The Price of Jumping Class

By Mandy Van Deven, December 9, 2009

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A new book examines what's lost by moving up the economic ladder.

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An Angle of Vision, edited by Vanderbilt University Associate Professor of English Lorraine M. Lopez, is a collection of essays from women writers who grew up in the poor and working classes.

The contributors to this book -- including Sandra Cisneros, Dorothy Allison, Joy Harjo, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Bich Minh Nguyen and Joy Castro -- explore the complex love-hate relationships they have with their current workplaces, what they learned from work they've done in the past and how both serve as a kind of binding liberation.

The sentiment present in these works remains grounded in the reality that "making it" comes with a price: "dual class citizenship" or an outsider status whereby they do not fully belong to one class or another.

WireTap: This book came about quite serendipitously. Can you tell me how it happened?

Lorraine Lopez: In 2007, I organized a panel of women writers for Associated Writing Programs in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled "Trashy Women" and consisted of readings from personal essays on growing up in lower-class homes.

LeAnn Fields, the senior executive editor of the University of Michigan Press, happened to attend and approached me afterward with the idea of collecting the essays for a book.

I felt it was time to broach the subject of class difference in a pragmatic and relate-able way, so I set about identifying women writers from the lower classes whose work inspired or continues to inspire me to live beyond my beginnings.

What are the effects of writing one's own story?

It's an opportunity to claim authority and to flip the script by writing about ourselves in particular and personal ways instead of being written about by others in generalized and impersonal terms.

To become the subject instead of the object in the long convoluted sentence of one's life is intoxicatingly liberating.

Yet some women you approached turned you down. What barriers may prevent someone from offering their experiences for public consumption?

We cannot predict and should not underestimate the repercussions writing about the past might have on those we love. Their stories intersect with our stories, and in telling these, we inadvertently reveal things that loved ones might not wish to share, things that can implicate those who struggled to raise us for not being more provident.

When writing about social class and deprivation translates into betrayal for those we care about, the sharp edge of grief and guilt quickly subsumes the triumph of accomplishment.

In my own case, a close family member was deeply hurt by my pieces in the collection, and I had no idea this writing would have such an effect. The women who contributed to this collection all take this risk in sharing their personal stories.

What role does education play in class jumping?

While education appears to be the ticket out of the lower classes for women writers, it also leads to an often inhospitable destination: academia. Clearly, the benefits are greater resources for composing creative work and economic stability, but we pay for these benefits in ways that our colleagues don't. We pay through outsider status, and if we are from a marginalized cultural group, we pay through our tolerated and tokenized presence.

In either case, we routinely confront the unspoken belief held by many of our colleagues -- and sometimes our students -- that we have not fully earned the positions we occupy, that these were charitably granted despite our shortcomings in some misguided institutional quest for "diversity."

The royalties for An Angle of Vision will be given to the Child Welfare League of America. Was it important that there be an activist element to this book?

This is extremely important. All of the contributors supported this decision, and many contributed their honorariums as well. Wherever and whenever possible, we are determined to blur the distinction between activism and art.

In Joy Castro's titular essay, she discusses what we women from the lower classes bring to the world as "an angle of vision and the will to change," and delineates ways formerly poor women writers now in academia can translate current privilege into opportunities for others, citing Toni Morrison's edict: "The function of freedom is to free someone else."

I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I could compile and edit the collection, work to promote it and not be paid for my efforts. I feel well compensated, even richly rewarded by the chance to commune with these remarkable women writers and publish the powerful collection we have built together.

Mandy Van Deven is a freelance writer based in India.