Right yes thanks for this insightful comment Jenn. This rings very true when I reflect on my own experiences as well. I think part of my middle-school and high-school attraction to middle-class white women involved factors very similar to the ones you’ve mentioned: a lightness of mannerism, more social confidence and situatedness, their family dinner tables were lively and fun, more likely to read books for fun, their parents actually had friends, etc...
It makes sense that these deep middle class manners take a generation or more to settle in. Similar to this “Room of One’s Own” analysis you’re giving on women writers, I think about Proust’s analysis of Jews in France. Swann, the Verdurins, the narrator himself, they are all the grandchildren of Jewish stockbrokers or traders, and it takes them more than a lifetime to bury this fact and successfully join the social circles of, absorb the mores of, and ultimately supplant the older aristocratic French families like the Guermantes. Cultivating the appropriate lack of baggage and grievance takes generational time.
Right yes thanks for this insightful comment Jenn. This rings very true when I reflect on my own experiences as well. I think part of my middle-school and high-school attraction to middle-class white women involved factors very similar to the ones you’ve mentioned: a lightness of mannerism, more social confidence and situatedness, their family dinner tables were lively and fun, more likely to read books for fun, their parents actually had friends, etc...
It makes sense that these deep middle class manners take a generation or more to settle in. Similar to this “Room of One’s Own” analysis you’re giving on women writers, I think about Proust’s analysis of Jews in France. Swann, the Verdurins, the narrator himself, they are all the grandchildren of Jewish stockbrokers or traders, and it takes them more than a lifetime to bury this fact and successfully join the social circles of, absorb the mores of, and ultimately supplant the older aristocratic French families like the Guermantes. Cultivating the appropriate lack of baggage and grievance takes generational time.