Essays on Literature, Literary / Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy
Editor: Ollie O. Oviedo, Eastern New Mexico University
Assistant Editors: Royal Prentice, Harvey Stanbrough,
Eastern New Mexico University
"I Hate this Book": Middle-Class Virtues
and the Teaching of Multicultural Texts
Roberta Rosenberg
English Department
Christopher Newport University
Every year, I teach a course in "Multicultural Literature of the United States" to undergraduate and graduate students who
wish to become teachers in both public schools and colleges. This semester, however, I decided to include a new
novel—Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine—since it focused on the culture of the rural poor. We had just spent the
past seven weeks analyzing many different racial, ethnic and religious cultures, and I was pleased with my students' ability to
handle "difference" wherever it appeared in a literary text. For this reason, I was particularly surprised when a student
approached me and announced in front of her classmates: "I hate this book. When the course is over, I will give you this book
because I do not want to keep it in my library. And a lot of other students in this class agree."
The student's level of feeling was so strong, so obviously apparent in both her demeanor and her proclamation, that I knew I
was about to begin either the best or the worst class of the semester. But the question foremost in my mind was: "Why had
this novel elicited such a strong, negative reaction from otherwise open-minded students?1
From this rather provocative, and sometimes explosive, discussion, I learned a great deal about my students and their ability to
analyze class issues in literary texts. In this essay, I would like to analyze their reactions and then hypothesize about why class
antagonism may be a hidden and, therefore, unacknowledged impediment to multicultural understanding. Why was it possible
for many of my students to accept cultural disparity when it seemed to be a matter of race, ethnicity or religion, but not when it
was a matter of class? Was their previous open-mindedness just political correctness, or are class antagonisms more difficult
to identify and accept in an American society which theoretically views itself as "classless?"2 The more I explore these
questions, the more I am convinced that American middle-class assumptions and values should become a more prominent
topic for critical analysis within multicultural literature.
In order to analyze the effects of class on literary interpretation, the literature teacher needs to acknowledge the pervasive
nature of middle-class values, even among individuals who would not identify themselves as "middle-class." As Barbara
Ehrenreich notes in her book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989), the "ideas and assumptions [of the
middle class] are everywhere, and not the least in our own minds. Even those of us who come from very different social
settings often find it hard to distinguish middle-class views from what we think we ought to think" (5).
And what are those values that we believe we "ought" to have? Ehrenreich describes them as "self-discipline, a strong
superego, an ability to plan ahead to meet self-imposed goals" (50). Likewise, Richard Ohmann in his book The Politics of
Letters (1987) defines the middle-class virtues of the "professional-managerial class" as the "dream of autonomy . . .
originality, innovation, and individual personality" (92). Middle-class values include independence, rationality and the ability to
separate oneself from the group in order to become singularly successful. As historian Loren Baritz notes in The Good Life:
The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class (1989), successful middle-class people are foremost autonomous
rationalists: "if you had the right sort of technical or professional education and learned to live by your own rules without the
rituals that had punctuated life over millennia, life in contemporary America could seem sweet" (315).
If middle-class life is "sweet," progressive and empowering, then the "culture of poverty" as defined by the "experts" is
characterized by its "fatalism, helplessness, dependence and inferiority" (Ehrenreich 49). According to Barbara Ehrenreich,
many sociologists "infantilize" (48) the poor by suggesting that poor people exhibit a "peculiar psychopathology" which
precludes them from adulthood: "the poor person live[s] for the moment, unable to think ahead, to save or plan for the future .
. . trapped in the past, unable or unwilling to ‘grow up,’ as the middle class ha[s]" (50-l).
Indeed, if American culture views poverty as somehow pathological, then it is not surprising that the impoverished Beans of
Egypt, Maine are viewed by my students as immature adults, individuals who cannot or will not grow up and join independent
American society. Worse yet, the Beans who are members of the American "underclass," that part of contemporary society
which has separated permanently from the dream of middle-class upward mobility, are also feared by the middle-class.
Ehrenreich believes that American class antagonisms have actually escalated during the 80's and 90's as middle-class
perceptions of the poor degenerate further: "as the poor become dangerous—addicted, short-tempered, diseased—the
middle class withdraws still further from contact" (20).
Teachers of multicultural literature who acknowledge the pervasiveness and power of middle-class virtues and lower class
vices can begin to understand my students' aversion—if not hatred—of the impoverished Beans of Egypt, Maine. To
middle-class students who value originality, autonomy and success and, therefore, fear dependence and disorder, the Beans
are a frightening apparition of failure. Earlene, a middle-class first-person narrator in the novel, distances herself from the
Beans by viewing them as entirely "other," alien and animalistic. She speaks of a "BIG BEAN WOMAN" or "BIG BEAN
BABY" (5) and "look alike babies" (92) who are more animal than human. Roberta Bean's babies "hiss" (11) like snakes
while the Beans in general "breed like flies" (50). "Big and hunched like bears," (53) they are physically indistinguishable from
each other with their "fox color" (9) Bean eyes and "Cro-Magnon look" (65).
