Narratives of Class and Old/New Class of Narratives

• Published in: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 2008, Vol.4 (3)
• Main Author: Mays, Kelly J
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Archaeology; Autobiographical literature; Autobiographies; Bronte, Anne (1820-1849); Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855); Deep structure; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); Ethics; French literature; Genre; Narratives; Postcolonialism; Professionals; Upward mobility
• ISSN: 1556-7524

The ultimate result of Robbins’ omnivorously “impressionistic” approach is not an exhaustive history or genealogy of the genre (13), but rather an archaeology or anatomy of its deep structure, affective dimensions, and socio-political implications. For far from “peddling … the shopworn ideology of individual self-reliance” fundamental to contemporary anti-statism, that story in fact “teach[es] us” how “to think about” and to desire “the common good” (2), effectively doing the affective and conceptual spadework — or “cultural-political labor” — needed to make and sustain modern social democracy as “the personally wished-for project of a multitude of protocitizens” (xiv). The complex emotional charge of these patron-client relationships, moreover, suggests the ways in which these stories record and enable “a re-channeling of risky and ethically unpredictable desires, erotic and otherwise” — away from heterosexual bonding and the family toward the looser, non-procreative, if “still compromised[ly] … hierarch[ical]” bonds characteristic of both a modern citizenry and the professions and institutions that serve it (242). Noting how a text such as Silence of the Lambs represents the Third World as the place where “the contradictions of the welfare state can be exported” (9), for example, Robbins also devotes his conclusion to what can only problematically be called postcolonial upward mobility narratives (Robbins himself wisely never resorts to this label): Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (2003); Lorraine Adams’ Harbor (2004); Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990); the memoir of Gulf War veteran Debra Dickerson, An American Story (2000); and Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).