Read an Excerpt
Class Fictions
Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890â"1945
By Pamela Fox Duke University Press
Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8293-5
CHAPTER 1
Rehabilitating Working-Class Cultural and Literary History: The Critical Agenda
We may have serious doubts about the quality of working-class life today, and especially about the speed with which it may seem to deteriorate. But some of the more debilitating invitations have been successful only because they have been able to appeal to established attitudes which were not wholly admirable; and though the contemporary ills which particularly strike an observer from outside certainly exist, their effects are not always as considerable as a diagnosis from outside would suggest, if only because working-class people still possess some older and inner resistances.—Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)
This chapter lays the groundwork for later discussions of individual literary texts by surveying the criteria by which a variety of cultural theorists classify oppositional strategies or activities employed by the British working class during its most striking, if erratic, ascendancy as a labor "movement." As suggested earlier, the CCCS model of resistance has been applied most zealously to post–World War II working-class culture in Britain in efforts to address the specter of the "affluent worker" popularized by Goldthorpe, Lockwood, and others in the mid-1960s. Dismay over the perceived breakdown in working-class cultural values caused by changes in the economy, the workplace, and urban planning from the late 1950s onward created the sensationalized portrait of a gutted working class suffering from a "loss of function" and anesthetized by the pleasures of the marketplace—a portrait which continued to influence analyses of class politics in the (very different) Thatcher era. But since the theory of a "new," "privatized" working class invokes the myth of an "old" working class, variations on that resistance model also inform the work of both labor historians and literary critics attempting to reconceptualize British working-class culture earlier in the century. They ask: did a single such class exist? How is resistance measured? Can we or should we link earlier political gains/defeats to earlier class cultural forms? The dispute is intriguing in its own right, yet I am finally less interested here in its current outcome than in the terms of analysis used.
The first part of this chapter addresses historical scholarship, which largely studies methods of resistance developed by workers in their daily cultural life. Part 2 addresses literary criticism, which studies methods of resistance manifested in workers' writing. Both segments span decades, combining earlier and more contemporary perspectives. In fact, the discussion of literary history primarily traces the antecedents of current Marxist criticism by detailing the literary standards originally devised for working-class writing through the confluences of working-class and middle-class interests. My intent is to demonstrate the ways in which a thematic of "decline" continues to be preserved within the commentary as a whole, despite some objections to the contrary, and results in the impulse to rehabilitate the status of working-class culture. Whether pinpointing women, music hall entertainment, or literary realism as potentially damning forces of cultural reproduction, these studies assume that susceptibility to dominant ideological norms signals an embarrassing defeat of working-class aims which requires remedying or rewriting.
Historians and contemporary literary critics, however, face different "data" and hence initially arrive at different conclusions: for historians, the years 1890 to 1945 tend to verify a tradition of militancy, tempered by conservative trends; for literary critics, they tend to verify a tradition of conservatism, tempered by a certain kind of militant content. In the end, it is the literary arena which proves the most advantageous to the documentation of working-class revolt. Historians clearly can cite more entrenched, institutional forms of resistance such as the General Strike and the growth of the Labour party (culminating in the 1945 election victory), along with the solidification of working-class culture itself. Yet these are ultimately imperiled examples—they have, according to one line of thinking, failed to create lasting structural change. They proved no match for the postwar transformation in the material conditions of existence which restructured both the public and private spheres of working-class lives. In contrast, novels like Means-Test Man and Love on the Dole, while seemingly conformist, can be marshalled as evidence of cultural intervention with demonstrable impact. Read against the grain, they can be shown to defy the strictures of the realist novel and can thus serve as examples of a distinct class cultural form. Both the historical and literary arenas, then, finally validate, as well as reject, a past of working-class agency.
I. Historicism
Despite E. R Thompson's groundbreaking work in the field at large, much historical scholarship examining the first half of the twentieth century tends to separate the study of politics from the study of culture, measuring working-class radicalism by researching either the masses' relation to the array of Marxist and Labour parties—together with their collective forms of direct, public action—or their more localized community networks, activities, and household practices/ relations. Since the argument surrounding Britain's "failed" working-class "tradition" typically hinges upon the checkered history of the Labour party, and all that history has come to signify, it is not surprising that such a separation has occurred, nor that historians have until recently accentuated the former. Studies of this bent attempt to determine Labour's ability to represent the working class authentically: Was it led by an elite or fueled by mass participation? And in the end, they aim to evaluate the impact of its reformist agenda: Has it (re)produced a passive, complacent class of workers?