Earlene and her father also equate the Bean's poverty with immorality. The Beans are "uncivilized . . . PREDATORS" (3).
And, most importantly, their lack of humanity and morality is in some way linked to their substandard living conditions in the
trailer. Earlene tells the reader that her Daddy believes "what the Beans do inside their mobile home would make a grown man
cry" (50).
In fact, the Beans are easy targets for middle-class scorn; they are complacent, illiterate, unprogressive, undisciplined, unclean,
unambitious, often irrational, unwilling to sublimate desires for future interests, not punctual, or introspective or goal oriented or
autonomous; in short, chronically if not fatally, unsuccessful. And, possibly—worst sin of all—the one that defies middle-class
virtue at its core—they do not wish to ameliorate their situation. They refuse to believe in either the secular welfare state or its
religious equivalent, the Christian afterlife. Roberta Bean's father rejects Christ's promise at the Sermon on the Mount when he
tells his daughter that "The meek shall inherit a hole in the earth" (159).
The Beans even reject one of the American middle-class' most revered institutions—public education. Earlene describes Beal
as a student who "will just go on forever in fifth grade . . . eatin' rat sandwiches and gettin' bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER"
(66) without showing any real progress or advancement. Thus, Beal, Roberta and the other Beans lack three of the cardinal
middle-class virtues: consciousness, progress and property—and for this and well as other reasons, Earlene believes they will
"burn in hell" (238).
It should be pointed out, however, that Earlene's narrative voice is not the only perspective on the Beans. There is another
narrator—a third person, limited omniscient narrator—who has some compassion and understanding for the Beans and often
presents them in positive, heroic ways. However, this viewpoint is not shared by Earlene who has accepted, even after she
inexplicably marries into the Bean clan, her father's middle-class prejudices.
And yet, it is the voice of this compassionate, third person narrator, that my students do not hear when they read the novel.
My students disregard the third person narrator's description of Roberta Bean's loving babies and beautiful flowers (157).
They ignore the important role that Roberta Bean plays in saving Earlene from a life-threatening depression (162-3). In fact,
Roberta is one of the characters most disliked by my students who find her repulsive and threatening.
This point of view, however, is less puzzling if one analyzes Earlene's attitude towards Roberta because, in many respects, it
serves as a mirror for many of my student's own fears and anxieties. In the scene mentioned above, a depressed Earlene is in
the process of starving herself to death in a darkened bedroom. No one seems to be able to help her until Roberta Bean
walks into the room, eternally pregnant with her dress of blue clouds and corn flowers. She instructs Earlene to "come out and
get some sun" and tells her "we have things in common" (162). Earlene, who has slipped from the middle to the lower classes
by marrying Beal Bean, becomes completely irrational and shouts at Roberta: "Don't SAY that! Don't you EVER say that
again!" (162). It is at this point that we see the real basis for the antipathy between Earlene and Roberta. Earlene, like many
members of the American middle-class, regards Roberta with fear and consternation. She will not allow their similarities to be
articulated, even if it means she will die in her bedroom. Despite Roberta's rescue, Earlene feels no affection or gratitude
towards the woman who rescued her: "'I HATE Roberta,' Earlene almost sobs. 'Daddy says it's just a mattera time before the
health department shuts her down’" (165).
The third-person narrator, however, does not share Earlene's class prejudices and, in fact, satirizes several middle-class
characters, including March Goodspeed, Warren Olsen and the J. K. Smiths, city people who build a vacation home across
the road from the Beans. March Goodspeed, in particular, is the personification of middle-class virtue; the narrator describes
Goodspeed by noting: "you'd never have known he had been a child. His eyes show leadership, are fibrous as salad olives"
(96). Although Goodspeed is a highway engineer who, with his "asphalt-color necktie" (97) symbolizes Western, linear
progress, he, too, must be rescued by Roberta. Goodspeed can design highways but he, too, is ironically paralyzed in Egypt,
Maine where he must be rescued by the pagan Roberta who with her snake-like cables, jump starts his car battery.
All of the middle-class characters who inhabit Egypt, Maine are certainly cleaner, as well as more ambitious, socially
acceptable and progressive than their impoverished counterparts. However, there is something sinister about the arrival of the
J. K. Smiths, a wealthy, enfranchised city family who take up residence across the road from the Beans. Most significantly,
these newly established yuppies arrive on Thanksgiving with their "Mayflower" moving van full of furniture and the equipment
of bourgeois life.
