Huoli kunniallisuudesta

valkoiset naiset ja luokka Joyce Carol Oatesin romaanissa Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart

• Lotta Kähkönen Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74765

Abstract

Worry about Respectability: White Women and Class in Joyce Carol Oates novel Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart

Recent fiction by Joyce Carol Oates offers new perspectives to the construction of identity and problems of inequality in postmodern American society. For example her novel Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart (1990), which returns to the age of racial segregation in the United States, combines the representation of poor and working class characters to the theme of race and ethnicity. Oates’s return to the past in her fiction is linked to the contemporary uneasiness about white racial identity and debates concerning race and ethnicity in the U.S.

This article examines the representation of the complicated dynamics of social stratification and inequality in relation to the particular cultural and historical context of the U.S. The question is discussed in particular with reference to the concepts of class, race and gender, which are understood as culturally constructed identity categories and discourses that work in relation to each other. The focus is especially on the changing concept of class and its intersections with race and gender. Class is examined through a theoretical framework of intersectional approach and the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Beverly Skeggs.

The analysis depicts the white working class women characters and their worry about respectability that appears in different ways in their everyday lives and bodily dispositions. Furthermore, the article examines the function of poor white family as social other for the working class white and black families in the novel’s context. By employing the viewpoints of differently positioned families the narration demonstrates the dynamic construction and regulation of the social hierarchy in the Jim Crow era. In so doing the novel offers a critical view to the production of inequality in American society.