The most recent trend has moved away from such a monolithic approach and has attempted to recognize the variety of protest strategies and vehicles devised by various members of the working class during this period. Often, however, when failing to lead to explicit studies of working-class "culture(s)," the work continues to focus on mass political movements, and hence, mass forms of resistance. Thus, a project such as Stuart Maclntyre's A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917—1933 (1980), which strives to be sensitive to the "untidiness" and "eclecticism" of working-class culture and ideology (3), invariably centers on fluctuating membership rolls in Marxist organizations and a decline in working-class intellectual leadership in order to mark out his sense of a fledgling, "organic" militant strain within various working-class communities scattered throughout the north, the south, and Wales. Maclntyre's vision of resistance cannot accommodate more individual, momentary interactions with capitalist ideology. I will turn, therefore, to several examples of more culturally-oriented historical approaches which represent a range of contemporary opinion. Some, like Gareth Stedman Jones and James Cronin, operate in official capacity as historians; others, such as Robert Roberts and Richard Hoggart, are male intellectuals who are themselves a product of working-class culture and emphasize personal history in their writing. As "insiders" with varying degrees of historical perspective, they produce their own overdetermined readings of the past. But while they offer conflicting assessments, they share a common concern with working-class embourgeoisement.
Working-Class Conservatism
Gareth Stedman Jones's provocative analysis of late Victorian class politics has established one classic mode of interpretation. In his 1974 essay, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class," Jones tries to puzzle out what he perceives as the marked decline of class consciousness among urban working people by the Edwardian era. As his title suggests, he posits and traces the emergence of a working-class culture distinctly different from that laid out in E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. Following Thompson's lead, Jones operates with an assumed correlation between class politics and class culture. He argues, however, that a "new pattern" of working-class culture emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century which focused on leisure and pleasure rather than radical trade union organization and political discussion. Because it was no longer a "work-centered" culture, he reasons, its revolutionary dimensions and political effectivity all but disappeared. It became "conservative and defensive," rather than "threatening or subversive" (215), overrun by the pub and the racetrack.
Though the essay in its original form did not contribute to the "affluent worker" debate, it does operate with similar assumptions (and as a reprint in his book Languages of Class, directly precedes the chapter entitled "Why is the Labour Party in a Mess?"). Jones clearly seeks to complicate the evolving history of the British working class and, in the process, rejects its simplistic symbolic function— what he calls the "social democratic mythology of Labour" in its "golden age" (Languages of Class 243; 239). But his analysis of class cultural "decline" validates the same restrictive vision of the political arena found in more orthodox historical accounts and employs a surprisingly familiar, conventional notion of resistance. Drawing upon Charles Booth's Life and Labour series of the 1890s, Jones concedes that this evolving class culture to a degree successfully resisted middle-class intervention and guidance. He describes at length the largely failed reform efforts conducted by Christian missionaries, temperance workers, and philanthropic societies to "civilize" and train the heathenish masses, arguing that any transformation in the culture primarily stemmed from "concern to demonstrate self-respect" (199) rather than religious "inspiration." Yet, in the end, these vestiges of revolt are robbed of stature: they illustrate a working class "impervious" to, but not "combative" with, dominant culture (215). It is his causal analysis that most successfully exposes the imposition of his own authentic terms of subversion: Jones first points to the erosion of an earlier artisan culture, which had provided political leadership and control over the work process, as the central problem; he next cites the growing importance of family life, resulting from reduced work hours and suburban migration, as a secondary marker of conservatism. Both are problematic examples. The first overestimates the power of that working-class sector and neglects its elitist relationship to others; the second, while accurately hinting at the fragmentation of social space that began to occur, too easily dismisses the appeal of a privatized existence and ignores the sexual, as well as class, politics pervading that sphere (for women, the home was hardly a "depoliticized haven" 220).
