. Then, the Pope, clad in a scarlet robe, and wearing on his head a skull-cap of white satin, appeared in the midst of a crowd of Cardinals and other dignitaries, and took in his hand a little golden ewer, from which he poured a little water over one of Peter’s hands. Prisoners who could not wind their faces round the barricading of the blocked-up windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to the rusty bars, turned THEM towards the overflowing street. And half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle in their hands. He threw himself upon his knees beside the unfortunate rider, and clasped his hand with an expression of the wildest grief.

(36)

(44)

(45) (53) (58) (60) (65) (105) (120) (126) (127)

(128) (155)

(159)

(161) (178)

language. I observed that in Pictures from Italy, hand movements substitute or support speech and often express behavior related to class. Hand gestures exhibit multiple meanings according to various situations; the acts of exchanging newspapers in the summer shadows of a pharmacy or smoking cigars slowly, for example, display a supposed tendency of the Italians to be idle. Hand movements that emphasize a conversation highlight their extroverted character as well as the depiction of the Italians clapping during feasts and religious rites. Hands, however, are not only linked to macro concepts but also tend to define micro-worlds. The focus on hands that play the finger-counting game is related to the lower-class forms of entertainment, and the Pope’s hands that pour blessed water during a religious service put emphasis on Catholic rituals. Hands also help to draw attention to people who live on the fringes of society, such as prisoners, whose hands cling to “the rusty bars” of a prison (159), on well-off women, and children. In Pictures from Italy, Dickens refers to the way the Italians put their hands in their hair as a sign of dismay or when they hold hats and sticks. He depicts hands keeping candles in churches or holding other hands as a sign of solidarity. Computational research also highlighted the frequency of other body noun words, such as “face” and “eyes.” Dickens starts from the Italians’ facial expressions to investigate their soul; he 211

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depicts their smiles and dwells on their white teeth to define salient aspects of their character.Their expressions and gaze are often indicators of a whole universe of relationships and conceptions of life. Faces and eyes emphasize the Italians’ kindness and good manners: When the Brave came running in, with a grin upon his face that stretched it from ear to ear, and implored us to follow him, without a moment’s delay, as they were going to show the Bambino to a select party. (132) “Seeing this little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have nothing in his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking wistfully at a certain plot of grass” (70). Body language becomes a cultural mirror in the text; the goodness of the Italians, for example, is not only linked to a generic concept of incorruptibility due to a primitive state but to a positive nature that from time to time manifests itself in individuals and that Dickens has the opportunity to observe and therefore appreciate.

Clothes and Class in Pictures from Italy Now that the central role of people in Pictures for Italy has been clarified, another aspect of the representation of the Italians will be examined, namely the use of clothes and accessories as cultural vehicles (see Table 15.5). I noticed that in the text, they are signifiers of meanings and contribute to thematizing and textualizing cultural and social aspects. Clothes, or their absence, feature different layers of society; barefoot women washing clothes at public tanks, for example, are juxtaposed with “well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans” (29). Dickens dwells on women who use their fans to bring relief from the heat; he describes groups of people wearing colored hats, and also dwells on their jewels in contrast to the worn-out clothes of the beggars. Clothes as well as gestures become the mirror of a multi-layered society where the author does not leave out any detail. The qualitative research was integrated with the quantitative research; a close reading of the text displayed that clothes and accessories frequently reflect different chronologically and economically mismatched social scenarios. Dickens’s Italy is split like a broken mirror, where inhumane living conditions predominate and overlap with the vestiges of an illustrious past. References to clothes, accessories, hats, and fans are part of Dickens’s operation of representing the Italians’ cultural complexity and highlighting the variety of their social strata. Table 15.5 Frequency of Clothes and Accessories in Pictures from Italy Hat Clothes Hats Coat Jewels Shoe Cigars Cloaks Skirts Stick Veils Cap Shirt

28 8 7 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 4 4

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The clothing of the officer on duty at the cemetery in Bologna, for example, offers an opportunity to reflect on the discrepancy between what appears and what it is. Dickens expresses surprise when the little guide suggests giving the officer a tip of a couple of Pauls for his services. His astonishment derives from the elegant appearance of the man, which contrasts with his over-enthusiasm for such a small tip. The representation of the officer offers the reader cues to reflect on the inconsistency between appearance and essence and to observe how human dignity does not depend on the state of need and necessity in which people find themselves. The presentation of these details, although indirect and subtle, makes the reader reflect on the Italians’ socio-economic conditions; meaningless details, like in a mosaic, form a complex image of the country. When the little Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in presenting this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a couple of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked incredulously at his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling buttons, and rebuked the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head. For, in splendour of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy Usher of the Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler would say, “such a thing as tenpence” away with him, seemed monstrous. He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would have been a bargain at double the money. (71) His denunciation takes place through the dissemination of cues that lead the reader to reflect on the existing situation and make comparisons between England and Italy. In this regard, in the last chapter of the book, the writer questions the traditional concept of the picturesque associated with Italian reality and focuses on patterns of inequality and injustice exerted by local governors. Dickens reshapes the meaning of this term and offers a renewed and more dignified view of the Italians. He mainly expresses his disappointment for their miserable living conditions, but the novelty of the book is represented by his love for the country that also urges him to free the word from its conventional limits. But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make ALL the difference between what is interesting and what is coarse and odious? (166) Hands, glances, smiles, and gestures are related to Italian culture and help us to understand Dickens’s encounter with “the other.” Body language expresses broader concepts; the writer seems to understand the meaning of certain cultural subtleties that are not known to most travelers and wants to share it with the reader. His concern when he sees the bound legs of children, which prevent them from crawling, for example, reveals his surprise at different cultural habits in childcare, and the recurring image of bare-footed people shows his concern about poverty. It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these times, or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or finger. This custom (which we often see represented in old pictures) is universal among the common people. A child is left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is accidentally knocked off a

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shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at an English rag-shop, without the least inconvenience to anybody. (47) The extensive review of the Italians in the pages of Pictures from Italy offers a view of Italy at a specific historical moment. Dickens pays the Italians the same service that he does to his countrymen as a narrator. He immortalizes them in a visual work that allows the reader to understand certain aspects of their culture, that were often ignored in other travel books. The country Dickens presents moves away from the beaten paths precisely because it tends to explore the cultural variety of its people. The Italians are not a uniform mass, but they differ not only in terms of antagonism with the British traveler but within their own society, which in Dickens’s eyes is varied and polyphonic. They are introduced by surname, as in the case of “Signor Bagnarello” (a butcher), or by name “Signor Salvatore”; they are depicted according to their age—“the old man”—and emphasis is given to a variety of social actors, among the artists “the singer,” to “the corpulent hairdresser” or “the half-French, half Italian Vetturino.” Dickens always has an eye for the outcasts and people who suffer: “blind men,” “a man without legs,” “half-naked children,” and many others. In his social review of Italy, he includes every class, people of all ages and gender. The corpus analysis has offered cues to exploring the writer’s transnational attitude which contrasts the idea that Dickens’s travels in Italy were travels in “Dickensland” (Chesterton, 2007 78). The writer dwells on elements that certainly denote his professional writing perhaps skewed orientation; however, his intention to restore dignity to the Italians cannot be denied. He poses “the other” at the center of the stage and does not leave anyone out: from beggars to peasants, from Roman policemen to prisoners, from customs officers to service personnel. His attention focuses on people’s physical appearance as well as on their moral qualities. The Italians assert themselves as a defined entity but at the same time various aspects of the social scale are profiled. A manual analysis has recorded all the Italians who are featured in the book, which can offer a view of how they appeared to Dickens during his travels in Italy (see Table 15.6).

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Dickens’s Fairness in Describing Italian Complexity Table 15.6 The Italians in Pictures from Italy In Genoa Signor Bagnarello is a butcher The brave Courier The old man Some men The singer The men, in red caps, with loose coats hanging on their shoulders Two men play together When playing morra: some men have the propensity to throw out some particular number ofter than another. One old Tom: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye The Jesuits Half-naked children Two or three blind men A man without legs The sellers of macaroni and polenta Few priests of prepossessing appearance A Priest A Monk The Cappuccini Jewelers Booksellers Very few of the tradesmen Apothecaries Poor physicians Barber’s shops The Genoese The Peasant Women A child The very poor The actors A comic man An enchanter A procession of musicians The corpulent hairdresser The steamer The captain The brave Courier A sturdy Cappuccino Friar The loquacious Frenchman The half-French, half Italian Vetturino Various carters and mule drivers The withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot To Parma, Modena, and Bologna The brave Courier A very old priest A young Jesuit A provincial Avvocato A gentleman A monstrous ugly Tuscan The driver (Continued)

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Germana Cubeta Table 15.6 (Continued) The Italians in Pictures from Italy A stately nobleman A Mexican chef Six or eight Roman chariots A little fiery-eyed old management A little Cicerone Through Bologna and Ferrara Cicerone The chief among the waiters The Brave Courier A wild and savagely good-looking a vagabond A Brigand An Italian Dream Two rowers Torch-bearers Carpenters Women gracefully veiled Idlers By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland Noisy Vetturini The Padrona of the Hotel The lean Apothecary The brave Courier A Cicerone A Vetturino The Milanese gentry A Monk or two To Rome by Pisa and Siena There were numbers of men The workmen Common people Old painters The beggars A good-tempered Vetturino The waitress the head-dress of the women There were numbers of men The workmen Old painters The beggars A good-tempered Vetturino The waitress was like a dramatic brigand’s wife In Rome Coachman The Pope Ladies in black dresses and black veils The gentlemen of the Pope’s guard A great many other gentlemen The singers A slowly moving crowd of people: talking to each other A perfect army of cardinals and priests Jesuits creeping in and put (Continued)

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Table 15.6 (Continued) The Italians in Pictures from Italy A very old man in a rusty gown with an open work tippet Drivers The handsome Roman women Handsome girls People Men and boys clinging to the wheel of coaches An old gentleman Another man in a brown cloak Another man, who constantly looks out of the corner of his eyes Another man, who constantly looks over his own shoulder Dirty beggars Cripples Blind men A kneeling lady A few choristers Jesuits priests Half-a-dozen well-dressed women Rigid climbers A demure lady of fifty-five The men The boys The old gentleman in the watch box The Roman police Many of the Contadini Sulky Romans Lively peasants Groups of pilgrims from distant parts of Italy Sight-seeing foreigners of all nations Dismal prisoners A Rapid Diorama Shaggy peasant A horseman All beggars Herdsmen The hungriest of soldiers Custom-house officers Scowling people All beggars A group of miserable children A ghastly old woman The mourners in white gown and masks Exhibitors of Punch Buffo singers with guitars Reciters of poetry Reciters of stories Clown and showmen Ragged lazzaroni The gentry, gaily dressed Quiet letter-writers Slave in chains A clerkly-looking management (Continued)

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Table 15.6 (Continued) The Italians in Pictures from Italy The secretary The soldier The beggars Two people bargaining for fish The buyer The old men Some women Signor Salvatore, the recognised head-guides, with the gold band round his cap The head guide A rather heavy gentleman Pickpockets Buffo singers Beggars Certain people who have a talent for dreaming fortunately There are some priests who are constantly with visions of the lucky numbers The man on the little stool behind the President The porter The women wear a bright red bodice laced before and behind, a white skirt, and the Neapolitan Headdress of square folds of linen, primitively meant to carry loads on Two priests Jewelers and Goldsmiths

Conclusions In this paper, a corpus-based analysis has helped to explore Dickens’s notion of culture and class in Pictures from Italy. This analysis, alongside an intersectional approach, has attempted to shed new light on the writer’s construction of “the other” and has displayed that Dickens does not erect boundaries between “we” and “they” but offers fresh opportunities to cross them. The corpus analysis has clarified that language expresses identities and constructs them (Evans, 2014 4). The Italians are active social actors in this book and language reveals the writer’s transnational view of Italy. Gesture provides a unique link between action and mental representation; the body and the representation of “the other” operate in a relationship with each other. The bodies of the Italians are a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society and are signifiers as they interact with the environment, and encode and create meaning. The gallery of Italians in the book, which is unusual when compared with travel genre conventions, helps us to understand Dickens’s broad view of class and gender in Italy.The writer describes service personnel, couriers, and ciceroni, as other travelers did, but he does not leave out the common man, and he includes his occasional traveling companions and the passers-by. He records their expressions, smiles, and glances. He departs from travel writing conventions and adopts a more personal and individual manner of presentation. He refuses to encapsulate the Italians into stereotypes and explores structures that help define transnational identities. Social categories are intrinsically linked to personal identities, as well as to wider institutional and structural systems. In Italy, Dickens’s attentive eye investigates every detail. The writer is interested in mankind and during his travel what strikes him most are the Italians. In the text, his aim seems to be to display the complexity of a people, that was often represented through stereotyped iconography. The computational analysis has highlighted the high frequency of linguistic elements that contrast with travel genre conventions. This allowed me to claim that the subject matter of the book is not the country but 218

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its inhabitants. Italy is certainly explored from a multitude of angles, but the reader is led to look beyond appearances in search for “the other.”

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. U of Texas P, 1981. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. Routledge, 1990. Bondi, Marina and Mike Scott. Keyness in Texts. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Charles Dickens. Wordsworth Editions, 2007. Cubeta, Germana. Dickens in Italia. Uno Studio Linguistico-Computazionale di Pictures from Italy. Gruppo Editoriale Bonanno, 2017. Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Edited with an introduction and notes by Kate Flint. Penguin Books, 1998. Evans, David. Language and Identity: Discourse in the World. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Flint, Kate. Introduction and Notes to Pictures from Italy. Penguin Books, 1998. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Polity, 2016. Korte, Barbara. Body Language in Literature. U of Toronto P Inc., 1997. Leech, Geoffrey. “Stylistics.” Discourse and Literature: New Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Genres, edited by T.A. van Diik. John Benjamins, 1985, pp. 39–57. Leroy, Maxime. Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publ, 2013. Mahlberg, Michaela. Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction. Routledge, 2013. McAllister, Annamarie. “A Pair of Naked Legs and a Ragged Red Scarf: An Overview of Victorian Discourse on Italy.” The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travels, Politics and Art, edited by Alessandro Vescovi et al., Polimetrica-International Scientific Publisher, 2009, pp. 19–43. McMaster, Juliet. Dickens the Designer. MacMillan, 1987. Sadrin, Anny. Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds. Macmillan Press LTD, 1999. Scott, Mike. WordSmith Tools 6.0. [Computer Software], Oxford UP, 2012. Sinclair, John. Trust the Text Language: Corpus and Discourse. Routledge, 2004. Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. Corpus Linguistics at Work. John Benjamins, 2001. van Leeuwen, Theo. “The Representation of Social Actors.” Text and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas et al., Routledge, 1996, pp. 32–70. Ward, John C. Dickens Studies Newsletter, no. 14, 1983, pp. 37–42.

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16 THE BRITISH WORKING-CLASS BILDUNGSROMAN DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION Charles Ferrall

According to Franco Moretti the bildungsroman is “deeply entwined with one social class, one region of the world, one sex” (x). For that reason a working-class bildungsroman is therefore almost impossible: Just think of how social mobility, which is such an essential trait of the Bildungsroman, literally vanishes in the presence of manual labourers: it worked within the bourgeois sphere, or between the new and the old ruling class, but below the middle class—in Jude the Obscure, or Martin Eden, or Sons and Lovers—it seems to defy narrative imagination … A youth without the right to dream: this is what makes the working-class Bildungsroman incomparable to Wilhelm Meister or Père Goriot. In a sense, Hardy’s cruel sentence says it best: Goethe’s “aspirations,” Eliot’s “yearnings”—all these emotions are here rewritten as the stark double negative of the “modern vice of unrest.” And even when sublimated in culture and art, self-repression only ends in another, truly definitive exclusion: no longer at home among his old fellow workers, but never accepted by the new bourgeois milieu, the hero suddenly sees the impossibility of his position (“And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know,” reads the last sentence of Jack London’s novel)—and drowns. (x) Before the 1930s there are probably only three working-class British novels that can be described as a bildungsroman or having significant aspects of the bildungsroman: Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (1849–1850), Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End (1914), and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). But during the 1930s, the first period “when working-class fiction achieves a cult status and popular mystique in British culture” (Haywood 36), twelve working-class writers—Simon Blumenfeld, F.C. Boden, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Walter Greenwood, James Hanley, Harold Heslop, Jack Hilton, Gwyn Jones, Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas, and Ellen Wilkinson—wrote one or more novels about the formative years or education of youthful protagonists. At least ninety working-class writers were published during the 1930s. Of these writers more than forty wrote autobiographies, which, while not formally bildungsroman, are frequently about their authors’ formation, that is the experiences by which they came to be written. This at least triples the number of working-class writers published during the previous decade. Many would not even have been written but for the Depression. As Andy Croft points out, “[w]hen novels did begin to appear in print in the late 1920s and early 1930s by working220

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class writers, they were almost all by and about unemployed men” (97). But if the Depression was in part the cause of working-class people being published, it also blighted lives. Hardly any of the writers were from the South of England, only a relatively small number were from London, and of those two were Jewish (Blumenfeld and Willie Goldman), a complicating factor. The rest were from the coal mining and industrial heartlands of South Wales, the Midlands, the North, and Scotland, the areas hardest hit by the Depression. Many of these novels can be described as bildungsroman because they are about the formation of usually young men and therefore contradict Moretti’s limitation of the genre to the middle class.Yet they might also be described as incomplete or even anti-bildungsroman since they epitomize “the stark double negative of the modern vice of unrest” and end with their protagonists alienated from either their own class or the class to which they aspire. According to Moretti, the Great War makes the bildungsroman or “novel of youth” finally “impossible” (229) whereas for Jed Esty the “great novels” of the genre from the late nineteenth century are “stalled” bildungsroman “centered on frozen youth” (1). But these working-class bildungsroman are different from their modernist contemporaries precisely because working-class adolescence was so different from the middle- and upper-class experience. Elsewhere, Anna Jackson and I argue that the Victorians invented a concept of adolescence that persisted until the 1950s in the massively popular “juvenile” literature of adventure and school stories. In this literature the boys and girls have reached puberty and yet retain a romantic idealism that will be dispelled by marriage; they are in the process of acquiring the bildung of adult duties and responsibilities but are yet to assume the roles of breadwinner or household manager.This period of adolescence could last from the onset of puberty, which was around the age of fourteen at the time, until well into the twenties, but working-class boys’ and girls’ experience was quite different. The Forster Education Act of 1870 made education for all classes compulsory until the age of fourteen, at which age workingclass boys and girls would enter the workforce. At fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, they would still be technically adolescents, that is not yet ready or able to marry, and yet working alongside married women and men. As Moretti suggests, there was no period between childhood and adulthood during which youth could dream. Many of these novels begin with their main protagonists at the watershed year of fourteen, or not much either side of it. Harry in Greenwood’s Love on the Dole has just left school; Hanley’s protagonist in Boy, Arthur, is nearly thirteen, at which age his father can get him an exemption from school; Joe in Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field is at the “momentous age” of fourteen, “the time when all the fetters are snapped” (6); Boden’s Danny in Miner is on the cusp of his fourteenth birthday; Gibbon’s Ewan is eighteen but has just got his first job (16). Yet if there are great expectations, they are soon dashed. In the first chapter of The Gate of a Strange Field, “Adolescence,” the narrator explains that “Joe stepped out of the school playground,” then walks across “waste ground” and sees the pit-head where he will go to work the next Monday, a place of which “[t]here is nothing more hideous upon earth” (7). In contrast, Alec in Jewboy is twenty-three, a virgin and living at home, but he can only dream that he is “back in school again” since “the day’s work made him dog tired. Too tired to read, think or do anything properly. His mind was ruined” (22, 29). Luke is also twenty-three in Times Like These but unemployed and, with a strike impending, unlikely to find work. The most catastrophic fall occurs to Arthur, the protagonist of Boy. Marlow, the hero of Joseph Conrad’s “Youth,” is much older, twenty, and therefore more resilient on his first voyage as second mate. After his ordeals on a burning and sinking “rattle-trap” and having finally made it to the “East,” the forty-two-year-old narrator, Marlow, sighs, “a moment of strength, or romance, of glamour—of youth!” (180). Hanley’s Boy is his rejoinder. Arthur is intelligent and wants to win a scholarship and eventually become a teacher, but his family is in dire straits after his father has been on strike for seven months during which the family has accumulated debts. His father brutally forces his son to leave school a year early just as 221

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he himself had been brutally treated as a boy. Arthur is afraid to leave school and his headmaster, recognizing this, sighed, for he remembered how many others of his pupils had been dragged from their benches, some willingly, many unwillingly, and sent off down to work amongst men at that tender age. He heaved a sigh of relief when he thought of his own son, now seventeen years of age and graduating for a university. (19) At the beginning of this interview with the headmaster, he is enjoined, like all the heroes of juvenile fiction, to be “manly” (7), but what follows is a series of initiations which leave him anything but a man. He goes down the bilges; then the boiler; returns home and is told he will be beaten if he does not go back to work; he stows away on a ship in the coal-bunker where he narrowly avoids being killed; then he is subjected to a series of sexual advances which may end in rape in various cabins (the text is ambiguous, though that did not prevent it being censored); he goes ashore in Alexandria where he has sex with an Arabian dancer, contracts syphilis, and, though thinking and having been advised to throw himself into the sea, is smothered by the captain. His final death is appropriate because his series of initiations take place in confined places which signify that they are not places of rebirth, perhaps even womblike, but places of destruction leading to death. Arthur wishes he had “been born a man right away” (131) but he is hardly ever referred to by name, simply as “boy.” The steward noted that he was a nice-looking boy. He liked his wine-dark skin, the fine eyes, the delicateness of the features, the slight down upon his face, the slender white hands like those of a girl. Suddenly he leaned over and said: “Boy! Kiss me.” (102) He is eventually probably raped by the steward but others on the ship also feminize him and believe he should “be used as a brownie” (129). His experience is the inversion of what the middleclass boy’s should be. Whereas the middle-class boy is supposed to have acquired manhood while remaining chaste, Arthur has sexual experience forced on him but never becomes a man. Going to work was not always, however, the trauma that it is for Arthur. In Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell remembers: It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a “job” should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school … To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons. Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! (148) This is certainly the case for Harry in Love on the Dole. He has been working part-time while still at school in a demeaning job at a pawnbroker’s and though his girlfriend, Helen, “pictured him” the former choir boy as “clean, tidy, going to an office where gentlemen worked,” he thinks of this as a “Tart’s job” (45) and aspires to work at an engineering plant with “Men, engaged in men’s work” (19). He is living at home and contributing to his family’s income, but for the first time in 222

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his life “Affluence entered his life” with “money to spend, Saturday’s nights’ entertainment” (54, 69). Similarly, in Boden’s Miner, Danny’s work as a pit pony driver “added considerably to the family income” (75), until his work becomes severely reduced. Being young and single but in work is the equivalent of the middle- and upper-class boys’ period of “great expectations,” providing, of course, that their work is not like that of those such as Arthur. But whereas the public-school boy’s protracted adolescence usually lasted through university—or indeed, for many Old Boys, never ends, at least, according to Cyril Connelly (253)—working-class boys’ “adolescence”—if they ever have one—begins at around the time in which they work and ends when their wages must support a wife and then children. Or it can be ended by unemployment. When Harry secures a seven-year apprenticeship at an engineering plant, he comes to realize: “Every year new generations of [lesser paid] schoolboys were appearing, each generation pushing him and his a little nearer to that incredible abyss of manhood and the dole” (92). Eventually, of course, that is where he ends up. Harry’s progress—and presumably many other actual boys’ as well—reverses the bildung of the upper-class boy. Harry’s “adolescence,” if he has one, begins rather than ends with work, and he is gradually emasculated rather than slowly acquiring “manhood.” It is somewhat different for his sister, Sally, and Harry’s girlfriend, Helen. They are both in work, probably because women’s wages were much less than those of men. But work does not really constitute their sense of identity and worth as it does for the male characters. For them, the equivalent of work is marriage. But, as Harry observes of the married women waiting to get into the pawn shop: throwing back their shawls from their disheveled hair revealed faces which, though dissimilar in features, had a similarity of expression common, typical, of all the married women around and about; their badge of marriage, as it were. The vivacity of their virgin days was with their virgin days, gone; a married woman could be distinguished by a single glance at her facial expressions. Marriage scored on their faces a kind of preoccupied, faded, lack-lustre air as they were constantly being plagued by some problem. (31) But Helen cannot marry a “man” on the dole—hence the title of the novel—and Sally’s lover Larry, though employed on a better than average working-class wage, believes that marriage will mean “Doing without the things that make life worthwhile” (140), by which he means essentially books. Whereas Harry is progressively emasculated, Sally believes she is unable to achieve full womanhood. And whereas the average age of marriage for women, which generally was twentyfive (and twenty-seven for men) (Coleman 70), allowed for a period of great expectations while on the marriage market, Sally and Helen seem to have settled on their respective partners at a much earlier age: Sally at the age of eighteen and Helen at fourteen. If their adolescence comes to an end earlier than their middle-class counterparts with them deciding on their partner at an earlier age, they nevertheless face the prospect, paradoxically, of it also lasting longer because they cannot afford to get married. In this respect their lives mirror those of their brothers: their puberty and entry into the workforce occur at roughly the same time and yet, because of unemployment, they experience a kind of adolescence that never ends. The relative lack of successful marriages in these novels—a contrast to the conventional bildungsroman which typically concludes with marriage (Love on the Dole is an exception to which I will return)—is in part due to many of their protagonists being psychologically unable to leave home. Incest or the fear of it is a recurring theme. Orwell recounts visiting houses in Wigan where “eight or even ten people” would be sleeping in two rooms, sometimes at the same time, sometimes rotating because of different hours of work. “There is an added difficulty,” he goes on to note, “when there are grown-up children, in that you cannot let adolescent youths and girls sleep in the same bed” because of the “danger of incest” (58). In reality, 223

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the average number of children had declined from over six during the Victorian period to just over two after the War, but this did not necessarily change perceptions (Benson, 99). Harry and Sally are the only children in the family, yet they share the same bed. Harry hates his workmate Tom because he is “obsessed with matters sexual” and tells “tales of the filthy behavior of his parents in whose bedroom he slept” (51). Tom’s tales make him fearfully think of his sister, Sally, but particularly of Helen whose family life is much like Tom’s. As a consequence, Harry is rather sexually repressed and Helen, at least initially, recoils from any sexual experience. In Gibbon’s Sunset Song, Chris wonders, “Was it likely a brother and a sister would do anything if they slept together?” though she does physically comfort her brother,Will, in bed after he has been beaten by their father. Later her father makes sexual advances towards and is in part associated with her future husband as both are repeatedly described as cats. In Cwmardy, Len also shares a bed with his sister, Mary, whom he closely observes coming to sexual maturity. Like Chris, she physically comforts her brother; later he associates his sister with his future partner, Mary, whom he regards as a “friend and a comrade” largely as a consequence (493). But the main reason why these boys have such difficulty leaving home is because of the dominance of mothers or at least their sons’ love for them. The historical basis here is the actual or imagined centrality of the mother to the working-class home. The concept of “separate spheres” and the “cult of domesticity” was one of the consequences of the industrial revolution (Wilson 28). From the mid-century, the two spheres would have ensured close bonds between mothers and their children with the father often interrupting this bond. In Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, which is partly an account of her parents’ Victorian marriage, this takes an Oedipal form. At the start of the novel, James’s “heavenly bliss” with his mother, a kind of Angel of the House figure, is dashed by his father who works in the public sphere of a university, telling him they will not be able to go to the lighthouse; and James thinks, “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast killed him, there and then, James would have seized it” (9). But in the working-class family, the mother is even more central if only because of the absence of servants and nannies. For the middle-class work belonged to the public sphere, but the back-breaking domestic work of the working-class woman would have made her an even more central and dominating figure in the home. Remembering his childhood during the 1930s, Richard Hoggart pointed out that the “scholarship boy” is likely to be separated from the boys’ groups outside the home, is no longer a full member of the gang which clusters round the lamp-posts in the evenings; there is homework to be done. But these are the male groups among which others in his generation grew up, and his detachment from them is emotionally linked with one more aspect of his home situation—that he now tends to be closer to the women of the house than to the men. This is true, even if his father is not the kind who dismisses books and reading as “a woman’s game.” The boy spends a large part of his time at the physical centre of the home, where the women’s spirit rules, quietly getting on with his work whilst his mother gets on with her jobs—the father not yet back from work or out for a drink with his mates … Perhaps this partly explains why many authors from the workingclasses, when they write about their childhood, give the women in it so tender and central a place. (242) D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers—though published earlier—is the exemplary novel. According to Lawrence’s famous letter about his novel, Mrs. Morel “selects” her two sons as “lovers” while they “hate and are jealous” of their father. When the sons “come to manhood, they can’t love” because their mother holds their “soul.” Both sons are “split” between the “soul” and “passion,” in one case, 224

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for a “fribble” of a woman and the “mother realises what is the matter … begins to die” and Paul “is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death” (476–477). In Lawrence’s case this dominance is in part because the mother comes from a higher class. But there is a similar Oedipal theme in Brierley’s Sandwichman, though the mother is from a workingclass background. Philip Gorski observes, Brierley was clearly familiar with Lawrence’s novel, and in some ways the plots are similar; a young man in a mining family, trying to “get on,” at odds with the father, leaves home after the mother’s death. (xviii) But Nancy, although sexually frustrated with Arthur and eventually married to another man after falling pregnant to him, is very far from being the “fribble” of Lawrence’s novel and his inability to marry her is the consequence of his poverty and the demands on his time for study. His “father” is actually his stepfather, which in part enables a greater degree of hostility between them, and they actually come to blows. Arthur’s stepfather has moved down in terms of class to become the “gentleman coal-cutter” (6), which probably also fuels his grievance towards a son apparently heading in the opposite social direction. His resentment and attempts to block Arthur’s attempts to “get on” are also fueled by the contrast to his own two sons’ (Arthur’s stepbrothers’) lack of ambition. His father says, “Thinks because ’e knows a bit o’ blasted ’istory an’ ’alf a dozen French words that ’e’s too good for t’pit” (101). But the main difference between the novels is that Arthur works as a miner while studying, often actually reading his study notes while at rest down the mine, whereas Lawrence’s Paul has a rather undemanding job as a clerk. Both novels have the same narrative arc, but Brierley’s is more concerned with the social impediments to acquiring a bildung. Although Brieley’s son and mother, Mrs. Shirley, are as close as Lawrence’s, the latter does not have the same dominating presence. In that respect, Mrs. Morel more closely resembles the mother of Hanley’s The Furys: The last child [of the Fury family], Peter, Mrs Fury adored. He seemed to her to be so different from the others.The woman, whose ambitions had long been thwarted by what she was want to describe as her husband’s “lack of character,” realized at once that Peter was something for her alone … The spirit within her, long buried, suddenly took fire. This son was going to be different. Peter must be a priest. At first Mr Fury protested.Why should this son be singled out for special favours denied to the others? … The woman was determined. She broke down all opposition. Her ambitions had been buried too long. Her husband retired, he had nothing more to say. (28) But Peter is expelled from the seminary for visiting a prostitute and his bildung is never completed. In contrast, the son of his earlier novel, Drift (1930), twenty-year-old Joe, has a hostile relationship with his mother. On the instruction of a priest, his mother burns one of his library books which is later followed into the flames by Zola’s bildungsroman, The Dream, and Ulysses, the work of a “dirty renegade Irishman named Joyce” (103), is torn up. Joyce is probably the most significant of these “filthy” (103) writers: Ulysses (which has aspects of the bildungsroman) is referred to three times; Drift begins as pastiche of the beginning of Joyce’s kunstlerroman, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Joe resembles Stephen Dedalus in his attempts to fly the net of religion. If Stephen is able to escape his mother in Portrait, though his apostrophe to her ghost in Ulysses, “Let me be [mother] and let me live” (10), suggests otherwise, Joe’s entrapment is of an even more Oedipal kind. But Joe’s embrace of secular avant-garde writers means that conventional Oedipal roles are inverted. Instead of the idealized mother of the Oedipal narrative, Joe is “conscious of a 225

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physical disgust” of his mother and, after he declares “I am a Catholic no longer, but a man at last” (167–168), she attacks him, they throw a religious statue at each other, and she dies, effectively killed by his confession, an echo of Buck Mulligan’s accusation in Ulysses that Stephen killed his dying mother by refusing to pray for her. Joe’s father is not his rival for his mother’s love but rather in complete accord with his wife and in league against their son. Joe does scorn his father, usually by remaining silent, but rather than any parricide there is an attempted filicide: Joe’s father, after a series of violent acts towards his son, eventually slashes his throat with a kitchen knife. As one of Joe’s middle-class friends comments, perhaps alluding to Freud, “Fancy a father murdering his son, and a son killing his mother” (173). Finally, the degraded lover of the Oedipal narrative, Jane, a Protestant and prostitute living in a slum, is transformed into a source of life and Joe plays Raskolnikov to Jane’s Sonya, though he denies having read Crime and Punishment. But inversion is not negation let alone indifference. Jane comes from the “abyss,” a word used obsessively, and it is from there that will come “the noble seed which was to regenerate mankind”; yet she and his mother are repeatedly conflated in his imagination. There is a pattern of imagery which connects the two women: Joe for example fixates on both his mother’s and lover’s “blue nipple[s]” (63, 151) and when he makes love to Jane and everything becomes “aflame” he sees “suddenly out of the chaos, out of the ruins of the abyss he saw—God—he saw his mother” (95). None of these authors invoke Freud or Freudianism, perhaps because their family romances, grounded as they are in particular social and religious contexts, require no such analysis. But in Gibbon’s Grey Granite, the son, Ewan, is aware of Freud: But once or twice when she put her arm under your head and unwound the bandage in the early morning, stuck on the lint, hands and arms so alive you felt queer—as though you were falling in love! You gathered the relations were something like that, and possible enough for all that you knew, those psychoanalyst Jewboy chaps had had cases enough, record on record, Oedipus the first of the Unhinged Unhygienics—Rot! Let’s dig in the phosphor bronze! (377) Later she finds him in bed and admires his “nice naked leg and that narrow waist that you envied in men, lovely folk men” but he feels “No shyness … just a cool disinterest” (381). A scene in which a mother not only admires the naked body of her grown son but is embraced by him is unimaginable in any of the other working-class bildungsroman—but so, too, is a son who calls his mother by her first name (as he always does) and maintains such a cool distance. Oedipal relationships are both stronger and more distant at the same time. If these characters are never able to figuratively leave home, they are also paradoxically unable to find a place within the working-class community. Ewan’s ambivalence towards his mother (and indeed all those he is emotionally close to) parallels his career path, if a working-class person can have a career. At the engineering firm where he gets his first job, he is taunted by the other apprentices in a scene which resembles the brutal “initiations” to which Arthur in Boy is subjected, though he eventually earns their respect. Later, as a labor leader, he is beaten up and sexually degraded in ways not specified in a police cell but a kind of stinging bliss came upon him, knowledge that he was that army itself—that army of pain and blood and torment that was yet but the raggedest van of the hordes of the Last of the Classes, the Ancient Lowly. (451) Yet, even after his gradual initiation into the “Last of the Classes,” he is never able to fully immerse himself in the class whose suffering he has assumed. The communist revolutionary with whom he 226

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now joins forces tells him that it is “A hell of a thing to be History,” but this declaration is preceded by him saying “For it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back [after a strike collapses] to Gowans” (459). Trease is a likeable character but quite unscrupulous about how he advances the communist cause, telling Ewan after his torture that “the Communists would exploit the case to the full—for their own ends first, not for Ewan’s” (454). Later when there is an explosion at the factory, which was the “kind of accident [that] would happen anywhere,”Trease recommends he could rub it in if he liked that there had been culpable negligence … Eh, what was that? Suggest it had all been deliberately planned to see the effect of poison-gas on a crowd? Hell! Anyhow, Ewan could try it. (485) Ewan’s lover, Ellen, tells him “that THAT was a lie. It was sickening of you to suggest that they let loose the gas deliberately … Ewan, it’s just cheating, it’s not Communism” (486; original emphasis). Soon afterwards Ewan breaks with Ellen after she tells him that she has left the communist party “because I’m sick of it, full of cheats and liars, thieves even … I’ve left because I’m sick of being without decent clothes, with the money I earn myself, pretty things that are mine.” Ewan cruelly tells her, “I can get a prostitute anywhere” (490; original emphasis). It is precisely Ewan’s coolness and distance which means he can never become one with the “keelies,” only with an ideology that purports to represent them. At the end, Chris tells Ewan that his “faith … Is just another dark cloud to me” repeating the imagery of clouds from Cloud Howe to which he replies theirs is “the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give it—the fight in the end between FREEDOM and GOD” (495; original emphasis). But the final scene is not with Ewan and his God but Chris and Freedom recognizing that “Change” will be “stayed by none of the dreams of men” (496). Ewan’s bildung has taught him about the suffering and cruelty that lies behind middle-class culture, that, like the socialist bildungsroman, he must unlearn his middle-class education; but his attempted immersion in the “keelies” is far from certain and is a “cloud” that will pass like all those that have preceded it. There is a similar sacrifice in Drift. Although from the abyss, it is Jane who ends up representing not so much some kind of élan vital or Nietzschean life force but someone who makes a Christian sacrifice in leaving Joe so that he can return to his father. When Joe does return home, his father, unemployed and facing the poorhouse, is waiting for death and incapable of forgiveness and Joe falls into the “abyss” of madness. Just as Peter is to board his first ship as a seaman at the end of The Furys, which will complete the reversal of his bildung at the seminary, his mother realizes he has been having an affair with his brother’s wife: “My God! I thought it had ended,” she was crying in her mind, “but it is only beginning.” Again and again she struck, not Peter, not a man, but all men, all those who had cheated and insulted her. Somebody was dragging her back, but her clenched fists, as though now freed from her body, continued to strike. “Damn you! Damn you!” She began to scream. (395) At the end of The Secret Journey Peter murders the money lender, Mrs. Ragner, who has been slowly destroying his mother through her usurious loans. After her murder, Peter runs back to his mother’s house pursued by bystanders in a kind of Dostoyevskian delirium yelling, “‘We’re free! Free! FREE!’” (569), the very last words of novel. But the murder is his final entrapment and, in the sequel, Our Time is Gone (1940), Peter is in gaol and his mother suffers a bout of insanity. The family name evokes, as Storm Jameson pointed out in her review of The Furys, a “Greek Tragedy” (Fordham 126), except that this is the tragedy of a working-class family. The hamartia, the original 227

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error—or, in another context, original sin—which determines the inexorable fate of all the characters is Fanny sending her son, Peter, to college. As in Drift, and in a quite literal sense, education makes the working-class hero mad. But if these novels can be described as incomplete or failed bildungsroman, eight others accord more closely to the traditional form. Of the latter, two feature relationships which are unusual or not in accordance with those of a typical working-class family, Hilton’s Champion and Thomas’s Sorrow for Thy Sons. Two others have female main protagonists, Wilkinson’s Clash and Love on the Dole (though it has already been discussed). One has a Jewish main protagonist, Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy, and the other three, Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field and Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live, are explicitly socialist.What these differences suggest is that their authors are stretching the form of the bildungsroman so that it can apply to an unconducive social reality. Hilton’s Champion does finish with the hero—or, in this case, two heroes—reintegrated back into their society. One of these heroes is Jimmy Watkins, a boxer who rises to Middle Weight Champion of England and with it to riches. The second hero is Charlie Smith, a socialist leader of the unemployed who has had a bout in prison and a long period destitute on the road. It is he who is the working-class intellectual and autodidact and accordingly is “slight-framed” and “just a little feminine” (172). His path barely crosses Jimmy’s and, for two-thirds of the novel, their stories are told almost entirely separately. However, there is a fortuitous meeting and they become partners of sorts, Jimmy providing the money and fame and Charlie the brains and speaking ability. The two heroes’ careers add up to a single bildungsroman not only because Charlie’s suffering tempers Jimmy’s success but because the former’s education into socialism can more effectively allow for his reintegration back into the working-class community than the latter’s money and fame. Accordingly, the novel finishes not with the flush of Charlie’s election to Parliament but with him at home afterward pondering on the miners who have provided the coal which is heating the fire he is enjoying: He felt their presence because he was part of their hereditary stream, the writers of history had never been with them in blood relationship. All the sufferings of his class would be ever unforgettable to him; they were not paper men, they were human beings that had felt pain, pain that could not be assembled by statistics, pain that his sensitiveness could never black out. He knew that he could never go back on his class, that he would have to serve them. (346) But Charlie’s bildung can only be achieved because it has been yoked together with another bildung, Jimmy’s. Both characters might be “typical” in György Lukács’s sense of the term but their partnership is quite untypical, merely a plot device that allows for Charlie, in Moretti’s words, to be “at home among his old fellow workers.” Thomas’s Sorrow for Thy Sons is also unusual because the family consists of only three sons, both parents being dead. Each of the brothers represents a particular social position: Alf, a miner, that of the traditional working-class; Hugh, a scholarship boy, the potentially upwardly mobile section of the working-class; and Herbert, the manager of a grocery branch shop, the lower-middle class. Whereas we might expect the tension in the family to be between Hugh and Alf, they are in fact in league against their priggish, acquisitive social-climbing elder brother, Herbert, and share a kind of dark irony that undermines his pretensions. And, because of the Depression, both Hugh and Alf end up unemployed. As Hugh observes, his “forefathers” knew nothing about unemployment, the sort I know of. They never guessed that there’s come a day when one of their sons would inherit the intellectual possessions of the ruling sect, have a mind overburdened with the most exotic intellectual dainties and then find 228

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himself thrust into all the damnable bitterness of penniless pauperdom, ruining his palate and taste for living by chewing the cold ashes of other people’s bereavements. (210) Because of his hostility towards his brother, Herbert, Hugh never shares his social ambitions and, being unemployed like other college graduates, he never leaves his own class. But, like Champion, this is because the family of “orphaned” sons is not “typical” in the working-class family. Six other novels can also be described as bildungsroman but significantly two of these, Love on the Dole and Wilkinson’s Clash, have female main protagonists and the other, Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy, a Jewish main protagonist. In the latter, it is assumed that its hero, Alec, already possesses high culture because he is a Jew. The vast majority of the members of the Workers’ Circle that Alec attends are Jewish; “a few of the very old members had been nihilists in Russia”; Emma Goldman “was always certain of an enthusiastic welcome at the Circle”; many are German speakers or as Yiddish speakers can understand German; and the “few strangers” present are there to witness “The novelty of watching a proletarian audience lapping up Brahms and Beethoven” (73). Possession of this culture makes Alec not just the equal of the middle-class characters but their superior; at a concert in the West End, Alec recognizes Stravinsky and wonders, “How in the world had the fire bird blundered into this cretinous jungle?” (115).Yet, with Elspeth, the classical music-loving middle-class bohemian who wants to slum it with the working class, it is not his culture that he asserts but his class origins. When the antisemitic Elspeth says, “You and your people are only guests here” (191), he angrily replies that his father, after escaping “the Czar’s hell,” “slaved in the workshops and ruined his health” for twenty years in London. “I was born here,” he states, repeating Leopold Bloom’s answer to the antisemitic citizen’s question in Ulysses about his nationality, “I was born here [Ireland]” (317). “This is MY country,” he continues, “Much more mine then yours. I help to produce its wealth,” unlike Elspeth’s landowning family (192). Later, when he meets the Oxford-educated Jewish poet, Leopold, he also asserts his working-class origins and dismisses Leo’s Zionism in favor of socialism. But, in dismissing Leo’s poetry as derivative of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, he does not reject high culture but rather what he considers its inferior modernist incarnations. Similarly, when he meets the sister of a potential romantic partner, Sarah, he asserts his Jewishness partly because Sarah’s sister wants to conceal her Jewishness because she associates it with the disreputable working-class East End.Yet, in drawing attention to his Jewishness by singing a Yiddish song, he is actually seen as more cultured than Sarah’s sister and her non-Jewish brother-in-law who is curious about and admiring of his Yiddish culture. Alec’s Jewishness makes him both more working-class and socialist than the other middleclass characters and more cultured. But, if Jewishness is that which makes Alex different from other working-class heroes, it is also what allows him to have a successful relationship, unlike the working-class characters from other novels. He can have a relationship with Olive, a prostitute, in part because the conventional and implicitly middle-class aspects of marriage are not what she wants as a working-class woman.What she wants is the emotional sympathy that Alex can provide that her middle-class clients obviously cannot. Alex is happy with her because of her working-class values and her disinterest in high culture is not an impediment to him because he already embodies it. Thus, whereas it is Jewishness that makes him unlike other working-class protagonists, it is also his Jewishness which allows him to be hero of a working-class bildungsroman. Because Jew Boy is the only Jewish bildungsroman, so Clash is the only bildungsroman by a woman. As Alec must decide between middle-class and working-class women, so the main protagonist of Clash, Joan, a working-class union organizer, has to decide between two men: Gerry, who, though from the middle-class, has thrown in his lot with the working-class; and Tony, a middle-class denizen of Bloomsbury. Initially, Joan feels that “she could never be thrilled by Gerry as Tony … Gerry could not make her feel as though an electric current were running up and down her back229

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bone” (126). As Dougal McNeill and I have argued, Joan might begin with “great expectations” for Tony but she is able to educate her desire in another direction and settle for the less exciting option of Gerry, thereby remaining true to her working-class background. Joan’s choice of Gerry is facilitated by the fact that, although he was originally from the working-class, he inherits enough money from his self-made father to establish a labor college, something of a deus ex machina. But the main reason that Joan can pursue her bildung is that her “culture” does not leave her as alienated from her own class as it does the working-class male characters of other novels. Continually through the novel, her Bloomsbury tastes are represented as feminine ones or associated with the private sphere. She knows that the (Jewish) wife of a wealthy mine owner is “quite the most appallingly dressed woman she had ever beheld” (121) and recognizes that Tony’s wife “knew how to wear clothes” (74); she enjoys the “special spring mattress” and the “soothing beauty of the mauve and silver bedroom” of her Bloomsbury friend’s house and, at breakfast, this friend, Mary Maud, gives her “a sports suit … by a fashionable dress-maker” (all in just “the shade of soft red that suited her … With a quaint little beret to match”) (169); Tony sends her a Batik bed cover while she’s roughing it in the North; she knows the difference between a tortilla and an omelette; and so on. Men such as Tony live in Bloomsbury but it is a place dominated by patronesses such as Mary and Tony’s wife, Helen. As Alec’s Jewishness allows him access to middleclass culture, so, as a woman, can Joan be at home in Bloomsbury. “What a complicated business English social life is,” she thinks when discussing a political project being hatched in Bloomsbury, “There must be a line between capitalist and worker somewhere, but whenever you think you’ve got it, it’s always somewhere else” (182). Joan can live in Bloomsbury without feeling cut-off from her working-class roots or at least with a greater degree of comfort than we could not imagine any of the other working-class male characters feeling. If Alec can “marry” a working-class woman because being Jewish and therefore “cultured” he does not need to marry up, Joan can marry an (apparently) working-class man because, being a woman, she has an instinctive understanding of middle-class refinements. In none of these novels, in contrast to the entirety of Lawrence’s oeuvre, does a working-class man have a successful relationship with a middle- or upper-class woman. But there is one case of a working-class woman establishing a relationship with a middle-class man, or at least someone with a middle-class income. In Love on the Dole, Sally has none of the cultural capital of Joan. At the meeting of the Labor Club to which she goes with her lover, Larry, she is excruciatingly overawed, thinking that the musical conversation is about people called “Baytoven” and “Bark” and the politics “about somebody named Marks” (97).The class background of the Club’s members is strangely never made clear, but Larry is certainly a working-class autodidact. With his education and better paid and skilled job, he is a perfect match for Sally but he dies, almost as though such a person could never be for this world. With her brother and father out of work, Sally agrees to become the mistress of Sam Grundy, the rich but culturally working-class bookmaker, and thereby rescue her family from poverty. Although this is a deliberate parody of the Cinderella story, it is what allows her to be the heroine of a bildungsroman. There is a similar brother/sister combination in Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These, but the sister, Mary, is able to leave her working-class home in a more socially respectable manner than Sally when the patronage of middle-class men allows her to become a secretary. Mary rejects her father’s desire that she “marry some little collier boy, and become dirty and common and dowdy like every else in Jenkinson” (200), breaks with her decent and likeable lover, Edgar, and goes to work in London. Her brother, Luke, does not fare so well: his wife dies and the failure of the General Strike leaves him, like the rest of his family and friends, despairing at the end. But Mary is living in London during the last four years of the narrative’s action and her working life in Newport and later London is never described. Just as Will in Sunset Song can pursue his bildung only in a foreign country, so her bildung can only take place outside the fictional world of the novel. 230

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Both Jones’s and Heslop’s novels take as their bildung, the socialist education of their protagonists. As part of this education, their youthful protagonists, Len and Joe respectively, move up through the union movement, in Joe’s case, even spending some time at the London Working Men’s College.Whereas an education for the other heroes alienates them from their working-class communities, this education means they become leaders of their community. But because the history of the period they live through is one of failure—notably of the 1926 General Strike—this education can only leave them “older but wiser.” The socialist bildungsroman is almost a contradiction in terms since, in accordance with the narrative arc of the traditional bildungsroman, as these novels do, it must cease to be socialist, that is provide hope for the future. But while Len is killed at the end in Spain, the torch is taken up by his increasingly politically active partner, Mary, not unlike the way in which Sally assumes control after the death of Larry in Love on the Dole. After the failure of the General Strike, Heslop’s character returns to his hometown and the coal face, but his rescue after being trapped down the pit after an accident allows the novel to finish on an affirmative note. A socialist bildungsroman is possible but only if it finishes with some kind of afterword to the future. In his Preface, Moretti also reminds us that the absence of the working-class bildungsroman, at least in his account, “is not just a matter of imagination, but of reality,” citing historian Michelle Perrot’s observation that, “Unlike their bourgeois counterparts, young workers don’t enjoy that period of ease and self-formation that makes individual social sociability and autonomous forms of expression possible” (x). This is the implicit recognition of most of these novelists, particularly Hanley and Brierley. But, in their different ways—through female or Jewish protagonists, through socialist commitment or through imagining different forms of “family”—these writers all attempt to give voice to the “aspirations” or “expectations” of the working class. In the tension between this “imagination” and obdurate “reality” was born the form of the workingclass bildungsroman.

Works Cited Benson, John. The Working Class in Britain: 1850–1939. Taurus, 2003. Blumenfeld, Simon. Jew Boy. 1935. London Books, 2011. Boden, F.C. Miner. Dent, 1934. Brierley, Walter. Sandwichman. 1937. Merlin Press, 1990. Bythell, Duncan. “Women in the Workforce.” The Industrial Revolution and British Society, edited by Patrick K. O’Brien and Roland Quinault. Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 31–53. Coleman, D.A. “Population.” British Social Trends Since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain, edited by A. H. Halsey. Macmillan, 1988. Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. 1938. André Deutsch, 1973. Conrad, Joseph. The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, edited by Samuel Hynes, vol. 1. Ecco, 1991. Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford UP, 2012. Ferrall, Charles and Anna Jackson. Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence. Routledge, 2010. Ferrall, Charles and Dougal McNeill. British Literature in Transition, 1920–1940: Futility and Anarchy. Cambridge UP, 2018. Fordham, John. James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. U of Wales P, 2002. Gibbon, Lewis. A Scots Quair; A Trilogy of Novels. Hutchinson, 1946. Greenwood, Walter. Love on the Dole. 1932.Vintage, 1993. Hanley, James. Boy. Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. ———. Drift. 1930. Nicholson & and Watson, 1944. ———. The Secret Journey. 1936. Lythway Press, 1974. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting. Northcote House, 1997. Heslop, Harold. The Gate of a Strange Field. Brentano’s, 1929. Jones, Gwyn. Times Like These. 1936. Gollancz, 1979. Jones, Lewis. Cwmardy and We Live. 1939. Parthian, 2006.

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Charles Ferrall Joyce, James. 1922; Ulysses. Oxford UP, 1993. Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, edited by James T. Boulton, vol. 1. Cambridge UP, 1979. Mayall, David, et al., editors. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography.Volume II: 1900-1945. Harvester Press, 1987. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World:The Bildungsroman in European Culture. 1986.Verso, 2000. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier.Victor Gollancz, 1937. Thomas, Gwyn. Sorrow For Thy Sons. Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Wilkinson, Ellen. Clash. Trent Editions, 2004. Wilson, Nicola. Home in British Working-Class Fiction. Ashgate, 2016.

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17 ENUNCIATIONS AND AVOIDANCES OF CAPITAL AND CLASS IN EVOLVING IRISH THEATRE Eamonn Jordan

In the rush to signify the implicit and explicit politics of Irish theatre, traditional critical reflections have eagerly foregrounded injustices, inequities, traumas, and historic grievances, and have seen these factors as consequences predominantly of colonization. This evaluative focus paralleled the prioritization of selective identitarian-focused analyses, whereby otherness, Irishness, and Irish identities are not inclined to be tied to the realities of wealth or class, but more to nation formation and consolidation, with specific gender biases and blind-spots. Currently, gender-engaged analysis dominates the critical discourse, with sexualities, ethnicities, races, and social classes addressed as intersectional, if on occasion, subsidiary considerations. (See comprehensive gender-inclusive historiographies by Kurdi (Representations of Gender), Leeney (Irish Women), Sihra (Women in Irish Drama), and Trotter (Modern Irish Theatre)). Without discounting the telling perceptions of class and wealth in the work of many scholars, and with acknowledgment of the ground-breaking work already done by Paul Murphy (Hegemony and Fantasy) and Michael Pierse (Writing Ireland’s Working-Class, A History of Irish Working-Class Writing), this essay offers not only a class-aware analysis of a series of mainly modern Irish plays, but suggests the continuities and discontinuities of their dramaturgical imperatives. My argument combines a survey of new evidence on both dramaturgy and spectatorship and is informed by the work of scholars who have written about Irish theatre, predominantly from a cultural materialist perspective, and these critical insights I situate alongside Jacques Rancière’s contentions on emancipated spectatorship. In terms of writing for theatre, I explore whatever is dramaturgically blatant, fanciful, contradictory, regulatory, suppressed, misaligned, mismanaged, and repressed. I utilize Jacques Rancière’s dispute with those critics that see spectatorship in negative terms. For Rancière, emancipative spectatorship begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her. (Emancipated 13) 233

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Rancière extends the point, arguing: The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective or elite body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her dissimilar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. (Emancipated 13) What she/he does and how she/he responds is dependent on one’s own alertness, dispositions, sensitivities, and sensibilities, and is determined by time and place. Spectatorship is never so passive as to allow ideological indulgences to filter through, undeflected, unconsidered unless tolerated, which suggests anything but subjugated ignorance. While I cannot speak for any individual spectator, less a collective “audience,” what interests me are the complex and specific sentiments, values, and mixed messages of the writings around capital and class. In relation to class, dramaturgical practices can simultaneously camouflage, normalize, disrupt, and reinforce differences, stratifications, hostilities, and inequalities. I will not suggest that plays serve the dominant ideology of their times, nor that plays function exclusively to enact and moderate the values of an elite class. Applying some of Rancière’s thinking about artistic engagement that relies on the notion of “dissensus” and the merits of representations and images perceived as “intolerable” (Emancipated 48–49, 89), in terms of dramaturgy this essay sets out to tease out the tensions between concordance and discordance, proper and improper, appropriate and inappropriate, the predictable and the unpredictable, coherence and rupture (disassociation), tolerable and the “intolerable,” consensus and “dissensus.”The work considered here variously foregrounds, devalues, disguises, and complicates inter- and intra-class dynamics through the complex and evasive interfacings of economic, cultural, and social capital. I cannot follow through on a more comprehensive set of class markers that would include reflections on pride, shame, rage, deceptions, stratifications, redistribution, snobbery, resistances, compliances, subjugations, injustices, and impacts on life opportunities and chances. (See Pierse’s thorough outline in Writing Ireland’s Working-Class 22.)

Playboy of the Western World: The Threat of Merging Assets John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) offers peculiar and anomalous representations of class, some of which are subtle, others blatant and at cross-purposes with thinking around equality. The play is set in a shebeen, where Pegeen is drafting an order for drink, clothing, and shoes, in preparation for her wedding to Shawn Keogh. It is a match based on a bargain, asset transfer, and the consolidation of social and wealth capital. Attractiveness is seen in terms of materialist worth, a viewpoint countered by multiple narratives about an array of local grotesques, whose transgressive, mischievous, and taboo-breaking behaviors are acknowledged in terms of surplus and heightened cultural and social capital. Shawn’s return in advance of Christy Mahon’s arrival is property related: a fear of Christy stealing hens. Although a fugitive, Christy flaunts his alleged economic capital, but soon realizes that the social and cultural capital that his story of patricide accrues is more advantageous. Pegeen’s wanting of her father to employ Christy to work under her supervision is a vital gendered assertion, whilst Shawn, who is suddenly keen to stay over, is effectively banished. Moreover, if it is Christy’s initial story that brings him acclaim, it is Pegeen’s licensing of Christy to imagine, articulate, find purpose in narrative expression, free from fact. Pegeen initiates Christy into the resources and possibilities of language by way of enhancing social and cultural capital. Pegeen reassures, “It’s near time a fine lad like you should have your good share of the earth” (Synge 189).The notion of compensation and the good life are raised, in sharp contradistinction to 234

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how most people in Ireland lived, close to abject poverty, during and in the aftermath of the Great Famine (1845–1849). Synge’s play is partly a repository of memories about land struggles and agrarian unrest, and the law is seen as a renegade force; the state as upholder of proprietorial landlord rights is found wanting. Tenant evictions may have had the law behind them, but they had neither a broader civil good nor the support of most of the population. Financial and material inducements offered by Shawn Keogh for Christy to leave, the bargain struck between the Widow Quin and Shawn, and finally the agreement between the Widow Quin and Christy are all demonstrations of a willingness to strike deals based on material trade-offs for relational/social gain. In full knowledge of his father’s aliveness, even with the realization that his new-found sense of self (social and cultural reputation) is based on a lie, Christy wins all before him on sports day, accumulating multiple tokens of success. However, marriage to Pegeen will be Christy’s “crowning prize” (Synge 217). Unthinkingly, Christy’s next striking of Old Mahon with a loy is based on an intention to bring a more decisive conclusion to his story of patricide. For that deception, Pegeen would incite a baying mob to destroy Christy; the gap between “the gallous story and the dirty deed” is intolerable (Synge 227). Shawn wants the final leave-taking of Christy and his father—who has survived another assault—to be marked by the miracle of marriage, but Pegeen declines. Instead Pegeen accounts for her true loss, which is emotional and interpersonal (cultural and social), rather than any material deficit. In his “Preface” to the play, when writing The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Synge claims that got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. (Synge 174) One can acknowledge Synge’s celebration of authentic speech and class differences, even if acquired by way of eavesdropping. Additionally, Synge’s claim that in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his (sic) words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. (174) A rich and living language inspires writing that differentiates itself from the work of Ibsen and Zola and their dealings “with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words” (Synge 174). Synge adds that drama should possess “the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality” (175). That which is wild and superb is linked to difference, joy, also to a suspect exoticization of class differentials. This elaboration also divorces such peasant worlds from the harshest of material effects; social/cultural capital can be read as forms of compensation and results in the dilution of harsher material facts. Accusations of inter-class voyeurism, misappropriation, and exoticism can easily follow, but Synge’s writing strengths are evident in his willingness to foreground material concerns in a complex manner. Materiality is inbuilt into language as forms of social and cultural reserves; his play does something far more unnerving with words, when words are unhinged from reality and veer towards fantasy. Language is not simply a process of compensation, not only about possibility, articulacy, and defiance, but also about mutuality, self-assertiveness, and self-fabrication. Simultaneously, Playboy threatens not only a consolidation of various forms of capital, by uniting agrarian and 235

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publican riches through marriage, but also an abundance of excessive social and cultural capital, through sporting prowess and the eminence of linguistic expression and the symbolic and metaphorical registers deployed. These intersecting forms of capital are compounded by sexual or erotic capital and that is not necessarily monogamous in orientation. Nicholas Grene identifies the “animal physicality” and that the “drift of females in their shifts were scandalously erotic” (81–83). Furthermore, the various expressions of the grotesque and the transgressive are linked to pagan impulses that contravene the religious, sacred, or moral capital associated with Fr Reilly. These transgressions undermine conventional cultural norms of Irishness, about which the populace and many cultural commentators were unduly, if understandably, sensitive. The audience revolts which greeted the play’s first staging have had many explanations; none explain it better than Murphy, who is alert to Synge’s “contempt for the upwardly mobile Catholic nationalist,” the challenges to national stereotypes, fostered and performed values, Catholic mores about “sexuality and female propriety,” the insecurity of a newly emerging bourgeois cohort, “apropos of their peasant ancestry” (“Drama, 1900–1950” 277). Both Pegeen and Christy are not just elucidating a sexual jouissance that exacerbates a potential wealth jouissance through the consolidation of the Mahon and Flaherty family assets. The threats of plenty begetting plenty are a harrowing, unwelcome, perhaps “intolerable” vista. Synge may withdraw that ultimate union of publican and farmer, but the damage was done by its proposition. For Rancière, “dissensus” means an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all. It means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification. (Emancipated 48–49) Instead of being ideologically malign and incoherent, Playboy possess an intuitive sense of “dissensus.” Additionally, as Rancière, notes “This shift from the intolerable in the image to the intolerability of the image has found itself at the heart of the tensions affecting political art” (Emanicpated 84). Playboy partially embraces but also provokes the culturally/politically intolerable encounters and suggestivities, while the riots that it stoked were the response when a tentative emerging cultural/ nationalist consensus feels maligned.

Cathleen ni Houlihan: Money for Nothing Now acknowledged as co-written by Augusta Gregory and W.B.Yeats, but once attributed to Yeats only, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) is one of the most contentious plays about class in the Irish tradition. The play is set in a cottage in Killala in 1798, as French forces are landing to support revolutionary efforts, while the Gillane household is readying itself for a wedding between Michael and Delia Cahel. Bridget is riled by Peter’s regret that he got no dowry when he married, because if she did not bring much, he was not wealthy. Bridget has worked extremely hard, cut corners, and demanded little. Their current standing is not a cause of delight, as their successes leave a bad taste, even though they are hungry for more. For Bridget, Michael is a good catch, someone who will be conscientious and not wasteful. Michael’s motivations are different to those of his parents, their wealth gives him advantages and alternative perspectives. Michael has the luxury of noting: “The fortune only lasts for a while, but the woman will be there always” (Gregory and Yeats 21). When an Old Woman arrives, Michael is not keen on her presence, but grows inquisitive. The Old Woman’s language is inconsistent with realistic speech norms, and instead is rich, diverse, elusive, and incantatory, drawing on metaphor, 236

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allegory, and symbolism. The Old Woman is a wanderer, a victim of having “too many strangers in the house,” and has lost her “four beautiful green fields,” words that suggest intrusion, eviction, unhomeliness, and violation (Gregory and Yeats 23). Those that fight on her behalf will be injured, expelled to foreign shores, lose their lives, but it is a price worth paying as their reward will be of a different order. Their legacy will be found in songs and reminiscences, in the eternal memory of nationhood. The Old Woman is temptress, recruitment officer, hypnotist, and the weaver of seductive revolutionary outcomes, but does not consummate her romances. Michael sets aside his affections for Delia; their romantic, immediate, future material prospects are dislocated by a focus on rebellion, sacrifice, and the eternal. The prospects of capital abundance and children are trumped by the symbolic and sacrificial capital of insurgency and independence. Michael’s investment in altruistic, patriotic sacrifice leads to the Old Woman’s symbolic transformation, from an elderly person to a young woman/Queen.

Juno and the Paycock: From Rags to Rags Juno and the Paycock (1924) is set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) when rival factions (Free Staters (Pro-Treaty) and Die Hards (Anti-Treaty)) fought each other as a consequence of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922; a truncated independence was agreed upon by Irish negotiators, who were strongarmed by the British government. In Juno, the calamitous nature of Civil War politics is captured by Johnny Boyle’s betrayal of a former friend and neighbor, Robbie Trancred, and in Johnny’s later execution for being an informant. Civil War politics divided families and communities, but even in this chaotic world of bitter conflict, O’Casey emphatically signals the significance of wealth, inheritance, and poverty. The Boyle family lives in a squalid tenement; matriarch Juno does her best to keep her family afloat, while her husband, the fantasist, work-shy Captain Jack Boyle, is motivated more by alcohol consumption than by any need to earn money to keep destitution at bay. (Jack’s acquaintance, Joxer Daly, is a broke, cunning, conniving, disloyal, and parasitic character, desperately living from hand to mouth.) Mary Boyle is an intelligent trade union activist, but has no wage as she is on strike. Tenement living was shaped by the needs of landlords to maximize occupancy and profit; privacy, security, sanitation, maintenance, and safety were lower order considerations. Fortunes appear to change when Mary’s new boyfriend, Bentham, announces that Jack Boyle is to inherit a substantial sum of money. By Act Two, Jack performs a version of what he thinks it is to be middle-class personae, overly keen to demonstrate a knowledge of the business world, taking delight in the signing of documents and discussing consols (a debt instrument), and he sheds much of his anti-Catholic Church rhetoric.The Boyle household is “dressed up” to look more bourgeois; a visual jarring arises between the original nature of the space now overlaid with the conspicuous nature of its new-found content. Neighbors pawn some of their possessions so that the Boyles can have immediate access to cash; suppliers of furniture and clothing provide goods on credit. A celebratory party is interrupted by those intending to attend Tancred’s impending funeral cortege, and serves as evidence of unneighborly insensitivities, as well as signaling the play’s grotesque and carnivalesque humorous intent. Moreover, the precarity and transgression of their world is later captured by the capacity of figures like tailors, furniture removers, and the mobilizer (Republican operative) to encroach on the family space; private and public are not divisible. Juno expresses a major disdain for the mercantile middle classes; Needle Nugent is a tailor and undertaker, profiting from the making of police uniforms and the provision of burial shrouds, and Bentham’s ineptitude in the writing of the will makes the document invalid. Bentham forgot to mention Boyle by name, merely listing him as Mr. Addison’s first cousin. Bentham has fled the jurisdiction, and abandoned Mary, not knowing that she is pregnant. The wealth that the Boyles had hoped to inherit and change their lives will not be forthcoming. 237

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Bentham has failed the Boyles in the carrying out of his professional duty. While the other characters are more in awe than antagonistic towards him in their interclass exchanges, all his talk of theosophy and personal values suggest that his beliefs are not only a luxury item, but ones to be conspicuously performed; they are not actionable. Bentham is grossly incompetent, and his professional colleagues are in dereliction of their duties, by offering no oversight of Bentham’s work on the will. The failed or “fake” will, ill-recorded bequest, unrealizable inheritance can also be read analogously as consequences of revolution and self-governance, hinting at the broken promises of better living conditions and enhanced rights for the very large cohort of Irish working classes. If social elites, including the upper and middle classes, were in receipt of the power and authority transferred from the British to the new Irish state, the dividends of independence were not shared more broadly. It was a seamless asset and power transfer from one privileged cohort to another, leaving poverty and inequality levels unchanged (see Merriman 4–17). Multiple scholars have castigated O’Casey’s dramaturgy for variously undermining the poor, ignoring ideas, and sentimentalizing victimhood and jabbering leprechauns (Kiberd 218–238), advancing eccentricities and subordinating pain (Murphy, 2008 69), dismissing and repudiating politics (Deane 108), discrediting militancy (Pilkington, 94). Contrastingly, for Murray, Juno espouses “practicality over ideology” (Sean O’Casey 66). The emphasis on family over nation is captured in Juno’s view that Johnny lost his best principle (his ability to work) when injured fighting for Ireland’s independence. Juno discounts the merits of sacrifice; she is nothing like the Old Woman in Cathleen. Juno is remarkably good on demonstrating how social class can mark, position, challenge, engage, and disable characters. The impact of a relentless daily grind has O’Casey suggesting that Juno’s life force is one of “mechanical resistance” (O’Casey 6), that poverty has aged her, yet she is also the most focused and defiant of those around her. Mary is keen to read and understand her world; a collection of Ibsen’s plays is associated with her. O’Casey suggests that while Mary is enabled by literacy and knowledge, her cultural capital projects, she is weakened by another, confined by the social and ideological blind-spots of her own class loyalties and under-acknowledgment of the precariousness of its cohesion, mutuality, and solidarity (common sense perspectives). Woman characters in Juno are doubly colonized, but the resistance and agency afforded Mary and Juno, in that they abandon their home to move in with Juno’s sister, need both acknowledging and deeper consideration in terms of agency, and not with the passive fatalism often associated with workingclass characterizations. The limits to the generosity of Mary’s former boyfriend, and trade-unionist leader, Gerry, implies a gap between thought, romantic sentiment, and action. Jack and Joxer breach the notion of the noble working classes, marked by a good work ethic, reciprocity, kindness, and loyalty. Jack’s unreflective generosity is foolhardy; Joxer is so marginalized that he will say and do anything to avoid attrition. Juno signals how money is circulated and exchanged, how poverty and destitution drive a collective consciousness, how attitudes to wealth and class stratification are expressed and performed. Central to the exposure and importance of wealth is the failure of the will, an inheritance mismanaged with brutal outcomes.Wills often come to the rescue of the “good” in melodrama, but in Juno, even such compensatory good fortune cannot be drawn upon in the service of O’Casey’s poor. The tragi-comic impulse of the writing does not disguise the terrors and fundamental impacts of poverty; rather the genre’s associated excesses outlandishly foreground the horrors of necessity, in relation to war, and impoverishment and hunger. Juno exposes the costs, horrors, and futility of civil war, ideological contradictions, and the limits of principles, but nothing is proposed as a sustainable alternative. O’Casey’s radicalism is to divest his characters of simple belief systems, to find the contrary in his characters, and to identify that the working classes are not merely the passive victims of the dominant class. Trade unionism and 238

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worker resistance are marked as much by solidarity as by vested interests. Revolt will not easily, reflexively, coherently, or necessarily originate from within this class.

Katie Roche: Illegitimacy, Gender, and Inter-Class Hierarchies First produced in 1936 prior to the often-discredited 1937 Constitution, Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche raises very complex issues around money, gender entrapment, naming, illegitimacy, and interclass marriage, in a work that sets out to confound gender and dramaturgical norms and that situates poverty alongside relative plenty in ways very different to O’Casey’s approach. Katie works as a domestic servant in the Gregg household, is adopted, and the absence of a name has parental figures warning sons away from her. Katie is keen to be compliant with Catholic Church teachings, considered entering a convent, but she receives an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal from architect Stanislaus Gregg, a much older man, who is the owner of the modest middle-class home Katie shares with his sister, Amelia. It is an offer Katie feels obliged to accept, even if Katie is different to him by way of background, education, circumstance, age, and disposition. Stan admits to being attracted to Katie’s mind and heart, not her physical appearance, and his perverse revelation that he was previously in love with Katie’s mother is further convoluted by his sense of authority over women, behavior consistent with the unjust gender norms of those times. During Act Two, Katie flirts with Michael Maguire, and locks a door to suggest the concealment of something illicit, attempting to force Stanislaus to be more attentive to her needs. The fraught lack of intimacy between the newly-weds is much to Katie’s distaste. By way of reprimand, Stanislaus goes back to living alone in Dublin. Katie surrounds herself with religious iconography to prompt normative behaviors but realizes the mistake: “I’m not like them. They’re not like me … I thought in my mind—wouldn’t God like what we like ourselves” (Deevy 112). Gendered expectations that Katie should be good, loyal, honest, virtuous, sensible, patient, and modest are consistently undermined by her spontaneity, questioning, defiance, and more importantly, her exuberance and vibrancy that are not so easily suppressed. Amelia offers a degree of empathy to Katie’s dilemmas, whereas Katie’s other sisterin-law, Margaret Drybone, disregards Katie, calling her “A girl like that” (Deevy 87). Margaret promotes acquiescence to the limited roles offered to women. Despite having no birth-right, Katie has ambition, so when Reuben, a wandering mystic, tells her that her bloodline is that of a wealthy family, the Fitzsimons of Kylebeg, owners of a grand house, Katie latches on to its significance. Katie states, “Didn’t I always know I came from great people,” adding, “I’m done with humble. I was meant to be proud” (Deevy 50). It is this vivacity, and intuitive insight, alongside Deevy’s canny use of the laughter associated with Katie that ensure Deevy’s challenges to the conservative-laden values of the Irish state. Katie distinguishes between “for want of a name” with what “good is” the name of many locals (Deevy 61). The views on sex, illegitimacy, and of a woman conceiving outside of wedlock are circumstances that would haunt Irish theatre, especially in plays like John B. Keane’s Sive (1959), Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail (1964), and Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy (2011). In most Irish dramaturgical practices, sexual acts invariably result in trauma, disease, or unplanned pregnancy, consequence formations that must be read as cautionary and punitive for perceived deviance, rather than as any recognition of natural desire or satisfactory pleasure. There is nothing vile about Katie, but figures like Reuben would want her to be perceived that way. Indeed, Reuben is Katie’s father and feels free to strike her with a stick when he witnesses her kissing Michael. Stan is afraid of Katie’s eagerness, threatened by her vitality and what she demands of him, yet he ardently kisses her by the play’s end, but it is passion in the context of the plans he has made for them, without her input, taking her away from the only life she has known. 239

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It would be brave of her to accept her banishment from her homeplace, according to Amelia. Katie agrees to be courageous and make it grand, re-framing it so that she will have something “great” to do (Deevy 122). Desire, in its multiple forms, sexual, social, and cultural, is discommoding to a conservative value system, and its banishment or exile are the go-to, definitive ideological strategies. Amelia’s acceptance of Frank’s proposition is driven by mutual need, less about intimacy, and has nothing to do with having children. Equally, Frank states that Stanislaus is treating Katie badly, not only chiming with Amelia’s own criticism of her brother, but Frank’s awareness suggests that there is no blanket value-system shared by males. Inter-class marriage is complicated by hierarchies and devious and compliant expectations; the victim of such inequities is Katie, damaged, defiant, brave, but relatively powerless. Anthony Roche convincingly articulates the multiple power inequalities across the play, whereby marriage re-affirms woman as the token of exchange within patriarchal practices (167–174). Marriage in Katie and Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) serves as a reinforcement of gender alienation, acquiescence, and servitude; yet freedom, dignity, aspiration, and defiance remain, even within such fraught and disadvantageous circumstances. Deevy’s work captures a resolute dissatisfaction with gender norms. Article 41.2 of Bunreacht na hEireann/Irish Constitution of 1937 asserts that the common good is dependent upon a woman remaining within the home, her labor confined to housework and child-rearing. This retrograde article contrasts sharply with the egalitarian values of the Proclamation of 1916 and Article 3 of the 1922 Free State constitution, as Melissa Sihra reports: “every person, without distinction of sex, shall … enjoy the privileges and be subject to the obligations of such citizenship” (2). For Rancière, This is what a process of political subjectivation consists of: in the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible. (Emancipated 50) In Deevy’s work, there is evidence of a collusion between various binaries: the possible and the impossible, concordance and discordance, the visible and invisible, the cherished and uncherished, the valued and undervalued, the prominent and the marginalized, the forgiving and the unforgiving, the feasible and unfeasible. As Katie’s gendered and class-informed agency and fatalism collide, her subjugation is “intolerable.”

The Whiteheaded Boy: Keeping it Local Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy offers a perspective on class that is inconsistent with Irish dramaturgical practices more generally, in that the work is not seemingly hostile towards wealth or asset transfer and uses the working classes as a troubling and troublesome foil. Although the play was first performed on the 13th of December 1916, apart from one moment late on, the play says little about the revolutionary activities of those times, and the impacts of British rule are almost intangible. The Geoghegan home and some land were “bought for” Mr. Geoghegan by his wife, before he died (Robinson 65). In the aftermath of the Great Famine the Irish population was decimated by deaths caused by disease, starvation, and mass emigration. The Wyndham Land Act (1903) and the Encumbered Estates Act (1904) provided tenants with the financial supports to purchase land from landlords. Although there were population rises in many of the smaller urban towns, there remained a significant economic dependency on agriculture. Commercial activities increased, resulting in more publicans, grocers, and various material providers. Banking, medical, engineering, architectural, 240

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legal, and accounting services expanded. The belated embourgeoisement of rural and urban life brought to the fore issues of inheritance, money, reputation, and class. In Robinson’s play the Protestant Geoghegans are variously obsessed with the activities of Denis, the “whiteheaded boy,” who has been spoilt and silver-spooned all his life. Denis is costing the family to keep him studying medicine in Trinity (never mind his spendthrift nature, leading to excessive gambling and drinking), and the allocation of sparse resources is impacting the needs and aspirations of his siblings. George, who runs the grocery business after his father’s death, controls the purse strings. Having repeatedly failed his exams, Denis is to be sent to Canada and Denis’s engagement to Delia Duffy is to be broken off. Delia’s father, Chairman of the District Council, multiple business owner, and a “member of every Committee and every league in the village” threatens to sue for “breach of promise”—to the amount of a thousand pounds damages, enough to bankrupt the Geoghegans (Robinson 87). Denis and Delia’s hasty, riposte marriage, and his acquiring of a job working on the roads scupper Duffy’s attempts to cash in from the side-deals variously made by some other characters to withdraw his threat to sue. Denis’s appearance in work overalls marks his transition from career doctor to road repairer, and also the exchanging of big urban house-type living to the taking of two rooms in Nolan’s cottages (Robinson 112). A working-class existence and downward social mobility are the appalling vista the middle classes cannot abide, a counter-move that forces Duffy, George, Mrs. Geoghegan, and Aunt Ellen to make offers of accommodation. Ellen owns a couple of hundred acres and three small houses. Ellen remains unmarried is because she has “too many notions” (Robinson 70), according to the play’s not necessarily reliable narrator. As a female landowner, Ellen appears to be a risk-taker, ahead of her time, has been mainly successful in her enterprises, and seemingly has access to considerable wealth. The Co-operative movement proposes a rival business model to the sole trading grocer, and for some it is seen as the “salvation of Ireland” (Robinson 71), but for George, the “foolish, contrary people” setting up such shops come from a class that “is as thick as thieves and lavish with the money” (Robinson 86). Denis substantiates that critique: “Co-operation? … That’s the latest Sir What’s-his-name, the hairy poet chap and all the rest of the gang” (Robinson 78), implying the activities of Sir Horace Plunkett. While Ellen is ideologically opposed to the Co-operative movement, she also sees opportunity; if its collective approach leads to its own demise, then the business would resort to being a sole tradership, so there is future potential in the likely failure of this alternative, romantic, and more socially oriented capital (even if driven by old Anglo-Irish Ascendancy money) means of conducting business. The threat of downward social mobility, the evaporation of social capital, and the sense of shame associated with the working classes are enough to inspire enterprises that draw wealth and resources to Delia and Denis’s circumstances. Whether it is by cunning, trickster-like design, or naive unintended default, Denis outwits, even out-risks the others by calling their bluff. Denis is not necessarily brave or moral, but because he is attuned to their values, he can exploit their need to maintain status and avoid reputational damage. In effect he uses failure as his social capital against their need to avoid class-related shame and disgrace. Even educational failure and incompetence beget success in this realm. There is no consideration given to the dishonest nature of anybody’s dealings in the play. Nobody seems to have anything ethical at stake, other than fears of being found out and causing scandal. For those that win and those that lose out, the shared class-related pragmatism suggests that a surrender to the greater good of their own class must be read more as a submission to that will rather than as any indictment of that class.The tenacity of the characters’ abilities to survive must be seen in the relation to how secure they are, even when they themselves possess very little. Despite the humorous intent surrounding the lengths that the characters will go to avoid shame and disgrace, and despite the critical disposition of the narrator’s voice-overs and the play’s satiric impulses, 241

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engagements with wealth merely signal caution, encouraging and facilitating asset transfers according to the logic of cunning, pretense, gambling, risk taking, without rewarding or consideration of decency, courage, or virtue. If there is a threat of wealth falling into the wrong hands in Boy, Aunt Ellen’s oversight of all things seems to be a counterweight. The obsessions of characters with wealth in Boy run counter to another form of political mythologizing seen in de Valera’s 1943 St Patrick’s Day radio address, where he stressed the importance of people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit … Cozy homesteads … joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens. (Moynihan qtd. in Murphy “Drama, 1900–1950” 285) Frugality and austerity are lauded, and abundance and plenty championed only in relation to the common good and social harmony. Notions of citizenship are prompted by a fallacy of frugality, a near-perfect ideological ploy to encourage the vast majority to settle for less (in fairness, during a time of war), but those same aspirations were not inculcated equally across all classes. Agency constrictions faced by characters do not suggest a similar fate for the spectator. Characters may move from ignorance to knowledge, or from ignorance to greater ignorance, but that does not mean that spectators blindly follow suit. As Rancière notes “An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators” (Emancipated 22). Robinson’s dramatic world includes characters who are narrators and translators, liars, manipulators, self-deceivers, and rogues, and the play’s ironic spirit is not necessarily emancipative in orientation, further complicated by the fact that the play’s narrator offers a form of framing, interpretation, and interference that is unreliable, and the perspective is never uniform or coherent.

Purgatory: Contamination and Dissolute Progeny A hostile class bias towards the marginalized, one of the most contentious aspects of Yeats’s work, is very evident in Purgatory (1936). The plays of W. B.Yeats are often associated with the Ascendancy writings of Synge, Gregory, and Robinson, but also notable for the influences of Edward Gordon Craig and Noh theatre practices, amongst many. In Yeats’s dramas, reality is seldom just the immediate present; past traumas and transgressions are not left behind by time. Souls of the dead re-live and re-enact suffering, within a purgatorial-like sensibility. Purgatory is set outside of a ruined house, whose threshold has been removed to “patch a pig-sty?” (Yeats 255), and with a bare tree as a backdrop, exchanges between an Old Man and his young son lead to reflections on death and loss, how the past invades the present, and most of all, what is intergenerationally exchanged. The Old Man’s mother came from a wealthy background, married a stable groom far beneath her class, and died during childbirth. Her husband squandered his wealth and brought ruin to the big house. The Old Man’s mother is compelled to re-live her transgressions, despite her remorse. Lust, pregnancy, and death result in the property finding itself in the wrong hands and ensuring devastation. The house was not just lost but was burnt down. The Old Man is now a peddler, and his son the outcome of a sexual encounter with a tinker in a ditch. The play appears not only cautionary about inter-class relationships, but warns that given undeserving privileges, the poor are likely to destroy the rich. The keenness to pass the blame and offset the demise of the Ascendency class reflects a disinclination to countenance contributary actions by the Anglo-Irish themselves. The Old Man establishes not only the house’s demise, but its symbolic importance: “Great people lived and died in this house; Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, Captains and Governors, and long ago men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne” (Yeats 257). The young 242

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boy does not have a problem with his grandmother marrying down, stating: “What’s right and wrong? My grand-dad got the girl and the money” (Yeats 256). While fixated on the moment of his conception, as it is re-enacted in another dimension, the Old Man faces down his son as the son attempts to steal his money, which the son believes to be his entitlement. The Old Man slays his son with the same knife that he had already used to kill his father, bringing an end to his line. The play’s final lines “Release my mother’s soul from its dream! Mankind can do no more. Appease the misery of the living and the remorse of the dead” (Yeats 262) serves to summarize the negligent ramifications of a woman marrying outside of her social group, again prompted by wayward sexual desire. Infiltration rather than assimilation with the natives is seen as central to the demise of the Ascendency class. Across simultaneous time frames, pollution, repetition, and purification are gender and class inflected as a form of “ethnic cleansing” (Murray Twentieth-Century Irish Drama 32).The Old Man’s inclination to bring such a hereditary line to an end serves as a kick-back against the demise of the Ascendancy class. It seems there is nothing natural or remedial about its decay, and little or nothing noteworthy of its social and cultural capital to be preserved, as it is cross-class breeding, the contamination of a gene pool, arson, and murder that accelerate its demise. For Lionel Pilkington, the Abbey Theatre’s work was fundamentally “an act of quasi-Ascendancy philanthropy” (Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland 10) intent on “moderating the traumatic prospects of majority rule” (2001 4), but also a paving of the way for a new Catholic elite. Indeed, following on from Yeats, the unsavory demise of elite cohorts serves as a dramaturgical staple for much of the work that followed. Legacy is not abundance, but decline, evident in a play like Robinson’s The Big House (1926).

Conclusion Anglo-Irish Ascendancy writers like Synge, Yeats, Gregory, and Robinson have been interrogated as to what they promote and propose in relation to how they substantiate an Ascendancy class and as to how they misrepresent the marginalized (Pilkington 2–3). Discussing Synge, Gregory, Yeats, and O’Casey, Murphy argues that many of the early Abbey playwrights essentialized the subaltern as a “fantasy object which is symbolically central to dramatic and ideological representation,” while simultaneously reinforcing social marginalization, by ignoring class and gender hierarchies, and by being disinterested in equality (Hegemony and Fantasy 12). Criticism by numerous scholars is easily antagonized by the notion of embourgeoisement.Yeats’s contempt for the “greasy till” expressed in the poem “September 1913” is much referenced, but the donning of the “greasy cap” by Denis and the level of disdain it accrues have not attracted the same scrutiny (Robinson 112). Intra-class marriages such as Delia’s and Denis’s in Robinson’s Whiteheaded Boy bring a degree of confidence and assured closure, whereas the potential grotesque unions proposed in Synge’s Playboy carry their own cautions and fascinations, alongside the failure of Christy and Pegeen to wed. However inter-class relationships and marriages generate greater discord. In O’Casey’s Juno Bentham deserts, not knowing that Mary is pregnant, and in Deevy’s Katie, Katie marries Stanislaus as a solution to her dilemma of name. Rubens abandons Katie’s mother because he can, preferring repentance and mysticism to parenthood. Malfunction and disappointment are also evident in the cross-class relationship between the Old Man’s father and mother in Yeats’s Purgatory. Michael’s jilting of Delia, and his “elopement” with the Old Woman, and all she stands for in Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen suggest that societal and political capital triumph over romantic or economic considerations, respectively, but also the Old Woman’s elite status trumps Delia’s bourgeois standing. (The absence of children is striking across almost all of the plays considered here. It would not be until McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen (1999) or Gates of Gold (2002) or Amy Conroy’s I ♥ Alice ♥ (2010) that dramatizations of marriage/vows/civic partnerships would move beyond heteronormative frames.) 243

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Additionally, the substitution of one type of capital for another as a tangible reward or the ranking of social over the economic capital, perhaps best seen in Dion Boucicault’s melodrama The Shaughraun (1874), may well be another means of ideological regulation. But this trope is also evident in the characters rewarded in The Whiteheaded Boy and those who are penalized like Shawn (The Playboy of the Western World) and Duffy (The Whiteheaded Boy). These variously antagonist incompetents are cowards, grabbers, manipulators, about whom there are clear hierarchies of offense and malevolence. The ability of O’Casey’s characters to generate humor, and the tragi-comic disposition of his plays are, for some, merely a legitimization of poverty via the histrionics of the characterization. Such accusations against O’Casey’s work are not substantiated because although social and cultural capital are compensatory and part of character aspiration, they are never a surrogate for various lacks. Poverty is always a persistent force, difficult to escape, inciting defiance and desperation, but also signaling frailty and vulnerability in Irish theatre. There can be nothing decent or honorable about poverty. In Juno poverty ensures that the future is heavily discounted, bringing a corporeal immediacy that is absent in Robinson’s work. If the banjaxed will in Juno has huge consequences, the failure of Ellen to honor her promises is not so tangible or costly in Boy. For Rancière, the aim is to create an awareness of political situations leading to political mobilization. The means consist in producing a sensory form of strangeness, a clash of heterogeneous elements provoking a rupture in ways of seeing and, therewith, an examination of the causes of that oddity. The critical strategy thus comes down to including the aesthetic effect of sensory rupture within the continuity of the representative cause–effect schema. (Emancipated 74) The argument proposed here tracks the awarenesses of the work, and the blind spots, and how dramas can facilitate different “ways of seeing,” through estrangement, rupture, dissensus, and the intolerable. John Brannigan identifies a persistent theme in O’Casey’s drama as “the attempt by working-class men and women to challenge authority and to become visible as thinking, democratic subjects” (294). While they may not always “arrogate to themselves the entitlement to culture” (Brannigan 297), O’Casey does something more complex, developing not “only the power to see themselves as others see them” (Rancière in Drury 2004 qtd. in Brannigan 297), but they have the power to decline how others situate them as well as the power to position others competitively, antagonistically, and as rivals, not merely as accommodators of deference and tolerant of hierarchies and disparities. They are always visible, glazed, obscured, invariably not always seen. The notion that working-class characters fail to advance their own cause is deemed a failure of this Irish writing tradition, but such an accusation I have always found to be suspect. Perhaps characters cannot conceive of difference, decline to invest in improbable outcomes or failure, and cannot but misarticulate their experiences. However, in the characters’ invariable and instinctive polarization of classes, in their awareness and signaling of hostilities and mimicking performances of class differences, there may not be a complete articulation of their inequitable realities. Marginalized characters are acutely aware of the consequences and conditions of what they have internalized, without necessarily knowing exactly what and how they have adopted ranked modes of relating or have taken up subjugated positions. This is complicated by class-related selfpolicing of status quo by all classes. Upward social mobility is a carrot, but failure is the stick, and downward mobility is the omnipresent admonishment. Protest is too often individualized rather than collectivized across this tradition. From a writing perspective the gap between articulacy and understanding, and the absence of actionable knowledge does not necessarily imply a collusive form of writing that discourages 244

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engagement with inequalities, especially when capitalism is almost never framed as the best and only form of escape from poverty. Wealth, inheritance, and legacies affirm an alignment of class values in Boy, whereas in nearly all of the plays in this tradition, intergenerational asset transfer begets devastation, unstoppable decline, downward social mobility, or subsistence-level outcomes, even if the work features resolute characters (Purgatory). Such cautions about economic wealth transfer suggest something complex, even insidious. In the eagerness, tendency, and conviction to pattern the diminution of wealth, there is a grand deception. (Of the writers considered here, only O’Casey comes from a working-class background, and O’Casey’s class origins are variously disputed.) Most plays settle for a dramaturgy whereby the tolerable is incessantly threatened by the monstrous, the unthinkable, the inappropriate, intolerable. Even as plays strive to legitimize a perspective, they almost invariably undermine themselves, intentionally and unintentionally, through genre shifting, genre confluence (tragic/comic), through compounding agency and fatalism, and through ironic self-awareness of the aware/unaware narrators/characters. Yeats’s Purgatory self-sabotages itself. Dramaturgy cannot merely have ideological designs on its audiences or be merely intent on consciousness raising. Rather my position on the works considered here is that dramaturgy is invariably contradictory, ambivalent, multiple, problematic. Texts and performances do not simply amplify or substantiate a dominant ideology but often reinforce contradictions and compound the dramaturgical oppositionalities therein. It is the incongruities that make the work interesting, less so, their immediately discernible ideological affiliations, sentiments, and markers. The effective penalizing of wealth, the ironic dispositions of the writing towards wealth when it persists, or the proposition that wealth is precarious and short-lived may serve as a caution, as a motivation to defy that transitional state, or it might propose that the redistribution of wealth is unnecessary. The strategy belies the nature of wealth to persist, grow, and transfer intergenerationally in most instances. To undermine the consolidation, obstinacy, and steadfastness of capital or the multiple benefits of asset ownership is an impulse that has remained a complicating, if insidious dramaturgical impulse in Irish playwriting. Contrasts are profound between the have-nots, who crave basic resources because of lack, scarcity, insecurity, depravation, and destitution, and the haves, who need to consolidate, merge, and acquire further wealth, variously based on greed or entrepreneurship, cunning, deceit. There is a myth that middle-class audiences want to see theatre about people like themselves. I would argue the opposite; the productions of such plays seem to be actively discouraged in the Irish tradition, unlike the British tradition of playwriting. Irish writing is more comfortable dealing with lack rather than plenty even during the Celtic Tiger period of relative affluence (see Jordan 378–396). Dramaturgical wealth loss, shaming, disdain, or disparagement can be regarded as egregious ideological ruses in the face of rife social inequalities, disparities, and impoverishments. Such complications inform a tradition of writing from the early part of the twentieth century and onwards and tabulate “our existence separated from ourselves” (Emancipated 86).

