Feeling ‘Like a Work-Girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Face ◽  
Upper Middle Class

This essay argues that ‘The Garden Party’ confronts us with the uncanny intimacy and alienation created by class relations in the upper-middle-class household at the turn of the century. The consequences of protagonist Laura Sheridan’s desire and failure to transcend what she calls ‘absurd class distinctions’ (288) are well established in Mansfield criticism, and psychological readings of ‘The Garden Party’ often consider how the working class Other influences Laura’s developing subjectivity. In this essay, I draw upon similar psychological frameworks to examine how ‘The Garden Party’ deals with the idea of working-class selves – not just Others. I contend that, though it does not render the inner lives of its working-class characters, ‘The Garden Party’ still raises important questions about the selfhood of the Other, and the uncanny, sometimes abject, sense of the Other within one’s self.Through a series of uncanny parallels between middle and working-class life, ‘The Garden Party’ collapses the distance between Laura and the working class. As it does, it confronts us with questions about what it means to stare the working class Other in the face – as Laura stares into the swollen, grief-stricken face of Scott’s widow – and to realize that the Other is at the core of the self.

“Uncanny Domesticity” in Contemporary American Fiction: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (54) ◽  
pp. 94-105
Author(s):  
Jelena Šesnić
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Contemporary American Fiction ◽  
The Face

The argument contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction – in particular her two novels to date, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowlands (2013) – features a combination of the elements of homeliness and estrangement, domestic and foreign, ultimately, self and the other, that evokes the Freudian concept of the uncanny. Placing it in the context of the diasporic family dynamics, prevalent in Lahiri’s fiction, the uncanny effect may be seen to reside in the unspoken secrets and repressed content passed on from the first to the second generation and disturbing the neat acquisition of the trappings of middle-class domesticity. Drawing on recent models of the “geopolitical novel” (Irr), the “new immigrant fiction” (Koshy) and the “South Asian diasporic novel” (Grewal), the reading engages with the irruption of the unhomely into the domestic space, sustained by immigrant families in the face of local and global disturbances.

Profane Culture

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Willis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
The Self ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rock N Roll

A classic of British cultural studies, this book takes the reader into the worlds of two important 1960s youth cultures — the motor-bike boys and the hippies. The motor-bike boys were working-class motorcyclists who listened to the early rock 'n' roll of the late 1950s. In contrast, the hippies were middle-class drug users with long hair and a love of progressive music. Both groups were involved in an unequal but heroic fight to produce meaning and their own cultural forms in the face of a larger society dominated by the capitalist media and commercialism. They were pioneers of cultural experimentation, the self-construction of identity, and the curating of the self, which, in different ways, have become so widespread today. This book develops an important and still very contemporary theory and methodology for understanding the constructions of lived and popular culture. Its new preface discusses the ties between the cultural moment explored in the book and today.

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

The New Brazilian Mediascape

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eli Lee Carter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Internet Access ◽  
Web Series ◽  
Long Form ◽  
The Face ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Brazilian Identity

In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil imagines itself as a nation, especially within the context of an increasingly connected global mediascape. For more than half a century, South America’s largest over-the-air network, TV Globo, produced long-form melodramatic serials that cultivated the notion of the urban, upper-middle-class white Brazilian. Carter looks at how the expansion of internet access, the popularity of web series, the rise of independent production companies, and new legislation not only challenged TV Globo’s market domination but also began to change the face of Brazil’s growing audiovisual landscape. Combining sociohistorical, economic, and legal contextualization with close readings of audiovisual productions, Carter argues that a fragmented media has opened the door to new voices and narratives that represent a more diverse Brazilian identity.