When Beal decides to shoot out the windows of the Smith's new home, he reenacts, in class terms, the explosive, racial
antagonism between Native Americans and Europeans at the first moment of contact. Although my students could not or
would not empathize with Beal Bean, the narrator hints that his seemingly senseless act of violence has symbolic importance
and could be understood as a rational act of class struggle. However, my students, who found Beal too threatening, missed
the point. They were unable to explain why the Sheriff cries after killing the destructive Beal: "A cop is sobbin', cryin', a large
open mouth. Others just close their eyes" (212). The idea that the sheriff might sympathize with or share a sense of class
solidarity with Beal was not immediately apparent to middle-class students who disapprove of vandalism and refuse to view it
as a political act.
Since class issues are not always immediately apparent in American literature courses, it is important to make students more
class conscious when they read multicultural literature. Sometimes, what a student identifies as an issue of gender, race, region
or ethnicity, is more complex than any single analysis would suggest. For this reason, teachers of multicultural literature might
organize the course in what Paul Lauter terms a "comparatist" manner (9). Lauter argues for treating the literatures of America
as a "comparative discipline" because he believes that "the United States is a heterogeneous society whose cultures, while they
overlap in significant respects, also differ in critical ways" (9). In analyzing and separating class issues from race, gender or
ethnicity, we avoid creating "normative models" which, according to Lauter, "present variations from the mainstream as
abnormal, deviant, lesser, perhaps ultimately unimportant" (9).
For instance, class struggle plays a decisive role in other texts I analyze in my multicultural class including Lee Smith's Oral
History, Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Terry McMillan's Disappearing
Acts, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gary Soto's Small Faces. Although these literary works may first be thought of in
terms of their analyses of race, ethnicity, region or gender, it is important to identify the complex nature of "difference," the
ways in which multiple factors (gender and class, race and class) may contribute to an understanding of a character's situation.
Although I devote much attention to explaining Southern and regional cultures when I teach Lee Smith's Oral History—new
South vs. old South, etc.—the crucial problem of cultural misapprehension in the novel really involves the same class issues
found in The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Lee Smith asks the reader to decide who owns the "oral history" of Appalachia, the
entrepreneurial middle-class comprised of Debra and Al, Richard Burlage and Jennifer, or the historical subjects themselves.
Who speaks for Hoot Owl Holler: the intellectual bourgeoisie of the academy (Jennifer and her professor/lover Dr. Ripman);
Richard Burlage and the LSU Press which publishes Burlage's "memoirs"?
In this context, class struggle focuses on the contest for interpretive power over the memory of the past. Al wishes to make a
"killing" (291) in both Amway franchises and his new venture capital project, a theme park based on Hoot Owl Holler.
However, the reader wonders how a more intellectual and erudite project like LSU's publication of the Burlage diaries differs
from the more commercial theme park, if at all.
Both Jennifer and Richard Burlage, the middle-class "recorders" of the oral histories, seem to view the Appalachian people as
"primitives" (7, 110). In fact, Richard's superior, paternalistic attitudes towards his students in Hoot Owl Holler are quite
similar to my own students' attitude towards the Beans of Egypt, Maine. He feels disdain for his students who do not believe
in American progress and who "expect nothing more from life than the subsistence their parents have torn from these
mountains" (113). Even when Burlage contemplates marrying the impoverished Dorry Cantrell whom he loves, he admits that
"She is not of the same social class" (134) and acknowledges that such a disparity is an impediment to their union. Therefore,
Burlage's intellectual memoirs published by a university press seem as imperialistic as the capitalist theme park which purports
to give outsiders a view of Appalachia—neither middle-class enterprise can or should speak for the "ghosts" on Jennifer's tape
recorder.
Class antagonisms are also evident in the struggle for the remnants of the past in Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use." A
college-educated, newly enfranchised, middle-class daughter returns to the dusty shack where her mother and sister still reside
in order to plunder the house of artifacts of her humble beginnings. In terms of American success, Dee, the upwardly mobile
daughter, is superior to her rural mother and sister, Maggie. It is Dee who has the initiative, the drive to succeed in a racist
culture; it is Dee who believes that "no" is a word she does not have to accept. When Dee is unable to get the old quilts,
however, she is enraged. The quilts symbolize a past she wishes to coopt and use, much in the same way that Burlage and
Jennifer exploit their own histories. When Dee is frustrated, she strikes out against her family in the most class conscious
manner possible by telling them to "make something" of themselves: "it's really a new day for us," she lectures. "But from the
way you and Mama still live you'd never know it" (28). The tension between the newly enfranchised black middle-class and
the rural poor has never been as clearly or complexly drawn as it has been in Walker's short story. Dee is both admirable and
despicable, successful and lost—a most ambiguous contemporary portrait of Horatio Alger.