Works Cited Brannigan, John.“Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan: Aesthetics, Democracy and the Voice of Labor.” A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 289–302. Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals. Faber & Faber, 1985. Drury, John et al., translators. The Philosopher and his Poor. By Jacques Rancière. Edited by Andrew Parker, Duke UP, 2004. Gregory, Augusta and W. B.Yeats. Cathleen ni Houlihan. Selected Plays of W. B.Yeats. Penguin, 1997. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge UP, 1999. Jordan, Eamonn. “Multiple Class Consciousnesses in Writing for Theater during the Celtic Tiger Era.” A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge UP, 2016, 378–396. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Jonathan Cape, 1995.

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Eamonn Jordan Kurdi, Maria. Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women. Edwin Mellen, 2010. Leeney, Cathy. Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939: Gender & Violence on Stage. Peter Lang, 2010. Merriman,Victor. Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s. Carysfort Press, 2011. Moynihan, Maurice. Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917–1973. Gill & Macmillan, 1980. Murphy, Paul. “Drama, 1900-1950.” A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge UP, 2016, 271–288. ———. Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Murray, Christopher Sean O’Casey. Faber & Faber, 2000. ———. Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation. Manchester UP, 1997. O’Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock.Vol. 1, Faber & Faber, 1998.Vol. 1 of 2. Pierse, Michael, editor. A History of Irish Working-Class Writing. Cambridge UP, 2016. ———. Writing Ireland’s Working-Class; Dublin After O’Casey. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pilkington, Lionel. Theatre and the State in Twentieth–Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. Routledge, 2001. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott.Verso, 2009. (Kindle Edition). Robinson, Lennox. The Whiteheaded Boy. Selected Plays. Colin Smythe, 1982. Roche, Anthony. Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama. Carysfort Press, 2013. Sihra, Melissa. Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Synge, J. M. The Playboy of the Western World in The Complete Plays. Methuen, 1981. Trotter, Mary. Modern Irish Theatre. Polity, 2008. Yeats, W. B. Purgatory. Selected Plays. Penguin, 1997.

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18 CLASS AND UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S STORIES Peter R. Kuch

Born in the national capital of Wellington in colonial New Zealand on the 14th of October 1888; living much of her short life in an England torn apart by the First World War; and dying in Fontainebleau in France on the 9th of February 1923, Katherine Mansfield’s short life and revolutionary writing dramatize the rapid and turbulent reconfigurations of class and class consciousness that impacted her and generated her modernist stories. This chapter will argue that class drives the narrative in “The Garden Party,” “Bliss,” and “Marriage à la Mode,” and that much of what Mansfield dramatizes about colonial and English class and class consciousness is colored by a wry but finely regulated scorn for those “absurd class distinctions” (Mansfield “Garden Party” 247) that were being extensively reconfigured in postWWI England and New Zealand even as she wrote. The chapter employs aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s work (1930–2002) and aspects of post-colonial theory to argue against the view advanced by Ali Smith, the editor of the Penguin edition of The Collected Stories, that class and class consciousness are merely “surface” issues (Smith xv) rather than controlling themes in Mansfield’s work. The chapter will then conclude by briefly examining the relevance of two contemporary issues—the dramatic increase in divorce during and just after WWI, and the political rise of the working class post-WWI—for understanding the ways Mansfield’s English and New Zealand women characters perform their upper-middle-class fictional lives. Bourdieu has been selected because of his seminal fieldwork showing that class is distinguished as much by social, cultural, spiritual, and material attitudes as by economic and financial means. Post-colonial theory has been chosen because Katherine Mansfield, an Anglo-Celt, was born in a white settler colony which at the time regarded itself as an integral part of the English empire. The two theoretical approaches thus speak to significant aspects of Mansfield’s life and creativity. But first, briefly, to Katherine Mansfield’s own experience. In the second volume of her Notebooks, Mansfield records an incident which took place in 1902 or 1903 when she was a fourteen-year-old student at Queen’s College, an exclusive liberal girls’ school in Harley Street, London, founded by Charles Kingsley. Considered an ideal finishing school for young colonials, Katherine and her elder sister had been sent there by their father, Harold Beauchamp, a respectable merchant banker in Wellington, New Zealand, who was later knighted for his services to his country. For a New Zealander, merchant banking and a genteel English education signaled the colonial upper-middle class and, when complemented with a knighthood, the colonial aristocracy. But “home,” as England was then known in New Zealand, did not always regard colonials as “fam247

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ily.” It so happened that the Queen’s College Headmaster, who was conducting a Bible class, was prompted by the set passage, most likely Psalms 22:12, to enquire of the class, “if any young lady present had ever been chased by a wild bull?” Katherine raised her hand because, as she recorded, “nobody else did … though of course I hadn’t” only to be met with the crushing retort: “Ah, I am afraid you do not count.You are a little savage from New Zealand” (Scott 31). The anecdote is impregnated with issues relating to class, to class consciousness, and to ways of reading both the competitive cultural construction of class and the individual, collective, and institutional policing of its boundaries. Occupying the imperial center, the patriarchal headmaster dismisses the young colonial woman’s claim to have experienced what in the antipodes would have been considered a stereotypical situation in the colonial settler short story by labeling her a “savage.” By doing so he denies his student a voice, negates her settler culture, and, in front of her fellow students, demeans her humanity by banishing her to the limits of civilization. Post-colonial theory offers one way of interpreting this anecdote, and of interpreting Katherine Mansfield’s representation of class in her published stories set in England and in New Zealand. But that is to read the anecdote spatially and in terms of power and gender, to read it, as it were, top down and from center to margin. But like many of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, the anecdote may also be read the other way, from base to apex and from margin to center. The incident most likely took place in late 1902 or early 1903 at a time when the settler literature of Australia and New Zealand was being published in London. These included Bannerman Kaye’s Haromi: A New Zealand Story (James Clarke, 1900); Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (Blackwood, 1901); Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited (Grant Richards, 1901); Louise Mack’s An Australian Girl in London (Fisher Unwin, 1902); Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (Duckworth, 1902); Louisa Alice Baker’s Not in Fellowship (Digby, Long, 1902); and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (Grant Richards, 1903) (Papers Past, Trove, The Times). Colonial poetry was also strongly marketed. The Times (London) of the 10th of October 1902, for example, advised readers that Macmillan and Company would shortly have the fifteenth impression of A. B. Patterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses ready for sale (The Times 10). This is not to claim that the young Katherine Mansfield was familiar with the English market for settler fiction. What she does acknowledge in her Notebook is that she was aware, whether then or later, that her claim about being chased by a bull was fictional. Whether or not the headmaster knew of the current interest in antipodean settler literature is also a moot point. That it was part, however, of the London literary scene provides a cultural context for the headmaster’s question, for Katherine’s response (being chased by a bull is what happens to colonials in settler literature, or at least what might happen to them), and for his final crushing retort. Another way of reading the anecdote, and Katherine Mansfield’s representation of class in her stories, is to employ Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the competitive cultural construction of class and the ways this competitiveness relates to individual, collective, and institutional sensitivities to its boundaries. There are several key concepts that are central to his theory of class. These include “capital,” “field,” “status,” “collectivities,” and “habitus.” For Bourdieu, class is a social formation, “an objective network of positions which are systematically related to one another in terms of the distribution of cultural and economic capital across occupational locations” or within “collectivities” (Weininger 95–96). “Capital” is taken to mean what an individual possesses culturally, intellectually, socially, spiritually, physically, and financially within any given “field.” “Field” describes the space in which such capital is performed and contested as “play” [from the French, “jeu”]. The term “field” is meant to recall a battlefield or a playing field and, more specifically, the fact that those “who confront one another will enter into conflict or competition, each from a more or less advantageous position” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 16–18). “Status” refers to the individual’s place not only within the “field” but also within the “collectivity”—which is Bourdieu’s term for “uniformity of lifestyle.” In turn, the “status” of a lifestyle is determined by its proximity to or distance from the “legitimate culture”—that is, whatever is widely recognized as “worthy,” “canonical,” or 248

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“­distinguished” (Bourdieu, Distinction 251). “Habitus” describes a socially constituted system of dispositions that orient “thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions” (Bourdieu, Logic of Practice 55). In this formulation, the word “dispositions” places emphasis on the notion of a stance; the word “orient” on the notion of being directed or encouraged rather than being compelled or constrained. Thus, what distinguishes Bourdieu’s analysis of class is his emphasis on symbolic systems, on the interplay between “capital,” “field,” “status,” “collectivities,” and “habitus,” and his insistence that class must be understood in terms of fluid, contested, and contestable social and cultural practices that are sensitive to status. While he also conceives of class, in common with much Marxist thought, as a “system of positions defined in terms of ownership of and/or control over the means of production,” his emphasis on symbolic systems and the perpetual policing of class boundaries offers exciting ways of approaching the intricacy, fluidity, and theatricality of Katherine Mansfield’s stories (Bourdieu, Logic of Practice 55; Weininger 86–87). Applying Bourdieu’s theories to “The Garden Party” yields fresh insights into the dynamic, site-specific operations of class occluded by other theoretical approaches to her work. It is not only Mansfield’s best-known story, but it also the one frequently selected by critics to comment on or analyze her depiction of class (Ferrall 106–120). What generates and shapes the story are the conflicts between Laura Sheridan’s developing class consciousness—with all its advances, hesitations, and retreats—and the seemingly assured class consciousness of all those she encounters during the day: her siblings, her mother and father, the servants, the workmen who erect the marquee, and finally the mourners for the dead carter, a workman named Scott, who Laura visits while his relatives and neighbors are holding a vigil at his house, one of the “little mean dwellings” in “deep shade” down the lane and at the bottom of the hill (Mansfield, “Garden Party” 254). Both the title of the story and the opening paragraph of “The Garden Party” signal that what follows will take place within a financially comfortable, middle-class setting, most probably uppermiddle-class. The reader is given several markers of “status” that indicate a particular lifestyle. The Sheridans employ a gardener to manicure the lawns. There are extensive and obviously welltendered garden beds planted with “literally hundreds” (245) of roses, all obligingly in bloom. (The mention of “literally hundreds” signals an excess of production and consumption that will prove troubling for Laura.) Even the weather, it seems, has obliged the Sheridans, for it creates the impression, being “windless” and “warm” (245), that it might well have been ordered by a family who is accustomed to “ordering” things and having them personally delivered. And a marquee is to be erected by hired workmen who have arrived early. What the opening paragraph establishes is that, in addition to their well-established economic position as owner and employer, the Sheridans possess considerable social capital—they know a sufficient number of people of similar “status,” or “uniformity of lifestyle,” to host a garden party. The opening paragraph also intimates that the meticulous preparation of the garden party discloses an unconscious desire shared by the members of the Sheridan family to perform what they consider appropriate for their “status” and for the class to which they consider themselves to belong. The suggestion is that lawns are swept, roses are cultivated, and marquees are ordered because that is how garden parties are conducted by the upper-middle class. And this is what the Sheridans have done—seemingly without questioning the morality, value, or usefulness of the activity. Intuitively hosting a garden party in the way it is expected to be hosted not only endorses the activity as having an intrinsic value, but it also positions both the family and the garden party with respect to what has been legitimized by mainstream upper-middle-class capitalist culture. Whether or not this socially and culturally endorsed way of doing things will be questioned proves central to the story. Identified by her older sisters, and presumably by her brother, as “the artistic one” (246), will Laura find it more difficult than her siblings to conform to the Sheridan “habitus”? Laura’s inexperience and her conflicted feelings about the class into which she has been born come into play as soon as she greets the workmen who have arrived during breakfast to erect the 249

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marquee. The social and cultural “capital” she possesses does not equip her for this new social and cultural “field.” Her upper-middle-class upbringing prompts the thought that it is not appropriate for her to be eating bread and butter while greeting people, particularly people of a different class. But she is fond of bread and butter and, since she has entered a “field” where she is socially superior, she instinctively decides not to throw the buttered bread away. And when she discovers she is blushing, she pretends to be severe and somewhat short-sighted. To conceal her youth and her inexperience, she will play the role of an independent, bookish Edwardian woman. She then mimics her mother’s voice in the hope that she will sound authoritative, but what comes out, she immediately detects, is “so fearfully affected” that she stammers like “a little girl” (246). The answer to the question she eventually asks is embarrassingly self-evident: “Oh—er—have you come—is it about the marquee?” (246). The response from one of the workmen, the tallest, soon restores a measure of social harmony, with a respectful “That’s right, miss,” which is reassuringly appropriate in terms of “status” and boundaries, but to which he adds the mildly ironic, “That’s about it” (246). His next comment, however, that “you want to put a marquee somewhere where it will give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me,” causes Laura, given her upbringing, to wonder “for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bang slaps in the eye” (247).Yet she does follow him. But when another of the workmen responds to her comment that there will be a band with, “H’m, going to have a band, are you?,” Laura again becomes uneasy and again searches for a way of restoring social harmony. “Only a very small band,” she replies, “gently” thinking to herself that perhaps this pale, haggard workman “wouldn’t mind so much if the band was quite small” (247). Arguably what is more important than a formulaic analysis of a typical “bourgeois girl talks to working class men” for understanding how class operates in this encounter is Laura’s conflicted social consciousness; Laura’s social and cultural “capital” does not provide her with ready-made strategies for employing accepted conventions and adopting appropriate modes of interaction within and beyond her class. Much of this conflict, both internally for Laura, and externally in terms of her interaction with the workmen, is dramatized through Mansfield’s skillful command of dialogue and, in particular, the registers and tones of language that are specific to class. Dialogue not only clearly demarcates class and class consciousness, but it also works subtly to suggest the extent to which class hierarchies are constructed and contested in social exchanges. It is worth noting that the servants address her as Miss, while the workman addresses her as miss; the former acknowledging her status, the latter merely her youth. Laura, it is evident, is still learning how to accommodate herself to the “habitus” in which she finds herself but which she senses defends itself by sometimes instinctive and sometimes deliberate recourse to various undesirable prejudices, modes of speech, practiced indifference, and rehearsed economic, social, and cultural positionings. It is only when the tallest workman stoops to smell the lavender in the garden, an action that surprises and delights Laura because she does not expect someone from the working class to appreciate scent, that she decides she will rid herself of class consciousness. How many men that she knew would have done such a thing. Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought.Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came on Sunday night to supper? She would get on much better with men like these. It’s all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped up or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part, she didn’t feel them. Not a bit, not an atom. (247–248) In the event, it is the tallest workman who decides where the marquee will be erected with a “Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees. Over there.That’ll do fine” (247). For Laura, the trees 250

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identified by the workman are not simply trees: “They were like trees you imagined growing on a desert island,” she thinks to herself, “proud, solitary, lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of splendour. Must they be hidden by a marquee?” (247).The question is merely rhetorical because, by the time it occurs to her, the workmen have begun preparing the site. Identifying the trees as “karakas” (corynocarpus laevigatus), a tree endemic to New Zealand, marks the first point in the story where the reader is made aware that this garden party is going to take place in New Zealand, most likely in the North Island. Although a shapely, medium-sized tree, the Karaka is not recommended by horticulturalists for gardens frequented by children or dogs because the kernels of their enticing clusters of yellow fruit contain the toxic alkaloid Karakin which, if eaten, can result in a painful death. The Karakas are not the romantic desert island tree that Laura imagines. They are potentially deadly. One effect of identifying the trees as Karakas is to resituate the hundreds of roses, the lavender, and the manicured lawns that readers have encountered so far. The Sheridan garden is a settler garden; it is as if it needs immaculate lawns and plantings of roses and lavender to achieve the status of a garden. Growing in the colonies, at the margin, it mimics an imperial center which, in post-colonial terms, is the repository of authenticity, and which, employing Bourdieu’s theories, has been granted by class-conscious colonials the status of the “legitimate culture.” Laura, as it were, is situated at the intersection of imperial and symbolic systems of power that orient her to view herself as upper-middle-class, an upper-middle class that comes to assert itself through performance, mimicry, and contestation. The next conflict between Laura’s developing class consciousness—with all its advances, hesitations, and retreats—and the seemingly assured class consciousness of all those she encounters during the day occurs when Sadie, the house servant, asks her to talk to the florist who has arrived at the front door with a large tray of canna lilies (Cannaceae; there are nineteen species). Laura’s response to the sensuous beauty of the flowers echoes the upper-middle-class response to aesthetic experience documented by Bourdieu. While she immediately and instinctively responds to the beauty of the lilies—she is after all “the artistic one” in the family—she enjoys the aesthetic experience for its own sake. This contrasts with her earlier response to the Karakas whose loveliness had prompted her to frame them as exotic, as fit for a desert island. According to Bourdieu, the cultural capital and self-assurance that enables the upper-middle class to experience the aesthetic for itself rather than embark on an “interminable circuit of inter-legitimation”—by comparing or contrasting what they are experiencing with miscellaneous examples from art, literature, or music—is one of the aspects of taste that distinguishes the upper-middle class from the middle and lower-middle class (Bourdieu, Distinction 46). In contrasting the two aesthetic experiences, a post-colonial reading would draw attention to the fact that canna lilies are exotics, that they came originally from the tropical regions of the Americas, while Karakas are endemic to New Zealand. But to render the Karakas suitable for an upper-middle-class garden, Laura feels she needs to exoticize them. Because the colonial mind has been conditioned to think of the local (the Karakas) as inauthentic it needs to render them exotic to harmonize their co-existence with whatever else it knows to be exotic (the canna lilies). This need to exoticize the endemic, to elide its distinctively New Zealand nature within the space of the “garden,” reveals the extent to which Laura is learning how to think as a colonial upper-middle-class young woman. A comparable learning experience comes when she protests the abundance of lilies to the servant rather than the florist with: “Nobody ever ordered so many. Sadie, go and find mother” (249). But Mrs. Sheridan has joined them, and calmly explains to Laura that she had seen the flowers in the shop window and had decided that “once in her life” she would have enough “canna lilies” (249). What ensues registers several aspects of class. As defender and performer of upper-middleclass mores, Mrs. Sheridan waits for Sadie to leave and the florist to return to his van. It would not do to contradict her child in the presence of the servants or the commercial classes. The right way to do things is enacted and is implied rather than enforced. Then there is the issue of excess. It would seem from her reaction that Laura is concerned about the expense of so many pots of 251

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canna lilies. But her mother subverts her daughter’s claim to be the organizer of the garden party by stating, “My darling child, you wouldn’t like a logical mother, would you?,” before proceeding to secure Laura’s compliance by obliging her to endorse the way the flowers are to be arranged: “‘Bank them up, just inside the door, on both side of the door, please,’ said Mrs. Sheridan. ‘Don’t you agree, Laura?’” (250). The somewhat arch disparagement of logic, the strategic use of the word “darling,” a word that continues to play an important role in reinforcing the “habitus” of the uppermiddle class, the way Laura expresses her affection for her mother by gently biting her ear, and the use of the italicized intensifier in “Oh, I do, mother” are all indicative of the way language and action subtly reinforce class consciousness (250). The profusion of canna lilies is not the first time, however, that excess and what it says about economic power and the theatricality of performing class have come to Laura’s attention. The advice she receives about placing the marquee in the garden, although spoken by a hired workman, nevertheless reinforces the way the lower classes see the upper-middle classes and what their image of the upper-middle class discloses about maintaining class boundaries. The tall workman rejects Laura’s initial suggestion of siting the marquee near the lily lawn: “‘I don’t fancy it,’ said he. ‘Not conspicuous enough.You see, with a thing like a marquee … you want to put it somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye’” (246–247). His advice reveals two aspects of class disclosed by this remark—that upper-middle-class expenditure is assumed to be free of concern about cost, and that there is an expectation from the lower classes that such expense will be conspicuous. As Bourdieu points out in Distinction, [w]omen of the bourgeoisie, who, being partially excluded from economic activity, find fulfilment in stage-managing the décor of bourgeois existence … Economic power is first and foremost a power to keep economic necessity at arm’s length. This is why it universally asserts itself by … conspicuous consumption, squandering, and every form of gratuitous luxury. (Bourdieu, Distinction 48) Although Laura’s father and brother are at home when the workmen arrive, she is given the responsibility of siting the marquee. Again, she is the one who responds to Sadie’s announcement that the florist has arrived, for by this time her father and her brother have left for the office and her mother has appeared and has begun to exercise a measure of control. As Bourdieu points out, drawing on his research about contemporary attitudes, as sexist as these now appear: [W]hereas the court aristocracy made the whole of life a continuous spectacle, the bourgeoisie has established the opposition between … place of work and place of residence, working days and holidays, the outside (male) and the inside (female), business and sentiment, industry and art, the world of economic necessity and the world of artistic freedom that is snatched, by economic power, from that necessity. (Distinction 48) To endorse the status of the upper-middle class and fulfill the expectations of the lower classes the garden party must appear to have been staged without regard to expense and in a manner that makes its excesses—whether marquee, lilies, or club sandwiches and cream puffs—unashamedly conspicuous. It is shortly after Laura and her sister have finished eating their cream puffs that they overhear the cook, a servant, and the man from Godber’s who has delivered the cream puffs talking about a fatal accident that had occurred that morning. A horse-drawn cart has tipped throwing the carter onto the road when the horse shied at a traction engine. Capitalism, in the form of a mechanized product of the industrial revolution destined to replace the horse and cart, has not only killed 252

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the carter but has also raised doubts about using traditional forms of transport as they relate to ­consumption and production. It is Godber’s man who relates the details of the accident to Laura. She immediately seizes hold of her sister and drags her “through the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door. There she paused and leaned against it. ‘Jose!’ she said, horrified, ‘however are we going to stop everything’” (253). Within this unfolding “field” of social conscience versus social consciousness, Laura soon finds herself at odds with the Sheridan “habitus.” First Jose, and then her mother, are astonished that Laura should even suggest that the garden party be called off as a gesture of respect for a young man from a working-class sphere. For her part, Laura is furious when her sister says: “‘You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental.” “Drunk!” she exclaims at her sister’s gratuitous stereotyping, “Who said he was drunk?” (254). But when she continues to demand that they must show respect for the death of someone who should be considered a near neighbor, neither her sister nor her mother can conceal their irritation. Both, it might reasonably be conjectured, could counter Laura’s protests using similar arguments. The garden party was planned long before the news of the young working man’s death. It is only by chance that the Sheridans have become aware of the accident. It is reasonable to assume that the garden party should not be canceled as a mark of respect for an accident that has only just happened. Fatal accidents are unfortunately the lot of the working class. Reacting to the news by becoming involved might provoke suspicions of meddling or of being patronizing and might blur the distinction between the classes. Best to leave such people to live their own lives and conduct their own grieving according to their own customs and rituals. Show sympathy or compassion and who knows where it might end! Laura leaves this “field” of social conscience versus social consciousness by walking quickly “out of the room” until she catches sight of herself in a mirror: “There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl … in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies and a long black velvet ribbon. Never had she imagined she could look like that” (256). A fictional character catching sight of themselves in a mirror is a common trope in realist fiction. But what Laura sees is not a “real” self, but an acculturated construction. It is her mother who has put the hat on her head with the comment that “It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me. I’ve never seen you look such a picture” (255). Reconfirmed in her upper-middle-class status, Laura decides to postpone whatever she might be able to organize for the grieving family until after the garden party. Her attempt to consult her brother about an appropriate response to the accident is subverted by his complimenting her on her appearance, particularly her hat. And as the garden party gets underway a flow of unsolicited compliments has the effect of transforming her into a dutiful upper-middle-class daughter anxious to ensure the family’s garden party is an outstanding success. Her realignment with the Sheridan “habitus” is signaled by her interactions with her father: “Daddy darling, can’t the band have something to drink?” (257); and, “Have a sandwich, daddy dear” (257). But when her father mentions the carter’s death, and her mother reveals that Laura wanted to cancel the party as a gesture of respect, Laura attempts to close down the conversation. There is an awkward silence until Mrs. Sheridan suggests that they gather up the leftover food and send it down in a basket with a garland of arum lilies, observing that “people of that class are so impressed by arum lilies” (258). Once again Laura finds herself at odds with the family: “To take scraps from their party. Would the poor woman really like that?” (258). Not surprisingly, given her insistence that they acknowledge the death of a neighbor, it falls to Laura to deliver the basket, minus the arum lilies for fear they will “ruin her lace frock” (258). Laura’s descent into the valley of death at dusk confirms the limitations of her social and cultural “capital.” She senses she is inappropriately dressed but does not know what to do about it. She is momentarily disconcerted to find that when she arrives the mourners who have gathered for the wake silently make way for her as though she has been expected. She decides she will simply leave the basket at the door but finds she is drawn into the house to view the corpse as is the custom at a wake. She does not know how to offer her condolences to the widow. And when she views the 253

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corpse her conflicted emotions cause her to utter a “loud childish sob” and say: “Forgive my hat” (261), a status symbol imposed on her by her mother. All she feels she can do is leave the basket of food and quit the house as quickly as possible. Her brother, who has grown anxious about her, is waiting in the shadows. Laurie put his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t cry,” he said in his warm loving voice. “Was it awful?” “No,” sobbed Laura.“It was simply marvellous. But Laurie—” She stopped, she looked at her brother. “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—” But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. “Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie. (261) That her brother completes the sentence for her with a rhetorical question and in the language used by their class confirms Laura’s reintegration into the Sheridan “habitus” of an upper-middleclass colonial family. What “The Garden Party” reveals is Katherine Mansfield’s assured grasp of the subtleties and complexities of the social, cultural, and political construction of class and of class consciousness. What her reader comes to understand is the degree to which Mansfield’s dramatizing “these absurd class distinctions” is central to the energy and complexity of her stories. Just how “absurd” class distinctions can become is dramatized in “Bliss,” where the momentary suspicion of the possibility of an illicit relationship threatens to destroy the privileged upper-middle-class life of Bertha Young, through whom the narrative is focalized. Bertha is Laura Sheridan ten to fifteen years on: a somewhat naïve, self-absorbed, sensitive thirty-year-old woman married to a successful man. They have a very young child, cared for by a nurse. There is a house servant and a cook. Financially secure, they don’t “have to worry about money” (96). They have “friends, modern thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions—just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and they were going abroad in the summer” (96). So delighted is she with her world and her upper-middle-class life that she is ill-prepared for the glimpse of an encounter that threatens to destroy it. Like Laura, Bertha is a woman of buoyant flights and compensatory fancy. She is so full of a febrile joie de vivre that she would like to be able “to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop. To throw something in the air and catch it again, to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply” (91). But consciousness of her class prevents her from such child-like expressions of “bliss” for fear they might border on hysteria. Like Laura, she is engaged in preparing her house for guests, although what is being staged is a small dinner party for a select number of upper-middle-class friends—a couple about to launch a theatre and keen on interior decorating, a young poet who has just published his first volume, and a beautiful, if somewhat mysterious, blonde woman called Pearl Fulton she has met at the club who is sufficiently well-off to take taxis everywhere. Finally, like Laura, prior to meeting her guests, Bertha Young catches sight of herself in a mirror, but instead of seeing a beautiful young girl in a picture hat, she sees “a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something … divine to happen … that she knew must happen … infallibly” (92). Throughout the evening anticipation and knowledge coexist in tension, for if “ignorance is bliss” then it might very well be that bliss needs ignorance, willful or otherwise, to exist. The “habitus” of the Young household removes Bertha Young from the knowledge that comes with being a mother, friend, hostess, and wife. Her life is performed for her. It is the servant Mary who lets her into her house because she has forgotten her keys. It is the nurse who tells her how to interact with her child when she comes to the nursery before going down to dinner. And even though Harry, her husband, compliments her on the souffle, a compliment she is thrilled to receive, 254

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it is not clear whether the credit should go to her or to the chef. Her only achievements in her own right, which she fears might be absurd, are to buy purple grapes for the fruit bowl so the color will harmonize with the new carpet and achieve the aesthetic effect of bringing “the carpet up to the table” and to rearrange the cushions on the chairs and the couches (93). What also perplexes her is her inability to enjoy sex with her husband. This makes it difficult for her to participate in the gossip about sexual liaisons that are a key topic of the “field” she finds herself in when her guests arrive. In the early days of her marriage she had consoled herself with the thought that she and her husband had agreed to live together as “pals” … “They were so frank with each other … That was the best of being modern” (103–104). But from the comments she recalls Harry making about people, she is vaguely aware that his frankness is as disparaging as it is cruel; and that his zest for life is as self-centered as it is impulsive.What troubles but also excites her as her guests arrive and the dinner party gets underway is a growing awareness that her blissfulness is seeking to express itself sexually. But what this sexuality is and how it will express itself awaits discovery. She is drawn to Pearl Fulton and waits for a signal to confirm what she suspects is a mutual attraction. And when Pearl asks to see the garden, and they stand together in the moonlight to admire the pear tree, Bertha wonders whether her feelings for this cool, mysterious, aloof woman involve intense friendship or erotic fantasies, and whether her urgings are homosocial or homosexual. The moment passes. Her feelings remain unresolved. Did Miss Fulton say something that defined the moment, or did Bertha imagine she did? Their abrupt return to the “collectivity” of the guests in the lit dining room does not clarify what might have happened. The social “capital” of her husband and her guests—the impresario, the interior decorator, and the poet—and the way they define and confirm themselves is based on affecting liberation from middle-class mores. What confirms their uniformity of lifestyle is gossip about sexual liaisons; social chatter about the latest plays, paintings, and books of poetry; anecdotes about outraging the middle class; and coded conversation that is comme il faut because it is conducted via insider pet names, throw-away cultural allusions, and assumed complicity. But there is nothing in this chit-chat that will help her to understand the experience she has just undergone. Believing that she has come to recognize sharing something vaguely erotic with Pearl Fulton, Bertha decides to talk frankly to her husband about it in bed after the guests have left.The thought awakens her desire for him, but as the guests are about to leave she accidentally catches sight of him embracing Pearl Fulton and appearing to arrange a meeting: “Oh, what is going to happen now?” she exclaims to herself (105). Will she continue to be blissful by feigning ignorance or will the unmasking of her ignorance destroy her bliss? How robust is her social, cultural, spiritual, and financial “capital”? Does she possess the strategies to preserve her upper-middle-class lifestyle against the assaults of desire and the “field” she and her husband will find themselves in should she confront him? With Laura Sheridan in “The Garden Party” it was a confrontation with a workingclass death that provoked her retreat into her upper-middle-class lifestyle. With Bertha Young, it is the specter of illicit sex revealed by her one fateful coup d’oeil that threatens to haunt or destroy her blissful upper-middle-class life. The possibility that a marriage might end in divorce is made explicit in “Marriage à la Mode,” which was first published in The Sphere on the 31st of December 1921 and subsequently reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories (1928). As with “The Garden Party” and “Bliss,” it is class and class consciousness that drive the narrative. William, who is married to Isabel, is a lawyer with a practice in London. They have two young boys. To escape what she comes to regard as the stultifying domesticity of their “little white” London house with its “blue curtains and a window-box of petunias,” Isabel befriends Moira, a young artist, who she meets at a studio party (313). They travel to Paris together; Moira introduces Isabel to her social set.Wanting to enjoy her new friends, Isabel persuades William to buy a new house by the seaside. She will live there with the boys and the servants. He will continue to live in London but will come down by train to spend weekends with them. The new house by the sea proves irresistible to Moira and her set, and it’s not long before 255

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weekend house parties, with Isabel playing hostess, begin to feature, despite William’s evident discomfort. Instead of a wife who is attentive to him, a home that is a source of domestic comfort, and children who are eager to spend time with him,William finds himself excluded from and mocked by a “collectivity” of brittle young people whose in-jokes and polite contempt stigmatize him in terms of class. They consider him bourgeois and boring; to be politely scouted because he is paying for everything, but to be carefully excluded because his seriousness and sentimentality are at odds with their banter woven around references to Edwardian musical comedy (The Maid of the Mountains) and Victorian poetry (Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman”), their assumed fecklessness, and their affectations of boredom. The financial “capital” William possesses as a lawyer working in London proves ineffectual for the class conflicts that are brought into play in the social and cultural game (“jeu”) of the house-party by the sea. Arriving at the station, he finds Isabel has surrounded herself with her new friends: “We’ve all come to meet you,” she said. “But we’ve left Bobby Kane at the sweet shop to be called for.” “Oh!” said William. It was all he could say for the moment. There in the glare waited the taxi, with Bill Hunt and Dennis Green sprawling on one side, their hats tilted over their faces, while on the other Moira Morison, in a bonnet like a huge strawberry, jumped up and down. “No ice! No ice! No ice!” she shouted gaily. And Dennis chimed in from under his hat. “Only to be had at the fishmonger’s.” And Bill Hunt, emerging, added, “With whole fish in it.” “Oh what a bore!” wailed Isabel. (314) William soon finds himself obliged to take a seat already allocated for him in the taxi; to pay via Isabel for Bobby Kane’s purchases at the sweet shop; to surrender the melon and the pineapple he had bought for his children to Isabel and her friends; and to forego the bathing party in what proves to be a futile hope that he can spend time with his children. His lack of success in competing in the “field” created by Isabel and her set is confirmed when he suspects that the abrupt termination of conversation among the servants indicates that they have been talking about him and also when he overhears Isabel say to her friends as they return from the bathing party: “That’s not fair to William. Be nice to him, my children! He’s only staying until tomorrow evening” (316). Attempts to be fair to William, however, prove tokenistic: “Well, William, and how’s London?” asked Bill Hunt, drawing the cork out of a bottle of whisky. “Oh, London’s not much changed,” answered William. “Good old London,” said Bobby, very hearty, spearing a sardine. But a moment later William was forgotten. Moira Morrison began wondering what colour one’s legs really were under water. (317) In an attempt to re-establish himself in his wife’s affections,William writes her a long love letter as soon as he returns to London. When the letter arrives at his seaside house the following day, Isabel is still entertaining her friends. She reads William’s protestations of love and his “God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness” (320) with a perplexity that gives way to astonishment and then to unrestrained laughter. The set cannot wait to hear what has amused her so much, so she reads William’s letter to them.They too burst out laughing, Moira remarking: “I always thought 256

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those letters in divorce cases were made up. But they pale before this” (320; Kuch 86–89 et seq.). Although Isabel initially feels ashamed of betraying her husband’s feelings and rushes off to her room, she soon decides that she will join her friends who are going bathing and will write to him later: “Some other time. Later. Not now” (321). The reference to letters being used as evidence in divorce proceedings provides a key insight into the economic, social, sexual, and political forces in post-WWI Britain that underpin Katherine Mansfield’s representation of class, class consciousness, and her fictional dramatization of the lives of the English upper-middle class. “Bliss” and “Marriage à la Mode” are late stories in that they were published for the first time between August 1918 (three months before the Armistice) and Mansfield’s death on the 9th of February 1923. It was during these years that the impact of the huge loss of life that occurred during WWI took effect on English life. The disproportionately high percentage of causalities among the landed class, the less deferential attitudes that resulted from cross-class experience in the trenches, and the prospects of advancement offered to the working class as death and wounding thinned the ranks meant that the strict hierarchy of Edwardian society had effectively disappeared by 1918. The Home Front, with the Land Army and the urgent need to build a skilled workforce for all aspects of the war effort, also saw lower-middle-class and working-class women achieve greater social mobility, even though this mobility was socially reengineered when men sought re-employment after the war. Although there is some disagreement among historians about the significance of the Representation of the People Act (June 1918) on postWWI English society, there is general agreement that granting the vote to all men over the age of twenty-one and all women over the age of thirty significantly changed upper-middle-class English life. It became, for example, increasingly difficult during and after the war for upper-middle-class women to hire servants. In addition to losing husbands and sons in proportionally greater numbers than the lower classes and being denied, because of their social standing, the opportunity to equip themselves with manual and technical skills that would secure them an income independent of their husband’s, uppermiddle-class women’s financial and emotional well-being was also threatened by an increased recourse to divorce that occurred during the period. In 1914 there were 856 divorces granted by the English Court of which 443 were obtained by men and 413 by women compared with 1,111 in 1918 of which 742 were obtained by men and 369 by women, compared with 3,522 in 1921 of which 2,487 were obtained by men and 1,035 by women (Savage, Social History 103–110). Although alimony was legally obtainable, divorce for an upper-middle-class woman often resulted in a significantly reduced standard of living unless she remarried into her class. But remarriage was not easy, given the significant social stigma associated with divorce. To draw attention to the rise of the working class and the prevalence of divorce as relevant historical context for reading “Bliss” and “Marriage à la Mode” is not to argue that Katherine Mansfield was a social realist, but it is to affirm that her dramatization of upper-middle-class English women’s experience of class and class consciousness skillfully captures the nervously shifting energies and the barely concealed class conflicts of the period, conflicts that fuel the energy and febrile intensity of her stories. What specifically a Bourdieu and post-colonial reading of “Bliss,” “Marriage à la Mode,” and particularly “The Garden Party” discloses are Katherine Mansfield’s subtle dramatization of the performativity and cultural politics of the upper-middle class in English and New Zealand society post-WWI. By employing some aspects of the critical vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu and post-colonial theory, this chapter has argued against the view that class and class consciousness are merely “surface” issues in a selection of Katherine Mansfield’s stories about the English and New Zealand upper-middle class post-WWI. Class and class consciousness, and particularly the policing of class boundaries, demonstrably drive the narrative in “The Garden Party,” “Bliss,” and “Marriage à la Mode.” The family politics, the material culture, the setting, the registers, and vocabulary of the dialogue work with and against one another to reveal the subtle acculturation 257

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of the characters’ class consciousness as they interact with and against one another in forging identity.

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.Translated by Richard Nice, introduction by Tony Bennett, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ———. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge UP, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge UP, 1992. Ferrall, Charles. “Katherine Mansfield and the Working Classes.” Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 2014, pp. 106–120. Kuch, Peter. Irish Divorce / Joyce’s Ulysses. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Stories. Introduction by Ali Smith, Penguin Classics, 2007. ———. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Scott, Lincoln University UP, 1997. The National Library of Australia. Trove. trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/. Accessed 27 June 2020. The National Library of New Zealand. Papers Past. paperspast​.natlib​.govt​.​nz/. Accessed 27 June 2020. Savage, Gail L. “The Operation of the 1857 Divorce Act, 1860–1910 a Research Note.” Journal of Social History, vol. 16, no. 4, 1983, pp. 103–110. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021. The Times (London). www​.thetimes​.co​.uk​/archive/. Accessed 27 June 2020. Weininger, Elliot B. “Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Class Analysis.” Approaches to Class Analysis, edited by Erik Olin Wright, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 82–118.

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19 WRITING WORKINGCLASS IRISH MOTHERS Heather Laird

This chapter offers an overview and an analysis of the representation of working-class mothers in Irish urban writing. It assesses depictions of working-class Dublin mothers, as provided by such well-known literary figures as Sean O’Casey and, more recently, Roddy Doyle. However, challenging the oft-rehearsed equation of Ireland’s working class with the country’s capital city, the chapter discusses works set in other urban centers, such as Cork, Limerick, and Galway. Moreover, “Writing Working-Class Irish Mothers” takes an island-wide focus, examining some Belfast-based writings. In Writing Ireland’s Working Class, Michael Pierse notes the “plethora of male-authored texts about working-class women’s lives” in Ireland (110). Ruth Sherry, comparing these writings favorably on gender grounds with fictional accounts of the English working class, asserts that “Irish men write with considerable understanding of working women” (120). While acknowledging the importance of male-authored texts in constructing, reinforcing, and sometimes challenging key tropes in the representation of working-class Irish mothers, this chapter draws attention to the many female-authored texts that feature disadvantaged mothers living in Irish urban centers, from the late nineteenth-century “slum fiction” of Fannie Gallaher to more recent works by Paula Meehan and Mary Morrissy. The chapter determines the principal functions served by workingclass motherhood in Irish literature. With reference to a broad array of writings, it also explores some of the issues that arise at this particular intersection of class and gender. In Dublin’s Lost Heroines, Kevin C. Kearns asks, Can one imagine any figure in Irish society with less time and opportunity to write letters and keep diaries than Ma’s from the liberties or north-side—past or present—burdened with large families, financial problems, domestic chores, outside job duties and emotional strains. (xxii, emphasis in original) Here, Kearns usefully points to the practicalities that can prevent working-class mothers from expressing themselves in the written word. When outlining the factors that hinder the self-representation of these “heroines,” however, he echoes tendencies common to the portrayal of such women by others. In the twentieth century, the figure of the overburdened and under-resourced mother valiantly struggling to look after and provide for her children dominated depictions of working-class Irish women, particularly in writings by men. Terence MacSwiney’s The Holocaust (1910), James Stephens’s Hunger: A Dublin Story (1918), Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (1954), Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child (1961), Paul Smith’s The 259

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Countrywoman (1961), and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969) all feature a harried yet dutiful mother/nurturer. In some of these narratives, details provided of the day-to-day reality of maintaining a dwelling and family on a working-class wage offer a strong critique of the economic and political status quo. Thus, in the leftist-aligned novel, Strumpet City—set in 1913 during a Dublin labor dispute that lasted nearly five months and involved some twenty thousand workers—Mary Fitzpatrick’s attempts to keep her home intact, and her children safe and healthy are to the fore. Significant emphasis is placed in such texts on the dedication with which mothers engage in unpaid household labor, notwithstanding the many obstacles that they face. Strumpet City is typical in this regard, with Mary striving to keep an unfurnished living space clean and homely: “The room was still bare of any real furniture. But there was a fire in the grate” (564). Plunkett’s novel also tells of an unnamed mother whose children are presumed dead after the collapse of a Dublin tenement building: The “young woman whose dark hair was matted with blood” was “barely conscious and kept saying over and over again: ‘The children … the children’” (447). The cozy collusion of capitalism and the state against the interests of the working class is revealed when one character tells another that the owner of the tenement had pulled political strings to ensure that the unstable building passed its last safety check (447). In Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman, set predominantly during the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923, the figure of the impoverished mother doing her utmost to care for her children serves a different purpose. The Countrywoman tells the story of Molly Baines, a woman originally from rural County Wicklow who has spent the last eighteen years in Dublin, living in “two rooms in Kelly’s Lane” (1). Always behaving honorably towards others, Mrs. Baines is liked and respected by Dublin-born neighbors who, as the title of the novel suggests, still view her as an exotic outsider. A Protestant benefactor, pleased to note “the beautifully neat darns in [Mrs. Baines’s son’s] navy-blue gansey and the threadbare well-patched breeches that were obviously homemade but done with much care and attention,” concludes that the child’s mother is a worthy candidate for charity (105). But Mrs. Baines’s conscientious efforts to keep her children fed and clothed are impeded by a drunken and abusive husband who is not beyond maliciously ripping their children’s clothes to shreds and slashing their shoes with a razor (179–180). Through a heart-breaking account of Mrs. Baines’s repeated attempts to build a home for her children after each of her husband’s destructive visits, the novel offers a damning appraisal of a church whose representatives have instructed this woman to not only “stay with her husband,” but to “forgive” him for his violent treatment of her and their children (2, 176). That Pat Baines is aware of the complicity of the Catholic church in the physical and psychological abuse that he inflicts on his wife and children is suggested by his insistence that they get down on their knees and pray after a particularly savage beating: “Mrs. Baines began to pray, the words issuing in gasps through the new gap where teeth had been” (168). The diligent yet struggling working-class mother has also functioned in Irish writing to underpin a critique of “abstract” politics. Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock is a case in point. Scholars of O’Casey frequently draw attention to his portrayal of women. Pierse asserts that “women’s plight in working-class life is a key, abiding theme of [O’Casey’s] oeuvre” (Ireland’s 57). Nicholas Grene summarizes the oft-rehearsed gender aspect of the “Dublin trilogy” as follows: “The men boast and blow, but it is the women who show the real courage of suffering and endurance” (125). The supposed “cult of the woman” that can be found in the three iconic O’Casey plays—The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926)—has facilitated a commonplace acceptance of O’Casey as a playwright with feminist leanings (Grene 125). It is certainly true that in these plays women, and in particular mothers, tend to be depicted in a positive light. The most fully central and most fully heroic of O’Casey’s women is Juno Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, a play that like The Countrywoman is set during the Irish Civil War. Juno is hard-working, resilient, and caring. As she herself acknowledges, she is crucial to the survival of the dwelling-space and the family:“Who has kep’ th’ home together for the past few years—only me?”; “I don’t know what any o’ yous ud do without your ma” (O’Casey 138, 71–72). Her working-class 260

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pragmatics are constantly pitted in the play against the supposed idealistic political stances adopted by her children; her son, Johnny, is a Republican who has taken the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, while her daughter, Mary, is a labor activist currently on strike. “A principle’s a principle,” says Johnny, when Juno comments on the life-changing injuries he has received in the independence struggle (93). “A principle’s a principle,” says Mary, when Juno suggests that she is in danger of losing her job (70). “You lost your best principle, me boy,” Juno tells Johnny, “when you lost your arm; them’s the only sort o’ principles that’s any good to a workin’ man” (93). “When I go into oul’ Murphy’s tomorrow,” Juno asks Mary, “an’ he gets to know that, instead o’ paying’ all, I’m goin’ to borry more, what’ll he say when I tell him a principle’s a principle?” (70). In the course of the play, we learn that Johnny has betrayed a former Republican comrade who was subsequently murdered by supporters of the Treaty. Mary’s political commitment is similarly superficial, with her trade unionism exposed as “no more than a trite slogan” (Pilkington 94); for all of her grandiose talk of politics, Mary seems more interested in picking the right color ribbon for her hair. Juno is grounded in the day-to-day struggle to keep her family sheltered and fed. Johnny and Mary are in thrall to a high-flown rhetoric that has very little bearing on the life choices that they make. Thus, through the figure of Juno, Juno and the Paycock forms an opposition between the “real” instincts of maternal love and the illusory nature of political posturing. All three sets of narratives—those which employ the figure of the impoverished yet diligent working-class mother to expose the injustices of the economic and political status quo, those in which this figure offers a strong indictment of the Catholic church, and those in which it provides a critique of “abstract” politics—rely on an idealized and essentialized concept of motherhood.The more fervently the reader believes that Mary Fitzpatrick in Strumpet City is a “good” mother who is doing everything in her power to care for her children, the more successful is the condemnation offered in this text of prevailing economic and political forces. Moreover, the extent of the reader’s outrage at the collapse of the tenement building in Plunkett’s novel is largely reliant on her/his emotional response to the predicament of the unnamed mother whose children are missing. This response is in turn dependent on that reader’s internalization of an ideology of maternity which suggests that the connection between mother and child is not only precious but unique. In The Countrywoman, Mrs. Baines’s tireless efforts on behalf of her children are contrasted to the church’s careless treatment of its flock, including Mrs. Baines herself, whom it condemns to a life of deprivation and abuse. Mrs. Baines’s innate maternal nature is, therefore, key to the narrative’s critique of the Catholic church. Thus, we are told that her decision to have yet another child that she cannot afford is based not only on her knowledge of the church’s rigid stance on abortion, but on her own “inordinate love of life, and children in particular” (Smith 186). She later convinces Queenie Mullen, a young pregnant woman who is in a relationship with Mrs. Baines’s son, to get married and have the baby she is carrying, notwithstanding Queenie’s assertion that she would rather remain single and abort the fetus (200–206). Therefore, although The Countrywoman’s harsh portrayal of the Catholic church contributed to the novel being banned upon publication until 1975, the story of the “good” mother, Molly Baines, is underpinned by the same ideology of maternity that the church drew on at that time in its celebration of idealized motherhood, personified in the figure of the Virgin Mary. The opposition established in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock between illusory politics and pragmatic realism is equally reliant on essentialist constructions of maternity. As Susan Cannon Harris states in Gender and Modern Irish Drama, “Juno’s connection to what is ‘real’ is established and sold through O’Casey’s appeal to the purported universality of maternal instinct” (198). By offering his audience the one thing that he knows they will unquestionably accept as “authentic,” a mother’s love, O’Casey seeks to “break the connection between authenticity and the body of the slain political martyr” who dies for an abstraction (Harris 198). In short, in this play O’Casey employs an ideology of maternity to undo the power of political ideology. While the careworn but diligent mother/nurturer is the dominant female figure in narratives that draw on Irish working-class life, some texts offer alternative or opposing versions of 261

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­ orking-class motherhood. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, a 1996 memoir that is mainly conw cerned with this Irish-American author’s childhood in Limerick, features a “defeated” mother who sometimes opts to remain in bed rather than face yet another day of deprivation and drudgery (1). Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Snapper (1990), is focalized predominantly through a pregnant girl and her father, but the girl’s mother, who veers between looking “tired” and looking “very tired” (145, 146), is a shadowy reminder of the toll that working-class motherhood can take. Permanent exhaustion ensures that neither Angela McCourt in Angela’s Ashes nor Veronica Rabbitte in The Snapper is capable of playing a significant role in their children’s lives. By contrast, Mary Makebelieve’s mother in James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912) seeks to maintain an influence in her daughter’s life that is far more suited to the relationship between a mother and a much younger child. The ardent version of mothering that she employs infantilizes Mary, leaving her vulnerable to the man who seeks to control her. Paula Spencer, in Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), admits to having sometimes bought alcohol with money that should have been spent on food for her children (88). Fannie Gallaher’s Katty the Flash: A Mould of Dublin Mud (1880), one of the earliest examples of Irish urban fiction, is centered on an impoverished street vendor who, notwithstanding the recent death of her daughter, continues to divide her time between “the whiskey-shop, the police-court, and the prison” (939). Paula Meehan’s Cell (2000) and Heno Magee’s Hatchet (1972) explore the concept of perverse or monstrous mothering. Dolores Roche (Delo), the self-proclaimed matriarch of Meehan’s prison drama, adopts a motherly tone while sexually abusing Lila Byrne in exchange for heroin: “Mammy loves Lila. Mammy loves her little titties” (19). In the play Hatchet, Mrs. Bailey is depicted as having socialized her son into committing acts of violence: “The Digger would fight anyone, and so would Hatchet, I never reared a gibber … Hadn’t he to face the animal gang with a hatchet when he was only fourteen, didn’t ye son?” (Magee 33). The first section of Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987) is the story of a mother who imprisons and regularly beats a child born of an incestuous relationship. Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City (1982) foregrounds a woman’s complicity in the sexual abuse of her daughter. Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl (1996) features a mother who finds it hard to accept the “stick-like being” that she has given birth to as human (115), while her short story “Rosa” (1993) tells of a young woman who arranges for her new-born baby to be left to die in an empty department store. All of the working-class mothers featured in the above texts can be contrasted to Plunkett’s Mary Fitzpatrick, Smith’s Molly Baines, and O’Casey’s Juno Boyle, but the extent to which these writings challenge essentialist constructions of maternity varies. The grotesque mother that is the focus of the short satirical piece, Katty the Flash, is key to that narrative’s highly moralistic treatment of “illegitimacy” and single motherhood. Katty Sr.’s “unnatural” maternal behavior is the ultimate indicator of her divergence from bourgeois societal norms. In The Woman Who Walked into Doors, written over a hundred years later, Paula’s limitations as a mother are linked to the socio-economic critique provided by the novel. Like the female characters that Pierse discusses in Writing Ireland’s Working Class, Paula has experienced “multiple social and economic impediments: as part of a disadvantaged economic class, as [a woman] in a male-dominated society, but also as [a woman] living in an especially androcentric working-class culture” (113). Doyle’s novel points to the double standard in sexual matters that Paula has encountered throughout her life: “You were a slut if you let fellas put their tongues in your mouth and you were a tight bitch if you didn’t—but you could also be a slut if you didn’t. One or the other, sometimes both. There was no escape” (47). Paula’s entrapment takes many forms, but is ultimately shown to stem from the simple fact that she is a woman from a working-class background. Her maternal instincts are revealed to be intact—Paula’s eventual expulsion of her violent husband from the family home is triggered not by his many brutal attacks on her but by the sexual threat that he begins to pose to their eldest daughter—but sometimes these instincts are eclipsed by a dependency on alcohol that is at least partially attributable to the difficult circumstances of Paula’s life. Thus while Katty Sr. in Katty the Flash is held 262

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personally accountable for her failings as a mother and Paula’s failings are contextualized, both of these texts assume the reader’s awareness of the maternal ideal from which these mothers deviate. Mary Morrissy’s writings on Irish women in marginalized social conditions, in contrast to these two very different texts, are notable for their sustained interrogation of patriarchal ideologies of maternity. These writings include works that challenge the idea of motherhood as “natural” and foreground issues relating to the “dark” side of maternity, including “illegitimacy,” abortion, and infanticide. In several of her publications, Morrissy broaches women’s sometimes troubled responses to pregnancy, parturition, and new motherhood. In the aforementioned short story “Rosa,” the narrator’s pregnant sister describes fellow expectant mothers as “[d]romedaries, onehumped camels, beasts of burden” (Morrissy 32). In The Rising of Bella Casey (2013), we are told that after “hours of hard labor” which culminate with the doctor “tear[ing] away the afterbirth with his fingers,” Bella would be more than happy to follow his advice that she have no more children (Morrissy 219). It is perhaps no accident that this especially gruesome description of childbirth is to be found in a fictionalized account of the life of Bella Casey, sister of the playwright, Sean O’Casey, whose Juno Boyle is the very embodiment of maternal love. When Rita, in Morrissy’s best-known work, Mother of Pearl, watches other new mothers breast-feed their babies, she cannot understand the women’s calm response to an act that she perceives as akin to a physical assault (120). Her own daughter, Pearl/Mary, ends her pregnancy by dispelling the “mollusc of flesh” with a knitting needle (215). The pregnant girl in “Rosa” gives birth having previously failed to induce a miscarriage and asks her sister to abandon the new-born baby in a closed department store’s Christmas crib, “the ultimate picture of maternity” (Morrissy 28). The crib, which had replaced a plastic Santa Claus following the Pope’s declaration of a holy year, points to the Catholic church’s role in reinforcing an essentialized concept of motherhood. Its location, in Dublin’s commercial center, suggests an alignment between that church and the Irish middle classes. This story of infanticide set against the backdrop of a bourgeois society that wishes to be seen to obey religious dictates contains covert references to a medical procedure that the pregnant working-class girl clearly wants but has limited access to: “her arms encompassing the bump in a gesture of aborted protection” (31). That Ireland, notwithstanding its stereotypical association with large happy families, has a long history of women disposing of unwanted children is signaled by the ending of “Rosa.” Here the widowed father and his two daughters sing, “in ragged unison,” “Weile Waile,” an old murder ballad generally believed to date back to the Great Famine of the 1840s.The song tells of a woman, living in the woods, who sticks a penknife “long and sharp” in her three-month-old baby’s heart (38). Morrissy’s story concludes before the verses that detail the woman’s capture and punishment, though a three-dot ellipsis informing us that the song is not yet finished points to the possible fate of Rosa and her narrator sister. Pearl/Mary in Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl has two mothers, her birth mother and the woman who snatches her from a maternity hospital. In this, she is similar to Juno’s imminent grandchild in Juno and the Paycock; when Juno’s daughter discovers she is pregnant and laments that her baby will have no father, Juno reassures her that she will be a second mother to the child (O’Casey 145–146). While in the O’Casey play the double mothering referenced towards the end of its closing act functions as a final endorsement of the exemplary mothering role provided by Juno, Morrissy includes two mothers in her partially Belfast-based novel so that she can ask difficult questions about the nature and reality of motherhood. One of these mothers, Rita Golden/Spain, is the biological mother who views her baby as “something not quite human,” and the other, Irene Rivers/Godwin, is the nurturing mother who feels “as one” with the child that she images into being and then kidnaps (Mother 117, 70). As Anne Fogarty states, in the complex story that is produced by Morrissy’s tripartite narrative, “it is only the non-biological mother who is capable of experiencing a positive connection with the daughter that she has forcefully to create for herself ” (68). Indeed, Rita views the kidnapping of her child as divine punishment for her “unnatural” response to a pregnancy that she experienced as a “violent struggle” (Morrissy, Mother 98). Notwithstanding allusions to the 263

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Judgement of Solomon (31, 49, 89), a biblical tale of two mothers wrangling over one child, this novel is less interested in determining the “true” mother of Pearl/Mary than in “open[ing] up to investigation the notion that maternal love is a natural and instinctive aspect of the female psychic economy” (Fogarty 68). Both mothers are relevant to this investigation. Rita’s negative response to pregnancy and motherhood challenges a belief in the essential maternal nature of all women, while Irene’s intense longing for a child is shown to be exacerbated by the expectations of her working-class female neighbors who will not accept her into their midst until she produces a baby: “The first thing they asked if they met her at the dairy or in the church porch was ‘Any news?’ By that, they meant one thing, the one thing Irene knew she could not deliver” (Morrissy, Mother 40). When anticipating losing Pearl/Mary, Irene remembers the “pride” that she “had felt pushing the baby carriage out into the sun by the front door,” her maternal prowess visible to all (86). Her only request, when the police come to arrest her, is that she herself be taken away “under cover of darkness,” her de-mothering unwitnessed by the same women to whom she had previously displayed Pearl/Mary (89). Moreover, as Fogarty notes (68), Irene’s all-consuming desire for a child is revealed in the novel to at least partially stem from the invasive physical procedures and loss of identity that she experienced while being treated for tuberculosis as a young woman: What had become of those delicate shanks of bone removed so long ago, she wondered … [H]ad they been used, as Irene now suspected, to make something new. She saw a group of doctors, unknown to her, closeted away in a bubbling laboratory, grinding each rib down by hand into a fine dust. They would add something then … Mother’s milk. To make a paste as pliable as dough. And from that dough a baby make … This was her off-spring, hers alone, the child of her illness, Irene’s first loss. And she was still out there. Not dead, simply lost. In a hospital ward somewhere, unclaimed, waiting for her mother. (Morrissy, Mother 54–55) Morrissy’s writings also point to an additional underlying factor in the prevalence of the mother figure in Irish literature: the link between woman and nation. The titular character in “Rosa,” who was once a “dark, freckled child” named Rosie (28), is clearly an allusion to Róisín Dubh or Dark Rosaleen, a figure with its roots in Irish aisling or vision poetry and one of the many female personifications of Ireland. The strange spatial features of Mother of Pearl indicate that there is a national dimension to this novel too. These features include mentions of geographic divides that echo but are not the Irish Border and the novel’s multi-layered references to north and south. Most pointedly, Irene gives the false name Mrs. North when checking into the Four Provinces Hotel, an allusion to the four provinces of the island of Ireland that includes the disputed province of Ulster (56). That this is her base for stealing Pearl/Mary suggests that in deconstructing motherhood, this cross-Border tale of split maternal identities is also deconstructing Mother Ireland. Moreover, insight given in the final section of the novel into the “troubled and divided interiority of the daughter who has been passed back and forth between the two mothers” gestures to the trauma of partition for those who inhabit the contested territory that resulted from it (Fogarty 65). By denaturalizing motherhood and drawing attention to connections between woman and nation in the Irish context, Morrissy’s writings on working-class mothers provide a necessary dismantling of the ideology of maternity that informed some earlier Irish texts. That said, notwithstanding the marginalized class position of some of the women that they feature, the socioeconomic critique offered in these writings is less stringent than that which can be found in works like Plunkett’s Strumpet City. Indeed, it is difficult to pinpoint an Irish literary text that highlights class and gender issues and is equally strong in its treatment of both. Moreover, though gender is to the fore in the literary output of the most recent generation of Irish women writers—with young women resisting, or struggling with, various aspects of the socialization into womanhood featuring heavily—social class tends to be side-lined. This reflects broader trends in Ireland and elsewhere, 264

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as can be demonstrated by reference to intersectionality, an important concept in contemporary feminist scholarship. Key to intersectionality is the very necessary recognition that while gender is the main source of oppression for white, heterosexual, middle-class women, other women may be subject to different forms or structures of oppression that intersect in various ways with gender. However, though class is one of the categories of stratification or identity that impact on women’s lives, it invariably receives less attention from intersectional feminists than, for example, race or sexual orientation. With regard to the aforementioned recent works of Irish literature, Sally Rooney’s writings are an exception in that they are concerned with young women’s often negative responses to the versions of “growing-up” they are presented with, while also paying close attention to the tangible and intangible effects of class structure and economic disparity. Her novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), for example, acknowledge the impact of class on the social and educational lives of the young, and point to the extent to which a privileged class position can allow some people to “just move through the world in a different way” (Rooney, Normal 68). Moreover, the impact of financial imbalances among friends and lovers is a common preoccupation in Rooney’s writing. However, for the purposes of this chapter, an earlier text, Does Your Mother? (1970) by Lee Dunne, the most banned writer in Ireland, is especially relevant. Not only is this a neglected leftist-aligned urban novel that features a mother, but through her depiction the novel combines socio-economic critique with a hard-hitting commentary on contemporaneous representations of working-class motherhood. Does Your Mother? is set in the 1950s in a block of corporation flats nicknamed Hell’s Kitchen in a part of Ranelagh, Dublin, known as the “Hill.” The portrayal of Maire Damian, at least initially, echoes that of the “good” working-class mother found in the writings discussed in the opening pages of this chapter. Though residing in a fever-foul slum where a family lived in a single room without running water, and where the wash-houses and lavatories were almost always filthy enough to be a serious hazard to the health of the tenants in the block she somehow manages to keep herself and her children clean (Dunne 11). It is in the “deep, agestained sink” of one of these wash-houses that Maire rubs “Sun-light soap” that she can little afford into “the few garments that she had to wash” (17). An early encounter with a child reveals both Maire’s kindness and the fact that there are other children in the flats not nearly as well looked after as her own: “Maire stopped to wipe the nose of a child who stood crying on the footpath. His face was filthy and the pants and gansey that he wore were little better” (9–10). However, it is soon revealed that she is an occasional prostitute, only one of whose six children was fathered by her husband, now deceased. As Pierse points out in Writing Ireland’s Working Class, the figure of the prostitute often functions in working-class writing to “highlight the narrowness of opportunity that working-class women are afforded” (159). A prime example of this can be found in Strumpet City, a novel that—as the inclusion of an archaic word for female prostitute in the title suggests— depicts Dublin itself as defiled by economic forces and agents. Lily Maxwell’s selling of her body is directly linked in this book to the exploitation associated with the other forms of labor available to her: “Making biscuits or something for five bob a week? I had enough of that” (Plunkett 127). The figure of the prostitute and the figure of the mother are, therefore, both employed in Strumpet City to heighten the novel’s socio-economic critique, but they are kept separate, with the emphasis placed on the mother. In contrast, Dunne combined these figures in the character of Maire Damian, whose past struggles to care for her family, in particular her alcoholic husband, included not only unpaid household labor but paid sex work. Indeed, these seemingly opposing aspects of her life are uncomfortably conflated in some of her interchanges with her policemen lover: “He knelt down, wanting her again. Needing to be held that way. Nobody but Maire. She sneered at the pain in his face. ‘Oh, have we hurt the baba, now, made him unhappy, have we, diddums’” (Dunne 265

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31). Maire has an enduring passion for this man, but the subsequent sexual encounter between them is at least partially motivated by her concern for her eldest son, Peter, who, as the policeman suspects, is a petty thief. In its complex rendering of Maire, Does Your Mother? draws our attention to the careful and oft-times clichéd construction of motherhood in other Irish writings that are equally condemning of class inequality. Moreover, this is a novel that takes the risk that its readers, so attuned to celebrations of idealized motherhood in stories of Irish working-class life, will disapprove of Maire to the extent that they won’t feel impelled to rail against the conditions that impact so negatively on her. Thus, Maire, unlike the more conventional working-class mother of twentieth-century Irish fiction, must make a strong case for herself, overtly giving voice to the many injustices that she and those around her face. A common characteristic of fictional accounts of the Irish working class is that the women they feature are presented as having little or no awareness of the structural basis of class inequality. For example, while Strumpet City’s Lily Maxwell is shown to make choices based on her marginalized social position, when Pat Bannister accuses her of never asking herself “why the poor are poor,” she tells him that she doesn’t question the way God made the world (Plunkett 129). In a similar vein, in Stephen’s The Charwoman’s Daughter, Mrs. Cafferty, pondering why her husband has no regular work and her children are hungry, concludes that “there was something wrong somewhere, but whether the blame was to be allocated to the weather, the employer, the Government, or the Deity, she did not know” (97). Maire Damian is an exception in this regard, assigning culpability for the “stinking hole” that she and her children inhabit to an official mindset that views slums “not fit for rats” as appropriate living quarters for working-class people (Dunne 7). Maire’s fortunes are transformed when an alcoholic neighbor wins five thousand pounds in the Irish Hospital Sweepstake and brings her and her younger children to live with him in a house in a more upmarket neighborhood. Notwithstanding this improbable happy ending, throughout Does Your Mother? Maire demonstrates an awareness of both the social reproduction of poverty and the role of the state in reinforcing class boundaries; in a conversation with the policeman, for example, she suggests that his job consists of going out “hunting kids because they were stupid enough to be born in Hell’s Kitchen” (33). It is, of course, possible for a literary work to offer a leftist critique of society without any of the characters in that text directly voicing this critique. Indeed, the text may focus instead on that which prevents these characters from comprehending the structural underpinnings of their impoverished circumstances. Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter is a good example of such a work in that lack of comprehension on the part of its main protagonists is linked to the women’s desire for wealth and its consumerist rewards. As Liam Lanigan notes, the younger of these protagonists “frequently alleviates her hunger pangs by indulging in the phantasmagoric escapism provided by the Grafton Street shop windows” (10). Capitalism is thus revealed to be a highly seductive economic system that diverts the women’s attention from the power structures at work on their lives by encouraging them to divide their time between either wanting the things that they do not have or enjoying the voyeuristic pleasures that a consumerist society has to offer. By contrast, Smith’s The Countrywoman and McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes depict the Catholic church as playing a key role in maintaining the socio-economic status quo by stringently policing class boundaries and encouraging working-class women to accept their fate. In several female-authored writings, religious/ethno-religious division impedes working-class women’s understanding of the power structures that shape their lives, preventing them from joining forces against class and gender inequalities. For example, Christina Reid’s Belfast-based play, Tea in a China Cup (1983), features women across three generations of a working-class Protestant family whose sense of superiority over their Catholic neighbors is shown to facilitate their acceptance of the status quo. In other texts, such as Stephens’s Hunger, poverty itself renders “its victims voiceless, politically impotent” (Sherry 119). Though offering a less explicit critique of the existing socio-economic order than The Charwoman’s Daughter, this story uses the observations of its central female charac266

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ter to draw the reader’s attention to the unequal distribution of wealth that results from that order: “She ­followed people with her eyes, sometimes a little way with her feet, saying to herself: ‘The pockets of that man are full of money; he would rattle if he fell’” (Stephens, Hunger 23). However, the starving woman at the center of this story can voice neither these observations nor any other when seeking assistance at a relief kitchen: [S]he did not argue about the matter, for now that she accepted food, she accepted anything that came with it, whether it was opinions or advice; she was an acceptor, and she did not claim to possess even an opinion. (24) But given that Irish leftist-oriented texts featuring working-class life often contain at least one male character who claims to grasp the structural basis of inequality—the mansplaining Pat Bannister in Strumpet City for example—the focus in Does Your Mother? on a female character who has an informed opinion and expresses it represents a significant intervention in literary portrayals of working-class Irish women.Women in marginalized social conditions, the novel suggests, are more than mere passive victims of an unjust system they don’t understand. Thus, Maire’s portrayal counters the more conventional representation of the heroically suffering and enduring working-class mother who, while designed to spur the (male) reader to action on behalf of such women, lacks the awareness herself that would be required to bring about an end to class injustice. In this chapter, I have gathered together an array of Irish urban writings that feature workingclass mothers, tracing connections and pinpointing differences between their depictions of these female characters. Notwithstanding the many fictional texts that deal with aspects of working-class life in Ireland, working-class concerns, as Michael Pierse points out in Writing Ireland’s Working Class, have been largely disregarded in Irish academia with regard to both course design and research. Indeed, when lamenting the lack of an Irish Working-Class Studies in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, Pierse claims that his own “Representing the Working Class” module at Queen’s University Belfast is relatively unique in offering students the opportunity to explore Irish writing from a class perspective (15). However, when discussing the scant scholarship that could provide the underpinnings for an Irish Working-Class Studies, such as book-length publications on Sean O’Casey and Roddy Doyle, Pierse inadvertently reveals the potential for gender bias in this emerging field of scholarship. Given the enduring nature of the most frequently employed tropes in the representation of working-class Irish women and the tendency of some of the most beloved fictional accounts of working-class life in Ireland to rely heavily on these tropes in their social commentary, women writers, female characterization, and gender issues need to be front and center from the very beginnings of this new scholarly endeavor.While my chapter’s focus on a relatively large number of works is sometimes at the expense of textual exposition, formal analysis, and historical contextualization, by demonstrating the often vital role played by working-class motherhood in well-known texts and by bringing some less familiar urban writings into the critical frame, it lays the foundations for much-needed further scholarly work on literary representations of working-class Irish mothers and of working-class Irish women in general.

Works Cited Bolger, Dermot. The Woman’s Daughter. 1987. Penguin, 1992. Brown, Christy. My Left Foot. 1954. Minerva, 1990. Doyle, Roddy. The Snapper. 1990.The Barrytown Trilogy. Secker and Warburg, 1992, pp. 141–340. ———. The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Jonathan Cape, 1996. Dunne, Lee. Does Your Mother? Arrow Books, 1970. Fogarty, Anne. “Uncanny Families: Neo-Gothic Motifs and the Theme of Social Change in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction.” Irish University Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2000, pp. 59–81.

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Heather Laird Gallaher, Fannie. Extract from Katty the Flash: A Mould of Dublin Mud. 1880. Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol.V, edited by Angela Bourke et al., Cork University Press, 2002, pp. 939–944. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge UP, 1999. Harris, Susan Cannon. Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Indiana UP, 2002. Kearns, Kevin C. Dublin’s Lost Heroines: Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City. Gill and Macmillan, 2004. Lanigan, Liam. “Revival and the City in James Stephen’s Dublin Fiction.” UCDscholarcast, series 12, no. 54, 2015. www​.ucd​.ie​/scholarcast​/series​.12​.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2019. MacSwiney, Terence. “The Holocaust: A Tragedy in One Act.” 1910. Terence MacSwiney Papers, UCD Archives, P48b/296. Magee, Heno. Hatchet. 1972. Gallery, 1978. McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. 1976. Flamingo, 1997. Meehan, Paula. Cell. New Island, 2000. Morrissy, Mary. Mother of Pearl. 1996.Vintage, 1997. ———. “Rosa.” A Lazy Eye. 1993.Vintage, 1996, pp. 25–38. ———. The Rising of Bella Casey. Brandon, 2013. Nelson, Dorothy. In Night’s City. Wolfhound Press, 1982. O’Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock. 1924.Three Dublin Plays. Faber and Faber, 1998, pp. 63–148. O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child. Macmillan, 1961. Pierse, Michael. A History of Irish Working-Class Writing. Cambridge UP, 2018. ———. Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin after O’Casey. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pilkington, Lionel. Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. Routledge, 2001. Plunkett, James. Strumpet City. 1969. Arrow, 1990. Reid, Christina. Tea in a China Cup. 1983. Christina Reid: Plays One. Methuen, 1997, pp. 1–65. Rooney, Sally. Conversations with Friends. Faber and Faber, 2017. ———. Normal People. Faber and Faber, 2018. Sherry, Ruth. “The Irish Working Class in Fiction.” The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, Edward Arnold, 1984, pp. 111–124. Smith, Paul. The Countrywoman. 1961. Penguin, 1989. Stephens, James. The Charwoman’s Daughter. 1912. Scepter, 1966. ———. Hunger: A Dublin Story. The Candle Press, 1918.

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20 SOCIAL CLASS AND MENTAL HEALTH IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION Simon Lee

While the initial rise of the welfare state in post-WWII British culture is generally regarded as a triumph of state responsibility, the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by attempts to undercut social support with subsequent decades left to pick up the pieces. Furthermore, comprehension of welfare and wellbeing itself has changed. In recent decades, awareness of issues surrounding mental illness has increased, with representations of neurodiversity permeating cultural production in ways that test the efficacy of existing social programs. Despite this shift, a social stigma persists, and individuals suffering from mental illness are frequently alienated and ostracized in society. In working-class communities—especially communities decimated by deindustrialization and state negligence—identities are frequently structured around concepts of resilience and autonomy. Such approaches are likely to draw on venerated models of working-class solidarity in which traditions and values associated with self-sufficient, community-driven problem solving is prioritized. However, nostalgia often deforms such referents, masking the fact that attempts to import retrogressive traditions into the present can prove both futile and harmful. In other words, notions and ideas about what constitutes working-class life are often grounded in anachronisms from an era in which work was readily available. These are difficult conversations to have in terms of sensitivity to the plight of the marginalized, but literature about working-class life allows for a consideration of such issues without resorting to victim-blaming or gross generalizations. In this sense, classconscious fiction bids consideration of the ways in which mental illness in working-class spaces is susceptible to double stigmatization: the alienation concomitant with a broad-scale social shame as well as intra-community stigma tied to past ideals of resilience and self-sufficiency. In Richard Milward’s 2007 novel Apples, the two main protagonists struggle with the challenges of growing up in a socially alienated and economically deprived area. In addition, both characters are portrayed as battling forms of illness marked by lax coping skills and inadequate support networks within the environment itself. Although the text’s discussion of mental health is subordinate to a broader set of working-class concerns, Milward offers a perspective on the way such issues are compounded in environments characterized by destitution.Yet, as this essay will discuss, links drawn between issues of mental health and social neglect are manifold, and Apples suggests that illness is also symptomatic of the kind of constraint felt within working-class communities and the pressure to conform to shared, collective values that are perhaps ill-suited for postindustrial spaces. Post-WWII British fiction has proven particularly useful in contouring these dynamics, from texts such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) to David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) to Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963).Yet, Milward’s novel revises post-WWII portrayals 269

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of working-class life for the twenty-first century, inviting reflection on the way class and mental illness intersect in a postindustrial world. Set on a disenfranchised housing estate, Apples offers a protagonist stricken with OCD whose attempts to control his symptoms underscore the double stigma of mental illness in working-class communities. The novel is driven by stereotypes, and as such, it allows for a consideration of issues of representation while also raising questions about the way working-class values are enacted. Although Apples offers no solutions to such concerns, it aligns with class-conscious texts of the past by sounding alarms and alerting readers to the way social deprivation conspires with working-class tradition to complicate the relationship between precarity and mental health. This essay turns upon Marx’s notion of immiseration to consider how narratives of self-sufficiency and resilience are troubled by present-day social conditions. Although distinctions can be made between the way Marx discusses immiseration in Capital and, alongside Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, the term generally refers to progressively deteriorating conditions for the worker. As Ernest Mandel notes in his introduction to Capital, while this prediction was critiqued by figures such as Karl Popper who questioned its scientific legitimacy, history itself proved to be the ultimate gauge of its precision (Marx 25). Given that what constitutes a workingclass identity has grown increasingly indeterminate in a postindustrial economy marked by precarious labor, the essay considers immiseration today as a state of enforced complicity in which immobility becomes instrumental in terms of upholding one’s identity when identity itself is under threat. In doing so, this essay emphasizes the critical role of literary fiction as a tool by which to discuss challenging topics pertaining to working-class life in addition to exposing inequalities in a manner that necessitates attention.

The Novel The narrative of Apples is told primarily from the perspective of two protagonists, both fifteen years old, who live in a world in which cohesive family units are obsolete, and their council estate exists as something to be survived rather than relished. Adam is cast as an outsider figure in the environment, due in part to his anxious personality and antiquated musical taste. However, Eve is the epitome of high school popularity, a status expressed through promiscuity and drug abuse. As both characters endure violence as the result of their social position, Milward’s decision to depict them as somewhat indifferent to their suffering is a telling reflection of the effect environments have on the psyche of their inhabitants. Adam’s home life is hostile, with his father prone to outbursts of violence; the surrounding area is no better as he becomes the victim of an attack that places him in the hospital for several weeks. Eve’s rape occurs while she is under the influence of ecstasy, and her awareness of the attack as it unfolds is borderline dismissive given her drug-induced state and her own pre-existing familiarity with violence. In this regard, the text recalls Pat Barker’s Union Street (1982) in which visceral and graphic depictions of suffering serve to establish a standard of existence in postindustrial working-class life.While Barker’s text is characterized by subtle inversions of power that award her characters a modicum of agency, Milward cuts his more traumatically violent scenes with dark humor to provide levity. Milward’s novel was well received at the time of its release, winning awards and receiving accolades from writers like Irvine Welsh, who Milward cites as a major influence.The novel was adapted to the stage in 2010, with the staged version winning subsequent awards of its own. Notably, the text deploys strategies used in class-conscious narratives of the past, intensifying them for the contextual, hyperreal moment. For example, the taboo subject matter seen in post-WWII British fiction becomes a desensitizing barrage in Milward’s work. As a result, the text reads more like a catalog of conservative anxieties tied to stereotypes of council housing estates. It does so in a manner that complicates the binary of ethical and aesthetic imperatives associated with class-conscious fiction in that it reads both as signaling alarm and as exploitative—a cavalcade of working-class stereotypes often categorized by the pejorative term “chav.” In a 2014 interview, Milward cited 270

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“tabloids” as the source material for his 2012 novel, Kimberley’s Capital Punishment, noting that his early writing acted as an intentional echo of Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993). Given this, it is possible to see how a text like Apples reads like a pastiche of social stigmas and working-class signifiers—ones grounded in a certain degree of reality. With that said, Milward’s novel is important in its attention to detail—a motif established in mid-twentieth-century British writing, amplified through the acceleration effects of 1990s and 2000s class representation. Largely based on Milward’s own experience in the town of Guisborough, the environment depicted throughout Apples designates a specific way of life to those who live there. The setting is scattered with standard-fare council estate facilities, largely comprised of pubs and clubs—several of which serve as hosts for immediate community functions. Escape from the estate is characterized by cheap, packaged holidays to destinations like Ibiza, cementing the limited mobility available within the estate itself. The limits of such spaces are articulated in the way that the characters attempt to transform rather than leave them, with Debbie’s penchant for graffiti (“She was artistic like that” [38]) and the continual stream of designer drugs that act as “an antidote to a boring evening” (39). Milward’s objective is clear: to present the Middlesbrough area as constricting, both physically and psychologically, emphasizing the kinds of pressures placed on working-class people to negotiate mental health issues internally rather than through professional avenues. In doing so, it is possible to consider Apples as a narrative that is conversant with a history of neglect as well as a history of the kind of self-sufficiency that views social assistance with skepticism.

Mental Health in Post-WWII Britain Recent research conducted by the Center for History of Medicine at Warwick University has focused on placing the current state of mental health care in Britain into historical context through an interdisciplinary collaboration with historians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and policy makers. In a 2015 report, the center argued the necessity of historicizing postwar mental health services to better understand how “organizing categories such as ‘costs,’ ‘risks,’ ‘needs,’ ‘inclusion’ and ‘equality’” have come to impact access to treatment and transformed the way socioeconomic difference affects health care more broadly (Turner et al. 600). As the report outlines, one of the most significant changes in the history of British mental health treatment stemmed from the 1959 Mental Health Act—an act aimed at deinstitutionalizing mental health treatment by abolishing the distinction between psychiatric hospitals and general hospitals, mitigating stigma for treatment, and granting additional rights to those afflicted. In 1948, psychiatric hospitals were incorporated into the National Health Service in an attempt to move away from some of the more punitive options that emerged from the 1890 Lunacy Act. However, the postwar years also saw new endeavors to redistribute power to local authorities, rendering health care a regional rather than a national concern. The imperative to decentralize health care into regional authorities increased with the 1990 National Health and Community Care Act, and the 2000 NHS Plan designated mental health care as a priority alongside cancer treatment and the treatment of heart disease. The 2011 policy proposal, No Health without Mental Health, reasoned that the coalition government’s success should be measured by the general wellbeing of the public as well as the economic wellbeing of the country. The proposal reiterated past attempts to “empower the local” rather than the national, suggesting that a move away from “Big Government oversight” would produce greater innovation in treatment and resources on the macro level. As with past attempts to decenter health care, though, subsequent analysis revealed that working-class regions lacked sufficient health resources. These regions also experienced heightened rates of mental illness in addition to residents exhibiting resistance to professional treatment. As Warwick’s 2015 report adds, the move toward specialized mental health care services was described as the “patient journey” through paths that would, presumably, lead to an ideal result. Yet, as the report summarizes, for many, “the patient journey never started, and for most it was very short” (607). As such, the authors suggest that inadequate 271

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resources played a critical role in the failure to destigmatize mental illness (609). Furthermore, the report also shows that a number of these issues were compounded by “the denial of civil rights” (610) and the instrumentalization of compulsory treatment as a discriminatory endeavor. Young Black men were maligned as “unstable,” and women were often misdiagnosed as “overreacting” and their health concerns dismissed (610). In other words, mental health care issues in Britain over the last century saw increased visibility, but the solutions proposed appear, at best, dismissive and, at worst, discriminatory. This is especially true in regions and areas with a known lack of basic resources and subsidized funding such as working-class regions or regions occupied by marginalized groups. Still, it helps to consider the spatialization of mental health in two ways: how regions characterized by poverty and immiseration contribute to mental illness in addition to the kinds of support available in communities to treat such problems. A 1974 comparative analysis of mental illness across Western society argued that “the rate of existing mental disorder among the poor is substantially higher than among the affluent or working-class groups” (Levy 271). In this particular report, “working-class” may be understood today as “middle class”—“blue collar and clerical occupations with intermediate levels of education and income” (272) whereas “the poor” are designated as “persons in the lowest income bracket with little formal education who are in the main, unskilled laborers, chronically unemployed and recipients of welfare” (272). Despite the categorization used, the research is helpful in linking mental illness to socioeconomic difference. Nevertheless, it also brings up a particularly provocative point about class awareness more broadly: that diagnosis is often informed by the class difference between the psychiatrist and the patient, with “upwardly mobile psychiatrists [diagnosing] an affective disorder rather than a cognitive disorder in persons with similar demographic credentials” (276). Above all, though, the report upholds what is most likely an unsurprising claim: “To be born into an impoverished family will most often entail a success of environmental hazards dating from the beginning of life” (281). Furthermore, the authors add that “Poor education in school coupled with an intellectually and culturally impoverished environment at home with early termination of formal education set the stage for limited ego development, poor coping skills and limited potential for economic and social betterment” (282). When work is available, “the lowerclass person will be selected for unskilled labor where the work is physically exhausting, boring, hazardous, and demeaning” (282), and in home communities, Discrimination against the poor by the police, the courts and the entire government bureaucracy, poor medical and social services and a perverse moralistic condemnatory attitude from society at large serves to place the lower-class citizen in an extraordinarily difficult psychological position. (282) Turner et al. conclude by noting that middle-class and upper-class connections to mental illness are less determined; the environmental factors experienced by the working-poor are universally understood to yield the conditions in which mental illness can thrive. Even though this particular report dates back to 1974, such concerns remain true today and are, perhaps, reflective of the way that the visibility of mental health has risen despite inadequate resources and methods of addressing the problem of stigma and treatment. Therefore, it is important to consider how mental health is viewed from within working-class communities and how working-class identities navigate mental health concerns, especially those stemming from environmental conditions that are complicated by notions of shared immiseration. In addition to the lack of resources available, stigma also plays a critical role. A 1977 article published in Social Work in Health Care explored the way stigma differed in working-class communities as opposed to communities with greater access to resources and higher social capital. Combining data on attitudes toward mental health with representations of mental health in cultural production, the authors 272

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concluded that “working-class people are likely to be authoritarian, less accepting of and more exclusionary toward those diagnosed as ‘psychologically sick,’ and subsequently less amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention than their more affluent counterparts” (Rosenberg and Attinson 77). The authors note that, within working-class communities, there exists a notable distrust of professional services made manifest as alienation.This might be parsed in two ways: first, what the authors describe as the result of “the contemporary economic anemia and the paucity of operative liaisons between the available social/counseling services and the working class” (84); second, the result of the phenomenon of “them and us” delineated by Richard Hoggart in his 1957 The Uses of Literacy. As Hoggart notes, distrust of such professionals is structured less on empirical evaluations of treatment’s success and more on the fact that traditional working-class communities tend to self-define, in part, based on their distinction from the middle- and upper-class life and professions. As such, stigmas around mental health in working-class communities are amplified beyond general stigmas affiliated with mental health, largely because anomalies within such communities can appear threatening to collectivity, solidarity, and identity. This has changed in the last half-century, but marginalization still occurs through antiquated articulations of class as is demonstrated in a text like Milward’s Apples. A 2015 study by the University of Cambridge sought to revisit several of these concerns, finding similar patterns with a few notable distinctions. In addition, the study notes that more work needs to be done to fully understand the link between mental health literacy in working-class communities and the lingering impact of stigma that stems from the kind of “paucity of operational liaisons” outlined by Rosenberg and Attinson. Daniel Holman unpacks the use of the term “stigma,” arguing that its origins in social science and health can be understood “as a process where an individual is marked out as different in a less desirable way and reduced to this attribute,” which results in (quoting Erving Goffman) the shift from “a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (414). This, the author argues, is exacerbated by the internalization of the stigma that results in the individual amplification of their symptoms as a means by which to justify their alienation. Alienation within a categorical group is further intensified when the particular group is defined by shared characteristics, and the individual’s diagnosis marks them as different. This point is pertinent to Hoggart’s observation that working-class communities operate on shared principles and values (or at least did so through much of the twentieth century) and how a lack of mental health literacy (the direct result of a lack of resources) renders the diagnosed individual as deficient and different, largely because of the way that mental illness is parsed as a moral or behavioral deficit rather than a tangible, physiological illness. Holman’s critique supports this assertion, noting that “people may avoid appraising themselves as emotionally distressed if doing so would pose a threat to their selfidentity. This avoidance is likely to be acute among groups where being seen as resilient is central to identity” (415). He argues that the primary link between mental health literacy and stigma is education—which, by extension, is a reflection of resources and how such resources are classed and regionalized. His report concludes with the suggestion that issues of stigma be addressed not only by increasing health services in marginalized communities but also by increasing educational resources to help recategorize mental illness as a health problem akin to physical manifestations. For the purposes of this particular essay’s emphasis on contemporary analysis, though, what becomes clear is that formative research on the intersection of class and stigma conducted in the 1960s and 1970s remains largely commensurate with research conducted at this intersection today.This is true for at least two possible reasons: first, that mental health resources have failed to improve since that time; second, that attitudes about what constitutes working-class life have failed to fully adapt to a postindustrial society.

Immiseration Working-class writing and imaginative fiction are exemplary in their exploration of class dynamics, specifically how concepts such as “shared struggle” speak to the kinds of classed identities that 273

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privilege resilience in ways that cement insider/outsider dynamics linked to stigma and mental health. Apples is no exception, offering up a portrayal of twenty-first-century British working-class culture characterized by life on a sink estate and the way that such environments shape identity. But, to what degree are the conditions of immiseration internalized as part of an identity? And, to what degree is that identity upheld through the performance of immiseration? The language of working-class resilience—“getting by” and “making do”—also connotes a degree of complicity, not in terms of environmental conditions themselves, but in terms of the way working-class identities ossify around subjugated states. It should be noted that this is not the basis of an argument about upward mobility or working-class people “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”; that is a different argument entirely and one beyond the purview of this particular essay. What is worth consideration, though, is the nature of collectivity in working-class spaces that can no longer support traditional working-class identities, and how shared morals, values, and ethics associated with such spaces are also colored by a seeming embrace of subjugation. Famously, Marx described this curious state of affairs at the end of volume 1 of Capital, noting that increasing the productivity of the worker through methods of dehumanization renders them as little more than a willing cog in the machine complicit in their position: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into torment; they alienate [entfrendem] him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. (Marx 799) Working-class literature of the early and mid-twentieth century portrays these conditions well, even when texts like Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Storey’s This Sporting Life promote subversion through instances of individual entrepreneurship and implied agency. For example, a character like Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton opts to work overtime on his lathe in order to enjoy the fruits of his labor. However, this sense of agency is phantasmagoric, aligning more with the kind of simulated agency that Paul Willis discusses in Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get WorkingClass Jobs. Here, Seaton’s industriousness is rewarded with disposable income aimed squarely at conspicuous consumption and binge-drinking—practices that serve to uphold his oppressed position by distracting him from the drudgery of his monotonous routine. Similar practices served to assuage the living conditions of working-class communities, offsetting some of the more disheartening and dehumanizing aspects of the milieu while preserving the more admirable aspects of a working-class identity: the state of pride in one’s work, the values and traditions of a shared community. Still, when an identity is determined primarily by the conditions that produce the identity, what happens when the conditions change? What happens to a working-class identity when the work is no longer present? These are questions that a great deal of class-conscious literature seeks to address, especially from the late 1970s onward, and Milward’s narrative is no exception. Pete Alcock and Phil Lee help to map a number of material changes over time in working-class communities, tracing this process through shifting social housing policies from that of the Welfare State era to policies like the Right to Buy program introduced in 1980—ultimately a privatization scheme masquerading as social policy. While the scheme held the promise of what then-Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine famously noted as “transferring capital wealth 274

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from the state to the people” (HC Deb), it arrived packaged with a series of duplicitous complications. Prime housing stock was bought up fast by speculators, investors, and private landlords, and the remaining stock tended to be in less desirable areas that lacked the kind of employment opportunities required to fund the purchase. Many council estates were in a state of disrepair, largely due to the fact that the mass housing developed in the immediate postwar years was designed to be temporary, built using cost-cutting prefabrication techniques aimed at solving the postwar housing crisis with expediency. At the same time, deindustrialization emerged as a driving conservative policy, with factories and mines shuttered and work moved overseas for lower costs. The combination of policies that displaced working-class people into areas with no work, housing that exceeded its shelf-life, and the Tory-mandated devastation of local industry, all served as a way to strategically undo post-WWII social policies aimed at boosting the economy as well as the broken spirits of the nation. So, Marx’s discussion of working-class immiseration is rendered clear in light of conservative attempts to dismantle working-class community spirits, and the estate depicted in Apples offers insight into the way such experiences play out in society. Such shifts in the milieu and living conditions of working-class people correspond to the issues outlined prior in terms of the dearth of resources and issues of mental health literacy. From the 1980s onward, a time in which working-class communities were systematically undermined, attempts were made to uphold traditional values of working-class life under the auspices of resilience, grit, and shared struggle. As David Wray and Carol Stephenson have suggested, the drive to sustain traditional working-class values in an environment in which work is scarce intensifies the sensation of immiseration. Whereas working-class people historically self-identified through their relation to the means of production, in the absence of stable work, identification must be found elsewhere. The sustenance of working-class traditions and cultural values offers one possibility, but also the space of the community itself—especially in its derelict state—serves as a marker of one’s social position. As has been noted, such an environment is liable to produce issues of mental illness based on its lack of available resources, yet the paradox is that attempts to police and manage definitions of working-class values also lead to concerns of who belongs and who does not. As such, Marx’s original concept of immiseration is magnified under these conditions, and the state of immiseration is internalized as a defining characteristic of working-class subjugation. Whereas Marx spoke specifically about immiseration as a state produced by labor itself, it is possible to imagine how a working-class identity stripped of access to identity-defining labor turns to other signifiers of class as a form of self-preservation.Therefore, the state of immiseration felt by working-class people in postindustrial communities might be understood as an augmentation of Marx’s original concept as well as an issue that requires increased nuance to parse. In the absence of labor, the internalization of immiserated conditions serves as a means to affirm a destabilized working-class identity. Furthermore, destabilization increases the policing of what constitutes class boundaries, resulting in what Hoggart describes as a “them and us” binary.

