Abstract
For the clever girls of the 1950s and 1960s, getting to university and escaping their origins is the route to upward mobility. This chapter considers novels by Andrea Newman, Margaret Drabble and Barbara Trapido. The protagonists in Drabble’s and Trapido’s work seek a new, enabling family that will be the conduit to a more rewarding life. Employing the work of Steph Lawler on narratives of women’s upward mobility and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus, Chap. 2 examines how the protagonists supplement their educational capital with the social and cultural capital of their new families; how they struggle both to understand and to enact the processes of social mobility; and how their habitus is challenged. Though the fiction gestures towards some resolution with origins, the new social position is hard won and any slippage back has to be guarded against.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephan Collini , ‘Whisky Out of Teacups’, London Review of Books Vol. 37, No. 4, February 19, 2015, 14.
- 2.
Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden (1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969); Barbara Trapido , Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982; London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 2; Andrea Newman, A Share of the World (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). NB Trapido was born in South Africa but emigrated to the UK in 1963 and all her work was written here.
- 3.
Carolyn Steedman , Landscape For A Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1986), 50.
- 4.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1984; London: Routledge, 1986a), 6.
- 5.
Andrea Newman, The Cage (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). Tessa Hadley’s protagonist of the 1970s, Stella, is in the same predicament. Finding herself pregnant after having sex only twice, she mocks her supposed ‘cleverness’ and gives up her hopes of university. See Clever Girl (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013).
- 6.
‘Dip. Ed.’ is short for ‘Diploma in Education’, a one year full-time or two year part-time, post-graduate course.
- 7.
Mike Savage et al., Social Class in the 21st Century (Milton Keynes: Penguin, 2015), 50.
- 8.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 261.
- 9.
Loïc Wacquant , ‘Habitus’, in International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski (London: Routledge, 2004), 316.
- 10.
Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalik Sayad, ‘Colonial Rule and Cultural Sabir’, Ethnography Vol. 5, No. 4, (2004): 471–2.
- 11.
A.S. Byatt, Still Life (1985; London: Vintage, 1995), 26.
- 12.
Adrienne Rich , Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976; New York: Bantam Book, 1977), 237. The term ‘matrophobia’ was originally coined by Lynn Sukenick.
- 13.
A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 126.
- 14.
The verbal play here is, of course, with the washing powder, Persil.
- 15.
For discussion of different forms of cultural capital—objectified, embodied and institutionalised, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986b).
- 16.
Luce Irigaray , ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981).
- 17.
Elizabeth Grosz , Sexual Subversions (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 121.
- 18.
Jacqueline Rose , ‘Mothers’, London Review of Books Vol. 36, No. 12, June 19, 2014, 22.
- 19.
Patricia Beer, ‘The Lost Woman’, in Linda France (ed.), Sixty Women Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 1993), 52–3.
- 20.
Sigmund Freud , ‘Family Romances’ (1909), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 1X, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959).
- 21.
Drabble’s title is from John M. Neale’s English translation (1858) of a twelfth-century poem by the monk, Bernard of Cluny.
- 22.
Steph Lawler , ‘“Getting Out and Getting Away”: Women’s Narratives of Class Mobility’, Feminist Review No. 63 (Autumn 1999): 9. See also Lawler , Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects (London: Routledge, 2000) where she extends the material of this essay to cover both the mothers’ stories and the daughters’ stories.
- 23.
Steph Lawler , ‘Escape and Escapism: Representing Working-Class Women’, in Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, ed. Sally R. Munt (London: Cassell, 2000), 122.
- 24.
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003; London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 50.
- 25.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 68.
- 26.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop)’, in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 127.
- 27.
Lorna Sage , Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1992), 95.
- 28.
Diane Reay , Gill Crozier and John Clayton, ‘“Strangers in Paradise”? Working-class Students in Elite Universities’, Sociology Vol. 46, No. 3 (2009): 1112.
- 29.
E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 58.
- 30.
Note how the class significance of ‘mess’ features in Muriel Spark’s satiric short story, ‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’ (1958). Lorna turns down a place at Grammar School on the grounds that the Secondary Modern School was newer and, hence, more ‘hygienic’. Her subsequent life experience confirms her horror of ‘mess’. See The Complete Short Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 242–8.
- 31.
The quotes are, respectively, from: Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 56; Bourdieu, ‘Habitus’, in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2005), 45; Bourdieu, ‘The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop)’, 131.
- 32.
Paul Sweetman, ‘Twenty-first Century Dis-ease? Habitual Reflexivity or the Reflexive Habitus’, The Sociological Review Vol. 51, No. 4 (November 2003).
- 33.
John Friedmann, ‘Placemaking as Project? Habitus and Migration in Transnational Cities’ (299–316), in Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (ed.), op. cit., 302.
- 34.
Margaret Drabble, ‘Women Writers as an Unprotected Species’ in Writing: A Woman’s Business: Women, Writing and the Marketplace, ed. Judy Simons and Kate Fulbrook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 163–4; Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir (London: Virago Press, 1986), 28.
- 35.
Valerie Hey , ‘Joining the Club? Academia and Working-Class Feminists’, Gender and Education Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sept., 2003): 320.
- 36.
Clare Hanson , Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (Abingdon: Routledge 2013), 33.
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———. 2000a. Escape and Escapism: Representing Working-Class Women. In Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change, ed. Sally R. Munt, 113–128. London: Cassell.
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Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Habitus. In International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski, 315–319. London: Routledge.
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Eagleton, M. (2018). Escaping Origins. In: Clever Girls and the Literature of Women's Upward Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71961-0_2
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