Likewise, class and race issues need to be defined when my multicultural class discusses Tayo's aunt and cousin in Leslie
Marmon Silko's Ceremony. We need to analyze the aunt's decision to reject Native American religious principles and schools
in order to provide her son with an upwardly-mobile education which will give him an advantage in the job market and remove
him from reservation life. Although this is an important issue in the Native American community, it is fundamentally a class
issue as well: in order to achieve middle-class success, characters from many racial and ethnic groups may have to assimilate
the culture of the dominant professional-managerial class. This choice is also crucial to women who wish to achieve higher
status by accepting the work ethic of the patriarchal elite.
For instance, in an effort to focus on gender and racial issues in Terry McMillan's Disappearing Acts, the teacher may forget
to analyze the class conflict between the middle-class woman and her working class lover, the two main characters in the
novel who serve as dual narrators. Likewise, several of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club also exhibit an attraction to
American bourgeois materialism which finds itself in conflict with the spiritual ideals of traditional Chinese culture.
An emphasis on class issues within the literary text would not exclude the analysis of other cultural differences or a discussion
of universal American problems and conflicts. Instead, class analysis would illuminate the complexities of the multicultural text
and its reactions on readers. This would be especially important for those of us who instruct future English teachers. In
addition to training them in literary analysis, we need to teach them how to assess their own assumptions and prejudices as
readers.
In The Politics of Letters, Richard Ohmann stresses the importance of asking students to examine their own presuppositions
and class consciousness. Ohmann believes that students "need to see their own responses as themselves social and historical,
not as unassailably individual, much less as objectively professional" (127). In a society which unconsciously views
"middle-class as the norm for mature, adult behavior," Ohmann asks the college literature teacher to "problematize" students'
responses to texts (127) by asking important questions about why we empathize with or reject certain characters, why some
characters are thought "worthy" of our sympathy and others, like Roberta Bean and the Bean family, are thought despicable.
Ohmann tells the literature professor to begin a discussion of the course syllabus by saying to one's students: "If you find
yourself hating a novel, take that as an invitation to learn something about yourself, as an historical being, with a class, a
gender, a race, a particular background" (127). This would seem like a lesson about difference, tolerance, and
self-understanding which we who teach multicultural literature also need to learn.
Notes
A shortened version of this paper will be presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication meeting in
Milwaukee, WI, March 1996.
1The students in my class come from many racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. However, Christopher Newport
University is primarily a commuter school in an urban, working-class region of Virginia. In addition, Tidewater, Virginia has
many military installations and a number of my students come from military families. The majority of the students are often the
first members of their working-class families to go to college. Furthermore, many of the students live in rural areas immediately
outside Newport News and have direct experience with the rural poor. Sometimes, members of their families have
experienced the sort of rural poverty that we see in Egypt, Maine. Although I grew up in a suburb in the New York
metropolitan area, my own background is similar.
This course in "Multicultural Literature of the United States" is for advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors) and graduate
students who are teachers in the Virginia school system or the University's M.A.T. in Language Arts program. The course is a
survey of many racial, ethnic and religious cultures. Before reading Carolyn Chute's novel, the class had read Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye, August Wilson's Fences, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Mary Gordon's Final Payments as well as a
number of short stories and essays by Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, Scott Momaday, Louise
Erdrich, Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Rodriquez, Gary Soto, and Maxine Hong Kingston—a varied group of writers who do
not avoid controversial topics and themes.
2Although the United States has a tradition of "rugged individualism" in which people from all socio-economic classes have an
equal opportunity to succeed, several recent studies have suggested a link between class and I.Q. The implication, of course,
is that poor people are poor because they cannot hope to inherit the genes needed for middle-class life. This view partially
absolves the middle-class from any guilt it may feel about the lower or under classes. It also sets up an almost irrevocable
basis for a static class system. For more information on this thesis, see Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell
Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994); J. Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1994) and Seymour W. Itzkoff's The Decline of Intelligence in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger
Publishers, 1994).
Works Cited
Baritz, Loren. The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1988.
Chute, Carolyn. The Beans of Egypt, Maine. New York: Warner Books, 1986.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle-Class. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Lauter, Paul. "The Literatures of the Americas: A Comparative Discipline." Redefining American Literary History. Ed. A. La
Vonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: PMLA, 1990. 9-34.
McMillan, Terry. Disappearing Acts. New York: Penguin, 1989. Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place. New York:
Penguin, 1983.
Ohmann, Richard. Politics of Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Smith, Lee. Oral History. New York: Ballantine, 1984.
Soto, Gary. Small Faces. New York: Dell, 1993.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Walker, Alice. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. San Diego: Harcourt, 1973.
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