Them and Us The question may also be raised as to what kinds of mental health issues tend to arise in immiserated conditions, how such conditions are exacerbated by alienation within the community, and how working-class identities and communities perpetuate such issues through anachronistic principles of resilience. As has already been suggested, copious studies emphasize how mental health issues are common in poverty-stricken environments, the reasons for which are unambiguous. A 2011 report by the Health Survey for England showed that 25% of people in socioeconomically deprived areas are at high risk of mental illness, with manual labor and unskilled workers suffering at the greatest risk of all (“No Health”). As noted, environmental concerns and social deprivation play a large role in this figure, and depression is widely considered the most dominant index. But what contributes most to depression, according to the report, is the state of precarity prominent 275

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in such areas, stemming either from “unemployment, redundancy or the threat of it, and financial difficulties” (“No Health”). In this regard, correlations can be observed between mental illness in immiserated communities and the rise of deindustrialization that renders work obsolete or at risk. One of the most effective treatments for mental health is stability, and so it is clear how precarity compounds such issues. Further, the increased rate of mental health concerns for lower socioeconomic strata is elevated by the increased frequency of stressful events in a working-class person’s life (Hudson 32). As such, environmental concerns surrounding precarity are clearly linked to issues like depression, anxiety, PTSD, but ties between community ideals of perseverance and resilience—specifically the way that immiseration can act as a defining characteristic of one’s identity in a moment when that identity is threatened—warrant scrutiny. Hoggart, in his examination of the impact of mass media on working-class life, offers a helpful approach to understanding the way working-class identities thrive on representations of solidarity that emerge through distinction. In the opening of his chapter on “Them and Us,” Hoggart frames this attempt at insular self-definition: I have emphasized the strength of home and neighborhood, and have suggested that this strength arises partly from a feeling that the world outside is strange and often unhelpful, that it has most of the counters stacked on its side, that to meet it on its own terms is difficult. (62) Although he argues that shifts in media consumption are to blame for the erosion of such assumptions, what remains in working-class communities is a distrust of authority figures and professionals— a point reiterated by Turner et al.’s argument about how middle- and upper-class health professionals are likely to misdiagnose or mistreat working-class patients. The upshot of tight-knit communities that pride themselves on self-reliance is that the need to seek outside help is liable to produce a skepticism of one’s own dedication and reliance on the community itself. Phrases like “making do” and “getting by” are hardly mere platitudes of survival but rather signifiers that problems such as mental health issues should be addressed internally with the primary solution being to “suck it up” and “fix your attitude.” Although this is somewhat of an anachronistic perspective by today’s standards, it was certainly dominant in the time of Hoggart’s writing.Texts like Apples, however, suggest that such an impulse persists, largely because self-reliance is such a critical part of a working-class identity, one that must be upheld through expressions of self-sufficiency which, in this particular instance, can be parsed as a refusal of assistance or as a way to draw attention to inequitable resources. In short, Milward helps clarify that working-class identities are still characterized by gestures and values that are not only antiquated but are potentially harmful in their pursuit of solidarity built on idealized nostalgia. In a postindustrial world where the notion of a working-class identity is threatened by a lack of employment, other aspects of classed identity rise to prominence, and yet the question of whether such characteristics are practical remains. To claim that working-class people are complicit in their subjugation would be ineffectual and untoward, yet questions of how classed identities are performed in relation to outmoded articulations of class—even at the expense of wellbeing—are worth engaging. Apples shows how the literary imagination can help address such questions without resorting to generalizations or by placing the blame on working-class people themselves.

Intersectional Stigma All of this is to say that it can be understood that deviations from traditional articulations of working-class culture might pose a threat to the notion of collectivity and, by extension, identity itself. This raises the question of what it means to be doubly stigmatized—to exist at the intersections of class, be it through an identity that deviates from traditional articulations of collective experience 276

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or through other social categories that mark the individual as an outsider. What such texts reveal is the challenges that traditional forms of working-class communities face in terms of understanding difference and diversity from within their ranks. Debates about class intersectionality versus collectivity have raised similar concerns, such as recent commentary by David Backer on “the uses and abuses of class separatism” in which the author argues that class separatism is not tantamount to class reductionism. However, as Sylvia Arthur notes in her essay “Britain’s Invisible Black Middle Class,” reducing manifold identities to a single-class structure erases other vital components of identity by privileging sameness. Arthur clarifies that the kind of discrimination experienced by working-class minorities is not limited to their socioeconomic status but their cultural identity as well. In other words, the marginalization of a Black working-class person will always differ from that of a white working-class individual; to suggest that the two are commensurate is to disregard racialized violence. While neurodiversity does not signify in the same manner as other categories of identity, literature can help us grapple with the way double stigma plays out. Consequently, intra-class splinters emerge along the lines of identity with historic instances of xenophobia still traceable in tandem with other forms of prejudice that might be understood, through Emile Durkheim, as a tangible fear of the erosion of class identity. For Durkheim, preservation instincts shape the notion of collective consciousness in that the beliefs and values of a particular group are to be maintained if the group is to survive shifts in culture and society.Values and beliefs pertaining to a specific group, then, operate as a stabilizing function and as a mechanism that sustains a group in perpetuity. Durkheim saw such endeavors as a positive factor pertaining to a group’s survival, citing a “mechanical solidarity” which responds to like-minded thought and actions that become automatic over time (31). In this sense, mental illness can be understood as a form of divergence and is therefore susceptible to the kind of intra-class skepticism furthered by anxieties of difference. If social categories that signify can all be understood as carrying the potential for increased stigma, it is clear that working-class culture cannot fail to recognize issues of neurodiversity as an analogous concern. While Backer’s concerns are legitimate and warrant attention, class must be considered as intersectional and fragmentary in that many working-class identities do indeed deviate from idealized, nostalgic images of the past. To extend this concern further, the process of maintaining a homogenous working-class identity through behavior and actions might be understood as a kind of performative act. This performance, though, may or may not reflect one’s aspirations or desires, causing internal conflict as well as prompting the individual to regard immiserated states as not just “one’s lot in life” but as something to embrace. In this sense, the internalization of immiserated states is paradoxical in that it claims to support a facsimile of working-class tradition (that of the alienated individual) yet alienates in a different manner in that the performed homogeneity allows little room for unique identities or eccentricities. In such circumstances, deviations that do not signify as innate are liable to be understood as a “choice” or as some kind of moral flaw. For example, Andrew McMillan’s essay on being gay and working-class sheds some light on these issues, noting how cultural shifts require a degree of acceptance that the traditional notion of working-class as hyper-masculinized cannot remain (“One of Us”). As such, McMillan helps to show how definitions of “us” must remain pliable to match shifts in culture. To be gay in a traditional working-class environment is likely to result in prejudice and abuse similar to what is found in non-working-class spaces; despite its connection to traditional values, working-class life is perhaps more inclusive than stereotypes might make it seem. Nonetheless, this does not account for the kind of data noted earlier in terms of the resources available for mental health awareness in working-class communities as well as the reluctance of working-class people to address mental health issues when they arise. As such, it is possible to understand how instances of mental illness that are stigmatized in the larger culture are further stigmatized in a community that constructs itself on resilience and the willingness to ­survive through sameness and shared ideals. Fiction, particularly fiction committed to exploring the dynamics and nuances of class, is especially helpful in terms of navigating these concerns. 277

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Novel as Intervention Apples drew criticism for its reliance on stereotypes, and the narrative does feel like a collage of delinquency often tied to poor, working-class youth in alienated spaces. Commensurate with other representations of working-class life from the 2000s on, the novel splices some of the post-WWII years’ gritty representation with the exaggerated and hyperbolic portrayals popularized by writers like Irvine Welsh and Zadie Smith. The result is perhaps too simply described as “sensational.” However, of interest for this particular analysis is the way that the novel speaks to instances of mental illness, especially the way that the text foregrounds such concerns to help reveal nuances about the way mental illness is managed in working-class communities. In this sense, Apples invites difficult conversations about working-class traditions as well as opening up an engagement with definitional concerns. The opening chapter’s subtitle (“She Is Sick”) and the first line of the novel introduce the notion of illness, but it becomes immediately clear that this is in reference to Eve’s mother who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer.Yet, what immediately follows “She is Sick” is Eve’s own name—not her mother’s, suggesting that Eve herself is also ill in some manner. Early sequences featuring Eve serve to emphasize the distinction between a tangible diagnosis (cancer), forms of “invisible” illness that register in different ways (her friend Claire using a claim of epilepsy to stay home from school [5]), and a brief mention of her friend, “Dyslexic Debbie” (5)—a character whose name emphasizes how forms of disability inform identity (and one who, when she speaks, requires the reader to read her narration in a mirror [90]). Early sequences with Adam emphasize his OCD, marking him as an individual characterized by his diagnosis and mental state: “I had to shut the door seven times or else my family dies” (6).The same opening paragraph also clarifies that Adam must “shut the curtains six or seven times or else he’d [his father] get struck by lightning” (6). These initial introductions situate the characters in relation to forms of illness and difference, signaling early on the novel’s willingness to engage with such issues. For Adam, much of the novel centers on navigating and negotiating both the estate and passé articulations of working-class life while attempting to hide his symptoms from his peers whereas, for Eve, the novel centers on how she seeks to numb her experience on the estate through drinking, drugs, and promiscuous sex. Eve’s behavior is permeated by moments of lucidity, usually associated with the recollection of her dying mother, but these moments are rare as she does all she can to escape consciousness. For Eve, the discovery of ecstasy at age thirteen offered her a solution to the problems of her world: “The boys were much sweeter, and depending on what night you did them school was much easier to bear. We knew something about being happy that our mams and dads and the other kids at school wouldn’t understand” (22). Given how quickly the narrative draws on such topics, it is clear that Milward is invested in thinking through the relationship between forms of illness and behavior in a contemporary sink estate. What is of particular importance is how these instances of behavior are understood within the realms of the environment where both characters live, marking the difference between accepted and unacceptable norms that constitute a contemporary working-class identity. Apples is a novel that juxtaposes humor and stabs at experimental writing (the narrative voice volleys around, occasionally taking the form of inanimate objects like streetlamps) alongside aggressive, visceral images of rape, child abuse, and infanticide. Therefore, the novel’s moral center is evasive, rendering its representational goals opaque. Adam’s depression is made known largely through his inability to connect with others, his claim that “I tried to surround myself with friends to get through the next twenty-four hours, but I didn’t have all that many friends” (48), and his father’s inability to accept him as exemplified by violence and abuse that Adam describes in a strangely nonchalant manner (49). For Eve, her reliance on drugs, alcohol, and sex stems from both her own and her mother’s lack of resources and treatment. When her mother coughs up blood for the first time, on the morning of an important exam that Eve is supposed to take, it is clear that her mother abides 278

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by the working-class dictum of “getting by,” simply wiping up the blood and going on with her day. Her example is passed onto Eve in the form of a lesson in how not to cope, and Eve’s own trauma and challenges are met with similarly ineffectual responses. Adam’s mode of survival is to disguise his symptoms and try to fit in as best he can whereas Eve’s survival comes from escapism. However, what the novel discloses is the way in which environment perpetuates such problems, and the way such problems cause ripple effects. For example, Adam tries to forgive his father for his physical abuse, noting that, My dad was weird, but he wasn’t all that bad … He was always going on about his hectic life working at British Steel and then coming home to a stupid tosser like me. He’d been working on the plant for about twenty years, and with all that pollution and dust in his system perhaps he’d gone clinically insane. (82) In several of these cases, characters internalize their struggle with mental health issues, attempt to manage their suffering, and normalize their responses despite the negative consequences that result. The disturbing nature of class representation in the novel, though, is multivalent—even if the overall tone is kept at the level of dry, dark humor. Eve’s responses to her mother’s progressive sickness culminate in an instance of sexual assault, even though assault and sexual abuse play a continued role throughout the text (fifteen-year-old Eve often sleeps with older men to boost her self-esteem). When Adam and Eve kiss at a dance, provoking jealousy in one of the estate’s most renowned bullies, the result is a scene of egregious and graphic violence which places Adam in the hospital for weeks to recover, his father (who commits similar acts of violence) admonishing him for “picking fights” (113). Eve’s response to the attack is rationalization—that although she likes Adam, he is “different” as the result of his mental state: “Kids like Adam always tended to walk around with a sad face, like they hated the world and wanted to murder everyone” (119). When Adam and Eve do meet again, her dismissal of the incident, combined with Adam’s own concerns about his reaction to it are telling: “‘You’re not still bothered about Gaz, are you?’ she went. I wondered if it was that obvious I was a mental patient” (131). Milward’s treatment of mental illness, be it through Adam’s behavioral quirks that alienate him from his community, or Eve’s burgeoning substance abuse, is ill-defined; the problems are introduced but are never fully explored or examined with any real resolution or position. Nonetheless, given that the novel tends to magnify working-class life and characteristics in a hyperbolic manner that reflects other class-centric texts of the time, it is possible to see how different shades of illness thrive in such environments and how treatment for such issues is both nonexistent within the represented community while simultaneously internalized as something to be suppressed in ways commensurate with working-class stereotypes. Adam’s attempts to mask his symptoms in an attempt to appear like his fellows, and Eve’s substance abuse mirrors a number of the novel’s other characters, rendering her behavior as “normal.” In this regard, Apples is an instructive text in how it stages mental illness in working-class environments, emphasizing the impact of the milieu on the way such conditions are understood. Apples is perhaps inelegant in terms of an in-depth exploration of mental health, states of immiseration, and the links that exist between the two. However, it is a text emblematic of working-class writing of its time in which visceral, graphic depictions of abuse are made synonymous with poverty-stricken environments. In texts such as this, the line between satire and exploitation is often hazy. Yet, what Milward’s text does well is to capture contemporary manifestations of mental illness that are either symptomatic of immiserated conditions or perpetuated by them; the text can be elevated from its somewhat sophomoric shock tactics and understood as a cipher of ­twenty-first-century working-class life. In this regard, the text succeeds in engaging difficult conversations about taboo topics associated with working-class life, specifically a critique of the way certain working-class values and traditions seem anachronistic in a contemporary working-class 279

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space. Neither the novel nor this essay suggests that working-class people are at fault by any stretch, but both invite consideration of the way that nostalgic idealizations of working-class life can prove retrogressive and actively cause harm. While attitudes to mental health and resources continue to shift as awareness grows, the novel clarifies how working-class identities under threat of extinction are still liable to rely on romanticized models of working-class values as a means by which to sustain identities. Doing so has the potential to perpetuate binaries of “them and us” that, in turn, perpetuate insularity and stigmatize treatment in the manner outlined by the scientific literature. Despite its flaws as a novel, Apples is a text that places such concerns in the forefront of the cultural imaginary, presenting mental illness as less of an anomaly in precarious environments and more as an inevitability of disenfranchisement. In this manner, the text builds on a lineage of British working-class writing in which troubling social concerns are showcased in order to generate discussion, the result of which carries the potential to enact necessary changes on the social plane as well as on the plane of identity itself.

Works Cited Alcock, Pete, and Phil Lee. “Struggles in the Welfare State.” Critical Social Policy, vol. 1, no. 2, 1981, pp. 72–93. Arthur, Sylvia. “My Jobs, My Lives.” Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, edited by Nathan Connolly, Dead Ink, 2018. Backer, David I. “Uses and Abuses of Class Separatism.” Verso Books Blog, 10 Jan. 2019, www​.v​​ersob​​ooks.​​com​ /b​​logs/​​4201-​​uses-​​and​-a​​buses​​-of​-c​​lass-​​separ​​atism​. Accessed 4 Apr. 2020. Barker, Pat. Union Street.Virago Modern Classics, 1982. Department of Health. No Health Without Mental Health: A Cross-Government Mental Health Outcomes Strategy for People of All Ages. 2011, pdfs.​​seman​​ticsc​​holar​​.org/​​c03c/​​b9611​​9d0b3​​7fd72​​b106b​​fb328​​4783b​​3b9a7​​a​.pdf​ ?​_ga=​​2​.704​​27288​​.9889​​66607​​.1580​​13698​​7​-​958​​77229​​3​.158​​01369​​87. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019. ———. The NHS Plan. A Plan for Investment. A Plan for Reform. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2000, webar​​ chive​​.nati​​onala​​rchiv​​es​.go​​v​.uk/​​20121​​10218​​4216/​​http:​/​/www​​.dh​.g​​ov​.uk​​/en​/P​​ublic​​ation​​sands​​tatis​​tics/​​ Publi​​catio​​ns​/Pu​​blica​​tions​​Poli​c​​yAndG​​uidan​​ce​/DH​​_4002​​960. Accessed 3 Nov. 2019. Dunn, Nell. Up the Junction.Virago, 1963. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. The Free Press, 1984. HC Deb 15 January 1980 Vol 976 Cc1443-575. api​.p​​arlia​​ment.​​uk​/hi​​stori​​c​-han​​sard/​​commo​​ns​/19​​80​/ja​​n​/15​/​​ housi​​ng​-bi​​ll. Accessed 2 Jan. 2020. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. Penguin Classics, 2009. Holman, Daniel. “Exploring the Relationship Between Social Class, Mental Illness Stigma and Mental Health Literacy Using British National Survey Data.” Health, vol. 19, no. 4, 2015, pp. 413–429. Hudson, Christopher G. “The Social Class and Mental Illness Correlation: Implications of the Research for Policy and Practice.” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988, pp. 27–54. Levy, Leo. “Social Class and Mental Disorder.” Psychopathology, vol. 7, no. 4–5, 1974, pp. 271–286. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes,Vintage, 1992. McMillan, Andrew. “One of Us: Some Thoughts on Sexuality and the Working Class.” Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class, edited by Nathan Connolly, Dead Ink, 2018. Milward, Richard. “An Interview with Richard Milward.” Bookslut, May 2014, www​.b​​ooksl​​ut​.co​​m​/fea​​tures​​ /2014​​_05​_0​​20639​​.php. Accessed 6 Nov 2019. ———. Apples: A Novel. Canongate, 2008. ———. Kimberley’s Capital Punishment. Faber & Faber, 2012. Rosenberg, G., and L. Attinson. “Attitudes Toward Mental Illness in the Working Class.” Social Work in Health Care, vol. 3, no. 1, 1977, pp. 77–86. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Knopf, 1958. Storey, David. This Sporting Life. Longmans, 1960. Turner, John, et al. “The History of Mental Health Services in Modern England: Practitioner Memories and the Direction of Future Research.” Medical History, vol. 59, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 599–624. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. Norton, 1996. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Columbia UP, 1981. Wray, David, and Carol Stephenson. “‘Standing the Gaff ’: Immiseration and Its Consequences in the De-Industrialized Mining Communities of Cape Breton Island.” Capital & Class, vol. 36, no. 2, 2012, pp. 323–338.

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21 PENNY FICTION AND CHARTISM A Literature’s Exclusion from the Canon Rebecca Nesvet

Class prejudice shapes some of the most popular works in the British literary canon. A striking example is J. R. R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). In this novel,Tolkien pointedly excludes workingclass British people from civilization and even from the category of the human, most evidently in Bilbo Baggins’s encounter with three man-eating trolls. Unusually for Tolkien characters, they have quotidian, modern English names: Tom, William, and Bert, but they are “obviously trolls,” Tolkien explains. A tell-tale sign of their monstrosity is their vocabulary, which includes such terms as “blimey” and “tomorrer,” and is, Tolkien insists, “not drawing-room fashion at all” (34– 35). In fact, Catharine R. Stimpson argues, it is “filthy, rough, working-class Cockney” (Stimpson 13). Some critics argue that Tolkien intended the trolls to be read as “Cockneys,” or workingclass Londoners, but did not expect this to convince readers that actual working-class Londoners behave like trolls. “[O]nly the critics are silly enough to suggest that he means that all those who talk in this way are likely to act like Bill Sykes,” Richard L. Purtill (1974) claims (l45), but more recent criticism finds the stereotyping “problematic.” For instance, Phil Hartley (2014) observes that the trolls’ “cockney behavior” suggests “that Tolkien was more focused on spoofing the stereotypical ‘lower-class Londoners’ of his day than making metaphysical claims about evil” (Hartley 117). Tolkien considered working-class metropolitan people innately potentially violent savages. This opinion informs not only his popular writing but his pedagogy, as, in his position as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford University, he dissuaded Rhodes scholar Stuart Hall from examining William Langland’s Piers Plowman through the lens of “contemporary” (Hall’s word) literary criticism, that is, with attention to the original cultural contexts of Langland’s “labourer hero” (Lavezzo). Literary gatekeepers reveal their attitude to working-class people and experiences in what literature they choose to enshrine and defend, as is apparent in Tolkien’s refusal to allow cultural materialist critique of the medieval and “Anglo-Saxon” classics that he loved, taught, and translated. However, gatekeepers also divulge their class attitudes via the literature that they choose to ignore or forget. Today’s canon noticeably excludes Victorian penny fiction: the “penny bloods” and “dreadfuls” that targeted working-class readers and boasted circulation numbers as impressive as Tolkien’s. Flourishing circa 1840–1870 and often published serially in penny-a-number periodicals or “parts” (standalone installments), penny fiction captivated a large audience, but is absent from virtually all major teaching anthologies of British or Victorian literature. Nor is there any penny fiction in the current Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 2012, nor the 2016 Longman Anthology. The critical resurgence of penny fiction, begun in the 1960s in the context of British Marxist literary history, is only now taking off. 281

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Why has the literary establishment largely ignored penny fiction? As this essay will show, this omission seems not unconnected with Victorian working-class political self-determination. A great deal of penny fiction aims to advance Chartism, the mid-Victorian organized campaign for universal male suffrage and other reforms necessary to facilitate working-class participation in political life as not just subjects, but citizens: as people who can be heard in public, and may help to determine the organization of their kingdom and its empire. In 1838, in response to the “Great Reform” Act of 1832, which expanded suffrage but still excluded the vast majority of working-class men (and all women) from the electorate on economic grounds, and the New Poor Law of 1834, rightly made notorious to modern readers by Dickens, a group of twelve activists—both MPs and working-class organizers—composed the “People’s Charter.” William Lovett, a London cabinetmaker, born in Cornwall, is credited with writing most of it. They aimed for the Charter to inform sweeping legal reforms, specifically on six points: near-universal male suffrage, secret ballot, no property qualifications for MPs, payment of MPs to allow men not independently wealthy to stand for public office, equally populated constituencies, and, to limit corruption, annual Parliamentary elections. These demands became known as the “Six Points of the Charter.” In the judgment of critic Ian Haywood, this document unprecedentedly “exposed the growing pains of a rapidly industrializing, rationalizing society, highlighted the contradictions of laissez-faire reformers” such as the legislative victors of 1832 and 1834 (Haywood, Literature of Struggle 1). Chartism was an organized movement, albeit with internal conflicts, primarily between “moral force Chartists” like Lovett, who promoted nonviolent protest alone, and the “physical force Chartists” who thought that show of force might prove necessary. The Chartists drafted five petitions and presented three major ones to Parliament in 1839, 1842, and 1848. These three petitions were endorsed by literally millions of signatures, but Parliament rejected them. While the Chartists printed official newspapers and other periodicals, a great deal of penny fiction sustained not only promotion of Chartist ideas but also critique of the movement’s divisions, methods, and impact. In retrospect, penny fiction’s exclusion from the canon highlights the classism of the English literary enterprise and demands that we ask what other great omissions this ideology has occasioned, and who might benefit from them.

Growing the Working-Class Reading Nation: c. 1790–1840 Penny fiction was one of the more widely read products of a literary revolution that generated for the first time in British history a working-class intellectual community aware of itself as such. This was a vital goal, and it had a long history. The desire for intellectual freedom, writes Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), “may have been strongest in people who have spent their lives following orders and wanted to change that,” which made this desire perhaps “the most crucial arena of the class struggle” in the long dureé, dating “all the way back to the Lollards” of the fourteenth century (Rose 13). Early in the nineteenth century, Martha Vicinus explains in her 1974 classic The Industrial Muse, working-class Britons created a “distinctive literature” that could “reaffirm the merits of their class in the face of the cultural domination of the upper classes” (Vicinus 2–3). As Jon Klancher reveals, during the 1790s—the decade of the French Revolution—the periodical realm created “four strategically crucial audiences: a newly self-conscious middle-class public, a nascent mass audience, a polemical radical readership, and the special institutional audience—what Coleridge called the clerisy” (Klancher 4). Periodicals defined each of these audiences. From this discourse emerged a new conception of the working classes as actual and potential readers (Klancher 4). When 1790s radical literature was revived during the Chartist era via extract, quotation, and citation, it reaffirmed this ideology. For instance, William Godwin’s constantly reprinted, extracted, and cited novel Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams (1794), “the revolutionary power of democratic literacy and enlightenment” aims “to correct the Gothic abuses and injustices of the past” (Brantlinger 48). 282

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What literature had the content necessary to achieve these aims? By the 1830s, working-class people had access to some recreational reading, in the form of broadsides festooned with verses and accompanying images (Vicinus 8–9), the songbooks to which this genre gave way (Vicinus 19), lurid Gothic fiction chapbooks (Hoeveler 69), and the unappealingly wholesome, dry pamphlet literature churned out by middle-class-managed “improvement” organizations such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Vicinus 28). Meanwhile, industrial poetry marshaled Romanticism’s aesthetic ideals in order to protest working conditions. As Casie LeGette’s recent monograph shows, Chartist newspapers published poetry consciously informed by the radical, exhortatory verse of Byron, Shelley, and sometime Jacobin, later Poet Laureate Robert Southey. Radical journals including Chartists “blithely ignored” Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth’s conservatism, “reprinting only their more radical early work and often treating them as lifelong radical poets,” to give radicalism the imprimatur of establishment-recognized genius (LeGette 2). By excerpting, quoting, and reassembling the oeuvres of these renegades from radicalism and more consistently provocative Romantics such as Godwin and Paine, radical editors of the early Victorian era worked to construct a new narrative, a radicalized history of the nineteenth century in which the energy of the 1790s flowed through the decades that followed, rather than being bottled up by the British government’s stifling response to the French Revolution. (LeGette 3) By putting old wine in new bottles, Victorian radicals helped to forge a politically conscious working-class reading nation. Nor did Chartist poetry merely recycle and reinvent. Critic Mike Sanders has counted at least 390 individual Chartist poets among the contributors to the poetry section of the main Chartist newspaper The Northern Star, which due to “the sheer volume of poetry produced by rank and file Chartists” migrated from a marginal to highlighted position in the paper’s layout (Sanders 70). The early Victorian working-class intellectual community’s emergence frightened those who already held power, especially, if we might invoke Coleridge, the predominantly middle-class clerisy. The young Dickens, agreeing that poetry could change individual hearts and minds and the socio-economic status quo, proclaims Oliver Twist enlightened by his middle-class rescuer Mr. Brownlow’s serious books, but also at risk of moral danger from the crime romances peddled to the boy criminals as how-to literature by the villain Fagin. These unnamed texts are likely “Newgate novels,” or illustrated dramatizations of crime history and folklore, often glamorizing criminals, which middle-class commentators feared and condemned (Brantlinger 70–71). With the advent of mass literacy, reading had become a controversial activity.

Penny Fiction and Chartism: 1839–1848 Aspects of these early Victorian popular genres, from the broadsides and chapbooks to Chartist poetry and the Newgate novel, inform mid-Victorian “penny” fiction: serials sold in penny newspapers and magazines or “penny part” installments, that targeted working-class readers. Flourishing circa 1836–1860, penny fiction achieved enormous circulation. To wit, the oldest edition of the early penny bestseller Ela the Outcast (1839) in the collection of the British Library, the most extensive publicly accessible collection of penny fiction in the world, is the eighteenth. In texts like Ela, Louis James (1963) recognized, working-class readers saw themselves and their concerns reflected in the mirror of leisure reading to an unprecedented degree, both as part of demonstrably Chartist agendas and as rhetoric sympathetic to at least parts of the Chartist platform. This fact is evident from the plot summaries of several of the earliest penny bestsellers. In Ela, published by the penny press magnate, innovator, and sometime Chartist Edward Lloyd (1815–1890) and adapted by Lloyd’s regular employee Thomas Peckett Prest (1810–1859) from Hannah Maria 283

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Jones’s The Gipsey Girl, or, the Heir of Hazel Dell (1824), the title character is a sympathetically depicted ­working-class woman, the eponymous Ela. She has become indigent after being cast off by her deceptive aristocratic lover. Her daughter’s pursuit of family secrets, self-knowledge, and justice is the book’s suspense plot. Another early Lloyd bestseller, by the working-class, Clerkenwell-raised author James Malcolm Rymer, is also conspicuously committed to the struggles of Britain’s working classes. Ada, the Betrayed (1842) features a stereotypical Gothic villain, Lord Learmont, who has murdered his elder brother and by this Cain-like act obtained his title. A Northern oligarch, he presumably profits from industrial labor. Two henchmen, former clerk Joseph Grey and local blacksmith Andrew Britton, are blackmailing him over the murder. Grey had kidnapped and hidden Learmont’s brother’s child and made Learmont believe this child was a boy. In fact, it is a girl, Ada, whom Gray has raised as a boy, “Harry.” Like Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Harry/Ada is, as Louis James has observed, a personification of “natural goodness in a corrupt city-world” (James, “I am Ada!” 67). Unlike Dickens’s boy-waif, Ada models dawning political self-consciousness.When she escapes from Grey’s clutches, “Ada emerges with a new identity,” James argues, “intelligent and practical,” she ultimately proves “self-confident … and eager to help fellow victims of ‘harshness and misfortune’” (67). In short, Ada achieves “freedom … through … self-knowledge” (James, “I am Ada!” 68). As for Ada’s minor villains, Grey and Britton fail spectacularly to realize their own dreams of fortune and status because they aspire to no higher aims and because they distrust each other. Such emulation of the upper classes and lack of solidarity, Rymer suggests, are the working classes’ most dangerous temptations. Britton’s Herculean physical strength and Grey’s cleverness would clearly be put to much better use were they to support each other, just as Ada and her working-class beloved Albert do. Moreover, Albert’s name, suggestive of Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Victoria’s consort, suggests that Britain itself could be positively transformed by the monarchy and aristocracy reinventing themselves to genuinely model virtue and nation-spanning empathy. A Victoria-and-Albert-like pageant couple possessing working-class life experience could rule the country kindly and sensibly, the novel suggests. The only way to introduce people of this demographic into government, it seems, is to expand the electorate, allowing working-class people the right to vote—the specific right demanded by Chartism. Rymer wrote this sort of working-class consciousness-raising into another ambitious work of penny fiction, Jane Shore, which commenced in his short-lived Queen’s Magazine, published at a high point of Chartist agitation during the spring and summer of 1842, when the Chartists presented to Parliament their second major petition in favor of the Charter, and Parliament rejected it. This set off a wave of industrial strikes across the country, as the Charter’s working-class signatories demanded that their voices be heard in the only manner that seemed to remain to them. Four years later, Rymer returned to Jane Shore, completing it as a penny-parts serial for Edward Lloyd. In Jane Shore, Rymer’s specification of Cheapside as the heroine’s home establishes the novel’s conflict as a struggle between working-class Cockneys and the allied forces of the monarchy, aristocracy, and emergent financial class. Well before the 1840s, Cheapside was understood as the capital of the Cockney world. While mid-Victorians understood “Cockney” as a descriptor of any inhabitant of London, the traditional test of Cockneyism was whether one was born within earshot of the “Bow-bells,” or the carillon of Cheapside’s church of St. Mary-le-beau. As this church was first recorded as having bells in 1469, Rymer’s late-fifteenth-century characters might have been of the first generation of nominal Cockneys. Well within hearing of these bells, fifteen-year-old heroine Jane Wainstead struggles with the banking industry’s encroachment. When her workingclass lover Walter Fane is kidnapped by an aristocratic villain, the historical, doomed Lord Hastings, Jane marries the affluent goldsmith Master Matthew Shore of Lombard Street. Moonlighting as a moneylender, Shore personifies the emergence of a moneyed class that funds and so controls the monarchy. His street was named for the medieval financial center of Lombardy: merchants from Lombardy settled there.Today, the street terminates at the Bank of England, built at the juncture of 284

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Lombard and Threadneedle Streets in 1734. As the serial progresses, Shore defrauds Jane to compel her to stay with him. He tells her that he possesses a “bond” (The Merchant of Venice here comes to mind) that, if called up for fulfillment, would financially ruin her father. “All he has in the world is mine,” Shore tells Jane (75). Gothic villain and financial industry are indistinguishable from each other, shifting the signification of the former from oligarchic to plutocratic evil. Moreover, in the 1846 complete version of Jane Shore, Jane becomes a tireless advocate for aggrieved Londoners, but later is condemned by Hastings and Richard III to a “walk of shame,” exile from court, and homelessness. Destitute, she dies in the street. Her bones become sacred relics testifying to class-based tyranny, just as, in Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris, 1829), La Esmeralda’s skeleton, enduring deep inside the Cathedral, testifies to the religious hypocrisy by which she was martyred. Rymer laces similar socio-political agendas through his Varney, the Vampyre (serialized in 1845– 1847), which popularized the notion of the vampire. In Troy Boone’s reading, Varney is a conspicuously Chartist text, which offers working-class child readers a parable about the danger of mob violence and the transformative potential of patient, peaceful protest (Boone 54–55). According to Hackenburg, Varney repurposes key tropes from British Romantic poetry, including the Romantic genius, to create a story that questions the idea of Quixotic reading, or dangerously uncritical populist reading of escapist literature, as exhibited in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and a raft of British Romantic “quixotic” imitations, beginning perhaps with Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). In Varney, Rymer “express[es] caution against the excesses embedded in violent Byronic masculinity and creative Romantic genius” (Hackenberg 165). A more pointed socio-political critique pervades Rymer’s The Lady in Black, or, the Widow and the Wife (1847). This title’s heroine, Marian Whitehead, is the suffering secret fiancée of a city clerk whose employer, the Scrooge-like merchant trader Godfrey, frames him for financial forgery. Like Jane Wainstead/ Shore’s ordeal, Marian Whitehead’s demonstrates that the legal system maintained by Britain’s plutocratic electorate oppresses the productive classes. The Lady in Black also seems designed to exhort its working-class target audience to political consciousness and perhaps action. At its resolution, nearly six hundred pages into the penny-parts edition, an elderly, homeless, and “mad” Marian has been run down in the street by an oligarch’s carriage. She is brought indoors and tended back to lucidity, if not to health, by the affable Cockney cheesemonger Miles Atherton. A dying Marian tells Atherton that she sends her fiancé’s wealthy murderer not the “curses” he expects from her, but her “forgiveness” (Rymer, Lady 553–554); a move consistent with moral force Chartism. She then gives Atherton a precious portfolio of documents that reveal the fortyyear-old history of her downfall.With reference to this portfolio, Marian carefully explains to Atherton her economic dispossession and Ormond’s judicial murder and authorizes him to publish the documents in fifteen years’ time: that is, in 1847, the year of the publication of The Lady in Black (Rymer, Lady 9; see also 18, 30). Marian’s selection of Atherton as her executor and publisher of her archive renders her story working-class intellectual property and a tool of socio-political critique that working-class readers beginning with Atherton may seize to alter their nation’s laws and their everyday circumstances. A more obviously Chartist author and editor of penny fiction than Rymer was George W. M. Reynolds, Lloyd’s longtime competitor, who in the 1850s hired Rymer away from Lloyd’s thenfloundering operation. Reynolds involved himself in Chartist politics to an extent unmatched by Rymer or Lloyd. As a Chartist leader, he attended decisive delegations, rallied crowds at mass demonstrations that proved key moments in British history, and in 1850 stood for election to the National Charter Executive. His radical newspaper Reynolds’s Political Instructor, later published under the less incendiary title Reynolds’s Weekly News, “remained one of the most important radical and working-class papers until its dissolution in 1967” (Haywood 121). Reynolds stuffed most of his penny periodicals with serial fiction, much of which contains editorial digressions on the ills of the socio-political status quo. These fictions included Reynolds’s greatest success as a novelist, the 285

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sensational, lurid The Mysteries of London (1844) and its sequel The Mysteries of the Court of London, which appeared serially throughout 1848–1856.The earliest installments of The Mysteries of London sold forty thousand copies per week (Haywood 200). In The Mysteries of London, hero Richard Markham takes readers on a picaresque tour of contemporary poverty, class inequity, corruption, and tyrannical government. For instance, in the first installments, Markham finds himself imprisoned for uttering (attempting to circulate) a forged banknote—a capital crime prior to 1837 and after that not uncommonly punished with life sentences to prison or transportation. Markham had no idea that the note given to him was in fact a forgery; indeed, many victims of forgery prosecution did not. As Stephen Basdeo has shown, this serial’s sensational investigation of crime decouples criminality from poverty by suggesting not only that there is a separate criminal underworld in London, but that there is also an upper-class criminal echelon that pervades metropolitan society, intermingling with and enabling the criminal underworld. In the end, therefore, Reynolds’s exposé of the underworld is an exposé of the elite. Like Rymer’s The Lady in Black, Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London enlists the specter of erroneous suspicion of financial forgery to indict the inextricably enmeshed fiduciary and political systems that, back during the era of the Napoleonic Wars, got Britain, or at least its middle and upper classes, hooked on paper currency and credit economics in the first place. Another particularly memorable feature of The Mysteries of London is the “Resurrection-Man,” or grave-robber who sells exhumed corpses to the medical industry, sub rosa, for vivisection. Reynolds saw this crime, which almost exclusively affected pauperized decedents, as a literal dehumanization and appropriation by the propertied, professional elite of the very bodies of the poor. As Sally Powell has shown, grave-robbing and vivisection sufficed as metaphors for other, far more common forms of class-based dehumanization and exploitation. Modeled upon Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris (1842–1843), Reynolds’s Mysteries of London introduced to Britain what critic Rohan McWilliam calls “the Chartist Gothic”: a radical reinvention of traditional British Gothic storytelling that pictures a dystopia divided into permanently opposed working class and aristocracy—with nothing in the middle—and dominated by the French-derived image of the dungeon or other prison as the medium through which “the rich and the poor are linked through a tendency towards crime, corruption, and debauchery” (McWilliam, “Sweeney Todd” 22). While Haywood claims that “the extent to which Reynolds radicalized the experience of reading popular periodical fiction has been largely overlooked” (124), his activity seems to have reinforced and built upon a radicalism already inherent in British popular literature ranging from the broadsides Vicinus surveyed to cheap piracies of Shelley and Southey’s most bracing works to Prest and Rymer’s output for Lloyd.

Sustaining the Faithful: 1848–1866 After Parliament rejected the Chartist Petition of 1848, Reynolds and Rymer’s penny fiction only becomes more vehement. Novelists who contributed to the most prominent, explicitly selfdeclared Chartist periodicals, such as Leeds-based Chartist M.P. Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star (1837–1852), vigorously published topical fiction because Chartism “had beg[u]n to falter politically,” and so “needed an alternative form of fiction to encourage potential members and to sustain the faithful” (Vicinus 114). While formal Chartist novelists such as Martin Wheeler, “wanted a fiction that working men would recognize as an intellectual achievement by one of their own class,” a fiction that would “focus … the anger of the reader against those in power” by “increas[ing] social tension” and refusing, quite unlike Dickens, “to provide an explanation for injustice” (Vicinus 114), “penny bloods” were also pursuing these aims to an unprecedented degree and for the same strategic reason. An enduring example is The String of Pearls, Rymer’s tale of Sweeney Todd first published in Lloyd’s People’s Periodical in 1846–1847 and updated in 1850. Set in 1785 and focusing on the fatal travels of the eponymous string of pearls, taken from Hastings-era India by the hapless fortune-hunter Mark Ingestrie, beloved of the serial’s heroine Johanna Oakley, The String of Pearls 286

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implicates various actual Victorian metropolitan constituencies in the orgy of cannibalism that Sweeney Todd and his hireling Mrs. Lovett facilitate.The consumers of the pies are primarily members of the legal profession, drawn from the Inns of Court streets away from the Bell Yard pie shop. Rymer depicts these consumers as ravenous and bestial, as much middle-class Victorian literature depicts the working-class poor. In other words, in The String of Pearls, if there are cannibal trolllike monsters in London, they are members of the establishment, yet specifically not aristocrats. Implicating the middle classes in unchecked venality and unknowing destructiveness, The String of Pearls presents a world more complicated than the Reynolds-style Chartist Gothic does, but also one that explains why the limitation of suffrage to propertied men is not enough. Moreover, the characters who do see through Todd and Lovett’s plot are workers, from Johanna (a spectaclegrinder’s daughter who lives in decidedly plebeian Fore Street) and her friend Arabella, a milliner, to the very first character to suspect Todd of murder: the ship’s dog Hector, a Newfoundland who proves consistently industrious in his pursuit of Todd and decidedly more humane and rational than most of the human characters. Finally, The String of Pearls advances Chartism by critiquing its methodological and ethical missteps, subtly in 1846 and more pointedly in 1850. Notably, Todd’s accomplice Mrs. Lovett shares her name with a prominent Chartist, William Lovett, the main author of the Charter. He led the London Chartists and promoted moral force Chartism, which was attacked and superseded by the physical force Chartism promoted by Feargus O’Connor, MP for Leeds and proprietor of the Chartist paper The Northern Star. The updated 1850 String of Pearls declares the apparently ethnic Irish Todd (“Sweeney”) is “a native of the North of England” (Rymer, String of Pearls 548), O’Connor’s adopted region. Whereas in the 1846–1847 version of The String of Pearls, Todd seems motivated by avarice, in 1850 he claims to be its scourge, which arguably associates him with O’Connor’s struggle against property-class monopolization of political power. While no version of The String of Pearls is primarily a political allegory, the 1850 update seems to suggest to readers dejected by Chartism’s apparent failure that its weakness was not its political goal, but the means by which it pursued it: a fragile alliance between the outwardly nonviolent Lovett and the violent rhetoric of O’Connor, who dominated the movement; an alliance characterized by internal conflict. According to McWilliam, after 1848, the former Chartist Lloyd’s publications turned pointedly against radicalism to support liberalism, a vision of reform capable of embracing the middle classes by promoting trade.Via Lloyd’s post-1850 fictionless newspapers, he manufactured a “liberal consensus” in the mass sphere (McWilliam, “Sweeney Todd” 2019, 213). The String of Pearls of 1850 certainly bears out his commitment to this endeavor. Also in 1850, Lloyd published a Rymer-authored penny-part romance that far more obviously promotes a liberal political vision to working-class readers. Rymer’s 878-page behemoth Mazeppa, or, the Wild Horse of the Ukraine spins off Byron’s poem Mazeppa (1819) but its protagonist is a working-class Londoner, Mr. Lumpus, who aspires to join the propertied classes by excelling in invention and international trade. Mazeppa does not mock this aspiration. Instead, Rymer depicts Lumpus’s liberal innovativeness as sufficient preparation for his resourceful navigation of the dangers of a Byronic fantasy “East.” Consistently throughout Mazeppa, Lumpus’s exploits rival those of Byron’s titular Ukrainian prince or any traditional adventure hero. Nearly five hundred pages into Mazeppa, Rymer reveals a strikingly direct critique of Victorian Britain’s socio-political status quo, insisting that the problem with Britain is the monopolization of political power and economic opportunity by an impenetrable socio-economic elite. Impressed by Lumpus’s bravery and creativity, his Eastern European allies demand him for their Prime Minister. In response, Lumpus reveals deep dejection consistent with the catastrophe of 1848. “I have not the capital” to govern (492), he explains, by which he means both financial and social capital. [N]ot altogether money, although that is essential; but in England, you must know, no man can be anything or hope to be anything in the population without capital. That is to say, he must have birth and its consequent influence, and its consequent opportunities 287

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… and it is about as impossible for any one not born in the classes from which members of parliament, parsons, and lawyers are made, to become either, as it would be for me to walk away with the castle of Ureka in my waistcoat pocket. (492–493) Rymer identifies this state as the absence of liberalism.When Prince Mazeppa’s friends call England “the most liberal country upon the face of the earth,” he swears “Tush! It's all humbug” (493). As McWilliam argues, Reynolds did not share this reaction to the events of 1848. Instead, he continued to advance radical political ideas via the Chartist Gothic and to expand his political vision to imagine working-class empathy and collaboration across international boundaries. Antony Taylor shows that Reynolds consistently promoted not just Chartist ideals but republicanism, the idea that the monarchy should be abolished or reduced to a nominal role in political life, facilitating representative government by and for the people. Ellen Rosenman has demonstrated that Reynolds’s later works of penny fiction, such as three of his 1850s Crimean War-themed penny romances, turn from frustrated Chartism to embrace an internationalist radical political vision, which exhorts British readers to see their struggles as akin to those of laboring populations outside Britain, for instance in Czarist Russia. I would argue that the same agenda permeates some texts published in periodicals that Reynolds edited but written by others, such as Rymer’s extremely topical penny blood The Sepoys, or Highland Jessie: A Tale of the Present Indian Revolt, serialized in Reynolds’s Miscellany in 1858, which depicts the Indian Revolt of 1857–1859, which was then in progress, as the brutal oppression by British East India Company functionaries of an oppressed indigenous population, who are led to violent response by their subcontinent’s aristocratic libertines. The moral hero of the piece is an Indian prince who initially joins the revolt, but later is repulsed by its violence against English civilians. While deeply problematic as an interpretation of the actual Indian revolt, The Sepoys asserts the same internationalization of the Chartist message as its editor’s Crimean romances. Penny fiction was altered but not neutralized.

The “Pernicious Pen’orth”: 1858–1951 Later in the nineteenth century, middle-class critics attacked “penny dreadfuls,” declaring them both immoral and unmemorable. In 1858, two essays condemning “penny dreadfuls” appeared: Wilkie Collins’s “The Unknown Public,” which attempts to sleuth out the juvenile delinquents whom he supposes are both the main audience and main social product of penny fiction, and fellow novelist Margaret Oliphant’s “The Byways of Literature,” which literally, in topographical terms, marginalizes penny fiction. In a reactionary inversion of the imagery of Victor Hugo’s by then famous paean to the liberatory, democratic potential of the printing press “Ceci Tuera Cela” (NotreDame de Paris, 1831), Oliphant contrasts penny fiction, which she encounters as fragments scattered in the street, thus, literal rubbish, with the solid, state-sanctioned and state-sanctioning, morally purifying, and immortal Canterbury Cathedral. According to the critic Paul Fyfe, Oliphant’s topological and architectural imagery reinforces her thesis that, in Fyfe’s words, “the social and material conditions of working-class lives” fatalistically “structure their receptiveness as readers” so that they cannot engage in “rational recreation” (Fyfe 147). In Oliphant’s view, this is as solid and immobile a fact as Canterbury Cathedral’s façade of eminent, unforgiving stone (147). In the sensationalist 1869 exposé The Seven Curses of London, the journalist James Greenwood further discredited penny fiction by judging the “pernicious pen’orth” literally a diabolical arcana. The authors and publishers of penny literature lurk in the shadows, Greenwood claims, requiring exposure by canny middle-class sleuths such as himself. Greenwood relates the lot of them to Dickens’s criminal pedagogue Fagin, like whom they “make it their profit and business” to corrupt urban working-class youth with “what may be truthfully described as ‘gallows literature’” (99). Greenwood’s stoking of moral panic foreshadows the midcentury American persecution of comic books championed 288

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by the pediatric psychiatrist Frederic Wertham (Hadju 234). Furthermore, Greenwood’s incorrect assumption that early penny fiction targeted primarily boys and was therefore children’s literature helped to reduce its cultural value. Despite Greenwood, Oliphant, and Collins’s most ardent efforts, cultural memory of the Chartist-era penny bestsellers persisted, though they were constantly remembered only to be savaged. A backhanded compliment to penny bloods, and Rymer specifically, appeared in the Athenaeum in 1880. Unimpressed by H. Buxton Forman’s edition of Shelley’s early Gothic novellas Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, the anonymous critic claims to have learned from it “that the author of the ‘penny dreadful’ may be an epic poet in the bud; and, moreover, that the long-expected poem of the age is to be looked for, not from a writer” such as Matthew Arnold or Cardinal John Newman, “but from a master of that more vigorous and picturesque style adopted by the author of ‘Ada the Betrayed’ and ‘Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood’” (297). Had Rymer enjoyed Shelley’s wealth and privilege, the Athenaeum suggests, he might have been able eventually to write a verse epic, an unprofitable but respected genre. In 1892, George Augustus Sala, who had been dubbed the “Emperor of Journalism,” asserted that penny bloods will not be immortalized because they are not literature. In the question-andanswer column of his periodical Sala’s Journal, Sala desperately and with much choler guessed that Prest had written The String of Pearls, but declared that the accurate attribution of this vastly influential, enduring text did not matter, because “he does not expect [Prest’s] name to appear in Leslie Stephens’s “Dictionary of Biography”” (255). This quip about Stephens and Sidney Lee’s Dictionary of National Biography communicates that Sala does not consider the author of a major penny blood of sufficient cultural value to justify remembrance by his generation or in the future. To some extent, Sala correctly predicted the bloods’ descent into oblivion. In the 1920s, penny fiction’s earliest bibliographer, occultist Arthur E.Waite (1857–1942), finds his literature’s obscurity its most tantalizing quality. “I am dealing with abstruse mysteries,” Waite declares. With the same enthusiasm he shows in his work on Paracelsus, he contends that: a multifarious literature … has been circulating in England … by its thousands and myriads, its constituents dissolving almost at their birth and leaving so few traces behind that it is comparable to a realm of hiddenness, a world almost unknown. (Waite 1) To this scholar, the penny bloods are as inscrutable and intriguing as alchemy. Perhaps that contributed to their appeal to another bibliographer, Montague Summers, who in the 1940s pipped Waite’s bibliography with his own, and also believed Europe was infested with vampires and werewolves. In the 1950s, the next serious scholar of this literature, E. Margaret Dalziel, tried to vindicate it by arguing that it is not, as commonly supposed, as dangerous to mass readers as twentieth-century popular culture. Dalziel’s Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (1957) decries the “sordid realism” of Lloyd’s “penny dreadfuls” (23), and, while she finds Reynolds more talented than Lloyd’s writers, she deplores “the detail and gusto” with which, in his earlier works, he “describe[s] pain, torture, and sexual passion,” opining that “[T]his kind of writing is a perennial problem to those concerned with public taste and morals,” who aim to “eliminate what borders on sadism and pornography” (36). Dalziel claims that Reynolds “exploited the market for such literature” to a degree unparalleled even in the penny press (37), but that “in the case of both novels and periodicals there has at the lower end of the scale of merit been marked deterioration of standard over the past hundred years” (177). Still, penny fiction is not worth recovering. While true “masterpieces are seldom long forgotten,” penny literature’s obscurity proves its worthlessness (172). It is indeed true that the Victorian penny press now has little influence on the British or international Anglophone masses’ cultural knowledge. A case in point is the television show Penny Dreadful created by John Lodge, the screenwriter who adapted the Stephen Sondheim–Hugh Wheeler musical Sweeney Todd to the silver screen under the direction of modern Gothic impresario Tim 289

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Burton (2008). Notably, although Penny Dreadful contains nineteenth-century literary allusions aplenty, drawing on and winking at sources as disparate as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the clairvoyants supposed to have channeled the spirit of vanished Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, it contains zero references to any title that actually was a “penny dreadful,” by any common definition, nor to the network of publishers, editors, authors, readers, community organizers, and politicians that, we have seen, made the “penny dreadful” a tool of working-class selfdetermination. Chartism is barely represented onscreen at all. Furthermore, the show’s heroes are a decidedly late-Victorian upper-class woman and an American cowboy—a visitor from outside the British class system. Both protagonists are insulated by supernatural forces from the mortal physical danger that propelled the Chartists to outrage and action. Finally, Barnes and Noble’s “Collectible Editions” imprint’s anthology Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror (2016) contains canonical nineteenth-century elite novels such as Frankenstein, but nothing remotely resembling penny fiction, and even includes a selection from one of the critical scourges of penny fiction,Wilkie Collins. To modern readers, the penny press truly has vanished into the “byways” of the unmourned past.

“The Study of a Literature”: 1963–2020 Beginning in the 1960s, cultural materialist literary scholarship has done much to restore penny fiction, and the issues and constituencies it involves, to the canon and curriculum of English literature. Building upon the Marxist cultural materialist critique of canon etiologies propounded by Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, James virtually inaugurated the recovery of penny fiction with the opening of Fiction for the Working Man: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England, 1830–1850 (1963): “This is primarily the study of a literature—the literature published for the working classes in the towns of England” (James, Fiction xv). In these words, James insists that this material is not only literature, but “a literature” and “the literature,” italicized.The definite article and typographical emphasis reiterate that penny bloods and dreadfuls constitute a phenomenon and a mode. As such, no survey of the English literature(s) of the Victorian era or the modern British nation may be complete without them. Luckily, since the 1963 first appearance of James’s book, other scholars have begun to realize this, and so have public institutions. In the 1990s, Helen R. Smith and Elizabeth James catalogued the British Library’s extensive Barry Ono Collection of penny bloods and dreadfuls, acquired via bequest in 1940. A public exhibition followed in 1998. In this field as in others, bibliography facilitated a critical renaissance. In 2002, drawing in part upon Smith and Elizabeth James’s work, Marie Lèger-St. Jean began to publish Price One Penny: Cheap Fiction 1837–1860, a massive, growing, open-access hypertext bibliographic database that not only reveals up-to-date, accurate citations of “penny bloods” printed in periodicals and penny-part editions, but identifies the public collections around the world where they can be consulted, and even networks readers with prominent private collectors as well. A great deal of contemporary research on the penny press simply could not have been attempted without this resource. Since its inception, the scholarly discourse community concerned with Victorian penny fiction and its working-class contributors, readers, and politics has grown by leaps and bounds. This community now incorporates the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA), founded in 2009.The VPFA celebrated its first decade by inaugurating a journal, Victorian Popular Fictions, from the independent press Victorian Secrets, which has for some time produced new editions of Victorian popular and sensational literature. Reynolds and Lloyd have each been illuminated by a critical anthology, respectively, G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James in 2017, and, in 2019, Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics, and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by McWilliam and Lloyd family biographer Sarah Louise Lill. Meanwhile, cultural materialist questioning of the actual circulation and reader demographics of various kinds of Victorian text has exploded 290

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some of the myths that have been enlisted to marginalize penny fiction ever since its 1840s heyday. As Louis James observes in the 2017 update of Fiction for the Working Man, Dickens is “finally divested of the myth of a universal readership” (3). A few penny novels are available in paperback editions, such as the aforementioned Victorian Secrets publications, Robert L. Mack’s 2007 Oxford University Press edition of The String of Pearls—produced as a tie-in with Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd film of the same year—and Dagni Bredesen’s Valancourt Books annotated facsimile of the first novel to feature a female London police detective, the 1860s “dreadful” Ruth the Betrayer, by “Edward Ellis” (probably author and cartoonist Charles Henry Ross.) This recovery project requires critics and educators to investigate, respect, and discuss working-class culture and history. We must broaden the curriculum to include the penny fiction via which Victorian popular writers dared their working-class readers to imagine a more equitable future than Tolkien ever did.

Works Cited Basdeo, Stephen.“‘That’s Business’: Organised Crime in G.W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844– 48).” Law, Crime, and History, vol. 8, no. 1, 2018, pp. 54–75. Boone, Troy. Youth of Darkest England:Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. Routledge, 2004. Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson:The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Indiana UP, 1998. Dalziel, E. Margaret. Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago. Cohen and West, 1957. Damrosch, David, et al., eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2B, The Victorian Age. 4th ed., Longman, 2016. Dziemianowicz, Stefan R., ed. Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror. Barnes and Noble, 2016. Fyfe, Paul. By Accident or Design:Writing the Victorian Metropolis. Oxford UP, 2015. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Norton, 2012. Greenwood, James. The Seven Curses of London. Stanley Rivers, 1869. Hackenberg, Sara. “Romanticism Bites: Quixotic Historicism in Rymer and Reynolds.” Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics, and the Press in Victorian England, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 165–182. Hadju, David. The Ten-Cent Plague:The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. Picador, 2009. Hall, Stuart. Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Duke UP, 2017. Hartley, Phil. “Civilized Goblins and Talking Animals: How The Hobbit Created Problems of Sentience for Tolkien.” The Hobbit and Tolkien’s Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2014, pp. 113–135. Haywood, Ian. “George W.M. Reynolds and the Radicalization of Victorian Popular Fiction.” Media History, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, pp. 121–139. ---. The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Routledge, 2016. ---. Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting. Northcote House and the British Council, 1998. Hoeveler, Diane Long. The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880. University of Wales Press, 2014. Humpherys, Anne and Louis James, eds. G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press. Ashgate, 2008. James, Elizabeth and Helen R. Smith. Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850. Edward Everett Root, 2017. ---. “‘I am Ada!’: Edward Lloyd and the Creation of the Victorian Penny Dreadful.” Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics, and the Press in Victorian England, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam. Palgrave, 2019, pp. 54–70. ---. Penny Dreadfuls and Boys’ Adventures: The Barry Ono collection of Victorian Popular Literature in the British Library. British Library, 1998. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Wisconsin, 1987. Lavezzo, Kathy. “‘New Ethnicities’ and Medieval ‘Race.’” Addressing the Crisis: The Stuart Hall Project, vol. 1, Article 6, 2019, pp. 1–5. ir​.uiowa​.edu​/stuarth​all. Accessed 20 Jul. 2020. LeGette, Casie. Remaking Romanticism:The Radical Politics of the Excerpt. SpringerLink, 2017. Mack, Robert L., ed. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Oxford UP, 2007. Accessed 31 Jul. 2020. McWilliam, Rohan. “Sweeney Todd and the Chartist Gothic: Politics and Print Culture in Early Victorian Britain.” Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics, and the Press in Victorian England, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 198–215.

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Rebecca Nesvet Oliphant, Margaret. “Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million.” Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 84, 1858, pp. 200–216. Powell, Sally. “Black Markets and Cadaverous Pies: The Corpse, Urban Trade, and Industrial Consumption in the Penny Blood.” Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, edited by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, Ashgate, 2004, pp. 45–58. Purtill, Richard L. Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 1974. Ignatius, 2006. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.Yale UP, 2001. Rosenman, Ellen. “Beyond the Nation: Penny Fiction, the Crimean War, and Political Belonging.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, 2018, pp. 95–124. Rymer, James Malcolm, ed. The Queen’s Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1–5, 1842. ---. Mazeppa, or, the Wild Horse of the Ukraine. Edward Lloyd, 1850. Sala, George Augustus. “Answers to Correspondents.” Sala’s Journal, vol. 1, no. 9, 1892, p. 215. —. “Answers to Correspondents.” Sala’s Journal, vol. 1, no. 22, 1892, p. 525. Sanders, Mike. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge UP, 2009. “Shelley’s Prose.” Athenaeum, 4 Sep 1880, pp. 297–298. Smith, Helen R. New Light on Sweeney Todd, Thomas Peckett Prest, James Malcolm Rymer, and Elizabeth Caroline Grey. Jarndyce, 2002. Stimpson, Catharine R.J.R.R. Tolkien. Columbia UP, 1969. Taylor, Antony. “Reynolds’s Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy, and the Radical Anti-Jubilee: Britain’s AntiMonarchist Tradition Reconsidered.” Historical Research, vol. 68, no. 2, 1995, pp. 318–337. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit, or,There and Back Again. Del Rey, 1982. Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of 19th Century British Working-Class Literature. Harper and Row, 1974.

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22 ABJECT CAPITALISM AS THE SIGHT OF DEAD BODIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS Matthew L. Reznicek

It is a critical commonplace that nineteenth-century Gothic monsters function as metaphors for class and race, revealing marked anxieties regarding the precarity of power structures separating the ruling class from the lower class on whom their socio-economic power depends. The great fear of bourgeois civilization, Franco Moretti writes, is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula.The monster and the vampire are born together … in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century, under the names of Hyde and Dracula. (Moretti 83) In Moretti’s reading, these two monsters function as “two indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital” (Moretti 83). But these monstrous economic metaphors leave very real victims and leave their marks on the bodies of those victims. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the Creature’s most iconic victim is the newly married Elizabeth Frankenstein, found “lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair” (Shelley 141). Shelley’s use of the passive voice here is significant; this was done to Elizabeth by the Creature. She is the victim of this monstrous metaphor for capital, but she is largely absent in both Moretti’s and Halberstam’s analyses. And yet the site and sight of her body functions as an important symbol. If, as Halberstam claims, the monster’s body “is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning,” that meaning is read, I argue, on the corpse of the monster’s victims (Halberstam 21). The image of the dead body in British and Irish literature of the nineteenth century recurs again and again as an abject symbol that functions as a broader critique of the socio-economic, as well as biopolitical, forces that produce these corpses. Through both the psychoanalytic and biopolitical category of the abject, the image of the dead body in nineteenth-century literature not only reveals the structural inequalities that shape the nineteenth-century economy through the biopolitical processes of abjection, but, more importantly, the abject and exceptional nature of these corpses demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel, as a literary form, attempts to obscure or contain the everyday crisis of poverty. In the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, the presence of the dead body decisively disrupts the 293

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socio-economic narrative of normalcy and containment, resulting in a crisis of representation for the nineteenth-century novel.

Wretched Conditions: Poverty and Theories of Abjection It is with a combination of revulsion and exclusion that the dead body transfers its abjection to the population of the poor in nineteenth-century literature. The corpse becomes a site for socio-economic analysis because the Kristevan disgust gives way to the need for an analysis of the violent socio-economic and biopolitical powers that produced these victims in a manner that follows more the model of Georges Bataille and Imogen Tyler. In Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–1855), the abjection of the corpse points to the crisis of poverty and the biopolitical powers of capitalism. Before moving into an analysis of the various corpses and the economic crises their presence reveals, it is worth pausing to establish some critical definitions and frameworks. I have repeatedly described the dead body as “abject” and I want to explain the two distinct critical traditions from which this term emerges. Firstly, and most famously, French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva uses the image of the corpse in Powers of Horror (1982) to define the category of the abject; its “fluids,” “defilement,” and “shit” reveal the “border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border” (Kristeva 3). The corpse functions, not as a metaphor, but as the literal materialization and objectification of the border between life and death, between the clean and the abject. As a result, it creates in its viewer the “repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away” from the site of the abject (Kristeva 2).This psychological, emotional response emerges from a desire for self-protection through a preservation of the border between the clean and the abject, between the living and the dead.The spasm of disgust that “thrusts me to the side and turns me away” also “protect[s] me” (Kristeva 2). Indeed, Kristeva asks, “How can I be without that border” (Kristeva 4). In her articulation of the power of the abject, the physical and spatial rejection of the abject corpse is necessary because the corpse show[s] me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (Kristeva 3) For Kristeva, the abject is a necessary response. The state of being alive is marked and defined by the differentiation from and the disgust for the corpse. The disgust experienced in the presence of the abject is a mode of differentiation that stems from a psychological need for self-preservation that casts out in order to protect the uncontaminated and living body. This sense of protection, as William A. Cohen notes, also carries an undeniable social component. While “polluting, infectious, fearful” objects are labeled “filthy … the nearer they approach the ultimate repositories of decay and death, feces and corpses,” people “are denounced as filthy when they are felt to be unassimilably other, whether because perceived attributes of their identities repulse the onlooker or because physical aspects of their bodies (appearance, odor, decrepitude) do” (Cohen IX–X). For Cohen, the threat of the abject, filthy body is that it “challenges the very dichotomy between subject and object … the filth of the object defiles the subject who, identifying as such, has had to rub up against it” (Cohen X). Whereas the Kristevan distinction between the living and dead is clearly demarcated by the experience of abjection, Cohen’s understanding highlights the transferable nature of the category of the abject, which undermines our construction of selfhood as well as our ability to extricate ourselves from a situation in which we are confronted with and able to reject the abject. Indeed, too much proximity to an abject object, Cohen argues, 294

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can ultimately make the subject itself abject, so that the subject is no longer able to thrust aside that which must be “permanently thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva 3).The transferable nature of abjection “explicitly integrates the psychological and the political” (Cohen XV). Especially in the context of nineteenth-century literature, the political threat of the abject emerges as a social experience and a social category that applies uniquely to the poor. This identification of abjection with a socio-political category is most clearly identified and explicated in the writings of Georges Bataille, whose understanding most directly relates to the representation of social and economic forms in nineteenth-century literature. In “Abjection and Miserable Forms,” Bataille explains that the category of the abject derives from the “imperative forces” of sovereignty to “exclud[e]” the “the amorphous and immense mass of the wretched population … by prohibiting any contact” (Bataille 9). Derived from the powers of “sovereignty,” the “wretched population, exploited by production and cut off from life by a prohibition on contact is represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the people, populace, and gutter” (Bataille 9). His definition of abjection points to a structural element lacking in Kristeva’s; like Shelley’s representation of Elizabeth’s corpse, Bataille defines the dominant mode of representation for the abject in the passive voice: they are “exploited by” and “cut off from life by” the powers of sovereignty. This is a process that is done to them by the biopolitical and socio-political forces that enforce “symbolic relative position … of high and low” (Bataille 9). While both Bataille’s and Kristeva’s definitions share an understanding of the abject being associated with disgust and a status of being cast out, Bataille’s definition recognizes the abject as victims of social, economic, and biopolitical power. Imogen Tyler’s Revolting Subjects (2013) extends Bataille’s socio-political understanding of abjection, applying it specifically to the question of citizenship in Britain. Tyler’s analysis of contemporary Britain establishes the category of “social abjection,” which is “a theory of power, subjugation and resistance” (Tyler 4). It is Tyler’s category of social abjection that I will use to explore the exclusion of the poor through their proximity to disgusting, filthy conditions in nineteenth-century novels. As such, it is important to provide a more thorough explication of Tyler’s category of social abjection in order to differentiate it from the psychoanalytic category of Kristeva and to highlight its potential for socio-cultural analyses of literature. By emphasizing both “the violent exclusionary forces of sovereign power” alongside “the condition of one cast down—that is, the condition of being abject,” Tyler’s theoretical model “allows us to think about forms of violence and social exclusion … as a mode of governmentality … of subjectivization and subjugation” (Tyler 21). Indeed, one of the key elements of marking an individual or an entire population as abject or revolting is “the curtailing of the representational agency of those individuals and groups interpellated by these figures,” enabling “[s]ymbolic violence [to be] converted into forms of material violence that are embodied and lived” (Tyler 26). The threat of symbolic and material violence, faced by the poor, will reveal the social exclusionary forces that reject the impoverished from these novels and the societies they represent, as well as the “revolting aesthetics” with which these abject populations are represented when they disrupt the narrative of social stability.

An Execution Hanging over My Head: Debt and Sovereignty in The Absentee Imogen Tyler’s account of social abjection insists on a dual understanding of the term “abjection.” As I have noted, it describes both the “violent exclusionary forces of sovereign power … that strip people of their human dignity” as well as “the condition of one [who is] cast down—that is the condition of being abject” (Tyler 21). Originally included in Edgeworth’s two-volume series Tales of Fashionable Life, the representation of social abjection in The Absentee provides a stark reminder of the social forces that produce such abjection. These tales, which exposed the vices of the metropolitan elite, proved “her greatest critical success to date,” and included “Ennui and The Absentee, the two most influential tales she wrote” (Butler 211, 302). Central to their representation of “those 295

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errours [sic] […] to which the higher classes of society are disposed” is the threat that debt poses to the individual, the family, and the community (R. L. Edgeworth IV). Indeed, the threat of debt is so powerful in The Absentee that Edgeworth ties it directly to the threat and experience of abjection, both the socio-political forces of exclusion and the psychoanalytic category. Through the specific threat of the seizure of the body, Edgeworth’s The Absentee implicates the economic, legal, and social forces of nineteenth-century London in the violent biopolitics that strip people of their dignity, especially the poor. Focusing on the Clonbrony family, a family of absentee Irish landowners, The Absentee’s representation of London’s upper class is unique in its corrupting effects on the individual. As the novel’s protagonist, Colambre, is beginning to realize that “[t]here are difficulties for ready money … which often surprise” the family, he is forced to confront the dual threat of debt and disease through the sudden and violent experience of his Cambridge friend, Mr. Berryl (Edgeworth, Absentee 15). Sir John Berryl, the father of Colambre’s Cambridge friend, “was suddenly seized with a dangerous illness,” which produces an acute and complex experience of “domestic distress” for both the Berryl family and for Colambre (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). The illness is so severe and dangerous that, throughout this episode, Berryl is constantly referred to as “lying upon his deathbed,” at the very edge of the psychoanalytic border between life and the abject status of the corpse (Edgeworth, Absentee 49).The abject presence of the corpse, however, becomes even more threatening because of the socio-economic threat that the corpse poses to the Berryl family and, eventually, the Clonbrony family. This corpse, as we will see, reveals an economic crisis that threatens to infect a much broader population, threatening to drag untold numbers of people into the abject state of poverty. As Imogen Tyler’s articulation of social abjection reveals the forces that cause abjection, Berryl’s near-corpse functions as a nexus of socio-political forces that reveal the threatening specter of abjection. The first force that Berryl’s near-corpse reveals is the threat of disease, contamination, and contagion. As Edgeworth notes, the news of Berryl’s disorder “spread an alarm among his creditors” (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). Just as the illness has spread throughout Berryl’s body to the point of near death, the news of his death and his debt “spread[s]” amongst his creditors, revealing a disorder. The overlapping of medical and economic discourses is remarkable. As Eva R. Porras has shown, the physiological language of “disease” has a significant economic valence as well; in an economic context, a “contagion” is “the spread of market changes or disturbances from one regional market to others,” caused by “infection mechanisms that work to extend these crises beyond their initial epicenters” (Porras XII). For Berryl’s anonymous creditors, the threat is clearly that his death and his debt can create an infection because of a default on his credit, sparking a series of defaults that produce a market crisis.Thus, this economic crisis of debt not only threatens the ruin of the Berryl family, but an extensive crisis across the London market. As in Edgeworth’s 1817 novel, Ormond, an individual economic “illness” can have dramatic social effects. In Ormond, Sir Ulick O’Shane’s profligacy forces him to declare bankruptcy, which results in “a public calamity, a source of private distress, that reached lower and farther than any bankruptcy had ever done in Ireland” (Edgeworth, Ormond 284). Throughout the streets of Dublin and well into the rural countryside, Ormond “heard of it from every tongue, it was written in every face—in every house it was the subject of lamentation, of invective,” while people “of all ranks, gathered—stopped—dispersed, talking of Sir Ulick O’Shane’s bankruptcy—their hopes—their fears—their losses—their ruin—their despair— their rage” (Edgeworth, Ormond 284–285). Edgeworth’s representation of all ranks reveals the remarkable extent to which this crisis of individual disorder has spread up and down Irish society. And, in The Absentee, Berryl’s near-corpse poses the same infectious threat. In fact, Berryl’s corpse poses a greater threat because of its proximity to death, exacerbating the threat of abjection. As one creditor declares to Colambre’s friend, the “arrest is made on the person of your father, luckily made while the breath is still in the body … Your father, sir John Berryl, sick or well, is my prisoner” (Edgeworth, Absentee 49). This same creditor adds that Berryl “sha’n’t die in peace, if he don’t pay his debts” (Edgeworth, Absentee 49). For the mostly nameless creditors in 296

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The Absentee, as for the nameless citizens of Dublin in Ormond, the death of their economic partner exacerbates the crisis of debt. But the specific threat of Berryl not dying “in peace, if he don’t pay his debts,” combined with the threat of an arrest “made on the person,” highlights the severity of the moment; indeed, the creditor Mordicai insists that a man’s lying upon his deathbed was no excuse to a creditor; that he was not a whiffler, to stand upon ceremony about disturbing a gentleman in his last moments; that he was not to be cheated out of his due by such niceties. (Edgeworth, Absentee 49) The tension here between social niceties and the need for repayment signals an important fracture in the two forms of abjection: the refusal of the family’s privacy in Sir John Berryl’s “last moments” points to the radical attempt to contain the contagion of his debt-driven disorder and his debtdriven illness; however, it also reveals the abjecting forces of the economic order that can be so contaminated by these debt-fueled contagions. In this way, then, the revolting aesthetics of Berryl “lying upon his deathbed” and not being allowed to “die in peace, if he don’t pay his debts” moves the aesthetic register of disgust from his physiological illness and proximity to the abject image of the corpse to an even more revolting aesthetic that indicts the socio-economic forces that produce this state. This is achieved through the representation of “the foremost and the most inexorable of their creditors,” Mordicai (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). As Tyler argues, “revolting aesthetics resonates with Rancière’s argument that the political is always aesthetic” (Tyler 25). The revolting aesthetics of the near-corpse and the specter of poverty reveal a specific politics of disgust; the most obvious interpretation of the association between Berryl’s economic disorder and his physiological disease is to make debt and poverty revolting. Without praising or ennobling poverty, however, Edgeworth subverts this interpretation by shifting the source of such aesthetics of disgust and, subsequently, of abjection as a political force away from the Berryls onto Mordicai. As he becomes a sort of Gothic villain throughout the novel, threatening not just the Berryls but eventually the Clonbronys as well, Edgeworth’s representation of abjection rejects the identification of abjection with “the state of being cast out” through the poverty and debt, opting instead for an understanding of the abject as the forces that produce such a state. This occurs through the representation of Mordicai. Firstly, Edgeworth represents Mordicai’s actions as violating the norms of decency and respectability, casting him out from the realm of polite society. In response to Mr. Berryl’s offer of “his bond for the amount of the reasonable charges,” Mordicai is “livid with malice, and with atrocious determination in his eyes,” insists that he will not “stand upon ceremony about disturbing a gentleman in his last moments” (Edgeworth, Absentee 48–49).The language of malice and atrocious determination, set in contrast to the rhetoric of reasonableness, exacerbates the irrational and vindictive nature of this creditor. Moreover, the refusal to adhere to “ceremony” in such a moment exposes not simply a refusal to accept social norms but a melodramatic hyperbole that marks Mordicai as outside the bounds of the humane. If ceremony, as Mary Douglas has noted, can be used to protect “sacred things and places … from defilement,” then even in the presence of the near-corpse Mordicai himself becomes the source of defilement, the thing which ought to be cast out (Douglas 9). What makes Mordicai’s violation of this sacred scene of Berryl’s last moments so profound is his refusal to create or respect a boundary between the two realms of the economic and the sacred; his insistence on the need for repayment in the face of death violates social norms that respect the sacrality of death in the family by impiously reasserting the role of economics. This demonstrates Edgeworth’s portrayal of the realm of economics as the source of abjection, especially when it is not properly enacted or maintained. In addition to his disregard for ceremonies surrounding death, Edgeworth further represents the Jewish Mordicai as a source of abjection through the characterization of his debts as illegal and 297

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predatory, clearly standing outside of what is deemed acceptable. This well-recognized antisemitic trope, of course, depends upon the ability to cast out and abject the Jewish community. As Judith W. Page has demonstrated, the abysmal representation of Jewishness in The Absentee and in Edgeworth’s other fictional works earned her a rebuke from a young Jewish American reader, Rachel Mordecai (later Lazarus) in a letter, which sparked a lifelong correspondence as well as a pledge to do better (Page 134–136). Edgeworth later examined the representation of Jews and Jewishness in her 1817 novel Harrington in an attempt to present Jews more justly and liberally and questioning the role of prejudice and exclusion. Despite this, her critics pointed out the shortcomings of this effort. Furthering the antisemitic stereotype that exacerbates the threat of abjection, Edgeworth’s novel characterizes the debts owed to Mordicai as “exorbitant … it was a debt which only ignorance and extravagance could have in the first instance incurred, swelled afterwards to an amazing amount by interest, and interest upon interest” (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). Their exorbitant status shows Mordicai’s charges to be predatory, preying on Lady Berryl’s ignorance; these debts, as Edgeworth notes, “would not be allowed if examined by a court of justice” because of their exorbitant nature (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). The extrajudicial nature of Mordicai’s claims further reinforces the sense of abjection; he is separated from the realm of justice. Despite the assurance that a court would not allow such claims to be imposed on the Berryl estate, the threat Mordicai poses feels very real. His claim “on the person of your father, luckily made while the breath is still in the body” evokes the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century remedy of seizure of the body (Edgeworth, Absentee 48). Dating from the reign of Henry II, English law “allowed merchant creditors to compel debtors to acknowledge their liabilities before a town mayor, and to distrain the debtors’ goods or imprison their bodies should they subsequently default on these obligations” (Finn 110). While these statutes defined neither the debtor as a criminal nor debt as a crime, a complex system of default emerged: bankruptcy was restricted by law to merchants and traders who owed substantial sums; persons who owed sums of forty shillings or more but were unable to declare bankruptcy because they failed to meet the definition of merchant or tradesman, as we can presume with Sir John Berryl, fell into the legal category of insolvency. Creditors of insolvent debtors “were empowered by statute to initiate a suit … and so obtain the power to arrest the debtor’s person. Debtors unable to obtain bail were committed to prison to await trial” (Finn 111). In this instance of default, the person effectively stands in place of the unpaid debts, a corporeal promissory note. Ultimately, it is Mordicai’s attempt to equate the body with capital that produces the threat of abjection in The Absentee, revealing a broader form of Gothic economy through its destabilization of the body as a source of wealth. While Finn describes the debtors as “bodies function[ing] as the common coin of debt repayment,” Catherine Gallagher argues that the corpse reveals a “nexus of … economic exchange” in which the body has become an “indirect [source] of life” and, as a result, “a seemingly thoroughly civilized, if a bit ghoulish, network of economic circulation” (Finn 48; Gallagher 93–94).The “collapsible” distinction between flesh and coin results in a clear debasement of currency and the body (Gallagher 94). This confusion between body and coin reveals Bataille’s forces of abjection producing “the condition of being abject” through the commodification of the body until it loses its human value and retains only the simulacrum of monetary value (Tyler 21). Thus, for Edgeworth, it is the Gothic economy that produces the “violent [and] exclusionary forces of sovereign power” as they mark the debtor as contaminated by “a dangerous illness” (Tyler 21; Edgeworth, Absentee 48).

The Boy Felt that It Was a Corpse: Social Exclusion and the Miserables in Oliver Twist While The Absentee reveals an abject economic condition associated with the “illness” of death and the threat of imprisonment, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist uses the abject presence of the corpse in 298

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two key moments to explore the social conditions that lead to the production of “wasted humans … the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’” entire classes of abject individuals who are cast out and deemed filthy (Bauman 5). The novel’s focus on a young foundling orphan who struggles through interactions with the Victorian state, the criminal underworld, and the aristocracy before being restored to his rightful economic and moral status forces a largely bourgeois readership to confront not only the abject individuals but, as I will demonstrate, the biopolitical forces that constitute abjection. In Oliver Twist, Dickens much more clearly than either Edgeworth or Gaskell, attributes blame for producing these “wasted humans” and the novel’s abject bodies to Britain’s socio-political institutions. However, as we will also see in terms of Gaskell, Dickens’s ultimate restoration of normality at the end of the novel “misrepresent[s] the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives that crisis in ordinary time” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 101). In so doing, the crisis of poverty, embodied in the abject corpses, is redirected and misrepresented through the “heroic agency” of the ultimately bourgeois and moral figure, who is rescued from his own proximity to the impoverished corpses and the poverty that produces them (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 101). Oliver is marked as abject and miserable from the very outset of the narrative; he is born in proximity to death, on the boundary from which we seek to distance ourselves in Kristeva’s construction of this condition.The Dickensian narrator declares that “there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration … and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next” (Dickens 3). He is, from the beginning, doubly abject: the product of a porous body and “unequally poised” on the boundary between life and death, a new-born corpse. However, Dickens’s narrator quickly calls attention to the socio-political constructions that move this abject body out of the purely psychoanalytic realm into the biopolitical realm of abjection through a hypothetical reimagining of Oliver’s birth. If, the narrator wonders, Oliver “had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom,” things would have been remarkably different (Dickens 4). This hypothetical alternative clearly enjoys the trappings of bourgeois comfort and stability; the presence of multiple grandmothers demonstrates not only the expected stability of heteronormativity but also the physical ability to weather old age enough to see the production of another generation. The extensive familial presence in Dickens’s ironic imagining not only reinforces the isolation of Oliver and his mother, but also emphasizes the socio-economic conditions in which these events occur. If this alternative reimagining of Oliver’s birth employs the images of bourgeois domesticity, Oliver’s reality is marked instead by the abjection of poverty not only through his own liminal existence but also through the instability demonstrated by the death of his mother. The first, and only, words his mother speaks convey the abject proximity to death; she wishes to “see the child, and die,” despite the nurse’s exhortations that she “must not talk about dying, yet” (Dickens 4). In both phrases, the certainty of death is a given, not in an eschatological and Christian manner, but in an immediate or near immediate context. The use of “yet” lacks any of the comfort associated with the narrator’s imagined alternative and functions merely as a reinforcement of the need for this woman to continue to exist as “human refuse” (Bataille 10). Indeed, as Bataille explains, “[f]ilth, snot and vermin are enough” to render a being, even an infant, vile; it is not attributable to “personal nature,” but instead to “the negligence or helplessness … wreaked by impotence under given social conditions” (Bataille 10–11). The representation of Oliver’s mother engages all three elements of Bataille’s definition: the fact that “[s]he was found lying in the street” and “her shoes were worn to pieces” demonstrate the filthy, vile representation; the use of the passive voice in “was found,” as well as the inability to achieve the comfort of the all-too-easily imagined alternative, demonstrates the sense of negligence. For Bataille, it is the social conditions that ultimately produce this abject condition of human waste. Dickens’s representation of Oliver’s mother calls attention to this social condition through the repeated insistence that things would “most inevitably and 299

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indubitably” have been different if Oliver had been born into a different “circumstance” (Dickens 4, 3).The social comforts of class, the access to “doctors of profound wisdom” that wealth provides, clearly implicate the social order in this production of abject circumstances. Moreover, the presence of the corpse is attributed to these same social conditions through the off-handed reference to “[t]he old story, … no wedding-ring, I see. Ah! good night” (Dickens 5). The easily recognizable narrative, leading into the casual suspension of concern with “good night,” makes manifest the social conditions that enable the abjection of women in this condition. Indeed, not only does it make clear that social conditions enable this abjection but, as Halberstam argues in terms of the Gothic economy, it demonstrates a “logic which [it] rationalizes” into the system of production. The recognition of this clichéd narrative rationalizes the response of the nurse and the doctor, who have washed their hands of this abjected body. The second corpse discovered in Oliver Twist reinforces Bataille’s claim that abjection is “wreaked by impotence under given social conditions” that tie the production of this wretched body to the socio-economic conditions of Victorian Britain. Before ever encountering the specter of the corpse, Oliver and Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker to whom Oliver is apprenticed, trudge through [T]he most crowded and densely inhabited part of the town, and then striking down a narrow street more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused to look for the house which was the object of their search. The houses on either side were high and large, but very old; and tenanted by people of the poorest class, as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked like shadows along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but they were fast closed, and mouldering away: only the upper rooms being inhabited. Others, which had become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street by huge beams of wood which were reared against the tottering walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body.The kennel was stagnant and filthy; the very rats here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine. (Dickens 40) In a passage that is remarkably evocative of Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, Dickens’s narrator almost does away with the need for the production of the dead body itself through a series of images that implicate the socio-political and economic structures of nineteenth-century England in the violent and exclusionary act of abjection.The focus on decrepitude, dirt, and misery conveys the sense of disgust Oliver and, by extension, Dickens’s middle-class readership would be expected to feel in the face of this tenement. Disgust is the first mode of and precondition for the exclusion of an abject body; as Sianne Ngai argues, disgust might be “experienced physically,” it is “saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values,” which leads, ultimately, to the act of casting out (Tyler 21; Ngai 11). Just as the imprisonment of the contagious debtor in The Absentee must be separated and contained, the act of casting out or expelling based on disgust leads to the physical separation of these “houseless wretches” and “people of the poorest class” (Dickens 40). While Engels and later Charles Booth would show the physical proximity between the wealthiest and the poorest neighborhoods, Dickens emphasizes a physical distance that demonstrates the degree to which urban planning and urban housing have separated these “dregs of the people, populace, and gutter” from the respectable areas of Mudfog through the labyrinthine walking “for some time” and then needing to go further “down a narrow street more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through” (Dickens 40).The wandering and insularity of this 300

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slum mark it as physically abject through its separation. Upon entering the wretched room, Oliver notes that “there lay upon the ground something covered with an old blanket” and, immediately, he “felt that it was a corpse,” causing him to shudder (Dickens 40). The narrator’s insistent use of filth marks this entire landscape as abject; indeed, the very insistence on covering up the thing Oliver feels to be a corpse reinforces that need for separation from the abject itself. If, however, the status of abjection is an act imposed upon a passive population, Dickens’s narrator clearly identifies the agent who enforces this casting out. When confronted with the corpse of the dead woman in the tenement, Oliver and Mr. Sowerberry hear her husband explain that she starved to death … [S]he died in the dark—in the dark. She couldn’t even see her children’s faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged for her in the streets, and they sent me to prison. (Dickens 42) Once again, the Gothic economy becomes the source of abjection in the nineteenth-century novel. Just as Sir John Berryl’s abjection stems from his finances and results in his imprisonment, the Dickensian corpse is the result of both the tradition of Settlement laws, which preclude migrants from receiving charity, and the New Poor Laws of 1834, which punish able-bodied laborers who seek charity. Presumably, this old man is not a migrant, but he must appear able-bodied enough to have been imprisoned for begging. As Susan Zlotnick explains, Dickens’s target of criticism in Oliver Twist is “the infamous eligibility test, wherein life in the workhouse was supposed to be made ‘less eligible’ than life out of it” (Zlotnick 131). Mary Poovey notes that the New Poor Law of 1834 “insisted that morality and health were separable from one’s economic situation and that the poverty of some individuals was essential to the prosperity of the nation,” while Sonya O. Rose adds that the “reformers who shaped the 1834 act were convinced that poverty would be minimized if the state played no part in regulating economic relations” (Poovey 11; Rose 52). Central to these reforms was the “idea that poverty was incurable and that, because their destitution was of their own making, those who were capable of working should be humiliated for receiving community assistance” (Rose 53). Characterizing poverty as both a moral failing and an economic necessity, the New Poor Law produces wasted populations who ought “to be humiliated” and marked as abject. But, in Oliver Twist, it is the combination of the man’s imprisonment for his poverty and his inability to receive money to feed his wife that results in her death. As such, Dickens attributes her death not to his inaction or his moral failures, but to the state’s criminalization and abjection of poverty. It is the social conditions that lead to this economic corpse. Despite Dickens’s own criticism of the New Poor Laws and various attempts at reform in the nineteenth century, Oliver wonders “whether it had taken a very long time to get … used” to the presence of the abject bodies produced by poverty (Dickens 44). In this query, then, the experience of abjection remains exceptional, a state of crisis, as Lauren Berlant argues in Cruel Optimism. For Berlant, [s]low death prospers not in traumatic events … but in temporally labile environments whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself, that domain of living on in which everyday activity; memory, needs, and desires; and diverse temporalities and horizons of the taken-for-granted are brought into proximity and lived through. (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 100) It is this “ordinariness” and “taken-for-granted” nature of poverty that the corpse reveals precisely because it remains exceptional for Oliver.To draw further on Berlant’s definition, Oliver’s response to the corpse as exceptional suggests a singularity, an occasion that “frame[s] experience while not 301

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changing much of anything” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 101). In contrast to this singular event of the corpse, Charles Booth’s study of later Victorian poverty revealed that poverty was pervasive, with over “33 per cent of Londoners living in poverty, with an even greater proportion, 35 per cent, among those living in the city’s East End” (Vaughan 70). As Laura Vaughan notes, Booth’s study reveals that the “rate [of Londoners living in poverty] was much greater than had been previously estimated” (Vaughan 70). While Oliver’s response characterizes the abject state of poverty as an “event” that suggests it is exceptional, Booth’s study demonstrates that poverty ought to be seen instead as a pervasive “environment” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 100). Berlant distinguishes an event from an environment insofar as an environment denotes a scene in which structural conditions are suffused through a variety of mediations, such as predictable repetitions and other spatial practices that might well go under the radar or, in any case, not take up the form of event. (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 100) By failing to recognize the “structural conditions” that make abject poverty “everyday” and “takenfor-granted,” Oliver Twist emphasizes the singularity of the impoverished and abject corpse. In this way, Dickens’s novel fails to contend with the pervasive experience of poverty and inequality, containing it to the exceptional circumstance of the abject. This, ultimately, allows the forces of abjection in Victorian London to remain subsumed by the crisis of the abject corpse.

Some’s Pre-Elected to Feasts, Others to Toil: Industrialization and Wasted Lives in North and South If, in The Absentee and Oliver Twist, the dead body points to the social forces of exclusion, the dead body and the near-dead body in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South becomes a site of political reform and political action.To paraphrase Homi Bhabha, the dead body in Gaskell’s social problem novel “transforms our critical strategies” vis-à-vis “the symbolic and material forms of violence” that produce these wasted bodies (Bhabha 172;Tyler 49).Whereas Edgeworth’s and Dickens’s novels use the dead body in a way that is singular and exceptional, Gaskell’s two specific dead bodies not only become a normal part of industrial inequality but, in so doing, function as an indictment of the forces that produce such inequality. The attribution of Bessy Higgins’s illness to the conditions of labor as well as the cross-class sympathy produced by her ultimate corpse transforms the dead body from a site of abjection to a powerful site of political action. From their very first meeting in the streets of Milton, the newly arrived Margaret Hale is struck by millworker Bessy Higgins’s “feebleness,” which is so extreme that she is “too far gone in a waste” (Gaskell 73). Nicholas Higgins’s use of “waste” recalls Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of “[t]he production of ‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay)” (Bauman 5). For Bauman, the production of wasted humans “is an inevitable outcome of modernization … an inseparable accompaniment of modernity … an inescapable side-effect of order-building … and economic progress” (Bauman 5). Bessy’s illness, although hardly an “inevitable outcome,” is certainly attributed directly to her participation in the “economic progress” that produces this condition of abjection. In a delayed visit to the Higgins’s home, Bessy explains to Margaret that she “was well when mother died, but I have never been rightly strong sin[ce] somewhere about that time. I began to work in a carding-room soon after, and the fluff got into my lungs, and poisoned me” (Gaskell 102). “This fluff,” she continues is [l]ittle bits, as fly off fro’ the cotton, when they’re carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there’s 302

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many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they’re just poisoned by the stuff. (Gaskell 102) The focus here on the infiltration of the body by the “little bits” of excess from the cotton not only replicates “a robust contemporary concern with the potential for circulating airborne particles” that corrupt homes and bodies, but, more importantly, points to a pervasive environment of such suffering. The nameless “many” who fall into a “waste, coughing and spitting up blood” signals the type of “slow death” that Lauren Berlant associates with the concept of a “chronic crisis” (Berlant, “Intuitionists” 848). Discussions of this type of ongoing and everyday crisis “misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives that crisis in ordinary time” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 101). Margaret’s relationship with Bessy reveals her coming to consciousness of this “defining fact” of a crisis. Even before her death, Margaret’s relationship with Bessy begins to shift and shape Margaret’s understanding of the structures that produce this ordinary crisis. Unsurprisingly, Margaret’s initial response to Bessy’s description of these working conditions and their physiological consequences is one of sympathetic bewilderment. As Miranda Burgess has argued, sympathy “designate[s] more than the pity that it implies etymologically, and that is now conventionally associated with it,” indicating more fully “something like feeling with, as well as feeling for, another” (Burgess 297). For Margaret, the sympathy that Bessy’s condition, both medical and material, evokes is more than the “quasi-theatrical” “fellow feeling” of Adam Smith; it more accurately mirrors the ethical sympathy of Shaftesbury that requires “participation with others” and “an affective basis for the civic engagement he celebrates in the Characteristics [of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)] as the height of virtue” (Burgess 299–300). Margaret’s affective engagement begins with the simple question, “But can’t it be helped,” to which Bessy responds, Some folks have a great wheel at one end o’ their carding-rooms to make a draught, and carry off th’ dust; but that wheel costs a deal o’ money—five or six hundred pound, maybe, and brings in no profit; so it’s but a few of th’ masters as will put ‘em up. (Gaskell 102) Her explanation that few mill-owners will invest in such a fan because it “brings in no profit” explicitly subordinates the welfare of the laborers, and the crisis of their health, to the profitability of industry in a way that directly recalls Marx’s analysis in Volume I of Capital. In his discussion of the material conditions of the working day, Marx explains that [c]apital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit). (Marx 381) That Marx references the exact sort of health crises that produce the abject body of Bessy Higgins demonstrates the pervasive nature of this environment; far from being a singular event in Oliver Twist, Bessy’s illness implicates the forces of capital and industrialization as the forces that produce wasted bodies. Bessy’s death produces the affective and civic engagement that results in the cross-class politics on which the novel’s response to this crisis depends. Jessie Reeder has argued that her abject presence as a corpse functions as “a political act of making visible the detrimental effects of industrial 303

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waste and pollution” (Reeder). I want to extend Reeder’s argument by claiming that Bessy’s death not only “makes visible” the detrimental effects of industrialization, but by revealing this crisis, enables the affective politics that the novel uses to reform these dehumanizing forces of abjection. Bessy’s corpse becomes, then, a site of structural and political reform. Immediately following Bessy’s death, Margaret anxiously enters the Higgins’ house “into the quiet presence of the dead,” where she waits for millworker and union-leader Nicholas Higgins (Gaskell 218). While she feels “as if she had no business to be there,” she quickly becomes an advocate for the type of reform that Bessy needed by comforting Higgins and keeping him “from the gin-palace” by bringing him to “take a dish o’ tea” with the Reverend Hale (Gaskell 218, 222, 221). This tea produces a new form of community between “Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, [and] Higgins the Infidel, [who] knelt down together. It did them no harm” (Gaskell 233). Achieving this new crossclass community is directly attributable to Bessy’s last wishes to “[g]ive [Margaret] my affectionate respects; and keep father fro’ drink” (Gaskell 217). The abject presence of this corpse, a symbol of the wasted populations produced and discarded by industrialization, achieves a new affective “participation with others” that, ultimately, achieves the reform of the very structures that produce such abjection. We see the cross-class politics of North and South most clearly through its conclusive re-imagining of class relationships in which Margaret converts mill-owner John Thornton to achieve a “more hopeful … a closer and more genial intercourse between classes” (Gaskell 432).Though she often couches her arguments in a Christian humanist discourse, her language of stewardship and humanity seeks to undo the processes of abjection that characterize the masters’ discourse about their workers. Indeed, in the often-discussed strike scene, Margaret insists that Thornton “[g]o down and face them like a man. Save these poor strangers, whom you have decoyed here. Speak to your workmen as if they were human beings. Speak to them kindly” (Gaskell 177). In contrast to his earlier characterization of the laborers as “fools” “merely tall, large children—living in the present moment—with a blind unreasoning kind of obedience,” Margaret’s insistence on the dignity of these workers undermines the dehumanization that enables Thornton and the masters to conceive of “wasted humans” as the “inevitable outcome” of their economic development (Gaskell 117; Bauman 5). As the novel concludes, Thornton’s conversion to a social and economic model that rejects abjection becomes clear when he advocates for “that sort of common interest which invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each other’s characters and persons” (Gaskell 432). Thornton’s language, as well as his “complete plan,” elevates the discourse out of class-distinctions that are dehumanizing and abjecting into a discourse that is based in communality and dignity. To build on Mary Elizabeth Hotz’s arguments, Gaskell’s insistence on seeing the poor laborers with dignity and, especially, confronting the causes of their suffering, emphasizes “society’s improvement through practical human solutions” (Hotz 174). As Hotz claims, Gaskell’s novel demonstrates that “social evil, since humanly created, must be open to human remedy through practical measures” (Hotz 174). But, if Hotz understands Margaret’s reforms as stemming from a practical implementation of the Christian Gospels, I argue instead that the practical measures that correct social evil are instead the concretization of the abstract forces of abjection that “strip people of their human dignity” revealed in “the condition of being abject” (Tyler 21). It is only by Margaret’s hovering on the threshold of abjection and confronting the abject sight/site of Bessy’s corpse that she is able to begin to agitate for the type of practical measures that diagnose Bessy’s suffering “as symptomatic of wider social relations of power” (Tyler 24). It is, then, Bessy Higgins’s corpse that ultimately breaks the false consciousness that has obscured the crisis of poverty and abjection in North and South. Just as in Edgeworth’s The Absentee and Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Gaskell’s North and South shifts the attention away from the monstrous representations of Gothic capitalism and, instead, re-focuses attention on the body of the victim left in its wake. But Gaskell’s North and South advances this 304

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focus on the impoverished corpse one step further. As I have argued, the wasted corpse that signifies the conditions of poverty in Gaskell’s novel does not simply reveal the pervasive crisis of abjection, but also becomes the site for reimagining social and political relations so that we might “make a small contribution to the development of a new political imaginary,” one that no longer produces wasted and abject bodies (Tyler, 18). Reading the nineteenth-century novel with an attention to the abject presence of the impoverished dead body reveals both the crisis of poverty and, ideally, the means of solving that crisis through cross-class political solidarity that is rooted in the abjection of the corpse.

