One Bleak Picture
PIERSAWL, BRUCE C.
One Bleak Picture Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family By Lillian B. Rubin Basic. 336 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Bruce C. Piersawl Happily seduced by a 200-year-old illusion of one...
...If we allow every social scientist his or her special themes and commanding convictions, then Rubin has produced a work faithful to herself and her profession, replete with the modesty and wisdom that only someone personally involved is capable of...
...Our notions of homogeneity as a nation notwithstanding, it will hardly come as a surprise that our society is not free of class differences...
...Rubin's tact and critical sympathy elicit surprisingly frank responses from her subjects...
...This results in a far more convincing work than so-called "objective" investigations (many of them cited in Rubin's extensive bibliography) have so far produced...
...The bleak picture of hopelessness met with resignation or humble acceptance is confirmed by all the families interviewed (they were allowed to read and comment on the manuscript...
...But it would be unfortunate if this weakness (or the uninspired cover graphics of Worlds of Pain) turned away readers, for the work's real strengths lie behind the scholarly facade...
...Indeed, as the title makes clear, recurrent recitals of hurt are the leitmotif of the entire study...
...The absence of real choices, plus the vacuity of day-to-day existence, weighs most heavily on her subjects, according to Rubin...
...Worlds of Pain confronts our wilfull blindness with a description of life in blue-collar households...
...Yet it is only one portrait, as Rubin herself warns us, "a still picture, a frame abstracted from a movie...
...The theme of suffering is much too rigorously pursued to capture what Rubin calls the "fullness of experience, the richness of living...
...Even if it is granted that one's life is largely determined by the class one is born into, devices of diversion and catharsis are available and utilized...
...Perhaps the problem is that her book is essentially an academic study burdened with a thesis that is too diligently defended...
...Continuity, rather than upward mobility, is the dominant pattern: a sad trend toward the duplication of parents' lives...
...We are, as C. Vann Woodward calls us, "stonewall innocent...
...The author's sample is small?0 white families in the San Francisco Bay area...
...They talk with stirring humility about their childhoods, their consistently early marriages, their sex lives, and their daily chores, revealing in the process many of their troubles and doubts...
...Young men with little chance for an education found themselves, like their fathers, in meaningless jobs that appear and disappear with the changing economic climate...
...Young women who might have lived more creatively than their mothers, because of tradition or pregnancy, married in their late teens...
...Even in these self-conscious times, when each social and ethnic group seems to have its own Norman Lear sitcom, the myth is maintained, for the stories and characters of the various TV programs are broadly interchangeable: Apparently all Americans face the same problems and, half an hour later, meet the same happy endings...
...A worker's child herself, Lillian Rubin's controlled passion transcends the usual recondite sociological style...
...Eventually marriages sour, alcohol becomes a daily solace, and the awful realization sets in that life has been merely an endless chore...
...Yet by combining in-depth interviews with husbands and wives (portions of which take up a large part of the text) with a discussion of established sociological theory and the research findings of other scholars, she offers us a profile that is both intimate and universal...
...After a chapter or two, one realizes that for her this was a necessary project, a coming to terms with the anguish caused by her background...
...Nikki Giovanni's poem, quoted by Rubin in the book's epilogue, supports this notion, chastising the critics and theorists who would "probably talk about my hard childhood and never/understand that/all the while I was quite happy" At times it seems that Rubin's tone leads her to do exactly that...
...The broad themes are of course all too familiar—worker alienation, problem marriages, alcoholism, and television-oriented leisure, to name a few...
...Reviewed by Bruce C. Piersawl Happily seduced by a 200-year-old illusion of one nation indivisible, Americans have tended to neglect the legacy of a stratified society?of exploiters and exploited, winners and losers...
...Unlike many European countries, we have yet to accept that we are not a cultural or economic monolith...
...I would argue, in fact, that the exceptions defying the rule of malaise and monotony ultimately represent human reality in its most hopeful form...
...What the dialogues here most dramatically reveal is the wide gap that remains between the American middle-class ideal and reality for those whose childhoods were close to the true poverty line, despite now being neither poor nor unsettled...
...But the note of pain and self-discovery in these interviews give the book a tone of authority and humanity...
...What is depressing, though, is Rubin's demonstration that at least a sizeable chunk of the population is reconciled, from childhood onward, to its unhappy condition...
...That is a telling reservation, for no matter how sanctioned or well-documented this view of working-class existence might be, it is handicapped by its single-mindedness...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 5
