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MARGE PIERCY
Culture. This battle is still continuing, and most of what is taught
in school is still official cult, but at least now it is being chal–
lenged. The vast rest of us were deviations from the norm. I call
the fifties the end of that but what a fat squat end. What a grey
smug tight world. Everything that moved me at first contact
(Whitman, Dickinson) turned out to be declasse or irrelevant to
the mainstream, the tradition.
It
was not, of course, a mainstream
that had produced me, a tradition to which I was a natural heir. I
would never be a gentleman.
What a need to tidy everything, librarianlike. Everything in
art was taught as fitting somewhere in a vast hierarchy. The Great
Chain of Being seemed still intact. Even the lawns were Christian.
Human nature was a universal constant, each of us with her heart
of darkness. In this period of successful identification of ruling
class interests seamlessly with the interests of "the people" (who
were the images on the cover of the
Saturday EveningPost)
the con–
cept of American classlessness was being pushed at the same time
that critics like Lionel Trilling were calling for a novel of manners:
meaning literature
interior
to the world of the affluent. The defeat
of Marxist literary criticism and theory meant rejection of the
class struggle and somehow even of working class experience as a
viable theme. Yet class was a fact of my life, something I brooded
over constantly in childhood every time I took the] oy Road or
Tireman buses in Detroit and noted how if you went downtown
there were even more blacks than in our neighborhood and
housing got worse and worse, and if you went the other direction
there was more space, more trees, yards, single-family brick
houses, parks.
If
I had come to college never having thought about
poverty, born out of an egg the day before, going to college was a
never-ending education in the finer distinctions of class insult and
bias. It kept kicking me in the teeth.
When characters who were not white, male, and affluent ap–
peared in the literature we read, including novels of the time, they
were all image and mythology, when not comic relief. When a
character was black, generally she represented something in the
white writer',> psyche--nature, evil, death, life, fecundity. Like
Indians. Like women to this day. Such beings were never assumed
to have an inner reality equal and coherent to the white male