The Law’s Betrayal

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Willford ◽  
S. Nagarajan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Important Class ◽  
Indian Community ◽  
Legal Decisions ◽  
Cultural Displacement ◽  
The One ◽  
Deep Sense

This chapter focuses on the professionals of the Tamil population. A cultural displacement, as experienced by the Indian middle class, has produced its own narrative that was subsequently hijacked by Malay “extremists.” This sense of betrayal among the Indian middle class is important because their narrative of victimization takes cohesive ideological shape in a form that disseminates to the working class through the work of activists, politicians, writers, NGOs, and lawyers. Through this, one sees an important class dialectic within the Indian community that is divisive, as well as signs that recent legal decisions and events have exacerbated a sense of insecurity. Ultimately, a deep sense of political betrayal within this elite class is producing nostalgia for a nonracialized Malaysia on the one hand, and a consolidation of Indianness on the other.

scholarly journals Leisure, Loafing, and Life as Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Petar Bagarić
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
The Self ◽  
Total Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Moment ◽  
Life Work

Although leisure and idleness are promoted as a panacea for the problems of postmodern man, everyday logic of postindustrial societies is still subjected to the logic of “total work”. Throughout modernism, the discourse of leisure allowed for a certain separation of the worker from the work regime. However, this discourse lost its function in postmodernism due to the contemporary erasure of boundaries between life, work, and the self. The disappearance of these boundaries, due to technological development and newer forms of work organization, is an important element on the basis of which the contemporary middle class gradually assumes the position of the former working class within the system. Thus, it can be concluded that the fundamental way in which the avoidance of the world of total work is possible today is not leisure, free, fulfilled, and meaningful time, but shallow loafing, a stolen free moment otherwise scheduled for work.

“The Workingman's Bible”: Robert Blatchford's Merrie England, Radical Literacy, and the Making of Debsian Socialism, 1895–1900

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. Martinek
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social System ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
Missionary Zeal ◽  
The People ◽  
Adequate Food

Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people.

Introduction: The Middle Class in Post-socialist Europe: Ethnographies of Its “Good Life”

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-440
Author(s):  
Magdalena Crăciun ◽  
Ștefan Lipan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Current Period ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Turmoil

In this special section, drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in Estonia, Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria between 2013 and 2017, we argue that in post-socialist Europe the notions of “middle class” and “good life” have become interchangeable. Related dialectically, each can be substituted for the other as a signifier of a field of aspirations and possibilities. In the current period of persistent economic crisis, deepening social inequality, and growing political turmoil, this interchangeability is a significant ideational conjunction, making it possible to declare middle-class aspirations inherently ethical and thus depoliticise them. Equally important, this interchangeability sustains the continuous idealisation of middle-classness in the face of accumulating frustrations, disappointments, and disillusionments among both the aspiring and the more established middle classes. Nevertheless, our interlocutors differ in their understanding of the kind of “good life” that middle-classness supports. Beyond individual horizons of expectations and socio-economic positions, these differences stem from their experience of recent economic and political crises and from their location at the more, and the less, prosperous local and global “margins.” These differences illustrate the fluidity of these signifiers, which unify an otherwise heterogeneous set of meanings, practices, and relationships.

scholarly journals Annie Kenney and the Politics of Class in the Women’s Social and Political Union

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Significant Support

Abstract This article argues that an analysis of Annie Kenney’s public representation and private relationships offers a new way of evaluating how class was understood, experienced, and negotiated within the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Annie Kenney was a well-known suffrage activist from Lancashire, usually described as the only working-class woman to achieve prominence in the organization. This article analyses how the WSPU initially made much of Annie Kenney’s social origins, attracting significant press attention. However, it also demonstrates that their assumption that she could effectively speak for all working-class women was problematic, since it assumed a homogeneity of working-class experience. As the WSPU shifted its focus to recruiting more middle-class women, it sought instead to celebrate Annie Kenney’s commitment to the cause. Ironically, she was often more effective in building relationships with wealthier women, forming substitute families that provided significant support and benefits. Yet though the depth of these relationships was extraordinary in the context of contemporary class relations, they remained exceptional rather than typical. This article thus develops the work of scholars including Sandra Stanley Holton, Sue Thomas, and Laura Schwartz, who have analysed how class fragmented and shaped the women’s movement. It demonstrates that the significance of class within the WSPU was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static and indicates both the potential for, and barriers to, meaningful and lasting cross-class collaboration.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document