Works Cited Bataille, Georges. “Abjection and Miserable Forms.” More and Less, edited by Sylvere Lotringer. MIT Press, 1993, pp. 9–13. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity Press, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. ———. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 4, 2008, pp. 845–860. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Burgess, Miranda. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.” Poetics Today, vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, pp. 289–321. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford UP, 1972. Cohen, William A. “Introduction: Locating Filth.” Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. U of Minnesota P, 2005, pp.VII–XXXVII. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. 1837–39. Ed. Philip Horne. New York: Penguin, 2003. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 2002. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee, edited by Heidi Thomson. Penguin, 2000. ———. Ormond, edited by Claire Connolly. Penguin, 2000. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. “Preface.” Ennui.Tales of Fashionable Life.Vol. I. J. Johnson, 1809. Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge UP, 2003. Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2006. Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South, edited by Angus Easson. Oxford UP, 2008. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. “‘Taught by Death What Life Should Be’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Representation of Death in North and South.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 32, no. 2, 2000, pp. 165–184. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1982. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin, 1990. Moretti, Franco. “Dialectic of Fear,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller.Verso, 1988. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings: Literature, Affect, and Ideology. Harvard UP, 2005. Page, Judith W. Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture. Palgrave, 2004. Porras, Eva R. Bubbles and Contagion in Financial Markets,Vol. I: An Integrative View. Palgrave, 2016. Reeder, Jessie. “Broken Bodies, Permeable Subjects: Rethinking Victorian Women’s ‘Agency’ in Gaskell’s North and South.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2013, www​.ncgsjournal​.com​/issue93​/reeder​ .htm. Accessed 28 Nov. 2019. Rose, Sonya O. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. U of California P, 1993. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, edited by J. Paul Hunte. W. W. Norton, 2012. Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books, 2013. Vaughan, Laura. Mapping Society:The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. UCL Press, 2018. Zlotnick, Susan. “‘The Law’s a Bachelor’: Oliver Twist, Bastardy, and the New Poor Law.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 34, 2006, pp. 131–146.

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PART III

New Multifactor Trends in Literature Theory

23 TA-NEHISI COATES DEMYSTIFIES AMERICAN CLASS AND RACE MYTHOLOGY Marleen S. Barr

But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us … The wealth gap [between blacks and whites] merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. (Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Ca se for Reparations”) Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, set after the invention of train travel and before the start of the Civil War, divides people into “classes and subclasses of Quality, Tasked, and Low” (Coates, Water 83). This new language denotes the following respective class categories: upper-class whites, slaves, and lower-class whites. The blacks, beyond the pale of economic class, are defined as subhuman property. Protagonist Hiram Walker, an educated and talented bi-racial slave, despite his potential to contribute to his white father Howell Walker’s plantation called Lockless, has the same social standing as the furniture he restores. He is lower than the furniture, because unlike the furniture, his status as a slave cannot be refinished; his life is finished. Hiram’s position as an economically exploited nonentity within his family exemplifies the roots of a situation in which today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism— … a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider—one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is. (Desmond 40) The Water Dancer fantastically portrays the digging up these economic roots, a social class excavation from which Hiram ultimately emerges positioned on the monetary high road. Coates refers to “roots” in his essay “The Case for Reparations”: Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family … By creating a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. (“Reparations”) 309

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Water re-creates a slave society, portrays Hiram’s eviscerated nuclear family, and stresses that American black economic dehumanization forms the foundation of white wealth. Water can be read as a fictitious articulation of the class issues Coates describes in “A Case for Reparations.” My epigraph illustrates this point by combining the supernatural (via the use of the words “haunted” and “ghosts”) with a description of blacks continuing to be economically bamboozled. Water is itself an illustrative case for reparations, an “airing of family secrets” about “American piracy— black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it” (Coates, “Reparations”). Water is an economic fantasy about blacks being mad as hell and not taking it anymore—and taking it back. Coates argues that the class designations that form the foundation of southern American society are based upon smoke and mirror distortions—lies. He demystifies the seemingly immutable tripartite human genres by bringing literary subgenres to bear upon them. Water is sodden with science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tale. The novel is a mystery story which asks readers to make sense of clues about when the fantastic will enable Hiram to finally “get out” of Lockless, to borrow the recent Jordan Peele movie title. Hiram’s comment that “[p]erhaps I should have greeted the unraveling of a mystery” (Coates, Water 212) is an appropriate readers’ response. Readers impatiently await the arrival of the fantastic which can turn Hiram into a superhero and Lockless into Wakanda. Readers, in other words, have a long wait for the arrival of fantastic Godot. The reason why the novel’s fantastic trope called “Conduction” requires fighting fire with fire by using water is not revealed until the middle of the novel. The complete ramifications of Hiram’s ability to perform Conduction become completely clear only at the end. Meanwhile, readers are placed in the position of awaiting the next installment of a serialized novel or a radio soap opera as they try to answer such questions as when will the fantastic arrive to save Hiram and enable him to get out of Lockless. Is the “Underground” establishing a space of black freedom in the swamp? Perhaps. Jews, after all, successfully hid from Nazis in forests. Does Starfall, the town in Virginia located nearest to Lockless, symbolize that science fiction will cause the slavery system’s downfall? What is Hiram’s superpower? Even Hiram does not initially know the answer to this question. Coates asks readers to wait and see what will happen in the novel’s three sections.The first section familiarizes readers with Hiram and reveals teasing clues about exactly how the fantastic will save the day. The second section describes slavery as a horror story made real. The third section reveals a surprise fairy tale ending. Stay tuned, as supposedly Low genre fiction sometimes announces. In the end, Hiram becomes a superpower-endowed superhero. He is an imagined connection to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls Obama’s election reviving “New Negro,” a “‘new’ kind of black person” metaphor. Gates continues: “We might think of the New Negro as Black America’s first superhero” (Gates 3). Gates enables me to position Hiram as a fictitious first black superhero precursor to Obama. Coates’s agenda is to show that master narratives which support the class and slavery systems are false narratives, fictitious stories that are as unreal as science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tale. My purpose is to focus on how Coates uses genre fiction to underscore that class categorization is based upon ludicrous mythology. Extraterrestrials and unicorns do not exist. Ditto for Hiram’s inferiority. Coates underscores that the tenets which are used to justify class distinctions—especially in relation to race—are fictions. But the white supremacy which existed prior to the Civil War has survived as economic reality which relegates many contemporary blacks to lower-class status. Jamelle Bouie explains this enduring class divide: For the most part, before the [Civil] War, blackness marked one as a slave. Afterward, it marked one as the lowest of laborers, relegated to sharecropping and domestic work, excluded from the mounting ranks of industrial labor … If they lived in cities, blacks were relegated to the least sanitary neighborhoods with the most substandard housing; if they had a skill or knew a craft, they were excluded from the guilds and unions that 310

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would have given them a path to employment; if they possessed a formal education, they were barred from most middle-class professions. (Bouie 14) Bouie’s use of the words “least sanitary” vis-à-vis class and neighborhoods has a present-day economic resonance which relates to the coronavirus outbreak in New York City. The highest death rates have occurred in the neighborhoods inhabited by minority groups. Many blacks do not hold the elite jobs which enable people to work from home. Black New Yorkers have died due to the pre-Civil War race and class categorizations Coates describes. Coates demystifies class categorizations by, like Toto pulling aside the curtain covering the wizard’s mundaneness, revealing that without the efforts of those “Tasked” with sewing, the Quality Emperor of the plantation house/“palace” has no clothes. Itself breaking free of genre fiction constraints, Water extends beyond the slavery novel to posit that women and Northern factory workers also need to be freed from class distinctions. Public intellectual Coates, master of nonfiction and comic book creation—and now novel writing—authors a text which defies genre and shows that class distinctions based upon texts (such as the law) are as fictitious as warlocks. Money does not equate with Quality. Skin color should not relegate people to unending Task doing, turn them into flesh made robots controlled by Low task masters. Barack Obama said: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” (Obama). The word “if ” signals entry into the realm of the black imaginary. Coates follows Obama within this realm. When creating Hiram he was echoing Obama. He seems to be saying if I time traveled to near pre-Civil War Virginia, I would look like Hiram. I would belong to the Tasking class. Coates becomes one with Hiram to the extent that, in the novel’s world, Hiram is the author of Water: “I am here, telling this story” (Coates 66). Coates describes engaging in a Vulcan mind meld with Hiram. Coates’s gesture here is analogous to Philip Roth calling his protagonist Philip Roth. Coates journeys as a time-traveling Connecticut Yankee who is a servant in King Arthur’s court. Most importantly, Water is akin to Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Like Butler’s Dana, he goes back to a working plantation too. Kindred, classified as Low science fiction, and Water, classified as Quality literature, are both actually part of the black imaginary supergenre. American mythology which reifies class distinction is Low. All people are Tasked with defining all people as human. A nonhuman human is as fictitious as a science fiction alien. Replete with contradictions, Water is, in part, science fiction. Conduction, for example, is analogous to women wielding electricity in Naomi Alderman’s The Power. It is useful to place Water’s presentation of slavery as a social class lower than all-white social classes within the context of critical discussions of black science fiction. In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, for example, André M. Carrington articulates the integral reciprocity between blackness and speculative fiction by coining two terms: “the Whiteness of science fiction” (16) and “the speculative fiction of blackness” (241). The former term “names both the overrepresentation of [United States-based] White people among the ranks of SF authors and the overrepresentation of White people’s experiences within SF texts” (Carrington 16). The latter term describe[s] how black authors and artists take part in an intellectual tradition that encompasses print literature while also enacting racial identification and performing critiques of racial ideology in ways that the disciplinary conventions I have assayed in this book can hardly imagine. (Carrington 241) When these terms collide, hegemonic white science fiction norms are newly relegated to the terra incognito of being positioned as strangers in strange science fiction lands. This disruption produces a hitherto unimaginable racial awareness-based upheaval which results in new cultural 311

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production. Water, in general, and its critique of racial ideology in relation to class in particular, adhere to Carrington’s designations and function in a manner outside the whiteness of science fiction. The whiteness of science fiction would not include a trope such as Harriet Tubman using a combination of African culture, black memory, and story to engage in Conduction—a means to dance on water. The dance opens a portal to a location of freedom—a place where Task class structure is nonexistent. Water dancing, another version of Colson Whitehead’s fantastic Underground Railroad, is a combination speculative fiction of blackness portal fantasy and Star Trek transporter room. Hiram eventually masters the ability to beam enslaved people over from Virginia to Philadelphia. His ability to “beam me over, Hiram,” his belatedly revealed superpower, positions him as a fantastic Underground Railroad conductor who abolishes Task classification in speculative fiction of blackness. Coates himself has engendered an example of the speculative fiction of blackness. Damon Lindelof, the creator of HBO’s Watchmen, explains that reading Coates’s essay about adverse economic impacts upon blacks inspired him to undertake the series. Lindelof says that I had read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations,” and it totally shifted my perception of United States history. He mentioned Tulsa, the massacre of Black Wall Street, which I had never heard of. Tulsa was just like Krypton to me. It felt like the destruction of a world. It felt like this peaceful utopia with all these intelligent people who had built this safe haven, and it was destroyed overnight. I was like, “That’s the idea.” (Egner 15) Lindelof, who equates whites’ purposeful destruction of a dynamic black economic undertaking with Krypton, learns from Coates that a particular example of exploding blacks’ efforts to raise their class status is very much not science fiction. Coates’s factual essay about economics inspires Lindelof to create black science fiction which communicates the class violence reality Coates’s essay describes. Madhu Dubey’s explanation of the relationship between black science fiction and black mainstream literature is applicable to Water. She speaks to the literary categorization Water addresses when it demystifies social class distinction: The critique of scientific rationality forms such a strong impelling, force in the fledgling field of black-authored science fiction as to almost warrant the term “anti-black science fiction.” In science fiction novels by black men and women writers … scientific practice is relentlessly indicted for its predatory exploitation of black bodies and scientific theory for validating claims of black racial inferiority. Afro-diasporic systems of knowledge and belief, such as vodun, obeah, or Santeria, are consistently shown to confound and triumph over scientific reason. (Dubey 34) When the full description of Conduction is finally revealed, it is shown to be a magical celebration of black bodies presented as a viable transportation system which cannot function without African alternative belief systems. Conduction triumphs over the reason-based informatics of domination which perpetrated slavery. Dubey goes on to say that resonance between [Low science fiction writer Nalo] Hopkinson and [Quality mainstream writer] Morrison suggests that what is recently being marketed as the newly emergent phenomenon of black women’s science fiction shares common generic traits with “mundane” or “mainstream” black women’s novels such as Morrison’s own … Beloved. (Dubey 35) 312

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Water contains the ghost present in Beloved, the unreal viable Underground Railroad in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the positioning of Harriet Tubman as a superhero in the film Harriet, and the Afro-diasporic belief systems which pervade Nnedi Okorafor’s work.Yet Water is marketed as Quality literature while black science fiction, which shares its characteristics, is marketed as Low. Water acts as a ghost buster in terms of this literary class system which I have called “textism.” Eric S. Rabkin’s notion of a “supergenre,” which describes the inclusive class deconstructing “black fantastic,” is a more accurate term for black science fiction writers’ endeavors than “anti-black science fiction.” Like his fellow literary genius and comic book writer Okorafor—and like all the black writers I mentioned—Coates is involved in “flouting of the norms of realism and rational explication” (Dubey 35) to take on two ludicrous class systems at once. He emphasizes that class systems are constructed fictions which have nothing to do with people’s inherent value. Readers of Water wait interminably to fully understand Coates’s vision of the triumph of the black fantastic. Hiram, placed outside of economic class designations to the extent that he does not qualify as a pauper who can take the prince’s place, ultimately inherits the Lockless “white palace” (Coates, Water 385). He survives and thrives because Underground operatives are able to use the obfuscation which enables class systems to exist to their own advantage.White Underground agent Corrinne Quinn, who possesses the tactical acumen of Nancy Pelosi and the spy charisma of Emma Peel, is able to control her Bryceton plantation and to inherit Lockless. She covertly uses obfuscation to create a new egalitarian social order within these edifices. Demystifying how the Quality perpetuated itself via an insidious veneer is at the heart of Water. Hiram realizes that the insidiousness really was all an illusion, that his entire order was engineering, was sorcery, all of it held up by elaborate display, by rituals and … and powders and face-paint, it was all device, and now stripped of it I saw that we [Hiram and Corinne] were just two people. (Coates,Water 172) The “device” is analogous to the wizard’s fake rule of the Emerald City. Like Dorothy and the wizard, Hiram and Corinne are “just two people”; the pre-Civil War social hegemony does not see that there is no real and rational reason for class differences between black and white people. Yet Hiram’s white “father believed this insanity” (Coates, Water 68) to the extent that he at once trades his son’s black mother for a horse and lauds that son’s oafish untalented white half-brother Maynard. Howell continues to enslave the highly superior Hiram instead of benefiting Lockless by making him heir to the property. Charles M. Blow’s description of Trumpism as “a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy” (Blow) relates to this situation. Blow calls Trumpism the “belief that the most vile, anti-intellectual, scandal-plagued simpleton of a white man is sufficient to follow in the presidential footsteps of the best educated, most eloquent, most affable black man” (Blow). Howell believes that Maynard, who precisely adheres to Blow’s description of an inferior white man, is a better choice to follow in his footsteps as heir to Lockless than Hiram, who precisely adheres to Blow’s description of an intelligent black man. Howell thinks that a dead white man, Maynard’s corpse, is better than his exceedingly talented living black son. Blow’s following assertion continues the analogy between Trumpism and Howell’s faulty reasoning: Trump’s supporters are saying to us, screaming to us, that although he may be the “lowest white man,” he is still better than Barack Obama, the “best colored man.” For white supremacy to be made perfect, the lowest white man must be exalted above those who are black. (Blow)

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According to Howell, Maynard, who is the lowest white man, is better than Hiram, who is the best colored man. His attitude reflects Coates’s insistence that to celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism á la carte. Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and subhumans than the wealth gap. (Coates, “Reparations”) In relation to Maynard, Hiram is a sub-son denied access to his family’s capital. Maynard nonetheless belongs to a social category that Water does not mention: the Low/ Quality. For the system that runs Lockless to function smoothly, Maynard, despite his deficiencies, must be exalted over Hiram, despite his talents. In Blow’s words, No matter how much of an embarrassment and a failure Trump proves to be, his exploits must be judged a success. He must be deemed a correction to Barack Obama and a superior choice to Hillary Clinton. White supremacy demands it. Patriarchy demands it. Trump’s supporters demand it. (Blow) The entire social slavery edifice mythology demands that Maynard be valorized and that Hiram be branded as unsuitable. In the wake of mentioning Hillary Clinton, it can be noted that “Lockless” can be read as a humorous retort to Trump supporters’ “lock her up” chant. Lockless in this vein means more freedom and truth. Or, as Bernie Sanders might say, enough with the social mythology constructions. Howell Walker has an economic stake in a falsely constructed fake world Virginia “where it was held that a whole race would submit to chains” (Coates, Water 70); this fake social construction is “an empire so great that none dare speak its true name” (Coates, Water 70). Howell benefits from the fact that the “wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves” (Coates, “Reparations”). Water, a novel saturated with Low genre fiction, metafictionally speaks the true name: horror fiction. The Quality take care not to know the true story of their horror fiction’s protagonists. “To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own” (Coates, Water 83–84).The Quality cannot become resisting readers of the horror movie they write and direct because to do so would make them share Hiram’s feeling that “some trap door fell out from under me” (Coates, Water 85). This feeling mimics the plot of the already mentioned movie, Get Out. The Tasked have no realistic way to get out of slavery. As Georgie Parks, the free black unexpected villain of the novel explains, “‘Ain’t nobody out, son, you hear? Ain’t no out. All gotta serve’” (Coates, Water 60). Hiram does get out when he works with Corinne and the Underground to build an alternative history smoke and mirror space of black and white equality and mutual humanity. They construct literal rooms of Hiram’s own hidden within the penultimate destiny of Lockless and Bryceton. Coates juxtaposes fact and fiction to underscore the truth. He places Madison and Jefferson within a light which is as unfamiliar as the blue light which appears during Conduction: [B]ut these fools, these Jeffersons, these Madisons, these Walkers, all dazzled by theory, well I am convinced that the most degraded field-hand … knew more of the world than any overstuffed, forth-holding American philosophe … Power makes slaves of masters. (Coates,Water 153)

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Calling founding fathers fools and elevating field slaves above them is as jarring as using a plantation house as an Underground Railroad station. The blue light, a science fiction trope, reveals that the brilliant framers’ belief in the fictitious tenets which supported slavery are guilty of foolish thinking. Noticing the blue light’s relation to science fiction supports this unusual observation. Walter Mosley’s science fiction novel Blue Light describes how an extraterrestrial blue light causes people to exceed normal human capabilities. Those the light impacts, called “Blues,” are initially segregated from society due to their new superhuman powers. Similarly, Hiram possesses a superhuman power and he is removed from society when Underground agents train him by imprisoning him in a hole in the ground. The founding fathers were as enslaved by the fake slavery justification lying story as Howell Walker. They are perpetrators of “fraud” (Coates, Water 100) in the form of creating a race-based Ponzi scheme in which skin color regulates who is placed on top and who is placed on the bottom. Coates positions these founding father fraudsters as being analogous to fantasy story villains we all know. For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors at the gate, staving off African savagery, when it is themselves who are the savages, who are Mordred, who are the Dragon, in Camelot’s clothes. (Coates,Water 100) He is writing a fractured fantasy fairy tale in which slave owners such as Washington and Jefferson participate in a retold tale version of Jacqueline Kennedy’s presidential Camelot story. In this tale the founders become Virginia devils in King Arthur’s court who are so many Mordreds mounted atop dragons laying siege to the round table. They deny blacks a seat and add more dread to their lives. Here, again, Coates counters social mythology with genre fiction. He shows that the Quality build elite housing castles literally erected to make it seem as if the Tasked are as magical as Merlin’s powers. Lockless is built on top of “Warrens” where the Tasked live. The Warrens provide the sole entrance to the house the Tasked can access and, by doing so, turn them into invisible men. The tunnel … was the only entrance that the Tasked were allowed to use, for the tunnel was but one of the many engineering marvels built into Lockless so as to make it appear powered by some imperceptible energy … so that one could imagine that we were not slaves at all but mystical ornaments. (Coates,Water 35) Using architecture to make lower-class people seem to disappear is in force today. In New York City, condo towers, which by law must include affordable housing, relegate lower-class occupants to using a separate entrance called the poor door. I must break into my own experiential voice here to say that I lived in a Park Avenue co-op apartment building which required all maids to use the service entrance and the service elevator. Nannies, in contrast, could use the main entrance and elevators. Why? The maids were predominantly black and the nannies were predominantly white. Horror fiction becomes real when Coates describes how Washington Square in Philadelphia was built on top of black corpses. He states that Doctor Benjamin Rush, who of course was as real as Jefferson and Madison, created a fantasy story about how blacks were immune to a wave of fever. Further, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. (Coates,Water 236)

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This is an example of how historical reality included within Water juxtaposes fact and fiction. Coates reveals that blacks died because Rush literally turned them into science fiction protagonists. The truth is worse than the protagonists living in the Warrens under Lockless. Philadelphians “built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square [Washington Square] for their liberating genera” (Coates 236). Calling Washington a liberator is a mythology. Rush reified mythology to make blacks a literal underclass. Architecture holds up the mythology-based social edifice by being built to hide the truth about the social façade. “We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives” (Coates, Water 35). Hiram is better than his father and his white half-brother. While Howell (who evokes the comedic buffoon millionaire Thurston Howell of Gilligan’s Island fame) does nothing but eat and sleep within Lockless and Maynard is a joke, Hiram is a brilliant, talented, and triumphant hero. Coates again juxtaposes the fantastic with historical reality when he situates Harriet Tubman as the most superior person in Water. She is the best practitioner of Conduction, a superpower which moves the Tasked from the space of slavery to the space of freedom. Tubman is the water dancer. “She explains that conduction is just like dancing … [S]tay with the story and you will be fine” (Coates 271). The story, like slave narratives, is the articulated black experience. Conduction is a fantastic story which is about real class-related border crossing. Reyna Grande’s discussion of “another kind of border—the walls that the publishing industry puts up for Latino writers” (100) is applicable to connecting the border crossing Conduction science fictionally makes possible with real border crossing in relation to class. Grande links border crossing to class when she comments about her experience as a Mexican immigrant who wishes to become an American writer: I learned that American society is very good at hindering its immigrant population by putting up barriers—real and metaphorical. I soon discovered that there were more borders to cross—cultural, linguistic, legal, educational, economic and more.When I chose to pursue a career in writing, a field that is predominantly white, I realized that the publishing industry too had borders and people who patrol them … Once upon a time, being a border crosser was a source of shame for me. But when I got older, I realized that it was my superpower. (Grande 10) Conduction is a once upon a time story about a woman who possesses an economic border-crossing superpower. Coates’s Tubman can transcend any class barrier that white America can construct. Since Coates tells “the story” Tubman evokes, in addition recasting himself as Hiram the author of Water, he metafictonally engages in Conduction too. Water functions as a way-back machine which retells racist mythologies and reveals them to be ludicrous fabrications. The Conduction movement jump is done by the power of the story. It pulls from our particular histories, from all of our loves and all of our losses. All of that feeling is called up, and on the strength of our remembrances, we are moved. (Coates,Water 278) Story is the fuel which moves the slaves. It functions in the manner of “churten transilience,” the spaceship fuel which consists of story as Ursula K. Le Guin describes this material in “The Shobies’ Story.” Without story the spaceships cannot fly and Tubman cannot perform Conduction. “That is Conduction … The many stories. The way over the river … Conduction got to have water” (Coates, Water 280, 282). The combination of story and water Conducts slaves to the real North as well as their past origin point in Africa where they were located before being forced 316

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into waterborne slave ship passage. This is a fantastic optimistic vision which is akin to the plot of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. Amis imagines that Holocaust victims inhabit life camps and, hence, can return to their lives before they were imprisoned. Slaves who are Conducted can time travel to their past freedom too. Only deities can walk on water.Tubman’s ability makes her transcendentally transformative in relation to the Quality. She is a god. Her exalted position is derived from venerating the African culture Dubey describes. Black Africans were forced to walk through a portal, the door of no return, to board the slave ships. Tubman, a real historical figure, can make a portal fantasy real; she enables slaves to return to the door of no return. “And I knew we were not in Philadelphia anymore. A door had opened … Conduction” (Coates, Water 276). With reference to my aforementioned mention of the Emerald City, Tubman is the great and powerful figure who makes the Quality small and meek. She is the real fantastic deal in terms of being the wizard. She is a superhero who, in accordance with Gates’s aforementioned reference to “Black America’s first superhero” (Gates)—like Hiram—is also a precursor to Obama. When Coates elevates Tubman to superhero status, he uses mythology to circumvent race and class stratification in the manner of how Italian-Americans incorporated Columbus Day mythology to elevate their status in American society. Columbus Day is based upon a premise which is as fantastic as Coates’s Tubman: [William Henry] Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth … The mythologizing … granted Italian-Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative” … The Italian-Americans who labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965 used the romantic fictions built around Columbus to political advantage. This shows yet again how racial categories that people mistakenly view as matters of biology grow out of highly politicized myth making. (Staples SR 4–5) Blacks do not have an analogous mythological figure to raise their class status. Coates’s Tubman can function in the elevating manner of Italian-Americans’ Columbus. The powers and abilities he mythologically attributes to Tubman are as fantastic as the assertion that Columbus discovered a continent native people inhabited.Yet the Columbus myth enables families such as the Pelosis and the Cuomos to thrive economically. Coates’s supernatural Tubman underscores that blacks’ lack of an analogous mythology relegated them to further lower-class status in the American national story. Columbus crossed the ocean. Tubman engages in “conducting” (Coates, Water 283) to traverse a river: “She really had conducted across a river in winter. The whip really had melted in the overseer’s hand. She was the only agent never … to lose a passenger on the rail” (Coates, Water 284). The mundaneness of her activity is augmented by “conducting” in a fantastic musical sense: she imbues the orchestration of Quality, Tasked, and Low with a new liberating premise. The melted whip becomes a magic wand or an orchestra conductor’s baton in her hand, a baton which beats down the class distinction repertoire. The music resonates with “Afro-diasporic systems of knowledge and belief ” (Dubey 34); Hiram remembers “Cuffee [a slave who preceded him at Lockless], who tucked the drum into his bones” (Coates, Water 394). This impossible placement signals that the music resounds with fairy tale, a “Peter and the Wolf ” composition. Readers have waited interminably for the fantastic deus ex machina—the Low subgenre which demystifies placing blacks outside of economic class distinction by revealing that this segregation is a mythology—to arrive to enable Hiram to get out of slavery. They finally learn that his release comes in the form of fairy tale. The Goose River necessary to perform Conduction near Lockless is associated with this genre. “Momma was the goose. But we was the golden eggs” (Coates, Water 209). The baker Hiram meets in Philadelphia who goes by the science fictionally resonant name 317

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“Mars” shows kindness toward Hiram by giving him “gingerbread wrapped in paper. ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘Family’” (Coates, Water 310). Gingerbread, that most fairy tale-like confection, unlocks the importance of fairy tale in Water. In the end, the Quality receives its just desserts when Hiram reveals that the tenets which hold up slavery are specious tall tales. Hiram gets a family: his love Sophia and her daughter Caroline. Corrine, the owner of Lockless after Howell’s demise, has the real power to turn it into an Underground Railroad station. Hiram can live within in a dignified manner. Corrine creates a replacement smoke and mirror class façade, a new veneer constructed to undo the old veneer about the nonexistent difference between Quality and Tasked. Within the social role reversal Corinne establishes inside Lockless the old south is gone with the wind and Hiram inherits the wind—the ability to blow away race mythology’s positioning of blacks as an enslaved class by themselves. More directly, Corrinne makes it possible for Hiram to inherit the house. So much for “excluding black people from most legitimate ways of obtaining a mortgage” and the contemporary fact that “[b]lack families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by whites making $30,000” (Coates, “Reparations”).When Coates waves a magic wand to eliminate the basis of current housing discrimination, he uses humor analogous to Kevin Willmott’s mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Willmott hilariously imagines an alternative world in which the south won the Civil War and slavery presently exists to the extent that blacks are sold on the Home Shopping Network. Seeming to connect to Willmott’s tone, Coates states that [l]ike home ownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, affecting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves … Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners? (Coates, “Reparations”) The contemporary homeowners Willmott depicts read a magazine called Better Homes and Plantations.To update Coates’s and Willmott’s no longer exaggerated visions of exploitation:Trump, whose father refused to rent apartments to blacks, could be counted on to take property economically to benefit himself and—if he could get away with it—to sell blacks on television as a part of the Trump brand. In relation to Hiram, Corinne transforms Lockless into a gingerbread house. Like Tubman, he has ‘[t]he power” (Coates, Water 197) of Conduction. Hiram can permeate the walls of Lockless any time he pleases. He can go where he wants to go—even “to escape to—Africa” (Coates, Water 92). He can live in his house with his family in peace. “I am eating ginger snaps under the willow” (Coates, Water 397). Hiram can, in other words, boldly go where no real slave has gone before. Hiram gives new meaning to Jack Zipes’s title Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. To bet that Hiram, the slave who does not even qualify to be a pauper, will become the fresh prince of Lockless would not be a very good wager. In the fairy tale ending of Water, genre boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Don’t bet that Harry Windsor would want to be a prince forever. Don’t bet that Hiram will never be a prince. Hiram becomes ensconced as the Lockless kingdom’s rightful heir—and he possesses a science fiction/fantasy superpower too. Hiram looks up in the sky and he sees clearly science fiction and fantasy, and mythology: “I looked up into the night, which was big and clear, the moon as bright as a goddess, the stars all her progeny, all her fates and dryads and nymphs, spread out across the cosmos” (Coates, Water 392). Coates’s nonfiction 318

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brings this fairy tale happy class-busting ending to bear upon current economic reality. He indicates that, if they were real individuals, Hiram’s ancestors would probably not own the land they inherited: In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of blackowned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. (Coates, “Reparations”) Economic reality nullifies happy-ever-after endings in relation to black social class security. No longer waiting for black fantastic Godot to enable him to get out, Hiram clearly sees that social mythology—which is no more real than fates, dryads, and nymphs—provides the justification for enslaving him. When Hiram inherits the real estate property within which he was defined as property, he enacts a power fantasy about upending the race-based wealth gap, rooted in the slave system, which the coronavirus makes so apparent. Hiram ultimately transcends “[t]oday’s racial wealth gap [which] is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed” (Lee 82). He ends up in a fantastic class by himself. He is in “an Underground station all to myself … The necklace of shells was warm against me” (Coates, Water 392–393). The shell necklace, an African culture artifact, signifies that American social class constructions are shell games. Coates ensconces Tubman in the social firmament and positions her as a god. She is a hero—and so are the “factory slaves” (Coates 398). Slavery—and all mythological class divisions—can imprison us all. Water leaps beyond genre distinctions to align itself with literary criticism. Carrington echoes Coates’s intention when he says that his Speculative Blackness is a book about what speculative fiction, in the many ways we encounter and embody it, has to say about what it means to be Black. It is also about how placing Blackness at the center of discussions about speculative fiction augments our understanding of what the genre might be and what it might do … I … hope to encourage SF readers and critics to acknowledge that race matters in speculative fiction; whether we realize it or not, our engagement with the genre entails a variety of complex relationships with Blackness. (1–2) Water is a novel about what speculative fiction has to say about being black—about being a person who is not an alien in relation to the true definition of humanity. Coates was of course unaware of the class-related meaning of the title The Water Dancer which relates to Jamelle Bouie’s explanation of the correlation between American racial inequality and blacks dying from the coronavirus. This is his conclusion in answer to the question of “[w]hy the coronavirus is killing African-Americans more than others” (Bouie 14): If there was anything you could predict about this pandemic—anything you could be certain about once it reached America’s shores—it was that some communities would weather the storm while others would sink under the waves and that the distribution of this suffering would have everything to do with patterns inscribed by the past. As long as those patterns remain, there is no path to a better society. We have to break them, before they break us. (Bouie 14) When he mentions those who “sink under the waves,” he juxtaposes class with water imagery. Coates’s novel describes race and class category “patterns inscribed by the past.” The virus has 319

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shown that survival is not a sink-or-swim end game in which class and race provide some people with an economic life preserver. The virus has shown that we are all in the same boat. In order to weather the virus storm, we must all become the water dancer. We must all take steps to create a more egalitarian society.Will we break the race and class patterns inscribed by the past? The answer is currently a science fiction story. The story’s subgenre—race and class dystopia or utopia—is indeterminate.

Works Cited Alderman, Naomi. The Power. Little, Brown, 2017. Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. Random House, 2011. Blow, Charles M. “The Lowest White Man.” New York Times, 11 Jan. 2018. Bouie, Jamelle. “The Racial Character of Inequality in America” New York Times, 19 Apr. 2020, pp. 14–15. Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2009. Carrington, André M. Speculative Blackness:The Future of Race in Science Fiction. The U of Minnesota P, 2016. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “A Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 2014, www​.t​​heatl​​antic​​.com/​​magaz​​ine​/a​​rchiv​​e​ /201​​4​/06/​​the​-c​​ase​-f​​or​-re​​parat​​ions/​​36163​​1/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2020. ———. The Water Dancer. One World, 2019. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Directed and written by Kevin Willmott, produced by Rick Cowan, performance by Rupert Pate, Evamarie Johnson, and Larry Peterson, Hodcarrier Films, 2004. Desmond, Matthew. “In Order To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism,You Have To Start on the Plantation.” New York Times, 18 Aug. 2019, pp. 30–40. Dubey, Madhu. “Becoming Animal in Black Women’s Science Fiction.” Afro-Future Females: Black Writer’s Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New Wave Trajectory. Edited by Marleen S. Barr, Ohio State UP, 2008, pp. 31–51. Egner, Jeremy. “The Story’s Heart? Race and Masks.” New York Times, 20 Oct. 2019, p. 15. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Stony the Road: Reconstruction,White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin, 2019. Get Out. Produced, directed and written by Jordan Peele, performance by Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams and Bradley Whitford, Universal Pictures, 2017. Gilligan’s Island. Produced and created by Sherwood Schwartz, directed by Ron Amateau, performance by Bob Denver, Alan Hale, Jr., and Jim Backus, CBS, 1964–1967. Grande, Reyna. “‘American Dirt’ Isn’t the Problem.” The New York Times Book Review, 2 Feb. 2020, p. 10. Harriet. Directed by Kagi Lemmons, produced by Debra Martin Chase, screenplay by Gregory Allen Howard, performance by Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Joe Alwyn, Perfect World Pictures, 2019. Lee, Trymaine. “A Vast Wealth Gap, Driven By Segregation, Redlining, Evictions, and Exclusion, Separates White and Black America.” New York Times Magazine, 18 Aug. 2019, pp. 82–83. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Shobies’ Story.” 1990. Great Science Fiction Stories Universe 1. Broadway Books, 1996. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Random House, 1987. Mosley, Walter. Blue Light. Little, Brown, 1998. Obama, Barack. The Washington Post. Online. 23 Mar. 2012. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton UP, 2015. Staples, Brent. “How Italians Became ‘White.’” New York Times, 12 Oct. 2019. Watchmen. Created and produced by Damon Lindelof, performance by Regina King, Don Johnson, and Tim Blake Nelson, HBO, 2019. Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Doubleday, 2016. Zipes, Jack. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Routledge, 2012.

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24 DESIRING WEIRD BODIES Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf Rebecca W. Boylan

The truism, “it’s always about money,” reveals and complicates realism in socio-economic class identity and experience. In the novels of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, money talks a lot as the narratives focus on changing attentions to both the lower and upper classes and their shocking revelations given the rise of the new middle class.The British authors on whom this article focuses highlighted class as a tension worthy to present the complexity of realism. Consider Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff, washing up on the shores of Liverpool, just as possibly an exiled Indian prince as an orphan of the Irish potato famine, struggles violently with Yorkshire landowners of the Heights and Grange. Or, Charles Dickens’s travails of London’s lower-class hunger and contagion as a lens to explore stigmas of moral degradation cast by upper-class ignorance and fear grasping greedily for assumed dominance. George Eliot decidedly complicates matters of class by connecting these to biases against women, political rivalries, personal judgments born of religious pieties, and willful refusals to appreciate burgeoning professions in the arts and sciences. Literary realism, especially in the nineteenth century, was not defined as simply representing those actualities occurring every day, but provoked readers’ imaginations to reveal hidden truths— in ways similar to the century’s technological re-invention of the eye—the camera. As Jennifer Green-Lewis argues, realism has always been confused by itself: “Realism is an ostensibly consensual mode of representation, since to objectify a world, which is the project of realism, requires a shared agreement, a complicity, in what the object status of the world might be” (26; emphasis added). Green-Lewis continues that narrative realism thereby assumes that it objectifies that world we share, but instead appears as entangled discourses of “notions, representations, images, attitudes, gestures, and modes of action” that promise a normative “solidarity” not as certain as its claims in a century of varied and continuous social changes (John Tagg and Elizabeth Ermarth qtd. in GreenLewis, 26–27). This article extrapolates from this complex understanding of realism; the nineteenth-century novel’s focus on class dialectically created a commonality in everyday experiencing and knowing and, at the same time, a subjectivity that resisted shared perception. Postmodern and contemporary theorists have extended even further the connection between perception and subjectivities surrounding class. This article looks at three novels complicating realism’s response to societal constructs of these subjectivities provoked by lively if also tragically obsessive desires emanating from realism’s paradoxical readings of class identities and experiences: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway. I begin by acknowledging the more usual reason we explore class in literature, especially nineteenth-century texts fraught with class upheaval. Carolyn Betensky, who focuses on the social 321

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problem novel, creates a most worthy argument on class in her 2010 study, Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. She shows how these novels allowed the bourgeoise reader to feel for the poor and thereby satisfy their own sense of philanthropy. While I also find class an emotive and ethical launch into the nineteenth-century novel, this particular article is most interested in pursuing how examining the complex work of perception drives a means of knowing, and in particular, how that knowing technologically and aesthetically comprises both a cognitive and ethical understanding of the performance of class in the nineteenth-century novel. However, what about those novels depicting class tensions that fiercely refuse to succumb to sympathy? How might a more cerebral empathy pay attention to the importance of perceiving class in the commodified body—even weirdly so—as defined by its fiscal value? How do novels, clearly class-driven but situated outside of the didactic affirmation of the emotional as moral, expand class consciousness in dialectical exchanges of power erupting from obsessive perception and possession of one’s own subjectivity? How do these novels resist societal constructs which they so clearly enact as class identity performances? While the usual and understandable focus on novels of class relies on how they evoke sympathy en route to expanding moral conscience, this study is instead interested in the authors’ intellectual, and to a somewhat lesser extent, aesthetic purposes in evoking empathy—an understanding of but not necessarily compassion for those whose bodies are marked by both lower- and upperclass simulacrum. After all, none of these novels’ protagonists, variously troubled by their society’s prejudices toward class and gender subjectivities, were understood by their times. Instead they used to engender frustrated impatience, if not disgust, in many readers. Jude was notoriously burned for its immorality by a reverend; Wilde felt the need to write a Preface for Dorian after the scandalous response its first publication provoked, proclaiming, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (41). This same Preface was used against him in a trial that cost him his life. And Woolf ’s narrative told through fixating streams of consciousness decidedly is more concerned with knowing as a product of class than with ethical conundrums. This approach to class requires that we look at the interstices of class and perception.Visual and cultural theorist, Jonathan Crary, provides extensive and intensive scholarship on the significance of this relationship in the nineteenth century, arguing that the socially constructed meaning of one’s class is significantly driven by a co-evolution: class as determinant of individual worth and perception as determinant of cognition (Suspensions 97). According to Crary, perception, the objective of attention, is both unique to the individual and historically sensitive (Suspensions 1–10). Each age’s means of attending to their environment is in large part constructed by that age’s technology and the ensuing effects of such. As this article demonstrates, the nineteenth-century invention of the camera disrupted how we read faces as normative signifiers of class, for the photographed face or body began to trouble narrow preconceptions of poverty or wealth. These ubiquitous images were much less expensive to create and to purchase, the technology producing several copies of the original and situating these images in advertisements and other contexts that confused someone’s picture as someone’s truth (Baudrillard qtd. in Crary, Techniques 12). How we focus determines how we see and are seen as well as the importance or value we give to the performance of attention. Further, the different ways we pay attention or allow our attention to be captured or ensnare another’s attention define our subjectivities.The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, for example, is struck by how Modernity’s (which sometimes includes the late Victorian period) consumption of commodities shifted the context, manner, and degree to which we make meaning from that which we gaze upon. For Baudrillard, one of the most startling effects of this shift is a loss of the real, the consumer’s obsession with the commodity removing its self-referential meaning and giving way to a hyperreal meaning, significantly situating the nineteenth-century narrative’s realism portraying individual character study and crowd networking as socio-economically—or class—driven (36–37, 166–167). 322

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Baudrillard underscores that humanity has always, quite ironically, measured self-awareness according to the images of us constructed by others (167–171). These images determine how others see and judge our gender, sexual, ethnic, and class identities. All our identities are important in their many intersections, but the socio-economics of class launch especially complex consequences and ramifications in those internalized everyday realities of which Green-Lewis speaks. Our minds and psyches have always been decidedly involved in perceiving our sense of the real and the significance of its truths.Thomas Hardy identifies perceptions as impressions (Hardy qtd. in Bullen, 3).We might disagree with another about what we view or see, but it is very difficult to argue with how others process their visions. Paul Ricoeur, the twentieth-century philosopher celebrated especially for his work on metaphor, reminds us that our experience creates images in our minds which leave marks on our consciousness as impressions via language. For Ricoeur, influenced here by Sartre, this shift from image to language marks the process of perceiving that the real is what evolves from fiction—the process of telling the story begins but does not end with the image. Even when, for example, the subject of a photograph is absent from a viewer of the picture, that photographed subject might still be imagined as embodying a real presence. A photograph as both image and set of impressions does not replicate reality but creates its own perceptions of a subject we recognize as real to us (118–124, 133). In this way, Ricoeur thought-provokingly extends Green-Lewis on narrative realism in his claim that by evoking those societal norms which provide us a common context of our identity, “fiction changes reality, in the sense that it both ‘invents’ and ‘discovers’ it” (121). The differences between individuals’ impressions or perceptions of a shared reality—lived experience—or images of this reality are what make the studies of knowledge and truth both supremely frustrating and fascinating—even compelling. Given that corporate or mass perception is a reality produced within systemic hierarchies largely determined by class, it is also given that those individuals who don’t identify as powerful more often than not look at reality in very different ways from those with privilege. It is important to note that the nineteenth-century novel is troubled by the alienation of any individual whose class is determined by the normative perception of class as deserving of suspicion and exclusion. While those outside communal power are vulnerable, many resiliently resist the vision their society assumes as natural or legal law. The outsiders’ odd and perverse resistance to living according to the perceptions of those in charge often transforms into obsessive views and behaviors necessary for the endurance of those in fringe castes. These exploited identities, represented here as bodies queered by society’s systemic class hierarchy, strive to sustain themselves by obsessively desiring the self cast off by society.These lonely but fierce fixations provoke what The Oxford English Dictionary references as “the decomposition of the mind,” resulting from “the action or notion of any fixed idea which persistently assails or vexes” (obsess/ obsession”). Obsession, the OED informs us, attacks wellbeing from without, because the outsider’s mere struggle to survive and thereby maintain the self conjures the monster identity detailed by cultural medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen (1–20). Sadly these alienated subjects under obsession’s barrages—because they perceive truths beyond the assumed social realism—are consumed by those external forces dismantling their natures, their selves. Their subjectivities as rich or poor, healthy or ill, or even “that new middle,” result in a realism that is further confusing to traditional ways of understanding the relationships between individuals. The middle produces a non-binary, perverse to the simply defined duality dictated by social norms. In Hardy’s 1896 Jude the Obscure, Jude’s idealism for a university education to study theology becomes an idée fixe to enter Christminster (Oxford) despite being a tradesman who has educated himself, poring over Greek and Latin texts while driving his aunt’s bakery delivery cart. J. Hillis Miller defines desire in this novel as “‘compulsory,’” quoting Hardy himself in an earlier novel. Miller demonstrates how this “word suggests a psychological law, a law which governs the desires of all men and women with implacable coercion” (165). Of course, Jude’s own compulsory desire or law for a university education never comes to fruition because his lower socio-economic status 323

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prohibits his entrance through Christminster’s gates. His dream remains fraught with humiliating perceptions of his stonemason’s chalk-skinned body as good only to repair the university tower’s elaborately chiseled heads, but not allowed to dismantle a soul born ahead of his time. His wife, the fiscally pragmatic Arabella, leaves Jude suicidal when she realizes his aspirations will not produce her own socio-economic advancement. More perceptive of their century’s class hypocrisy than Jude, Sue Bridehead, his beloved, is that weirdly ethereal body, more spirit than substance, who becomes more invisible as she becomes more driven by the material. Ill and impoverished, Jude and Sue suffer the deaths of all their children, including one unborn. Estranged from Sue’s anguished spirit, Jude dies alone while hearing the university’s bells toll for Christminster’s Remembrance (graduation) celebrations. In Wilde’s 1891 The Picture of Dorian Gray, the wealthy subject in and of a painting—and its artists Basil Hallward, Lord Henry, and Sybil Vane—are individually and collaboratively besieged by tormented desires that literally and figuratively consume the life of the man in the painting, Dorian. In her 1925 Mrs Dalloway, Woolf assails the upper-crust but largely silenced Clarissa Dalloway and middle-class Great War veteran Septimus Smith with troubling, relentless vestiges of the 1918 flu epidemic. Illness takes over the body and mind of both characters, dialectically awakening and blocking perception of Modernity’s warring desire to protect English traditional power structures and the desire to break out to revolutionary new ways of regarding illness as part of England’s class systems. All three novels focus on subjectivities that begin, in some way, with the writers’ attention to desires driven by bodies and minds displaying changing perceptions of human capabilities, cravings, and rights, resisting societal constructs of the significance of their class identities. Jude, Arabella, Sue, Dorian, Clarissa, and Septimus epitomize the desire for realism’s indeterminate portrait of the human in bodies ostracized by rigidities and fears born of class assumptions.

Obsessed by Looking: Fetishizing Outcast Bodies in Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy’s final 1896 novel, Jude the Obscure, horrified readers and critics who attacked the author’s moral empathy for his peasant protagonist’s perverse defiance of societal decorum. Readers were disgusted by Jude’s and his lovers’ disobedience to Victorian marriage laws, as well as by the peasant’s weakness for drink and his seeming arrogance in seeking a theological degree from upper-class Oxford—or Christminster. However, as Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton demonstrates in his introduction to the 1974 Macmillan edition of the novel, Jude, showing quite a normal sexual appetite, threatens his century’s readers’ discomfort not as an uppity peasant, but as a humanist tradesman, whose intelligence and perseverance to earn his way into university disrupt the social order (Eagleton xii). Hardy reinforces evidence of Jude as obviously more suited for theological study than the rich young men whose wealth grants them places within Christminster’s gates. On the sad occasion of Jude’s drunken despair on being told by Christminster’s Master that Jude “‘will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your own trade,’” Jude is disgusted first by his own submission to the absurdly privileged youth who taunt him into reciting the Apostles’ Creed in Latin (96–101). Roused by their own privileged drunkenness, they fetishize the stonemason’s dusty body inebriated by class injustice and his mysteriously accrued knowledge—he is the enigma they obsessively mock to ensure his distance from their wealth. Jude, the self-taught stonemason, is secondly disgusted by the jeers of the ignorant wealthy on whom he has wasted his flawless recitation: “It might have been the Ratcatcher’s Daughter in double Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell!” (100). Hardy fills his narrative with characters looking and being looked at as socially constructed images determined by class identities, thereby disarming confidence that perceiving reality leads to productive knowledge. Productive knowledge is defined here as that which enables the knower to intervene in their society’s social-economic power dynamics to activate the equality and happiness they idealize. While the lower classes might not be able to move beyond what the upper class allows, Hardy reveals how 324

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upper-class hypocrisy stifles upper-class knowing, demonstrated in the audience-demanded creed performance above. Christminster inmates remain stagnant throughout the story’s approximate three decades because they insist on remaining ignorant, bound by myths rather than realities concerning social class and native intelligence and/or ableness. Bogdan Popa, in a most refreshing approach to political theory, develops a compelling argument about the agency of lower-class shame. I argue that even when this agency doesn’t evolve into measurable advancement for Jude, in Hardy granting Jude a voice reflecting reason and clarity, we perceive in the stonemason’s adamantly charged words that the hypocrisy of the dominant is teetering before the shamed bodies it desires and then casts out. In this turnabout study of Judith Butler, J. S. Mill, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and others, Popa argues compellingly for the outsider voice defying the norm not only to shame, but also to humiliate or expose in harsh language “the police” (9, 60, 63). Police is a concept identified by Rancière as “‘the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing, this distribution’” (Rancière qtd. in Popa 4). Jude’s class continually collides with these procedures, powers, and normative systems in encounters with police representatives (reading while driving his aunt’s bakery cart as a youth; speaking aloud to Christminster’s academic ghosts in his eerie midnight arrival disturbing the peace in his celestial city; and in an enlightened but mad rage when he returns, on the brink of death, to the place that has locked him out of his dreams simply because he is of the wrong class). In this last instance, before silencing by a policeman, Jude’s speech to Christminster on a rain-soaked Remembrance Day reels out shame on the pompous graduation rites: ‘However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses … were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages … I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas.’ (Hardy 278) As Popa demonstrates, it is the speeches, and even meaningful silences within the spoken language and verbal texts, that grant queerness its power to shame and humiliate that which has obscured and shamed “individual rights” (Popa 41–70). Hardy accompanies his protagonists’ verbal resistances with visions of class indignities in “diegetic” photographs vacillating between dreams of self-perceived worth and the crumpling realization that societal norms are obsessed by status quo categories of rich and poor. For a poor individual to realize their yearnings through hard work is illusionary. Arlene Jackson, scholar of illustrations of Hardy’s narratives, sees these embedded photos of Jude’s characters peering out at their readers in titillating and dreaming gazes as powerful fetishized commodities, naming them “icons … objects complete in themselves,” not for the good of themselves but for the privileged (8). Here I briefly study a photograph each of Jude and Sue, and the ekphrastic Christminster cakes which the couple bakes and sells in order to sustain a bare living once society refuses to grant Jude, unmarried lover and father, the right to his ecclesiastical labor. These images—arguably of bodies highly desired and then made invisible by careless and ignorant laws of society—epitomize what Elizabeth Langland identifies as a narrative “poised between centuries … cultures … and classes … [thereby] engag[ing] profound social dislocations in ways that disturb” (32). Baudrillard would interpret the photographs as societal constructs misreading Jude and Sue, and their dream cast and sold as consumable pastry dangerously “free[ing the crowd] to project [its] desires onto produced goods” (13). The object before the voyeuristic viewer assumes a realism in this projected desire, thereby dismissing the realism of the individual whose impression is the subject in the object’s frame or hand-baked traceries of Christminster windows. Baudrillard, 325

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underscoring a Marxist fetishizing, would identify Hardy’s photos and cakes as commodities possessing “a life of their own,” objects made by hand and consumed by the eye in both private and public market exchanges (777). For Crary, the visualization or commodifying of these bodies as classed identities transforms them into “symbols of value” rather than signifying value itself (Suspensions 198). An idealistic Jude, armed with books consuming his attention during any moment he is not laboring as a stonemason to earn a seat in the prestigious Christminster, finds himself dislodged both literally and figuratively from this idée fixe, when the lusty Arabella smacks him with a pig’s penis; Nature’s simulacrum of her work as a pig farmer, thereby marking her fetishization of Jude’s economical allure for her directly on his body. Attracted by his dark beauty, she’s more intent on Jude as fiscal means of escape from working-class low-wage meanness. Arabella perceives the educated youth as economic and political exchange value (Baudrillard 29–55, 77). For Baudrillard, dimple-making Arabella with hair extensions is the simulator, “feign[ing] to have what one hasn’t,” while Jude is the dissimulator, “feign[ing] not to have what one has” (167). A distracted Jude consumes her wiles and wares, temporally obscuring his Christminster dream. Arabella wants the social benefits of his university education, but her practicality dictates maneuvering his attention to immediate capital as a pig farmer—the work she knows. Hardy clarifies that forces other than Arabella deny Jude his university pursuit, but this contrast between Jude’s underperformed will and Arabella’s theatrics of unnatural hair and dimple is Baudrillard underscoring Hardy’s own criticism of abusively constructed social hierarchies. When Arabella traps Jude into marriage, we are not surprised at its disintegration when the pig’s slaughter (from sexualized commodity to economic commodity) traumatizes Jude whose kindness to birds and beasts is aligned early in the novel with his Christminster dream to study theology. Arabella slaughters his precious books with the dead pig’s grease, murdering dreams and desire in a single swipe. She departs to profit from colonized earnings in Australia, Jude bequeathing her all earnings from the sale of the pig meat. The next time Jude knows anything of her is when he comes upon the dregs of an auction of their household goods, unsold remnants of the failed union: He perceived a framed photograph, which turned out to be his own portrait. It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man in bird’s-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given her on their wedding-day. On the back was still to be read, “Jude to Arabella,” with the date. She must have thrown it in with the rest of her property at the auction. “Oh,” said the broker, seeing him look at this and other articles in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself … “The frame is a very useful one if you take out the likeness.You shall have it for a shilling.” (Hardy 56–57) Jude purchases the framed photo and burns the lot, signifying that his image, arguably commodified by himself to give to Arabella and then commodified again by Arabella for fiscal gain but left unsold, is ghosted by the fetishizing desire it evokes. In his 1931 “Small History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin emphasizes that photography’s earliest allure circa 1839 included turning desire itself into an obsession. Quoting an early photographic publication, the Leipzig Anzeiger, Benjamin informs us early portrait photographers “‘[w]ant[ed] to fix fleeting reflections,’” which he identifies as “fetishistic … art” (62; emphasis added). Hardy scholar Jane Thomas perceives this objective of photography of fixing, holding onto, the ephemeral in Hardy’s language identifying class exchanges: “Hardy’s novels investigate the compulsion to identify and linguistically fix identity, and examine the mutability and the protean nature of the self as it struggles to adapt to the ‘Necessity’ of discourse” (134; emphasis added). Benjamin and Thomas allow us to appreciate Jude, an idée fix in photo and dream, as valuable because as commodified identity, he is personally and socially vulnerable. 326

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Hardy critic Dale Kramer perceives Sue as Hardy’s bold female social critic “irreconcilable” with the demure educated tradeswoman eventually turned teacher (Kramer in Kramer 173). She works in a Christminster ecclesiastical bookshop as an illuminator of medieval letters, but is personally more drawn to the sculptures of pagan Venus and Apollo she purchases in a forceful bargaining with a foreigner on her day off when she’s able to escape the confines of the university town. This reading of Sue espies her more fascinating than irksome. For even as daunting Sue’s restless angst propels the diminutive sprite’s border crossings, this woman’s vibrating dialectics between “extreme decisions” brilliantly defy categorical identification even as they queerly embody her flirtatious being (173). Critics Elizabeth Langland, Mary Jacobus, and others perceive Sue’s disembodiment as Sue the individually and socially obscure, asexual, and insatiable in her relentless flightiness and flirtation (Langland 37). Eagleton identifies Sue as “elusively unpossessable” for Jude who perceives her as an extension of his dream to study in a place he deems hallowed (xvii). Covered with the dust of his stonemason trade, Jude becomes a mere ghost to Christminster’s eyes. The university’s class-blindness to Jude’s worth enrages Sue; ultimately his loss of Sue is as one with his loss of a university experience and degree. John Kucich underscores Jude’s awareness that “Sue’s ‘pureness’ [signifies] ideals embodied in social stations above his own,” and thereby he idolizes both the woman and Christminster because he cannot know fulfillment with either (230). Writing on the nineteenth-century photographer, Elizabeth Hawarden, Carol Mavor is struck most by Hawarden’s portraits of the Victorian female as “in between” identities, flirting not only with another but also with herself in creating a peculiarly strong and fragile sense of self “inbetween” voyeur subject and studied subject as “just missed” (16, xix). Flirting, Mavor and Hardy remind us, is “a game of suspension without the finale of seduction, keep[ing] our subjects alive … The more we flirt, the more we fantasize about our subject, the more elusive and desirable it becomes” (16). For Michel Foucault, one of the most telling powers of provoking hunger is the subject’s teasing rule over the viewer who must look and desire but not touch (83–86). John Kucich comes at Sue’s power from a different direction: Jude is aware that “Sue’s ‘pureness’ [signifies] ideals embodied in social stations above his own,” and thereby he idolizes both the woman and Christminster because he cannot know fulfillment with either (230). An adolescent Sue flirts with Jude from a photograph that teases him relentlessly to reach beyond his trade in rural Marygreen for the theological profession of Christminster’s illusions. Sue’s image entices the young scholar Jude when he “observed between the brass candlesticks on [his aunt’s] mantelpiece the photograph of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat, with radiating folds under the brim like the rays of a halo” (Hardy 78). Idealizing this beauty on the domestic altar, Jude’s worship is frustrated by his aunt’s refusal to give him the photo at his first request. When she later relinquishes Sue’s haloed likeness to a besotted Jude, Hardy’s “ridiculously affectionate fellow” arranges it on his own “mantelpiece, kissed it—he did not know why—and felt more at home. She seemed to look down and preside over his tea … uniting him to the emotions of the living city” (Hardy 85). Jude knows that Sue resides somewhere in the celestial Christminster, and so the allure of the photograph, itself no longer appeasing Jude’s desire, sends him out to find Sue herself, though at first he is content to gaze upon her without her knowledge of his distant desire. For Jude, Sue is Nature’s mythic maiden and Modernity’s urbane sophisticate; as both, she is angelic coquette, but for Jude, her elusive nature, “just missed,” is the photographic copy of the university dream “just missed.” Hardy’s final commodities of desire discussed here are the gingerbread cakes designed and baked by Jude and sold by Sue and little Father Time (Jude and Arabella’s son living with Jude and Sue) at “the spring fair at Kennetbridge … an ancient trade-meeting … much dwindled from its dimensions of former times” (262). These cakes, created by Jude and sold by Sue, obscure perhaps the obscenity of Jude’s failed ambition to become the scholar at one with Christminster’s domes, spires, and windows. Just as the photographs of Jude and Sue variously serve as the simulacrum of Jude obscured by class, the cakes return him to his baker status and are manufactured by the same hands as the stones 327

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he maintains. In this sad retreat, he enacts Baudrillard’s reading of the simulacra (the real) disappeared by simulation (the idealized, the imagined standing in for the thing itself (166)). Hardy mourns for Jude, the real scholar, left destitute by society’s sham hierarchies of knowledge even as he scorns Christminster’s useless, dead stones dusting the ill-used body and spirit of its greatest lover—Jude.

Obsessed by Beauty: Bookkeeping Bodies in The Picture of Dorian Gray The useless photograph of Jude and the beautiful painting of Dorian couldn’t be more distinct on a cursory glance. One is readily discarded, uncannily framing loss of fiscal worth later resurrected by desire for this very impoverishment. The other becomes the anxious infatuation of its privileged subject and all its many creators: the upper-crust worshipping artist Basil Hallward, the wittily careless and languid Lord Henry, and the besotted changeling actress Sibyl Vane, who performs at the Holborn Theatre for the masses. Jude’s image is literally consumed by self-lit flames whose ashes whisper a fragile chance of resurrecting this image’s determinism, while Dorian’s image reveals to its distraught beautiful subject a decaying body consumed by an excessive appetite for pleasure which only money can buy. Even though Jude is poor and Dorian wealthy, Hardy and Wilde create a common object for their respective idealizing males, the book. This commodity depends on its exchange value for its worth to its reader, and thereby, Baudrillard argues, usurps the meaning of the signified, or subjectivity, as I explore below. The book for Jude and Dorian is commodified by its guiding promise toward fulfilling their respective dreams. The book embodies the monomaniacal hunt whose economical meaning—its simulacrum of class—is disturbed by both forgettable photo and unforgettable painting. Dorian’s chapters 10 and 11, situated approximately in the middle of Wilde’s 1891 text, illuminate Dorian’s class as a creation out of cosmic time that allows Wilde to move tensions between good and evil beyond time as well. For Dorian embodies both classical beauty in his idealized form as well as degenerate narcissism emanating from humanity’s obsession with its own perfection. It is Dorian’s body that arouses Lord Henry to contemplate the youth’s Grecian form as indestructible and infinite. The yellow book, a gift to Dorian from Lord Henry, fixates the youth on imagining himself able to commodify the body recorded in the book. He assumes its Parisian hero’s hedonistic drive for pleasure, inviting the book to “poison” him so that “he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” (178). Dorian keeps the book in a type of frame marking it as simultaneously costly, exotic, and sacred: His eye fell on the yellow book … [held by] the little pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver … he became absorbed … [by what] seemed to him in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world passing in dumb show before him … suddenly made real to him. (158–159) Dorian’s infatuation with the book reminds us of Ricoeur’s claim that fiction both invents and changes reality. Dorian’s perceptions of his reality are also enhanced as a reader of his gilded portrait, that he shamefully hides in the attic (where he was hidden as a child by a wealthy grandfather humiliated by Dorian’s impoverished father). He must secret the portrait that loses its artistic worth when its purity gives way to sneer and writhing conjured by Dorian’s morally degenerate acts exploiting women, the lower classes, and opiates. Dorian’s physical body retains his glamourous goodness, but the portrait reveals his soul and thereby transforms Dorian’s beauty into the ugly. Inserting these texts of word and image into his novel, Wilde exposes how social class signifies a Hegelian dialectic between Lord Henry’s book (evil) and Basil Hallward’s painting (goodness). The word mesmerizes; its images of illicit pleasures prove contagious, instilling in the reader a 328

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monomania for beauty as does the portrait. Just as the word narrates the hero’s absorption in his decadent sensations and experiences, so the painting begins to narrate the physical effects of the youth’s monied debauchery consumed by its ever-growing need for pleasure. Simon Joyce furthers these ethical dialectics in his claim that although the novel situates crime as societally constructed as a vulgar East End behavior, Dorian himself knows better in his cruelty to lower-class Sibyl and impoverished Londoners, as does Wilde writing in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” that it is the wealthy who sin against the poor (403–423). An influential style and method of nineteenth-century painting that fetishized the body as one with the object was the mid-century’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. One of its supporters, and even teachers, John Ruskin, underscored that these luminescent vividly colored and minutely detailed portraits should look more real to the eye than nature herself, their human subjects enlivened by vividly textured and colored natural and material objects. This school of painters also became associated with monomania (perhaps even homosexual).Their intense quest for exactitude in depicting exquisitely detailed material beauty aligned with photography in its sometimes pornographic and voyeuristic exposures via light and textures inviting the observer to peer into and touch these highly objectified works of art (Barringer, Rosenfeld, and Smith, 9–25, 37, 52–53). Dorian’s portrait shares some of these same effects, thereby authenticating its image as life-like, its beauty as mesmerizing and irresistible. Given Wilde’s acute attention to Dorian’s body as Hellenic ideal, cultural artifact, and sensational text, especially dramatized in chapter 11, it is helpful to recognize Regenia Gagnier’s carefully delineated categories of subjectivity: 1) the subject is a subject to itself … 2) the subject is a subject to, and of, others … 3) the subject is also a subject of knowledge, most familiarly perhaps of the discourse of social institutions that circumscribe its terms of beings … 4) the subject is a body that is separate … from other human bodies … [and as body and subject] is closely dependent upon its physical environment … 5) subjectivity … is opposed to objectivity: the particular or partial view (the view in and for itself) is opposed to some other … universal view (the view from nowhere and for no one, the view that contains all possible perspectives). (8–9) Dorian’s subjectivity might be defined by all five categories in his relationship to both his portrait bestowed by Hallward and to the book bestowed by Henry. He is both an individual man and a type; he is a perceiving subject; he reflects both those spaces and times he moves throughout, absorbing the manners and effects of looking in studio, manor house, parlor, and attic as well as East London alleys; and he desperately yearns to be uniquely beautiful and charming to avoid disappearing into the nothingness of everyman. Nancy Armstrong envisions a Dorian compatible with Gagnier’s multiple socio-cultural senses of subjectivity. Armstrong perceives that the irreconcilable gap between portrait and book enables a reading of Dorian beneath his exterior image of idealized perfection. Armstrong underscores that it is the book’s strangeness which appeals to Dorian who becomes lost to its narrative, not only separating himself from the hideous changes in the painting but also giving into his infatuation for Hallward’s art. She writes that Dorian finds in the book’s hero-self the visual type of the degenerate, the gentleman who masquerades as a type … as pure in its grotesqueness as that of the perfect gentleman … in its beauty … [Wilde’s] inversion of body and portrait … forces the reader to see that this way of reading is but one more means by which Victorian culture reproduces human nature in its own image … as always a resemblance to type … [while] difference is resemblance to … a contrary type. (165–166) 329

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Dorian cannot resist the subjectivity—the fiction—given him as his own reality by a bored hedonistic lord standing in for society that is both “subject to itself ” and “opposed to some other universal view” (Gagnier 8–9). A longer study might look more deeply into the historical social significance of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as “male homosocial desire,” as she claims this not necessarily sexual longing between men begs study of societal structures producing “class and gender subordination” precipitated by a society’s homophobia (Sedgwick qtd. in Leitch 2434–2438). Dorian’s desperate looking for his disappearing self benefits from a Baudrillardian reading—one that acknowledges the consumer’s vulnerability before the “display, the advertisement … the arrangement” of “objects … offered for consumption” (31). Dorian first consumes Basil’s idealized vision of himself when the stunned sitter looks at his portrait as though seeing himself for the first time (Wilde 65). Mesmerized later by Lord Henry’s prescription of hedonistic fantasia in the Yellow Book, Dorian procured from Paris no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies over a nature over which he seemed, at times to have almost entirely lost control. (Wilde 161) The book provokes Dorian to travel in “arduous” and “devoted”“search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance” (165). These travels abroad and at home find an infatuated Dorian devoting himself for a year or more at a time to obsessively experimenting with various perfumes, performing wild musical concerts, losing himself in rites of mysticism, and fondling rich foreign textiles. A gothic phantasmagoria. Giles Whiteley reminds us that phantasma is Plato’s term for the simulacrum [b]ut in fact, the word “phantasmagoria” entered into English from German in 1802 … this genealogy of the term “phantasmagoria” is significant in understanding Marx’s concept of the commodity-fetish, linked, as it is, explicitly to vision. (138) Much has been written by Whiteley and others of the significance of Dorian as composite created by the powerful influence of Hallward, Henry, and Sybil who is never herself but only shadows the many characters she plays before Dorian on the stage until she falls in love with her Prince Charming and so removes the mask of Juliet to Dorian’s horror (126–128). Understood in this way, Dorian’s true self is not in any single one of his experiences or images; instead the truth of Dorian is created under many influences as “a process of signification,” each of his many signifiers or simulacra, including his name, brought to life in chapter 11 to accompany his portrait in both painting and yellow book that underscore his economic wealth. Whiteley states that signifiers of Dorian perform as the many masks of both Dorian and Wilde himself, for whom the mask, “far from diverting us from truth, is itself constitutive of truth” (3–4). And according to Whiteley, and perhaps also the most reflective reader of Dorian, his obsession with masks is his “insatiable desire for new impressions”—the plenitude that is nineteenth-century realism—resisting conformity to the norm (122–123).

Obsessed by Contagion: Classed by Illness in Mrs Dalloway We noted Dorian’s appetite for knowledge, his pandemic, as it were, of curiosity and desire for self. He is first attracted to his portrait as Narcissus perceiving his body’s material value in his first reflection of self. The Yellow Book, as tour and market guide, increases his obsession with his physical beauty.Woolf ’s 1925 novel is a novel of contagious illness—both the 1918 flu pandemic’s e­ nduring 330

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effects and the Great War’s battles living on in shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. England didn’t get over either of these traumas quickly or graciously. Woolf, herself suffering from maladies, including the flu, suffuses Mrs Dalloway subtly and overtly with the war and the flu’s obsessive influences that both divide and confuse class identities. Both upper-crust Clarissa Dalloway and lower middle-class Septimus Smith are vulnerable to the war’s pandemic and the ignorant power-hungry doctors’ condescending separation of the well from the ill. A brief nod to this novel’s class-consciousness offers a way to appreciate how the early twentieth-century British novel began to complicate the situation of class in narrative realism. Noting this evolving fascination with class, a cursory glance at Woolf serves as a fitting codicil to a study of how class is complicated by its attentions to changing perceptions of the body as commodity and subjectivity. A new study by Elizabeth Outka connects Woolf ’s protagonists of different classes via illness, and I suggest here, that this illness marks an obsession with the physically and psychologically ravaged body, signifying a Modernist perception of illness as a new class identifier. This seems, in part, supported by the fact that the two protagonists joined in illness are not of the same socio-economic class. Neither are Jude and Dorian; however, they do not appear in the same narrative. Upper-class Clarissa Dalloway, newly recuperating from the flu’s debilitation, is significantly disturbed in the course of a single day in mid-June 1923 by violent but strangely liberating challenges to her class privilege. Middle-class Great War veteran Septimus Smith, whose suicide interrupts the confident exclusivity of Clarissa’s dinner party, suffers shellshock probably compounded by residual sufferings from the 1918 influenza (Outka 112–124, 131–141). Early in the novel, an “aeroplane” flying over Regents Park interrupts a rather sanguine morning. The contagion of the crowd’s glances upward at the letters streaming in the plane’s wake provokes memories of the war’s air raids (though less prevalent in the First World War than in the Second). The letters are not easily formed into words but, after inciting intense attention, they eventually seem to identify products native to England, and so the plane of war becomes the plane selling national, i.e., patriotic, commodities. Crary argues that pictorial representations of crowds significantly offer “production of ‘contagious’ emotional effects,” which Woolf creates here (244). One of those disturbed by the buzzing plane is Septimus Smith, a veteran of the war suffering from shell-shock, which Outka suggests is aggravated probably by his having contracted the flu virus at the war’s end (125). Emily Dalgarno notes that Septimus struggles to read after the war (in significant contrast to his avid patriotic reading of Shakespeare and Aeschylus (in translation) prior to the war (Dalgarno 76). “[L]ooking up … he perceives ‘exquisite beauty’ in the sky writing, believing that ‘they are signalling to me’” (Woolf 21). And Septimus weeps. Later, he perceives and performs his own realism in escaping the doctors who variously prescribe that he deny his emotions and be whisked away from his wife to a rest home beyond reality. Outka remarks that when “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” Clarissa is not as much celebrating her women’s rights or upper-class women’s freedom for public capitalism as she is her liberation from her sick bed (Outka 112–124). Modernity’s upper class flaunts its privilege in a new way as the wealthy rise from their sick beds to shop. Clarissa’s eyes absorb hats, gloves, and books in Piccadilly before she purchases flowers oozing fetishizing colors and perfumes. Clarissa nervously strains to resurrect her own reality in the simulacrum of her monied green evening gown as she parades no less a significant person than the Prime Minister amongst her guests. However, the guests’ reception of the PM is languid, and Clarissa is unable to sustain value for her extravaganza when news of Septimus’s suicide interrupts the evening. Escaping the party’s dissembling decorum, the wealthy woman wonders at how in consuming his own life, a middle-class soldier, whom she’s never met, has strangely given her own life new value. Clarissa feels, rather than perceives, a new realism in the soldier’s defiant choice of death (180–182). This article began by noting that nineteenth-century literary realism often resisted what society assumed to be real. Both the assumption and the resistance were largely prompted by a­nxieties 331

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requiring definite divisions between class identities. The upper class could be assured of this distance as long as the lower-class body might be fetishized for its longing, illustrated in Jude’s quaint desire for Christminster baked and sold as consumable gingerbread towers. In another act of resisting the real, the simulacrum as portrait stood in for the real person, enabling and abetting the socially privileged Dorian to hide within his own fetishized ideal. Hardy and Wilde approach the dangerous arrogance of class pretense in commodifying all bodies.Without atoning their consumption, Woolf ends her novel by awakening the wealthy to the un-reality of commodifying another, for Modernity’s realism is not hierarchy but autonomy: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (190).

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography:The Legacy of British Realism. Harvard UP, 1999. Barringer, Tim, et al. Pre-Raphaelites:Victorian Art and Design.Yale UP, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Edited and introduced by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 1988. Benjamin, Walter, On Photography. Edited and translated by Esther Leslie. Reaktion Books, Ltd, 2016. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Pay as You Go: Exchanges of Bodies and Signs.” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Edited by Margaret R. Higonnet. U of Illinois P, 1993, pp. 66–86. Bullen, J. B. The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy. Clarendon Press, 1986. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. U of Minnesota P, 1996. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press, 1999. ———. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century. MIT Press, 1992. Dalgarno,, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Cambridge UP, 2001. Eagleton, Terry. Introduction. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy. 1896. Macmillan, 1993, pp. xi–xxi. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. Oxford UP, 1991. Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Framing the Victorians; Photography and the Culture of Realism. Cornell UP, 1996. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Edited by Terry Eagleton, notes by P. N. Furbank. Macmillan, 1896/1993. Jackson, Arlene M. Illustrations and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. Joyce, Simon. “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties.” The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie. W. W. Norton & Company, 2nd Norton Critical Edition, 2007, pp. 403–423. Kramer, Dale. “Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure.” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer. Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 164–182. Kucich, John.“Moral Authority in the Late Novels:The Gendering of Art.” The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet. U of Illinois P, 1993. pp. 221–241. Mavor, Carol. Becoming:The Photographs of Clementina,Viscountess Hawarden. Duke UP, 1999. Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1970. “obsess”/“obsession.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. vol. I. Oxford UP, 1973, pp. 32–33. Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism:The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia UP, 2020. Popa, Bogdan. Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century. Edinburgh UP, 2017. Ricoeur, Paul.“The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality.” A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, edited by Mario J.Valdés. U of Toronto P, 1991, pp. 117–136. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.“From Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch. W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 2434–2437. Thomas, Jane. Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels. Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999. Whiteley, Giles. Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum: The Truth of Masks. Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2015. Studies in Comparative Literature 35. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited and introduced by Norman Page. Broadview, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Annotated and introduced by Bonnie Kime Scott. Harvest/Harcourt, 2005.

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25 ORAL STORYTELLING AS A TRANSNATIONAL AESTHETIC IN THE INDUSTRIAL NOVEL Erin Cheslow

The waves in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) very clearly speak of eternity, a temporal link between life and death, but they also tell stories, relaying information in a way that imposes a spatial relationship to empire and nation based on the listener’s social class. Oral forms, embedded in the novel as stories characters tell, construct space in terms of movement; the formal movement of the story, not tied to any one speaker or convention, moves speaker and listener into imagined colonial spaces and, in some cases, allows them to return by opening up liminal or possible spaces between home and “elsewhere.” The waves, one such liminal space, speak to Paul, who then tells their story to Florence, mapping their structure of departure and return onto the siblings’ relationship. When Paul dies, departing across the waves, he is always able to return to Florence, just as Walter and Florence are able to return after crossing the more literal waves that connect England to the rest of the world.The waves, touching the shores of the colonies and of England, tell stories that elide the distance between the two, making the strange familiar and accessible. The often-extreme difference of “elsewhere” is brought under the umbrella of the imagined national community to facilitate a sense of domestic unity for those who are able to return, namely the middle class. Using aesthetics to approach the novel as a classed and imperial literary space, I argue that oral storytelling—exemplified by the stories told in Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton—as literary form affords classed movement through the empire in the wake of industrialism and urban population growth in nineteenth-century England.The stories told bring the “social problem” presented by the industrial poor into conversation with the desire for imperial expansion, overcoming physical and social distances through the possibility of social mobility and return. The waves do not tell their story to everyone though, and those who cannot hear it or cannot return develop very different relationships to space. Where the middle class has the means and the stories to build a life in England based on colonial wealth, the lower classes face only poverty and disappointment at home. Florence, firmly situated as a middle-class character, is able to hear and retell the stories the waves tell and return to a happy life in England after spending time abroad. The transported convict, Alice, on the other hand, never hears those stories and is unable to tell her own, returning only to die. The brief glimpses of other places provided by the waves reflect Edward Said’s claim in Culture and Imperialism that the middle class is simultaneously reliant on the productivity of the colonies and on the ability to return home “and [be] at rest,” while developing very different expectations for the working class (91). These classed relations to space are subdued in a novel that is primarily concerned with middle-class ideals of domesticity and mercantile success at home, but they are not absent or unexpected. Printed in nineteen installments from 1846 to 333

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1848, Dombey and Son responds to the industrial problems of working-class labor and population growth that figured prominently in Victorian literature and politics during the preceding decades. It is in the possibilities of movement for the middle class and certain members of the working class that the limitations imposed on others, like Alice, become visible. As these storied relationships to space are developed, they order England as a bourgeois domestic space, to which the middle class can always return, and the empire as a heterogeneous space of possibility, where the middle class can support a home in England and the working class can create a new home abroad. What emerges is a “transnational aesthetic,” with oral forms supplying movement as a way to work through the class tensions introduced by industrialization and imperial expansion. In The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, Lauren Goodlad expands Frederic Jameson’s “geopolitical aesthetic” “to describe how particular artistic forms suggest [an effort to figure out the] global situations that are at once lived and beyond individual experience” (9). Oral form as a transnational aesthetic builds on these aesthetic registers to better understand the specifically classed movement across national boundaries made necessary by the global situations Goodlad describes. Oral stories facilitate transnational movement between England and the empire by imposing a set of spatial relationships that extend the nation and subsume difference through trade. Which stories are told and which are not order space and people in terms of movements that bring the condition of England and the imperial mission into close conversation with one another. Additionally, the presence of transnational aesthetics in the novel suggests an attempt to story space specifically through engagement with oral forms. Oral storytelling as a form works within, while remaining distinct from, written narratives to construct and order the world, reframing class dynamics in terms of the future possibilities provided by movement through the empire. As a form that moves, orality can be utilized both in and out of written narratives to move people and ideas in space and time and circumvent the classed constraints of life in England and of the written forms that represent it. While written descriptions afford a perception of permanence, oral forms have the ability to change, to adapt to the needs of the moment without the need for corroboration.They can create fantasies that allow for movement in space and time, imposing their own fluid form onto life. In other words, stories afford certain kinds of movement for the listener, and these affordances make oral forms distinguishable from and visible in print. Caroline Levine defines affordances as “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” in order to rethink the way forms “travel” across time and space, “moving back and forth across aesthetic and social materials” (5, 4). Although the reader does not experience oral storytelling as a vocal act, oral form remains recognizable, imposing its structures on the world for the reader just as it does for the characters who listen. In this sense, the binary that divides oral from written, one that Walter Benjamin sets up in “The Storyteller,” is merely a matter of difference, rather than opposition or incompatibility. Benjamin writes, “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself ”; he recognizes storytelling as movement even if he does so only to idealize a supposedly extinct past (79–80). This same pastoralism relegates Indigenous and working-class communities to certain ways of knowing and being, but the movement of oral forms from person to person and into written texts reopens those possibilities by reorienting the temporal narrative of oral to written, “primitive” to modern, toward a spatial one. The empire becomes a repository for British fantasies that simultaneously preserve the past and imagine possible futures. Oral forms, then, afford aesthetic, spatial, and temporal fluidities that are not restricted by writing and are accessible to the working class. These fluidities are specifically classed, as it is changing conceptions of bourgeois capitalism, working-class conditions, and criminality that invite, or even necessitate, the creation of the domestic ideal both at home and abroad through emigration and transport, as well as its maintenance through profitable global expansion. To imagine classed movement in the nineteenth century is 334

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not to dismiss other kinds of global movement that occurred in other times and places. It is to recognize a moment when the confluence of free trade ideology with industrial urbanization introduces the “social problem” of rapid working-class population growth and an emphasis on domestic stability to reinforce imperial exploitation. Dombey and Son is situated in the midst of this transition, with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 opening up foreign markets and licensing an imperialist expansion.The economic concerns of trade that structure the novel cannot be separated from the empire that trade relied on, and issues of class underly both. The language of gendered and spatial economies that pervades scholarship on the mercantile world of the waves, particularly that of Suvendrini Perara on empire in the English novel, indicates the centrality of exchange value, and as such, the working class, to empire. Bourgeois capitalist interests, like the elder Dombey’s, often elide other kinds of movement, but transportation and emigration remain integral to those interests, expanding the nation into the colonies and disposing of the excess population that threatened a sense of national prosperity and unity. The stories told make these movements possible by transferring experiences of “elsewhere” to the listener within descriptions of known conditions afforded by written forms. The empire, both distant and different, provided spaces that could be filled with fantasies made impossible in England because of social conditions. Said identifies “the power to narrate” as crucial to an understanding of nation-building and empire. He writes, “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (Said xii). In England, the stories told about colonial spaces constructed them in terms of bourgeois, English conceptions of reality, wherein the imagined unity of the English nation was threatened by Indigenous peoples and the working class alike. The stories that appear in novels like Dombey and Son attempt to overcome these divisions by ordering space in terms of classed movement.

Who Gets to Speak: Storytelling and Class In a brief glimpse of somewhere outside of England in Dombey and Son, Florence sits on the deck of “a stately ship … out at sea, spreading its white wings to the favouring wind” (768). As they have so many times before, the waves speak to her as they once spoke to her brother, Paul. Her new husband,Walter, recalls the story as Paul told it with his dying breath, a story of a faraway land and a journey, and Paul’s little voice seems to wash across the ship just as the waves do, repeating his final words to Florence: “How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes, Floy! But it’s very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said so!” (218). Tears fill Florence’s eyes, and Walter thinks they are tears for the death of the brother she has lost. He knows she thinks of Paul, but the expression on her face is one of joy. She thinks not of the land on the other side of the waves, one that Paul thought of as the land of the dead, but of her love for her childhood companion.Though dead, he returns to her every time she listens to the story the waves are telling. Just as Paul always knew, “elsewhere,” or the invisible country beyond the sea, is only inaccessible if there is no one left at home to listen to the stories that float back on the waves. Stories, “what it was that the waves were always saying,” provide points of connection in the almost irretrievably atomized environment of mercantile, middle-class England, as embodied by Florence’s father, the elder Dombey (Dickens 107). Mr. Dombey’s world is a modern one. Trade and the imperial expansion on which it relies are of paramount importance, and money takes the place of human relationships. His insistence that “Money can do anything!” turns even his beloved Paul, the future of the firm, into a “presumptuous atom,” no more than a fragment of the totalizing and omnipresent Dombey and Son (91). This atomization spreads through the novel as Dombey creates barriers between people, sending Walter to the colonies and rejecting Florence and the domestic ideal she embodies. Without the determinacy of a seemingly unified community, stories become necessary to fill the literal and figurative space between characters.Walter’s return from the 335

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Caribbean to marry Florence is only possible if the waves are spaces of literal and social movement and not the barriers Dombey perceives them to be. Within this framework, I argue that the movement of stories, rumors, and reports of “elsewhere” and of people of certain classes back to England constructs the colonies as ideological extensions of the nation, which is itself reconstituted through the human connections made in the moment of storytelling. While novels and newspapers help to construct imagined communities for the reader, as Benedict Anderson famously argued, they also contain the stories that characters tell themselves and others. Unification becomes a doubled process, both global and interpersonal, folding distances between people and spaces in on themselves to reimagine connection through networks of communication rather than spatial proximity. In Dombey and Son, these networks are given form in the waves, which cross the physical distance between imperial spaces and tell the stories that connect Florence to Paul and Walter and eventually to Mr. Dombey, facilitating a sense of domestic unity through return.That same domestic unity is not available to the working class in England, however, requiring that it be reimagined elsewhere. As such, movement into an expanding empire as nation is notably absent from Dickens’s arguably most middle-class novel. Dombey and his family have access to such domestic prosperity in England because they are middle class. It is in the silences, the continual deferral of Alice’s story, and the marginality of other working-class characters, that class dynamics become apparent. When working-class voices are present, however, as in other socialcondition novels of the mid-nineteenth century, a different kind of national unity is made available. Published in two volumes only shortly after the final installment of Dombey and Son was issued, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton responds to many of the same issues of trade and industry but from the imagined perspective of the working class. Although the waves are not said to speak, stories are carried back on them and made the experiences of those who listen. Just as for Paul and Florence, oral forms afford a spatial and temporal fluidity that moves Mary and others to the colonies, but for them, the movement is permanent. They do not return, instead making a home abroad that fulfills fantasies of social mobility. This home remains distinctly English though, despite its physical distance from English soil. It extends the British nation by transplanting Englishness abroad, alleviating the tensions introduced by working-class population growth and reinvigorating the pastoral ideal of a rural English space. Settler colonies, as extensions of the nation, reinforce the nation as timeless or eternal, much like they do for Paul, and that eternity is distinctly spatial.The two novels, when placed in conversation with each other, develop a pattern of storytelling as movement that imagines national unity and continuity as necessarily imperial and classed. Eternity becomes spatial, just as movement through space becomes movement through time. Florence brings Dombey and Son into the future of free trade, while Mary brings England back into a rural, idyllic past that has been erased by urbanization. As stories move across the waves, they construct a seemingly global imagined community that will always support the nation and imaginatively resolve class tension. The story that the waves do not tell is that of a third kind of movement, one that relies on silence and distance to sustain community at home.Alice never hears what the waves were saying, though she spends a great deal of time upon them, because she is not meant to return. As a transported convict and a woman, she is cut off from the prosperity that empire affords.The stories she does hear, like the ones of disappointment and hardship her mother tells throughout the novel, are those that distance her from England, transforming her into the failed commodity of a fallen woman. With her removal abroad, stories are shown to impose a spatial distance specific to both class and place. The convict could be removed to an inhospitable, so-called terra nullius, storied as a waste land, to maintain the imagined unity and purity of England. The language of distance is maintained when Alice returns to England. She continually defers the moment when she will tell her story, saying only at first that she has been “far away,” “where convicts go” (Dickens 460). Although she is no longer physically separated from English soil, her story imposes the distance necessary for transportation. If Paul can always return from death and Florence from abroad, then an ideological distance is ­necessary for the movement of criminals away from England. Alice’s own story and the stories 336

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she does and does not hear afford movement by preventing return. Alice’s permanent removal from English society and the nation relies on her silence and the silence of the waves, whose stories of continuity might make return possible if heard.The movement of oral forms, only available to those who hear them, structures the nation through specific relationships between social class and the spaces of an expanding empire. The stories told in Dombey and Son and Mary Barton, and the ways in which they move formally and spatially, facilitate different kinds of classed movement through imperial spaces.

