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PARTISAN REVIEW
segregation and the quest for the "proper address," since at the end
of the chapter they are enabled to reaffirm the traditional pieties: "The
home, I should think, should properly be a private and very individual
heaven. Progress would seem to lie in the direction of turning inward
rather than outward for inspiration in the creation of one's homestead."
It
is safe to indulge in Packard's "sociology of sex appeal"-to learn,
for example, that "upper-level males show considerably more fascination
with the female's breasts, both as objects of beauty and as objects for
manipulation during intimacies, than males from the lower classes. The
latter tend to associate them more with the feeding function"-since
Packard assures the reader at the end of the chapter that "relations
between the sexes at all levels and in all areas have distinctive charac–
teristics that deserve our sympathetic understanding."
Still, Packard's adroitness can hardly explain the success of the
book. What then can account for it? I believe that the author has quite
accurately gauged or sensed the drift of the
Zeitgeist.
Twenty years
ago, when the Depression vividly demonstrated the realities of class
power, the dynamic force in American intellectual and political life
came from a desire to change or reform the social system. Today, dur–
ing the bland Fifties, there is little concern with the facts of power;
people are concerned instead with distinctions of status. Such concern,
of course, is not new in American life, nor has it exactly passed un–
noticed by earlier writers; only a
Kitsch
sociologist, crudely committed
to the knife-edge present, could write as if Tocqueville and Veblen had
never said anything about this matter. Nonetheless, the temporary disap–
pearance of major and dramatic political issues and the affluent sta–
bility that at least some Americans enjoy, has led to an intensified pre–
occupation with status. In the Thirties the Lynd's monumental
Middle–
town
studies focused on the drama of exploitation and the inequalities
of class; in the Fifties we experience a "honeymoon between the classes,"
to use Kenneth Burke's apt phrase, and we read
The Lon,ely Crowd.
Anxieties now center upon the visible appurtenances of status and the
precarious hold we have on our status identities. It is these anxieties
which Packard shrewdly exploits. His
Kitsch
sociology, far from being
informed by a scholar's concern or a reformer's zeal, is anchored in
nothing more substantial than a guilty nostalgia for a supposedly less
status-conscious and hence less anxiety-ridden past.
The more secure the status of individuals the less need they have
to talk about it, and the less likely they are to emphasize consciously
the preservation of status barriers. There are no restrictions to the ad–
mission of Jews to the leading social clubs in Britain, but in America
