BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Class and identification

  
 
Cat Chant
10:22 / 10.03.06
For reasons which will not become clear,* I am reading And God Created the Au Pair by Benedicte Newland and Pascale Smets. It's about the day-to-day life of two upper-class mothers, told in emails. The title has given me lots of thoughts about my Theory of Heterosexual Triangularity, but it was this bit I wanted to talk about (and this thread's for you, Flyboy):

Charlotte, the mother of Maddie, is discussing Maddie's upcoming birthday. Here are some extracts.

I'm having a little dressing table with fairy lights round the mirror made for her. Have been very crafty all week threading brightly coloured love beads onto florist wire, to make flowers to go round light. Looks lovely so far but have loads more to do & v time-consuming.

I have abandoned all pretence of looking after children & doing housework in favour of getting ready for Maddie's birthday party this w/e... in between making sodding wire flowers (why did I ever start?) I've been sewing 2 royal dresses and a prince's outfit for Hugh... Am now on the home run, making drawstring satin party bags while bewildered Ana Frid has been instructed to substitute ironing with cutting out golden crowns from cardboard for children to decorate with stick-on jewels when they arrive.

Maddie absolutely thrilled with her dressing table... The flowers looked lovely, until we turned the fairy lights on. Unfortunately as I am not a great inventor in ilk of James Dyson had not foreseen that when the lights are left on for more than a few minutes at a time the heat from the bulbs (which is v efficiently conducted via the central metal washers) melts all the glue holding the petals together... Came down to find... mixture of hot melting glue, florist wire & love beads dropping off metal washers onto the dressing-table top.

What struck me about this episode is that our sympathy and self-deprecating identification is evoked (unsuccessfully, in my case) almost entirely through very classed markers. Would it be possible to get sympathy for a mother who 'abandoned all pretence at looking after her children' in order to waste a huge amount of labour on procuring a birthday present which immediately falls apart? I suspect if the objects in the passages above were replaced with objects associated with a working-class aesthetic, the episode would be far more likely to signify the fecklessness and incompetence of the mother.

So, apart from just wanting to bitch about how annoying I find upper-class characters in books, this is a thread to talk about how class affects our identification in reading (maybe as a companion to the thread on gendered identification). I suppose there are two main questions here:

how are classed markers used by writers to (successfully or unsuccessfully) solicit the reader's sympathy/identification?

how do we, in practice, identify with/read writing which is strongly marked as classed? What examples are there of books which have turned people off - or on - specifically through class?

Just to kick off briefly (if people are interested, I can talk more about these), a couple of examples: I'm constantly alienated by the way Ruth Rendell shapes her dialogue with her audience through classed markers (for example, assuming a shared knowledge of Renaissance painting but slowing down to explain what ketchup is). I feel I'm being addressed specifically as a member of the upper-middle-classes. Which I suppose I am, but because my areas of knowledge and practice don't map onto Rendell's classed assumptions, that address is both noticeable and unsuccessful.

Melissa Lukashenko's book Steam Pigs, on the other hand, opens with a brief section about the experience of getting a car on hire-purchase which is just stunning, and which made me re-think the classedness of my own experience of money and possessions, moving the question away from discourses of 'fecklessness', thrift, etc and resituating it very economically and beautifully in terms of, well, class.

*Okay, this is the reason: I read books that annoy me when I'm depressed and/or stressed. They create just enough white noise in my brain to drug me through the stressful times.
 
 
Olulabelle
18:00 / 10.03.06
What a remarkably good idea.

I find any fiction writer who presupposes a knowledge of something fairly frustrating, but then I equally do not like having ketchup explained to me. I imagine there is a happy balance somewhere.

Deva, I was going to ask you if you find working class characters as annoying, but then I tried to think of a reference, and I thought I'd probably get it wrong. I had in my head Julie Burchill in particular but that might be because I find her supremely irritating. I'm sure someone will probably show me I've got it completely wrong and her characters are actually middle class people wanting to identify as working class. Or something.
 
 
neukoln
13:18 / 12.03.06
Would it be possible to get sympathy for a mother who 'abandoned all pretence at looking after her children' in order to waste a huge amount of labour on procuring a birthday present which immediately falls apart?

My feelings are that the critical element is the falling apart bit. If she'd sidelined her looking-after-children-commitments and had created something which worked gloriously, we as readers would have been encouraged to coo at how talented she is. Which evokes the 80's super-mum we despise.

The fact that she failed (and the concommitant humour it inspires) would appease the Middle Class reader (see, we are just like everyone else) and the non-Middle Class reader (see, they are just like everyone else). I think the failure element earns the reader's sympathy/empathy.

There is also (and I'm speaking as an ignorant childless person who reverts to stereotypes oh too often) the underlying belief that whatever the child is doing whilst the mother is gainfully employed making this gift, it will be Safe. We, as readers, don't need to worry about the child during those absent hours, because a mother who strings together beads will have the safety of her child taken care of. My feeling is that if the protagonist were not Middle Class then the absence of the child during this creative project would introduce an element of suspense.
 
 
Saturn's nod
07:04 / 13.03.06
I need to state that I haven't read the works in question, so perhaps this is coming from ridiculous ignorance. I wonder whether the class references in e.g. Ruth Rendell as mentioned are part of a fantasy call. It might be like in the novels about romances amongst titled families in the Regency, and the whole genre of 'lower class woman is discovered by upper class male and inducted into upper class society'.

The vast majority of readers would have no access to that world, but through the novels gain the delightful impression that if they were to enter it somehow, they would be acquainted with the cultural reference points. So the author is writing herself into the role of an inside source, smuggling out information to those waiting outside.

But perhaps the world she is showing exists only in her imagination, which adds another layer. Then, because the fantasy call is even more fake, is it then wishful social engineering - 'people who read my works might begin to honour my personal aspirations for culture and value'?
 
  
Add Your Reply