Tag: social class

Oliver Twist Syndrome

Y’ know how the point in Oliver Twist is that working class people are just as good as posh ones (sorta) but in order to make Oliver sympathetic Dickens gave him a posh background and most importantly gave him a posh accent and wrote his speech in a posh dialect?

It’s interesting to me how working class people are only sympathetic, are only relatable, are only given cultural space when they can speak bourgeoisie.

Y’ Know What Really Fucks Me Up

Seeing some of my comrades who are from lumpen prole/prole backgrounds be SO fucking bright and having had ZERO access to education (the lucky ones have and the difference it makes to like… being able to pass and institutional access and shit– damn that’s a thing)

Like they’re smart, and they’re curious and they soak up information like a sponge and analyze it with such intelligence and just… they give a fuck, they’re intellectually engaged, and like there are just these gigantic gaps in informational and educational access… and it’s just so fucked up.

Like I know so many fuckin’ bougie prep school kids who were utterly intellectually lazy, gave not one single shit about immense amount of culture and information at their finger tips and like laughed at people who did care, and like the fucking best and brightest are fucking working cashier jobs and don’t even know how to find academic articles let alone being able to afford access to them while shitty little whoopit is getting drunk with his gross startup bros.

And it’s just like on top of everything it’s so fucking unfair.

In This Romance Novel The Bourgeois Hero Is Lectured By Two Proletarian Women On His Abandonment of His Parents Money (without redistributing it, which is bougie as fuck)

but also is ultimately a fantasy about being rescued from the proletariat by a bourgeois man, and given respectable status.

I suspect this mythology combined with the idea of the slut (something proletarian women are stigmatized as being) being the kind of woman you don’t marry, allows bourgeois men sexual access to proletarian women but precludes the possibility of social mobility through marriage.

IDK just a thought.

They also often serve as morality tales about the importance of maintaining the performance of respectability and propriety, but also often disseminate certain elements of proletarian culture and morality.