But Jones's greatest shortcoming, it seems to me, is his failure to comprehend the complexity of this new "culture of consolation" which did, unarguably, exist and which manifested itself most dramatically in leisure practices (though he detects its presence in the "new unionism"). Noting that working-class demands had shifted from "power to welfare" (238) in the post-1870 period, he dwells upon the weakness, rather than desperation, responsible for the growing acceptance of capitalism as an economic/social system. His discussion of late '8os/early '90s London music-hall culture encapsulates his overall attitude. Echoing Martha Vicinus's objections in The Industrial Muse, Jones asserts that music-hall entertainment was at once escapist and realistic: it often captured the unjustness of the workers' lot but shied away from radical solutions, thereby naturalizing class difference. Music-hall symbolized both "the small pleasures of working-class life—a glass of 'glorious English beer', a hearty meal of 'boiled beef and carrots', a day by the seaside, Derby Day and the excitements and tribulations of betting" (225), and its lasting constrictions. As Jones summarizes one music-hall song, "Class is a life sentence, as final as any caste system" (228). But he simply identifies and critiques, rather than probes, this "fatalistic" view of class divisions, linking it solely with comic put-downs of socialism and a "mood of bombastic jingoism" (229). His reluctance to rethink the multiple motivations and effects of working-class popular culture—particularly its connection to the desire for pleasure—undermines the force of his entire decline thesis.
Robert Roberts's The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (1971), which has itself achieved a quasi-"classic" status among cultural historians, works in tandem with Jones's perspective by offering a "realistic" account of working-class life in one particular community. His study picks up working-class culture where Jones's tapers off, centering on the Edwardian period through World War I. Looking back on his memories of this period, Roberts (like Carolyn Steedman) seeks to counter the faded blissful reminiscences found in autobiographical works spurred by the late 1960s explosion of radical labor history, as well as celebratory accounts of class agency found in historical studies proper, such as Thompson's. Contesting the image of one cohesive working class, he focuses not on its multiple identities and positions but on its inner divisions and own stratification—what he calls the "English proletarian caste system" (1).
Though Roberts touches on a range of issues and characteristics, his anthem is working-class passivity: "Ignorant, unorganized, schooled in humility, they had neither the wit nor the will to revolt" (148). He gleefully recalls the failure of Marxist and socialist recruiting in his neighborhood which appealed, he surmises, to a nonexistent class "consciousness." According to Roberts, class division was perceived by his family and neighbors as a "natural law," a struggle against "life" rather than an oppressive employer; "fear," not rebellion, was the "leitmotif of their lives" (66). Excess energy was channeled into exiting, rather than preserving, their class community, be it through momentary escape at the cinema or an actual move to a different, better neighborhood. The Classic Slum especially targets this latter preoccupation, detailing a vast and intricate social "rating" network based almost entirely on appearance: house, clothes, head-ware, shoes, speech, pawn shop items. It returns again and again to the working-class obsession with objects, the drive for acquisition and importance of display. These outer signs reflect the skilled/unskilled labor divide and in turn suggest distinct moral codes which finally instigate what he terms a "chain reaction of shame" (30) running throughout the community.
Roberts largely offers disdain for, rather than analysis of, the social relations he describes. He is more concerned with working class people's comically crude notions of status—and their inability to ever reach a middle-class level—than with the complexity of their desires. And as with subsequent commentators, he identifies the accompanying "culture of consumption" specifically with women. While gossip and envy ("the besetting sin") mark men and women alike in Roberts's version of this class culture, both are seen as primarily feminine attributes. He specifically trivializes the elderly "matriarchs" of the neighborhood: they are "guardians, but not creators, of the group conscience" who form an "ultra conservative bloc," clinging to and upholding rigid material standards of "respectability" (26-27). It is only a transformation in the work sphere itself, he argues—the switch to mass production and increasing "dilution" of labor during World War I—that converts intra-class competition into solidarity, a nascent form of class-based consciousness. In this account, the culture thus remains masculine only in its brutality and rawness; its conformist aspirations are feminized.
The Classic Slum, however, is most interesting when it is at its most sensational. On the one hand, Roberts is simply attempting to make working-class history more authentic by exposing its roots of shame and divisiveness. His unflattering portrait serves as a sobering reminder of the internal "drama of class" However, unlike Steedman, a cultural critic with a similar intent, he never considers himself an actual member of the masses he describes. Roberts often reminds the reader that his family owned a small "corner shop" and was in a position to suffer the hostility of others (as well as to exercise its own notions of class superiority). That portrait thus has a different effect. Invested in distancing himself from the rest, his extreme resistance to the notion of working-class rebellion is fraught with tension. Emphasis on the lower strata's vulgarity and complicity with dominant culture provides him primarily with material for their critique, rather than for the historians who have "misread" working-class militancy. Roberts' denial of radical class consciousness, like others' denial of working-class passivity, seems suspiciously over zealous. As in the actual fiction produced within this amalgam of class cultures, it functions like an exposed nerve to which we must pay equal, if not more attention.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Class Fictions by Pamela Fox. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