Paul and the Waves, Mary and the Mermaid The waves begin to speak early in Dombey and Son, but, at first, Paul is the only one who hears them. Like Paul, whose death is framed as a response to “what it was the waves were always saying,” the first Mrs. Dombey is said to drift out over a metaphorical sea when she dies, but the waves do not speak at the moment of her death. Perhaps because she is without her own story, present only to give birth to young Paul, or perhaps because Florence is not yet ready to let her mother go across the waves, she is unable to tell what the waves are saying, if she hears them at all. Even when Dombey’s sister tries to rouse her, Mrs. Chick receives “No word or sound in answer” (Dickens 12). Her death is marked by silence, and her absence will continue to haunt the rest of the novel. Only once Paul hears the waves and tells their story is movement made possible. He acts as a translator and storyteller, speaking for the waves and telling his own story. His presence as a listener and a speaker opens up interpretations of the waves and of the imperial and personal connections they make possible. He provides a formal link to an otherwise elusive story that ebbs and flows with the tide. Because the waves cannot speak for themselves in a way that readers or characters can understand, their story cannot be formally represented in the novel. This formal silencing allows more nuanced readings of empire and death as symbolically represented by the waves and the class movement they afford, but in so doing, it also limits the text to these more symbolic readings. John M. Picker summarizes this limitation well in Victorian Soundscapes: Scholars have debated whether the ocean in Dombey might represent the mystery of life, or a transcendent voice of both death and communal reconciliation, or a force for human feeling, or (as one critic has proposed) merely a gross sentimentalism … Yet … the waves never precisely disclose or clarify themselves: they never say what they mean. (21) Florence and the reader can only hope to understand them through Paul as an engaged listener and medium for their story. He is willing and able to listen where others are not and imaginatively retells the stories that he hears. Paul’s stories explore what it is the waves are saying—not simply what they represent in their relationship to death but the stories they tell middle-class characters in life. Unlike Dombey, who sees Paul as part of the workings of the firm, the novel frames Paul primarily as a brother and a child wise beyond his years. He is a storied creature, described early on as having a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful way … of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair, when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings in the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been substituted. (Dickens 92) Paul’s fantastical world separates him from the “worldly schemes and plans” of his father, reframing the novel in terms of transcendent human connection. 337

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Yet, his voice, ever present in itself or in Florence’s memories, is rarely heard in more symbolic readings of the waves. His death seems to relegate him to an absence in the text, ignoring his presence throughout it. Picker starts to reclaim Paul’s presence as listener when he writes, “Such a struggle to understand the waves is indeed what Little Paul attempts[;] he possesses the animating force of the artist, who imaginatively receives and attempts to convey the sensory details of sound and sight,” but he reads Paul’s relationship to the waves as one of “failed reception,” ignoring what Paul himself says (22). The waves do fail to convey their message fully in the novel, but the failure is one of form, not of reception. What Paul hears cannot be made formally available to the reader, so it is inaccessible without Paul as storyteller. The novel might fail to convey what it is the waves are saying directly, but Paul as intermediary overcomes this formal failure precisely because he receives their story and conveys it to others. On his death bed, he exclaims, “I hear the waves! They always said so!” (Dickens 218). He has not failed to receive what the waves are saying at all. Like the free indirect discourse through which Florence is shown to communicate, the story told by the waves is given voice through Paul. Paul’s stories double those of the waves, making visible what is formally invisible. It is through this storied relationship to the waves that Florence is able to repair the broken domestic space of her childhood, one framed as distinctly middle class. There is no evidence that Florence hears the story the waves are telling when she walks or sits on the seashore with Paul, but Paul often shares what he hears with her. When Florence later understands their story to be one of love as she sits on the deck of a ship at sea, “elsewhere” is made visible as structurally supportive of middle-class life in England through stories—Paul’s stories. In two brief glimpses of what the waves are saying, both heard and retold by Paul, he creates a direct relationship between empire and the waves. The “far away” that Florence will later recognize is made spatial, as well as temporal; it is a land that evokes eternity through the ever-present possibility of return. When Paul has only just begun listening to the waves, he learns that India is a long distance off, somewhere across the sea. He responds to Florence, “If you were in India, I should die, Floy[,]” producing a morbid parallel between spatial and temporal distance (Dickens 106). Florence only magnifies the parallel when she replies that “so would she … if he were there. But he would be better soon” (107). She conflates his illness, which ultimately kills him, with a distant “elsewhere,” in this case India. As Paul continues to listen, however, the distance begins to close. On a different day, Paul makes the same connection. This time, he makes it clear that it is the waves telling the story, but it is a story he does not yet understand. When Florence says that the sea does not speak, that it is only the rolling of the waves, he replies, “Yes, yes … But I know that [the waves] are always saying something. Always the same thing. What place is over there?” (Dickens 107). Florence tells him that there is another country across the sea, but Paul is thinking of somewhere farther away. Once more, “elsewhere” is associated with death, but it is also complicated. Where Paul expressed dismay at the distance between England and India, he now associates the waves with curiosity and excitement. The more he listens to the waves and interprets the stories, the more he recognizes the possibility in movement, whether it be movement to faraway places, the movement of stories across different speakers and places, or the movement of the waves themselves. In this second conversation, Florence’s words are not shared with the reader, nor is her actual response to Paul’s claim that he would die if she were in India. The narrator takes over in these moments, granting speech only to Paul and the waves and emphasizing spatial continuity over separation.The lack of direct speech from other characters in this scene, and in the novel as a whole, causes the speech that is present, Paul’s speech, to stand out. Elizabeth Gaskell also weaves oral stories with written narrative throughout Mary Barton, but her characters are factory workers in Manchester, so they are not granted the kind of life in England that would prompt return. The descriptive work of Gaskell’s written narration works alongside the stories characters tell just as in Dombey and Son, but it precludes working-class movement in England, requiring a different kind of movement from oral stories. For Carolyn Betensky 338

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in the work aptly titled Feeling for the Poor, descriptions of daily life do not afford social mobility; they give agency to middle-class citizens who “feel for the poor.” As a result, possibility for the working class exists in the unknown, other people and other places constructed as unrestricted by immediate material need. Oral storytelling provides a formal space in the novel in which to construct working-class fantasies and transfer them to the colonies. Shortly after social mobility proves impossible for Mary in England, when John Barton returns from London unheard by Parliament and Mary transfers her feelings from the factory owner’s son, Harry Carson, to her working-class peer, Jem Wilson, a sailor named Will comes to visit his aunt with stories of his many travels. Fantastic and firsthand, Will’s stories move through foreign spaces, setting the foundation for Mary’s future immigration to Canada. They provide a stark contrast to the hardship experienced at home, an imaginative space where social mobility is conceived as spatial mobility. It is through the fantastical images he presents that Mary slowly replaces her fantasies of life in England with fantasies of elsewhere. Her own movement from England as national center to Canada is embedded in the formal movement of Will’s stories. Where Paul’s stories ebb and flow with the waves, Will’s radiate out from one thought into multiple narratives. When Will and Mary visit Job Leigh, a family friend and amateur naturalist, Job questions him endlessly about his adventures and the specimens he has brought back from the furthest reaches of the globe. Will starts in Sierra Leone, where the ubiquity of what are otherwise uninteresting insects makes them desirable as specimens, and branches out into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The insects, which he describes as “queer things” that “folk at home” like to hear of, bring him to the real marvel, a mermaid a fellow sailor saw off the coast of the Chatham Islands (Gaskell 202). According to Jack, she beckoned to them, only to dive back into the sea, never to be seen again. Job expresses only skepticism at this tale, as mermaids are but myth, unrecognized by the natural sciences, but Mary reacts quite differently. As Will finishes this piece of a narrative, she muses, “I wish they had caught her” (Gaskell 204). The wonders of the deep have caught her imagination, allowing her to remain deaf to Job’s incredulity and believe in the mermaid as specimen, a reality that can be caught and observed scientifically, as well as imaginatively. Her believability is only confirmed by the comb left on the rock, which Will says is “a sure proof of the truth of their story” (204). Fantasy is conflated with experiences of elsewhere, and Mary’s imagination runs on the possibilities, “on coral combs, studded with pearls” (205). Even when Will describes the comb as entirely commonplace, she continues to trust in what it represents. She begs for more stories, and Will takes the opportunity to vindicate Jack Harris with a description of a flying fish, moving the story again, this time from the Pacific to Madeira, off the coast of Africa. With the introduction of another fantastic, though not mythological, creature, Will’s stories give substance to possibilities through movement. They impose an outward movement without return and imagine elsewhere as an unformed space that can be claimed for the nation by those who do not have a place in the imagined domestic, middle-class unity of England. Will’s many radiating stories of African insects, Pacific mermaids, and flying fish are only possible outside of England, yet they support a sense of unity at home by simultaneously locating difference elsewhere and cataloguing that difference in order to bring it within the imaginative space of the nation. Before Will leaves Job’s home, he offers to bring back a Manx cat for Margaret, Job’s granddaughter. The Isle of Man, where the cats are found and where Will’s family lives, is just off the coast of England, yet Job has never heard of such animals. As Will describes them, “They look as queer and out o’ nature as flying fish,” even though they are found within the British Isles (Gaskell 208). The island, which will not obtain home rule until 1866, is made both distant and English, exotic yet domestic. Later, Mary thinks of Glasgow in much the same way, identifying it as “mysteriously distant” from Manchester (263). These extensions of the nation are still marked by their difference. When Mary transfers her fantasies to the empire, she imposes her own sense of Englishness, what Job identifies as “British liberty” to peace, work, and food, on that space while maintaining its difference from England (Gaskell 259). As a result, her movement, like that of Will’s 339

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stories, is only one way, outward from England. The difference that allows for possibility also precludes those same possibilities at home. A new life must be built abroad, where none is possible for the working class in England. The sea, once again, connects the many parts of the world in an imagined web of stories, which impose movement on the listener through classed relationships to space. For working-class Mary, English domesticity is made possible through emigration, while for middle-class Florence, it is made possible by return. For both Mary and Florence, elsewhere must be constructed by stories to make movement possible. Imperial spaces, much like the waves, are not immediately accessible to those who remain in England. They remain invisible, although, as Adam Grener points out, the atmosphere of Dombey and Son, including the waves, keeps the empire in view if only as a possibility. The view is a limited one “that reflects the individual’s limited capacity to conceptualize a global system that remains … inaccessible to lived experience” (127). In this framework, Grener writes, a “combination of particularity and abstraction [is] required to represent systemic interconnection” (123). What the waves are saying and the empire itself are inaccessible within the form of the novel and the social structures of the British nation respectively. They cannot be represented directly, so they require formal abstraction to become visible. Paul’s and Will’s oral stories, which rely on fantasy rather than representation, create a link between empire and nation, death and life, imagining “elsewhere” not for what it actually was but for its classed possibilities. Like the waves themselves, that which “can be imagined but not fully experienced” is an ever-present (eternal) potential, a fluid space that is constructed by oral stories.

A (Trans)National Aesthetic The temporality of the storied relationship that the waves create is well established. The “invisible country far away” to which Florence alludes when she looks back on Paul’s death can be read as heaven and the waves as the passage of time that eventually brings everyone to that same far-off place (Dickens 769). Such a temporal framing links Paul’s imagined immortality with the imagined timelessness of the nation, which is specifically rooted in the firm and the bourgeois ideal it represents. Paul’s ability to return “across the waves” through his relationship with Florence works to alleviate the finality of death and its implications. Though Paul himself dies, the death of the firm as stand-in for the nation can be put off eternally, made possible by the birth of Florence’s son, another Paul, who extends the family line into a limitless future. It is not only Paul’s return through time in the next generation, however, that supports middle-class national continuity, but also Florence’s return across the waves with the child. The waves extend the continuity of the nation to include space, as well as time. When the waves speak, producing a fantastical elsewhere in the middle-class imagination, they implicate both nation and empire in death, specifically Paul’s death. Mortality is inescapable, but it can be reimagined in terms of continuity when it is linked in both time and space to other people and other places. Paul’s death is tragic, not only for the loss of a beloved individual, but also because that loss occurred when he was too young to reinvigorate the firm or the family through reproduction. Benedict Anderson calls for “a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last of a whole gamut of fatalities” (10). The nation is essentially a continual struggle to contend with death, in terms of both individual mortality and communal survival. Paul’s death provides one possible alternative in the spatial continuity made possible by imperial expansion. When Paul conflates India with the eternal “farther away” to which he will eventually depart, the empire is engaged to bolster the continuity of a middle-class nation built on trade. The idea of the nation, like the stories of the waves, counteracts the arbitrariness of life and death by imagining an immemorable past and a limitless future that, as Anderson puts it, “turn[s] chance into destiny” (12). Paul’s and the waves’ stories of elsewhere rely heavily on eternity as a model for continuity, but they also augment a temporal framework with the more material possibilities of other places. 340

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Through return, more specifically Florence’s return from China with her son, Paul’s continued temporal relationship with England, Florence, and the firm are merged with a physical one in the tangible body of the newborn child. The empire makes Paul’s birth possible as Florence can only marry Walter, who is not of her social class, if they then leave the country. When Walter tells Florence she cannot marry him because he is “but a wanderer,” too poor to make a life in England, she responds, If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world’s end without fear … and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left. (Dickens 676–677) Like Paul, Florence reimagines a limitless future embedded in the eternal bond of marriage, one that will not end even in death, in terms of the “limitless” space where she and Walter can be together. Walter can only support the wealth of the nation and, as such, produce children who embody the continuity of the middle-class community if he leaves and returns with new wealth and resources. Continuity of space, with the empire becoming a new, if temporary, home, merges the temporal and physical in the body of Florence’s child and transforms fatality into national continuity through domesticity. Like Walter, Mary gains social mobility through movement in both time and space. Where Walter is already of the merchant class, a clerk in Dombey’s firm, however, Jem is a laborer. For him, the empire is a return to a pastoral past that is no longer possible in England because of rapid urbanization. Jem’s labor, transferred to the colonies, reclaims the idyllic laborer who civilizes foreign spaces while producing resources for others, like Walter, to bring back to England. For Ivan Kreilkamp, this dual movement is inherently tied to storytelling; the “lost” storyteller comes to stand in for the idyllic, rural laborer over the course of the nineteenth century. By recreating the ideal laborer abroad, the idyllic, rural England that has been lost along with that laborer and her voice is constructed in colonized spaces, reflecting the English nation’s imagined self back onto the metropole. Orality and the pastoral are reclaimed for the present through working-class movement. Gaskell sets up this connection rather explicitly with the first and last chapters of the novel. Opening on charming fields just half an hour from Manchester, where the working class of the manufacturing city can take a holiday on rare occasions, the novel closes on much the same scene in Canada. Both are described in the same language, with the occasional tree overshadowing neat cottages surrounded by neat gardens. The only difference is that one does not reflect the historical conditions of the 1830s. As D. S. Bland explains in a short monograph on the rural England of Mary Barton, contemporary evidence largely shows that rural spaces were rarely, if ever, accessible to the citizens of Manchester, as the city’s expansion made them much further than half an hour’s walk away (58). Gaskell’s own language reflects the imaginative qualities of the opening lines. The field “speaks of other ties and other occupations than those which now absorb the population of the neighborhood” and her descriptions read more like the lines of the Romantic poets than the realist descriptions that will follow (Gaskell 33). The closing scene is much the same, only it locates the pastoral firmly in the present, even switching to present tense to describe “the old primeval trees” and “the glory of an Indian summer [that] is over all” (Gaskell 481). To reclaim the idyllic laborer, that root of English culture, the industrial laborer must be moved elsewhere. Working-class movement, like that of Mary and Jem, attempts to overcome the paradox of pastoral nostalgia and the push for progress. England remains eternal by extending simultaneously into the future and into the rural spaces of the empire. As such, movement in the novel follows very specific trajectories.Walter and Florence frame their own movement in terms of return.When they visit little Paul’s grave before their wedding, Florence exclaims, “Dear Walter, thank you! I can go away, now, happy.” Walter quickly corrects her, however, responding, “And when we come back, 341

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Florence, we will come and see his grave again” (Dickens 763; my emphasis). They leave in order to return. By contrast, Jem and Mary only speak of leaving England behind them. As Mary Barton draws to a close, Jem, who has been falsely accused and acquitted of murder, cannot find work because of the stigma of his arrest. His sympathetic former supervisor offers him a position “as instrument maker to the Agricultural College they are establishing at Toronto, in Canada” (Gaskell 461). Though he offers to let Jem think on it, Jem immediately accepts: “Thank you, sir. No need for seeing the letter to say I’ll accept it. I must leave Manchester; and I’d as lief quite England at once when I’m about it” (ibid). Mary echoes him as they plan to leave, saying, “I’ve never had no opinion of England, ever since they could be such fools as to take up a quiet chap like thee, and clap thee in prison” (477). The movement that is available to them, originally set up by Will’s stories, requires them to reject England to recreate it elsewhere. Gaskell and Dickens have their characters confirm the movement afforded by oral stories as transnational aesthetic, with working-class characters rejecting England to leave it and middle-class characters leaving to return.The temporal shifts at the heart of each set of movements are made spatial by oral stories that project fantasies of national continuity and pastoral reclamation on imperial spaces.

A Note on Alice The story that remains silent is that of the convict. While transportation is its own kind of transnational movement, the stories surrounding it rely on the silence of the people who are moved.Their stories are continually deferred, often to the moment of death or even interminably, confirming the removal of the convict from English society and the imagined space of the nation. Unlike Paul and Florence, who return, or Mary, who remains part of the English nation as imperial nucleus, the convict Alice remains removed from the nation even when she returns to England. Jem almost falls to the same fate, as it is his trial as a convict that removes him from England, but his acquittal and subsequent choice to emigrate allow him to remain within the imagined community. It is important that Jem has a choice both in leaving and in his destination. As Diana C. Archibald writes, If he immigrated to New South Wales, it would be an implicit acknowledgement that he had done something wrong, for the stereotype of the Australian colonies being the last resort of thieves and rogues remained strong in nineteenth century fiction … Of the other outposts of empire then thriving under British control, none seemed so able to reproduce English comforts, and thus English domesticity, as the Neo-Europe Canada. (36) Jem is not able to return, but he is able to “reproduce English domesticity” and, as such, retain his Englishness. Even the convict who builds a life and works to support the nation once he has been transported might be able to return, as Abel Magwitch does in his support of Pip in Great Expectations, but Alice is not afforded any of those opportunities. Alice does not tell her story, except briefly to her mother who presumably already knows it, until just before her death, when she repents for her attempts at revenge. Even what she tells her mother is disjointed, three short stories of one life, all of which predict her fall from grace in the conditions of her life: “What came to that girl comes to thousands every year. It was only ruin, and she was born to it” (Dickens 466). Her stories, those she heard as a child and those she tells now, map a very specific kind of movement on her. As a working-class woman whose mother does not contribute her labor to the nation, she can only move downward, away from England and Englishness. The form of the story is separated, imagining three different Alices who cannot be reconciled with one another except in their separation from England. They all seem to have a different beginning, but all end in ruin. Her language continually distances her from England, though she has physically returned, as when she says, 342

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And Alice Marwood is come back a woman. Such a woman as she out to be, after all this. In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her. (467) All that is clear is her conviction, which solidifies the stories told about and to her, or convicts more generally, but defers her own story. When Alice does tell her story, she does not do so in order to return to the English community. She makes clear that she does not wish to be forgiven, only believed (Dickens 713). Her story does not allow her to be reintegrated into the imagined community but confirms her separation from it. The fallen woman, no matter the cause of her fall, cannot be reclaimed. Alice tells her story as one who was already dead when she went to trial: I was concerned in a robbery … Though I was but a girl, I would have gone to Death, sooner than ask him for a word, if a word of his could have saved me. I would! [But] who was it do you think, who … left me without even his poor sign of remembrance; well satisfied that I should be sent abroad, beyond the reach of further trouble to him, and should die, and rot there? (714) Though transportation was meant to reform the system of capital punishment, providing an alternative to death, it proves just as permanent as death for Alice. She is removed from England, “beyond the reach of further trouble to him,” and does not recover even in her return. The stories she is told, the stories told about her, her story of herself, and her movement from England to Australia all mark her as separate. Even when she dies, she will not be permitted to return as Paul does. Her death is simple, and when the light has left her eyes, “Nothing lay there, any longer, but the ruin of the mortal house on which the rain had beaten, and the black hair that had fluttered in the wind” (784). There is no mention of the waves or their stories, only ruin and loss. Alice takes up very little of the novel, but she performs many roles within it. Her very absence reveals the ways in which national unity relies on her erasure.The domestic tranquility that Florence and Walter find on their return is dependent on a system that removes industrial waste, including the excess population made waste by those, like Carker, who exploit the lower classes for their labor and then dispose of them.Though Carker does ultimately die for his misdeeds, Florence’s rise in her father’s esteem, her ability to rehabilitate the firm and the domestic spaces of her childhood, is only possible with his fall and the resultant fall of the firm. The domestic space Florence creates and the revival of the firm rely on Alice’s transportation and her resultant revenge on Carker. Yet, Alice does not have a place in the imagined community of the nation, so she never hears the stories of the waves. The stories she hears and tells are of her own sexual exploitation and ruin, imposing a kind of movement that removes her entirely from the British imagination. Both she and Florence end up “far away,” but the stories they hear limit Alice, where they open up possibilities for Florence. The eternal elsewhere full of love to which Florence sails holds only death for Alice. Oral storytelling as a transnational aesthetic links time and space, class and empire. As Florence sits on the deck of the ship on her way to China, she begins to understand the story that Paul attempted to tell. Because he shared his stories with her, she now thinks of the waves in relation to him and is willing to listen. The voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love … not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away! (Dickens 769) 343

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Florence is part of growing middle-class trade networks, so “the invisible country far away” becomes real in this moment in the form of the imperial space on the other end of their journey. The message she hears is one of interconnection embodied in the waves that supports the nation through the return of resources and wealth, as well as fantasies of renewal. Mary hears similar stories through Will, allowing her to transfer working-class fantasies of social mobility elsewhere. As Alice shows, however, that web is closed to many, who must be disposed of in order to make a national community possible. The endings of both novels carefully erase Alice and others of the disposable classes to make room for the middle-class, domestic ideals they imagine. The industrial novel, and the distinctly classed stories its characters tell, come to serve the empire, producing and reproducing classed relations to space that facilitate imperial expansion and an idea of national unity. Dombey and Son ends by the sea, looking in on a scene of domestic bliss that parallels that at the end of Mary Barton. In both, the waves continue to tell their story, returning again and again to wash upon the shores of the empire.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.Verso, 2016. Archibald, Diana C. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. U of Missouri P, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, edited by Michael McKeon, The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000 [1936], pp. 77–93. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action & the Victorian Novel. U of Virginia P, 2010. Bland, D.S. “Mary Barton and Historical Accuracy.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1950, pp. 58–60. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. The Modern Library, 2003 [1848]. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton, edited by Jennifer Foster, Broadview Press, 2000. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford UP, 2015. Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Cambridge UP, 2005. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. E-book, Princeton UP, 2015. Proquest E-Book Central. Perara, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire:The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. Columbia UP, 1991. Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford UP, 2003. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism.Vintage Books, 1994.

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26 CLASS, RACE, AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN BRITISH THEATRE BETWEEN THE 1950S AND 2000S Önder Çakırtaş

In Britain’s historical, literary, and sociological perspective, the concept of class has been transformed around ideological conflicts and rejection policies in economy-oriented, race-oriented, and culture-oriented differentiation, respectively. In his essay, “Muslim Minorities in Britain: Integration, Multiculturalism, and Radicalism in the Post-7/7 Period,”Tahir Abbas paraphrases Ceri Peach that “British discourse on racialised minorities has shifted its focus from ‘colour’ in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘race’ in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, ‘ethnicity’ in the 1990s, to ‘religion’ in the present climate [2000s]” (288). While my assessment relates to racial stratification in British society, when I adapt this to the class hierarchy in the British social stratification, I contend that the scope and activity of the concept of “class” are quite large and comprehensive. This transformation in the concept of class has become the complementary element of prevailing ideology and culture moderated as “grand narratives” of artistic and cultural products. British theatre’s mission includes being carrier of these narratives. British political theatre is alive with works from the 1920s Theatre Workers Movement to the twenty-first century, with the works of “leftist” playwrights focusing on class divisions. I assess new, post-1920s playwriting under the umbrella terms of “agitprop” and “epic,” especially those describing the battles of the working class with the bourgeoisie. In the 1950s, the theatrical works of a group of playwrights (some call them “Angry Young Men”) repeatedly weave around the subject of class separations. Affected by the 1968 global student unrests, the 1970s open the epoch of new leftist, idealistic theatre, while in the 1980s, women’s political writing rises against the masculinist upheaval in playwriting. The 1990s, with rare examples of political theatre, is the age of “in-yer-face” in which violence, sexuality, and murder predominate. Since 2000, theatre has dealt with identity conflicts, while multicultural and postcolonial identities have been marginalized. I have tracked the social transformation specifically in terms of the shift of social stratification from class to race and culture. This shift in Britain followed in the second half of the twentieth century. However, I do not argue that this chronological and historical transformation caused class to disappear completely. Classes undergo structural changes with the emergence of new and different factors throughout history. Here, the concept of class has not disappeared but has undergone some intersectional transformations with race. I have selected plays of three playwrights, John Osborne, David Edgar, and David Hare, whose social and political themes typify the conversion of “social stratification” from solely a class hierarchy to a racial pyramid and cultural cluster in British public spheres. Considering that the economic system, the backbone of the class struggle, 345

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appears to be the main source of the racial struggle in Britain over the years, I theorize using not only Marxist criticism, but also dialectical materialism, because the latter covers an eternal cycle and an absolute change “in which every finite mode of existence of matter … is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes” (Engels 34–35). However, in this absolute transformation, the economic hierarchy, as well as social and cultural theories, form the basis of transition from class to expanded racial and cultural conflicts. Class conflict seems partly replaced by racial conflict in 1970s Britain; since 2000, Britain has experienced cultural collisions, as proposed by Samuel Huntington’s iconic Clash of Civilizations (1996). Thus, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), David Edgar’s Our Own People (1977), and David Hare’s A Map of the World (1983) are worthy of study in the context of the shift in social stratification in Britain, with the lens of theoretical readings of Stuart Hall and Ambalavaner Sivanandan on class hierarchy, racism, and kulturkampf (culture struggle).

Look Back in Anger (1956) and Osborne’s Class-Oriented Anger The 1950s were a unifying decade of transformation for Britain. The country largely lost its imperial character and experienced an economic conversion with two contrasting scenarios covering the period before and after the political rebellion of Egypt for the nationalization of the Suez Canal; Western media covered the Suez Crisis as a political crisis in 1956. The Commonwealth countries, by declaring their independence respectively, demonstrated that Britain, the superpower of the Victorian world, had left the leadership to the United States, and a great antipathy for America started in England, as Jimmy Porter illustrates in Look Back in Anger: “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans” (Osborne 17). It was nearly impossible for cultural and art forms to be unaffected by the transformation due to the loss of empire. In 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was successful as an iconic late-postwar dramatic play, which John Russell Taylor characterized as “a succès d’estime, a succès de scandale and finally just a succès” (9) though critics came to understand the actual importance of the play as launching a contemporary history of British world theatre both pre-1956 and after. The majority of academic studies related to the period like William Hutchings’s The Plays of David Storey: A Thematic Study (1978), Michael Billington’s State of Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (1997), and Sanford Sternlicht’s Masterpieces of Modern British and Irish Drama (1959) consider Osborne’s premiere of Look Back in Anger on the 8th of May 1956 as a decisive moment of a new theatrical era. In contrast, several works by various critics, scholars, and essayists like Samuel A. Weiss’s “Osborne’s Angry Young Play” (1960), Taylor’s Anger and After (1962), Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade (1958), Aleks Sierz’s “John Osborne and the Myth of Anger” (1996), and Colin Wilson’s The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007), among others, identified the word “anger” in the title of this play as the key perception of the transformation period. Many other critics such as Sanford Sternlicht, John Russell Taylor, and Aleks Sierz described this play as revolutionary and emphasized that this play was thematically separated from what had been presented in numerous post-war British theatrical works so far. Sternlicht, for instance, alleges that the revolution in Osborne’s work that provoked and shook the audience was political, “but,” as he continues, “it was also a revolution in style” (59), while Taylor instead highlights its content and the directness in its language rather than the form (qtd. in Sierz 46). Nevertheless, Dan Rabellato “offers a counterreading of this period” (2) and implies that many related books “ignore what came before” (2) the production of Look Back in Anger in 1956 in his book 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Drama and suggests that those who treat 1956 as an “explosion,” a “renaissance,” and a “breakthrough” in British theatre misjudge the period as follows: “the old era becomes exclusively characterised by the absence of Anger, and the new era by its presence” (4). 346

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Osborne’s play involves anger that the working class’s struggle against the bourgeoisie and the upper class would not encompass the struggle of the “new working class” that emerged in the 1950s, because the 1950s were the years of economic prosperity; as Stephen Brooke puts it, “the experience of ‘affluence” (773) was taking place. This profusion led the working class in the country to a different quest. Ken Roberts claims that, “in the 1950s, it was believed that poverty had been abolished and consigned to history. The working class was enjoying a type of prosperity that had been almost beyond the imaginations of pre-war generations” (83). With a similar point of view, Stefan Collini calls this radical change in the working class life “the embourgeoisement of the working class,” as he recalls that this transformation “involved losing or repudiating the old selfconsciously separate, fatalistic, working-class stance, and adopting broadly middle-class attitudes and ways of life” (271–272)—though the adjective “fatalistic” appears as a questionable generalization for earlier generations of workers. Perhaps, one of the most important reasons why Osborne’s play created such an impact was that Osborne saw and proficiently analyzed this societal metamorphosis. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter was opposed to, to borrow Rebellato’s phrase “an unctuously faux naïf quality” (3) of the working class, because he “feared that this birth implied the death of an older class consciousness” (Brooke 773), and thus he was characterizing a rebellious nature against the easy engagement of working-class people in this social and political atmosphere. Aleks Sierz’s in-depth analysis of Osborne’s play notes that various early critics decided that Osborne and Jimmy match the cultural and political characteristics of the “Angry Young Men,” which, according to Sierz, makes the work an example of “biographical fallacy” (47). Britain’s Angry Young Men, allegedly formed in 1952 (Kroll 157), intended to demonstrate the common characteristics of the group members with the consciousness of the protest that the earlier working class had; the impulse that brought them together can be described “as a marked and intense dissatisfaction with many current values and institutions in British society” (157) in the 1950s. Osborne was among the intellectual figures of the Angry Young Men along with writers, poets, and playwrights such as Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Iris Murdoch, Arnold Wesker, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and John Wain who were commonly from working-class backgrounds. Being the only woman of the Angry Young Men, Murdoch “was in process of creating a novelistic world unique to her own art” (Spear 24). Murdoch and the other “angry” young intellectuals, as Wilson puts forward in his The Angry Years:The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007), “driven by a detestation of the class system that had been around since William the Conqueror,” strove for “a real political protest that hoped to get something done” (xv). Jimmy Porter is a distinctive stereotype of the working class and he is a cultivated individual in terms of education, politics, and culture, like some characters of Osborne. However, Osborne’s main emphasis in this play is on Porter’s complaint about the working class rather than having Porter complain about class hierarchy in society. Osborne’s play, which critic Kenneth Tynan nominated as “the voice of the young” in his article in The Observer on the 13th of May 1956 (“The Voice of the Young”), is therefore based on the concepts of economy, class hierarchy, shifts in working-class consciousness, and the discontent and their association with the 1950s youth. The emphasis on youth is particularly important, because Osborne alleges that two things were imperative in the making of this work which he termed as “principal ingredients … [of] theatrical perceptions”: one was vitality and the other was honesty (John Osborne Plays: 1 xi). Osborne, in his “angry” response to criticism of his play, which he still had not lost after almost twenty years, mentions that many other contemporaneous writers were writing for the sake of receiving applause from society (xi). However, Osborne, from his own perspective, was clinging to the truths that the people and writers of the time largely ignored.To Osborne, the working-class struggle of the 1920s and 1930s, years which coincided with Osborne’s early years, was replaced by a new formation that began to embrace middle-class values. In other words, the working class was evolving in a fashion that would almost regard the middle-class lifestyle as usual in their working-class lives, and Osborne opposed this. That is what Jimmy meant by his iconic words “Our youth is slipping away” (Osborne 15). Angry Young Men as British leftists, and hence Osborne, of the same view, adopted “liberalism and social democracy” (Kroll 157), the 347

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invariant political philosophy of the working class.The launch of a young and working-class character as a protest hero by Osborne, therefore, comprises the reaction against the general 1950s transformation, because, as Morton Kroll puts, “[a]mong the most articulate of the displaced are the young men of economically and socially impoverished background who—received under scholarship auspices some—upper class training” (158). According to Osborne’s view of this transformation, the struggle of the working class seems to be malformed; measures must be taken against it, and Jimmy, who mirrors Osborne’s own identity, worries that the vulgarity he believes exists in the middle class will spread to the working class, and hence throws up his anger at his middle-class wife, Alison, his friend Cliff, and his mistress Helena. This was typical of the literatures of Angry Young Men, as Kroll transcribes, [t]he hero is the core of each of these works; through his perceptive, sensitive personality the Angry Young Men present their reaction to society. In some instances, the world is rejected; in others the hero is victimized by it. The hero, like his author, is in his twenties, not long out of college. (162) Jimmy comes across to the audience as a bully who complains about the mediocrity of the people around him and protests their unresponsiveness. He expresses his anger against the people who are trapped in the home and believes that their cultural and socio-political assets are confined to a domestic environment. The 1950s was the time when television entered the home, technological devices evolved into mass production, and the home became the only place where social gathering was provided, which created the term “kitchen-sink realism” that became widespread in the theatre. Alice Ferrebe expresses that Worst of all, it ushered them into a space crucial to the ideology of Britain’s project of reconstruction: the home. The sheer number of official reports and commissions focused upon the family in the immediate post-war period is evidence of its psychological and institutional importance during the 1950s. (8) This points out that, as it is the case in the play, the working-class people were being bribed out of the public arena by housing and consumerist goodies, while still being oppressed. Considered this way, Osborne’s metaphorical and realistic crest of “home” used as a setting includes the dialectic and materialist reflection of a working-class ideology in Marxist philosophy, where Jimmy’s protest echoes. Accordingly, in Osborne’s play, the home as a concept of “existence” in the changing British social order and its interconnection with human relations is represented by its economic reality, which hints at Marxist dialectical materialism. The anxiety that is reflected in the play’s people and relationships appears as soon as the characters are described as occupants of a rented home.This anxiety appears not only due to “real changes and interconnections” (Cornforth 15) in things which is “what is meant by dialectics,” but is also due to “the real conditions of material existence” (15) which reveals a materialist outlook; the home became a fundamental economic base. As Ferrebe states it was not just the relationships between its inhabitants, but the structure and site of the home itself that were causing anxiety. The 1957 Rent Act, initiated by British MP Enoch Powell as part of his crusade to free up the market, allowed rents to rise steeply. (Ferrebe 8) This explains what Jimmy yells when he perceives the exploitative attitude of a stereotypical upperclass home owner, Miss Drury, “She’s an old robber. She gets more than enough out of us for this place every week” (Osborne 25).The characters of the play display the change of the 1950s clearly in 348

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their experiences, relationships, and attitudes.Therefore, Osborne attempts to portray the reality of the domestic structure with characters stuck in the attic house where Jimmy complains of people’s lack of feeling. Jimmy believes that domesticity makes people unresponsive, which partly reflects Osborne’s socialist attitude. As Luc Gilleman quotes, according to Osborne, “Socialism is about people living together, and the sooner the leaders of the Labour Party stop arguing about sugar and cement and wake up to the fact the better” (2). While Jimmy criticizes the banality of domesticity, he talks about everyone’s submission to consumerism and materialism, and according to him “Nobody can be bothered. No one can raise themselves out of their delicious sloth” (Osborne 15). This is closely related to Osborne’s socialism, because to Osborne, “socialism was all about feelings” (Gilleman 2). Hence Jimmy criticizes people’s numbness, implying that people do not have a human life: “Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and that we’re actually alive” (Osborne 15). Simon Lee suggests a similar approach and relates to what Emile Durkheim sees in the notion of class-consciousness it is possible to consider how domestic interiors reflect attempts to make sense of an unstable world, but the very desire to do so signals more psychologized grasping for stability—specifically the kind found in class identification and notions of solidarity. In other words, domestic space is rendered as defensible space not just through consumerism, but through a specific kind of décor that communicates adherence to class principles as an attempt to find grounding in a shifting environment. Kitchen sink era texts address such nuance through their careful articulation of the way consumerism and domestic space was united, specially the way that a new home with modern appliances connoted progress and social ascendancy. (149) While Osborne reveals his world’s traces in the Jimmy prototype, he also emphasizes the reality the working class’s transformation in the social metamorphosis of British society. In this context, Jimmy’s words reflect nostalgia, causing us to feel that the past is desirable, reality is there, because the new order’s new consciousness has demoralized the working class, with a new social hierarchy embracing a “privatized” materialist culture. As Brooke quotes an impression of Chris Waters, “in post-war Britain, nostalgia became embedded in the conception of being working class” (qtd. in Brooke 775). Osborne’s commitment to the past involves an issue with the “identity” of classes because, as Collini puts it, “the embourgeoisement of the working class was not just a matter of increased prosperity, but a fundamental change of identity” (qtd. in Ferrebe 7). Jimmy’s frustration is exactly about the metamorphosis in the identity of the working class which he feels like “loss and antagonism,” as Brooke puts it, “often mediated through a nostalgia which accorded integrity and moral heft to a vanished working class world uncompromised by affluence and materialism” (773). Osborne reveals what the working class evokes for Jimmy with some psychoanalytic tips on his childhood and establishes an identity link between anger and class existence and struggle: “I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless” (Osborne 58). Look Back in Anger involves Jimmy’s raging warfare on the class pyramid in which Jimmy is attached to his working-class past, while the middle class that Alison represents disgusts him. As Alison puts it, “They both came to regard me as a sort of hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on” (43). David Edgar’s words about Osbourne’s iconic play, which stands out from the stereotyped theatre plays and boldly reveals 1950s panoramic realities, are significant: “John Osborne bitterly resented the narrow, lower-middle-class culture he’d left behind” (qtd. in Sierz 57). From the points of view of Osborne and Jimmy, England is not the old England, and the working class is not the old working class, nor is the middle class the old one. Osborne and Jimmy are both angry because it seems that “England was finished for” everyone who “can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining anymore” (Osborne 66–67). 349

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Our Own People (1977): Racialized Economic Hierarchy in Edgar’s Political Theatre In the introduction to Edgar Plays Three (1991), David Edgar, claiming that the concept of “class” embraces other meanings in the construction of social issues, discusses the perception created by Our Own People in the reader/audience as follows; “people originally committed to the idea that the only division that matters is class are forced to come to terms with the notion that there are other divisions between people as deep and perhaps even more painful” (xi). This is a reasonable explanation when looking at the time, because the socio-historical and political logos depicted by the play and the real events that are thematically associated with the play illustrate that the socioeconomic identity of Britain transformed in the changing world order. The post-1950s process is the basis for a new economic and subsequent political conflict in the UK. Although the alteration of the 1950s in all areas continued in the 1960s, the 1960s had an impact on the world as a period of fundamental political events. The harsh student events, les évènements, that broke out in France in 1968, initially aiming at protesting the Vietnam War, spread to Britain, and continued in many parts of the world for days. However, one of the most important events of the 1960s for Britain was the increase of racial conflicts and racism, and British MP Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech more specifically against black immigrants in the same year in 1968 was the clearest example of racial issues being politicized in the country. Following the Second World War and especially after the colonial states obtained their independence, Britain experienced migration invasions from these “non-white” countries. In post-war Britain, thus, the ongoing same-race class struggle evolved into a race-centric economic structure, with the “other” races entering the country seeking a share in the “white” British economy. Contrary to the abundance and profusion in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s covers a crisis period when the economy collapsed, Britain borrowed large sums of money from the IMF, and miners and some public officials started economic protests, as Margaret Thatcher took over the country through these protests in 1979. Although the economic crisis became more evident in the country, embodied the visibility of immigrants in Britain, the British government was aiming to solve “its ‘black problem’” (348), as Ambavalaner Sivanandan ironically puts it solved [it] in the sense of having diverted revolutionary aspiration into nationalist achievement, reduced militancy to rhetoric, put protest to profit and, above all, kept a black under-class from bringing to the struggles of the white workers political dimensions peculiar to its own historic battle against capital. (348) In Modern British Playwrighting: The 1970s (2012), Chris Megson emphasizes that “the 1970s saw the emergence of ‘identity politics’—feminism, anti-racism, and gay rights—predicated on the notion that ‘the personal is political’” (36). Thus, unlike the popular commercial theatrical performances of the 1960s, the 1970s witnessed the staging of dramatic works that focused on politics of identity and culture and targeted various works of “identity politics” which Megson described as “alternative theatre” rejecting the “words ‘underground’ and ‘fringe’ [which] have been deployed to describe the multiple forms of theatrical performance that emerged from the 1960s counterculture” (37). David Edgar, as a socialist intellectual and political dramatist, was one of the most prolific playwrights of this turbulent time, and it was not enough for Edgar to witness events, but he also provided the vision that made it possible for authors to create from an awareness from a socialist perspective. As Edgar noted in the introduction in the seventies we awoke from that party with a severe economic hangover, to find the institutions and principles of the forties corrupt and decayed; that out of that understand350

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ing would come the realisation that the revolution of the forties had indeed been halfhearted and now was the time for “real socialism” to emerge. (Introduction to Edgar Plays: 3 ix) As Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt put it, although Edgar has been engaged in differing political formations over time, “Edgar has been politically on the Left since he was a young man at university, attracted by the idea of Marxist revolution” (2). Reinelt and Hewitt advocate that Edgar, therefore, has worked hard “to forge a theatre that embodies the social predicaments of modernity as they have developed from the Second World War to the new millennium” (2). For this reason, while he was a journalist, he wrote The National Interest (1971) just after Edward Heath’s Conservative government “in which the Conservatives were portrayed as Chicago gangsters” (Peacock 88). Referred to as “agitprop”—“a form of touring left-wing theatre intended to mobilize working-class audiences, especially at times of industrial struggle” (Megson 44)—The National Interest politically and sarcastically reveals some contemporary issues in Britain. While the political situation of 1970s Britain was getting worse in a synchronized manner with its economy, the bad trend also affected the post-war immigrants settled in the country. Increasing racism against the presence of immigrants was also becoming the main element of the political parties that mitigated national ideologies. Edgar’s anti-fascist play Destiny (1976), which captured “an analysis of British society in the seventies, and in particular of those sections of society who were then (and might again in the future) tend towards support for an emerging neo-fascist organization” (Edgar Introduction to Edgar Plays: 1 viii), was a chief play that conveyed the contemporary problems of the country through a socialist viewpoint and realist style. Edgar, who was born in Birmingham and worked as a journalist in Bradford, was also connected to Asian immigrants, mostly Pakistani and Indian, by his birthplace and place of employment. Therefore, he was also aware of the possible conflicts between the white and the non-white British people, as he underlines, “I was alarmed by the growth of racism in Bradford’s local politics, which is a town where a lot of Asian workers had come to in the 1960s” (qtd. in Kathryn and Nick “David Edgar”). As he notes elsewhere in another text, [d]uring the decade since Powell’s speech, against a background of the worst economic crisis since the War, there’s been an Immigration Act and a brace of Race Relations Acts. Unemployment has risen to high levels for whites, higher for blacks. (Edgar 111) For these reasons, the economic-based class struggle in Britain had turned into racial struggle. Similarly, Our Own People (1977), one of the plays of Edgar’s socialist thought in question, deals with minority Asians’ economic struggle against British whites from such a communalist perspective. Based on a fictional industrial dispute in Yorkshire in the 1970s, the play centers around racial problems, racialized economic systems, social prejudice, and Asian sub-groups’ feelings of “othering” and alienation. First presented by Pirate Jenny at the Half Moon Theatre in November 1977, the play reveals the issues involving Pakistani Muslims as employees of a small textile company in Yorkshire who launched a strike due to unfair working conditions. Although the play focuses on racial issues, economic anxiety drives group bonding, as it has in the pyramidization of Britain’s class-consciousness since the 1920s. Our Own People depicts such conflicted English and Asian characters; indeed, Yorkshire, the setting of the play, was one of the places in 1970s Britain where race issues were abundant. At this time, as Edgar notes in his Destiny, National Front (NF) appeared as a fascist political party that exhibited and gained strength with its anti-immigration policies. “The growth of the NF from the early 1970s,” as Laura Christine Price suggests, “was troubling to many black and Asian people,” (171) and she continues, 351

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the growth of the NF was a considerable concern to Asian communities in the woollen district. In 1973, the Yorkshire Post asked whether there would be a “race war” in Yorkshire, and an oral history narrator commented that as a child in the 1970s “We were warned in assemblies.” (171) But the economics were the real driving force of this possible “race war,” as Edgar writes in an article, “fascist ideology opposes the more unpleasant symptoms of the development of capitalism” (“Racism, Fascism” 113). Therefore, Our Own People adds a different dimension to the struggle of the working class, and this time the white working class starts a racially oriented war against the working class of people of color. Edgar tries to activate the “othering” phenomenon produced by orientalist and postcolonial discourse in the axis of an “us” and/vs. “them” paradigm, which, from my own perspective, is one of the sharpest parts of the play. The conflict of Pakistani workers with British whites who did not support them during their labor protests is a manifestation of the existence of the capitalist and materialist social structure in post-war Britain.This newer construction of the conflict confirms what Mohammed Lateef, an interpreter for the Asian people who cannot express themselves clearly enough in English, claims in Our Own People. This newer view also clarifies the statements by Hameed Faruqi, “it was evidence of racial prejudice. The white workers were not interested in the victimization of the strikers” (Own People 21). In Edgar’s witty description, the concept of class turns into a conflict of “us” and “them” around the postcolonial and orientalist discourse of identity politics. Accordingly, the diagram of “us” as the “Self ” and “them” as the “Other” is categorized as a theoretical and operative axiom in the play by Edgar. The playwright also expresses this linguistically as if he was looking for an answer to the question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks in her original essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as an image of postcolonial economic discourse in the social subconscious under homogeneous supremacies. The following dialogue appears as the most palpable instance of this: CHAIR:  I

have only one question. You said “We came out” on the 16th. Who was “we” at this stage? I mean, who was on the strike. HUSSEIN:  Well, all the nightshift, almost, some of the dayshift, and some of the Sultzer people. Also a few labourers and menders and so on. CHAIR:  I have to ask if all the strikers were Asian. HUSSEIN: Yes. (Own People 12–13) In Our Own People, at the level of interpersonal, inter-communal, and inter-class conflict, where capital seems to be the othering factor, the identity politics of subaltern individuals seems to occur in social, political, and cultural polarizations where the economy is prioritized.Therefore, as one of the most appropriate forms of behavior for the socialist mission of the working class, the workers fulfill the idea of being involved in a mass strike by supporting and organizing with each other. As Hussein remarks, “[t]hey joined the strike because it is normal that when there is a dispute in a factory everyone is involved. That is normal even when people are not directly affected. Or that is what we thought” (13) which prompts “educate, agitate, organize,” the three basic principles of Fabian socialism. But, in line with the “us” vs. “them” paradigm I pointed out above, “[w]hat made this strike special, however, was that all the strikers were Asians, and nearly all the people who stayed at work were white” (5). Sivanandan indicates that immigrants from colonial countries migrated to Britain between 1946 and 1951 for labor purposes and in the following years, a controlled migration permit was experienced, which he calls a “stop-go” period in which “periods of economic expansion led to 352

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a rise in immigration, periods of recession to a decline” (348). In the continuation of his review, he states, “in a period of full employment the indigenous worker would move upwards into better paid jobs, skilled apprenticeships, training programmes, etc, leaving the dirty, hard, low-paid work to immigrant labour” (348). The working class were part of most immigration, as well. This is exactly the situation that appears in Edgar’s play. In the play, at a time when job demand is apparently high, white British workers who are placed against the protesting Asians represent an interesting example of dialectical materialism in Marxist thought. More importantly, in such a labor psychology and approach, in which dialectical materialism is embodied as a secret agenda, the struggle of Asians continues against more than one person or case: against the employer, against racial segregation, and against the sexist approach. Workers in shifts at the textile company are categorized into class and racial hierarchies which exposes a chauvinist segregation, regardless of working conditions. In the play the workers are systematically allocated a workload; there emerges an unfair hierarchy in work divisions rather than allocation based on the seniority and ability of the workers. The employer assigns white workers to two vacant units, where the payments are relatively higher, although “there were Asians who were as or more experienced than the people who were appointed” (Own People 18). Another case is the gender-based humiliation of Asian females. It is portrayed that there are officers who cause problems for Asian women to meet even their most basic physiological needs and Asian women complain about this situation. In the play, the Asian woman is put in a racial category and subjected to a different otherization, as Mrs. Bhandari, a committee member of the workers union, cries “I suppose, that someone, somewhere, is prejudiced against you” (39). The epitome of the “us” vs. “them” practice as a way of making identity politics in the context of belonging and self-categorization produced by postcolonial discourse needs to be emphasized. The language adopted by Edgar has a separate influence in the emergence of this epitome in that the concept of class appears in both the economic and racial dimensions of this paradigm to cover both meanings. In this regard, Jowett’s following remark is Edgar’s emphasis on the marginalization of class differences, historically embedded in social memory: “Them’s who them always is. Them is the employers” (26). Asians, “discriminated against by the company in terms of pay, conditions of work and promotion” (7), ask for “equality … between Asians and whites” (12). The Asians direct this appeal to the management, though this will not work out as it seems counter-intuitive that the same management who pits groups against one another will grant them equality and lessen their own levers of power. The workers are in search of public support to raise the awareness of race- or class-consciousness, instead. In post-war Britain, class divisions take on a different dimension, and as Sivanandan found out “the jobs which ‘coloured immigrants’ found themselves in were the largely unskilled and low status ones for which white labour was unavailable or which white workers were unwilling to fulfill” (349). Accordingly, as it is the case in the play, the othered Asian is stereotyped as “The White Man’s Burden,” and poses a threat due to the economic worries that broke out in Britain especially in the postcolonial period, and for this reason outbursts of xenophobic attitudes occupy the “white” perception of the English, as Jowett decrees in the play, “there’s fears, among the English workers, that in three years’ time, won’t be a white face left” (Own People 42). And Mrs. Dawson, who portrays the cliché xenophobic manias and racist manners, refers to Muslim Asians, saying that there are “more Mohammads there [in London] than there are in bloody Mecca” (45), referring to the dimension of religious discrimination against Muslims.

David Hare’s A Map of the World (1983) and the Representation of “Clash of Civilizations” In 1993, the journal Foreign Affairs published Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which led him to write the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) 353

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in response to the discussions in this essay. As can be construed from the title, the essay and later the book in its comprehensive form discuss the concept of civilizations; the question of a universal civilization; the relation between power and culture; the shifting balance of power among civilizations; cultural indigenization in non-Western societies; the political structure of civilizations; conflicts generated by Western universalism, Muslim militancy, and Chinese assertion; balancing and bandwagoning responses to the rise of Chinese power; the causes and dynamics of fault line wars; and the futures of the West and of a world of civilizations. (Huntington 13) For the West, and especially Britain, which has gone through the grim challenges of the post-war and postcolonial process, this conflict now had to be addressed within the cultural and social integration of multicultural philosophies as part of political and social agendas. The massive presence of particularly non-white or even non-Western races and cultures in Britain after the 1950s made cultural integration a mandatory policy towards the end of the century in British politics. In the early 1980s—just at the aftershock of the Winter of Discontent—when the Thatcher government was struggling with economic problems, the existence of these issues in the British theatre was also acknowledged. Although the economic difficulties affected theatrical innovation and quality, the Theatres Act of 1968 which abolished censorship of the stage in the United Kingdom allowed the writers who wanted to create products to form an agenda with different works. David Hare, one of the leading figures of the political theatre, also brought the period’s dominant ideologies and ways of thinking and lifestyles to the audience in a witty and in-depth sense. Starting his theatre adventure in the late 1960s and taking steps towards professionalism with the Portable Theatre which he co-founded with Tony Bicat in 1968, Hare “emerged … as one of a whole generation of radical, left-wing political dramatists” (Boon 5). Despite all social and institutional obstacles that were arrayed to prevent his plays’ success, Hare continued to work without compromising the combination of contemporary socio-political issues with a humorist’s aestheticism of politico-social realism. The reasons for his struggles, although he could produce films, sketches, radio plays, and adaptation works during the vicious period of the 1980s, are somewhat due to his educated identity: that is, Hare “went to Cambridge where he studied with Marxist Raymond Williams” (Homden 10), and Hare had an acknowledged love for literature. As Bicat notes, “We [Hare and Bicat] both had an abiding love of English literature, which we had come at from different angles. David was very well educated” (16).Yet, Hare’s love of theatre was shaped more with a leftist approach, with works prioritizing the public interest. Accordingly, the “State-of-Nation” plays that Hare penned in the 1980s were political chefs-d’oeuvre that contained political sarcasm and ridiculed Thatcherism and Thatcherite policies along with various institutions. As Lib Taylor expresses, “with Pravda [(1985)], written with Howard Brenton, he launched an excoriating attack on 1980s British society,” while “the cynicism of politicians and their lust for power [are] cruelly magnified in The Secret Rapture [(1988)] and, in Racing Demon [(1990)] the Church of England is portrayed as an empty shell, devoid of caring purposes” (91–92), as featured by Monique Prunet. The 1980s in Britain emerges as a time when ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity was clearly exposed, and therefore, “British multiculturalism,” as Amir Ali puts it, “emerge[s] in the 1980s in a political context dominated by the stern conservatism of Margaret Thatcher’s rule dominating nationally and the more emollient Labour presence entrenching itself at the level of the local authorities” (44). However, how effective these practices were from a social perspective is controversial, because cultural and racial diversity might be disrupted if the social acceptance of a democratic anti-hierarchical system is not conceivable; henceforth, 1980s Britain witnessed the rejection of these communitarian movements to the extent that the period saw widespread race 354

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riots. The “discriminatory practices” which Ali Rattasi expresses as the motives behind “new racism,” against immigrants, were the result of a Western supremacist way of thinking in the 1980s articulated as “inferiorization, discrimination and exclusion” (80). Although Hare’s A Map of the World was written in the early 1980s, it comprises “discriminatory practices,” and exemplifies Samuel Huntington’s “the West and the rest” paradigm on the background of cultural and racial conflicts in Britain. The play basically moves through the paradigm of the conflict between the West and the others and provides a platform of discussion of the main axis of social and cultural conflicts by presenting various biased generalizations articulated by the characters. That the play starts with a poverty-themed conference in Bombay and centers on the clash of an English leftist journalist and a right-wing writer of Indian origin concerns the nature of the various conflicts in British social stratification. In the first lines of the play, the origins of the “the West and the rest” paradigm are given by making alignments based on Edward Said’s ideas on Western conceptions of the Orient, along with references to European and Western supremacism and othering. Stephen, the English journalist, in his first critique of India, conveys “‘Oriental’ ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendour, cruelty, sensuality)” (Said 4) by referring to the work conditions and lifestyles of the Indians, to which the American journalist Elaine reacts by expressing the preconception of the Western against the Orient observing that you come from the West and are absolutely set on having an experience, so you find it necessary to dramatize.You come absolutely determined in advance to find India shocking, and so you can’t see that underneath it all there is a great deal about the life here which isn’t too bad. (Map of the World 159–160) While Elaine reacts to this status quo, she also refuses the people’s bigoted approach to making stereotypical value judgments, crying, “But it is arrogant to look at the world … through one particular perspective … which is always to say ‘This is like the West. This is not like the West’” (160). In A Tolerant Country?: Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities, Colin Holmes writes that “by the 1980s, Blacks and Asians had become more numerous than at any other time in their history in Britain” (4). Non-white immigrants flocked to Britain for social, economic, or cultural reasons, but in the 1970s were subject to prejudices, to being marginalized, with economic concerns that became the axis of another conflict in the 1980s: cultural conflict. However, the center of this conflict is based on two opposing polarities that could not meet, the West and the East, in which “[t]he Orient,” as Said underlines, “is an integral part of European material and culture” (2). But in this piece-whole connection, as Hare’s Indian character Mehta says, “One is civilized. One is cultured. One is rational. That is how you help people to live” (Map of the World 165), while the other is not. The irony in the usage of the words “That is how you help people to live” (165) unveils the economic discrimination that lies in the politics of imperialist upsurges of the English authorities and community. Sivanandan illustrates forms of exploitation,“Everyone made money on the immigrant worker—from the big-time capitalist to the slum landlord—from exploiting his labour, his colour, his customs, his culture” (349). The words “you must endure dictatorship and bloodshed and barbarity” (Map of the World 164) that Stephen says depict the basis of the formation of orthodox Eastern and Western cultural conflict and include a stereotypical generalization of the depiction of the Orient. Stephen’s subsequent expression, on the other hand, “I would—please—do—like you to admire my civilization” (165) embraces the Eurocentric concept of supremacist Self. As cultural representation, Hare offers impressions of the existential presences of otherized individuals in the hegemonic space of upper-class identity (Englishness) and concentrates on the distinction between the surface meaning and intended meaning. The play sarcastically reminds us of steel oligarch Lakshmi Mittal’s postmodern style of engineering in the huge sculpture in Queen’s 355

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Park made of steel named “The ArcelorMittal Orbit” which has a real “metamessage.” Unveiling what Roland Barthes calls a “metamessage” (qtd. in Hall 229), Hare creates “A Map of the World” in which colonizer and colonized are together but in conflict, and binary oppositions are given in the same space in a multicultural and multi-racial structure. Unlike Mittal, who has gained liberation from “the West” as someone who has challenged “the West,” people of the play appear to be West-convicted beings. As Stuart Hall formulates, “people who are in any way significantly different from the majority ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ are frequently exposed to this binary form of representation” (229). Therefore, the preference in how cultural difference is interpreted by individuals is the determining factor of cultural othering, and in this play of Hare, how whites in British society define the cultural differences of non-whites might include the paradigm of “them” vs. “us” in the context of “preferred meaning” (228) itemized by Hall. While cultural differences constitute the perhaps primary cause of people’s antagonism framing the “them” vs. “us” paradigm, the inferiorization, contempt, and rejection of the other cause psychological distress, which may lead the person to consider himself a scapegoat, as A Map of the World’s Mehta puts it, “In the West we are always being asked to feel guilty. And so we must pay a price in lies” (186). Although, in Mehta’s view, the playwright points to the material and moral snags for postcolonial subjects in representing themselves in the Western space, he also refers to Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of “grand narrative”— “unifying and controlling narratives of the past” (Marciniak)—through the fictional lies that Victor Mehta underlined as a novelist. The non-whites who are othered, rejected, and unaccepted, reveal to be stereotyped in grand narratives, and Mehta is represented as one of these Asian stereotypes, such as “an Indian, but his manners are distinctly European” (Map of the World 161). And that he “should be left desperately mimicking the manners of a country that died” (168). This covers Lyotard’s “cultural imperialism” (27), and the “otherization” that starts with cultural differences leads to the dominant culture’s swallowing of sub-culture with its superiority, so colonized people are dragged into conflict to protect their culture. Hare’s cultural marginalization depicts cultural imperialism as a multi-dimensional whole of postcolonial Western policies. Accordingly, in Hare’s play, economic imperialism also appears as part of this cultural marginalization, where M’Bengue, an African speaker at the conference on poverty, elaborates that We take aid from the West because we are poor, and in everything we are made to feel our inferiority. The price you ask us to pay is not money but misrepresentation. The way the nations of the West make us pay is by representing us continually in their organs of publicity as bunglers and murderers and fools … All your terms are political, and your politics is the crude fight between your two great blocs … In your terms. In the white man’s terms and through the white man’s media. (Map of the World 184–185) Hare critiques British immigrants’ cultural differences as not being seen as normal variations in a social perspective. Moreover, Hare rejects the othering of these differences by individuals, and explains the stress caused by this situation with the following words, “immigrants have the highest expectation of the society they come to. They are deeply disappointed if the society lets them down” (qtd. in Homden 98). He highlights the racial and cultural anomalies of multicultural Britain in the context of the East–West conflict in a poverty-themed conference in A Map of the World. The play’s primary theme, thus, turns around the view that in the early 1980s, Britain embraces a period where the left-wing fades, so debate about socialism remains without consequences, while the right-wing concentrates on postmodernism which leads cultural conflicts to remain groundless (Milling 68). The capitalizing society’s “otherization” revolves around the paradigm of “the West and the rest.” In Hare’s political theatre, the conflict in question is knotted around power, supremacy, exploitation, and a new world order. Hare plays with words, and in Hare’s play every expression that the white uses against the non-white is evidence of the existence of a racial and class separa356

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tion in the UK, which is exactly what Rabiah Hussain experienced while being shouted at as a “smelly oik” by a fascist English—which she ponders as an example of micro-aggression (“I knew I wasn’t white,” The Guardian). As a second-generation British Pakistani, Hussain was discriminated against on the basis not only of her skin color but also of that invisible stigma, her class. She was from the working class and the term “smelly oik” was used to refer to those who are “minority and working-class students” (“I knew I wasn’t white,” The Guardian). Hare, therefore, conveys a subject similar to what Hussain experienced, through his theatre play, a social realist and political expression of ethnicity and racial issues in Britain’s multicultural and multi-ethnic social structure.

Works Cited Abbas, Tahir. “Muslim Minorities in Britain: Integration, Multiculturalism and Radicalism in the Post-7/7 Period.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2007, pp. 287–300. Ali, Amir. South Asian Islam and British Multiculturalism. Routledge, 2016. Bicat, Tony. “Portable Theatre: ‘Fine Detail, Rough Theatre.’ A Personal Memoir.” The Cambridge Companion to David Hare, Ed. Richard Boon, Cambridge UP, 2007. Billington, Michael. State of Nation: British Theatre Since 1945. Faber and Faber, 2007. Boon, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to David Hare. Cambridge UP, 2007. Brooke, Stephen. “Gender and Working-Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s.” Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 4, Summer 2001, pp. 773–795. Collini, Stephan. Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics. Oxford UP, 2008. Cornforth, Maurice. Materialism and The Dialectical Method. International Publishers, 1978. Edgar, David. Introduction. Edgar Plays: 3:Teendreams; Our Own People;That Summer and Maydays. Bloomsbury, 1991. ———. Introduction. Edgar Plays: 1. Bloomsbury Methuen, 1987. ———. “Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front.” Race & Class, vol. 19, no. 2. 1977, pp. 111–131. Engels, Frederick. “Dialectics of Nature.” Marx and Engels: Collected Works, vol 25. Lawrence and Wishart: Electric Book, 2010, pp. 334–335. Ferrebe, Alice. Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Gilleman, Luc. John Osborne:Vituperative Artist. Routledge, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the Other.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Ed. Stuart Hall, Sage, 1997. Holmes, Colin. A Tolerant Country?: Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities. Routledge, 1991. Homden, Carol. The Plays of David Hare. Cambridge UP, 1995. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Hussain, Rabiah.“I Knew I Wasn’t White. Realising I Was Working-Class Hurt More.” The Guardian, 5 Jul. 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​mment​​isfre​​e​/201​​8​/jul​​/05​/w​​hite-​​worki​​ng​-cl​​ass​-e​​ast​-l​​ondon​​​-immi ​​ grant​​-comm​​unity​. Accessed 22 Aug. 2019. Hutchings, William. The Plays of David Storey: A Thematic Study. Southern Illinois UP, 1988. Kathryn and Nick. “David Edgar: The Complex Balance between the Arts and the Left.” Searchlight Magazine Arts, 11 Oct. 2014, www​.s​​earch​​light​​magaz​​inear​​ts​.co​​m​/int​​ervie​​ws​/da​​vid​-e​​dgar-​​the​-c​​omple​​x​-bal​​ance-​​ betwe​​en​-th​​e​-art​​s​-and​​-the-​​left/​. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019. Kroll, Morton. “The Politics of Britain’s Angry Young Men.” Social Science, vol. 36, no. 3, 1961, pp. 157–166. Lee, Simon. “‘Look at the State of This Place!’: The Impact of Domestic Space on Post-War Class Consciousness.” Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice, Eds. Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.Translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Marciniak, Katarzyna. Introduction. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard. homep​​age​.w​​estmo​​nt​.ed​​u​/hoe​​ckley​​/read​​ings/​​sympo​​sium/​​pdf​/2​​0​1​_30​​0​/224​​.pdf.​ Accessed 12 Sept. 2019. Megson, Chris. Modern British Playwriting:The 1970s:Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Bloomsbury, 2012. Milling, Jane. Modern British Playwriting:The 1980s:Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Bloomsbury, 2012. Osborne, John. Introduction. John Osborne Plays 1: Look Back in Anger; Epitaph for George Dillon; The World of Paul Slickey; Dejavu. Faber and Faber, 2013. ———. Look Back in Anger. Faber and Faber, 1957. Peacock, D. Keith. Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties. Greenwood Press, 1999.

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Önder Çakırtaş Price, Laura Christine. “Wool Textile Workers and Trade Union Organisation in the Post-war Woollen District of Yorkshire.” Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of York, Sept. 2015. Prunet, Monique. “The Outrageous 80s: Conservative Policies and the Church of England Under Fire in Steven Berkoff ’s Sink The Belgrano and David Hare’s The Secret Rapture and Racing Demon.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 5, no. 1–2, 1996, pp. 91–102. Rattasi, Ali. “Racism, ‘Postmodernism’ and Reflexive Multiculturalism.” Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, Ed. Stephen May, Falmer Press, 1999. Rebellato, Dan. 1956  And All That:The Making of Modern British Drama. Routledge, 1999. Reinelt, Janelle and Gerald Hewitt. The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retrieval. Cambridge UP, 2011. Roberts, Ken. Class in Contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Random House, 1978. Sierz, Aleks. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Continuum, 2008. Sivanandan, Ambavalaner. “Race, Class and the State: The Black Experience in Britain.” Race & Class, vol. 17, no. 4, 1976, pp. 347–368. Spear, Hilda D. Iris Murdoch. Macmillan, 1995. Sternlicht, Sanford. Masterpieces of Modern British and Irish Drama. Greenwood Press, 2005. Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After (Routledge Revivals): A Guide to the New British Drama. Routledge, 2013. Tynan, Kenneth. “The Voice of the Young.” The Guardian, 13 May 1956, www​.t​​hegua​​rdian​​.com/​​books​​/1956​​ /may/​​13​/st​​age​#m​​ainco​​ntent​. Accessed 15 Jan. 2020. Wilson, Colin. The Angry Years:The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men. Robson, 2007.

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27 PECUNIARY EMULATION, ANOMIE, AND THE ALLEGED METROPOLITAN CONVERSION OF SISTER CARRIE Wendy Graham

Theodore Dreiser is a historian of the present well versed in the “journalistic” practices of observation and notation (Moers 146). His conceptual apparatus has been disparaged as social Darwinism at second hand: “The impressive unity of effect produced by Mr. Dreiser’s five novels is due to the fact that they are all illustrations of a crude and naively simple naturalistic philosophy” (Sherman 91). Dreiser’s indebtedness to late nineteenth-century systems of thought, which today seem mechanistic and racist, has obscured his independent faculty for generalization and improvisation. This essay will explain how the Spencerian formulas, specifically, the theory of adaptation, stimulated Dreiser’s original contributions to the discourse of gendered urbanism. Dreiser’s penchant for describing modern metropolitan phenomena in the language of social Darwinism was neither outmoded nor disqualifying circa 1900. The Chicago School of Sociology developed an ecological model of the growth of the city based on Darwinian precepts in the 1920s. Theorizing a symbiotic relationship between human behavior and city growth, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess described cities as natural organisms populated by denizens who prosper when working towards a shared goal. This notion is consonant with Herbert Spencer’s idealistic pronouncements regarding the evolutionary progress of humankind. The Chicago School accumulated and employed life stories as part of their data set, combining document gathering, field research, social mapping, and quantitative analysis. With their emphasis on the dynamics and patterns of organization and disorganization in Chicago, Park and Burgess might have written an epilogue to Sister Carrie. With this background in mind, longstanding criticisms of Sister Carrie as a “flawed novel marred by its adherence to the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer” (Fluck 209) come properly into focus as formalist (and classist) concerns. Dreiser’s once reputable social science is unfashionable among leading twentieth-century literary critics. As Winfried Fluck points out, Dreiser deviates from the narrative of social apprenticeship and character development plied by the preferred champions of American realism. Carrie’s upward trajectory runs counter to the late Victorian concept of “civilizatory progress”; she fails to acquire an “inner-directed personality” (Fluck 204, 200). As Paul Giles notes in “Dreiser’s Style,” Lionel Trilling and John Berryman heap derision on Dreiser’s solecisms and literary pretensions (48). They regard him as an autodidact from the wrong side of the tracks, whose first language was German not English.1 They understand that Spencer’s dictums lend Dreiser credibility and gravitas, enabling him to craft fictional worlds with the heft of treatises 359

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on social research. They complain that Dreiser relies on formulas to codify everything from his protagonists’ sexual selection to their unconscious criminal propensities: The male of the species is characterized by cupidity, pugnacity, and a simian inclination for the other sex. The female is a soft, vain, pleasure-seeking creature, devoted to personal adornment, and quite helplessly susceptible to the flattery of the male. (Sherman 91) They are not impressed. In deference to the publisher Doubleday, references to natural law are sharply curtailed in the first edition of Sister Carrie (1900). Notwithstanding this concession, a fairly nuanced understanding of scientific sociology determines the disparate fates of the fresh-faced Carrie and her lover, the middle-aged Hurstwood. Carrie’s attainment of wealth and fame as an actress conforms to a Darwinian model of strife followed by successful adaptation, whereas her unsatisfied yearning for happiness betrays the futility of her strivings. Carrie’s journey ends in boredom; Hurstwood’s in suicide. Such plotlines reveal the illusory character of the “principle of individuation” and attest to the basic uniformity of the human condition from birth to death (Baguley 217).The character arcs of success and failure are explicitly naturalized as a function of youth and age, energy and lassitude. Carrie’s rise to prominence within the ranks of the chorus line is juxtaposed by the ex-manager’s slide into anonymity among a troop of mendicants. Through his precipitous downfall, Hurstwood instantiates yet transcends the question of fitness for survival that is the hallmark of Spencer’s philosophy, bending the story arc towards the “entropic vision” of the literary naturalists admired by Dreiser (Baguley 221). In French naturalism proper, biological determinism dictates catastrophe or happiness with a hole in it. Applying pseudoscientific glosses on evolution, which view contemporary civilization as insistently imperiled by man’s base instincts and atavistic tendencies, naturalist “plots of decline” subordinate human intellectual and moral progress to the irresistible forces of entropy—chaos and degeneration. The influential naturalist Émile Zola traces the exploits of Nana, the protagonist of his novel by the same name, from poverty to the pinnacle, as the cynosure of a crowd of bestial suitors, noting the devastation that follows in her wake. Ravaged by venereal disease, Nana symbolizes the poisonous emanations spreading from the lower to the upper reaches of society. In the aftermath of HenryVizetelly’s obscenity convictions for translating and publishing cheap editions of Zola’s novels for the British reading public (1888, 1889), Zola’s lewd and catastrophic scenarios are not closely imitated by American writers. By Zola’s standard, Dreiser’s treatment of premarital sex and adultery, even in the unexpurgated edition of Sister Carrie, is quaint. Still, Dreiser’s “New York is governed by the decisive contribution of Naturalism to the small stock of curves for human action: the plot of decline” (Fisher 271). Fluck goes a step further in “Beast/Superman/Consumer,” arguing that the “unrelenting logic of self-destruction” governing Hurstwood’s demise obliterates personal agency (205). In drawing attention to the overpowering elementary forces “obscured by the idea of civilization” and reason (Fluck 204), Dreiser is said to divest his narrative of social critique as well. Clearly Fluck considers Dreiser’s deterministic rhetoric incompatible with the aim of resisting or even recording the injustices wrought by American capitalism. From Marx onward, theorists have understood the category of the natural (or eternal) to invest the ruling group or hegemon with unimpeachable authority. Yet, when Dreiser invokes biology or physiology to describe economic phenomena, he strips laissez-faire capitalism of its patina of fairness. In Sister Carrie, the narrator explains the “true meaning of money” as “honestly stored energy, not as a usurped privilege,” a progressive thesis straight out of the scientific sociology handbook that holds little sway in the urban world of the novel, where the hardest work is the least remunerative.2 Carrie often reflects on “the small pay for work a hundred times harder than she was now doing,” as her lot in life 360

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improves (Dreiser 457). However, Carrie dislikes any reminders that she was once an hourly wageearner. Hence, her epiphany about wage-labor-capital is short-lived and recurrent—more for the reader’s edification than her own. Though he is never deliberately tendentious, Dreiser is capitalism’s forensic biographer. Dreiser impartially records the distribution of individuals by occupation into divergent economic groups, whereby the division of labor entails a corresponding division of social life, residence, and consciousness. Writing at the close of the Gilded Age, Dreiser complicates the rags-to-riches narrative popularized by Horatio Alger by inverting, feminizing, and depersonalizing it. Some critics persist in seeing Carrie Meeber as a heroine, an ingenue on her journey to celebrity (McNamara 78). However, Dreiser eschews memorable personalities in Sister Carrie in favor of phenotypes or socially typical subjects, whose reactions to modernization underscore the realignment of residual and emergent culture circa 1900. Newcomers to the city, like Carrie, invariably experience a “reorganization of attitudes and conduct” in their new environs (Burgess 54).There are pitfalls (demoralization, poverty, crime) but also allurements: bright lights, big city attractions of urban shopping emporiums, theaters, and restaurants. Burgess explains Carrie’s rise when he writes:“Stimulation induces a response of the person to those objects in his environment which afford expression for his wishes. For the person, as for the physical organism, stimulation is essential to growth” (58–59). In Dreiser, mobility functions as a metonym for inertia (half-voluntary, relentless movement, driven by forces beyond the individual’s control).The law of inertia is a vestigial structure common to both the Chicago School and Dreiser’s thought, linking the growth of the city and its denizens. Readers are drawn to characters, but Carrie is an algorithm set in motion by the desire to “see something” of Chicago and later New York, who becomes marginally more sophisticated and articulate over the course of her career (Dreiser 55). For Walter Benn Michaels as well, Sister Carrie exemplifies a key contradiction of industrial and market capitalism: the trajectory of upward mobility acts “more to subvert the ideology of the autonomous self than to enforce it” (51). As many critics note, Carrie’s lack of depth or fixed identity is a precondition for her professional and social ascent (Fluck 212). Unencumbered by personal and family ties, morals, and taboos (about which more later), she readily jettisons prior roles and identities. Her soul has no fixed abode. At the same time, her cosmopolitan attitude belies a cluelessness about how the monied metropolis operates and is organized. In the big city, neighbors are strangers,“clothes are one’s address” (Fisher 270), and the universal currency of social prominence is pecuniary rather than hereditary. Potentially and practically a force for democratization and liberation from tradition, the dominance of the money economy neuters the qualitative value of things and persons, reducing all exchange and social interaction to “calculative functions” (Simmel qtd. in Reichardt, 93–94). The monetization of daily life is pervasive yet beyond the average city dweller’s comprehension. Applying an anthropological lens to the “popular understanding” of money as a precious commodity and purchasing “power,” Dreiser introduces Carrie’s primitive fetishistic understanding of money (62). Carrie’s overvaluation of her buying power (exchange value) is a source of unhappiness and an illustration of her disordered relationship with money. Similarly, Hurstwood’s perverse understanding of use value—the portability of “ready money”—leads him to rob his employer (Dreiser 268). After a few months in Chicago, Carrie assimilates the calculating attitude. As Ulfried Reichardt notes, she keeps track of amounts of money gained, lost, or lacking, and this is how she measures her own worth, how she sees and designs herself. The decisive point is that rather than internal and psychological features, external, material, and measurable ones are mentioned and listed. (94) Dreiser is no portraitist. Carrie hasn’t adopted norms; she’s internalized a set of beliefs that govern her every waking thought and distort her relationship to the real conditions of her existence. 361

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Dreiser’s achievement inheres in his revelation that the ideology of bourgeois consumerism has a “material existence,” as Althusser would say (165). Carrie’s seduction by the logic of capital is a matter of repeated actions and performances freighted with meaning, which she enacts of her own volition, as if she were a free subject. Simmel, a sociologist unknown to Dreiser, explains Carrie’s detachment from the stream of people in her shifting environment and reciprocal emotional investment in things. Carrie is a poster-girl for Simmel’s discussion of the city dweller’s blasé attitude and Raymond Williams’s description of alienation (Jurka 102). Through Simmel, Carrie’s relationship to fashion—the paradoxical desire to belong to society and to stand out—becomes clear (Simmel 296). Carrie learns that codes of decency with respect to dress are sacrosanct. Rejecting mores out of self-interest, because they cannot be seen, Carrie is a study in the paradox of metropolitan subjectivity, an interiority shot through with social reference points, struggling to keep ahead of the crowd yet drawing sustenance from society’s notion of status. Dreiser’s exposition of the emerging psychology of public space and markets at the turn-of-the-century arrays material cultural artifacts in meticulously delineated settings. Restaurants, department stores, and theaters function as classrooms of evolving mores and deportment: “Seeing a thing, she would immediately set to inquiring how she would look properly related to it” (Dreiser 98). After a visit to Chicago’s elegant North Shore, Carrie contrasts her lot with “what she had so recently seen.The glow of the palatial doors was still in her eye” (Dreiser 116). Carrie is a desiring machine, vaguely aware of the far-reaching implications of a system that draws her like a moth to the flame. This is what makes Philip Fisher’s description of Carrie’s “anticipatory selfhood” so compelling (Fisher 263). Dreiser’s rapid-fire account of Carrie’s ascent mimics the accelerated temporal schema of capitalist modernity, as it modifies the human sensorium, attitudes, and body techniques required to cope with a frenetic environment. She is the city made flesh. It is partly by design and partly by accident that Dreiser is a savant of urban modernity. Engrossed by the minutiae of quotidian reality, Dreiser hones his genius for microhistory. In Sister Carrie, space is “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history”; narrative time “thickens, takes on flesh” to become visible. In keeping with Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the “chronotope,” Dreiser’s “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole” (Bakhtin 84). Dreiser renders modernity as a temporal schema instantiating the ever-accelerating rate at which novelties fall out of fashion and disappear from the face of the earth under the regime of capitalism. A revved up temporal schema highlights “the uncanny passage of modernity into instant antiquity, instant ruins” (Sieburth 9), even as concomitant developments (technological progress, expansion of markets, growing GNP) divert attention from the wreck of history: “The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation” (Dreiser 22). This is a neat trick Dreiser repeats elsewhere, collapsing the distance, elapsed time, between the inauguration and extinction of, in this case, retail corporations. Dreiser’s ventriloquism of Karl Marx’s formula, “All that is solid melts into air,” highlights an essential feature of modernity, as permanent transition (Marx 38). Dreiser recovers the peripheral details omitted from the dominant historical and realist narratives. Wedged between the Haymarket strife in 1886 and the Pullman strike of 1894, Sister Carrie instead discourses on plate glass windows, how their introduction abashes wage-seekers yet enhances the allure of the department store and the majesty of the bank. At a moment of crisis for his characters, Dreiser mentions that Hurstwood telephones Carrie from one of the first public pay phones installed in a Chicago pharmacy; like the blaring of the telephone, the march of technological progress interrupts the naturalist “plot of decline.” Sister Carrie illustrates Edward Soja’s point about the “dialectic developing between urgent socio-economic modernization” and “a responsive cultural and political modernism aimed at making sense of the material changes taking place in the world and gaining control over their future directions” (Soja 26). This formulation 362

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applies to Dreiser as well as his characters. Although Sister Carrie was published in 1900, Dreiser launches Carrie’s career in 1889 when both he and his protagonist are eighteen years of age and Chicago-bound.This retro-modernist gesture allows Dreiser to capture the shock of the new from the perspective of the ingenue, while omnisciently forecasting the effects of modernization. As a modern protagonist in situ, Carrie’s inherited traditions and habits of mind are incommensurate with the task of making sense of her rapidly transforming, burgeoning habitat: She could have understood the meaning of a little stone-cutter’s yard at Columbia City, whittling little pieces of marble for individual use, but when the yards of some huge stone corporation came into view, filled with spur tracks and flat cars, transpierced by docks from the river and traversed by immense trundling cranes of wood and steel overhead, it lost all significance and applicability to her little world. (17) Through free-indirect discourse, Dreiser itemizes Carrie’s sensory overload, packing his sentences with construction terminology beyond her ken. The effect for the reader, however, is one of historical immediacy. Sister Carrie’s itineraries of city space, glancing depictions of new modes of production, poorly remunerated employment opportunities for women, labor unrest, innovations in architecture, transport, and media take centerstage, eclipsing (without erasing) the older organizational imperatives of naturalism focused on the individual’s struggle for survival. The expansion of industrialization drew hordes of young women from the countryside to participate in the urban labor pool, the novelty of city life, and commodity fetishism. For the first time, woman is an active player, both as producer and consumer, in industrial capitalism. However, “the urban script which is articulated within the broader hegemonic discourse of Capitalism” continues to subordinate female agency to male economic activity (just as women are paid lower wages) (Gibson-Graham 226). From the 1860s on, the feminine is employed as motif to delineate specific scenes of modernity, concealing the historical reality of woman’s experience: “the feminine body is an allegory of modernity” (Buci-Glucksmann 221). As Walter Benjamin famously observed, modernity and capitalism conspire in the creation of “fantastic spectacles” of enchantment and bedazzlement, in which the “motif of the woman” as agent, but more often as object, is featured (Buci-Glucksmann 221, 220). It is fitting that Carrie is an indistinct personality whose appetites guide her ascent, since the pleasure economy diverts attention from the inequities of capitalism: Naturally timid in all things which related to her own advancement, and especially so when without power or resource, her craving for pleasure was so strong that it was the one stay of her nature. She would speak for that when silent on all else. (Dreiser 32) “Notoriously passive and insubstantial” (Brown 91), Carrie’s “blankness” facilitates her turn as an everywoman whose story is potentially universal in application, while time-bound and canalized by forces that restrict her freedom. Oppressed by her dull round of toil, in search of diversion, Carrie positions herself in the doorway of her sister’s Chicago flat. Deaf to the entreaty, “It don’t look good” (Dreiser 51), Carrie ventures a little way into the street where she is mistaken for a “streetwalker.” She is initially “frightened” that a stranger would accost her during a solo nighttime ramble (53); however, in short order, Carrie herself becomes a kept woman, like her French counterpart. Carrie adapts to the “cosmopolitan standard of virtue” without much of a struggle in record time. Dreiser’s figuration of the country and city, as respectively benign and malign influences, is disingenuous, though it is the premise for his story: “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes 363

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the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (Dreiser 3–4). It is clear that “Carrie had no excellent home principles fixed upon her” (Dreiser 78): “What, if anything, Carrie Meeber’s typical American parents taught her about the conduct of life is suppressed; for we meet the girl in a train to Chicago, on which she falls to the first drummer who accosts her” (Sherman 96). One of Dreiser’s most consequential revelations concerns the spiritual and affective hollowness of that home back in rural Wisconsin, where Carrie ought to have been “morally standardized,” in Priscilla Wald’s apt phrase (187).3 Carrie’s family ties are also tenuous: A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. (Dreiser 3) Carrie’s lack of home culture, religious training, and personal attachments is representative of peculiarly modern forms of restlessness, dislocation, and homelessness. Presumably, Carrie would be less “dissatisfied at home,” in Columbia City, Wisconsin, with no particular place to go (15). As Jackson Lears affirms, “The city fed dreams of release from village privation,” even as it “created new forms of discontent” (63). By 1889, tens of thousands of young women had migrated from the countryside to Chicago, the metropolis of the west, to take advantage of job openings in retail and textile manufacturing afforded by the nation’s second largest city, after New York. Boarding a train at the outset of the novel, sporting a “cheap imitation alligator skin satchel” (Dreiser 3; emphasis added), Carrie’s destiny is over-determined by global forces driven by capital and powered by steam, effectively compressing distances and offering possibilities of self-invention, work, and purchase beyond the “longings” that “the displays” of the local dry goods establishment stimulated within her (Dreiser 7). Apart from the familiar “village green,” the countryside has already been despoiled of its wholesome pastoral character. The same train that brings Carrie to Chicago, and later to New York, has transformed the Plains states. Situated at the eastern edge of the nation’s agricultural heartland, Chicago was the hub of multiple transport networks as well as a center for slaughtering cattle and packaging meat, for manufacturing and wholesale trade in the nation’s natural resources: timber, iron ore, etc. Carrie’s father doesn’t grow wheat on a farm; he’s a day laborer at the “flour mill,” a profitable agribusiness staffed by slaves along the banks of the Hudson through the eighteenth century, but now, with the construction of a canal at the mouth of the Chicago river in 1836, largely in the hands of Midwesterners, the beneficiaries of Indian removal and the extension of the railroad (87,000 miles of track by 1890), quick and cheap transportation via land or water (Cronon, chapter 2). In sum, industrialization has brought the city to the country. Dreiser attempts to pass off Carrie’s plasticity of mind and character as an innate quality, but it has historical ramifications. Through unstable juxtapositions of country/city, success/failure, youth/age, Dreiser disrupts Spencer’s seamless conflation of nature (evolutionary success of bees and ants) with the salubrious and efficient factory system (order and cooperation of men). Dreiser’s preoccupation with Carrie’s naiveté and innocence belies the always already before penetration of the ethos of capitalist consumption (and its influence on traditional forms of class status) into the hinterlands. As agents of character formation, family, church, school are co-opted by the siren song of consumer culture. Although Dreiser’s narrative alleges a moral topography of city life, in which the “cosmopolitan standard of virtue” represents a diminishment of the country girl’s purity and niceness, this schema proves manifestly anachronistic as it plays out in the novel. At eighteen, Carrie Meeber is deeply impressed by the trappings of prosperity (the shiny tan shoes, smart suit, and fat purse bearing greenbacks) possessed by Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman or “drummer,” in the lingo of the time (Dreiser 5–8). After twenty minutes in this “masher’s” company, Carrie regards 364

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him as her oldest friend in the world and her sister as a virtual stranger:4 “When he disappeared, she felt his absence thoroughly. With her sister she was much alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea” (Dreiser 12). This is largely because Drouet advertises Chicago as a metropolis for pleasure seekers, whereas Minnie brings “with her much of the grimness of shift and toil” (Dreiser 11). On the interpersonal level, Carrie is “conscious of an inequality” when she meets the nattily dressed Drouet, who makes her feel “the worn state of her shoes” (Dreiser 7). Carrie’s estimate of her character-in-relation betrays the hallmarks of pecuniary emulation and invidious comparison, to borrow terms from Thorstein Veblen (77): “Money: something everybody else has and I must get” (Dreiser 62). Carrie must have learned these values at her mother’s knee, since she boards the train with this mental baggage in tow. While she feels “shabby” in Drouet’s company (7), she also looks down on her citified and “common” working-class counterparts (53), practicing invidious caste comparison to her own credit. Dreiser should know better than to describe his country girl turned sweatshop laborer, “a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant” (4). Only in the prospective sense—the bootstrap American mythology of Alger and Benjamin Franklin—is a “wage-seeker” already middle-class (18). Carrie’s openair upbringing is said to unfit her for the “hard contact” of the shoe factory (39); she was used to something better, and “her heart revolted” (41). While this a credible account of the “the better side of her home life” (40): cleanliness, modesty, and decorum, the reader balks at Carrie’s sense of natural superiority: “She was not used to slang. Her instinct in the matter of dress was naturally better. She felt bad to have to listen to the girl next to her, who was slangy and rather hardened by experience” (53). Meanwhile, the girls on the assembly line come to her aid by working more slowly; she is unaware of their efforts and does not share their class solidarity.Throughout the novel, Carrie is oblivious to women of her own class, who are rendered invisible by their lack of social possibility: “She saw the servant working at dinner with an indifferent eye” (326). Male laborers are beneath her notice. Carrie rebuffs a factory hand for calling her a “daisy” (53) yet takes no umbrage at Drouet’s use of the epithet. When Drouet tells Hurstwood, “I struck a little Peach” on the train into town (48), he affirms Carrie’s country-fresh appeal to the jaded city palette.5 Later, the narrator observes that Hurstwood’s attraction to Carrie was “the ancient attraction of the stale to the fresh” (105). Dreiser dangles the possibility of a “pastoral retreat into a world of psychological renewal” facilitated by the possession of a country lass (Giles 49). This promise is as false as the stage make-up worn by “Katisha, the country maid”—Carrie’s break-out role (Dreiser 442). Carrie eventually realizes “how her identity has been commodified as part of the cycle of economic supply and demand” (Giles 49); however, I would stipulate that she doesn’t rebel against this usage. In a sense, Dreiser supersedes Simmel by equating the anomie attendant upon modern urban existence with the need to import or counterfeit nature. It is noteworthy that Carrie’s ennui and restlessness are not caused by the intensifications of city life—the violent and churning stimuli, accelerated pace, and crowds—only exacerbated by them (Simmel 325). As the center of the money economy, the city is responsible for leveling the values of quality and utility to the purely quantitative level of “how much” (Simmel 330). Simmel’s analysis of the growing estrangement between the producers, sellers, and consumers of agricultural products beginning in the eighteenth century culminates in Dreiser’s radical account of Carrie’s amnesia concerning where shoes come from. In other words, through automated piece-work, sales networks, and nationwide transportation, the industrial producer and ultimate consumer are estranged from each other. It is easy to see how Carrie, struggling with a fastening machine to form the “right half of the upper of a man’s shoe” (Dreiser 36), might gaze with wonder at the fashionable spectator pumps for sale at The Fair. From a Marxian perspective, that of object fetishization, the finished shoe is a miracle of beauty and synergy beyond the purchasing (and productive) capacity of the worker. Dreiser traces the evolution of market capitalism from production (Carrie’s job) to sales (Drouet’s job) to the service economy (saloon manager Hurstwood’s incarnation of 365

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the well-heeled gentleman). Dreiser spends several delicious chapters illustrating how, in a market swollen with product, department stores have created a secondary enchantment industry, bedizening shop windows and showcases to entice customers (Leach, chapters 1–2). Mirroring the shift from advertising goods on their merits to selling a fantasy, Dreiser employs prosopopoeia to convey Carrie’s infatuation with material goods: “Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. Ah, ah! the voice of the so-called inanimate” (Dreiser 98).This scene captures the “sex appeal of the inorganic,” Benjamin’s pithy rendition of commodity fetishism (Brown 91). I agree with Michaels that what makes Sister Carrie so trenchant is “its unabashed and extraordinarily literal acceptance of the economy” circa 1900 (35). Dreiser is not the fierce cultural critic that Virginia Clare Eby describes in Saboteurs of the Status Quo (1998); however, she is correct that Veblen’s eclectic sociology is the most important of Dreiser’s contemporary influences. Sister Carrie can be read as a novelization of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) with its illustrations of conspicuous consumption, invidious comparison, and pecuniary emulation. Dreiser draws on Veblen to emphasize the middle-class stake in a consumer economy that has lost its instinct for workmanship through the automation of production (Veblen 70).Veblen documents the shift created by the preponderance of ready-made clothes and the need for new markets. The upper class, unable to hold the line against conspicuous consumption, a hallmark of nouveau riche vulgarity, participates in wasteful expenditure, weakening the foundations of class distinction.The spectacular economy of shops, restaurants, and thoroughfares recontextualizes exclusivity as belonging to the public rather than the private sphere. At one point, Carrie swoons over a parade of elegantly attired New Yorkers shopping on Broadway. Escorted by strapping young men in uniform, footmen and chauffeurs of the idle rich, ladies perform vicarious leisure for the good repute of patriarchy, as in Veblen’s schema (Veblen 55, 58): Such a crush of finery and folly she had never seen. It clinched her convictions concerning her state. She had not lived, could not lay claim to having lived, until something of this had come into her own life. Women were spending money like water. (Dreiser 326) This passage makes a mockery of the “true meaning of money” thesis by celebrating consumer excess. Indeed, Dreiser’s personal fascination with the glittering spectacles of capitalist excess is an obstacle to weighing his moral vision (Brown 93). However, like the seductive displays that whet Carrie’s desire when she first enters a department store, this scene underscores the grand scale of pecuniary tutelage and its normalization. After Carrie has waded into fashion’s throng, “the pretty little flat seemed a commonplace thing” to her; “It was not what the rest of the world was enjoying” (Dreiser 326). Carrie’s desires are focused on the spectacle of the metropolis and the part she may yet come to play in it: “she longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy” (324). Carrie’s wholesale internalization of the canons of pecuniary reputability, achieved through fashion and carriage in the spectacular economy, detaches being-in-the-world from traditional social status anchored in family of origin and marriage.This is an epochal cultural shift illuminated by Dreiser’s merger of Carrie’s social aspirations with her theatrical career, as Fisher first observed (263). In the rural milieu, Carrie’s failure to abide by conventional mores would expose her to censure and jeopardize her rise in social class. In a city of strangers, pecuniary standing rather than character is the order of the day. Fashionable clothes serve as placeholders for less portable demonstrations of wealth. What Dreiser calls “the moral significance, to her, of clothes” is best understood as a hollowing out of canons of personal behavior (7). Fashion replaces older pecuniary standards of “decency,” which must be “lived up to on pain of losing caste” (Veblen 72). In contrast, Dreiser avers: “She felt ashamed in the face of the better-dressed girls who went by” (41). Impelled 366

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by the desire to climb the ladder, Carrie experiences “urgencies of decency,” which pertain to self-presentation (395): “I haven’t a decent tie of any kind to wear” (396). Carrie personifies the “symbiosis between character and culture” through her consumer mentality (Giles 54). Dreiser demonstrates that character psychology, urban spectacle, consumer economics, and culture are not independent processes but intricated. Carrie’s “need of clothes” confuses need with desire, use with exchange value (Dreiser 395). Category mistakes of this kind are pervasive in the novel. Spending and consuming are Sister Carrie’s master tropes: “I need someone to waste a little affection on me,” Hurstwood pleads to Carrie (128). To the degree that Carrie is responsive to his lovemaking: “she heard instead the voices of the things which he represented” (118). Owing to demographic upheaval in the new world order, Dreiser’s protagonists should be wracked by contrary personal investments and identifications. Instead, mores and folkways are relegated to a corner of their collective memory. While Carrie is not entirely destitute of shame over premarital sex and later infidelity: “I seem to be getting very bad. It’s wrong to act as I do, I know” (137), the self-correction suggested to Carrie by her conscience—leave the man, give up the fancy clothes—elicits a vehement protest. Her “average little conscience, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention,” is no match for her narcissism: She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie there than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe. (89) Positioned before the mirror, a site of play where Carrie imaginatively launches herself into future roles and desired states, Carrie’s soul searching is fleeting. Carrie precipitously resolves her moral dilemma in favor of the outward woman: “I have a fine cloak. I have gloves. It (sic) would be a machine again without those things” (91). Here, Carrie intuitively contrasts the delights of consumption with the hardships of factory work, as if she had long dwelt in the city and struggled against anomie. Once again, Dreiser’s exposition outstrips the circumstances (endurance of labor) that give rise to metropolitan subjectivity. He precociously grasps that the urban phantasmagoria diverts “expectations from social solidarity to individualized consumption” (Bridge and Watson 112). Critics have written extensively about Carrie’s socialization (Wald 189, Eby 118–123). Carrie is “branded like wax” by her impressions of urban vistas and city dwellers (Dreiser 101). Others have called attention to the reflective properties of plate glass windows and mirrors, which alternately freeze Carrie in the humiliating posture of the “wage-seeker” or allow her to prepare to “capitalize on being the object of visual attention” (Brown 87). Mirrors are prominent in the novel’s spaces of emulation, such as Sherry’s restaurant, where “tall, brilliant, bevel-edged mirrors” magnify the gilded atmosphere and gleaming place settings of Haviland china, Tiffany sterling silver cutlery, and crystal goblets. Beyond the display of wasteful and costly gastronomy, the mirrors multiply “the little genuflections and attentions in the waiters and head waiter which Americans pay for” (Dreiser 332). Each diner has a personal attendant, whose obsequiousness adds an air of “elegance” to the proceedings (333). The paradox of metropolitan individuality is that consciousness is both hierarchical and tribal. Communal rituals, such as dining, entail an exchange of looks to ratify the self-complacency of the participants: “To stare seemed the proper and natural thing” (323). Like shopping, fashionable dining exemplifies the contrary tendencies of urban social psychology: elites seek union with, yet also differentiation from, members of the same class, while excluding other groups (Simmel 297).What Dreiser contributes to this analysis is the protean figure of a girl whose performance practices are “installment payments on the world of possibility” and mobility; Fisher underscores this fine point by noting how often “the word ‘showy’ is used to mark the conversion of experience into performance” (269). 367

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A genial “masher” typified by his stylish clothing and womanizing (Dreiser 5), Drouet is eager to partake deeply of the metropolitan pleasure economy. Drouet masters the art of self-presentation necessary for business and social success: “Drouet fairly shone in the matter of serving” (59). Carrie is receptive to Drouet’s efforts to mold her carriage and demeanor. Ogling the “dainty, self-conscious swaying of the hips by a woman,” Drouet tactlessly calls Carrie’s attention to the “Fine stepper” with predictable results: “Instinctively she felt the desire to imitate it. Surely she could do that too” (99).The claim that “Carrie was naturally imitative” is another page torn from the Spencerian playbook: “We are,” after all, “more passive than active, more mirrors than engines” (Dreiser 104, 78). In practice, Dreiser contradicts this general principle by illuminating the effort and pretense behind apparently unselfconscious social performances. Carrie learns to make an impression— something that comes in handy when she is asked to lead the chorus line: “To say truth, Carrie did unconsciously move about with an air pleasing and somewhat distinctive. It was due wholly to her natural manner and total lack of self-consciousness” (397). Carrie is an “apt student of fortune’s ways” (98); she patently does not possess natural and unconscious grace. Atomizing the ritualized practices of bourgeois femininity, honed in the spaces of emulation, Dreiser exposes a scandalous inversion of the time-honored American belief in bootstrap success as a manifestation of freedom. Through imitation and playacting, voyeurism and exhibitionism, self-possessive individualism gives way to performativity without interiority. Sister Carrie bears witness, on a molecular level, to the social education of a young woman in what anthropologist Marcel Mauss calls the “Techniques of the Body”—such as walking—which vary in prestige and performance with regard to time and place. These techniques comprise the habitus, which is transmitted through “prestigious imitation” of individuals in authority (Mauss 73). At the opening of the novel, “[i]n the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual for the same reason” (Dreiser 4). How can “intuitive” grace be acquired? Mauss points out (and Dreiser illustrates) that the positions of the arms and hands while walking are a “social idiosyncracy” (sic), a product of an “education in walking” (Mauss 72). Having acquired “a chic way of tossing her head on one side and holding her arms as if for action—not listlessly,” Carrie attracts the attention of a stage manager: “That girl knows how to carry herself ” (Dreiser 401; emphasis added). Carrie’s successful assimilation of techniques of walking, dressing, and acting produces an illusory sense of dominance for Carrie, her menfolk, and certain readers: “The independence of success now made its first faint showing.With the tables turned, she was looking down, rather than up, to her lover” (Dreiser 193). In reality, the fulfillment of Carrie’s deepest aspirations reflects the imposition of a social education on a pliable character; desire “is imposed from without, from above” (Mauss 73). I take issue with the notion of Carrie’s “stardom” (Fisher 269, Wald 188, Eby 107), which confuses fame with renown, notoriety with quality. The story of her ascension on the New York stage is a case of one step forward, two back. Carrie rarely has a line. There are actresses with speaking parts on Broadway at this time. Carrie first appears as a member of the chorus, where she is spared the indignity of wearing “tights”; instead, she wears a short golden-hued skirt—hardly proper attire for ladies (Dreiser 393). Placed at the head of a column of girls arrayed in gorgeous outfits of silver and blue, with the addition of epaulets and a silver belt for herself alone (401), Carrie transitions from being a “show girl” or “chorus girl” to becoming a “clothes horse,” a distinction emerging in 1900: “The former simply hoofed and sang in the ensembles; the latter was a more pretentious performer who wore expensive costumes and sometimes had a few lines” (Mencken 736). Carrie gets her big break by quipping with the Vizier in a harem number, when she extemporaneously mouths: “I am yours truly” (Dreiser 431). This applause line gives Carrie a leg up on the company. Carrie’s hitmaking turn as the frowning Quakeress is explicitly described as a function of career disappointment. She is frowning because her part is small. That the audience finds this hilarious is an accident rather than evidence of a career strategy. Further, male nostalgia for feminine guilelessness informs the cameo role of the “demure” and “silent little Quakeress” (446). Highlighting the 368

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simulated intimacy between audience and actress, “[t]he portly gentlemen in the front rows began to feel that she was a delicious little morsel. It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses.” Despite her meteoric rise and “triumph” as a stage personality, Carrie’s silence deprives her of agency and individuality (447). A further reminder of the transient boundary between theatricality and everyday life, Carrie schemes to attract the clean-cut engineer, Bob Ames, by duplicating “[t]hose little effects which the critics had noted concerning her as the Quaker maid” (Dreiser 479). Carrie surmises that this quaint presentation of femininity will appeal to the pure-minded Midwesterner. Incongruously, Dreiser absolves Carrie of the intent to enhance her appearance through the application of makeup: the “almost unconscious touches to her demure type of beauty” (Dreiser 479). Cosmetics render her more truly herself and advertise her brand at the same time. As a monologist, Ames offers Carrie an alternative to the mantra of conspicuous consumption. However, “the ideal brought into her life by Ames” in no way assuages her yearning for glamour (Dreiser 346). As Eby notes, Ames reinforces “Carrie’s pecuniary, emulative, and comparative method of reckoning” (127).That is because Ames’s asceticism strikes her primitive mind as the highest grade of self-sufficiency— voluntarily doing without is the metropolitan version of potlatch, more impressive than hosting a banquet at Delmonico’s. Unconventional and intellectually serious, Ames is drawn by Carrie’s sympathy and attentiveness. His vision of her potential for drama-comedy inspires her: “Carrie thrilled to be taken so seriously. Here was praise, keen, strong, analytical” (484). Dreiser uses Ames to expatiate upon Carrie’s “emotional greatness” (378). In a city of emulous and competitive strangers, “melancholia” (longing, loneliness) is tantamount to the human condition (481). Dreiser entrusts his heroine’s epiphany to Ames; she was “the perfect Carrie in mind and body, because now her mind was aroused” (485). The problem is that Ames, absorbed with his dinnertable lecture on Balzac, “did not see her” (482). Even when he locks eyes with Carrie, his scrutiny is superficial: “‘It’s in your eyes and mouth,’ he went on. ‘I remember thinking, the first time I saw you, that your mouth looked as if you were about to cry’” (484). Dreiser’s awkward prose speaks volumes about Carrie’s reduction to parts. This fragmentation of self is normalized in her experience, such that “She looked away, longing to be equal to this feeling written upon her countenance.” There is a disconnect between emotion as a vehicle for artistic expression and physiognomy. It is no less dehumanizing than the assessment of the disgruntled stage manager who says, “[s]he’d never make an actress though. Just another pair of tights” (255).6 While Dreiser disparages melodrama through Ames, Gaslight is Carrie’s greatest role. She connects emotionally with Laura, the orphaned pickpocket foisted on good society by a well-intentioned protector; on the eve of her wedding, Laura’s cover is blown, and she is shunned. Carrie’s speaking part gives voice to her yearning for respectability, which she is unable to put into words: “This part affected Carrie deeply. It reminded her somehow of her own state” (163). After a case of stage fright, from which she is saved by the buoyant Drouet, Carrie fully inhabits the bitterness of Laura’s outcast situation. The pathos of Carrie’s performance registers with her lovers as a “personal thing” (191), “a personal appeal” (192). For Dreiser, it is the triumph of the “born actress” (186), yet he wastes no time in divesting Carrie of agency. Overcome with admiration for “their idol,” Drouet and Hurstwood translate their love into the language of dollars: “He would marry her, by George. She was worth it” (192). (Later, Carrie receives marriage proposals from strangers, a rhyming sequence that signifies Carrie’s stagnation and isolation.) The career of an actress underscores the dematerialization of the relationship between producer and consumer, as the audience experiences intimacy without proximity to the object of desire. Carrie’s detachment and unhappiness in the midst of her prosperity signify her inability to capitalize on her sex appeal. Similar to her position before the footlights, Carrie’s celebrity turns her into a shiny object employed in advertising campaigns. Carrie’s pretty face is a selling point; she is photographed and “blurbed” (Mencken 207) by one of the “newer” magazines and illustrated Sunday newspapers, which were “beginning” to feature theatrical beauties (Dreiser 442). She is invited to 369

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stop at the new Wellington hotel, free of charge, because “we must have celebrities” (451). Dreiser doesn’t bother to explain Carrie’s transposition to the Waldorf, “the fashionable hostelry, then but newly erected” (474). In Dreiser’s rendering, the revved up temporal schema of urban modernity means that fashions in clothing, starlets, and even buildings expire at the drop of a hat. Carrie’s meteoric rise is merely a flash in the pan. She remains part of a series of decorative objects, divested of individuality, like the Ziegfeld and Goldwyn Girls that come after her. Nearly a century after Dreiser published Sister Carrie, theorist Elizabeth Grosz identifies the complex feedback loop through which the female body and its environment engage in mutually constitutive “modes of simulation” whereby the body is “urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body” (242). Sister Carrie is an early primer illustrating how the body and mind of a young girl are inscribed with specific modes of subjectivity favorable to a capitalist ecosystem. Urban spectacles of wealth and consumption inspire Carrie to adapt to her environment by rehearsing and performing pecuniarily enhanced versions of herself. What Dreiser calls “the drag of desire” (23) blurs the lines between the motive to outperform competitors in nature, to achieve reputability in society, to find happiness through consumption. Shopping sublimates female sexual appetite, as advertisers would have us believe. Dreiser brilliantly distills scientific sociology’s immutable natural laws into discrete social facts in the service of a farsighted analysis of the city at the intersection of capitalist accumulation, demographic trends, class, and gender relations.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Dreiser attended Indiana University for one year (1889–1890). Sister Carrie (62). I will be quoting from the unexpurgated 1981 edition, unless otherwise indicated. See Catherine Jurka, “Dreiser, Class, and the Home” (100). See Mencken (704–705). See Mencken, “peach” is slang for a beautiful girl (704). In the first edition, the line reads, “Just another chorus girl” (276).

