Honestly, it's enough to make you jump down the rabbit hole - not Rustin's thoughtful article, but this continuing English class war: the prejudices, and/or the perceived prejudices; in any case this whole never-ending and quite frankly Through-the-Looking-Glass English wish to categorise and pigeonhole, and (it seems) wilful blindness to the fact that few of us can truly claim dyed-in-the wool social status. Personally, coming from Wales, where the class system is historically less ingrained - and with ancestors closely related to each other but ranging from farm labourers and servants through shopkeepers to schoolteachers and chapel ministers - I find the whole thing quite confounding, and when I was a young person in England, pretty threatening (I didn't have any group to belong to, and felt subject to the sneers of them all!).
In the novel I've just finished, social mobility and the psychological effects of such categorisation are strong themes. Class is not the only thing confounding the protagonist, but when she is a Welsh child in England as I was, she wonders about herself and her sister:
What were they, she and Kathy? They were poor, but the rough boys were poorer, and those boys punished Josie and Kathy for being what they called them when they jeered: posh. So what were they? Poor girls or posh ones..? ... The girl who sat next to Josie in the big wooden desk, Gillian, was posher ... Josie had been for tea to her house in a leafy older suburb. There were plump furnishings and thick carpets ... They experienced themselves as strange ... The evening sun tipped away behind the house, tipping away the answers they didn’t ever have when they were asked to account for themselves.
6 comments:
As an American, this is always a fascinating topic for me. Americans equate class with money, and of course in England the two have nothing to do with each other in real life. But what really infuriates me are these talking heads who claim X or Y aren't appropriate topics for fiction. Fiction is about human beings, and anything that applies to them is appropriate to fiction, it seems to me. And class is one of the most fascinating subjects, as your latest work is clearly exploring. Jeez, these guys drive me nuts :-) Can't wait to read the latest Baines!
Yes, Sue, that's another point: that class means different things to different people!
Interesting - I noticed Penguin's Joe Pickering was tweeting about class last week, asking the fascinating and ever-so-slightly provocative question whether any work of US fiction has made the transatlantic trip with massive hype in the last 10 years that wasn't about the middle class.
I think class is an easy peg to hang social barriers on - something familiar and that's "always been there", which makes it seem somehow comfortable, when in actual fact the myriad glass ceilings we each spend our lives bashing our heads against are way more complex than that and, between individuals, often only a few bricks will be shared.
Yes, 'class' is used as a catch-all, and the whole issue of social barriers is a lot more complex than the use of it implies...
I'm certainly more aware of 'class' after studying at a university with a (largely deserved)reputation for attracting posh people! I do agree that it's very complex: my own family seems to straddle the boundary between working and lower middle class, but factors like income, aspirations and professions play a huge role in determining both one's own and other people's perceptions of class.
Good fiction is good fiction, regardless of the class of the characters. However,I can't say I've noticed a decline of the middle class in fiction - quite the opposite, in fact!
Interesting comment re your university, Hayley. But yes, in reality class is very complex, in contrast to certain simplistic perceptions.
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