Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (review)

Abstract

In White Collar, C. Wright Mills identified a profound social consequence of the alienation experienced by the new American middle classes as a result of their lack of control over both their work and their time: "If their way of earning a living does not infuse their mode of living, they try to build their real life outside their work. Work becomes a sacrifice of time, necessary to building a life outside of it." 1 Mills's midcentury observation might be seen as a sociological coda to the ambivalent middle-class fictional world Robert Seguin documents in the work of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Nathaniel West, and John Barth. He sets out to unearth what he calls the "middle class imaginary," with both its material underpinnings and aesthetic articulations, a task made both difficult and essential by the novels' constant sidestepping and refusal of both work and class. Beginning with an understanding of capitalism as "a giant mechanism for the capturing of time via the necessity of wage work," Seguin explores the ways in which the fictional texts figure middle-classness as a liminal space or condition in which that time machine can be evaded (6). This is most vivid when the novels engage an "imagined zone of interface between working and not working," such as Carrie Meeber's arrival in Chicago at the end of the working day in Sister Carrie (1900), or the bored violence of the mob that ends West's Day of the Locust (1939) (5). Through all the novels Seguin traces a peculiarly middle-class utopian desire, one that is often distorted and blocked. Its various forms include a desire to step outside of capitalism's control of time, to turn middle-classness into classlessness, and to be liberated not through work but from it. [End Page 349]