Abstract
In a social moment full of paradoxical formulations like cruel optimism and flexible employment, it seems particularly apt that another popular social concept, meritocracy, has itself undergone a deeply ironic evolution. When Michael Young first coined the term in 1958, in his satirical monograph, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality, he could already foresee its limits and pitfalls. In her newest book, Mary Eagleton rightly notes the dramatic departure of the term ‘meritocracy’ from Young’s sardonic coinage, with which he warned that the end of aristocratic privilege would not bring about the end of social rank. Rather, a hierarchy based on birth would be replaced by one whose top tiers believe their status to be justified by their intellectual superiority. The succeeding decades have borne out his grim prediction. The often-uncritical value placed upon standardised tests, for instance, affirms a social system in which the children of wealthy, educated elites just so happen to receive high test scores and concomitant acceptance into selective educational institutions. Young was especially worried about the creation of a permanent underclass, and indeed, the elevation of scholarship boys and clever girls out of their working-class origins into the professional class has served as a blind behind which the reproduction of social stratification persists.
Eagleton’s ambitious book includes attention to novels, memoirs and dramas that foreground a change in class status for women since the Second World War. Fluent in the history and socio-economic contexts of the era she considers, she launches her study with reference to Richard Hoggart’s famous scholarship boy and his under-acknowledged female counterpart, discussed so much less that she lacks a moniker of her own: the ‘scholarship girl, the clever girl, the professional woman … the “future girl” or the “top girl” and now, maybe, the “austerity girl” or the “have-not girl”’ (p. 2). As this list of labels suggests, the category is capacious but comprises women (none of them still girls, in this study!) whose position in the social hierarchy changes as a result of education, with or, increasingly, without economic advancement. With this backdrop in mind, Eagleton’s introduction maps how social mobility has been framed in increasingly neoliberal terms that emphasise individual effort, pluck and ambition. Next come six relatively short chapters, then a coda, moving thematically, and also roughly chronologically, through works by authors such as Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Janice Galloway, Caryl Churchill and Zadie Smith, contextualising analysis with a theoretical apparatus that includes Lauren Berlant, Pierre Bourdieu and Carolyn Steedman. Both primary and secondary texts are diverse in their origins and methods, and one of the strengths of the book is Eagleton’s wide scope on both fronts.
Chapter Two examines efforts of clever girls to escape their origins, focusing on texts where mothers serve as the locus of class anxieties: ‘identification with femininity and maternity will inhibit intellectualism and autonomy’ (p. 40); therefore, the protagonists here seek to form replacement families of more suitable class and cultural capital. Eagleton notes a conviction that marks a troubling through line in the book: the sense that cultural capital is less acquired than somehow intrinsic and authentic, needing only the right help or outlet (pp. 42–43). Her readings here treat fiction and memoir at times as interchangeable artefacts that reflect the conditions of their production and illustrate an individual’s possible options, an elision that recurs throughout the volume. Especially given the elegant close readings elsewhere in the book, the choice to privilege representation over rhetorical production feels troubling.
Chapter Three traces the impasse or ‘seeming impossibility of bringing career, marriage, and maternity into any viable relation, a conundrum which the social history of the period confirms’ (p. 59). The chapter’s strongest moments attend to what makes novels special artefacts, like a passage in which Byatt opts to use ‘and/or’, ‘a deliberately intrusive conjunction [that] draws attention to the rapid, contradictory, and, possibly, defeating moves between the desires of the body and the desires of the mind’ (p. 62). This is a lovely bit of close reading, one of many in the book, like the attention in Chapter Four, ‘Troublesome Bodies’, to the role of similes in Mantel’s works, where gothic figurations help to reveal the class dimensions of the monstrous female. Eagleton’s analysis is at its best when it moves past descriptions of the novels’ portraits of class mobility and takes such rhetorical dimensions into account.
One fascinating connection between the chapters, developed most in Chapter Five, is the discussion of what is variously referred to as chance, happenstance or fate, and the way that such language, particularly when opposed to rhetoric of ‘choice’, can obscure more nuanced readings of class and the ‘real labour involved in social mobility’ (p. 119). This chapter, focused on memoir and novels that resemble memoir, features works by Galloway and Andrea Levy, noting ‘the continuing power of institutional inequality, the uneven distribution of not only economic capital but cultural and social capital, and the disabling effects of a habitus schooled in inferiority’ (p. 114). Eagleton’s own terminology is continuously sensitive to the social pressures that complicate social mobility, unlike some of the aggressively upwardly mobile characters explored in Chapter Six, who uncritically embrace Thatcherite ideas and an emergent neoliberal mindset. Here the book takes its most interesting turn, recognising the complicated ways that feminism empowers women ‘opposed to gender inequality [who believe] the way forward is not through state intervention or collective action’ (p. 141). This tension pervades the remaining chapters, which focus on novels and plays of the last three to four decades. While Eagleton stops short of offering an account of postwar literary history that locates the seeds of this neoliberal feminism in mid-century meritocracy, the evidence certainly could be read in this way. I wish she had pushed in this direction; instead, this chapter’s discussion of Smith’s NW (2012) offers socio-economic statistics that parallel the novel’s reflections on space, gender and mobility. The convergence of fiction and scholarship tells us a lot about British society but little new about this novel. Eagleton’s excellent knowledge of context and her excellent skills as a literary critic do not work in concert here so much as in alternation, affording one type of insight or another.
The final chapter before the coda enacts most fully the fusion of socio-historical and textual analysis that best illuminates the material and argument. For instance, in its discussion of analepsis and prolepsis in Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good (2011), the chapter tracks the dynamics of inter-generational conflict, deftly linking Baby Boomer prosperity to the novel’s disavowal of traditional narrative arc – historical progression and ‘unproblematic upward mobility’ (p. 170) are yoked in a way that sheds light on the novel’s workings and the culture’s. It is here that Michael Young makes a very welcome reappearance: his critique of meritocracy could feature to good effect in other chapters as well. As the final chapter and coda reflect on the problematic relationship of novels of upward mobility to a time in which such progress is no longer seen as likely, or even possible, Eagleton initiates a compelling investigation of the nature of time and temporality in recent texts, where ‘all that is now possible is a frantic scrabble for enjoyment in the present; there is no point in planning for a future’ (p. 189). The note of pessimism becomes more prominent as Eagleton, whose own work has importantly steered conversations about feminism, worries about its ongoing relevance. Her volume ends on a hopeful note, but not before it articulates the uncertainty that pervades austerity society.