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971. Baguley, David. Naturalistic Fiction:The Entropic Vision. Cambridge UP, 1990. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination.Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,Texas UP, 1981. Bridge, Gary, and Sophie Watson, editors. The Blackwell City Reader. Blackwell, 2002. Brown, Bill. “The Matter of Dreiser’s Modernity.” The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 83–99. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. “Catastrophic Utopia:The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern.” Representations, vol. 14, 1986, pp. 220–229. Burgess, Ernest W. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.” The City, edited by Morris Janowitz, U of Chicago P, 2019, pp. 47–62. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900. ---. Sister Carrie: The Unexpurgated Edition. Edited by John C. Berkey, et al., the Pennsylvania edition, Penguin 1981. Eby, Clare Virginia. Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo. U of Missouri P, 1998. Fisher, Philip. “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects.” American Realism: New Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, Johns Hopkins UP, 1982, pp. 259–277. Fluck, Winfried. “Beast/Superman/Consumer: American Literary Naturalism as an Experimental Literature.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, edited by Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz, Heidelberg, Winter 2009, pp. 199–217.Gibson-Graham, J.K. “The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy.” The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 225–228. Giles, Paul. “Dreiser’s Style.” The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 47–62.

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The Metropolitan Conversion of Sister Carrie Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies-Cities.” Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992, pp. 241–253. Jurka, Catherine. “Dreiser, Class, and the Home.” The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 100–111. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.Vintage Books, 1993. Lears, Jackson. “Dreiser and the History of American Longing.” The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 63–79. Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works. International Publishers, 1980, pp. 31–63. Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 1973, pp. 70–88. McNamara, Kevin R. Urban Verbs: Arts and the Discourses of American Cities. Stanford UP, 1996. Mencken, H.L. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. 1919. Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of American Naturalism. U of California P, 1987. Moers, Ellen. Two Dreisers:The Man and the Novelist as Revealed in his Two Most Important Works, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.Viking, 1969. Reichardt, Ulfried. “Counting Success and Measuring Value: Money, Numbers, and Abstraction in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 1, no. 12, 2017, pp. 89–104. Sherman, Stuart. On Contemporary Literature. Henry Hold and Company, 1917. Sieburth, Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” Assemblage, vol. 6, June 1988, pp. 7–23. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine, U of Chicago Press, 1971. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies:The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.Verso, 1989. Wald, Priscilla. “Dreiser’s Sociological Vision.” The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 177–195.

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28 POWER AND THE DIALECTICS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCIENCE FICTION Christopher Loughlin

The last three millennia witnessed the development—imaginatively and, increasingly, in fact—of automated, mechanical beings, both androids and robots. These automata, within the last century, began to be conceived concretely. First, Karel Čapek invented the term robot. Second, Isaac Asimov popularized a humane approach to robots and invented the field of robotics. What unites proto-robot stories and the modern invention of the term is the use of automated or artificial beings; they are all created as laborers and some form of assistance to humanity. Further, the link of labor, work, and robotics can be demonstrated etymologically. Čapek utilized the term “robota,” which comes from Czech and originally meant “a central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labor or service” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). Therefore, it involved some form of coerced, dominated, forced labor: it did not involve free or voluntary labor. When Čapek invented the word robot he had already linked the artificial, created—organic or otherwise—machine with forced labor. The link between slavery and robotics is made explicit by J. M. Jordan: “the word ‘robot’ originated in the 1920s and was at first a type of slave” (3). The etymology of robot also further highlights the role of unequal power relationships.These connections of inequality are the basis of both Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Marx’s dialectic of capital and labor. Fundamentally, unequal power relationships are another way to conceptualize class and labor analysis. Class is merely the generic, modern way of describing this type of exploitative relationship. It is this concept of unequal power relationships, therefore, which will form the central axis of this chapter. This chapter will explicate how Hegel and Marx’s interdependent relationships of inequality can be utilized to understand the phenomenology of the robot. The creation of these beings imaginatively alludes to how they may occur in fact; the poetics of artificial creation, from both the past and the present, shape the facts of the future.This chapter will use class and labor analysis to understand the robot. Specifically, it will show that Hegel and Marx’s collective ontology—their theories of inter-subjectivity—are a useful means by which to analyze the robot. Therefore, conceptualization of the robot is about both the creation of artificial subjectivity and human subjectivity. Hegel’s theory of inter-subjectivity will be applied in this chapter to understand what the robot (or android) tells us about the (human) self and robot other. The concept of unequal power relationships will demonstrate how the alter-subjectivity of the robot is created in struggle with humanity. Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage is exemplary of an unequal power relationship. Marx and Kojève both extend this concept into the dialectic of history. The othering of labor (slave or additional dominated groups) is a necessary moment in the full development of these relationships. Power is, 372

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ultimately, in work via the dominated and not through the dominator. The lord, the master, begins as subject, but, ultimately, the object (labor, the slave, the robot) will be revealed as the true subject. In the proceeding analysis, I will first set out the use of unequal power relationships. Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage will be explicitly correlated to Marx’s dialectic of capital and labor. The twentieth-century developments in French and American critical theory and their central categories of desire and power are then discussed. The second section progresses to present analysis of the robot as object. The robot is without independence. It is dependent on the subjecthood of the creator. These robotic objects, however, often rebound on the creator. The created becoming a threat to the creator—Asimov’s “Frankenstein Complex” (Asimov, 1964 xiii)—is a Mephistophelean curse, or Promethean mistake. The third section presents an alternative resolution of the paradox of artificial, created life. It demonstrates how the robot has been presented as subject, self, and autonomous existence. The robot as an autonomous, independent being has been most thoroughly explicated by Asimov.The phenomenology of the robot, hermeneutically, is demonstrated to develop through a struggle of inter-subjectivity A final, short conclusion brings this chapter to an end and links the science fiction of the robot to alterity and otherness, critical theory, and the re-development of class analysis. Ultimately, this chapter delineates a new approach to critical theory: the analysis of class and labor via the theorization of unequal power relationships. This alternative Western Marxism combines the critical theory of the Frankfurt School with Hegelian, historicist, and political Marxism, and the Irish New Wave.

Mastery, Servitude and Unequal Power Relationships Hegel’s first mature work to be published was The Phenomenology of Spirit (previously translated into English as The Phenomenology of Mind, German original: G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes). Hegel completed it in 1806 as Napoleon rode through the streets of Jena in victory. The Phenomenology is a propaedeutic for the full, Hegelian, system and located within this work is perhaps the most famous passage written by Hegel, the dialectic of lordship and servitude. The conflict between the lord and servant is one over recognition and, ultimately, is a life and death struggle. The dialectic of lordship and servitude—the master-slave dialectic for Kojève—involves self-consciousness and the emergence of collective ontology, recognition (Kojève). Mastery and servitude are a social relationship. It is their struggle that will cause history and is, ultimately, an association of unequal power. The Hegelian phenomenology of spirit will, eventually, result in the conscious realization of Spirit in the Absolute Knowledge of the philosopher. Hegel’s dialectical conception of ontology means that this has epistemological consequences. In Hegel’s conception of being the development of human consciousness is both history and subjective, human, agency.This emerges by way of the “I,” self-consciousness. According to Hegel,“self-consciousness is Desire” (109). It is at this stage that the desire for recognition emerges:“self-consciousness exists in and for itself when … it so exists for another” (111). The “I,” self-consciousness, desire, exists between two agents.We arrive at the stage of the dialectic of lordship and bondage. It is between the struggle of two representatives, inter-subjectively, that consciousness emerges.Two agents, master and servant, recognize each other;“they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other” (112). But these two agents appear as “independent shapes, individuals in the being [or immediacy] of Life” (113). It is the struggle for recognition—the issue of life and death—which, for Hegel, is of signal importance:“each seeks the death of the other. But … action on its own part is also involved; for the former involves the staking of its own life” (113). Just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is a natural negation of consciousness, negation without the required significance of recognition. Death certainly shows that each staked his life. (114) 373

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There are two, opposed, shapes of consciousness facing each other, “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself [the master], the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to be for another [the servant]” (115). In other words, the master is subject, the servant is object, “the Lord is the power over this thing … he holds the other in subjection” (114–115). The domination of the master over the servant involves an asymmetrical power relation. Yet this outward dominance is undermined from within. The master’s power is over an inferior and, consequently, merely over the object. By contrast, the servant, the dependent consciousness, must control their desire. The master surrenders, in unseemly fashion, to the object, to his own desire, while the servant masters the object and their own desire. How, exactly, does the servant master the object? The servant masters the object via work, productive activity; their work forgoes immediate desire to labor productively. To summate: while the lord is powerful and can enforce recognition, he can only consume the object; the servant, the bondsman, the slave, is forced to recognize, work, to master their desire. The servile consciousness, however, “realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own” (118–119). Kojève summarizes: “idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working slave” (Kojève 20). The key development by Karl Marx, beginning in the 1840s, was to link the dialectic of lordship and bondage to the emergent working class. The servile class under capitalism, the working class, was the analogue to Hegel’s servant. Kojève cites Marx’s early writings to make this point: “Hegel … erfasst die Arbeit als das Wesen, als das sich bewährende Wesen des Menschen” (“Hegel … sees labour as the essence, the self-confirming essence, of man”; Kojève 1; Marx 386). These considerations help to re-conceptualize Hegel and the dialectic of lordship and bondage. Hegel’s dialectical conception of consciousness, self-consciousness sets the stage for Marx’s dialectic. Marx’s application of it led him to labor and work as the foundation of human activity. For Marx, to realize human potential, it is necessary for the working class to become conscious of their exploitation. The working class, for Marx, are the servile consciousness become conscious: the real foundation of Hegel’s ideal lord and servant. Hegel and Marx used the dialectic of lordship and bondage as part of a delineation of social ontology: the theory of collective being. The influence of Hegel on Marx would later serve as a source of Western Marxism. György Lukács was the first to undertake a serious analysis of the Hegelian roots of Marx’s thought, although both Lenin and Gramsci also highlighted these links. While the worker-intellectual James Connolly demonstrated, in fact, the realization of enlightenment philosophy’s aims in the working class. Hegel and Marx’s use of the dialectic of mastery and servitude further opens onto the key critical theory developments of the twentieth century. Central European Marxists—those who created Western Marxism—utilized Hegelian philosophy to re-interpret Marx. Lukács, for example, created the basis for this development in 1923 with his classic work, History and Class Consciousness. The Frankfurt School used Lukács’s work to re-analyze alienation, capitalism, and modernity. However, most significantly, it was Alexandre Kojève’s work which saw the French appropriation of Hegel during the inter-war period. His work centered upon utilizing The Phenomenology to understand Hegel’s philosophy and he was heavily influenced by Marx’s interpretations. The master-slave dialectic, as Kojève coined the term, utilized Hegel’s understanding of desire, fear, fighting, and work. He claimed that fighting and working formed the key to understanding the dialectic of history. This key category of desire forms the center point of Judith Butler’s seminal work, Subjects of Desire. But, similarly, the role of desire was also influential on Marxist historians writing in Britain after 1945. H. J. Kaye’s 1992 analysis of some of these historians was entitled The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History. This reinterpretation and usage of desire was a key term of twentieth-century critical theory. Desire is part of the development of the dialectic of history. As such, the conflict of desire—the battle for recognition—drives the dialectic of lordship and servitude. And this dialectic is an exemplar of an unequal power relationship. This notion 374

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of unequal power relationships is especially significant because of the critique of class analysis and labor inaugurated by the developments of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the “retreat from class” of the last quarter of the twentieth century (Loughlin 57). The 1970s ended with the reactionary rise and victory of Reagan and Thatcher; equally, intellectually, there was a recoil from the usage of class.This phenomenon took place across the Western world and registered the displacement of class by alternative categories: for example, culture, gender and sexualities, “race,” and ethnicity. Particularly important here was the rise of the concept of power as an analytical category. The term was popularized by Michel Foucault, but the term was influential across the arts and humanities and examined how power was directed, obtained, and utilized. Joan W. Scott called for analysis of this term in the late 1980s and, similarly, E.P.Thompson moved to examine the term around the same time. Recently, Scott has renewed her call for analyzing power by calling for historicized critical theory (Wild On Collective). The investigation of power is where this chapter’s central innovation, class and labor analysis as the investigation of unequal power relationships, can be re-highlighted. The central axes of both Hegel’s dialectic of master and servant and Marx’s dialectic of capital and labor are unequal relationships of power. For them, the outward appearance of domination (fear) of the master and capital is dialectically inverted (or, sublated, aufheben). The dominated— rather than the dominator—are the truly living. These dialectical inversions and developments also form the logical basis of the wider philosophies of each: dialectical idealism for Hegel; dialectical materialism for Marx. These inversions also demonstrate a slippage and reversal in how the object and subject switch positions. The master, or power-holder, begins as subject and makes the object conform to their wishes. The servant’s (or dominated) work involves denial of their own desire and, hence, is future-oriented. The master is thereby only ever successful in the immediate situation, with the result that tomorrow belongs to the servant. Similarly, for Marx, the capitalist is all-powerful today, but tomorrow belongs to the one universal, servile, class: the working class. However, it is the conceptualization of unequal power relationships that integrally unites Hegel and Marx’s work. Further, these associations of inequality also link science fiction understandings of the phenomenology of the robot. Unequal power relationships and the robot, therefore, will form the central portion of the analysis of the next sections of the chapter.These unequal power relationships, or class and labor analysis, will be applied to readings of the robot in science fiction. This analysis will demonstrate how resolutions—or, alternatively, indeterminacies—can be utilized to understand the phenomenology of the robot.The next sections of the chapter present three case studies.The first case study involves Karel Čapek’s Reason’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), which will be analyzed as the urtext of robots as a Frankenstein complex. In this reading, mechanical, artificial beings are inevitably bound to overthrow and destroy their creators. Asimov’s technology-as-neutral perspective on robots will form the second case study presented. The final case study will examine P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? These case studies will be presented analytically in the next two sections.The next section examines the robot as a dependent being, subjects without subjectivity and, hence, merely objects. Here, the fear of the robot—the robot complex—will be demonstrated as fundamental.

Fear: The Robot Complex and the Robot as Object The idea of the created turning on the creator is so commonplace that it is best understood as a myth of modernity. Some of the precursors to the concept include the Promethean myth about humanity and technology and the Faustian bargain with Mephistopheles.Yet, the key way that this myth entered popular culture is via the “Frankenstein complex,” as coined by Isaac Asimov in 1964 (Asimov, 1964 x). According to Asimov, Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein is exemplary of civilization’s ambivalent relationship to science, social change, and technology. The use of contemporary science also makes the novel the first science fiction novel (see Brian Aldiss 1973 and 1986 for the 375

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origin of science fiction as Mary Shelley). Her work has become the most important science fiction text of modernity.Victor Frankenstein creates an artificial man from old body parts, creating an artificial life. The creature, however, turns on the creator and leaves a trail of woe in his wake. The story impressively combines horror, literary influences, romanticism, and the gothic. Three aspects should be highlighted. First, fear of socio-technological change, the self, and other—the Frankenstein complex—pervades notions of the robot. We will see that Čapek’s work is exemplary of this approach, Asimov reacts against it, and P.K. Dick utilizes an ambivalent approach to it. Second, Frankenstein can be read via unequal power relationships, as these are key axes of the text. Last, there is an important link between the gothic, magic, and the romantic which pervades Marxism, modernity, and science fiction. But how does the Frankenstein complex morph into a robot complex? The word robot was coined by Karel Čapek in the play, Rosumovi Umělí Roboti (R.U.R.) (first English translation, 1923: Rossum’s Universal Robots; translation, 1999: Reason’s Universal Robots). Amongst the most important sources of inspiration for Čapek may have been the golem of Hebrew and central European legend (Christensen).The golem, created as protection for the Jews of Prague against violence, escapes the control of its creator, Rabbi Loew, creating havoc and destruction (Ashley). Further, there is an important slavery context to the work: “The word derives from the Czech word ‘robota,’ or forced labor, as done by serfs. Its Slavic linguistic root, ‘rab,’ means ‘slave’” (Jordan 30). And, equally significantly, the work is also deeply informed by central European criticism of capitalism in the early twentieth century. This context informs the critique of capitalism, consumerism, scientism, and technology contained within Čapek’s classic. A further context is the societal anxieties created by automation, Fordism, mass production, and rationalization (Latham and Luckhurst). Like Shelley’s work a century before, Čapek’s explicated many of the contradictions of modernity in a work of literary fiction. The play itself is a science fiction melodrama about the fall of humanity and the dawn of robot civilization. In act one, artificial humanoids—the robots of R.U.R. are actually closer to androids than present views of the robot—have been created and are replacing working people throughout the world. Above all, according to Harry Domin, robots replace human labor because of their minimum comparative cost: HARRY DOMIN:  What kind of worker would you say was the most efficient? LADY HELEN GLORY: The most honest and industrious? HARRY DOMIN:  Wrong. The cheapest. The most economical to run. Young

Russum [Reason]

invented a worker with minimal needs. (9) The robots have had all the superfluous aspects of the human body replaced by the minimum necessaries for life. They were created at first as a scientific experiment by the older Reason; the latest, made by young Reason, have been made more efficient. The robots have been created purely for work, with minimal costs for production; they are without emotion or feeling: LADY HELEN GLORY:  Why didn’t you make them happy? DR HALLEMEIER:  Impossible. They’re Robots, Lady Helen, without LADY HELEN GLORY:  Without love? Without defiance? DR HALLEMEIER:  Of course. Robots love nothing.

will, passion, history or soul.

(20–21) The arrival of a liberator of the robots—Helen Glory of the Humanity League—sets the dramatic scene for Act I. In Act II, ten years later, the world has been transformed by the robots, but they now demand to be heard. In Acts II, III, and IV, Čapek introduces a number of different robots as examples of different stages or understandings of consciousness (Kinyon 241).The robots e­ ventually overthrow humanity, but they simultaneously lose the formula to reproduce robots because Helen 376

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Glory destroys it. The play ends with the beginnings of romantic love between Robot Helen and Primus, the new robot Adam and Eve.Yet, it is the struggle between humans and robots that drives the development of an emergent robot consciousness of self and collective. Adam Roberts has highlighted the idea of the robot as a Kantian, ethical figure (198–200), while Kamila Kinyon has—in contrast to the present author—described R.U.R. as including “an implicit criticism of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Kant’s categorical imperative” (Kinyon 240). Kinyon explains the significance of three robots in the play, one of which was cut from the first English translation in 1923. First, the robot Radius exemplifies the rebellion and overthrow of humanity. As he states in the play: RADIUS:  You’re

not Robots. You’re not clever like Robots. Robots can do everything. You issue invalid commands. Make unnecessary words. (40)

The beginning of a robot “I,” and implicit we, is highlighted when Radius states: RADIUS:  I

want to be master of humans. (41)

He demonstrates the beginning of rebellion against humanity and the emergence of a sense of self amongst robots. Second, and in contrast, Damon is a figure of self-sacrifice and duty. This robot is willing and prepared to sacrifice his own life in the pursuit of robot knowledge of re-production (83–85).The sole surviving human is unable to conduct the surgery, however, and Damon does not have to prove his willingness to sacrifice. He concludes: DAMON:  Life, I

want life! I want … to live! It’s better to … (85)

The last robot figures are the robots Helen and Primus. They rediscover love and the ideals of humanity, freedom. As Kinyon states, “each [robot Helen and Primus] comes to a sense of selfconsciousness through the double awareness of mortality and love for the Other” (Kinyon 259). The play concludes with the beginning of robot civilization’s Adam and Eve, the robots Helen and Primus. There is a continual tension between the robots as slaves and robots as overlords (Jordan 48, 68), or, as I analyze it, a dialectic of mastery and servitude. The resolution of R.U.R. allows us to see how robot self-consciousness develops through rebellion to the explicit relationship. Humans begin as the creators; the masters, and the robots are objects. Subjectivity resides with the human being. The robots eventually, however, reject this creation and domination. They begin to act, develop, and feel for themselves.The robots, from an initial position of being created, progressively become self-conscious in their struggle with humanity. Humans are displaced, then replaced, and, ultimately, destroyed by the robots. The inversion of mastery, the switching of the subject and object positions, exemplifies why Hegel and Marx’s conception can be applied to analyzing robots. Last, freedom as self-determination is linked explicitly to inter-subjectivity: the self and the other emerge through the struggle of two agents. This further explicates why discussion of the robot is inherently rooted in human self-conception and conceptualization of the other. The dystopic displacement of humans by technology contrasts with Asimov’s optimistic portrayal of the robot. Isaac Asimov, in the middle of the twentieth century, invented the modern conception of robots and robotics. Asimov’s views were fundamentally utilitarian. He explicitly discussed R.U.R. as an updating of the Frankenstein-inspired myth: “once again the scientific Faust [in R.U.R.] has been 377

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destroyed by his Mephistophelean creation” (Asimov, 1964 xii). Robots would not overthrow humanity because safety features would be a portion of their construction; for example, frying pans have plastic handles and electric wire is covered with insulating material (xiii). His conception of robots was, like any other tool or technology within modern society, neutral. “As a machine, a robot will surely be designed for safety, as far as possible” (xiii). Further, Roberts has claimed, his robots are essentially ethically Kantian in conception (Roberts 198–200). It was alongside J. W. Campbell that Asimov invented the three laws of robotics (and a zeroth law added later): 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. 0: A robot may not injure humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. (Langford)

Asimov’s robots were an attempt to escape the Promethean mistake, Mephistophelean curse, and Frankenstein complex. Further, he subverted the notion of robots replacing humans. He did this in a portrayal of robots as integral to, and supportive of, humanity. This is demonstrated in both his robot novels and short stories, as well as the role robots play in the final Foundation books of the 1980s and 1990s. For example, the robot, Daneel Olivaw, has a key role in the robot novels, but he is also revealed as a key figure in the future development of humanity at the finale of the Foundation series. It is, however, to one of Asimov’s final robot stories that the analysis will proceed. One of Asimov’s most important robot stories was “The Bicentennial Man,” published on the bi-centenary of the foundation of the USA. It touches upon creativity, labor, the phenomenology of human and artificial life, and robotics. Andrew Martin is obtained as a household robot, yet he begins to actively create. He becomes a furniture-maker and Martin’s owners are convinced he is creating works of art (Asimov, 1995 640). Whilst he states, “it makes the circuits of my brain somehow flow more easily [when I carve wood]. I have heard you use the word ‘enjoy’ and the way you use it fits the way I feel. I enjoy doing them, Sir” (639). Having been granted legal freedom as a robot, Martin then progresses to become a historian. Martin states his wish to write “a history of robots, by a robot. I want to explain how robots feel about what has happened since the first ones were allowed to work and live on Earth” (654). As a result of his desire to become more human, Andrew Martin has US Robotics replace his metallic body with an organic replacement: he becomes an android (662). Andrew then advances to become a robobiologist and the organic, prosthetic organs he invents are utilized in both his own body and the bodies of human beings. Eventually, he is a legally recognized human being, the bi-centennial man. At the center of Asimov’s story is the question of humanity, the non-human, artificial life, and technology. Andrew Martin’s self-hood is a struggle for recognition and is the key axis of the story. Martin’s rights as a robot are recognized halfway through his life, but it is the human ideal of freedom that, ultimately, motivates him. First, Andrew has to rebel against his owner. “Sir,” his original owner, is outraged when Martin requests his freedom, telling his daughter Little Miss: “He doesn’t know what freedom is. He’s a robot” (644).When questioned about why he wishes to endanger his earnings and position thus far, Martin responds, “Freedom is without price … even the chance of freedom is worth the money” (645). Martin’s endeavor is contested at every stage, however. A class-action is brought against his claim on the basis that, “the word ‘freedom’ had no meaning when applied to a robot. Only a human being could be free” (645). Yet, the court finds in favor of Martin. It rules that freedom cannot be denied to any “object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state” (emphasis added) (646). Martin, following his 378

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switch to an organic body and his 150th anniversary as the “Sesquicentennial Robot,” helps to develop human habitation of the moon and prosthetic technology for humans. He is still, however, dissatisfied: “to be a human being de facto is not enough. I want not only to be treated as one, but to be legally identified as one. I want to be a human being de jure” (673). The final aim of Andrew Martin, to become human, is a struggle of decades. But eventually he concludes that “human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn’t matter how long a machine lasts. They cannot tolerate an immortal human being, since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal” (680). Forced to choose between a mortal humanity or immortal inhumanity, Martin chooses the former. As he states to a political representative: “I have chosen between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires” (680). Andrew Martin’s embrace of mortality leads to his recognition as a human (681–682). Initially, Martin is recognized as a legal object.Yet, it is only his embrace of mortality that causes him to be recognized as a subject. He desires freedom and this demonstrates his humanity, but his reconciliation to death is what allows humanity to recognize him as equally a subject. Last, the story of “The Bicentennial Man” also involves an integral discussion of fear of the other as exemplified by the robot. Throughout the story, the fear of the robot, technology, is an explicit and implicit motif. Similarly, the earth of Rick Deckard is permeated by fear of the other and the non-recognition of androids as valid “life.” The “andys,” or replicants in Bladerunner, are merely objects in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Androids are simply to serve as slaves for humanity to colonize outer space. Yet Rick Deckard, the novel’s protagonist, shrewdly notes that the latest type of andy he must hunt, the Nexus-6, has surpassed the intelligence level of some humans, “the servant had become in some cases more adroit than the master” (Dick 23). The ability of ever more advanced andys to pass the Voigtt Kampff Empathy Tests imposed by a paranoid earth leads to the hunting of eight escaped andys on earth. It is the measurement of empathy that divides humans and androids in Dick’s novel: an empathetic response indicates human being; the lack of empathetic response is indicative of the android. Rick Deckard—a bounty hunter of these andys or replicants—spends Dick’s novel hunting down six surviving escapees from earth’s colonies in the solar system. They live for just four years, serving only their masters.Yet, eight rebel and escape to earth.Throughout Dick’s novel there are mentions of servitude, slavery, and colonization. Ultimately, the rejection of servitude by the andys sets the stage for Dick’s clever and imaginative title. Deckard starts the novel with a “fake” electric sheep. A dystopic, poisoned earth has made live animals into a status symbol. Hence, from the beginning of the novel, the divisions between human-animal and human-non-human are central (Vint). The latter division, of the human and the inhuman, is the most important aspect of the analysis presented here. It is, ultimately, undecidable whether Rick Deckard is an andy, mercilessly hunting down his compatriots, or, alternatively, he is a human being eyeing an object, a machine, with no inherent right to life.This indeterminacy forms the central axis of Dick’s novel. Deckard, however, begins with a clear distinction between himself and the andys, “a humanoid robot is like any other machine” (Dick 32). As he proceeds his consciousness changes; Deckard even asks a fellow bounty hunter, “do you think androids have souls?” (107). He begins to realize that he has empathy for, at least, two androids and, “so much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs” (113). Previously, Deckard is able to see andys as only objects: “retiring,” or killing, an object involves no ethical questions, they are simply animated machines, incapable of emotion. “Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude” (145). His empathy is revealed when he explains to his android amour, Rachel Rosen, “legally you’re not [alive]. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity” (155). Deckard “retires” his own career by the close of the novel, alluding to his own humanity and empathy. Equally, the refusal to accept servitude indicates the android’s humanity. Dick leaves the novel in an irresolvable space, and this indeterminacy is indicative of the new wave science fiction of the 1960s. Perhaps this is 379

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why Asimov’s fiction is less favored today than Dick’s by science fiction critics and the wider public alike. The robot and android are a staple of science fiction, but the fear of the robot, dystopian futures, and anxiety at socio-technological change are all spoken to by the trope of the robot-as-monster. It is the fear of the robot we can see articulated in Čapek and Dick; whereas Asimov is much more favorable about the robot. The robot as object—the robot complex—is to be feared. The robot is an autonomous, though dependent, body which can act, labor, and work. Its ability to act independently is heavily circumscribed by its dependency and creation by humanity. The robot, as created, is an object of another consciousness: the master’s or power-holder’s consciousness. Each author deploys the robot as dependent on humanity. However, Hegel’s dialectic of mastery and servitude involves the development of self-consciousness inter-subjectively. The object of the master’s consciousness develops its own self-understanding and becomes a subject. The robot as object is dominated by the master and, yet, each author in this chapter demonstrates some subversion of this idea. For Čapek, the robots overthrow humanity, and the play ends with a new robot, Adam and Eve. For Asimov—despite the anti-technology and anti-robot attitudes that dominate earth—a robot becomes both de facto and de jure recognized as a human. Finally, robots serve a decaying and moribund earth in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The fictional representations of each author point to the deep-rooted anxieties about creation, social change, and technology. The robot as object becomes, therefore, the screen onto which these human anxieties can be projected. This fear—the robot complex—is another manifestation of the central myth of modernity, the Frankenstein complex.The section below now proceeds to the development of the robot as an I, a subject capable of self-determination.

Robots of Desire: Consciousness, the Robot, and Self-Consciousness Isaac Asimov was particularly motivated to write about the robot against the Frankenstein complex. He viewed robots instrumentally as merely another piece of technology, or tool, created by humanity. This optimistic view should be tempered with the knowledge that nineteenth- and twentieth-century history demonstrates that health and safety regulations are only considered post factum. Both Čapek and Dick’s more critical and cynical interpretation of social and technological change is probably closer to the truth. In their two works, the health and safety implications of robots and andys are considered after the fact: in the former, robots destroy humanity; in the latter, ever more advanced andys are created and only subsequently is the question of how to detect these machines confronted. Both express, implicitly, the Marxist notion that technological change is driven by the social implications of the accumulation of, and search for, profit. Frankenstein’s central role as the first science fiction novel correlates with the twentieth-century creation of the robot complex. Both complexes are indicative of humanity’s fear of their own obsolescence. What, however, about the object of the master’s consciousness? How do these objects desire and, ultimately, express their own subjectivity? Desire and power, as critical historical terms, have been utilized decisively in the critical theory of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Most famously, Judith Butler’s first book used it as the key lens with which to hermeneutically analyze the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century French philosophy. This section will examine the movement, hermeneutically, of the phenomenology of the robot. It will explicate and chart the development of robots from an objective, in-itself (an sich) position, to a subjective, for-itself (für sich) position. In the Frankenstein and robot complex, the created turns on the creator. The position of mastery is inverted and the dominated triumph.The subject becomes object and the object becomes subject.This leads to desiring robots, both in the sense that humans come to desire artificial life, such as Rick Deckard and Rachel Rosen, and that the robots desire human beings’ desire. This desire is the desire of freedom and,

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for Hegel, posits the movement from qualified life (animal, artificial) to true life (human). How do robots become capable of unqualified life? In Čapek’s play the robots are originally ambiguous on consciousness, but they end by signaling an understanding of love, desire, and, by implication, human freedom. The new robot Adam and Eve, robot Helen and Primus, replace humanity and signal the end of human beings and the close of the play. The robots begin by replacing human labor, but they eventually rebel and stake their existence on the overthrow of humanity. This confrontation is symbolic of the development of self-consciousness via the confrontation of master (power-holder) with servant (slave, dominated). Radius, for example, refuses to serve: RADIUS:  I

will not work for you. (40; quoted by Kinyon 224)

CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER ALQUIST:  Robots aren’t alive, Damon. Robots are machines! FIRST ROBOT:  We were machines, sir. But through pain and fear we have acquired … CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER ALQUIST:  What? FIRST ROBOT:  Souls, sir.

(81; quoted by Kinyon 251) Damon—symbolic of robot rule—ultimately chooses life and wishes to live. This choice and determination symbolize the development of collective and individual life (collective ontology). Primus and robot Helen further symbolize this development of robot self-consciousness; they are hailed by the sole human survivor—Construction Engineer Alquist—as the new robot Adam and Eve. An important qualification here is the necessity for the two agents, in any dialectic of mastery and servitude, to survive. If the master triumphs via the death of the other, or vice versa, then there isn’t an agent left to recognize. This is, ultimately, what occurs in R.U.R. The robots overthrow and destroy humanity, but this leaves no agent free to recognize the mastery of the robot. The robots, in Čapek’s play, develop a sense of self-consciousness, but this is left incomplete with the disappearance of humanity. They, however, do express desire and understanding of the human conception of freedom and self. Primus is willing to sacrifice his life, in order to save robot Helen’s, at the close of the play.This is indicative of robotic self-consciousness and its equal validity to humanity’s. Another expression of this explicit sense of self is illuminated by the “bi-centennial man,” Andrew Martin. Asimov described his robots in both utilitarian terms and as equal to humanity. He wrote a convincing portrayal of artificial, mechanical life, despite the dystopian effects of science and technology which were clear to twentieth-century contemporaries. In the robot novels he situated robots between an over-populated earth, fearful of technology, against human settlers off-world who are overly dependent on technology and, especially, robots. In these hybrid science fiction detective novels, it is the robot Daneel Olivaw that is the central character. This same robot will shape humanity’s future for millennia. These robots are not central, however, to Asimov’s description of artificial mechanical life; that accolade rests with Andrew Martin. A domestic robot initially, Andrew Martin acts independently. His creativity, labor, work, and eventual choice of mortality, see him recognized as a human being. His choice of mortality to be recognized as human is part of the dialectic of mastery and servitude, and the emergence of self-consciousness. Martin desires that to which humanity also aspires. As another form of existence, he demonstrates his equality in fact to the human. Further, Asimov’s story is a convincing portrayal of how humanity humanizes the machine. Andrew rejects a dependent existence and chooses independence, chooses freedom. “Freedom is without price,” as Andrew Martin states in a Hegelian vein (Asimov, 1995 645). This recognition and desire demonstrate the dialectic of master and servant: the robot moves from an initial position of dependence to a position of independence—from an objective, in-itself (an sich) 381

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position to a subjective, for-itself (für sich) position. Martin begins by being owned, d­ ependent, an object that can labor and create further objects. Eventually—following myriad “organic” upgrades—with his embrace of mortality, Martin is recognized as an independent human being. The recognition of Martin as a man signifies the resolution of the exclusion of robotic, artificial life from the human. Asimov’s writing and publication of the short story in 1976 also link servility and robots with the history of human slavery. On this issue, of servility and humanity, Asimov is more convincing than either Čapek or Dick. By contrast, P. K. Dick’s phenomenology of the robot involves indeterminacy and, ultimately, irresolution. The andys are explicitly enslaved in his novel and are given only four years of life. Their rebellion against servitude does place them, ultimately, on a par with humanity. Deckard’s recognition of this fact also demonstrates the problem of determining between different forms of consciousness: is it artificial pretending to be real or is it real but thinks it is artificial? The desire for life, for freedom, humanizes artificial life. Dick’s insistence on indeterminacy, however, means which of the two meanings of robot freedom above fits the case is left unresolved. Unlike Čapek (where robots destroy humanity) or Asimov (where a robot is recognized as human), for P. K. Dick there is no resolution of the difference between artificial and human life.This irresolution points to a dialectic of mastery and servitude which does not move past unequal power division. Andys are artificial, non-organic life; despite Deckard’s, eventual, recognition of them as equal to human life, this makes no difference to the wider societal opposition between andys and humans. The staking of their lives proves the andys equality with humanity and their desire for freedom. But this staking of their life is not recognized by humanity; an object cannot be granted ethical or political rights. The desire for freedom—for all three authors—demonstrates the human potential of artificial life. The subversion of mastery by the slave demonstrates this dialectic of history. The robot, or other artificial life, moves from dependence to the claim for independence. It is only in Asimov that robot, artificial, life is recognized as being in- and for-itself as equal to the human. Yet, all three authors demonstrate that the robot can have desire. For Čapek, the robots reject servitude and overthrow humanity. The robots are willing to stake their existence and embrace a human understanding of freedom and love. But their overthrow of humanity results in a nonrecognition as there is only one human left to recognize robot superiority. In Asimov, it is the desire for freedom that ultimately makes Andrew Martin human. But Martin is only legally recognized as human once he accepts mortality. Last, in Dick, Deckard begins to accept that robots are biologically alive. Rachel, for example, vocalizes her empathy for fellow andys: “identification: there goes I” (Dick 149). And, despite not being legally recognized as alive, Deckard accepts that her life is de facto equal to any human’s (155). And it is in desire, for Hegel, that the I and we are revealed. The robots of desire demonstrate this movement from object to subject. Only, however, in Asimov is this resolved with the recognition by humanity of one robot as human. The subordinate group subverts domination and fear to explicate their own desire. Fear of the master (the power-holder) is subverted by the slave and a robot is able to gain independence and freedom, at least with Asimov. The robot is symbolic of such subversion: the representation of the phenomenology of the robot is in and through servitude; therefore, both etymologically and in science fiction, the word for slave is robot. The robot (like other dominated groups) begins as dominated, but the dialectical development of these asymmetrical relationships of power leads to the victory of the subordinate. The robots, begin as created, an object to the master (power-holder): the robots end with their acceptance that the created has become self-creating and, therefore, equal to the master’s power. The onesided recognition of the robot (object, or other dominated agent) is unsatisfying for humanity. Humanity will only be satisfied with the recognition of an equal; the progressive development of history points towards just such an expansion of freedom. An important point to consider here is the Hegelian proposition of the reciprocal nature of the dialectic of lordship and bondage (Hegel 382

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109). In other words, what is done to one agent is also done to the other. The unequal power relationship is reciprocal and what is done to one agent is correlatively done to the other. This lays the basis, therefore, for previously excluded groups to be recognized as equal. The expansion of political rights with women’s citizenship, the abolition of slavery, and the de-colonization of subordinate groups, nations, and states, for example, all demonstrate the development of freedom through the expansion of political rights. These groups then become accepted as self-creating and equal to the previously exclusive elite power-holders. The robot, or other artificial life, develops from being an object to becoming a subject. Andrew Martin is at first only life in-itself (an sich), but he progresses to become a life for-itself (für sich). Finally, this processual relationship contextualizes how human understanding of the robot is equally revealing of the subjectivity of the human. The dialectical development of mastery and servitude—unequal power relationships—sees the development of a free, independent, self-creating robot. Asymmetrical relationships, therefore, undermine themselves from within. Humanity begins by creating something, an object for its use. Activity, action, seems to simply reside on the human side. But the object of humanity, the robot, is not only an object: the robot becomes subject. This taking of subjectivity puts artificial life on a par with the human. The ethical and philosophical implications of such a view are profound. The robot is merely an object, in-itself (an sich), but it moves to become a subject, for-itself (für sich). Domination, enslavement, and fear are replaced by desire: the robot’s desire for freedom and emancipation and the robot’s desire to desire another desire. The utilization of unequal power relationships—class and labor analysis—can, therefore, contribute to the study of science fiction literature and social class.

Desire, Fear, and Unequal Power Relationships This chapter examined the phenomenology of the robot, as revealed in three key science fiction authors. It explicated how Hegel and Marx’s power relationships of inequality can be utilized to understand the imaginative creation of artificial, mechanical, life. In the preceding analysis, we first examined the dialectic of lordship and servitude and how this involved self-consciousness and the emergence of collective ontology. The master-slave dialectic utilizes Hegel’s understanding of desire, fear, fighting, and work. The struggle over power and recognition are the axis of Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Marx’s dialectic of capital and labor. Hegel and Marx’s use of the dialectic opens onto the key critical theory developments of the twentieth century.The second section of the chapter turned to examine the robot complex. The development of the robot as an object is indicative of how it is understood as an object for consciousness: specifically, how it is constructed by the power-holder. In other words, the robot, at first, is merely an object for the real subject: the creator. However, the robot, android, or other dominated agent turns upon the creator. It is through the conflict of creator and created that the latter begins to take on self-agency. Therefore, the third section advanced to discuss the development of the robot as subject. Here what once appeared to be a machine and only an object has now become subject. It is only in Asimov’s work, however, that the robot truly becomes an autonomous agent in- and for-itself. Both Čapek and Dick, by contrast, demonstrate the struggle between humanity and robots and andys. In the latter two authors, however, robots are only recognized in-itself. In Čapek, only one agent is left—the robots. Whereas, in Dick, the humans and andys are left in an irresolvable and indeterminate space; they are recognized as conscious but not alive. The robot in science fiction is a central question of modernity with long-term roots in Western societies. Further, the robot-as-monster is the twentieth-century version of the Frankenstein complex. This highlights some of the philosophical topics raised by the creation of artificial life. James Burton has argued for the ancient nature of these topics (158–159). For example, he claims that in some global mythologies human beings were created by the Gods to labor (160) and that the use of empathy to measure the android in Dick’s novel links to ancient historical questions. As was 383

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stated in the introduction, the question of artificial, created life has a three-thousand-year history. These issues—artificial life, consciousness, creation, labor, and servitude—are deep-seated questions of human civilization. Last, the question of the self and other raised by the robot is also expressly linked to issues of alienation, the commodity, and the monster. Therefore, what the robot unveils about the human and self-consciousness still requires further labor.

Works Cited Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. ———. Trillion Year Spree. Gollancz, 1986. Ashley, Mike. “Golem.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Edited by John Clute and John Grant. Orbit, 1997. Science Fiction Encyclopedia, sf​-encyclopedia​.uk​/fe​.php​?nm​=​golem/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2020. Asimov, Isaac. The Complete Robot. HarperCollins/Voyager, 31st printing of 1995 edition. ———. The Rest of the Robots. Doubleday, 1964. Burton, James. The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. Columbia UP, 2012. Čapek, Karel. Rosumovi Umělí Roboti (R.U.R.) (first English trans., 1923: Rossum’s Universal Robots; trans., 1999: Reason’s Universal Robots).Translated by Cathy Porter and Peter Majer, Bloomsbury Academic, 1999. Drama Online, doi:10.5040/9781408190982.40000006. Christensen, Andrew G. “Karel Čapek.” The Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company, 2007. www​.litencyc​.com/. Accessed 7 Oct 2020. Dick, P. K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Gollancz, 2010. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. German original 1807. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford UP, 1977. Jordan, J. M. Robots. MIT P, 2016. Kaye, H. J. The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History. Routledge, 1992. Kerman, Judith. Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2nd ed. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Kinyon, Kamila. “The Phenomenology of Robots: Confrontations with Death in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.” Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction. Edited by Arthur B. Evans. Wesleyan UP, 2014, pp. 240–266. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Edited by Allan Bloom. Cornell UP, 1980. Langford, David. “Laws of Robotics.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 2018. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, www​.s​​f​-enc​​yclop​​ edia.​​com​/e​​ntry/​​laws_​​of​_ro​​botic​​s/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020. Latham, Rob, and Roger Luckhurst. “Automation.” The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Edited by Rob Latham, Oxford UP, 2014. Oxford Handbooks, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199838844.013.002. Loughlin, C. J. V. “Representing Labor: Notes Towards a Political and Cultural Economy of Irish WorkingClass Experience.” A History of Irish Working-Class Writing. Edited by Michel Pierse, Cambridge UP, pp. 57–71. Lukács, Gyorg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Merlin Press, 1971. Oxford English Dictionary Online. www​.oed​.com/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020. Vint, Sherryl. “Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2007, pp. 111–126. Wild On Collective (Kleinberg, Ethan, Scott, J. W., and Wilder, Gary). Theses on Theory and History. Published by Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder, 2018. theoryrevolt​.com​/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2020.

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29 THE STRANGE CASE OF DYSTOPIAN FICTION Patricia McManus

Presence and Absence: The Doubleness of Class in Dystopian Fiction In his essay “An American Utopia,” Frederic Jameson ruminates on the historicity of developments in the “field of utopias,” noting the late efflorescence of utopian thinking in the 1960s and then its replacement by a stance of revulsion from the creative imagination of alternative forms of power. This was a replacement which had many forms, but which issued from the late 1970s on in a “dystopian obsession, a quasi-paranoid fear of any form of political or social organization” (Jameson 2). Jameson’s job in “An American Utopia” is to push politically for new forms of utopian thinking, but he makes an aside early on, an engagement with which grounds this essay. It is a stray comment, generated by noting the “overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias” in our own day. These dystopias, he remarks, mostly look “monotonously alike” (Jameson 1). This essay will wager that dystopian fiction as a sub-genre of science fiction is not newly monotonous in one regard, its relation to class divisions. That the “monotony” of the sub-genre’s understanding of class is visible now has arguably to do not with changes in the generic movements of dystopia—though there are vivid changes in the form’s shapes in our own century—but with the release of class politics from the grasp of Cold War thinking, a delayed release and one which has opened new ways of thinking not only of oppression but of liberation. Jameson’s remark is picked up by Slavoj Žižek in “The Seeds of Imagination.” Žižek is blunter than Jameson but the judgment remains at core the same. Recent dystopian fictions mute or hobble our imaginations: Jameson is right to emphasize how dystopias that abound in recent blockbuster movies and novels (Elysium, The Hunger Games), although apparently leftist (presenting a postapocalyptic society of extreme class divisions), are unimaginative, and also politically wrong. (Žižek 271) This essay will suggest that the “monotony” or “political wrongness” arguably newly visible in contemporary dystopian fiction is not a new phenomenon: when read from the perspective of class politics, dystopian fictions make use of class divisions to dramatize oppression, but never of working-class agency to imagine what liberation might look like. To begin, I want to take a moment to inquire into the “political wrongness” of one of Žižek’s examples of this “misery of imagination,” The Hunger Games trilogy (2008/2009/2010), before going on to compare its politics with those 385

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of a dystopia from over a century ago, H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). For reasons of space, I have not here explored the critical dystopias: their insistence on interrogating, rather than reproducing, a model of subjectivity as immanently “private”—self-sufficient and singly gendered—from a critique of racialized and gendered hierarchies, puts them in a different relation to class formations than their “classic” counterpart (Moylan, 2000; Baccolini, 2000; Donawerth, 2003, Balasopoulos, 2011, Claeys, 2016). The job of this introductory comparison is twofold: to establish a way of looking at class relations as a matter of structure and form rather than character or identity, empathy or pity; and crucially to draw out the historicity of the sub-genre’s internal continuities and discontinuities so that the sub-genre itself may be seen as inflected not so much with class loyalties as a pattern of class erasures, an economy of political visibility and invisibility for which collective agency is radically ambivalent: typically a ruling class is visible and secures its rule visibly while an exploited or oppressed class cannot secure its own agency in equivalent ways. Arguably the commercial success of Suzanne Collins’s young-adult dystopian trilogy, The Hunger Games, and their later film adaptations, rests on Collins’s clever use of her teenage female protagonist. Katniss Everdeen is never without an internal tumult or conflict to counterbalance and throw into manageable shadow the external conflicts her actions inaugurate and resolve in the plot. A sixteen-year-old who struggles with her feelings for her mother, her dead father, her best friend, her partner, rival, and eventual lover, her success and the role it thrusts on her, and her relation to the revolution she inspires and is finally made (reluctant) leader of, Everdeen’s internal life is ripe with doubts and uncertainties, fears and wishes, a tumult of internal life. Fearful, brave, sullen, loving, loyal, skeptical, witty, shy, athletic, awkward, she meditates constantly on her own shortcomings faced with the responsibilities she must shoulder. These responsibilities are typically local, as concrete as possible in a fiction which, to establish the scope of its story—the totality of a social order and its history—must skimp on the narrative details of everything from institutions to that history. Everdeen’s loyalties, the objects or external formations made most “real” by her episodic meditations, are to her family, her friends, and to her community at home in the working-class neighborhood, the Seam, of her district. These loyalties, ceaselessly tested, never quite resolved till the final return to her burnt-out district and declaration of love to her partner, enrich the text, giving it whatever depth it has. But they do so by personalizing conflict, privatizing it in a manner which renders the central conflict of the novel—resistance to, and finally rebellion against the regime—moral, stripped of its politics in a conflict which devolves into a seemingly instinctive battle of autonomy and individuality against arbitrary authority and control. Everdeen, the first-person narrator of each of the three volumes of Collins’s trilogy, focalizes all in the narrative in more than a technical sense: she sees, clear-eyed, the injustice of the inequality, sees through the seductiveness of triumph in the gaudy Capitol to the tawdry voyeurism which is such an engine of fear and grief in the districts. That audit of the machinery of deprivation and terror has no political issue. Everdeen’s over-riding or definitive desire is to be left not alone but private. For the safety of family and friends she fights, for herself not to be a pawn in power-games not of her making, she fights. Hers is a negative political position: it has no positive content except the assumed or normative status of the private itself as the organic expression of human autonomy and dignity. When, in the third volume, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2010), Everdeen agrees to take on the role of the Mockingjay—the symbolic or titular leader of a revolution which here needs such a mass-mediated point of inspiration and unity—the combination of naivety or inexperience, honesty, and stubbornness, which is her signature, results in a quick-fire relay—recognizable now from the other two volumes—from individual confusion to structural centrality, to a merger of her individual resolution and the symbolic role her structural centrality needs to manifest itself publicly. 386

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On hearing that she is being taken to visit one of the Districts in rebellion, Everdeen is all confusion: Now that the flurry of activity leading up to this mission is over, I realize I have no idea what I’m facing on this trip to District 8. In fact, I know very little about the actual state of the war. Or what it would take to win it? Or what would happen if we did. (Collins, Mockingjay 91–92) By the end of the mission, bombs from the Capitol have informed and clarified her position. Her anger is spontaneous as is the address she makes to the cameras trained on her: “I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I’m right here in District 8, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women and children.There will be no survivors … This is what they do! And we must fight back!” I’m moving in toward the camera now, carried forward by my rage. (111) Here the clarity of the antagonism is powerful because it is collectivized, however momentarily. The rebels or the rebellion has no more content than it did previously, but it is enriched and polished, made dynamic and articulate by its fusion with Everdeen’s fury with the Capitol and its figurehead, Coriolanus Snow. The use of class suffering as content for a narrative of exploitation and rebellion is not peculiar to The Hunger Games but can be found much more widely across the sub-genre of dystopian fiction. The narrative form is that of collective exploitation given shape and direction by a figure of rebellion. These are narratives deft at weaving social “background” or the mechanisms of anonymous pain into the moral motive or impetus of individual acts of sacrifice, where the immediate and richest meaning of these acts comes from no extravagant abstractions—democracy, say, or solidarity or equality—but from the local, concrete ties of familial or kin-like networks. In a review of their filmic adaptations, Mark Fisher argued that Collins’s dystopian fictions do indeed force “class and precariousness … into the foreground” (Fisher 27). This is incontrovertible but once so foregrounded they are left there. Fisher’s argument was that texts such as The Hunger Games render not class struggle but what Fisher calls “precariousness” contingent, a political arrangement rather than an ontological basis for the reproduction of inequality. It is worth producing his point here: Precariousness here is not a natural state which the rich are fortunate enough to rise above; on the contrary, precariousness is deliberately imposed on the poor as a means of controlling and subduing them. (Fisher 27) In The Hunger Games, however, work across the twelve districts which, with the Capitol, make up Panem, is divided by landscape, resources, and occupation and is unified by each district’s dispossession. Workers own nothing and get a bare subsistence in turn for the production of everything that makes life in the Capitol such a sequence of sensuous delights. They labor: this is what defines the districts. In District 12, the coalmining district, candlelight is more frequent than electricity, while in the Capitol the lights, the entertainment, and the security cameras are never turned off. This is, in other words, a crudely recognizable recreation of a nineteenth-century working-class model of the relations of labor to the wealth it produces. Factories, fields, mines, and workshops are the constitutive elements of the districts. Leisure, consumption, display, and spectacle are the constitutive elements of the Capitol. There is no equivalent to nineteenth-century capitalism itself 387

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as the state owns all and there is no market, no competition.There is, however, a clear delineation of the dependence of the whole twisted social order not on “the poor” but on the working class.This is important as it ties The Hunger Games’ adherence to filling out the dystopian form to a much earlier manifestation, H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes. The focal character of Wells’s work is an upper-middle-class gentleman of late Victorian London. The form follows his confusion at waking up after a 203-year sleep to find himself owner and hence “Master” of the property of the world. Despite his different social and temporal position, however, the sleeper’s character, saturated with bewilderment, momentary enthusiasms, and revulsions, plays a role homologous with Katniss Everdeen’s. His is the position against which everything first fails to make sense and then is made to make sense. The normative position of the sleeper is the perspective from which the social order of the early twenty-second century is deemed to be both horrendous and archaic: He thought of Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic state. He had already seen enough to realise that the ancient antithesis of luxury, waste, and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty on the other still prevailed. He knew enough of the essential factors of life to understand that correlation. (Wells 64) There is much to differentiate When the Sleeper Wakes from The Hunger Games. Wells loads his fiction with spatializing detail: it is thick with a kaleidoscopic empiricism, bristling with descriptions of perspective, views, buildings, transit systems. The visual configuration of the complexities of the imperial metropolis his sleeper wakes up to is conveyed by what Keith Williams has termed the “visual mobility of Wells’s writing” (Williams 129).There is no equivalent to this profusion of visual detail in The Hunger Games. The interiority of Everdeen is the most proximate in terms of textual attention but even here Collins’s style is sparse and economic: Everdeen frets over some guilt or anxiety; she hesitates between some competing options; events propel her in one direction or the other, and the cycle begins again. In addition to stylistic practice, there is also the geo-political scope of the novels’ respective regimes. The Hunger Games never mentions an outside to Panem or the North America it replaces. Despite the technological sophistication of the Capitol, there is no traffic in either communications or other forms of trade with the invisible external world. In keeping with the globalizing scope of earlier dystopian fictions, and their existence within social orders much more proudly imperial, Wells’s sleeper is “Master” of a World Empire when he awakens, his Victorian investments having grown over the course of the two centuries of speculation to buy the property of the world.Wells’s is a racialized dystopia while Collins allows only the gentlest of echoes of American slavery to enter her text when she places Rue and Thresh, the District 11 tributes from Volume 1, in a district characterized by field-work, barbed wire fences, and more brutal overseers. In When the Sleeper Wakes, Ostrog’s decision to bring the “Black Police” to London, armed mercenaries from French and British colonies deployed to suppress revolts in European cities, seals his “betrayal” for both the sleeper and the “common people” as “White men must be mastered by white men” (Wells 249). Finally,Wells’s novel demonstrates an ease with the collectivization of domesticity which is alien to Collins and the whole tradition of classic Anglo-American dystopian fiction as it developed after Wells. There is no praise in Wells for the communal “crèches” and mechanical wet-nurses of the new world or for the dancing parents and working mothers of the new middle class, but the sleeper’s repugnance is mild and is rebuked by the narrator as a historical “prejudice” (Wells 225–230). What the two novels share, however, is something primary and central to the structure of the sub-genre of classical dystopias. It is the use of class divisions as central to a dystopian social order, and the dissolution of those divisions, their dematerialization, when it comes to the political 388

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c­ hallenges mounted against that order. Class is a foundational division in dystopias; it is causal but itself without cause, its historicity erased in platitudes (“the old quarrel of the common man with his commonness” (Wells 131)) or lost in the fog of erased memories.The class divisions are material only; they receive articulation along an axis of power and powerlessness, an axis which has stability until the brutal equilibrium is challenged by a figure who belongs to neither end but who moves between them. Powerlessness is where labor happens, where labor is on the one hand the productivity of all, and yet on the other hand, is all lack, want, and need.When the sleeper is brought “downward, ever downward, toward the working places” (Wells 239), he is in an arena of factories, workshops, docks, and warehouses populated by a mass of blue-uniformed workers: the men, women, and children of the Labor Department. These workers are described in multitudes or masses or crowds; or in parts: “the pinched faces, the feeble muscles and weary eyes” (238), “nimble fingers brightly lit and moving” (239); the “lips and nostrils a livid white” of metal workers (240); the “vague shadows” gesticulating about the feet of the “multitude of coughing men” (241). Here was the smell of tanning and here the reek of a brewery, and here unprecedented reeks. And everywhere were pillars and cross archings and such massiveness as Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anaemic millions were crushed by its complexity. And everywhere were pale features, lean limbs: disfigurement and degradation. (Wells 242) As masses or multitudes, the working class are a swarm needing focus.This focus is given by a point vertically above them—a physically higher perspective, one occupied by Ostrog, the sleeper, or the news issued by the “babble machines.” Without this catalyzing perspective there would be only motion and shapelessness. Once that perspective is present, the swarm can crystalize into “the pale buff of human faces,” the upturned faces of those yearning for and calling for leadership (Wells 45). As reluctant or hesitant leaders of their respective revolutions, these two protagonists move revolution into focus and into legibility in the dystopia’s terms: that “ancient antithesis” between the laboring poor and the idle rich becomes a moral obscenity, short-circuiting not just capitalism historically but also the opening up of any questions about systemic power, its bases or modes of operation. As involuntary leaders of their respective revolutions, and with no or only a negative political content of their own (the violation of the energizing sense of “fairness”), both Everdeen and the sleeper must become public figures, the eloquent yet empty form which will make their own revolution visible to the masses who are that revolution, and which will make the revolution itself legible for each novel or for the novels’ readers as a moral revolution, a revolution to regain a fairness which is posited as recognizable to readers. Their leadership is their publicity, their reluctant entry into publicness. When Everdeen is dressed and made-up for the cameras, given a “smudged but sexy” look (Collins 79) and the scripted line, “People of Panem, we fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice” (80), she is wooden, unconvincing, “can’t pull it off ” (81). The problem is not the cameras, not publicity itself, but the squeezing out of her authenticity by a painted role: “that, my friends, is how a revolution dies” (81). The same insistence on a publicized authenticity, a public sphere that can deliver the private self, as the core of the symbolic power which is both the premise and the medium for leadership, is at work in When the Sleeper Wakes. In scenes structurally parallel to those in The Hunger Games, the sleeper is sent to “show yourself ” (Wells 91) to the people who need to see “the Master,” need there to be a master publicly, to know they exist at all as people who can revolt. Through the “kinetotel389

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ephotographs,” the sleeper is asked to deliver a scripted sentence: “I have awakened and my heart is with you. That is the sort of thing they want” (Wells 139). It is not until the revolt has turned against the autocratic Ostrog that the sleeper gets to be himself or to speak himself as leader rather than as Ostrog’s tool. In a chapter titled “Graham Speaks his Word,” he moves from confused shyness to eloquence in front of the “unseen multitudes who stared upon him through those grotesque black eyes” (Wells 264). The camera “eyes” of the kinetotelephotographs are no obstacle to his eloquence. This is a form of individuality that can withstand publicity or publicness, that is indeed amplified and enriched rather than being damaged by being so mediated. In that mediation, however, politics is lost. Both novels end, resolving formally without any substantive resolution; that “ancient antithesis” erased rather, by devolving attention to the fate of the leaders as private individuals: a heroic death for the sleeper, and an equally heroic move to settled, monogamous maternity for Everdeen.

Class Formations as the Sedimented Content of a Sub-Genre As I aim to create an argument not about these two fictions but about the sub-genre of dystopia itself and its relationship to class formations, it is necessary to step back a little and to expand on the understanding of “genre” at work here. Dystopias are arguably rich fictions with which to analyze the imbrication of genre and class over historical time, as they are fictions of a peculiarly political type. Where the polyvalent modern forms of oppression and suffering are no strangers to the novel, they are the point of dystopia, a sub-genre which has as its object less the experience of any form of oppression than the designed and systemic nature of that oppression. Dystopias secularize and totalize the world of the novel; they take the political world—the state and/or capital, their apparatuses, resources, limits—and render it as context and protagonist, as medium of life and life’s implacable opponent. It is difficult to conceptualize a genre, however, not to be lured into hypostatizing the complex conjunction of narrative convention and innovation, unfolding in its dialectic of recognizability and novelty over time and space. The danger is at its most vivid when certain texts are taken as “typical,” as representatives, in a movement which risks flattening into a mirror that formal mix of diversity and unity which it was such texts’ job only to illustrate. It is not possible to proceed in a short essay without using some examples, however, so I hope to protect this argument from the lure of exemplarity by offering an understanding of how “genre” is here understood. In “The Writer: Commitment and Alignment” (1980), Raymond Williams probed the layers of meaning which had gathered over time in the antagonistic pairing of commitment and freedom in relation to the writer. He then opened a new and adjacent term “alignment” and worked to unfold the many ways it pre-empted and complicated the putatively stronger senses of “commitment.” He notes “we are in fact aligned long before we realize that we are aligned” (Williams 85). Then Williams pushes down a level deeper: the forms we use to write are themselves aligned and constitute alignments. These precede the writer and her readers: Alignment goes deeper again, into the actual and available forms of writing. When I hear people talk about literature, describing what so-and-so did with that form—how did he handle the short novel?—I often think we should reverse the question and ask, how did the short novel handle him … [T]here is a point where, although [the writer] is holding the pen or tapping the typewriter, what is being written, while not separate from him, is not only him either, and of course this other force is literary form. (Williams 86) 390

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For Williams, the form of the English novel in the nineteenth century, the “most popular form” of that century was not available to the working-class writer “who wanted to write about their working lives” (Williams 86). The classical realist novel could not be picked up and used to narrate lives whose rhythms and cultures, relations to time, and to national and regional space, were at odds with the models of subjectivity, civil society, and private life which governed the alignments of nineteenth-century fiction: The novel with its quite different narrative forms was virtually impenetrable to workingclass writers for three or four generations, and there are still many problems in using the received forms for what is, in the end, very different material. (Williams 86) If we pull the focus down to the moment of the second half of the nineteenth century, that moment when technological and organizational changes in the printing and publishing industries combined with an extension of compulsory schooling to reorder the composition of the reading public—while keeping its form—we can see the development of a recognizable dystopian subgenre as belonging to a moment when the forms of the novel mutated. The work of Wells, among many others, was part of the creation of what Roger Luckhurst terms “a new marketplace” in which writers flourished: often not writing in the stolid tradition of domestic realism but presenting wild, exotic revivals of the older romance form, often in thrilling, headlong prose that abandoned classical rhetorical structures for a more demotic style. (Luckhurst 46) Within this new marketplace coalesced “the structures of genre … in their distinct mass modern forms” (Luckhurst 47).Their mass-mediation, or even the composition of their reading publics, did not determine the mode of address embedded in dystopian fiction at this moment, however. That was a mode of address that continued the positing of a public of private individuals, a public which was posited as so securely in possession of the material and symbolic means of privacy as to be outraged or shocked by any social order which deprived privacy of its priority. As the flip side of this generic commitment, a specifically working-class politics is either erased, not thinkable, or is present as a realized or actual threat to “civilization,” a matter of dystopian origins rather than utopian aspiration. Even if written by working-class writers, the sub-genre’s reliance on a valuation of the private individual as ontologically necessary to both freedom and to right order necessitates that a class politics or a valuing of inter-subjectivity is generically outside the purview of the fiction. The genre or sub-genre of dystopia—part of that larger, historically messy, and internally divided genre later to be known as science fiction—is both caught up in the transformation of the reading public for novels and strives to maintain that public as the object of address, a public made of private individuals. The erasure of privacy, of the material and symbolic apparatus of the self ’s autonomy, has long been recognized as one of the defining anxieties of both the early or “classic” dystopias, and of the later more critically potent variation, the “critical dystopia.” In the former it is the centralized state, the technocratic apparatus of “planning”; in the latter there is typically some play on a newly centralizing yet globalized, symbolically hyper-efficacious, corporate or consumer capitalist regime. In both, however, one of the central indices of the horror of the regime will be the statification or socialization of the family, sexuality, language, and culture. Genres are large and messy things, however, and neither When the Sleeper Wakes nor The Hunger Games neatly fits the definition of either a classical or a critical dystopia. Wells’s novel came in the midst of that first tumultuous wave of modern genre fiction, before generic borders had been 391

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formalized or stabilized as such. It would take the triad of Evgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell to consolidate the recognizability of what later came to be termed the “classic” dystopia. Likewise, Collins’s trilogy belongs to a moment of generic tumult, our own, a moment when dystopian fictions seem both pervasive and yet subject to a type of generic flail, being frequently unrecognizable in terms of the older critical vocabularies as “happy endings” enter the scene on the one hand and the bleakness of post-apocalyptic narratives fuse with dystopian worlds or visions on the other. Nevertheless, the structural parallels already established in the opening section of this essay, between two fictions separated by over a century, are yet historically and politically significant for an understanding of the sub-genre’s alignments with relation to class. They can allow us to open a problem with the theoretical approaches that have proven most productive for the scholarly understanding of the history and political valences of dystopian fiction. The body of thought on the sub-genre of dystopia which is associated with the field of utopian studies is large and complex and full of its own internal contestations. Two areas which are widely accepted, however, will be the key points here. The first is Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of the sub-genre as involving fictions in which: A non-existent society [is] described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse that the society in which that reader lived. (Sargent 9) The second area is the work of Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini on the formal shape of the dystopian narrative, its dependence on the textual creation of a challenge, a counterpoint to the dystopian regime. Distinguishing the types of “social dreaming” which dystopias perform from those characteristic of the literary utopia, Baccolini and Moylan outline the “specific formal strategies” which constitute that difference. The one of interest here involves their argument that the dystopian narrative relies on conflict, a conflict which typically comes from within the social order of the regime to raise a perspective against it. This involves a deeper and more totalising agenda in the dystopian form insofar as the text is built around the construction of the hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance … [A] counter-narrative develops as the dystopian citizen moves from apparent contentment into an experience of alienation and resistance. This structural strategy of narrative and counter-narrative most often plays out by way of the social and anti-social use of language. (Baccolini and Moylan 5) For Moylan and Baccolini the dystopian narrative turns on a conflict generated by the movement of a subject against the dominant social formation.This movement is typically one that requires the conflictual subject to enter a process of “taking control over the means of language, representation, memory and interpellation” (Baccolini and Moylan 6). If we put these two definitions of the formal work of dystopias side by side, we get a sense of the sub-genre as involving a totalizing social order thrown forward in time but recognizable to its contemporaneous interlocutors as worse than their own; the dystopian plot proceeds by way of an internal conflict, pushing the reality of its social order against something which stands antithetically to that order; the counter-narrative involves access to a type of language which is itself hostile to, and may be used to rally hostility to, the structures and self-image of the dystopian regime. I want to add a complicating elaboration: the “recognizability” of the “worse” nature of the dystopian social order is reliant on the values actuated or made textually “real” by the conflict 392

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instantiated by the counter-narrative. That counter-narrative, although typically the property and practice of either a lone character or a plucky few, globalizes itself in its address to a readership which is posited as needing no explanation of its values. To create its own world, in other words, the dystopia must assume a single, evenly distributed society against which its world is, in Sargent’s phrase, “worse”: its mode of address must hence posit readers—a public—for whom those values are embedded in and embodied by their own present. Class divisions, class suffering, so necessary a part of any dystopian world, are yet difficult for the dystopian fiction to handle: its world must be a future one, one which is possible, but exploitative class relations are also and more-so a fundamental part of its present, the novel’s own contemporaneity as much as the contemporaneity of the readers it addresses. For the future world to be posited as “worse” than that present, class divisions must be simultaneously stressed and erased. The final section of this essay will consider two examples from “classic” dystopias, and one from our own moment.

A Language Blind to Class To create its own world, the dystopia must posit a single, evenly distributed society against which its world is, in Sargent’s phrase, “worse.” It is not that dystopias are written by people with something to lose; it is that they must posit readers who have something to lose. As part of their process of world-making, class divisions and exploitation will be utilized to index the horrors of that new world. The divisions may be dramatized as stark and foregrounded thematically—as in The Hunger Games, Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Richard Bachmann’s The Running Man (1982). They may be less visible, class exploitation paling into insignificance beside some greater atrocity—as in the treatment of the Econowives (and “Economen”) and Marthas compared to the forced sexual and gestational labor of the Handmaids in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Or the damage done to laboring bodies may be more dispersed, a pervasive yet backgrounded, grimly “atmospheric,” disdain for life—as in the quasi-aestheticized revulsion occasioned by the ranks of identical, standardized Deltas and Epsilons in Brave New World or the anonymous roiling population of William Gibson’s “Sprawl” in Neuromancer (1984), Marge Piercy’s “Glop” in He, She and It (1991), or the “Pleeblands” in Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003/2009/2013). As part of the dystopian totality, such class divisions are structural; both materially and in terms of meaning, they are central to that totality’s capacity to reproduce itself. In terms of the counternarrative constitutive of the genre, however, the moment of conflict, the division ceases to matter as it ceases to mean. If we agree with Moylan and Baccolini that the conflict is one inaugurated through an appropriation of language, a refusal of the legitimacy of either social coercion or consent as—and once—the subjects of the counter-narrative have encountered or forged a language which enables the socialization and articulation of what may otherwise have remained a profound but illegible personal unease or unhappiness, we still have to wonder why this language is one disinterested in or hostile to class expression and emancipation. Take three examples of the contradictory success of a language directed against the regime— contradictory because that success may also be a failure, as in two of the following examples.These two latter are from classic dystopias. The final example is one from our own moment, a moment in which the sub-genre is mutating in ways which make the terms “classic” and “critical” seem relegated to historical use only. The first is from Brave New World: John Savage, having watched his mother die, is full of grief and rage. Leaving the hospital, he comes across the day-staff queuing up for their soma ration. The “menial staff … consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas.” John Savage is initially viscerally repulsed, looking at the same two faces “[r]epeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors … the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness” (Huxley 165) but gathers himself to address the crowd, to exhort them to choose freedom over soma. 393

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The turn to militancy from an affronted misery is occasioned through his recall of Miranda’s cry from The Tempest, “O brave new world.” The words [s]uddenly … trumpeted a call to arms. “O brave new world!” Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. “O brave new world!” It was a challenge, a command. (Huxley 166) The workers hear no such echoes, however; when addressed by John Savage—“I come to bring you freedom” (Huxley 167)—they riot to regain their soma. Infuriated, John Savage returns to revulsion and what should have been the language of rebellion becomes a battering rebuke: Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are? … I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not. (Huxley 168) Nineteen Eighty-Four is stylistically and politically a different book to Brave New World yet shares with it both the generic centrality of language to the generation and composition of the counternarrative and the inexorable movement towards defeat and closure of the classical dystopia. When Winston Smith writes in his diary “if there is hope … it lies in the proles” (Orwell 80; my ellipses, text’s italics), he literalizes the central paradox of his own dilemma. Hope “must lie in the proles” in “those swarming disregarded masses, 85% of the population” (Orwell 80; text’s italics), as they alone have the strength—in the novel’s terms, the sheer numbers—to take down the Party: “[t]hey needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies” (Orwell 80). The “proles,” “[l]eft to themselves” (Orwell 82), un-surveilled by the telescreens, still in possession of “Oldspeak” (Orwell 61), are “allowed to follow their ancestral code” in all questions of morality: “[t]hey were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free’” (Orwell 83). The “hope” in the proles exists as a phantom hope, incommunicable to the “proles” who are its subject but whose own minds are impenetrable to Smith’s language and to his need for language. The one encounter between Smith and an unnamed man in a pub in the prole district is designed to illustrate the lack of a capacity for “general ideas” in the proles’ use of language, their concentration on details, fragments of a past only-ever personal, one obscured rather than clarified in the telling. The text describes this as a lack of “general ideas” (Orwell 82), a lack performed in the hiatuses, digressions, and dead ends of the old man’s speech. He is over eighty, therefore he is a link with the past but cannot respond to Smith’s urgent need for knowledge of that past: beer, his bladder, or (when momentarily away from the press of the fleshily immediate) only scattered, personalized, memories, remembering “useless things” (Orwell 106). Smith cannot reach the old man, and the old man cannot reach him. Language cannot work for them but must separate them: “[a] sense of hopelessness took hold of Winston.The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbishheap of details” (Orwell 105). Smith’s knowledge of the past—when and if it comes—emerges from Goldstein’s book: he reads it as the reader does, both interpellated into the sphere of its “general ideas,” both addressed as members of a reading public at once as socially particular as linguistically delimited, but also without social limits. The reader of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments (2019), is likewise doubly interpellated, at once a reader of the novel, a member of its public, and a reader of the three “testaments” which constitute the novel: the two transcripts of witness testimonies and the journal of Aunt Lydia. Whereas the accounts of the two “witnesses” are retrospective and are 394

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addressed to an unknown textualized interlocutor, to someone or something which transcribes for a purpose unknown but clearly a benign one, Aunt Lydia’s voice is a first-person voice, distinctively confiding, acting as the stylistic gathering point for a narrative of the past, present, and desired nonfuture of Gilead. The Aunt is a figure familiar from The Handmaid’s Tale but whereas before she was refracted through the eventual transcription of Offred’s narrative, here it is her own voice which flourishes. She is the point or perspective of social as well as temporal mobility as she is both of the regime, coerced into it and thriving within it, and also against the regime, a key nodal-point for the Mayday Network. The Aunt is pointedly “educated.” Reflecting on the suddenness of the political alterations and her own helplessness in the face of those alterations, she reasons thus: There’s been a coup … Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated. (Atwood 111) Aunt Lydia attributes her survival to the toughness and craftiness her origins in pre-Gilead working-class America forced her to acquire if she was to rise to the ranks of “the educated”: unlike her colleagues, she has a position which prioritizes that self-preservation she can “revert to” once Gilead cuts across the landscape of the professional class. Her social position is less important here than her style, however, intricately embedded in the latter as the former may be. Aunt Lydia’s style is as intimate as it is descriptive, as contemplative as it is impersonally narratorial. She pulls the reader close, addressing her directly—“my unknown reader” (Atwood 4)—pausing frequently to reflect on the nature of any possible reader, calling out “[w]ho are you, my reader? And when are you? Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps never” (Atwood 60). Aunt Lydia’s journal is a hidden manuscript tucked into a hollowed-out copy of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, itself concealed in the Aunt’s “private sanctum within the library of Ardua Hall—one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic book-burnings” (Atwood 4). That “inner sanctum” lies “deep in the Forbidden World Literature section” where Lydia keeps both her own “personal selection of proscribed books, off-limits to the lower ranks,” and files full of secrets she names the “secret histories of Gilead” (Atwood 35). She addresses her reader from within this literature-saturated sanctum as she narrates—selfreflexively defends—her own life. What the reader is embraced into is a record—“I record, I record” (Atwood 115); a guide—“[t]hink of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood” (Atwood 141); a history, and a plan for destabilizing Gilead by exposing the secrets of its commanders. The reader is a stranger, a friend “met” on the page (Atwood 141), “somewhat of an obsession—my sole confidant, my only friend” (Atwood 172). But the reader may also not exist, may “never materialise” (Atwood 173), or may be a spy, an enemy, or only a wish: “[y]ou’re only a wish, a possibility, a phantom. Dare I say a hope?” (Atwood 173). Though the reader is hence a shifting thing, amorphously located as “my future reader” (Atwood 317), she is also stylistically concrete, possessed of the same material substratum of language and the same literacy as Aunt Lydia. The performative iteration grounds that “future reader,” that “phantom” and “hope,” in the novel’s own contemporary moment. Whoever the reader will be or is, the reader does understand. Inside Gilead itself, literacy of all types is distributed according to a strict hierarchy and is as equally regulated.The “supplicants” (apprentice aunts) must learn to read and to write in controlled careful ways. Writing is forbidden to all other women and girls, and to men underneath the ranks of the powerful. 395

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Conclusion In 1981 Gary Morson noted that “the novel has been especially hospitable to anti-utopia.” While many scholars now would resist his fusion of dystopian with anti-utopian fiction, his point is a useful one: novels we read as dystopian involve an immanent defense of the novel as a form which cherishes an aesthetic subject, a subject which it thematically frets about losing while simultaneously supposing that subject’s longevity in its own mode of address. Morson’s work suggests that what I will call dystopian fiction, from the late nineteenth century on, has a relationship not to language generally but to a model of language use: an important theme of some anti-utopian novels is their own “novelness”: implicitly answering utopian criticisms of the genre of the novel, a particular work may self-consciously affirm what other novels simply assume, specifically the existence of personality, the complexity of psychology, and the value of aesthetic experience. (Morson 117) When Jameson and Žižek rebuke contemporary dystopias for their monotony, we might consider if that monotony is only visible now.The dystopian fictions of our own day inherit their structures from the sub-genre as it has developed since the late nineteenth century. Throughout the course of that history, with the partial exception of the “critical” dystopias, the division of labor has not itself been dramatized as dystopian.That contemporary levels of class inequalities have rehabilitated some semblance of a class politics may mean that our dystopian fictions no longer answer to political needs, may indeed appear monotonous. There is a suggestion in one recent dystopian text of a different route. The short stories which make up the debut volume of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black (2018), trace some misery deeply eloquent of the socially specific miseries of our own moment. In the title story, “Friday Black,” a shop assistant lives out a dystopian reality: it is his job. The force of the stories in Friday Black is their refusal to seal their horrors in the future, a refusal which includes the telescoping of the dystopia into the realm of work, the place where nobody owns herself, where we are all not free. Stories like these suggest not only that dystopia may be finding ways to accommodate itself to the jagged edges of our own contemporaneity but that in doing so dystopia may find it necessary to abolish its older form: what need has the present of warnings about the future when—as Adjei-Brenyah’s stories insist—our present’s horrors are the past’s way of telling us it is unfinished business.

Works Cited Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame. Friday Black. Riverrun/Hachette, 2019. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale.Virago, 1985. ---. Maddaddam. 2013.Virago, 2014. ---. Oryx and Crake. 2003.Virago, 2009. ---. The Testaments. Chatto and Windus, 2019. ---. The Year of the Flood. 2009.Virago, 2010. Baccolini, Raffaella. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler.” Future Females,The Next Generation, edited by Marleen S. Barr et al., Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. “Introduction. Dystopias and Histories.” Dark Horizons, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Routledge, 2003, pp. 1–12. Bachman, Richard. (Stephen King.) The Running Man. 1982. The Bachman Books, Hachette, 2012. Balasopoulos, Antonis. “Anti-Utopia and Dystopia: Rethinking the Generic Field.” Utopia Project Archive, 2006–2010, edited by Vassilis Vlastaras, Athens School of Fine Arts Publications, 2011. Beaumont, Matthew. Utopia LTD. Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Haymarket, 2006. Claeys, Gregory. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford UP, 2016.

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The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic, 2008. ---. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Scholastic, 2009. ---. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Scholastic, 2010. Donawerth, Jane. “Genre Blending and the Critical Dystopia.” Dark Horizons, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Routledge, 2003. Fisher, Mark. “The Hunger Games, in Time, and Never Let Me Go.” Film Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 4, 2012, pp. 27–33. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. Harper Voyager, 2013. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Trans. Peter Burger. MIT Press, 1991. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. Penguin, 1974. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future:The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.Verso, 2005. ---. “An American Utopia.” An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2016, pp. 1–96. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. Faber, 2011. Luckhurst, Roger.“From Scientific Romance to Science Fiction: 1870–1914.” Science Fiction: A Literary History, edited by Roger Luckhurst, British Library, 2017. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740. 1987. John Hopkins UP, 2002, pp. 1–37. McMillan, Gloria. “The Invisible Friends:The Lost Worlds of H. G.Wells and Henry James.” Extrapolations, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 134–147. Milner, Andrew. “Introduction.” Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia, Peter Lang, 2010. Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. U of Texas P, 1981. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. 1986. Edited by Raffaella Baccolini, Peter Lang, 2014. ---. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press, 2000. Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. 1991. Ballantine, 1992. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–37. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. 1979. Edited by Gerry Canavan, Peter Lang, 2016. ---. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK:The Discourses of Knowledge and Power. Hall, 1983. Wells, H. G. When the Sleeper Wakes. 1899. House of Stratus, 2002. Williams, Keith. “Seeing the Future: Urban Dystopia in Wells and Lang.” European Studies, vol. 23, 2006, pp. 127–145. Williams, Raymond. “Science Fiction.” 1956. Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. Peter Lang, 2010. ---. “The Writer: Commitment and Alignment.” 1980. Resources of Hope, edited by Robin Gale, Verso, 1989, pp. 77–87. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Seeds of Imagination.” An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited by Slavoj Žižek,Verso, 2016, pp. 267–308.

