Fabricating Feelings in the Post-War Workplace: Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961)

Abstract

This essay focuses on two satirical works of the early 1960s: Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose's The Middlemen (1961), both of which are set in and around synthetic textile firms. In these novels, synthetic textiles function in analogic relation to the synthetic emotions that were coming to inform the modern workplace. More specifically, the novels document the emerging importance of inner feeling within professional frameworks and contexts. The main character of Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye is in the process of conducting ‘human research’ within his working-class district while Brooke-Rose stages an encounter between psychology and public relations through documenting the psychotherapeutic experiences of her corporate middlemen. Both writers send up new office and corporate jargon that drew on psychological discourse in an attempt to fuse, as Nikolas Rose notes, the values of ‘democracy, productivity and contentment’ (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 1999). Together, the novels offer illuminating perspectives on the complex politics of emotional expertise that was beginning to seep into cultures of governance and work in the post-war period.