Welcome to the TLS
Winner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
The-TLS-appstoreThe-TLS-googleplay
Social & cultural studies|Book Review
Elegy for white trash
Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America opens by invoking To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s novel climaxes in the famous courtroom scene where the...
By George Bornstein
December 9, 2016
IN THIS REVIEW
- WHITE TRASH The 400-year untold history of class in America Nancy Isenberg
- HILLBILLY ELEGY A memoir of a family and culture in crisis J. D. Vance
Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America opens by invoking To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s novel climaxes in the famous courtroom scene where the lawyer Atticus Finch tries in vain to defend the black Tom Robinson on the false charge of raping a poor young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Of course, the true villain turns out to be Mayella’s father, Bob Ewell, who lives with his family behind the town dump and whom Isenberg describes accurately as “what Southerners and a lot of other people called white trash”. Isenberg has compiled a formidable history of the people known as “white trash” or “waste people”, from the founding of America to the present day, giving portraits of various pop icons and political figures – including Elvis Presley and Sarah Palin – as well as successful television shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Some of Isenberg’s examples seem more arbitrary than others, as when she highlights without real explanation portrayals of her subject in the work of the novelists Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina, 1992) and Carolyn Chute (The Beans of Egypt, Maine, 1985) alongside that of the more important Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The book takes a heavy political slant, starting with an early attack on the conservative theorist Charles Murray, “an authority in the minds of many” but who, Isenberg says, has “conjured” up a never-existent class-free America. She aims “to put class back in the story where it belongs” – which in her case is everywhere. The author helpfully recovers many aspects of the story that are less known than they should be: for example, that in the mid-1600s fewer than half of immigrants to Massachusetts – mostly poor, white people from England and Scotland – were feeling religious persecution (most, in fact, came to find work); or that the Thanksgiving holiday did not exist until the Civil War and was associated with native turkey to help to protect the futures of those employed in the struggling poultry industry. At other times, though, Isenberg becomes snide, as when she interjects “of electricity?” after Benjamin Franklin’s remark that the poor needed “a jolt” to lure them back to work. She tends, too, to lean on early and more conservative works by writers such as Franklin or Jefferson rather than more moderate later ones. Elsewhere, she cites an early...
You have no more free articles available
Enjoy unlimited digital access, free for 1 month
Subscribe
Already a subscriber? Log in here
Keep reading
No comments:
Post a Comment