Feeling like a clerk in H. G. Wells.
In three turn-of-the-century novels about clerks and scholarship boys, H. G. Wells illustrates the emotional impact of social hierarchies on individual lives. By portraying the conflicted, class-related emotions of lower-middle-class men, Wells departs from the common contemporary image of the clerk as a figure synonymous with his function. But Wells depicts other emotions--specifically, those associated with domesticity and recklessness--to push against what he sees as the classed nature of emotional lives. He rewrites Victorian domesticity as a zone of sexuality and desire for his lower-middle-class clerks, and he mobilizes an emergent cultural appreciation of recklessness to instill them with vitality. The "significant selves" that develop as a result help to offset their ultimate failure to escape their class.
Higgins
Richard
R
Indiana University, USA.
D004644:Emotions; D005197:Famous Persons; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D008297:Male; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D012649:Self Concept; D012923:Social Class