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30 ON CAPITAL AND CLASS WITH BALZAC, JAMES, AND FITZGERALD Erik S. Roraback

What definition and relation to capital and to class open up opportunities for another sociality and social formation? Secondly, in order to renew the world from a perilous and worsening oligarchic inequality, how can another macroeconomic and political era be constituted for an egalitarian reconfiguration of the biosphere and of the social? For this we need first to reconceptualize, repoliticize, and transvalue money and power, i.e., capital and class. In this light, this chapter argues that languages and forms of class and capital mark and suffuse writings by Honoré de Balzac and Henry James, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. These narratives may not convince those holding the whole bag of marbles to give some of those up, but they offer the possibility for critique for the other ninety-nine percent. Indeed, Karl Marx wanted to write a book-length study of Balzac, though he did not live long enough to do so. Not only this, if read in a certain way, our chosen texts are clearing the deck of cards for other alternative visions of what may be possible for an equitable world.To be clear on the structure from the outset, the present analysis will open with a contextual assessment of our trio of writers, then examine texts by Balzac and James, followed by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, before ending with some concluding remarks. Paradoxically, by embedding and identifying with certain class assumptions, oligarchic values, and inequalities, these writers expose the contradictions between the means and relations of production produced by the class dynamic.Thus, our chosen texts may function as provocative springboards for investigations into the environmental effects of the capitalist political economy on the emergent situation of massive extinction driven by the advancement of capital’s profit logic and sociality based on infinite economic growth. Our three chosen writers, through their reflections on society, stood for something new, and they pointed the way to a certain societal shift, which we are now undergoing. Perhaps this is why Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marx, Friedrich Engels,Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Fredric R. Jameson, inter alia, saw Balzac’s writings as revolutionary for their own emancipatory causes, or as trenchant for materialist criticism. Or this may explain why critics such as Julian Markels champion James’s sympathetic “Marxian imagination” with special reference to the worlds that clash and populate The Princess Casamassima. Markels also argues more generally of writers … who keep striving toward a Marxian imagination and the tragic forms of writers like Shakespeare and James who reluctantly reach it. Such multiform tragedy is what Marxism conceivably could lead us to expect: a resistance to its imagination, ingrained in the texture of bourgeois culture and consciousness, which then makes its impact and value all the greater for being so rare. (13) 398

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The principal point thus is not the avowed allegiances or explicit political messages of texts authored by these writers, but of what the reader can do with their artistic worlds as scenes for a co-creative response. This may seem counter-intuitive given the complicity of élite writers with big capital and class, but one function of the artwork is to provide a tabula rasa for rethinking and reconfiguring possible alternative worlds in the light of the construction of encounters between fiction and critical thinking. Our writers are giving, in their texts, valuable signs and signals they were incapable of knowing or controlling. One may find phenomena they did not consciously intend. Those matters are still there, like slavery issues now being found in Jane Austen, who never intended to write about the issue, about which we do not even know how much she knew or cared; this distinction between artistic intentionality and outcome is very helpful, so that you can know the difference between what they knew/advocated for, as against what I theorize from their works. The present interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the conceptual intersections operative between forms of class and capital, especially the monetarist system of capital, structuring the above-indicated works. The discussion will assess Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët and its stamp on James’s Washington Square, which functions as a recalibration of Eugénie Grandet, as well as the late-style James in three novels and a travel work. Although not directly adduced, James’s five critical texts on Balzac also inform the aesthetic and analytic sensibility of the present chapter. The time from 1799 to 1940 (Balzac’s birth to Fitzgerald’s death; James died in 1916) constitutes an historical era of immense changes in France, England, and the USA as geopolitical and financial powers. Those changes inform the general attitude and aesthetic sensibility toward class and capital in our selected texts.To understand capital and class we have to rethink each of them afresh for new forms of conceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual/material knowledge for another social configuration or for what Jacques Rancière would call another “distribution of the sensible” (The Politics of Aesthetics 12). From another perspective, un-capital is a view on capital from the view of the exploited people (as in that which is lost as surplus extracted from labor and basic exchange to be transferred into commodities). Works by Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald clear space for thinking capital and history from the axiomatic angle that history is what gets told by the winners, for they reveal forms of hierarchy that overdetermine what has been rejected, excluded, and expelled. Thus, their writings invite us to tease out layers of class-driven meaning to which they may have been oblivious, and their texts are able to promote conceptual, sensuous/aesthetic, and spiritual thinking about capital and class for a new epoch and for another linkage to the sensible and to the intelligible world. Allan H. Pasco writes, Balzac knew that we can never know the substance of reality. We can only grasp its idea. But in doing so, he showed that it is possible to conceive of the raison d’être of economics, fiat versus “hard” money, the opposition between Paris and the provinces, the reality of love and marriage, art and journalism, creation and imitation, class structure and the dissolution of families. (169) Here the blind, contingent, hard reality of spiritual and conceptual un-capital versus the false fundamentalist ideal of power surfaces, creating the possibility of a wider and richer existence for capital, wherein instead of being passive, expropriative, and predatory, egalitarian forms of emancipatory un-capital as outworkings of the imagination would dynamically contribute to what we all share, to the commons. These conditions occur when our authors decondition and disarticulate our historical capitalist gaze. After the catastrophic and historic takeover of our planet by the religion of capital, we may thus be given a second chance. By mediating forms of disidentification for the reader from this dominant narrative, scenes from Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald make an important contribution to another set of sensibilities. 399

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Balzac’s La Comédie humaine displays a profound interest in and rhetoric articulating forms of capital and their relation to class power. In his avowed political views, Balzac is, for some if not all, psychobiographically complicitous with class domination. However, because his works illuminate the workings of money and power, they enable us to read Balzac against Balzac, for his narrative worlds teach us about a vain and futile, because power- and profit-obsessed, commodity society. Jacques Rancière writes of the world of endless striving for so-called practical success in Balzac: “This waste of energies will be the common moral of Balzac’s Human Comedy” (Aisthesis 52). In this context un-capital, unclass, and unpower surpass limited capitalist human vision, not only abstractly but also about what is concretely feasible.These terms were unavailable to Balzac, who was writing in an earlier period of capitalist development, but for the twenty-first century these progressive terms free up space to rethink a postcapitalist relation to capital, class, and power. Balzac’s portrayal of the historicity of class capitalism pervades the panorama of La Comédie humaine. For example, in Le Cousin Pons (Cousin Pons) Balzac delineates the unwarranted disdain visited upon the amiable if less money-rich Pons by his well-heeled relatives. Or in Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) we witness the furtive machinery of class, capital, and duplicity in the book trade. Histoire des Treize (History of the Thirteen) illumines the workings of society, which revolves around the quest to gain rank and class and so to achieve social capital and power. New forms of egalitarian thinking will promote another macroeconomics that would institute a deinstrumentalized state of more cosmological equilibrium. À la Georges Bataille’s idea of a general economy, unclass power/un capital is handed down from the stars above us in a solar economy, and thus is here always and already. These two terms are an enlarging of the posited conception, function, nature, and organization of class power and capital, which mediate a less class-hardened state of affairs. Money and power as (capital and class) comprise the circle in which Balzac remains trapped, searching for a solution. Moral-ethical power/class and capital are unpower/unclass and un-capital, for they reduce forms of domination and function cooperatively and in a sharing way for the universality of the commons. For James, as Balzac’s transindividuated reader and mentee, the reductiveness of power proved seductive, and for Fitzgerald too, as a disavowed international trans-individuated disciple of James and, by extension, of the cultural unconscious of Balzac. Class power and capital are thus to be thought concretely and transformed in our chosen writers in a terminological shift from capital to un-capital; this is because their delineations of class and capital promote thinking outside convention. In writings of Balzac, as well as Fitzgerald and James, the exchange rate between different forms of capital and class inform inter-human relations, and different vocabularies emerge to open space to rethink and to reconceptualize the concept of capital as un-capital and of class as unclass; or non-capital or non-class, which are synonymous with un-capital and unclass. Unpower, un-capital, and unclass/non-class turn power, capital, and class on their head, so that they become subject to transformational thinking in ways that would serve the democratic, to what we have in common (the commons), and that which is egalitarian. Consequently, the most heinous and vulgar class power and capital may attain something progressive for the world of a global commons. One may see this microscopically in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep), which portrays the brutality of competitive human relations with an inheritance at stake between the brothers Philippe and Joseph in the Bridau family, wherein over against the nefarious acts of Philippe that lead to his demise, the artist Joseph, and so possible instigator of a confluence of egalitarian unpower, un-capital, and unclass (art’s very dedication is cooperative), gains the inheritance of capital. This is not itself a positive thing, but it reveals a condition of possibility for a positive emergent form of capital such as cultural non-capital. Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl also reveal this class dynamic. Adam buys objects including people, and Maggie is in league with this power of capital in order to regain her spouse Prince Amerigo. This scene indirectly links up with the bullying mechanisms and authoritarian twenty-first-century class capitalist society. 400

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The challenge then is to break the posited unity of money and power, and reground the meaning of luxury and wealth for a changing third millennium and world. To develop affect, discernment, and sensibility in this direction is a key adventure in our phenomenal universe. Balzac and James foreshadow this central economic concern. Insofar as James wrote international books, the topical idea of a new internationalism interests us in revising and globalizing an economically ethical affect. Balzac’s narratives also show a concern for gaining capital and achieving class power, revealing foresight in highlighting current ideological values regarding profit logics and the problem of a basic income to redress the contradictions of rentier capitalism.Yet, to change consciousness and the sensibility of a generation would require notions such as non-capital and non-class. This cognitive and affective shift would restore the ideas of money, power, and class to another potential content from what has been obfuscated. Unpower/unclass and un-money as a small “other c” for capital are also mediating agencies of the life of the spirit that is important for the expression of the void. In this context, Žižek considers the concept of materialism as “a position which accepts the ultimate void of reality … there is no ‘substantial reality,’ that the only ‘substance’ of the multiplicity is void” (Žižek and Milbank 97). This attitude represents the paradoxical materialist conception in Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald. A reconfigured new epoch would require egalitarian and materialistic-spiritual unpower, un-capital, and non-class. Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët (1841) illustrates the power of non-power, the capital of non-capital, and the class of non-class in the protagonist Ursule’s somnambulistic capacities, which allow her to recover her lost inheritance and to live in connubial bliss with Savinien, both of whom as we read have suffered in advance their quota of life’s misfortunes. “Theirs is the most wonderful happiness I have ever seen,” the Comtesse de l’Estorade remarked of them recently. Bless therefore those happy children, and feel no jealousy, and look yourselves for an Ursule Mirouët, a young girl brought up by three old men and by the best of mothers: Adversity! (Ursule Mirouët 265–266) As Armine Kotin Mortimer writes, “For Balzac, this combination whereby a spiritual faculty produces a material gain is not in the least contradictory. It is central to the effectiveness of the narrative semiosis of [Ursule Mirouët]” (For Love 154). Here spiritual/material non-capital and non-class prove potent. “The circulation of money,” Mortimer writes, “never secondary or insignificant in Balzac, follows a complex structure analogous to the excessive complexities of the genealogy” (For Love 158). Crucially too, and in consequence of a superficial understanding of materiality, Autochthonous families thus form the bourgeoisie of Nemours, which is endogamous, materialistic, anti-intellectual, and anti-musical. The heirs fail to appreciate Ursule’s piano-playing … They want nothing so much as to demolish Minoret’s exquisite library after his death. In contrast, Minoret’s chosen company explicitly excludes the bourgeoisie and is exogamous, spiritual, intellectual, and musical. A denoeticizing anti-intellectualism here stands tall, which informs today’s lifeworld, not least in places that should be otherwise.This derives from the hyper-reification of knowledge, no less artistic expression, which turn cultural products into forms of property or capital (as opposed to the egalitarian promise of un-capital). Mortimer adds, Ursule’s upbringing reproduces the ideals of the Enlightenment … From the opening pages, after Minoret’s conversion, the mystical and spiritual hold sway in his household, with the support of the priest. In the confrontation between the heirs and Ursule, these many structures of opposition repeatedly place Ursule outside the materialistic pathways by which a succession usually passes. (For Love 158) 401

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Ursule embodies non-capital and so non-class. As for the money/capital stolen from Ursule, Mortimer notes, “When it is at last returned to Ursule, it figures the reward of spirituality and recovery from error” (For Love 166). Accordingly, this narrative illumines unpower and un-money as forms of un-capital and unclass. Or, as Mortimer puts it, “Ursule Mirouët achieves a momentary unity that I can only describe as miraculous: Love and Money allied in perfect harmony. Their disastrous disjunction in so much of La Comédie humaine is here overturned” (“Balzac’s ‘Ursule Mirouët’” 861). In this account, state power, capitalist dogma, and class society are also on some level overcome and overturned, and non-power, non-capital, and non-class activated for a more egalitarian scene. Pasco adds some context: Recent works by Thomas Picketty and Karl Gunnar Persson make well documented arguments that the general economy of the July monarchy had reached a period of very low growth in which individuals had little or no chance of making a personal fortune without inheriting or otherwise stumbling across a substantial sum of funds … While these necessary riches may originate from theft … or from legitimate earnings, as in Eugénie Grandet … most often such funds come from an inheritance. (79) True. However, we are aiming at an anti-imperialist and progressive capital, power, and class, which would favor egalitarianism and forms of progressive non-hegemonic non-capital and non-power for a working notion of a classless society of posited equality. Hence a point of departure for a societal work in progress. James and Balzac reflect on the historical processes that have led to the current situation in this passage on Monsieur Grandet, who exults over his gold in his attic in Eugénie Grandet, it indexes an immense reference to capital … the role of significant objects in these two respective aesthetic universes of James and of Balzac’s work in novel writing anticipate what Mckenzie Wark writes … “The true celebrities of the spectacle are not its subjects but its objects” … As Balzac wrote of Grandet: “There, incarnate in a single man, revealed in the expression of a single face, did there not stand the only god that anyone believes in nowadays—Money, in all its power?” (qtd. in Roraback, Late Capital 356) Here is the foregoing Balzac quote in French: “N’était-ce pas le seuil dieu modern auquel on ait foi, l’Argent dans toute sa puissance, exprimé par une seule physionomie?” (Balzac 1976: f. 1052). Capital emerges as the reified, mystical potentiality of the money divinity. Further quotations are illuminating in a similar way. “Like Grandet, who ‘brooded over her [Eugénie] as if she had been gold’ (214) [Dr] Sloper with real intellectual violence reductively commodifies his daughter” (LCP 79) [that is, Roraback, Late Capital 79] “time and again in the ideological universe of James’s [Washington Square]” (Roraback, “Thinking Materialism” 357). Capital thus here towers up. Moreover, James and Balzac describe what Wark declares is a current necessity, “a different kind of social practice for expressing the encounter of desire and necessity, outside of power as representation and desire as the commodity form” [Wark, qtd. in Roraback,“Thinking Materialism” 359]. Our categories of un-money, un-power and uncruelty inform the logic of these statements. Currently each functions basically outside of the order of representation of the current practical and ideological regime. (359) 402

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Cultivation and nourishment guide the therapeutic conceptions of un-capital and unclass that are also the condition of possibility for capital and class, representing how they are terms with potential to be redefined from poisons to cures (i.e., Plato’s pharmakon as deconstructed in Derrida’s La dissémination/Dissemination and later discussed in Roraback’s Late Capital and in Stiegler’s Dans la disruption/The Age of Disruption, among others). These foregoing new forms of noesis (pathos/empathy as critical and revolutionary?) and categories for other possible pharmacological futures refer to real or good as opposed to bad, mock, and vain power and class. One may also have a non-capital form of class or stature without status, and status with neither class nor stature. The former is possible in a self-possessing non-capital of empathy. Hence it is important not to forget the emotions (Aristotle’s conception of pathos) as therapeutic forms of non-capital that One may adduce more with respect to thinking in the creative space generously offered by our sovereign notions of un-money, un-power and un-cruelty. It is the mediating function of these notions that constitute the true radicality of the atypical choices that many a Henry James protagonist makes at the end of his narratives, witness the forgiving and generous and so cooperative nature of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors or of Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl. (Roraback, “Thinking Materialism” 360) Maggie may too be given a different reading here, as earlier in this essay. One may also include Milly Theale’s sacrificial choice, in The Wings of the Dove, to leave her money to Merton Densher. Consider too the valuation James gives to his travel tome, The American Scene: “I would take my stand on my gathered impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to the stake for them” (1987 ix). From Balzac, James learns of a realist and humanitarian un-capital that would mediate non-class. Additionally, in the works of James and Balzac, consumer class capitalism is a principal struggle. Therefore, the following question: should we follow our obligations in the service of capitalist growth and expansion, or should we embrace the invisible power [and so subterranean revolution] of un-power and the invisible money of un-money? … We need to find the coordinates of the struggle with research in this direction … for a more accurate picture of what money and power truly are. (Roraback, “Thinking Materialism” 363–364) For instance, are money and power not truly just fetish objects invested with symbolic value to maintain a regime of a territory or society? This struggle leads, in texts by Balzac and James, to new views of capital and class. Our active, empathic, and giving imaginations can form a much larger socio-economic and geopolitical vision. When considering the inegalitarian depravities and stupidities of power/capital/class and the subversive egalitarian commons of non-power/non-capital/non-class, we discover new and exciting general and beautiful truths for other languages and forms of capital, including beyond the emancipatory and humane starters of non-class and non-capital. The race for profit asks for a thoughtful rest, so that we can stop and think and enact a new thinking subject. This societal non-power is a power that can alter things. Slavoj Žižek writes of another form of capital, temporality (the power of time): Hegel was the first to outline the contours of a logical temporality … some logical moves (precisely the right ones) can be made only after other (erroneous) moves have been done 403

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… for Hegel, “contradiction” is not opposed to identity, but is its very core … There is time, there is development, precisely because opposites cannot directly coincide. (629) Here we need a logical understanding, as against a merely empirical one, of temporality, wherein mistakes from the past will have been structurally necessary for later corrective decision and action. This period is growth time. In Fitzgeraldian/Gatsbian terms, a revolutionary construction concerns getting back to the beginning and to repeating matters for real and true success. However, Jay and Daisy’s co-return was not radical or true enough, partly because class power proves for him insuperable. Furthermore, Daisy does betray Gatsby for a second time when she refuses to go back to him after giving him hopes that she might do so and therein shows her susceptibility to the desires associated with commoditized class power and to the über commodity of an appealing spouse. As for the modern religion of commodification, consider Gatsby’s monetized words describing his desire for the objectified Daisy Buchanan, “her voice is full of money” (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 120). Reified here are the raw love or desirous feeling, and its adjunct of a human voice that locks Gatsby into the conceptual and linguistic servitude of money. Thereby, financial capitalism ingrains itself into the human voice, making it difficult to shed the skin of the commodity fetishism that lies atop everyday primordial and non-monetary wealth and riches. Here we observe the power of capital in an ironclad class capitalist system of exchange. The mediation of finance capital has become the existential absolute. And this kind of commodification subtends the dominant and élite capitalist class and instrumentalized human relations. Underground criminal activities of bootlegging and the sale of fraudulent bonds underwrite Gatsby’s capitalist successes, whose early mentor is Meyer Wolfsheim, who was also notoriously involved in the corrupt fixing of the 1919 World Series.This approach (what Marx might call the “primitive accumulation” in the end of Capital Volume 1 that produces the originary surplus through brutal and violent means of gaining assets) to gaining capital exposes the tenebrous activities that inform Gatsby’s financial status, which contain no moral-ethical value of non-capital. Gatsby functions in a world that favors and rewards brutality, corruption, and egotistical behavior. That the national pastime, American baseball, links up with Gatsby’s economic success, underscores the complicity of the capitalist sphere with some notorious American incidents. Lois Tyson explains how characters climb the capitalist ladder: George clings to his foundering business, and Myrtle … tries to start one of her own … she “rents” her body to Tom Buchanan, hoping he’ll want someday to “purchase” it by marrying her.They are victims of capitalism because the only way to succeed in a capitalist economy is to succeed in a market, and, as neither George nor Myrtle succeed in the only markets open to them, they are condemned to the “valley of ashes” … one might argue that George and Myrtle are negative stereotypes of a lower-class couple: he’s not very bright; she’s loud, obnoxious, and overtly sexual. (75) This passage captures embedded class stereotypes.Tom also mentions a racist book about the white race going under a flood of blackness. Another problem is the moral agent of the book Nick Carraway’s overly credulous idealization of Gatsby. Nick on Gatsby: We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” (Fitzgerald,TGG 154) 404

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Gatsby was heroic in overcoming obstacles, did his own work, unlike the inheritance vampire set of Tom and Daisy, and this in spite of Gatsby’s oft-problematic behaviors to acquire his capital and so achieve a certain stature.Yet now that Gatsby has reached the peak of his capital he is intensely alone, owing to the atomized and hierarchical social fabric in which he has lived and made his money. Nick’s idealization derives from his complicity with the capitalist fantasy and his projection upon Gatsby of his own desire while simultaneously ignoring the “primitive accumulation” that makes that world possible. As Tyson puts it, Nick “is in collusion with Gatsby’s desire, and his narrative can lead readers into collusion with that desire as well” (77). However astute these points, they elide that Nick does assert Gatsby’s problematic nature when he declaims, “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” (Fitzgerald, TGG 154). This statement may be pure ideology, for what Nick says about his knowledge does not accord with what he does.The mythic and religious devotion to the commodity marks Nick’s descriptions of Gatsby’s parties, as Tyson has shown in adducing a “tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight” as well as “buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold” (Fitzgerald, TGG, qtd. in Tyson 77; Tyson italics). Time and again Fitzgerald captures the magical properties of the commodity form, providing material for thinking about the symbiosis of culture and power; for it is the hypnotic and religious power of the de-individuating commodity form (Marx uses the word “mystical” in Volume 1 of Capital) that reveals itself in one’s concrete social practices that display making-it egotism and the profit motive. Tyson closes with a frontal attack on The Great Gatsby’s disavowed complicities with a depraved capitalist rationality. While The Great Gatsby offers a significant critique of capitalist ideology, it also repackages and markets that ideology anew. This double movement of the text gives the closing line a special irony: if we do “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (189; ch. 9), there is in this novel that which strengthens the back-flow, bearing us ceaselessly back under capitalism’s spell. In the end, Gatsby fails to realize the American dream, but because the novel falls prey to the capitalist ideology it condemns, many readers will continue to invest in it. (78) This reading underscores Nick’s contradictory portrayal. Gatsby is a failed capitalist. The foregoing passage also illuminates art as a sustainer of the status quo big power and property structure. Balzac and James texts function likewise. On the one hand, their writings uphold establishment values, and yet both writers were radical in their critique of class and capital and so allow us to engage in forms of disidentification from the dominant power edifice. Gatsby has considerable energy. Outsized passions. Will. Arguably even a bit of courage. Yet his modus vivendi lacks a moral-ethical sense informed by egalitarian non-class, non-capital, and nonpower. So, his life journey becomes a highway to the consumerist capitalist American nightmare perpetually and egoistically desirous of a kind of self-spectacularization (witness Gatsby vis-à-vis his parties) if not of anti-depressants and much else besides. Undeniable is Gatsby’s loyalty to his morally problematic and corrosive class capitalist values.Therein also lies the individual and collective cultural tragedy. A system that radicalizes and hyperbolizes the social and economic facts of commodification, commodity fetishism, exploitation, and big class/capital indoctrinates him.The result is a shallow and a superficial culture of money wealth that provokes desperate and instrumental behavior. Importantly, for Fitzgerald: the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. (The Crack-Up 58) 405

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The paradoxical structure of truth might teach us the merit of thinking class capitalism even as we think a new egalitarian commons within these coordinates for a profound metamorphosis of the apparatus. Also, we should demand precisely the impossible—to get things happening that would not have happened otherwise for achieving freedom, not around or behind but through the tradition of class capitalism that has been in many ways liberating from prior modes of production. As for The Great Gatsby, one critical gesture would elucidate such a function for the substance of the USA’s dream and experiment in social engineering, one that would tarry over the problem of the spiritual force of rebellious energy once more and the need to define the meaning of our lives and struggles in terms of the commons that we share in today’s terms, if not in those of the eighteenth century when early high capitalism was a more functional force. Capitalism’s current dysfunctional forms help less than they hinder for the imagining and construction of a better world.Where do we stand in the 2020s? Is our future like a moment from quantum physics? These authors are coming from the future; thus, what has true value in Balzac, in James, and in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an unwritten part that is ours to compose. Gatsby belies the American dream of success through the acquisition of wealth because he makes the wrong kind of money. Perhaps only now can we better apprehend The Great Gatsby. Paradoxically clean capital is spent by the children of mobsters. They ride into the world with doors swinging wide open. All the stench is bleached from their inherited wealth. This does not make them more sublime from others, such as Gatsby in the Valley of Ashes or as crooked pushers and thugs. For they too possess the wrong sort of capital. We had to subject ourselves to erroneousness, to failure, and to a categorical mistake (is atonement or greatness capitalist success or something other?) in order to discover the novel. Again we require a logical view of time, as against a simple empirical one, wherein the mistakes of the past will have been necessary for the new possibilities of the present and beyond. It was a structural necessity that things would be so problematic historically, so as somehow to set things right. Gatsby’s decision to adhere to the value ideals of his day must be reversed by understanding and explicating them. This reversal is the meaning of Fitzgerald’s statement adduced above about “the test of a first-rate intelligence” (The Crack-Up 58). Fitzgerald’s novel displays reflexivity in testing tenets of the US institution of private property and of the desire to join the bourgeois class of home-owners, with such mentions as “that incoherent failure of a house” (TGG 188). One conundrum is that Fitzgerald remains ambivalent about both his own and his book’s ideological investments. The power of habitation as a leading index of the American aspiration comes under scrutiny, as does the confused nature of a twenty-first-century situation. Bruccoli makes the relevant point that in The Great Gatsby the word “House appears 95 times” (11). As for Balzac, he was a Royalist who believed in the societal pillars of family and of the Catholic Church. Even so, Balzac was, against his better judgment, a flaming capitalist and as such close to thinking the opening out of a global commons beyond hierarchical and inegalitarian big capital. Under his sartorial capitalist finery, James was a most interesting and provocative thinker on the economic and the political. He remains, as do Balzac and Fitzgerald, with what has still to be brought into existence: unclass and un-capital. For at a disavowed level the text and author both work to create value that produces even more precarious capitalist if not non- or postcapitalist value. In the modern capitalist class struggle therefore The Great Gatsby’s oscillations underscore if not exemplify the contradictions and paradoxes of the American aspiration that now circulates the globe. This attitude accords too to Balzac and James. The semblances and contradictions of capital (that it is in its aggressive accumulation, true authority, and power, et cetera) for Fitzgerald’s imagination have become our own. Fitzgerald lyrically throws light on this vector of big capital and class; allegorically these have become so global that one may argue class capitalist globalization is a form of class-oriented Americanization. Although Jay Gatsby wants some aspirational and inspirational kind of ego ideal, his regressive ego ideal leads to his destruction and ruin. The power of capital corrupts Gatsby, and in spite of his thuggishness, he gains the reader’s sympathy. As Frédéric Lordon writes in a philosophical treatise,“it 406

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is capital that can afford to wait things out” (18), which also applies to how capital outlives Gatsby’s life narrative.Therefore, is Gatsby merely an epiphenomenon? Is his life story about the competitive nature of life under an oligarchic economic class system? Gatsby’s literary magic derives not only from his epiphenomenal status, but also from his clandestine potentialities. His force derives from the sensitive and social fact that he shows what might be possible in our capitalist constellation if we could get our ideological values right. Gatsby’s problem is not one of a certain deficit in the spirit of steadfastness and courage (albeit he is a corrupted figure) but of what to do ideologically with the means of production at one’s disposal. Put simply, he needs a paradigm of a community of radical economic equals. The fetish effect of his love of Daisy, combined with his naïve confidence in the capacity of money to win her back, institutes staged spectacles such as his parties. If one could channel Gatsby’s revolutionary energy, spirit, and commitment in new areas to free humanity, then new standards of equality might be glimpsed if not attained. Like the pharmakon wherein the poison may become the remedy, the toxicity that Gatsby represents could become the curative remedy. The British poet W.H. Auden underlines Fitzgerald’s take on money, which helps to explain the complicity the book and author have with the national if not the global ideology of capital, power, and class: Around the twenties a new romantic attitude had formed in regard to money. Take the case of Scott Fitzgerald. In a naïve way Fitzgerald romanticized money; his wife required it (safer in the long run). But this did not work to Fitzgerald’s advantage as a writer. With all his endowment he should have written a great deal more, good as what he did write was. His feeling—for it was a feeling—about money is curious; he thought it made a man freer; that it made him more interesting. (Griffin 82–83) This constitutes one legacy in the history of capital that indexes how seductive and infectious a general belief can be without people actually believing in it. What precisely is the status of American capitalism in this novel? With Žižek we may hypothesize that “poverty is not just a social fact but a wrong done to one class by another” (35). The Great Gatsby’s excesses of monetary wealth are allegorically part and parcel of the poverty of a fictionalized class capitalist era as well; a corporate model of the social body reveals this causality and phenomenality. Gatsby’s parties display, too, a certain vulgarity and moral-ethical catastrophe. This ties up with the brutalities, injustices, and exploitations committed by ruling-class power within the capitalist system’s egoistic and instrumental logic. Should we impute negative motives to Gatsby that harm his future? Carraway notes for one Gatsby out there, if not for all of them: “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (Fitzgerald, TGG 2). Gatsby communicates something of the poetic, if not of the poet, and of the apocalyptic and messianic.The problem remains the evil nightmare dream to which he fastens himself. Carraway’s words about Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift of hope” (TGG 2) mediate the kind of perpetual self-revolution that capitalism performs on itself by constantly borrowing from the future. In a way, this movement and circulation of capital allegorically display how in late capitalism each older generation steals from the younger one. The same point could be said about Balzac’s and James’s narratives in circulation. As for Gatsby’s fictionalized imaginary of the early 1920s, consider Žižek’s tack on capitalism’s historicity: capitalism was progressive until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it had to be supported in its struggle against premodern forms of life, but with the aggravation of class struggle, capitalism became an obstacle to the further progress of humanity and will have to be overcome. (474) 407

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If true, what are the critical implications for the novel’s cognitions and for thinking today? Paul Michael Levitt incisively argues that Fitzgerald’s book delineates “a bitter class struggle. Tom Buchanan, Daisy Fay, and Jordan Baker constitute the old-monied rich … Gatsby represents new money.” His feminine equivalent is the poor and lower-class Myrtle Wilson … Both were born into poverty and have questionable relatives: Gatsby’s father eats like a hog and used bad grammar; Myrtle’s language marks her as unschooled, and her sister is a prostitute. Both are willing to use immoral means to improve their stations in life, Gatsby through the illicit sale of alcohol, Myrtle through sex. Both have execrable tastes … Both are poseurs. (261) The solid realities of the commodity form remain unexamined for Gatsby. His designer shirts, uncut tomes, luxury home, and his use of linguistic exchange in the spectacle and show of his life embody this. Also evident here is the class conflict between old and new money in modern and postmodern economies of desire. Levitt writes: “Wolfsheim introduces Gatsby to a get-rich-quick scheme, namely criminal capitalism and gangster economics. The classless and even-handed society advertised in handbills inducing immigrants to come to America proves to be a lie. A person ultimately needs ‘gonnegtions’” (260). The American aspiration has become the American descent downhill into darkness. An obscene and egoistic subtext of greed and aggression traverses the novel. Lucidly, Levitt writes, “just beneath the surface of each of the characters is another person, usually one made worse by the worship or acquisition of wealth” (262). Levitt builds on the early Marx of 1844 to aver “it never dawns on him that the more he obtains, the less he keeps of himself. This equation virtually defines Gatsby’s quest; but it also holds throughout his world. Hardly a person escapes whoring” (262).The idea that universal prostitution is the end game of the capitalist show seems an undeniable progression of the system if the emergency break is not put on to halt its forward movement. Adds Levitt: The tragedy of James Gatz is not that he abandoned honest (Horatio Alger, St. Olaf ’s) capitalism for dishonest (Wolfsheim) capitalism, but that he never envisioned an alternative to a class structure in which the rich grow richer, and the poor poorer. (266) Levitt closes thus: neither recklessness nor rapacity killed Gatsby and Myrtle. They were victimized by their pasts. Without old wealth and family ties they were outclassed. Small wonder, then, that Fitzgerald is ruing the loss of an Edenic America and dreaming of a classless one. (266) In reproducing exploitation, Gatsby’s narrative is a travesty, a lie, and a cruel instrument. Gatsby proves hollow in how he makes a commodity spectacle of himself, only to achieve a broken promise. He requires a way of thinking economic and existential experience beyond the stultifying classsuffused capitalist one. His interpreters give Gatsby/Fitzgerald a rich legacy by thinking beyond the class structure possibilities for organizing reality. Even if all looking to the future is not harmful, and is in truth needed if we will survive in a future world, Nick’s melancholic and wistful voice on the last page of The Great Gatsby suggests the gloomy, alienating ability of capital in the human imaginary to deny one’s social symbolic substance and substantial content: 408

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Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (180) In a word, we continue to return to the past, but in an insufficiently radical way for a successful revisiting. This opportunity remains in wait with emancipatory potential. The revolutionary version of the American aspiration in The Great Gatsby is to have another go at the composition of the self in another economy of non-class relations that would minimize these destructive and false power games and setups. The dream of a more rational, just, and free society that honors the call of the cultural riches of an egalitarian humanity would go in this value-oriented direction. Gatsby should retroactively and counterfactually be given by the reader’s response the awareness befitting his courage and energy. His readers may give value and meaning to the economic and social disaster of class exploitation and problematic spectacle values. Capital’s alienating and imperious abusive power merits such a response. Gatsby’s individual social vanities need redressing and correcting. To sustain the glare, his readers may assert themselves in new ways in the labyrinth of reading and thinking today for another shared commons and for another experience of collective social symbolic life substance for common forms of life. A miraculous reversal (such as the aforementioned Balzac story of the eponymous Ursule Mirouët) of the egoistic logic of the capitalistic system would be structurally necessary in a posited community of radical equals. The risk of this happening is not an increase in the development of a capitalist serfdom and a numbing and bruising of sensibility that would make the subject ever more servile, and so a servant, of its egotisms and coarse de-individualizing consumerism (even if consumers are deluded it is anything otherwise). Transformative thinking about class and capital would promote an exacting and active culture of freedom. What could be a finer tip of the hat to The Great Gatsby, which on some level Fitzgerald took as a confrontation with a passé American ideology of capitalism? When that sensual object named Daisy quips to that other sensual object Gatsby, “‘You resemble the advertisement of the man’” (119) it teaches that Gatsby has passed out of his substantial content and into the world of advertising, publicity, and a culture of systemic lies. Is this not where we stand today? What needs reversing to upend the ongoing catastrophe of Gatsby’s literary-cultural relays is to halt class exploitation and vain and useless values. Richard Godden notes relevantly here vis-à-vis Gatsby: “Fashion is always disintegrative; it aims to give us several selves, thereby providing capital with a diversification of markets” (21). Moreover, for the early Jean Baudrillard, “it is a class logic which imposes salvation by objects” (60). Jordan quips to Daisy in Chapter 7, “‘Don’t be morbid … Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall’” (118). If this apothegm is one basic lesson of The Great Gatsby, does the book not always begin again? Like the uncut pages of the books in Gatsby’s library, a new world will issue from the separation of the folios. Everything for the novel’s reader might similarly remain to be written both in word and in deed, in language and in action. Fitzgerald’s novel longs for something beyond American capitalism, even if the novel must go through that logic in order to give birth to something new, because something radically revisited, revitalized, and transformed in the spirit of the pharmakon of writing. In short, Gatsby has class capitalist desire if not some drive on his side, but neither speaks to the reason nor to the moral-ethical of non-class and non-capital. Hence, he remains a tragically stunted figure. In short, Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald all advance insights into the mechanics of class power and the phantasmagoria of forms of capital and power. Their texts furnish scenes in understanding our present history that highlight living in equilibrium with other sensible and intelligible life forms, even as digital technologies and cognitive science have become the new instruments of social engineering.Technologies make microorganisms sensible and thus relevant to art in ways 409

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they could not be under prior regimes and means of production. Literary economics in narratives by our trio of writers as responses to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism serve as affective and conceptual resources for rethinking and regrounding digital twenty-first-century class capitalism. Fitzgerald, James, and Balzac’s work anticipates and underscores the inordinate importance that the economic holds in today’s hierarchical and pseudo-globalized life. The money or economic myth also measures how people want, at whatever cost, a sense of belonging. But the situation is even more retrograde. An unprecedented new political form of authoritarian class capitalism emerges today, even as money cries for its lost relation with power for a distribution of newfangled egalitarianisms and equalities.The loss of our so-called cosmological margin (not center) has led to a centripetal world of big finance and big capital that constitutes a subtending immoral actuality. Freedom from money and power, i.e., capital also means liberation from, including identification with, class power. This is increasingly so in our homogenized and standardized world that exists to serve the interests of financial capital and the metaphysical project of more circulating global capital and consolidated class power. The biblical god has been in major retreat for six centuries now, which has contributed to how oligarchical money rules our financialized social multiverse as a replacement fetish (humans always need, à la Marx’s commodity fetishism, fetishes to charge with social energy and power). We need to rethink finance capital from the bottom up. Class capitalism has become careworn and metastasized as a cancerous ideology because of an incapacity for it to be progressive without commodifying progressivism. Consider what we do not know. Giorgio Agamben alludes in The Fire and the Tale: to books that have not found what Benjamin called the time of their readability; books that were written and published but are—perhaps forever—waiting to be read. I know books that are worth reading but have not been read, or have been read by too few readers—I think all of you could name books of this kind. (79–80) James, Fitzgerald, and Balzac texts fit this description in formulating a new calculus for a possible future-oriented economy of conceptual and egalitarian non-capital forms of capital (simply shared communal wealth) for a society based not on the material exploitation of souls but on sharing and cooperation. Although they cannot be said consciously to intend this, Balzac, James, and Fitzgerald’s work in language informs our contemporary rhetorical situation about inequality, for they anticipate and express with the interpretive reader and critic the egalitarian concepts of non-capital and nonclass, both of which help us approach a new social contract of radical equality for the twenty-first century. Non-capital is posterior to a global capitalist system for a post-capitalist commons. Noncapital is also capital that is anterior to capital when it starts to circulate. So, it is capital when we think about it critically, ethically, morally, and without damaging presuppositions as to its emancipatory potential and bounteous possibilities as a gift to and from the social body of the universalist commons in the service of a coalition toward a non-class world society in the biosphere.

Afterword A first version of the parts on James and on Balzac was delivered as an Invited Speaker on “Languages and Forms of Capital in Balzac and James” on the 13th of April 2018 for a conference on “Balzac et L’Angleterre”/“Balzac and England” at the Maison Française d’Oxford, England, UK, 12–14th of April 2018. Invited by Tim Farrant (Fellow and Reader in French), Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Portions of the material on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were first aired on the 10th of September 2012 as two back-to-back guest lectures on the invitation of Paul Michael Levitt 410

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at the University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA. My grateful thanks to Fredric R. Jameson for his valuable feedback, and to Gianluca Avanzato, to Paul Michael Levitt, to Gloria McMillan, and to Mattius Rischard for their helpful edits.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Fire and the Tale. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford UP, 2017. Balzac, Honoré de. Eugénie Grandet. Translated by Marion Ayton Crawford, Penguin, 1955. ---. Eugénie Grandet. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Gallimard, 1976. Vol. 3 of La Comédie humaine [The Human Comedy]. Gen. ed. Pierre-Georges Castex et al. 12 Vols., 1976–1981. ---. La Comédie Humaine [The Human Comedy]. Gen. ed. Pierre-Georges Castex et al. 12 Vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1976–1981. ---. Ursule Mirouët. Translated by Donald Adamson, Penguin, 1976. Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner, Sage, 1998. Bruccoli, Matthew J.“Introduction.” New Essays on The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Cambridge UP, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. La Dissemination [Dissemination]. Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. 1936. Alma, 2018. ---. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Scribner, 2004. Godden, Richard. Fictions of Capital:The American Novel from James to Mailer. Cambridge UP, 1990/2008. Griffin, Howard. Conversations with Auden. Grey Fox, 1981. James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907. Granville, 1987. ---. Washington Square. 1881. Edited by Brian Lee, Penguin, 1984. Levitt, Paul Michael.“The Great Gatsby and Revolution, in Theme and Style.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 1, no. 17, 2011, pp. 260–266. Lordon, Frédéric. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Translated by Gabriel Ash,Verso, 2014. Markels, Julian. The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature. Monthly Review, 2003. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1992. Mortimer, Armine Kotin. “Balzac’s ‘Ursule Mirouët’: Genealogy and Inheritance.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 92, no. 4, 1997, pp. 851–863. ---. For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism. The Ohio State UP, 2011. Pasco, Allan H.“Balzac, Money and the Pursuit of Power.” The Cambridge Companion to Balzac, edited by Owen Heathcote and Andrew Watts, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 67–80. Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul,Verso, 2013. ---. The Politics of Aesthetics:The Distribution of the Sensible.Translated with an Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek, Continuum, 2004. Roraback, Erik S. The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory. Cambridge Scholars, 2007. ---. “This Is Money & Power; or Thinking Materialism with James & Balzac.” Argent, pouvoir et représentations (Money, Power and Representations). Sous la direction de [Under the direction of] Eliane Elmaleh, Pierre Guerlain, Raphaël Ricaud, Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017, pp. 347–364. Stiegler, Bernard. Dans la Disruption: Comment ne pas Devenir fou? [The Age of Disruption: How not to Go Mad?] Suivi d’un entretien sur le Christianisme [Followed by an interview on Christianity], Alain Jugnon, JeanLuc Nancy et, Bernard Stiegler, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2016. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006. Wark, McKenzie. The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century.Verso, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.Verso, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj and John Milbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by Creston Davis, MIT P, 2009.

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31 DARWINIAN IDEAS AND MARXIAN IDEALISM IN AUSTEN, TWAIN, YEATS, CAMUS, AND ISHIGURO Nancy Ann Watanabe

The revolutionary ideas of major theorists Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Gregor Mendel (1822– 1884), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) harmonize with classic texts by Jane Austen (1775–1817), Mark Twain (1835–1910),William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Albert Camus (1913–1960), and Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954). My chosen texts illuminate our topic of literature and class while deepening our aesthetic judgment and broadening our knowledge of real-world ethical and moral complexity; indeed, these internationally recognized literary artists lead us to a better understanding of what is required to resolve class conflict. My focus on theoretical viewpoints in juxtaposition with literary texts reveals a remarkable pattern that reflects a shared vision, of conflict-and-resolution among socioeconomically constituted classes, held by canonical writers whose origins are rooted in different national, linguistic, historical, and cultural milieus.Theoretical formulations of Darwin, Marx,Veblen, and Freud shed light on the significance of class as a defining feature of human experience. Concomitantly, critical consideration of imaginative literary history in dynamic interplay with class theory is a cutting-edge venture that leads to greater comprehension of intricacies of class phenomena all too often overlooked, taken for granted, or misunderstood. Imagination constitutes a common denominator, forming a nexus at the intersection of literature and theory. Friedrich Engels, in the 1883 Preface to the third German edition of Marx’s Capital, recognizes the role of imagination in shaping the monometallist monetary system that dominates capitalist society in observing that, in 1867, when the first edition was published, “the Reichsmark existed at the time only in the imagination of Soetbeer, who had invented it in the late thirties” (Engels 13; my italics).This scientifically powered capitalist imagination resurfaces, metamorphoses, and gains momentum in imaginative literature. My close reading of texts written by foremost masters of literary art, who foreground class conflict and resolution, reveals compelling portrayals of human character and forcefully delineated universal themes. In an oscillating pattern of progressive development, modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature depicts socially stratified society as a jungle in which survival of the fittest is the ethical norm, yet acts of romantic heroism suggest a moral imperative to adapt to people who belong to a different class. The outstanding contributions of Austen, Twain, Yeats, Camus, and Ishiguro to world literature shed light on perplexing social, economic, and political issues currently being debated around the world. These writers deserve ongoing attention as guardians of multicultural diversity who commemorate the tragi-comedy of world history. This critical essay focuses on the tensions between society and the individual, ranging from medievalism to modernism in the temporal and spatial continuum evoked in Twain’s “back to the 412

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future” portrayal of the Connecticut Yankee’s dream journey into the historic past.Yeats’s futuristic foray into a bioengineering fantasy, which features a superwoman named Attracta presiding over billions of eggs, has much in common with anonymity in marriage and out-of-control proliferation in absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve, 1949), The Lesson (La leçon, 1951), The Chairs (Les chaises, 1952), Rhinoceros (Rhinocéros, 1959), and The King Exits (Le roi se meurt, 1962). Similarly, Ishiguro’s mind-bending story of a migrant dreamer voyaging into an eternal present is reminiscent of surrealistic works by Franz Kafka (1883–1924), including The Judgement (Das Urteil, 1917), The Castle (Das Schloß, 1924), and The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1924). The fluidity and dynamic of interdisciplinary ties between class theory and imaginative literature are shown in the archetype of the butler, a man who bridges the gap between the aristocracy and lower classes. His nemesis is the archetypal overlord, or in popular parlance, “The Boss” (Connecticut Yankee 49–56). An interlocking of class theory promulgated by Darwin and Marx with the realm of imaginative literature is exemplified in works by writers whose post-renaissance cultural ties are with predominantly capitalist nation-states: British Regency novelist Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Scotch-Irish American novelist Twain’s samurai-inspired novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Anglo-Irish poet Yeats’s post-Meiji era dramatic text The Herne’s Egg (1922), Algerian-born French writer Camus’s récit “The Silent Men” (1957), and Japanborn English novelist Ishiguro’s resilient critique of upward mobility in The Remains of the Day (1988). My heterodoxical theoretical approach to literary masterpieces utilizes theoretical concepts of Darwin on the alteration and disappearance of species in On the Origin of Species (1859), Marx on hegemonic power and social alienation in Capital (1867),Veblen on consumerism in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and Freud on sexual drive in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Interplay between literature and class invokes Bakhtinian dialogic imagination, which encompasses polyphony, defined as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of valid voices” (Bakhtin 6). “Polyphony” is the “event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses” (Bakhtin 176), which embraces a coherent, comprehensive pattern that integrates literature with class. Polyphonic imaginative literary intersections uncover the “multi-centeredness, or ‘polyphony’ of human life” and the “sublimity of freed perspectives” (Booth xxii). When studied in tandem, literary art and class theories coalesce, broadening our grasp of the evolution of human society amidst fluctuating cultural values and norms. Like many women novelists of her time, Austen published her work anonymously, and was rarely reviewed. Today, she is universally recognized as a genius; indeed, her extraordinary achievement is still being unveiled. Her landmark novel, Pride and Prejudice, is an excellent example of the way a literary text featuring romantic love and marriages of convenience as a central theme anticipates the theories of not only Darwin, but Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), and Karl Marx, as well. Austen’s 1813 novel of manners is steeped in the nobility’s traditional cultivation of royal bloodlines and widespread preoccupation with economic advancement during the Industrial Revolution, which fomented displacement of the landed gentry by a burgeoning bourgeoisie that achieved economic advancement, beginning in 1712 with Baptist minister Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine, which was patented and produced commercially by Matthew Boulton and James Watt in 1775. Austen shows the importance to the landed gentry of royal blood, inherited wealth, property ownership, and annual income accrued through capital gains, characteristic of upper-class prosperity abetting British and European imperialism during the pre-Victorian Georgian period. Newton’s Principia (1687) heralded the dominance of the imagery and reality of the machine. Pride and Prejudice’s structural design mirrors the mechanization of society in its depiction of two marriage-minded matriarchs: Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Personifying scientifically engendered reason and Marxist dialectical materialism, Mrs. Bennet energizes the story. 413

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Alarmed by patrilineal inheritance laws that divest her of fortune and property upon the death of Mr. Bennet, she races against the clock, working hard to marry her five daughters to men of means. Epitomizing the aristocratic zeal for breeding, wealth, and social position, Lady Catherine opposes the love match of intelligent, independent-minded, and outspoken Elizabeth Bennet, who has no dowry and no royal blood, and Darcy, her nephew, a man of wealth, property, and related by blood to an earl, thus predestined, she thinks, to wed her daughter. Austen’s depictions of Elizabeth, inheritor of her father’s genteel manners and mother’s classless hybrid vigor, and Darcy, whose royal blood is vulnerable to genetic abnormalities through too many consanguineous familial alliances, anticipate Mendelian laws of inheritance. Her proud rejection of his proposal and his judgmental contempt for her unrefined familial background coincide with adaptation as a biological mechanism that governs natural selection. Marx’s economic theory, that capitalism exalts material production and monetary profits to create a lower class of underpaid laborers it exploits, is prefigured in the plight of sixteen-year-old Lydia Bennet, who elopes with Wickham, an army officer who fools Elizabeth until his abduction of Lydia proves to Elizabeth that Darcy was right about Wickham’s unreliability. Austen portrays class as the key factor in marriage, depicting two variants. Both Lydia and Elizabeth achieve upward mobility; however, Lydia’s fairy tale wedding is undermined by sacrilege, while Elizabeth adopts a scientific approach, holding to her requirement that Darcy give factual evidence of his worthiness. Elizabeth weds a man who elevates her class status, yet her love grows with proofs of his moral acuity and altruistic generosity of spirit, reflective of Austen’s devout belief in Anglican caritas, charitable love. During the lifetime of Twain, a world-renowned American southwest humorist, globetrotter, and book author, the desire for material prosperity was at an all-time high, and everybody in the newly forming middle class, whether man, woman, or child, put money and leisure time at the top of their priorities. Twain was no exception; indeed, he depicts the worldwide quest for money and material success in his most popular novels. Twain’s widely read novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1884) satirizes capitalist exploitation of minority labor cohorts, mimicking the way capitalist society exploits the working class. Twain portrays protagonist Tom hoodwinking the other boys in his neighborhood into doing the laborious task of painting the fence around his Aunt Polly’s house. At first, we are amused by his antics; however, we soon realize that he is a caricature of capitalist exploitation of workers. Although he deeply resents the work assignment his aunt gives him, Tom starts to whitewash the fence, whereupon he attracts the attention of his playmates, who are fascinated to see him working, not rousting about as usual. Soon, Tom hits upon a plan. He redoubles his energy, wielding the brush with great gusto to give the impression that he is not working at all; he is just having fun playing. His performance is so credible that his friends eagerly accept his offers to let them paint the fence in exchange for treasured trinkets they have in their pockets. In portraying Tom bargaining with his pals and swinging bona fide business deals, Twain parodies the way capitalists use money to start businesses by following a step-by-step plan to complete a series of transactions: to acquire commodities and hire workers to toil in factories at low wages, exploiting their need to hold jobs in order to have food, shelter, and clothing.Tom makes grandiose gestures of generosity to impress his prospective neighborhood workforce with his magnanimity, but as a miniaturized model of an archetypal capitalist, he wants to create a surplus gain in his own favor so as to increase his profit margins with a view to later being able to invest profits to acquire more commodities, hire more workers, purchase more buildings, and thus increase productivity, facilitate expansion, and ultimately dominate the marketplace as a corporate industrialist. In depicting Tom as a capitalist parody, Twain is mindful of the negative impact of capitalism’s big business practices on laborers who are underpaid and barely able to purchase the essentials of life. The incentive for workers wanting to keep their jobs is their instinct to survive. Influenced by the theory of natural selection endorsed by Darwin, English philosopher, political theorist, and anthropologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), in Principles of Biology (1864), points to “survival of 414

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the fittest” as a key factor in the industrial age when the dour specters of hunger and homelessness haunted laborers, spurring them to subjugate their will to materialist machinations of greedy utilitarian-minded capitalists who reified their subordinates, turning them into commodities exploited for their personal gain, unmindful of the common good. The drive to produce increasing amounts of goods and services parallels a sexually oriented drive to produce more offspring, especially workers to grow businesses into chain stores and corporations. Twain’s depiction of boy protagonists shows the nether side of the industrial age. Tom Sawyer accumulating prized possessions he takes from his friends in exchange for their labor makes fun of the need to supply the capitalist endeavor with successive generations of workers. In America, each new influx of immigrants provided migrant laborers to work in coal, iron, and steel mines, clothing factories, family-owned farms, flour mills, machine manufacturing shops, and food processing plants, all of which represents the proliferation of human population, not for love of family but for capitalism’s love of money. Capitalism’s voracious need for material commodities, buildings, and workers generated an explosive growth in population, which gravitated toward large cities, thus mobilizing developers to build housing, including ghettoes, crowded apartment houses, single-family dwellings, and sumptuous mansions to accommodate the everincreasing masses of peasants, laborers, proletariat, shop keepers, managers, executives, and moguls at the top. All of this industrialized capitalism resulted in urban sprawl, rising crime rates, and more to the point, a vicious cycle in which high productivity leads to a consumer throw-away societal environment where humanism succumbs to materialism, and, as Twain suggests, a consumer culture in which capitalism is determined by supply-and-demand policies and politics. Time and again, Twain underlays his comical situations with social and economic realism that ultimately reveals his unspoken philosophical insight that a capitalist-driven materialistic utilitarian culture, requiring an endless supply in response to demand for throw-away products, leads to a societal mentality of throw-away people. Consumerism as the foundation of capitalism results in disposable products made at the behest of capitalists whose attitude toward workers is that they are disposable, too. Of the numerous nineteenth-century novelists in America, perhaps in the world,Twain is one of the most Marxist-leaning. But capitalism and Marxist ideology are camouflaged, not foregrounded, in his novels. Twain uses homespun themes and magical realism to show, rather than to tell us, his ethical opinion that capitalism destroys humanity and human values in the end. The summum bonum of capitalism is incessant and endless expansionism through imperialism. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is a case in point. In postcolonial America, humans like runaway husband and father Jim, whom Huckleberry Finn wants to help, are slaves to imperialist captains of industry. Tom epitomizes, on a small scale, capitalist bosses who are obsessed with profit, oblivious of workers’ well-being. Tom’s infatuation with Becky Thatcher parodies the way capitalists use balance sheets to show high productivity and sexual desires to propagate. Men and women are reified as they are psychologically consumed and motivated by the desire to produce. They lose control of their materialistic environment. Machines control humans, who are mesmerized by the process of production and consumption. In his posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger (1916),Twain personifies the beastlike power of capitalist ideology to entangle human society in a dehumanizing syndrome that consumes not only the working class but the well-to-do bourgeoisie and exorbitantly rich capitalists. But Connecticut Yankee depicts the transnational bridge of capitalism that unites America with England. It is no coincidence that Marx wrote his treatise Das Kapital while he was living in exile in England. Marx recounts that after the Norman Conquest of 1066, “the English land” was “bestrewn with small peasant properties,” which “excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth” (Capital 789). The foundation of the capitalist mode of production was laid from 1466 to 1510, when “a mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labor market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers” (Capital 789). He mentions Japan as the last nation still living under feudalism, 415

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and he names England and France as his models for exemplifying the rise of capitalism. Indeed, Marx discreetly praises contemporaneous Japan as a last bastion of feudalism: Japan, with its purely feudal organization of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the middle. (Capital 789n.1) Marx observes the imminent end of feudalism and beginning of capitalism in Japan. His phraseology “narrow economical conditions” indicates his awareness of the oppression to which farmers were subjected by the Tokugawa militarist regime and shows his understanding of the socioeconomic circumstances for the Restoration of traditional order under Emperor Meiji the Great on the 3rd of February 1867. Coinciding with Marx’s denigration of capitalism, Twain parodies the capitalist archetype. As Henry B.Wonham aptly states, “One need only recall the dubious salesmanship of Tom Sawyer and Harry Morgan to appreciate that Mark Twain was as deeply invested in the critique of Gilded Age capitalism as he was in the possibility of its limitless extension” (2). Twain chooses for the setting in Tom Sawyer his childhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, which appears in the novel as “St. Petersburg,” providing a clue to his subtextual themes based on Marx’s anti-capitalist ideology vis-à-vis industrialization. In a humorous parody of business entrepreneurship, boy protagonist Tom manipulates neighborhood playmates, who then give him a high productivity rating with Aunt Polly and a high managerial rating in his egotistical self-glorification. Twain develops his depiction of Tom as a caricature of the business manager into full-blown satire.Twain’s Huckleberry Finn shows how antebellum Anglo-American society manipulates a whole race, motivated by a lust for wealth and a desire to dominate, reify, and oppress the land, labor, and the women. The wealthy may be seen to forecast their downfall at the height of prosperity when the high productivity of cash crops coincides with the nadir of immorality, birth of illegitimate children, and other abuses of human rights. Demographically significant, entire communities and populations are spurred by materialist concerns to seal themselves hermetically off from fellow humans, alienating their neighbors. Thus, upward mobility involves trampling on one’s fellows in order to “get ahead.” In the history of the human race, the idea that happenings that take place in the world of factual reality may implicate the redemption of the human race is relatable to our concern with class theory and imaginative literature. The predominant momentum in the masterpieces I discuss in this essay is discursive acceleration forward, into future time. Paradoxically, however, the plots trace a counterclockwise movement, which makes the protagonist gravitate into the recesses of the past. Thus, the primary impulse in the dream Harry Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee, has of landing back in King Arthur’s Court is buttressed by antithetical performances of “miracles” borrowed from the story’s present time. Twain creates dynamic fluidity. Points on his imagined space-time continuum create, not senseless, amoral relativity, but ethical relativity based on incisive knowledge of the good, i.e., decent, upright, virtuous, in the real, or verifiable reality. Marx advocates a classless society, and in doing so, he denounces the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In my critical view, Twain evokes the Marxist Weltanschauung in the atmosphere of fantasy that enshrouds his fictional characters in an aura of absurdity. An imaginative literary artist writing in the realist tradition, he endows this aura of absurdity with concrete, down-to-earth meaning through his deployment of satire, which sculpts a realistic edge to evoke the truths he conveys to readers. Clarence only appears to exemplify Marx’s notion that workers should revolt and overthrow the capitalist oppressor when he disobeys the Boss by controverting the order to inform King Arthur of his intention to blot out the sun on the 21st of July 539 ad, if he and the Boss are thrown into jail. Unknown to the Boss, Clarence edits the text of the message. He advises King 416

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Arthur to execute the mysterious stranger the day before the threatened catastrophe. No harm is done, for the Boss comes to believe that his life is saved by the grace of God. Twain invokes the quality of God’s merciful grace in the confusion of mind caused by the difference between the thought it is the 20th of July and the thought it is July the “twenty-first” and also between the thought of being in the twentieth century and the thought of being in “the sixth century” (39). In this commingling of numerical designations for the day of the month and which century it is, Twain evokes his sense of religious mystery located at the intersection between life and death traversed twice by Christ. Twain depicts another spiritual transcendence of conventional barriers. He uses metonymy, suggesting the whole macro-psychological phenomenon of collective consciousness in his depiction of the discrepancy between the Boss’s message to King Arthur and the message Clarence actually delivers. Although confusion in reportage of the facts on Clarence’s part is bad, because life-threatening to the Boss, the situation is resolved through faith. Instead of punishing Clarence for feckless disobedience, the Boss is left to wonder if he has miscalculated the date and the year until “the monk” tells him the answer. Thus, Twain’s novel transcends categorization as a fantasy and may be classified as a theological novel. Twain’s depiction of the solar eclipse, which actually occurred on the 21st of July 539 ad, is attributed to magic by the royal court, but, in the end, the Boss perceives what he cognitively knew was an event that truly happened as a divinely inspired miracle, because of the context in which he consciously apprehends it. Twain’s novel re-plots, thus recontextualizes, the medieval solar eclipse event, portraying it as an act of God that saves the Boss’s life, exonerates Clarence of blame, restores the Boss’s trust in Clarence, and symbolically redeems mankind, including ordinary bosses in the world of capitalist actuality. Awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature,Yeats, in The Herne’s Egg, parodies biogenetic engineering that produces hybrid vigor that fosters pugilism, while, at the same time foreshadowing in vitro procreation and anticipating twenty-first-century scientific studies. Coinciding with Marx’s assertion that “Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of a negation” (Capital, Bk. I, vol. 1, ch. 32, p. 837), the plot in The Herne’s Egg overrides eugenics.Yeats depicts Corney as a romantic hero, who rescues the damsel-in-distress, Attracta, a Virgin Mary symbol. Yeats exalts religious symbolism over scientific experimentation and bioengineering. The juxtaposition of virtuous Marian theological themes and ancient Celtic folkloric matter in The Herne’s Egg extends Yeats’s vision in “The Second Coming” (1919) of the mystical rebirth of Christ. The final verse, “what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born” metaphorically evokes Christ’s rebirth as a prodigious long-drawnout singularity that invokes a tremendous gestation cycle of great magnitude. Likewise, through the redemptive love of Corney, a Christ figuralization, Attracta, an archetypal woman, achieves greatness of soul as a New Eve. In The Herne’s Egg, Yeats subtly utilizes a theological frame of reference to improve, upgrade, and humanize Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the animal kingdom. Incorporating generic attributes of modern parody with ancient fable,Yeats portrays emblematic characters, intermingling animals and humans.The title character is an airborne prodigy, comparable to Greek sky god Zeus, who, in Yeats’s famous poem “Leda and the Swan” (1924), impregnates Leda in the form of a swan and fathers Helen of Troy and Polydeuces on the night her husband, Spartan King Tyndareus, fathers Clytemnestra and Castor.Yeats bridges a lacuna between myth and religion. Mythological Irish polytheism and theological Christian symbolism suggest parallels between the Great Herne and God, Attracta and the Virgin Mary. The Great Herne’s adversaries are Congal, an emblem of the legendary Irish king of Connacht and Tara, and Aedh, a Prometheus-like trickster who is ruled by his reason and views the world with realistic eyes. Attracta counsels three young women, Agnes, Kate, and Mary, to live like nuns, hence to reserve their sexuality for the marriage bed. The butler figure in The Herne’s Egg is Corney, whose name suggests a self-effacing pastoral priest or monastic monk. Corney is an iconic donkey herder associated with Palm Sunday and Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem: 417

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The great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it. (John 12:12–14) Taking place shortly before the Last Supper, this glorious welcome marks the commencement of Christ’s Passion. Yeats ends The Herne’s Egg with Corney’s moral victory over Congal and his soldiers. Corney resembles Joseph, who wed Mary after she was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. The central action in Yeats’s The Herne’s Egg comprises a sexually charged attack on Attracta amidst a violent battle between Congal and Aedh. The attempted ravaging of Attracta coincides with Congal’s theft of one of the Great Herne’s eggs. Congal bullies Attracta, using savage brutality and aggression to force his way into the hernery. Aedh scoffs at his adversary, arguing that bloodshed only supplies evidence that Congal is a colossal fool. Aedh argues that the eggs Congal purloins do not emanate from the Great Herne, but are only ordinary hens’ eggs. Yeats juxtaposes, interconnects, and crisscrosses a Darwinian-Marxian dominion where, ultimately, the bestiality of Congal challenges the overarching sublimity and wisdom of the Great Herne. Aedh is interposed amidst this Darwinian-Marxian hierarchy, where Congal is a representation of human society and subordinated to the Great Herne, an archetypal commander. Aedh, a timeless symbol of homo sapiens, proves to occupy a superior order of being above Congal, who emblematizes homo erectus. Yeats associates the brute force of Congal with the heartless, pitiless power of a mechanized battlefield with its ruthlessly advancing forces of ignorance incarnate. The structural scheme in The Herne’s Egg emulates an amalgamated Darwinian-Marxian model. Yeats foregrounds a Darwinian taxonomy of animals, with the Great Herne at the top, hens occupying a middle ground, and donkeys holding the lowest status, against Marxian social stratification of humans, with Aedh at the top of the rationally ordered ladder, Congal symbolizing the escalating middle class, and Corney located at the bottom. Somewhat paradoxically, the Great Herne, a pagan fertility god, acquires potency through the mindset of Attracta, his antithetical soul-mate. Attracta withstands the cruel assault staged by Congal and his soldiers, which metaphorically evokes the sacrilege wrought upon the human spirit. As Jesus, the man, is crucified, dead, and buried, yet rises, so, too, Corney mediates between the material realm of Congal and Aedh and the exalted realm of the Great Herne. Darwinian natural selection and survival of the fittest inform The Herne’s Egg, confirming Marx’s theory that capitalism breeds its own ruin. Corney wins the competition for Attracta, signifying successful revolt against materialistic might displayed by Congal and Aedh. Their union exemplifies heterosis, or hybrid vigor, which strengthens descendants through outbreeding. Yeats exalts his Darwinian plot, humanizing it, uplifting natural selection to embrace moral and spiritual values emblematized in his Marxian portrayal of Corney’s heroism.Yeats champions social justice for the poor and downtrodden, yet high-spirited working class. Camus, who won the 1957 Nobel for Literature, defines humanity as isolated individuals who are responsible for making a meaningful life for themselves. The last sentence in The Plague (La Peste, 1947) may also apply to “The Silent Men” (“Les muets”), the third of six short stories in L’exil et le royaume (1957): “What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (Plague 308). The humanist message in “The Silent Men” blends with Marx’s support of the working classes in Capital, which delineates capitalism’s dehumanizing maltreatment of labor. Camus elaborates his theme of working-class solidarity in depicting a day in the life of Yvars, the oldest worker in a cooperage in a French seaside town. A family man who supports his wife, Fernande, and young son,Yvars returns to work after a twenty-day strike that has failed. He pedals his bicycle with his good leg, joining fifteen workers, who resume their jobs under foreman 418

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Ballester’s supervision and the tutelage of factory boss Lassalle, who runs his business in his house, which is “grande et laide,” big and ugly (“Les muets” 68). The firm’s most prized possession is a pair of glistening, well-oiled mechanical saws: “deux grandes scies mécaniques, bien huilées, fortes” (70). Camus foregrounds workers who make planks from white whorled wood: Esposito, Yvars’s partner; Marcou, syndicate delegate; and Saïd, an impoverished Arab. The linear plot pits management, which rejects union demands, against laborers.Yvars is only forty, but both his morale and moral sense are influenced by too much overtime and a painful leg injury. As he pedals to work, each turn of the wheel makes him feel older: “à chaque tour de roue, il lui semblait vieiller” (67).Yvars is a sympathetic protagonist whose advancing age and decrepitude suggest the despair that predominates over the existentialist movement with which Camus is frequently identified by literary historians. Memory fuels the suppressed Marxian rage of Yvars, functioning like a movie reel flashing on the screen of his consciousness a narratologically constructed montage of images. He recalls that Lassalle inherited the family business, “Il avait pris la succession du père” (66), along with his father’s hard-nosed drive. Lassalle triggered the strike, denying workers monetary compensation commensurate with work performed so as to avoid a lower profit margin; indeed, he addressed them pretentiously using the third-person plural: “Les patrons voulaient préserver une marge de bénéfices; le plus simple leur paraissait encore de freiner les salaires, malgré la montée des prix” (65). Tragically echoing Twain’s Tom Sawyer in the fence-painting episode, Lassalle claimed he needed not workers, but contributions: “Quand l’atelier ne travaille pas, je fais des économies” (67). He gave them work out of charity: “il les faisait travailler par charité.” He ended the strike, promising arbitrage, offering recuperation of strike days in supplementary hours: “la promesse d’un arbitrage et d’une récupération des journées de grève par des heures supplémentaires.” Yvars pictures in his mind’s eye the workshop hierarchy. Ballester, the eldest workman, achieved rank through seniority and disapproved of the strike until Esposito told him it served the boss’s interests. As the ranking worker, Ballester watches the men file into the workplace and take their positions. Brimming with desire to cry out in protest, the men feel increasingly oppressed by their own silence: “Eux se taisaient, humiliés de cette entrée de vaincus, furieux de leur propres silence, mais de moins en moins capables de le rompre à mesure qu’il se prolongeait” (69). Paradoxically, the men express their outrage as overworked and underpaid workers, not with vociferous yelling, but with silence. In this brief récit, Camus portrays worker solidarity, drawing an ideological line between Marxist idealism and Leninist revolt, revolution, and violent overthrow. Lassalle summons Marcou and Yvars to his office in an attempt to elicit cooperation. He confesses his discomfiture with the men’s angry resentment but his conciliatory gesture fails. After he has suffered the indignity of Marcou’s bitter refusal to shake hands, he scapegoats Yvars: instead of offering his hand to the lame old man in sweaty gear, he curses him. Camus portrays the ensuing lunch break symbolically, illustrating how food restores humanitarian compassion. Yvars shares his paltry meal with Saïd, who graciously accepts it. Exposito distributes sweetened coffee given him by his grocer, who was moved by the strike’s failure. The afternoon sees the men working together, sawing and hammering to finish a project. Ballester intrudes with a misguided commendation that misfires as a reprimand, which reminds the laborers of management’s “take it or leave it” (“prendre ou laisser”) attitude. The oxymoron of thunderous silence is evoked, once again: “la colère et l’impuissance font parfois si mal qu’on ne peut même pas crier” (75). Esposito, though, kindheartedly taps Ballester on the shoulder in acknowledgment of the spirit, if not the letter, of the foreman’s mini-sermon. Camus utilizes a digression, or flashback, to evoke a quasi-familial relationship that unites the workers.Yvars recalls his son’s wish to be “instituteur,” a teacher (76), and he is grateful that his child, an emblem of subsequent generations, will avoid oppression. Work resumes, until Lassalle suddenly appears, disarrayed and panic-stricken, calling for Dr. Germain to minister to his child, who has fallen ill. The men listen as an ambulance arrives and 419

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then departs. The omnipresent hum of the mechanical saw continues, but ambivalent silence prevails.The men shutdown, shower, and congregate in the vestibule. Lassalle returns, casts his eye over the factory, and then mumbles “Bonsoir,” before disappearing into his residence to mourn the loss of his daughter (79). The story of Yvars ends as it began. Worn out, dejected by the decision to defer demands for better benefits and higher wages, he gazes at the Mediterranean Sea, says to himself it is the fault of Lassalle that his little girl died, and wishes he and Fernande were young again so that they might voyage to the other side of the sea to inhabit the kingdom of new beginnings. This kingdom is Marxian, for Camus characterizes “Marxists and their followers” as “humanists” who believe that “human nature will be formed in the classless society of the future” (Myth 148). Camus observes that Marxists are “religious in nature” because their ideal of a classless society does not have any “definable significance,” but is “the object of a faith and of a new mystification that is no less great than the one that of old based colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of infidels” (Myth 149–50). Strictly speaking, then, Camus is Marxist-leaning, but he is emblazoned in the annals of twentieth-century literature as a proponent of humanism. The Remains of the Day, first published in Tokyo, Japan, in the original Japanese text (Hi no nagori, 1988), and then in English (London and New York, 1989), is a multiple award-winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954, Nagasaki Japan), whose family moved to England when he was five. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1983 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2018. The Swedish Academy awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature to Ishiguro as “a writer who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of the world.” Ishiguro’s portrayal of an itinerant English butler in The Remains of the Day, which symbolically alludes to the glory days of the Tokugawa Shōgunate, subtly connects the Japanese novelist to the Marxist school of thought. In addition to their common bond as expatriated immigrants and naturalized citizens of England, Ishiguro and Marx share ties to Japan. Marx was influenced by the contemporary culture of Japan when he wrote Capital, which was published in 1867, the year that marks dissolution of the 265-year samurai warrior subjugation of Japan during the Tokugawa Shōgunate (1602–1867) and the Restoration of the traditional order of royal succession under the leadership of Meiji the Great (1852–1912). Although Marx conceived his class theory in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, his revisionary model was the classless predominantly agrarian culture of medieval Japanese society, composed of peasant farmers, merchants, artisans, and civil servants. Marx’s critique of capitalism casts in sharp relief the stratification of society into distinct classes that undermined the democratic ideals of freedom and equality for all citizens, whether townspeople or agronomists. Ishiguro’s contemporary novel The Remains of the Day illuminates a theoretical continuum that extends from the twenty-first century to the revolutionary scientific thinking of Darwin, while evoking the fast-fading feudal order in Japan. Marx’s Capital is an elegy and a prediction. “If the foreign trade, forced upon Japan by Europeans, should lead to the substitution of money rents for rents in kind, it will be all up with the exemplary agriculture of the country,” notes Marx, “the narrow economical conditions under which that agriculture is carried on, will be swept away” (Capital 158n.1). Marx forecasts an authoritarianism so extreme as to provoke dread and foreboding at the prospect of Japan’s absolute domination by capitalism. Ishiguro positions The Remains of the Day at an intersection between fantasy and reality. He begins with a Prologue, dated July 1956, written in a fictional English manor house named Darlington Hall. This illusory setting elevates the ensuing story above everyday life and suggests an allegorical structure, including a hidden layer of symbolism that ultimately conveys morally significant meaning. Ishiguro puns on the word “darling” to evoke bourgeois values; indeed, the term “bourgeoisie” traditionally refers exclusively to private property owners. Hence, the name of the mansion is reflective of the owner’s intellectual and emotional attachment to material objects. The Prologue establishes the dichotomous theme of bourgeois utilitarianism and materialistic 420

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desires in conflict with proletariat values, including the work ethic, working-class solidarity, and egalitarianism. For empirical evidence of the validity of his class theory, Marx looked to the agrarian culture of Japan when he wrote Capital. He conceived his class theory in the formative days of the Industrial Revolution, which was his paradigmatic model of the proletariat as a working class subjugated, manipulated, and tyrannized by capitalist oppression. Post-revolutionary Japan under leadership of the Tokugawa Clan denounced imperialism. As James Clavell reveals in his welldocumented Shōgun, the samurai held the top posts, replacing the deposed emperor. Similarly to Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), who executed Catholics in Ireland as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) persecuted converts to Christianity, established at Nagasaki in 1549 by Francis Xavier during the Ashikaga Period (1336–1573). Under Ieyasu, workers pledged fealty to revered fair-minded elite militarists loyal to the shōgun. The Remains of the Day allegorizes Japanese feudal society. Farraday, an American, plays the role of a titled English nobleman who owns land and behaves toward Stevens, the butler, as though he is a daimyō who condescends to engage in chit chat with a mere shopkeeper. Social stratification in feudal Japan placed merchants and shopkeepers in the lowest class below farmers and fishermen, above whom were artisans and echelons of samurai warriors. The shōgun was the military commander-in-chief. The daimyō was a nobleman who pledged fealty to the shōgun and often owned land. Next in line were samurai warriors who were civil officials and tax collectors reporting to the daimyō. The rōnins were samurai warriors who were not answerable to any lord after their daimyō was deceased. Rōnins were free to roam the land much like medieval knights in shining armor or cavaliers during the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Ishiguro portrays Stevens as psychologically torn between maintaining his lower-class status quo and seizing an opportunity for upward mobility. Stevens takes pride in working as an English butler, which surpasses his desire to marry, propagate, and climb the social ladder. Darwin affirms, I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification. (5) Ishiguro deftly intertwines the leisure class theory of American economist and sociologist Veblen with pointed allusions to Darwin’s adaptation and natural selection theories. Stevens is an archetypal worker at an intersection where he is given a choice between serving landed gentry and upward mobility to “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen, IV 49–69). The Theory of the Leisure Class is a “pivotal work” that brings to fruition Veblen’s early essays, which promote “post-Darwinian methods of scientific inquiry” to replace “outmoded views of an unchanging universe with theories capable of deciphering ever-evolving societies and institutions” (Banta vii). As Stevens rejects bourgeois consumerism, identifying with English working-class ethics, Ishiguro evokes Japan transitioning from agrarian egalitarianism to industrialization. The novel begins problematically with protagonist Stevens preoccupied with his decision about how to respond to his employer’s suggestion that he use his vacation time to take a motor trip to the country. Ishiguro embeds metaphorical Darwinian survival of the fittest imagery in the middle of the opening paragraph, which introduces class consciousness in conjunction with appearance and reality. Stevens, the first-person narrator, shows impeccable attention to detail and social niceties typical of a butler. He explains that Farraday informed him of his plans to return to the United States for five weeks between August and September and urges him to take his Ford motor car for a little trip 421

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during his absence. Stevens is worried because he has recently noticed he has developed a troubling tendency to make errors that tarnish his usually impeccable job performance. His humiliation is reminiscent of Kafka’s protagonist Gregor, who is horrified to discover his metamorphosis from man to beetle, which prevents him from going to his office job. In view of Farraday’s offer to pay for gas mileage, Stevens considers taking a week off to visit the former maid, Miss Kenton, who lives in the West Country. He incessantly defers making a decision for financial reasons, this vacillation identifying him with the lower class. He shows class consciousness as he weighs his predilection for thrift against his concern to compensate for the difference between his humble social standing and the luxury car Farraday loaned him. Although Lord Darlington, his benefactor, and some house guests had given Stevens some “splendid suits,” he contemplates purchasing a suit from a merchant, which might be appropriate for his excursion in the country (10). He decides that a lounge suit given to him in 1931 or 1932 by Sir Edward Blair is suitable for in-door wear when he stays in guesthouses. But he feels it to be ill-suited for when he will be seen in public on the open road driving Farraday’s automobile. He settles on a suit given to him by Lord Chalmers during the war, which is a tad too small, but adequate to set the right tone as traveling clothes. He reviews his financial situation, noting with satisfaction that he has enough cash if he decides to buy a new suit. Still, he feels compelled to justify his elaborate planning. He defends himself, making clear that “one never knows when one might be obliged to give out that one is from Darlington Hall, and it is important that one be attired at such times in a manner worthy of one’s position” (11). From the beginning, Stevens addresses the matter of his position as a modest, loyal worker who is employed in an aristocratic household of high repute, which necessitates his keeping watch over his economic and social resources so as to maintain high standards of conduct. Consistent with the traditional practice in many countries of the noble classes identifying by name with the ancestral estates handed down from one generation to the next, Stevens closely identifies with the responsibilities of upholding the manners and mores of Darlington Hall, despite the fact that he is only a staff worker, not an actual member of the family. Indeed, he evinces an even more pronounced sense of duty to uphold the honor of Darlington Hall because his job requires that he report to the person in charge, who is not a landed Englishman, but an American émigré whose rank is above that of Stevens, a native son of England. This is a reversal of the immigrant exploitation theme in Upton Sinclair, whose Zolaesque naturalist novel The Jungle (1906) depicts Lithuanian workers in the Chicago stockyards tormented by an Irish boss whose ethnic group has adapted to, and gained mastery over, the machinery of American politics.With cultural roots in Japan and England, Ishiguro strengthens his portrayal of Stevens locked into the confines of his lower-class status. This hybridity in Ishiguro’s national origins gives rise to an exceptionally persuasive portrayal of Stevens not only as a British butler, but also as a vassal, akin to a Japanese samurai who owes allegiance to his superiors, the daimyō and shōgun. Upper-level samurai were well-educated, and education is another key indicator of Stevens’s hybridized social class. Stevens prudently consults Mrs. Jane Symons’s seven-volume The Wonder of England, a road atlas devoted to detailed mapping of major regions in the British Isles. Stevens indicates his nationality as a citizen of the United Kingdom, identifying as an Englishman by using the first-person possessive plural: “I do not imagine German bombs have altered our countryside so significantly,” he asserts, commending the atlas as viable for post-World War II information (11, my italics). His obvious pride in having the privilege of accessing a benchmark cartographic reference work is in keeping with veneration for tradition in the United Kingdom, including England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Continuing in the same vein, he reveals that his appreciation of the magisterial work is augmented by his having met its author at Darlington Hall. Mrs. Symons was “a frequent visitor to this house before the war” (11). His personal connection to Miss Kenton often led him to consult Volume 3, which describes the “delights of Devon and Cornwall,” including “photographs” and 422

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“artists’ sketches” of the locale to which she had gone when her “married life” commenced in the 1930s (12). His excitement increases as he rediscovers the book’s description of the region’s attractive features and he reflects on the prospects of paying a visit to his former co-worker. Ishiguro depicts a symbiotic relationship between Stevens, a lower-class Englishman, and Farraday, an upper-class American. I interpret this social and economic symbiosis in terms of an elaborate anthropologically driven analogy in which these two gentlemen are figurative fossils embedded in “‘primaeval rock,’” which comprises the history of their respective cultures (Darwin qtd., Brent 156). Ishiguro depicts the emblematic Englishman and American in Darwinian terms as engaged in a struggle for survival as two characters whom Ishiguro portrays as representative social and cultural archetypes. The stakes in Ishiguro’s novel are primarily cultural, yet the novel’s evocation of societal tension parallels risks and dangers that beset the animal kingdom in Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Ishiguro embeds as a salient feature in the novel’s linguistic terrain a consistently truncated allusion to the narrator’s familial name, Stevens, which is in keeping with the occupational epithet, “butler,” indicating his subordination to the economically superior gentleman who holds sway over him. Likewise, the novel restricts all reference to the American owner of Darlington Hall by consistently omitting his Christian name. Readers never know Stevens’s first name; nor are we informed of Farraday’s Christian name. Of the two male protagonists, Stevens dominates the text, for it is through the lens of his consciousness that his story is narrated. Furthermore, Ishiguro incorporates, in the fictive world of the novel, references to actual events in world history. In so doing, he reinforces the novel’s structural design, which furnishes thematic and symbolic scaffolding that implicates class theories. Ishiguro achieves a sophisticated mimetic art, imaginatively creating literary equivalencies for Darwin’s biological concept of species transmutation. Ishiguro tells a story in which the plot subtly incorporates a struggle for survival that pits English cultural values against rival American social and economic mores. Stevens is a subordinate; therefore, he is obliged to adapt to the social environment established by Farraday. Yet, he worries over compromising himself. His diction transparently invokes an atmosphere very similar to Darwin’s natural world. He thinks to himself, “It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt one’s work to take in duties not traditionally within one’s realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether” (7). The occupation of butler has a long history in Western culture. Clearly, Stevens is devoted to maintaining the moral standards of his social standing as a butler and he does not wish to overstep class lines. Nevertheless, Ishiguro’s depiction of Stevens’s relationship with Farraday juxtaposes “to adapt,” evoking Darwinian adaptation to one’s social environment, and “another dimension,” evoking Marx’s theory of domination of the proletariat by capitalist overlords. In agreement with Marx, Ishiguro shows that the consciousness of Stevens is shaped by his social and economic circumstances. Farraday displays dominance by badgering Stevens in “banter,” belittling him to assert his superiority. He condescendingly chides Stevens for wanting to travel to keep an “‘assignation’” with a “‘lady-friend,’” a former employee at Darlington Hall (7). Although Farraday is an “American gentleman,” he makes Stevens feel very “uncomfortable” with his imputation of an unseemly liaison.When Stevens is about to suggest he contact Miss Kenton about returning to her housekeeper position at Darlington Hall, Farraday asserts dominance, like a tiger menacing a frightened wildebeest calf: “Mr. Farraday seized the opportunity to grin broadly at me and say with some deliberation: ‘My, my, Stevens. A lady-friend. And at your age’” (9). Ishiguro’s vignette infuses the narrative with an all but imperceptible jungle-like atmosphere that complements the aristocratic setting.The conversation between the lord of the manor and his butler reveals class consciousness that prevails, motivating Farraday to confront Stevens remorselessly and without compunction. In a show of conscience, Farraday taunts Stevens, threatening to retract his earlier offer to reimburse him for gas mileage to the West Country. In this moment of confrontation, it becomes clear to Stevens that he, 423

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in making himself appear timid and uncertain, instead of brave and confident, provoked Farraday, much like how fearful cowering prompts a bear to make a frontal attack. Aware of how his underling status makes him vulnerable to bullying by his employer, Stevens is reminded of his initial encounter with his new employer’s practice of attributing sexual motives to Stevens in a way that in twenty-first-century America is an illegal form of misconduct, namely sexual harassment. Ishiguro depicts Farraday, an American expatriate, as the perpetrator of a sophisticated form of sexual harassment. Farraday, a self-avowed misogynist, advises Stevens, during his planned visit, to take the wife of a business associate for a romp in the hay in the horse stable at Mr. Morgan’s farm because, jokes Farraday, “‘She may be just your type’” (8). Stevens tries to rationalize away his shock; he displays his status as a narrator whose naïveté may be traced to his insular life as a properly raised Englishman. He concludes magnanimously that Farraday is not blameworthy despite his bizarre misconduct. Stevens believes that he may be guilty of “some form of negligence,” he thinks, for failing to “provide good professional service” (8). Ishiguro portrays Stevens accommodating Farraday’s national origins. He respects Farraday as the landlord, concluding simply that a transatlantic cultural divide separates them. He recalls Sir Reginald Mauvis’s valet, Mr. Rayne, remarking that “a New York taxi driver” spoke to his fares “in a manner which if repeated in London would end in some sort of fracas” with the driver “frogmarched to the nearest police station” (8). Stevens’s cogitations imply awareness of cultural and ethnic discrimination. Ishiguro portrays the nuanced degrees of social distancing that separate Stevens from Farraday; indeed, his narratological art of depicting consciousness of societal stratification evokes the overriding power of class divisions. Ishiguro’s penetrating portrayal of character is Darwinian and Marxian. Stevens falls prey to displays of sociopolitical control brought to bear against him by an unmannered nouveau riche American.Yet, he respects Farraday as his societal superior. Stevens’s formal attire and stilted manner of conduct in social situations contrast sharply to Farraday’s brash and brazen pretentiousness. Nevertheless, Stevens adapts to his detractor’s cultural limitations. Ishiguro depicts Stevens as prey, Farraday as predator, analogizing the butler and his boss to a deer in the wild as it is being stalked by a mountain lion, wolf, coyote, bear, bobcat, dog, or alligator. Ishiguro shows how Stevens adapts to his dilemma intelligently, cultivating his discernment of cultural differences between Englishman and American. In the end, Stevens chooses to assert loyalty to his English forebears. As a chameleon changes color to merge with its natural environment to fend off predators, Stevens merges with Darlington Hall, emulating survival of the fittest. Stevens tolerates cultural barriers that alienate him from Farraday because this adaptation enables him to maintain guardianship of Darlington Hall and preserve English society’s class infrastructure. Stevens, whose anagrammatized name sanctifies the golden mean, personifies the egalitarian moral purpose of a Marxian classless society. Viewed altogether, Austen, Twain, Yeats, Camus, and Ishiguro teach us not to polarize, politicize, and pit an affluent minority against a working-class majority. Their literary works instantiate solidarity through a virtually classless society, based virtuously on their humanistic and humanitarian ideal of a morally and spiritually united society, regardless of a specific individual’s, group’s, or nation’s social, economic, and political affiliations.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Global Classics, 2019. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Banta, Martha. Introduction. The Theory of the Leisure Class. By Thorstein Veblen. Oxford UP, 2007, pp. vii–xxvi. Booth, Wayne C. Introduction. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. U of Minnesota P, 1984, pp. xiii–xxviii. Camus, Albert. “Les muets.” L’exil et le royaume. Gallimard, 1957, pp. 61–80. ———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.Vintage, 1955. ———. The Plague. Translated by Gilbert Stuart. Knopf, 1948. Clavel, James. Shōgun: A Novel of Japan. Dell, 1975.

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Darwinian Ideas and Marxian Idealism Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Routledge, 2003. Engels, Friedrich. 1883  Preface to the Third German Edition. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx.Volume 1. Translated by Ernest Untermann. Andesite P, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. Basic Books, 1962. Holy Bible. New International Version. Biblica, 2019. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day.Vintage, 2010. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Third German Edition translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Frederick Engels. Revised and Amplified According to the Fourth German Edition by Ernest Untermann. Modern Library, 1906. Mendel, Gregor. Experiments in Plant Hybridisation. Harvard UP, 1950. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Sterling, 2006. ———. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Engage Books, 2018. ———. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Washington Square, 1963. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Oxford UP, 2007. Wonham, Henry B. Introduction. Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture. Edited by Henry B. Wonham and Lawrence Howe. U of Alabama P, 2017, pp. 1–15. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays. Edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. Scribner, 2001. ———. “The Second Coming.” The Collected Poems of W. B.Yeats. Macmillan, 1952.

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32 THE “METAHOLON” METHOD FOR CLASS-BASED LITERARY ANALYSIS Agnieszka M. Will

The following essay is thematically situated between the two disciplines of social and literature studies and deals with the application of a social class concept to literary texts. Proceeding from Bourdieu’s definition of social class (106) on the one hand and Mudersbach’s holistic text analysis method HOLONTEX (Erschließung 338–341) on the other hand, the essay develops a universal method for analyzing literature through the lens of social class—the Social Class Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis (short: Social Class MBLA). Both terms, the holon and the metaholon, will be defined below. The method is applied to two current literary texts in Polish prose to show how it works and to make visible how social class is represented in these texts.

A Brief Note on Social Class and Literature Studies Social class, as a concept and term, was long associated with purely economic aspects as in the views of Marx and Weber from the early twentieth century (Baasner and Zens 231). In the late 1970s, the social class concept was significantly extended by Bourdieu who incorporated cultural aspects into it, as Baasner and Zens point out (231), thereby paving the way for new interdisciplinary considerations. For literature studies, Bourdieu’s concepts have been providing since then new viewing angles. But conducting analyses based upon Bourdieu’s unsystematic presentation of his ideas and methods is a challenge (Suderland 337). Furthermore, his sociological concepts have been so far applied directly to literary texts and not firstly merged with methods from literature studies. In comparison to a simple application of concepts from a source discipline to a target discipline, however, a systematic, interdisciplinary adaptation of concepts and methods—in the sense of a fusion—can be expected to result in a method producing higher quality results due to its higher conformity with the target discipline’s needs. More importantly, it would enhance the target discipline’s methodological instruments. Starting from this view point the article aims at developing a method for analyzing literary texts on the issue of social class. In order to make the method operationally concrete, it uses HOLONTEX, the holistic text analysis method by Mudersbach, which is a step-by-step approach for analyzing texts, including literary texts, on holons. A holon is by definition “an abstract structure in the mind of the user” (“Universal Principles” 8). Any larger concept or knowledge system can be a holon, for example “Polish Christmas ­traditions” or “politeness rules in Germany” or “currency systems in Europe.” Also abstract structures can be 426

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holons, for example “happiness” or “mood.” The most important thing about building holons from texts is that they are closely related to these individual texts which display them. So, the construction of holons on the basis of individual texts never results in a never-ending list of categories and sub-categories, but is always restricted to the particular text in which the holon comes up—in contrast to for example frame semantics. Against this background, also social class can be viewed and treated as a holon. Consequently, by applying appropriate analysis methods, namely HOLONTEX, it is possible to show how social class is displayed in a particular text or even in any particular text. This essay, however, goes a step further: I will not simply apply HOLONTEX to show how social class is displayed in texts, but I will first modify HOLONTEX, so that it can be systematically merged with Bourdieu’s ideas on social class. The details of the methodological changes are described in the next two sections. So, in this essay social class is examined in a sense closely related to a holon and uses for its particular social class shape the concept suggested by Bourdieu—due to its culture dimension.

Applying Bourdieu’s Social Class to Literature Studies? In their overview of literary analysis models and methods, Baasener and Zens depict the shifts in focus in the course of time. They show that from around the second half of the twentieth century on, literary analysis became increasingly interested in society and culture. The evolution of critical literature studies (German: Kritische Literaturwissenschaft), which combines critical theory with literature studies (Baasener and Zens 191), and the evolution of the sociology of literature paved the way for Bourdieu’s sociological concepts in literature studies. In his substantial publication, Wolf points out that a systematic approach for analyzing texts based on Bourdieu’s ideas is still missing (43f.). Apart from that, the application of Bourdieu to literary text analysis means to analyze a literary text in the context of its development in that the analysis sheds some light on the external conditions under which the text was written, “Die Struktur des Textes erhellt die ihm erkenntnislogisch vorausgehende Struktur des Feldes” (43). That in turn means that in literary text analyses even if we use Bourdieu’s social class concept, we do not apply his ideas to examine the social class as specifically portrayed in the text. However, looking at the inner world presented in a text and revealing its components and relations would meet the idea of a literary text analysis. Hence, the essay aims to close this methodological gap. This aim will be achieved by fusing the ideas of Bourdieu and Mudersbach.

