Classics, Colonialism and Crumpets

It's been said too often that if class is the British bugaboo, race is the American. But their respective literatures suggest it's a bit more complex than that. Since the 1814 publication of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park — the first British novel in which I remember an explicit reference to the colonies and the raw materials extracted therefrom — the rigid class system was assaulted at least indirectly by the confluence of cheap native labor and immigration. In the United States, the growth of a leisure class that mirrored the punctiliousness of Europe's was funded largely on the backs of slaves in the South, and an immigrant work force as industrious as England's in the North. In both cases, then, it was inevitable that class and race would meet and collide.

Also inevitable: the growth of the novel, which would evolve from an indulgence practiced by landed gentry (despite the superb work produced by Austen and Sir Walter Scott, among others) to a consciously crafted art form as aware of the importance of grace, symmetry, and tension as the architectural layout of the country estates at which those gentry wrote their novels in the first place. Neither George Eliot nor Henry James were aristocrats, but the spoils of colonialism funded the life of letters; at the very least it provided raw material for fiction. However, as the later novels of E.M Forster and William Faulkner's Light in August revealed, those marginalized by capitalism regnant were, by the first third of the 20th century, resisting violently, and it's fascinating to note how the authors themselves seem flummoxed by what they've unleashed.