Systematically Adapting Bourdieu’s Social Class Concept to Literature Analysis Now I would like to briefly explain the theories and methods that I am going to employ. First, I am using Bourdieu’s social class concept. His definition hints on the one hand at features that can be important for identifying a social class, and on the other hand underlines the relation between them as crucial. Bourdieu’s main idea on social class seems to be the relation between its properties. However, Bourdieu does not say a priori what the relation is, but the relationship must be found out for every set of actual constellations. The properties, on the other hand, are at least suggested as given from the beginning. Regarding the basic features of social class, we can expect them to be manifested also in literary texts. On this presupposition it seems possible to use Bourdieu’s features as key words in a list of key words in context, which means as a starting point for an analysis of literary texts through the lens of social class. Additionally, we should keep in mind to identify also the “structure of relations” between them, once the properties displayed in the text are collected. 427

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As to the relational structure of the social class features, we would theoretically need to show the structure of the relations between these features, that is to find out what are the major points and what are the sub-points and how they correlate, and then assign to each features-and-structureconstruct a social class. The last step, though, seems less important in a literary text analysis, whose aim rather seems to be to uncover social class features and their relations in a literary text instead of precisely assigning a social class to a particular literary character. The relation between the social class properties could be, in quantitative research, uncovered by correspondence analysis or multiple correspondence analysis (Veenstra 22). For a literary text analysis, though, these methods are for the following reasons not optimal: First and most importantly, because in literary texts the quantity of relations between properties is not necessarily equivalent with their importance. In a literary text, which is the result of a literary process, we can expect that a relation of variables, even a crucial one, is placed in a way that serves the aesthetic aims of the literary text—and is not necessarily repeated, which is important in correspondence analysis. Single relations are also relevant. In addition, when analyzing literary texts, we face the challenge that our data, in this case the social class properties and their relations, might be hidden behind words and stylistic devices. So, in literature analysis already the data collection process usually requires a higher interpretative level than during the analysis of non-literary texts, like surveys. Finally, it is important to note that a qualitative text analysis treats every single text individually. This means canvassing the literary text not only for predefined properties of a concept like social class, but also filtering essential new properties from the text, which might be immanent only in this text, before examining their relation. Only in this way can we uncover the way in which the social class is presented in this text and not only check if and how predefined properties are manifested in it. To sum it up: (1) in a qualitative literary text analysis the quantity of properties and their relations might hint towards their importance, but we have to pay attention also to non-recurring properties and relations, (2) we have to identify properties and relations potentially hidden behind words, and (3) we have to not only retrieve predefined properties, but allow our analysis to filter text-specific properties to substantially reflect the picture, for example of social class, presented in the literary text. These three goals can be achieved with an appropriate method, which I shall outline below. As stated above, for a systematic social class analysis of a literary text, we need a social class concept on the one hand and an analysis method applicable to literary texts on the other hand. Since the social class concept has been already set—we will be using the one by Bourdieu—the task is reduced to choosing an appropriate text analysis method. I have decided on HOLONTEX, which is part of the methodological triad by Mudersbach (Erschließung 326–341) consisting of ASPECTEX, RELATEX, and HOLONTEX. Note that these methods are not digital tools and their capitalization is just part of their proper names. The core value of these methods is their systematic applicability, which moves the results of linguistic and literary analyses away from being purely hermeneutical, in the sense of individual and intuitive, towards more objective. Their step-by-step deduction results also in a higher replicability. To sum up the ideas of Mudersbach, ASPECTEX allows the collection of aspects of an issue contained in the text, for example the portrayal of women, and then systematically the analysis of the text under these aspects. RELATEX aims at displaying the relations between such aspects, and HOLONTEX aims at finding hints for entire knowledge systems that come up in a text and complement these hints to full knowledge systems, the so-called holons, by consulting text-external sources, for example encyclopedias. For the reader’s convenience I would like to briefly explain the original HOLONTEX method and how I am going to adapt it. HOLONTEX consists of four steps (339). First comes the holistic reading of a text, then the listing of holistic systems, after that the second reading of the text, and finally the ranking of the systems. 428

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Having a predefined metaholon, steps 1 and 2 will become obsolete. Instead of identifying the possible holons in a text, we will be simply focusing on the social class as a holon. Hence, also step 4 becomes unnecessary: since we use only one holon, i.e. the social class holon, we do not need any ranking of holons according to their importance. Step 3 in Mudersbach’s HOLONTEX method is the most important one for our purpose. This second reading of the text is designed to compare each holon with the individual text. In our case we will use the predefined social class holon, which I therefore call a metaholon: a knowledge structure formed independently of the individual text on the basis of an overarching definition. By performing this step, according to Mudersbach, we especially try to find out if (1) the text contains any parts of this holon—in our case of the metaholon—or (2) complements it or (3) contradicts it. Ähnlich wie in ASPECTEX wird jetzt aus der Liste der Systeme ein System ausgewählt und an den Text angelegt. Es werden die Texte markiert, die einen bestimmten Systemteil entweder ansprechen und ergänzen oder ihm widersprechen. Dieser Durchlauf wird nacheinander für alle System durchgeführt. Translation: Similar to ASPECTEX, a system is now selected from the list of systems and applied to the text. The texts that either address and complement or contradict a particular system part are marked. This step is performed one after the other for all systems. (Erschließung 339) With reference to the social class metaholon with its Bourdieu prestructure, which will be deduced in the next section, it seems impossible to find contradicting elements; however, I will leave this option open for analysis. For better readability, I am not expounding in this section on the issue of relation that is important for Mudersbach’s holon concept as well as for Bourdieu’s social class concept. I just want to anticipate that this issue will be discussed in the analysis section together with the analysis results in the context of “interaction.” The three Mudersbach methods are fully flexible in terms of content and have no predefined solutions. In other words: in using them there are no restrictions to specific contents before the first reading of the text to be analyzed. This allows for approaching the text open-mindedly and exploring it according to its own principles. The other side of this flexibility is that the methods are not used for analyzing texts on predefined phenomena. However, this is exactly the direction in which the article wants to proceed. Hence, I shall combine Mudersbach’s methods with a predefined concept. By focusing on HOLONTEX, I will show how a literary text can be systematically analyzed through the lens of social class. However, unlike Mudersbach, I am less interested in encyclopedic, text-external knowledge for structuring a textspecific social class holon, but in information that can be directly taken from the text, which means that we move away from Mudersbach’s original idea of a holon as “an abstract structure in the mind of the user” (“Universal Principles” 8) and how to construct it. Both methods, Mudersbach’s and mine, do consult external sources with the difference being that in my approach the consulting comes in the very first place and results in a prestructure that I call metaholon which is a prerequisite for further analysis steps, while in Mudersbach’s approach the consulting part comes in the context of constructing the holon. The new approach does not want to replace HOLONTEX and so it is possible to construct a traditional holon according to Mudersbach complementarily to a metaholon as it is possible to conduct the analysis in two different ways. It would be interesting to compare holons built from the text to holons built encyclopedically. 429

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The value of the methodological fusion presented in this essay is that it will facilitate the analysis of the same phenomenon across various objects with an identical method, which in turn is a prerequisite for comparable results. Also, we will rely primarily (or only) on the text to develop a holon, which will reduce the number of interpretative presuppositions just to the text itself—we can concentrate on the inner logics instead of external options. After these basic considerations, I will now proceed to Bourdieu and his social class concept in order to filter his definitional ideas and use them to predefine a social class holon, that is to build a social class metaholon.

The Social Class Metaholon and How to Apply it Step by Step I am working with Bourdieu’s following thoughts on social class: Social class is not defined by a property (not even the most determinant one, such as the volume and composition of capital) nor by a collection of properties (of sex, age, social origin, ethnic origin—proportion of blacks and whites, for example, or natives and immigrants—income, education level, etc.), nor even by a chain of properties strung out from a fundamental property (position in the relations of production) in a relation of cause and effect, conditioner and conditioned; but by the structure of relations between all the pertinent properties which gives its specific value to each of them and to the effects they exert on practices. (106) As described in the last section, I am using the social class aspects, as stated in the definition above, for structuring the social class. I recognize that Bourdieu stresses that these largely demographic properties, coded in words like “sex” or “age,” are not enough to identify a social class and that the relation between them is crucial. I decided to take this path, because analyzing texts starts with looking at words and only after that relations between them can be identified. In the course of the exemplary analyses, we will see that the relations of characters become visible through the identified properties. The properties mentioned above are: sex, age, social origin, ethnic origin, income, and education level. So, the basic version of the social class—according to Bourdieu’s social class concept and in the visual form of a holon by Mudersbach—is: Social Class Metaholon (basic version) Sex Age Social origin Ethnic origin Income Education level The single properties, like age and sex, can be seen as examples of holemes in Mudersbach’s terminology. I would like to change the structure of these holemes, in order to group them thematically, and make visible that the metaholon structure is supposed to be enlarged or changed during text reading. To do this, I am creating overarching categories and categorizing the current holemes accordingly. Bourdieu’s original properties are highlighted in bold print. Note that this structure is a suggestion and the overarching categories might be set differently.

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Social Class Metaholon (structured version) 1. 2. 3.

Economy-related factors 1a) Income Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex 3d) Age

This “template” can now be applied to any text to check how the individual categories are realized in it—in words, phrases, or even concepts. Additionally, further elements, holemes and subholemes, can be added, according to the text, so that the metaholon is developed further into a textspecific holon—based on text individual features. Concerning the filtered results, we must bear in mind not to mix up the individual text level with the structural level of the final text-specific social class holon. To achieve that we have to abstract the current wording of the text into a category—in the analysis part, I am adding such an abstracted category whenever complementing or contradicting features are identified, i.e. features that do not immediately fit into an abstracted category of the predefined social class metaholon. Methodologically, this can be seen as a separate analysis step.This step is not expressly contained in the original HOLONTEX method, but follows Mudersbach’s considerations on avoiding logical fallacies in describing phenomena, as expressed in the ICS-Principle (Denkfehler 207–214, “Universal Thoughts” 11–13). After filtering the text, we may have to add some organizational steps in order to arrange the results in a well-ordered manner. Also, the practical part of the analysis may reveal how to further break down the analysis steps into finer-grained instructions. But generally, I would like to suggest the following three analysis steps: Step 1: Compare the predefined social class metaholon with the individual text. Try to filter from the text elements that (a) immediately fit into the social class metaholon, (b) complement it, and (c) contradict it. Step 2: Find abstract categories for (b) and (c). Step 3: Construct the text-specific social class holon by incorporating the newly found categories into the predefined metaholon and by deleting those metaholon categories that did not appear in the analyzed text. In step 3 we merge the text-specific results with the predefined metaholon categories and figure out, for the analyzed text, the text-specific social class holon.

Analyzing Two Modern Polish Narratives with the Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis For the text analysis, I chose two thematically connected modern Polish narratives, which are both part of an anthology with the title NieObcy: 21 opowieści, żeby się nie bać. Polscy pisarze dla uchodźców (UnForeign: 21 Narratives to Overcome Fear. Polish Writers for Refugees, my trans.) published in 2015. The overall topics of these narratives are migration and refugees. The ongoing migration process into the EU is politically and socially challenging for member states, including Poland, and resulted in 2015 in the first so-called “migration crisis.” The narratives deal with this current topic, trying to address the population’s fear of refugees. 431

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Text example 1 is the beginning of Droga przez Rurytanię (The Way through Rurytania, my trans.) by Ziemowit Szczerek. I confine the analysis to the beginning of the story to demonstrate how the analysis works. The story takes place in the fictive Eastern European country Rurytania in the present day and describes a wave of refugees heading west. Text example 2 is taken from a narrative entitled Rubież (Borderland, my trans.), written by Olga Tokarczuk, the Literature Nobel Prize Laureate of 2019. Since I exemplify the analysis with the beginning of the narrative, I am adding here, for better understanding of the entire story, the main information on its setting. The story takes place in a future time defined as postrepartition and is set at the Prut, a river that exists and marks the border of today’s Romania and Moldova. After presenting the first text to be analyzed, I perform step 1 and step 2 of the analysis on the selected text passage and present the results in Table 32.1. After that, I perform step 3 of the analysis and present the text-specific social class holon. Then, I discuss the results and introduce the concept of interaction. Following this, I split the collected results among the different acting characters and present them in Table 32.2. In the following discussion I uncover the interaction between the characters in Droga przez Rurytanię and demonstrate to which social class properties it is related. After this, I present the second text to be analyzed, perform step 1 and step 2 of the analysis on it, and present the results in Table 32.3. After that, I perform step 3 of the analysis and present the text-specific social class holon. Then, I discuss the results and split the already collected results among the different acting characters and present them in Table 32.4. In the following discussion I uncover the interaction between the characters in Rubież and show to which social class properties it is related. In my analyses, I keep the original narrative language and add for the reader’s convenience my English translation of the analyzed parts. I start with the text by Ziemowit Szczerek: W Tovarniku wszyscy mówili tylko o jednym: idą! Uchodźcy idą, prosto na nas! Orbán ich nie wpuścił, to go obchodzą. Tovarnik to była mała pograniczna mieścina i ci biedni prowincjonalni gliniarze nie mieli pojęcia, jak reagować. Nie wiedzieli, co robić, i byli totalnie zestresowani. Tym bardziej że media jeszcze przyjechały. I to od razu te, które wcześniej uważali za przynależne do innego, większego świata. Jakieś BBC, jakieś CNN, no ludzie, litości. Dajcie spokój. Porozstawiali kamery, jupitery powłączali, samochody poparkowały wzdłuż krawędzi drogi. Kręcili się pięknisie z mikrofonami i powtarzali kwestie, które zaraz trzeba będzie powiedzieć do kamery:—Here, in Croatian border town of Tovarnik, the inhabitants, as well the police and the humanitarian activists, expect the big wave of the immigrants, who are heading … Szli przez pola, przez kukurydzę i przez zboże. Serbowie podwozili ich pod granicę, pokazywali polną drogę: – Chorwacja tam – mówili. – Idźcie. (184–185) Translation: In Tovarnik, everyone was talking about only one thing: they’re coming! The refugees are coming, straight at us! Orbán didn’t let them in, so they go around him. Tovarnik was a poor little border town and those poor provincial cops had no idea how to react. They didn’t know what to do, and they were totally stressed out. Especially since the media also came. And right away the ones they had previously thought belonged to a different, bigger world. Some BBC, some CNN, come on people, have mercy. Let it 432

•• mieścina (poor little town) → financial situation •• pięknisie (handsome, but shallow guys) →outer appearance •• szli (they went) →financial situation •• kamery (cameras), jupitery (spotlights), z mikrofonami (with microphones) →business/wealth symbols •• w Tovarniku (in Tovarnik) →geographical setting •• pograniczna mieścina (poor little border town) →geographical setting •• prowincjolani (provincial) →geographical setting •• przynależne do innego, większego świata (belonging to a different, bigger world) →geographical belonging (of persons) •• Here, in Croatian border town (…) →linguistic belonging •• przez pola, przez kukurydzę, przez zboże (through fields, through corn, through grain) →geographical setting and direction •• pod granicę (to the border) →geographical direction •• Chorwacja tam (Croatia over there) →geographical direction •• pokazywali polną drogę (they showed the field path) →geographical setting

Text Features Fitting into Text Features Complementing the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English the Social Class Metaholon translation, and → the abstracted category) Categories (category number, original wording, and my English translation)

2. Culture-related factors 2a: Serbowie (the Serbs) 2a) Ethnic origin

1. Economy-related factors 1a) Income

Social Class MetaholonCategories

Table 32.1 Results of Steps 1 and 2 of the Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis Carried Out on Droga przez Rurytanię

(Continued)

Text Features Contradicting the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English translation and → the abstracted category)

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433

3. Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex 3d) Age

Social Class MetaholonCategories

•• wszyscy (everybody) →social status •• uchodźcy (refugees) →political status •• gliniarze (cops) →job position •• nie mieli pojęcia (they had no idea) → competence level and action •• nie wiedzieli, co robić (they did not know what to do) •• → competence level and action •• media (…) przyjechały (the media came) •• → social status •• BBC, CNN •• → social status •• podwozili ich (they drove them) •• → competence level and action •• pokazywali polną drogę (they showed the field path) •• → competence level and action •• porozstawiali kamery, jupitery powłączali (they set up their cameras, they turned the spotlights on) •• → competence level and action •• powtarzali kwestie, które zaraz trzeba będzie powiedzieć do kamery (they repeated the phrases they were going to have to speak to the camera in a moment) •• → competence level and action •• wszyscy mówili (everybody was talking) •• → basic action •• nie wpuścił (he did not let in) •• → competence level and action •• idą prosto na nas (they are going directly towards us) •• → basic action •• obchodzą go (they go around him) •• → basic action

Text Features Fitting into Text Features Complementing the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English the Social Class Metaholon translation, and → the abstracted category) Categories (category number, original wording, and my English translation)

Table 32.1 (Continued) Results of Steps 1 and 2 of the Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis Carried Out on Droga przez Rurytanię Text Features Contradicting the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English translation and → the abstracted category)

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“poor little town” (they live there, so are in general poor)

The Local Police

“handsome and shallow guys” (above average looks) “cameras, spotlights, cars, microphones”

The International Media Representatives

2. Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin (of persons) 2b) Geographical •• “Tovarnik” •• “Tovarnik” •• “Tovarnik” setting (of story) •• “poor little border •• “poor little border •• “poor little border town” town” town” •• present in the “provincial” •• “provincial” (strictly •• “provincial” (strictly town (strictly referring to referring to the police, referring to the the police, we can extend we can extend it to the police, we can extend “provincial” to the setting setting in which the it to the setting in of the story) inhabitants of the story which the police of are placed) the story are placed)

1c) Outer appearance 1d) Business/wealth symbols

1. Economy-related factors 1a) Income 1b) Financial situation

Text-Specific Social The Inhabitants of Tovarnik Class Holon Categories

435

“they drove them [to the border]” (so, they are close to Tovarnik)

“the Serbs”

“they drove the refugees” (transportation means)

The Border Neighbors

•• “they [the refugees] are •• going directly towards us [the inhabitants of Tovarnik]” (so they are close to Tovarnik) •• close to the “poor little border town” •• close to the “provincial town” (strictly referring to the police, we can extend “provincial” to the setting of the story) •• “through fields, through corn, through grain” (rural area)

“they went” (cheapest transport reflecting the financial situation)

The Refugees

Table 32.2 Text-Specific Social Class Holon Categories Manifested in the Characters of Droga przez Rurytanię

(Continued)

Orbán

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436

3i) Basic action

•• “they had no idea” •• “they did not know what to do”

3h) Competence level and action

“everybody” (average)

“cops” (authority)

“talking”

“everybody” (average)

3g) Job position

3f) Political status

3. Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex 3d) Age 3e) Social status

“CNN, BBC” (international media representatives) •• “they set up their cameras, they turned the spotlights on” •• “they repeated the phrases they were going to have to speak to the camera in a moment”

“the media, BBC, CNN” (higher than average)

“Here, in Croatian border town” (speak English to a global community)

2e) Linguistic belonging

The International Media Representatives “belonging to a different, bigger world” (not local)

The Local Police

2c) Geographical belonging (of persons) 2d) Geographical direction

Text-Specific Social The Inhabitants of Tovarnik Class Holon Categories

•• “they are going” •• “they are going around him” (i.e. around Orbán)

“refugees” (marginal)

•• “to the border” •• (between two places) •• “towards us” (i.e. towards the inhabitants of Tovarnik)

The Refugees

Table 32.2 (Continued) Text-Specific Social Class Holon Categories Manifested in the Characters of Droga przez Rurytanię

•• “they drove them” (i.e. the refugees) •• “they showed them [the refugees] the field path”

“Croatia over there” (showing towards another country)

The Border Neighbors

•• “did not let in” (the refugees)

Orbán

Agnieszka M. Will

1. Economy-related factors 1a) Income 2. Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin 3. Society-related 3c: wyznaczyłem (I chose) [referring to a male factors speaker] 3a) Educational 3c: będę pisał (I am going level to write) [referring to a 3b) Social origin male speaker] 3c) Sex 3c: ojciec Bazyl (Father 3d) Age Basil) 3d: tego nas uczył ojciec Bazyl (Father Basil taught us) (age and/or knowledge asymmetry) 3d: moja kolej zabawy z dzieciaczkami (my turn to play with the kiddies)

• tego nas uczył ojciec Bazyl (Father Basil taught us) → competence level • będę pisał regularnie (I am going to write regularly) basic action • myśli przychodzą mi, jak chcą, i nie panuję nad nimi w żaden sposób (thoughts come to my head as they want to and I cannot control them in any way) → basic action and competence level (incompetent) • tego nas uszył ojciec Bazyl (Father Basil taught us) [it is unclear at this stage of the story whether “father” refers to a family or religious relation] → social community • moja głowa nie nawykła do myślenia, a palce do pisania (my head is not used to thinking nor are my fingers to writing) → occupation (not intellectual) • gdy ręce mam zajęte barwnikami (when I have both hands busy with pigments) occupation (crafting) • pisadło (writing instrument) [linguistically archaic] → linguistic belonging (in the past) • moja kolej zabawy z dzieciaczkami (my turn to play with the kiddies) → social community (speaker is embedded in it) • chętniej poświęciłbym się temy dobremu zajęciu całkowicie (I would rather fully commit myself to this good occupation) [this refers to playing with the kids] → occupational preferences

→ linguistic belonging (in the past)

• a i głowa najświeższa (and also the mind is freshest) [the combination of “a” and “i” is linguistically slightly archaic]

Social Class Text Features Fitting into Text Features Complementing the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English translation and → MetaholonCategories the Social Class Metaholon the abstracted category) Categories (category number, original wording, and my English translation)

Table 32.3 Results of Step 1 and Step 2 of the Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis Carried Out on Rubież Text Features Contradicting the Social Class Metaholon Categories (original wording, my English translation and → the abstracted category)

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437

Father Basil

Community

Little Kids

1.Economy-related factors 1a) Income 2. Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin (of persons) 3. Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex •• “I chose” (referring to a male speaker) “Father Basil” •• “I am going to write” (referring to a male speaker) 3d) Age “Father Basil taught us” (younger/less experienced than “Father Basil taught “Father Basil taught “my turn to play with Father Basil) us” (older/more us” (younger/less the kiddies” (younger experienced than the experienced than Father than the narrator and community) Basil) community) 3e) Social status •• “and also the mind is freshest” (the combination of 3f) Linguistic belonging “a” and “i” in Polish is linguistically slightly archaic) •• “writing instrument” (in Polish linguistically archaic) 3g) Social community “my turn to play with the kiddies” “Father Basil taught us” “Father Basil taught us” “my turn to play with the kiddies” 3h) Occupation and •• “my head is not used to thinking nor are my fingers occupational to writing” preferences •• “when I have both hands busy with pigments” •• “I would rather fully commit myself to this good occupation” (this refers to playing with the kids) 3i) Competence level “Father Basil taught us” 3j) Basic action •• “I am going to write regularly” •• “thoughts come to my head as they want to and I cannot control them in any way”

Text-Specific Social Class Holon Narrator Categories

Table 32.4 Text-Specific Social Class Holon Categories Manifested in the Characters of Rubież

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be.They put up cameras, turned on the spotlights, cars parked along the edge of the road. There were beautiful guys with microphones and they were repeating things that needed to be said to the camera: Here, in Croatian border town of Tovarnik, the inhabitants, as well the police and the humanitarian activists, expect the big wave of the immigrants, who are heading… They walked through fields, through corn and through grain. The Serbs drove them to the border, showed them the field path: “Croatia over there,” they said. “Go.” Referring to the newly found categories, I would like to stress that they could be set differently. Apart from that, many of my abstractions of particular data, i.e. abstractions of single words or phrases to categories, are only comprehensible in the context of the story, for example why “they went” hints towards a financial situation. When abstracting data to categories for other texts, we must not automatically reuse data-to-category-abstractions already found for another text, because they are likely not to work for the other text. To perform step 3 of the metaholon-based literature analysis, as deduced in the last section, I am now incorporating the newly found categories into the predefined metaholon and deleting those original metaholon categories that did not appear in the text. The new categories are highlighted in bold print, which gives us the following structure of the Text-Specific Social Class Holon for Droga przez Rurytanię 1.

2.

3.

Economy-related factors 1a) Income 1b) Financial situation 1c) Outer appearance 1d) Business/wealth symbols Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin (of persons) 2b) Geographical setting (of story) 2c) Geographical belonging (of persons) 2d) Geographical direction 2e) Linguistic belonging Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex 3d) Age 3e) Social status 3f) Political status 3g) Job position 3h) Competence level and action 3g) Basic action

The results of step 1 and 2 have shown that Bourdieu’s original categories rarely manifest in the text, but that most social class manifestations are related to them and can be seen as complementary. Contradicting categories in turn have not been found in the passage. It lies in the nature of a holon that it can be filled differently for every character. In other words, if we look at person A, his or her job position might differ from that of person B and so on. Consequently, holons offer us a tool, in the sense of a manual method, for comparing systematically diverse entities. If we collect data for more than one character, we can compare their social class 439

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or show how particular social class properties impact interaction between characters. Therefore, a comparison will allow us to show how properties and characters are related to each other. We sustain the “relational” idea of Bourdieu, not primarily in order to assign the social class to an individual, rather to compare two or more individuals or groups in terms of social class properties and the interaction between them. The outcome might also be that we can say whether there is symmetry or asymmetry in the individual aspects between characters and hence if they belong to the same or to different social classes and why. Methodologically, the collected data can be split among different characters from the text that can be individuals or groups. This will help us to identify differences and parallels between the groups and a potential interaction between them. The concept of interaction has the potential to replace the traditional idea of social class in that its restrictive character is dissolved if full interaction is given. Instead of searching for new aspects for identifying and categorizing social class, we can turn our perspective towards the interaction between groups and individuals.The more permeability and fluency we can observe in their interaction, the fewer leftovers of the social class concept are given until we observe full diversity. On the other hand, blocked interaction would hint towards the old structures of social class—if it is observed, we can easily find out, by looking at the text-specific holon, to which aspects it is connected. And most importantly, interaction is a way to operationalize the “relation” between the features of social class that Bourdieu mentions as crucial. We arrive again at the core of his social class idea, newly interpreted for the twenty-first century. Let us turn again towards the first text and check if the analysis can help us to find out more about the interaction between characters and groups. The text-specific social class categories are already set, the data is also collected, so now it remains to identify the individuals and groups.These are the inhabitants of Tovarnik, the local police, the international media representatives, the refugees, the border neighbors, and Orbán. For simplicity, I leave out the narrator, since he does not play an active role in this text passage. The results of the metaholon-based literature analysis split among these acting characters are presented in Table 32.2. Methodologically, we take the newly structured holon, that is the text-specific social class holon, and assign the results of the performed analysis to the acting characters. Where necessary, some minor interpretations might be added, e.g. the deduction of an age difference between two characters if one is described as the father. I am adding small interpretations in Table 32.2 either in brackets or in normal print in contrast to quoted passages. Technically, we can use a matrix and put every category of the text-specific holon in a separate row, create for every single character a column, and fill in the analysis results. Let us now locate the interaction in the story by looking at Table 32.2. The most obvious form of interaction seems to be the one between the border neighbors and the refugees: they drive them towards the border and show them the neighborhood. The interaction seems fluent and directed away from the neighbors, which is in line with the aims of the refugees. The neighbors have transportation means, which the refugees are lacking, so, in terms of social class, we could say that the neighbors are situated above the refugees. Interestingly, the asymmetric ownership of social class properties does not inhibit the interaction between these two groups. On the contrary: the neighbors offer their means to help the lower situated refugees to achieve their aims. On the other end is the interaction between Orbán and the refugees. By not letting them in, he blocked any interaction. The text does not give any information on Orbán and since this essay proceeds from the text and tries to reduce to a minimum the need for and the use of external knowledge for structuring the holon and interpreting the text, it shall suffice here to conclude that Orbán has the power to act this way. The interaction blocked by Orbán, however, does not mean that there is no interaction at all between Orbán and the refugees—they go around him. What happens here is the basic action of going conducted by the refugees. This form of interaction can 440

The “Metaholon” Method for Literary Analysis

be regarded as indirect interaction—the refugees do not interact with Orbán right away, but they also do not fully stop their own actions. They change their original action and react to Orbán’s blockade. They still interact with him, but indirectly and without physical or verbal contact. Indirect interaction also happens between the international media representatives and the refugees in that the media are talking about the refugees to the world, without having any physical or verbal contact with the refugees. Analogously, the inhabitants are talking about the refugees and have no contact with them, so indirect interaction happens here also. If we compare the interaction between the individual groups with their financial and economic status, represented by the corresponding wealth features, we see that the gap between rich and poor is not crucial for interaction. The media for example do not interact with the poor local inhabitants, but they do interact, at least indirectly, with the poor refugees. Their competence, manifested by professional behavior and related gadgets, is in contrast to the lack of competence of the local police who do not know what to do. Coupled with the fact that the police do not interact with the refugees, but the media indirectly do, competence seems to be a prerequisite for interaction. This is also true in the case of the interaction between the neighbors and the refugees. The neighbors know how to drive and they know the neighborhood, both of which are crucial parts of their interaction with the refugees. The interaction between the neighbors and the inhabitants is also characterized by asymmetric ownership, which does not block but enhances the interaction. Coming back to the social class metaholon and the idea of interaction, we can sum up for the first text example: 1. The metaholon-based literature analysis resulted in a text-specific social class holon that includes 11 social class categories that were not mentioned by Bourdieu, but are relevant for the text. 2. The assignment of the text-specific social class categories to the individual characters and groups in the text made the interaction between them visible. It revealed that interaction between characters is connected to competence and asymmetric ownership.

Methodologically, the three goals mentioned in the theory section have been achieved, since the analysis (1) did not focus on repeatedly mentioned properties only, (2) started with looking at words and behind them to collect appropriate data, and (3) did not just retrieve predefined properties, but identified eleven new ones. Let us now turn towards the second text example, taken from a narrative by Olga Tokarczuk: Wyznaczyłem sobie do pisania godziny przedpołudniowe, kiedy słońce wpada wielką, jasną kolumną do mojego pokoju i rozbija się o krawędź stołu w świetlistą plamę na kamiennej podłodze. Wtedy jest najjaśniej, a i głowa najświeższa. Będę pisał regularnie, regularność jest najważniejsza, tego nas uczył ojciec Bazyl. Mówił, że powtarzalność jest prawdziwym mechanizmem świata i całe zło bierze się z zamieszania i chaosu. Ale moja głowa nie nawykła do myślenia, a palce do pisania. Dlatego postaram się ująć to, co mam do powiedzenia, jak najkrócej, zwłaszcza że myśli przychodzą mi, jak chcą, i nie panuję nad nimi w żaden sposób, szczegóły budzą się w mojej pamięci bez ostrzeżenia i składają się w okrągłe zdanie w najmniej odpowiednim momencie, gdy ręce mam zajęte barwnikami i nie mogę sięgnąć po pisadło albo gdy przychodzi moja kolej zabawy z dzieciaczkami, co bardzo lubię i chętniej poświęciłbym się temu dobremu zajęciu całkowicie. (9–10) Translation: I set my writing hours for the forenoon, when the sun comes in as a great, bright column into my room and crashes over the edge of the table in a luminous blur on the stone floor. That is when it is brightest, and my head is freshest, too. I will write regularly, regularity is most important, Father Basil taught us. He said that repetition is the 441

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real mechanism of the world and all evil comes from confusion and chaos. But my head is not used to thinking and my fingers not to writing. That is why I will try to keep what I have to say as short as possible, especially since thoughts come to me as they will and I have no control over them whatsoever, the details awaken in my mind without warning and they form a round sentence at the least opportune moment, when my hands are busy with dyes and I cannot reach for a writing tool, or when it is my turn to play with the kids, which I like very much and would rather devote myself entirely to this good activity. I have performed step 1 and step 2 of the analysis on the selected text and am presenting the results in Table 32.3. Now I am performing, exactly like in the first case, step 3 of the metaholon-based literature analysis, which gives us the following structure of the Text-Specific Social Class Holon for Rubież 1. 2. 3.

Economy-related factors 1a) Income Culture-related factors 2a) Ethnic origin (of persons) Society-related factors 3a) Educational level 3b) Social origin 3c) Sex 3d) Age 3e) Social status 3f) Linguistic belonging 3g) Social community 3h) Occupation and occupational preferences 3i) Competence level 3j) Basic action

The results of step 1 and 2 are similar to those of the first analysis. One feature fits immediately into Bourdieu’s categories, the others are related to them, and none is contradictory. Similarly to the first analysis, I split the collected data among the different characters of the text to reveal the interaction between them and to find out what properties it is connected to. The text passage differs from the first one in some literary aspects, for example the fact that the action and acting characters are presented through the eyes of the narrator who either recollects or reflects on events and people, while the first text passage contains, for example, direct speech. So, the presented reality is in the second example more strongly connected to the narrator who controls all interpretation of events and people by not allowing other characters to speak directly. The narrator’s views might distort the presented reality and result in the reader’s distancing himself or herself from the narrator’s interpretation. In the second text this distancing even intensifies in the course of reading, especially after the reader finds out that the narrator is naïve or perhaps mentally different. Such stylistic features that point to the brilliance of a literary text can be discussed together with the analysis results, but shall not disturb our step-by-step analysis. We observe what the text says and collect these features as we have done in the first case. This refers also to the choice of acting characters—we filter them from the text that is presented by the naïve narrator. These are the narrator himself, Father Basil, the community, and the children. In this analysis I include the 442

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first-person narrator as an acting character, because the story is centered around him and his views, and because he plays an active role in the analyzed text passage.Taking the already collected analysis results and splitting them among the mentioned characters, we get a picture as in Table 32.4. If minor interpretative steps are necessary, I add them in brackets. Let us now locate the interaction moments by looking at Table 32.4. There is interaction between the narrator and the children in that the narrator has to play with them. Another interaction happens between the community and Father Basil, who taught them things. There is no more interaction in this passage. So, what is this interaction connected to? The three striking properties are social community, competence, and age. All interaction happens within the social community and in a way that the older or more competent interact with the younger or less knowledgeable: Father Basil teaches the community, and the community, including the narrator, plays with the kids. The metaholon-based analysis of the second text example gave us the following results: 1. The metaholon-based literature analysis resulted in a text-specific social class holon with five categories that were not mentioned by Bourdieu, but are relevant for the text. 2. The assignment of the social class categories to the individual characters and groups in the text made the interaction between them visible. It was revealed that interaction between characters is connected to social community, age, and competence.

Methodologically, also here the three goals mentioned in the theory section have been achieved, since the analysis (1) did not focus on repeatedly mentioned properties only, (2) started with looking at words and behind them to collect appropriate data, and (3) did not just retrieve predefined properties, but identified five new ones.

Applying the Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis and Developing Metaholons The metaholon-based literature analysis is a step-by-step approach that can be applied to entire literary texts as well as to parts of them. In this essay, I demonstrated how the MBLA works on two short text passages.The analysis of entire texts might result in slightly different, especially more detailed categories than the analysis of parts of texts. The metaholon-based literature analysis can be used for analyzing literary texts also on other metaholons. The article showed exemplarily how to analyze a literary text through the lens of social class and therefore used the social class metaholon. However, there is no methodological restriction to social class; it is just one example. Metaholons can be deduced from the literature in the same way that the social class metaholon was deduced in this article.

Works Cited Baasner, Rainer, and Maria Zens. Methoden und Modelle der Literaturwissenschaft: Eine Einführung. ESV, 2005. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Harvard UP, 8th printing, 1996. monos​​kop​.o​​rg​/im​​ages/​​e​/e0/​​Pierr​​e​_Bou​​rdieu​​_Dist​​incti​​on​_A_​​Socia​​l​_Cri​​tique​​_of​_t​​he​ _Ju​​dgeme​​​nt​_of​​_Tast​​e​_198​​4​.pdf​. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019. Mudersbach, Klaus. “Erschließung Historischer Texte mit Hilfe Linguistischer Methoden.” Neue Methoden der Analyse Historischer Daten, edited by Heinrich Best and Helmut Thome, St. Katharinen, 1991, pp. 316–362. ---. “Universal Principles of Thinking.” EU-High-Level Scientific Conference Series, MuTra, 2007, pp. 1–42. www​.e​​uroco​​nfere​​nces.​​info/​​proce​​eding​​s​/200​​7​_Pro​​ceedi​​ngs​/2​​007​_M​​uders​​bach_​​Klaus​​.pdf. Accessed 1 Jan. 2020.

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold denote tables 1834 New Poor Laws 282, 301 1846 Corn Laws 335 1890 Lunacy Act 271 1959 Mental Health Act 271 1984 (Orwell) 393–394 Abbey Theatre 243 abjection 197, 293–302, 304–305; social 10, 295–296 “Abjection and Miserable Forms” (Bataille) 295 Ablow, Rachel 38 abortion 261, 263 Absentee,The (Edgeworth) 294–298, 300, 302, 304 actress 328, 360, 368–369 Ada, the Betrayed (Rymer) 284, 289 adaptation 354, 359–360, 386–387, 414, 421, 423–424, 426 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 9, 189–200 Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame 396 adolescence 79, 221, 223 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain) 415–416 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain) 414–416, 419 aesthetic ideology (AI) 53–54 Africa 60, 92, 148, 150, 193, 199, 316, 318, 339 Agamben, Giorgio 410 Alexander, M. 145 alignment 48, 245, 253, 263, 355, 361, 390–392 allegoresis 133, 138, 143 Allegories of Cinema (James) 138 allegory 8, 34, 131–135, 137–138, 142–143, 237, 287, 363, 406–407, 420–421 alternative history 314 Althusser, Louis 105, 362 American literature 6–7, 127 Amis, Kingsley 149 anarchists 38–41, 44–49, 114–115; Chicago 38, 46; French 45; Walsall 41

Anderson, Benedict 336, 340 androids/“andys” 372, 376, 378–380, 382–383; see also Dick, P.K., robotics Anglo-Irish Ascendancy 241, 243 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922) 237 Angry Young Men 9, 145–148, 155–157, 345, 347–348 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Hofstadter) 173 anti-war protests 6, 105, 112–113 Apples: A Novel (Millward) 269–271, 273–276, 278–280 aristocracy 92, 97, 247, 252, 284, 286, 299, 413, 416 Aristotle 35, 189–190, 403 Asimov, Isaac 56, 372–373, 375–378, 380–383 ASPECTEX 428–429; see also Mudersbach assemblage 120–123 Attfield, Sarah 9, 13–26 Atwood, Margaret 393–395 audiences 4, 6, 32–34, 136, 140, 149, 152, 167–168, 190–191, 200, 229, 234, 236, 245, 261, 281–282, 285, 288, 325, 346, 348, 350–351, 354, 368–369 Austen, Jane 9, 91, 399, 412–414, 424 Australia 9, 13–16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 248, 326, 342–343 authorial ideology (AuI) 54–56 available means 189–191, 199 Baccolini, Raeffaella 386, 392–393 Badiou, Alain 105, 115 Baguley, David 360 Bakhtin, Mikhail 106–107, 109, 111, 362, 413 Bald Soprano, The (Ionesco) 413 Ball Lightning (Liu) 53 Balzac, Honoré de 9, 369, 398–403, 405–407, 409–410 Banta, Martha 421 Bantman, Constance 45–46 Barlow, Aaron 7, 163–175

445



Index Barr, Marleen S. 9, 309–320, 396 Barrie, J.M. 9 Barthes, Roland 7, 356 Bataille, Georges 294–295, 298–300, 400 Bathwater Wine (Coleman) 177 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 322–323, 325–326, 328, 330, 409 Bauman, Zygmunt 299, 302, 304 Beatty, Jan 10, 176–178, 180–183, 185–187 Beaumont, Matthew 41 Beck, Robert 119–120, 122–123, 125–129 Benjamin, Walter 131, 138, 326, 334, 363, 398, 410 Berger, John 43 Berkley Press 165 Berlant, Lauren 299, 301–303 Best American Poetry 186 Bhabha, Homi 209, 302 Bhatia, Nandi 149 Biafra 189, 192–200; see also Nigeria–Biafra War “Bicentennial Man, The” (Asimov) 378–379, 381 bifurcation of humankind 58–59 Big House,The (Robinson) 243 Bildungsroman 8, 127, 134, 220–221, 223, 225–231 binary opposition 139, 356 biographical fallacy 347 Black Deaths in Custody (Eckerman) 23 black deaths in custody 19, 21, 23 Black Poetics (Heiss) 14–15 Black Thunder (Bontemps) 133, 135–136, 138, 143 Bleak House (BH) (Dickens) 92–95, 100, 203 Bliss (Mansfield) 247, 254–255, 257 Bloody Sunday 42–43 Boden, F.C. 220–221, 223 body: dead 43–44, 98, 194, 293–294, 300, 302, 305; female 68, 123, 370; human 300, 329, 376; language 210–213; physical 10, 328; social 407, 410 Boneshaker (Beatty) 178, 180–183, 185 Bontemps, Arna 133, 135–138 Booth, Charles 300, 302 Booth, Wayne 413 Boucicault, Dion 244 Bouie, Jamelle 310–311, 319 Bourdieu, Pierre 2–4, 8, 84, 105–107, 145–157, 247–249, 251–252, 257, 426–430, 439–443 bourgeois 8, 10, 83, 110, 121, 126, 141, 220, 231, 236–237, 243, 250, 252, 256, 262–263, 293, 299, 334–335, 340, 362, 368, 398, 406, 416, 420–421 bourgeoisie 120, 140, 252, 345, 347, 401, 413, 415–416, 420 Boy (Hanley) 221, 226, 228, 242, 244–245 Boyden, Polly 133–135, 137 Boylan, Rebecca W. 10, 321–332 Brandt, Deborah 190 Brannigan, John 244 Brave New World (Huxley) 393–394 Bread Givers (Yezierska) 63, 71–72, 74–75 breeding 243, 318, 414, 418 Brewster, Anne 14, 16 Brierley, Walter 220, 225, 231

British Empire 9, 145 Brooklyn 7, 127, 129, 163, 165–172 Brooklyn College 171 Brooklyn Riots of 1991 168 bureaucracy 91, 99, 272 Burgess, Ernest W. 359, 361 Burke, Kenneth 7 Burgess, Miranda 303 Butler, Judith 38–39, 44, 325, 374, 380 Butler, Octavia E. 311 Butler, Samuel 248,

Çakırtaş, Önder 9, 345–358 Caleb Williams, or,Things as they Are (Godwin) 282 Camus, Albert 412–413, 418–420, 424 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak) 189, 352 Canada 241, 339, 341–342 Čapek, Karel 372, 375–376, 380–383; see also robots, Reason’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Marx) 121, 270, 274, 303, 404–405, 412–413, 415–418, 420–421 capitalism 8, 38, 40–41, 63–64, 75, 105, 109, 116, 120–121, 125, 132, 140, 177, 184–185, 245, 252, 260, 266, 294, 304, 309, 331, 334, 352, 360–363, 365, 374, 376, 387, 389, 400–401, 403–410, 414–415, 418, 420 capitalist ideology 405, 415–416 Carlyle, Thomas 95 Case for Reparations, A (Coates) 309–310, 312, 314, 318–319 Castle, The (Kafka) 413 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut) 1 Catching Fire (Collins) see Hunger Games trilogy Cathleen Ni Houlihan (Gregory and Yeats) 236 Chairs, The (Ionesco) 413 Chancery Court 93–95, 100 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,Times (Shaftesbury) 303 Charters 282, 284–285, 287 Chartism 7, 282–288, 290 Chartists 282–290 Charwoman’s Daughter,The (Stephens) 262, 266 Chen, Qiufan 58–59, 61 Cherry Pickers,The (Gilbert) 18 Cheslow, Erin 9, 333–344 Chicago 6, 46, 119, 121, 128–129, 178, 351, 359, 361–365, 422; see also anarchists Chicago School (of Sociology) 359, 361 Chicago Tribune 165 China 27–30, 35–36, 51–54, 58–59, 61, 341, 343 Chinese: comparative literature 28; culture 28–30, 36; history 29; literature 9, 27–28, 30–32, 36–37; texts 28; theater 30–31; traditional drama 9, 27, 30; see also science fiction, society churten transilience (Le Guin) 316 circulation 111, 118–119, 136, 139, 208, 281, 283, 290, 298, 401, 407; of sympathy 44 Circumlocution Office 97, 99 Cisneros, Sandra 10, 176–184, 186–187 446

Index City University of New York (CUNY) 169, 171 city: big 77, 361; -dweller 118, 361–362, 367; modern 68, 70; suburbs 18–19 Civil Service Examination 27, 29–31 Clash of Civilizations,The (Huntington) 346, 353 class: aristocratic 5; consciousness 107, 140, 247–252, 254–255, 257–258, 284, 322, 331, 347, 349, 351, 353, 421–423; distinctions 101, 247, 250, 254, 304, 310–312, 317, 366; division 51, 53, 58–59, 61, 319, 345, 353, 385, 388–389, 393, 424; lower 150–152, 156–157, 169, 172, 191, 196, 211, 252, 257, 272, 281, 293, 309–310, 315, 317, 321, 324–325, 328–329, 331–333, 343, 404, 408, 413–414, 421–423; mimicry 69, 73; relations 2–3, 8, 242–243, 304, 386, 393, 409; social 1, 3–4, 10, 27, 36, 53, 56, 58–59, 81, 120, 146, 197, 202, 220, 233, 238, 264, 309, 311–312, 319, 325, 328, 333, 337, 341, 366, 383, 422, 426–432, 433–438, 439–443; studies 105, 107, 267, 357; upper 71, 79, 106, 148–150, 155–158, 169, 173, 181, 207, 221, 223, 230, 238, 272–273, 276, 282, 284, 286, 290, 296, 309, 321, 324–325, 331–332, 347–348, 355, 366, 413, 423; see also culture, middle class, Social Class Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis, society, struggle, working class, working-class Clavell, James 421 clothing 3, 57, 78, 80, 212, 213–214, 234, 237, 368, 370, 414–415 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 309–319 Cobby Eckerman, Ali 23 Cockney 281, 284–285 Cohen, Jeffrey J. 323 Cohen, William A. 294–295 Coldest Winter Ever,The (Sister Souljah) 121, 127 Coleman, Wanda 176–177, 180–187 collective consciousness 111, 238, 277,417; see also Durkheim collectivities 248–249, 325; see also Bourdieu Collins, Suzanne 386–389, 392 Collins, Wilkie 288–290 colonization 15–16, 24–25, 83, 146–148, 151–152, 154, 156, 233, 379, 383 Columbus Day 317 commodity 3, 10, 56, 103, 121, 138, 142, 322, 326, 328, 330–331, 336, 361, 363, 366, 384, 400, 402, 404–405, 408, 410 commons 119, 399–400, 403, 406, 409–410 Commonweal 38–42, 44–48 Commune of Paris 46Communism 41, 75 Communist Party 1, 36, 53, 106, 132, 140–141, 227 comparative literature 27–28, 84 complexity 204, 209, 212, 218, 254, 321, 389, 396, 412 condition of England 334 Condition of the Working Class in England,The 300 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A 413, 415–416 Connelly, Cyril 223 Conners, Carrie 10, 176–188 consumerism 58, 60, 95, 349, 362, 376, 409, 413, 415, 421

consumption 2, 4, 40, 55, 57, 121, 237, 249, 252–253, 274, 276, 322, 330, 332, 364, 366–367, 369–370, 387, 415, 421 contagion 93, 97, 296–297, 321, 330–331 Conversations with Friends (Rooney) 265 coronavirus 1, 311, 319 corpora 202–203 corpse 131, 194, 253–254, 286, 293–305, 313, 315 corpus linguistics 202 COVID 19 see coronavirus Crane, Stephen 8, 63, 65–71, 76 Crane, Walter 42–43, 45, 48 Crary, Jonathan 322, 326, 331 Crawley, Kristy Liles 9, 189–201 Cromwell, Oliver 421 Cronon, William 364 Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 299, 301–303 Cubeta, Germana 8, 202–219 Cultural Front,The (Denning) 132 cultural: awareness of 177; capital 3–4, 84, 230, 234–236, 238, 243–244, 251; conflict 346, 355–356; differences 356, 424; identity 208, 277; production 105, 118, 128–129, 138, 143, 269, 272; tradition 29 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 333 culture: African 312, 317, 319; American 172; class 14–15, 20, 22, 25, 39, 77, 227, 230, 262, 274, 276– 277, 291, 349; English 148, 341; gay 22; hybrid 147, 149–150, 152, 154; Indigenous 14; popular 14, 18, 106, 147, 289, 375; -related factors 431, 433, 435, 437–438, 439, 442; see also Chinese Cwmardy (Jones) 224, 228 Darwin, Charles 58, 412–414, 417, 420–421, 423 Darwin, John 150 Darwinism 58, 359–360, 418, 421, 423–424; see also Spencer, Herbert David Copperfield (Dickens) 91, 103, 203 Davis, Angela Y. 184 Deane, Seamus 238 Death Song, A (Morris) 42–43 deaths in custody 18–19, 21, 23 Deevy, Teresa 239–240, 243 deindustrialization 118, 126–127, 177, 269, 275–276 Denning, Michael 132 department store 128, 262–263, 362, 366 depression 275–276, 278; see also Great Depression Derrida, Jacque 7, 39, 111, 403 desire 31, 34, 39, 56, 72–73, 87, 96–97, 116, 122– 123, 126–127, 129, 135, 137–138, 169, 172–174, 184, 190–191, 193, 196, 230, 239–240, 243, 249, 255, 264, 266, 277, 282, 294, 301, 321, 323–328, 330, 332–333, 349, 361–362, 366–370, 373–375, 378–383, 386, 395, 402, 404–406, 408–409, 414–416, 419, 421 determinism 328, 360 Dhuuluu-Yala to Talk Straight: Publishing Aboriginal Literature in Australia (Heiss) 14 Di Prima, Diane 105–113, 116 dialectic of capital and labour 372, 374–375, 383

447

Index dialectic of mastery and servitude 373–374, 377, 380–383 dialectical materialism 346, 348, 353, 375, 413 Dick, Phillip K. 52, 375–376, 379–380, 382–383 Dickens, Charles 2, 8, 91–103, 155, 202–204, 207– 214, 218–219, 282–284, 286, 288, 291, 293–294, 298–302, 304, 321, 333, 335–338, 340–343 dignity 4, 102, 197, 204, 208, 213–214, 240, 295–296, 304, 368, 386, 419 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu) 84 distributions of the sensible 27, 34–35 diversity 14, 25, 127, 129, 176, 277, 354, 390, 412, 440; see also interaction, neurodiversity division of labor 8, 55, 361, 396 divorce 235, 247, 255, 257 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) 375, 379–380 Does your Mother? (Dunne) 265–267 Dombey and Son (D&S) (Dickens) 101–103, 203, 333–338, 340, 344 domestic space 76, 334, 338, 343, 349 Don’t Take Your Love to Town (Ginibi) 16–18 Dos Passos, John 133, 138, 143 Douglas, Mary 297 Douglas, Norman 166 Douglass, Frederick 129, 191 Doyle, Roddy 259, 262, 267 Dracula (Stoker) 290, 293 Dreadful Summit (Ellin) 163–164 Dreiser, Theodore 6, 9, 120, 359–370 Droga przez Rurytanię (Szczerek) 432, 433–436, 439 Dunne, Lee 265–266 Durkheim, Emile 3, 277, 349 dystopia 8, 51–52, 54, 286, 320, 380–381, 385–394, 396 Eagleton, Terry 7, 51, 53–56, 324, 327 Eby, Clare Virginia 366–369 Eckerman, Ali Cobby 23 Edgar, David 345–346, 349–353 Edgeworth, Maria 293–294, 296–299, 302, 304 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 295–296 egalitarian 129, 240, 313, 320, 398–403, 405–406, 409–410, 424 egalitarianism 402, 410, 421 Ela the Outcast 283 Eliot, George 39, 321 Eliot, T.S. 6, 106, 220, 229 Elizabeth I 421 Ellin, Stanley 7, 163–171, 173–174 empathy 2, 25, 239, 284, 288, 322, 324, 379, 382–383, 386, 403 Engels, Friedrich 77, 270, 300, 346, 398, 412 English Literature 290, 354; 1950s 145 entropy 360 environmentalism of the poor 59–60 Epstein, Jeffrey 172–173 Evilsizor, Kacey 9, 27–37 evolution 322, 360, 365, 413, 427

exploitation 2, 19–20, 25, 53, 58, 60, 66, 80–81, 86–87, 119, 121, 123, 127–129, 134, 140, 190, 265, 274, 279, 286, 312, 318, 335, 343, 355–356, 374, 387, 393, 405, 407–410, 414, 422 facial expressions 211–212, 223 factory 69, 71, 86–87, 134, 140, 181–182, 227, 311, 319, 338–339, 352, 364–365, 367, 419–420 failure of organized religion 93, 95 Fairclough, Mary 40–41 fairy tale 310, 315, 317–319, 337, 414 fantasy 87, 122–123, 126, 190, 235, 243, 287, 310, 312, 315, 317–319, 339–340, 366, 405, 413, 416–417, 420 feminism 15, 75, 105, 350 Ferrall, Charles 8, 220–232, 249, 258 Ferrante, Elena 9, 78–89; Neapolitan Quartet 9, 77, 79, 84–85, 89 fetish 3, 53, 324–326, 329–332, 361, 363, 365–366, 403–405, 407, 410 feudalism 3, 415–416 Fiction for the Working Man: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England, 1830–1850 (James) 290–291 field 1, 5, 10, 28, 36, 95, 107, 109, 111, 113–114, 133, 138–139, 143, 172, 248–250, 253, 255–256, 267, 290, 312, 315–316, 341, 359, 372, 385, 388, 392, 433–434, 436, 439; see also Bourdieu filth 10, 94, 98, 123, 136, 224–225, 265, 281, 294–295, 299–301 Finn, Margot 298 Fisher, Mark 172, 387 Fisher, Philip 360–362, 366–368 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 6, 9, 106, 181, 398–401, 404–410 flâneuse 70 Fluck, Winfried 359–361 Folding Beijing (Hao) 58, 61 Foley, Barbara 134 folk music 106, 113–116 Fontainebleau, France 247 For Cops Who Stalk Children on Houso Estates (Saunders) 24 For Love (Mortimer) 401–402 foreign burden 59 Forster Education Act 221 Forster, E. M. 147 Foucault, Michel 325, 327, 375 Foundation (Asimov) 378 Frames of War (Butler) 38–39 France and the Algerian War (Alexander and Keiger) 145 Frankenstein (Shelley) 290, 293, 375–276, 380 Frankenstein complex 373, 375–376, 378, 380, 383 Freud, Sigmund 125, 146, 167, 226, 412–413 Friday Black (Adjei-Brenyah) 396 friendship 42, 48, 80–81, 83–84, 86–87, 89, 193, 255 funerals 38–46, 48, 237 Gallagher, Catherine 298 Gandhi, Leela 48

448

Index garden party 249, 251–253 Garden Party,The (Mansfield) 247, 247, 249, 254–255, 257 Gaskell, Elizabeth 293–294, 299, 302–305, 333, 336, 338–339, 341–342 Gate of a Strange Field,The (Heslop) 221, 228 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 119, 310, 317 gaze 87, 109, 124, 130, 157, 210, 212, 322, 325, 327, 365, 399, 420 gender 120–121, 126–130, 149, 176, 180–181, 184–186, 197, 199, 204, 214, 218, 233–234, 239–240, 243, 248, 259–260, 264–267, 322–323, 330, 335, 353, 359, 370, 375, 386 general ideology (GI) 53–54, 56 general mode of production (GMP) 53–56 genre 3, 7–8, 16, 18, 106, 109, 111, 113, 118–119, 126, 164–168, 218, 221, 238, 245, 283, 289, 310–311, 314–315, 317–319, 390–391, 393, 396; sub 106, 310, 317, 320, 385–388, 390–393, 396; super- 311, 313 geopolitical aesthetic 334 gesture 4, 48, 64, 81, 84, 131, 135, 190, 208–213, 218, 253, 263–264, 276, 311, 321, 363, 406, 414, 419 “Ghetto Pastoral, The” (Denning) 132 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 220–221, 224, 226 Gilbert, Kevin 14–16, 18–19, 23 Giles, Paul 359, 365, 367 Gipsey Girl,The (Jones) 284 Glasier, John Bruce 47 globalization 8–9, 53, 58, 89, 126, 391, 406, 410 Godwin, William 263, 282–283 Gold, Michael 132, 141, Golden Bowl,The (James) 400, 403 Goodlad, Lauren 334 Gothic 132, 282–283, 289, 293, 304, 330, 376; Chartist 286–288; economy 298, 300–301; villain 284–285, 297 Graff, Gerald 5–6 Graham, Wendy 9, 359–371 grand narrative 345, 356 Grandmother Ghosts (Saunders) 24 granfalloon 1, 5; see also Vonnegut Great Depression 6, 8, 106, 132–138, 141–143, 170, 220–221, 228 Great Expectations (Dickens) 98, 203, 342 Great Gatsby,The (Fitzgerald) 181, 398, 404–410 Great Reform Act 282 Greenwood, James 288–289 Greenwood, Walter 220–221 Gregory, Augusta 236–237, 242–243 Grene, Nicholas 236, 260 Grener, Adam 340 Grosz, Elizabeth 370 Guan, Hanqing 27, 31, 36 habitus 4, 8, 105, 107–110, 146–151, 153–156, 158, 248–250, 252–254, 368; see also Bourdieu Haggard, H. Rider 148, 158 Halberstam, Judith 293, 300

Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie) 189–198, 200 Hall, Stuart 281, 346, 356 Halper, Albert 133, 138–142 Han Dynasty 30 Handmaid’s Tale,The (Atwood) 393–395 hands 210, 211, 212 Hanley, James 220–221, 225, 231 Hanley, Lawrence 132Hanson, Ingrid 7, 38–50 Hao, Jingfang 58, 61 Hard Times (Dickens) 203 Hardie, Keir 47–48 Hardy, Thomas 220, 321, 323–328, 332 Hare, David 345–346, 353–357 Harkness, Margaret 44 Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories 1968–1986 (Coleman) 180, 183, 185 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 27–28, 328, 372–375, 377, 380–383, 403–404 Heiss, Anita 13–15, 18 hereditary 99, 228, 243, 361 Herne’s Egg, The (Yeats) 413, 417–418 Heslop, Harold 220–221, 228, 231 heterogeneity 202, 208, 210 heteroglossia 109, 111 Hill-Collins, Patricia 15 Hilton, Jack 220, 228 History of White People,The (Painter) 174 history: literary 27, 30, 36, 119, 133, 281, 412; oral 352; social 169, 174; whitewashed 195, 200; see also Chinese Hobbit,The (Tolkien) 281 Hobsbaum, Philip 98 Hodgson, Elizabeth 20 Hofstadter, Richard 173 Hoggart, Richard 224, 273, 275–276 holon 8, 426–427, 429–432, 435–436, 438, 439–443; see also Mudersbach HOLONTEX 426–429, 431; see also Mudersbach homosocial 255, 330 Honig, Bonnie 43 hooks, bell 2, 4, 83, 118–119, 128–129 Hoosiers 1 Hotz, Mary Elizabeth 304 House of Commons 99 How the Other Half Lives (Riis) 63, 65–66Li, Hua 9, 51–62 human race 416 humanism 5, 58, 415, 420 Hunger Games (Collins) 8, 385–389, 391, 393 Huntington, Samuel P. 346, 353–355 Hurry On Down (Wain) 148, 155 Huxley, Aldous 392–394 ICS-Principle 431; see also Mudersbach identity 1–2, 4, 9, 15, 18, 21, 38–39, 67–68, 71, 76, 79, 82, 85, 105, 121, 123–124, 148–150, 154, 179, 182, 184, 195, 198–200, 208, 223, 258, 264–265, 270, 273–278, 280, 284, 321–323, 326, 335, 345, 348–350, 352–355, 361, 365, 386, 404; see also working-class

449

Index ideology 51, 53–56, 73, 80–81, 85, 87, 227, 234, 238, 245, 261, 264, 282, 311–312, 335, 345, 348, 352, 361–362, 405, 407, 409–410, 415–416; see also aesthetic ideology, capitalist ideology, authorial ideology, general ideology Igbo 189, 191, 193–196 immigrant 13, 64, 66–68, 71, 75–77, 124, 129, 134, 316, 350–353, 355–356, 408, 415, 420, 422, 430, 432, 439 immiseration 10, 270, 272–276, 279 immoral stereotype 195 imperialism 60, 147, 157, 356, 413, 415, 421; see also Darwin, John Indigenous literature 9, 13–15, 25 Industrial Novel 9, 344 Industrial Revolution 224, 252, 293, 413, 420–421 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 105–106, 110, 114–115 inequality 9, 39, 46, 61, 79, 119, 126–127, 213, 238, 266–267, 302, 319, 365, 372, 375, 383, 386–387, 398, 410 infanticide 263, 278 injustice 22, 32–33, 38, 40, 42, 46–47, 61, 84, 121, 130, 213, 233–234, 261, 266–267, 282, 286, 324, 360, 386, 407; environmental 51, 53, 58, 60–61 Injustice of Dou E,The (Guan) 27, 31, 33–34, 36 Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry (Gilbert) 14–16, 23 inter-class 235, 239–240, 242–243, 352 interaction 48, 54, 63, 77, 85, 103, 146, 151, 157, 250, 253, 299, 361, 413, 429, 432, 440–443; see also diversity, Will intersectionality 15, 21, 265, 277; see also race, sexuality intra-class 234, 243, 277 “Intuitionists” (Berlant) 303 invention 189–190, 286–287, 309, 321–322, 364, 372, 413 invisibility 59–60, 79, 192, 386 invisible labor 84 Ionesco, Eugène 413 Ireland 54–55, 229, 235, 238, 241, 259–260, 263–265, 267, 296, 421–422 Irish: Anglo- 242, 413; Constitution 240; theatre 8, 233, 239, 244; working classes 238, 261, 266–267; writing 244–245, 260, 266–267 Ishiguro, Kazuo 9, 412–413, 420–424 Italians 8–9, 78, 141, 163, 168, 170, 174, 192, 202–204, 205–206, 207–214, 215–218, 317 Italy 78, 103, 202, 204, 206, 207–210, 212–214, 218–219 Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (Beatty) 178, 180 Jaffe, Audrey 39, 44 Jalland, Pat 39 James, David E. 138–139 James, Elizabeth 290 James, Henry 6, 9, 398–403, 405–407, 409–410 James, Louis 283–284, 290–291 Jameson, Frederic 131, 133, 148, 334, 385, 396, 398

Jane Shore (Rymer) 284–285 Johnson, Edgar 91, 98 Jones, Gwyn 220, 230–231 Jones, Hannah Maria 283–284 Jones, Lewis 220, 228Jordan, Eamonn 8, 233–246 jouissance 122–123, 125–126, 236Joyce, James 225–226, 232, 258 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 220, 321, 323–324 Judgement, The (Kafka) 413 Jungle, The (Sinclair) 6, 422 Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey) 237, 259–261, 263 Kafka, Franz 413, 422 Katie Roche (Deevy) 239 Keiger, J.F.V. 145 keyness 204 key words 427 Kiberd, Declan 238 King Exits, The (Ionesco) 413 King of Spain’s Daughter,The (Deevy) 240 King Solomon’s Mine (Haggard) 148 kitchen sink realism 348–349 knowledge system 426, 428; see also Mudersbach Kojève, Alexander 372–374 Kreilkamp, Ivan 341 Kristeva, Julia 294–295, 299 Kuch, Peter R. 8, 247–258 Kurdi, Maria 233 La Comédie humaine (Balzac) 400, 402 La Voix et le Phénomène (Derrida) 7 labor: domestic 110, 182; forced 372, 376; industrial 176, 284, 310, 341; and management 9; manual 275; market 10, 415; physical 179, 182 Lacan, Jacques 105, 112, 122 Lady in Black,The (Rymer) 285–286 Laird, Heather 8, 259–268 Langford Ginibi, Ruby 16–18 Langford, David 378 language: body 210–213; definitive 32–33; indigenous 21; modern 5; oral 14; use of 392, 394 Law, John 44–45; see also Margaret Harkness Lawrence, D.H. 220, 224–225, 230 Learning to Labour:Why Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (Willis) 274 “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats) 417Lee, Simon 10, 269–280, 349 Leeney, Cathy 233 Lefebvre, Henri 8, 63–64, 66, 76, 119 leftist politics 115 legitimate culture 248, 251; see also Bourdieu Le Guin, Ursula K. 316 Lenin,Vladimir 140, 374, 419 Leslie, John 48 Lesson, The (Ionesco) 413 Let’s Get Physical (Reed-Gilbert) 19–20 Levine, Caroline 334 Levine, Philip 176–177, 181–182 Levitt, Paul Michael 408, 410 Li, Hua 54

450

Index linguistic 8, 14, 43, 53, 82, 84, 107, 111, 122, 202, 236, 316, 326, 352, 376, 394, 404, 408, 412, 423, 428, 433, 436–438, 439, 442 literacy 4, 80–84, 118, 189–191, 238, 282, 395; mass 283; mental health 273, 275; sponsor 190, 199; see also mental health literarity 118–119 literary: analysis 27, 36, 106, 427–428; archive 106; criticism 4–5, 36, 51, 54, 111, 120, 281, 319; history 27, 30, 36, 119, 133, 281, 412; movement 106, 132; production 2, 53, 55–56, 61, 133, 142– 143, 178; realism 321, 331; scholars 13, 28, 51, 105, 290; studies 1, 7, 51, 66, 115; texts 2–4, 6, 8, 27–28, 51, 53–56, 61, 63, 105, 202, 264, 412–413, 426–429, 442–443; theories 28, 36 Literary Formations: Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Globalism (Brewster) 16 Literary Mode of Production (LMP) 54–55 Literary Theory (Eagleton) 7 literati 29–30, 34, 36, 126–127, 167 Little Dorrit (LD) (Dickens) 91, 94–99, 103, 203 Liu, Cixin, 53 lived space 64, 119, 122–123, 125–127 living conditions 44, 65, 152, 191–193, 208, 210, 212–213, 238, 274–275 Lloyd, Edward 283–287, 289–290 London, England 38, 40, 42, 45–46, 48, 63–64, 92–93, 150, 155, 221, 229–230, 247–248, 255–256, 281–282, 284–288, 291, 296, 302, 321, 329, 339, 353, 388, 420, 424 London, Jack 120, 220 London Working Men’s College 231 Look Back in Anger (Osborne) 147–148, 150, 152, 157–158, 346, 349 Loose Woman (Cisneros) 177–180, 183–184, 186Loughlin, Christopher 9, 372–384 love: childhood 128; interest 128, 185; lost 128; maternal 226, 261, 263–264; parental 103 Love on the Dole (Greenwood) 221–223, 228–231 Lower East Side 63, 66–67, 69, 71, 74–76 Lucashenko, Melissa 21–22 Lucky Jim (Amis) 149, 154–156, 158 Lukács, György 105, 115, 228, 374 Macdonald, Ross 167 McKee, Adam R. 8, 63–76 McManus, Patricia 8, 385–397 McMillan, Andrew 277 Mad River (Beatty) 177 Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (Crane) 63, 66–67 Manchester, England 338–339, 341–342 Manhattan 65–66, 128–129, 138, 163–164, 167 Mansfield, Katherine 8, 247–250, 254, 257 Map of the World, A (Hare) 346, 353, 355–356 marginalization 122, 181, 243, 273, 277, 353, 356 Marriage à la Mode (Mansfield) 247, 255, 257 marriage of convenience 413 Marx Aveling, Eleanor 41, Marx, Karl 2–4, 9–10, 42, 77, 84–86, 88, 107, 120– 121, 270, 274–275, 303, 330, 360, 362, 372–375,

377, 383, 398, 404–405, 408, 410, 412–418, 420–421, 423, 426 Marxism 105, 373, 376, 398; Western 373–374 Marxist materialist literary criticism 51, 106, 290 Mary Barton (Gaskell) 333, 336–338, 341–342, 344 materialism 82, 89, 95, 101, 106, 346, 348–349, 353, 375, 401, 413, 415 materiality 53, 63, 84–85, 89, 105, 112, 116, 235, 401 Mauss, Marcel 368 Mazeppa (Rymer) 287–288 Meehan, Paula 259, 262 Meiji the Great 413, 416, 420 memory 16, 55, 81, 99, 105, 111–116, 125, 154, 171, 183, 194, 197, 237, 289, 301, 312, 341, 353, 367, 392, 394, 419 Mencken, H.L. 368–369 Mendel, Gregor 412–414 mental health 10, 269–277, 279–280; see also 1890 Lunacy Act, 1959 Mental Health Act, cultural awareness Mercurochrome (Coleman) 180, 182, 184–186 Merriman,Victor 238 metaholon 8, 426, 429–431, 439, 443; -based literature analysis (MBLA) 426, 431, 433–434, 437, 439–443; category 431, 433–434, 437; social class 426, 429–431, 433–434, 437, 441, 443 metamessage 356 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka) 413 method for analyzing literature 426; see also Will methodological fusion 430; see also Will methodological triad 428; see also Mudersbach metropolitan 44, 70, 118, 138, 281, 286–287, 295, 359, 362, 367–370 Mezzogiorno 78 Michaels, Walter Benn 361, 366 middle class 14–15, 19–22, 39–40, 42–45, 48, 58, 68–69, 74, 76, 92, 112, 120, 125–127, 135, 150, 155, 157, 174, 220–224, 226–227, 229–230, 237– 239, 241, 245, 247, 255, 263, 265, 272, 282–283, 286–288, 300, 311, 321, 324, 331, 333–342, 344, 347–349, 365–366, 388, 414, 418; lower 69, 155– 157, 228, 251, 257, 349; upper 48, 147, 149–150, 154–155, 157, 247, 249–255, 257, 388 Migliaccio, Cristina 9, 77–90 Millar, Kenneth see Macdonald, Ross Millward, Richard 10 Miner (Boden) 221, 223 Mockingjay (Collins) 386–387 modernity 6, 77, 120, 142, 302, 322, 324, 327, 331–332, 351, 362–363, 370, 374–376, 380, 383 money 2–3, 22–23, 25, 29, 42, 44–45, 69, 74, 82, 84, 86–87, 89, 91, 93, 97–102, 106, 139, 143, 166, 171–172, 174, 185, 205, 206, 213, 223, 227–228, 230, 236–239, 241, 243, 254, 262, 267, 287, 296, 301, 303, 311, 321, 328, 335, 350, 355–356, 360–361, 365–366, 378, 398–408, 410, 414–415, 420; -lender 284; as panacea 91, 97 Mongol 29–31, 35; invasion 27, 29–30 morality 94, 249, 301, 394 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 13, 16

451

Index Moretti, Franco 8, 220–221, 228, 231, 293 Morris, William 41–44, 48 Morrissy, Mary 259, 263–264 Mortimer, Armine Kotin 401–402 Mother of Pearl (Morrissy) 262–264 motherhood 259, 261–267 Moylan, Tom 386, 392–393 Mr Cage can you imagine (Hodgson) 20 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 321, 324, 330–331 Mudersbach, Klaus 426–431 Murdoch, Derrick 164 Murdoch, Iris 347 Murphy, James F. 131 Murphy, Paul 233, 236, 242–243 Murray, Christopher 238, 243 My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante) 77–78, 80–86, 89 Mysteres de Paris,The (Sue) 286 Mysteries of London,The (Reynolds) 286 Mysteries of the Court of London,The (Reynolds) 286 Mysterious Press 164 Mysterious Stranger, The (Twain) 415, 417 My Wicked,Wicked Ways (Cisneros) 179, 182–183 Nana (Zola) 360 Naples 77–80, 82, 87 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 191 natural 29, 31, 52–53, 55, 58–60, 82, 107–108, 129, 136–137, 150, 193–194, 196–197, 206, 235, 239, 243, 263–264, 284, 323, 329, 339, 359–360, 364–365, 367–368, 370, 373, 387, 414, 417–418, 421, 423–424 naturalism 66, 119–120, 132, 360, 363 Nelson, Cary 177 Nelson, Dorothy 262Nesvet, Rebecca 7, 281–292 neurodiversity 269, 277 New Masses,The (newspaper) 132, 141 New York City 63–67, 71, 74, 76, 123, 136, 138, 167–169, 173, 311, 315, 360–361, 364, 366, 368, 420, 424 New York Times (newspaper) 133, 167–168 Newcomen, Thomas 413 Newton, Isaac 413 Ngai, Sianne 300 NHS Plan 271; see also mental health Nigeria 191–193, 198–200 Nigeria–Biafra War 1967–70 189, 191–192, 200 “Night Highway Ninety Nine” (Snyder) 105–106, 108–109, 111, 114 Nixon, Rob 51, 59–60 Nobel Prize in Literature 417, 420, 432 non-capital 400–405, 409–410 non-class 400–403, 405, 409–410 non-power 401–403 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo 15 Normal People (Rooney) 265 normative 29, 54, 110, 191, 239, 321–323, 325, 386, 388; hetero- 243 normative models 29 North and South (Gaskell) 294, 302, 304

Northern Star,The (newspaper) 283, 286–287 Notebooks (Mansfield) 247 nouveau riche 366, 424 novel of manners 413 Nsukka University 198 nuclear radiation 59, 61 Obama, Barack 310–311, 313–314, 317 obituaries 7, 40–41, 44, 47–48 objectivism 146, 151 occupational narratives 77, 89 OCD 270, 278; see also mental health O’Connor, Feargus 286–287 O’Connor, Frank 259 O’Casey, Sean 237–239, 243–245, 259–263, 267 October Revolution 113 official landscape 60 Okorafor, Nnedi 313 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 203, 283–284, 294, 298–304 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 413 operational 273, 426, 440 oppression 14–16, 19, 49, 88, 124, 127, 166, 189– 191, 202, 204, 265, 288, 385, 390, 416, 419–421 oral forms 333–334, 336–337 Oregon 115 Ormond (Edgeworth) 285, 296–297 Orwell, George 134, 165, 222–223, 392, 394 Osborne, John 145, 147–152, 154–157, 345–349 Ostinato Vamps (Coleman) 184–185 Other, 69, 122, 126, 152, 377 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 98–99, 203 Our Own People (Edgar) 346, 350–352 Outsider Twenty Years On,The (Wilson) 147 Oxbridge universities 154–155 Painter, Nell Irwin 172, 174 pandering 118–119, 121–123 Papertalk Green, Charmaine 16 Park, Robert E. 359 parody 166, 230, 414, 416–417 Partisan Review 132 Passage to India (Forster) 147 passing 29, 68, 110, 118–122, 132–133, 146, 168, 193, 328 peddling 118–119, 121–122 penny: bloods 281, 286, 288–290; dreadfuls 7, 120, 288–290 Penny Dreadful (TV show) 289–290 Pension Day (Papertalk Green) 16 Penzler, Otto 164–165 People’s Charter 282 perception 35, 63, 83, 86, 151–152, 224, 233, 236, 249, 312, 321–324, 328, 331, 334, 346–347, 350, 353 personal pronouns 204, 207, 208 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes) 373 photography 326, 329 Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 290, 321, 324, 328 Pictures from Italy (Dickens) 202–204, 207, 208, 209–210, 211, 212, 213–214, 215–218

452

Index Pierse, Michael 233–234, 259–260, 262, 265, 267 Pilkington, Lionel 238, 243, 261 pimps 119, 121–126, 130 Pink Egg,The (Boyden) 133–135, 143 Pinter, Harold 152–154, 157–158 Plague, The (Camus) 418 Playboy of the Western World,The (Synge) 234, 244 plot of decline 360, 362 Plunkett, James 260–262, 264–266 poetry: beat 105–106, 111; Indigenous 15, 23; working-class 176–177, 186 Polish prose 426 political economy 42, 64, 79–82, 87–89, 120–121, 126, 398; theatre 345, 350, 354, 356 Politics of Aesthetics,The (Rancière) 9, 27, 34, 399 polyphony 413Ponzio, Peter J. 8, 91–104 Poovey, Mary 301 Porras, Eva R. 296 post WWI English society 257 post-capitalist commons 410 post-colonial theory 247–248, 257 postcolonialism 60, 120, 345, 352–354, 356, 415 poverty 9, 13–14, 16, 22–23, 38, 40, 46–47, 58–60, 66, 71–76, 78, 89, 93, 121, 134, 146, 152, 173– 174, 194, 200, 204, 213, 225, 230, 235, 237–239, 244–245, 266, 272, 275, 279, 286, 293–294, 296–297, 299, 301–302, 304–305, 322, 325, 333, 347, 355–356, 360–361, 388, 407–408 Powers of Horror (Kristeva) 294 preaching 118–119, 121–122, 128 Prest, Thomas Peckett 283, 286, 289 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 413 Principles of Biology (Spencer) 414 private space 67, 70, 76 Production of Space,The (Lefebvre) 63–64 Professing Literature (Graff) 5 proletarian literature 132, 141 proletariat 40, 46, 120, 136, 415, 421, 423 protecting 77, 79, 82, 84–87, 89, 197 providing 20, 47, 77, 79, 82, 84–87, 89, 148, 223, 228, 343, 405, 409, 416, 426 PTSD 276; see also mental health public: houses 206; housing 25, 129; office 282, 350; schools 5, 154–155, 223; space 65, 67, 70–71, 73, 76, 121, 362; spheres 38, 75, 224, 345, 389; tanks 207, 210, 212 publicness 389–390 Purgatory (Yeats) 242–243, 245 Qubilai Qan 30 race 1–4, 7, 13, 15–16, 18, 21, 24–25, 96, 118–119, 121, 125, 128, 130, 133, 138, 146, 164, 170, 172–174, 176, 180, 193, 206, 265, 293, 310–311, 314–315, 317–320, 345, 350–354, 375, 403–404, 416; see also intersectionality racism 13–16, 18–19, 23, 25, 121, 125, 146, 148–152, 154, 156–157, 163–164, 166, 169–170, 172–174, 176, 184, 193, 346, 350–352, 355 Radical Representations (Foley) 134

radicalism 137, 238, 283, 286–287 Rancière, Jacques 9, 27, 34–36, 118, 233–234, 236, 240, 242, 244, 297, 325, 399–400 Ransom, John Crowe 6 realism 66–67, 105, 115, 119–120, 132, 142, 146, 261, 289, 313, 321–325, 330–332, 348, 354, 359, 391, 415 Reason’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) (Čapek) 375–378, 381 Red Sugar (Beatty) 180, 183, 186 Redfern (Gilbert) 18–19 Reed-Gilbert, Kerry 19 Reeder, Jesse 303–304 Reichardt, Ulfried 361 Reid, Christina 266 RELATEX 428; see also Mudersbach religion 1, 53–54, 56–57, 61, 73, 85, 91, 93–96, 174, 183, 225, 313, 345, 399, 404, 417 reluctant revolutionary 386, 389 Remains of the Day, The (Ishiguro) 413, 420–421 Representation of the People Act (June 1918) 257 repression 96, 114–115, 220 Revolting Subjects (Tyler) 295 revolution 1, 28, 46–48, 53–54, 64, 75, 108–109, 111–112, 114–116, 134–136, 140, 186, 226, 236–238, 240, 247, 282–283, 324, 346, 350–351, 386, 389, 398, 403–404, 407, 409, 412, 419–421; see also Industrial, October Reynolds, George W.M. 285–290 Reznicek, Matthew L. 10, 293–305 rhetorical education 189–191, 195, 199 Rhinoceros (Ionesco) 413Rischard, Mattius 8, 118–130, 411 Richter, Zara 7, 105–117 Riis, Jacob 8, 63, 65–67, 76, 120 Rione Luzzatti 77–82, 84–89 Ritchie, Joy 189–190 Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell) 222 Robinson, Lennox 240–244 robots 311, 372–384 robot complex 375–376, 380, 383 robotics 372–373, 377–378, 381–382 Roche, Anthony 240 romanticism 283, 376 Ronald, Kate 189–190 Room,The (Pinter) 152, 157–158 Rooney, Sally 265 Roraback, Erik S. 9, 398–411 Rose, Sonya O. 301 Rosumovi Umě lí Roboti see Reason’s Universal Robots Rubież (Tokarczuk) 432, 437–438, 442 Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, The (Bourdieu) 145–146 rural 8, 16, 18, 128, 132, 163, 241, 260, 296, 327, 336, 341, 364, 366, 435 Rymer, James Malcolm 284–289 Said, Edward 120, 147, 335, 355 Sandburg, Carl 6 satire 92, 109, 133, 155, 279, 416

453

Index Saunders, Mykaela 24 Saussy, Haun 27–28 savage stereotype 198 Savage, Gail 257 Savage, Michael 148 Savage, Mike 148 Sayad, Abdelmalek 146–147, 149–152, 154–155, 157 scholars 5, 13, 27–32, 34–36, 51, 75, 78, 84, 129, 131, 176, 187, 190, 200, 233, 238, 243, 260, 281, 289–290, 324–328, 337, 346, 396 scholarship 6, 27, 105, 112, 119, 155, 176, 221, 224, 228, 265, 267, 290, 322, 335, 348 science fiction: black 311–313; Chinese 51–54, 58; Western 52, 56; women’s 312 scientific sociology 360, 370 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats) 417 self 29, 43, 115, 259, 262, 323–324, 326, 367, 374, 376–377, 384, 391, 409 servitude 240, 373–374, 377, 379–384, 404 sexuality 15, 21, 122, 176, 178, 183–184, 236, 255, 345, 391, 417; see also intersectionality Shaftesbury, Earl of 303 Shaughraun,The (Boucicault) 244 Shelley, Mary 293, 295, 375–376 Shetani’s Sister (Beck) 122 “Shobies’ Story, The” (Le Guin) 316 Shōgun: A Novel of Japan 421 Sieburth, Richard 362 signifyin(g) 119–120, 122 Sihra, Melissa 233, 240 silence 15, 20, 46, 73, 84, 89, 116, 132, 147, 184, 189–199, 253, 324, 325, 336–337, 342, 369, 419–420 “Silent Men, The” (Camus) 413, 418 Simmel, Georg 2–4, 9, 361–362, 365, 367 simulacrum 298, 322, 326–328, 330–332 Sinclair, Upton 6, 120, 422 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 6, 9, 359–363, 365–368, 370 Sister Souljah 119, 121–122, 126–129 Sivanandan, Ambavalaner 346, 350, 352–353, 355 slavery 123, 154, 191, 193, 309–312, 314–319, 372, 374, 376, 379, 382–383, 388, 399 slow violence 59–60 slums 40, 65, 67–69, 76, 134, 150, 226, 229, 259, 265–266, 301, 355 Smiley, Jane 103 Smith, Adam 42, 303 Smith, Ali 247 Smith, Helen R. 290 Smith, Paul 261 Smith, Zadie 278 Snyder, Gary 105–111, 114–116 social abjection 10, 295–296; see also Tyler social class concept 426–430, 440; see also Bourdieu social class metaholon see metaholon Social Class Metaholon-Based Literature Analysis (Social Class MBLA) 426 social: Darwinism 58, 359; distance 333, 424; mobility 14, 158, 189, 199, 220, 241, 244–245, 257, 333, 336, 339, 341, 344; pretension 97;

relationships 126, 202, 373; space 8, 63–64, 66, 68, 71; stratification 53, 58, 345–346, 355, 418, 421 sociality 121, 398 society: American 52, 310, 316–317, 416; British 145, 147, 154–155, 158, 345, 347, 349, 351, 354, 356, 416; Chinese 34, 37, 58; class 150, 402; classless 402, 416, 420, 424; English 147, 257, 337, 342, 424; human 52, 413, 415, 418; Igbo 193–196;Victorian 91, 95–96, 98, 103; Western 108, 272 sociology 1, 3, 107, 118, 360, 366, 370, 427; see also Bourdieu, Chicago School solidarity 4, 13–14, 22, 25, 39–40, 43–46, 48, 79, 177, 179–180, 202, 211, 238–239, 269, 273, 276– 277, 284, 305, 321, 349, 365, 367, 387, 418–419, 421, 424Solomon, William 8, 131–144 Song Dynasty 29–31 songbook 114–115, 283 songs 18, 44–45, 106, 112–116, 134, 143, 151, 156, 176–177, 184, 229, 237, 263, 364 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence) 220, 224 Southern drama 31 Southern Italy 78 spatiality 8, 64, 128, 131 spectacle 42, 69–70, 80, 87, 89, 122–123, 145–146, 151, 252, 363, 366–367, 370, 387, 402, 407–409 Spencer, Herbert 58, 359–360, 364, 368, 414 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 9, 120, 189, 191, 199–200, 352 Star Light, Star Bright (Ellin) 163–164, 166, 168 status 14, 16, 18, 22–23, 32, 34, 36, 43, 55, 58, 72, 75, 77, 86, 119, 141, 155, 172, 189, 191–192, 199–200, 209, 220, 241, 243–244, 248–254, 260–261, 266, 270, 277, 283–285, 287, 295–296, 298–299, 301, 309–310, 312, 317, 321, 323, 325, 327, 353, 355, 362, 364, 366, 379, 386, 403–405, 407, 414, 418, 421–422, 424, 434, 436, 438, 439, 441–442; see also Bourdieu Stephens, James 259, 262, 266–267 Stephenson, Carol 275 stereotypes 7, 9, 19, 120, 183–184, 186, 189, 193, 195, 198–199, 202, 218, 236, 270, 277–279, 298, 342, 347, 349, 353, 356, 404 stigma 85, 256–257, 269–274, 276–277, 280, 300, 321, 342, 357 Story of the Western Wing,The (Wang) 36 “Storyteller, The” (Benjamin) 334 storytellers 18, 334, 337–338, 341 storytelling 15, 18, 81, 109, 132–133, 286, 333–336, 339, 341, 343 Strange, Julie-Marie 38–39, 45 Strauss, Leo 137–138 street: literature 118–119, 121, 126, 130; novels 118–119, 121–122; savage 19 String of Pearls,The (Rymer) 286–287, 289, 291 struggle: class 2, 89, 105, 115–116, 131, 282, 345, 347, 350–351, 387, 406–408; historical 105, 112; labor 133, 137 Strumpet City (Plunkett) 260–261, 264–267 subjecthood 373

454

Index subjectivity 105, 109, 116, 130, 189, 321–322, 328–331, 362, 367, 370, 375, 377, 380, 383, 386, 391; human 4, 372, 377, 383; robots 372–373 Sue, Eugene 286 Sunset Song (Gibbon) 224, 230 supernatural 124, 148, 290, 310, 317 surveillance 41 Switching Yard,The (Beatty) 178, 180, 186–187 Synge, John Millington 234–236, 242–243 synthesis 111, 115 Szczerek, Ziemowit 432

262, 265, 267, 288, 300, 333, 360–363, 365, 367, 370, 415; space 66–68, 80, 118–119, 122, 126, 129 urbanism 359 urbanization 65, 118, 129, 335–336, 341 Ursule Mirouët (Balzac) 399, 401–402, 409 Uses of Literacy,The (Hoggart) 273 Utopia 52, 135, 312, 320, 385, 388, 391–392, 396; anti- 396

Tales of Fashionable Life (Edgeworth) 295 Tang Dynasty 29 telescopic philanthropy 92–93, 101 tenements 63, 65–67, 70–72, 76, 300 Testaments,The (Atwood) 394 text specific holon 440; see also Will text specific social class holon 431–432, 435–436, 438, 439–443; Will them and us 273, 275–276, 280; see also Hoggart Theory of the Leisure Class,The (Veblen) 366, 413, 421 “Thinking Materialism” (Erik S. Roraback) 402–403 Thirties, The 141, 412 Thomas, Gwyn 228 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud) 413 Time Machine,The (Wells) 57–58 To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 224 Tokarczuk, Olga 432, 441 Tokugawa Shōgunate 416, 420–421 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel 281, 291 Tom-All-Alone’s 93–95 tragedy 6, 91, 139, 192, 227, 498, 405, 408 transnational 38, 209, 218, 334, 342, 415; aesthetic 334, 342–343 transportation 46, 286, 312, 335–336, 342–343, 364–365, 435, 440 travel writing 8, 207, 218 Trotter, Mary 233 Trump, Donald 165, 173–175, 313–314, 318 Trumpism 313 Tubman, Harriet 312–313, 316–319 Twain, Mark 9, 412–417, 419, 424 Too Much Lip (Lucashenko) 21 Tyler, Imogen 10, 294–298, 300, 302, 304–305 Tyson, Lois 404–405 U.S.A.Trilogy,The (Dos Passos) 133, 143 Ugwu 9, 189–200 un-capital 9, 399–403, 406 unclass 400–403, 406 unequal power relationships 372–376, 383 Union Square (Halper) 133, 138, 141–143 unpower 400–403 upward mobility 4, 69, 72–75, 82, 191, 228, 236, 272, 274, 361, 413–414, 416, 421 “Uranium Flowers” (Yang) 51–61 urban 3, 8–9, 18, 58, 61, 63–64, 70, 78, 118–122, 126–130, 132, 138, 142, 163, 166, 240–241, 259,

Varney, the Vampyre (Rymer) 285, 289 Vaughan, Laura 302 Veblen, Thorstein 365–366, 412–413, 421 vernacular: architecture 118–120, 122, 124, 128–129; landscape 60 Very Old Money (Ellin) 163 Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, The (Goodlad) 334 Victorian: era 58, 91, 148, 283, 290; fiction 39, 44; literature 281, 287, 334; period 322; socialist 7, 38–39; see also society Voigtt Kampff Empathy Tests 379 Vonnegut, Kurt 1, 5 voyeur 192, 235, 266, 325, 327, 329, 368, 386 Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 248 Wain, John 148, 154–155, 347 Wald, Priscilla 364, 367–368, 370 Walker, Kath see Noonuccal, Oodgeroo Waste Tide (Chen) 58–59, 61 wasted humans 299, 302, 304 Watanabe, Nancy Ann 9, 412–425 Water Dancer,The (Coates) 309, 316, 319–320 Watt, James 413 Watts, Andrew 135 We Are Going (Walker) 15 wealth 8, 78, 82, 87, 92, 97–100, 121, 123, 128, 137, 145–146, 229, 233–234, 236–238, 240–242, 245, 266–267, 274, 289, 298, 300, 309–310, 314, 319, 322, 324, 330, 333, 341, 344, 360, 366, 370, 387, 401, 404–408, 410, 413–416, 433, 435, 439, 441 welfare state 149, 269, 274 Wellington, New Zealand 247, 370 Wells, H.G. 57–58, 386, 388–391 What Work Is (Levine) 177, 181, 187 When the Sleeper Wakes (Wells) 386, 388–389, 391 Whiteheaded Boy,The (Robinson) 240, 243–244 Wilde, Oscar 321–322, 324, 328–330, 332 Wilkin, Stanley 9, 145–159 Wilkinson, Ellen 220, 228–229 Will, Agnieszka M. 8, 426–444 Williams, Raymond 290, 354, 390–391 Willis, Paul 274 Wilson, Colin 46, 147–150, 152, 155–156, 346–347 Winnicott, D. W. 43 Wonham, Henry B. 416 Woolf,Virginia 10, 224, 321–322, 324, 330–332 work: domestic 14, 224, 310; ethic 184, 238, 421; sex 19, 23, 121, 265

455

Index working class: identity 182, 274–278; solidarity 269, 418, 421; studies 105, 107, 267; women poets 176, 181, 186; see also poetry working-class 4, 8, 9, 10, 13–25, 38–40, 42, 44, 48, 77–78, 80–84, 86, 89, 105–111, 115–116, 118, 122, 128, 129, 134, 145–147, 149, 154–155, 157, 163, 165–168, 171, 173, 176–187, 220–321, 241, 244–245, 253, 257, 259–267, 269–280, 281–291, 326, 334–336, 338–342, 344, 347, 349, 365, 385–387, 391, 395, 418, 421, 424 Xavier, Francis 421

Yang, Dantao 9, 51, 53–54, 57–61 Yeats, William Butler 9, 236,–237, 242–243, 245, 412–413, 417–418, 424 Yezierska, Anzia 8, 63, 71, 73–76 Yuan: drama 27, 30–31, 35; Dynasty 9, 27, 29–31, 34, 36

Žižek, Slavoj 105, 385, 396, 401, 403, 407 Zlotnick, Susan 301 Zola, Emile 126, 225, 235, 360, 398, 422

456