Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (review)

Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction. Robert Seguin. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 210. $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

In White Collar, C. Wright Mills identified a profound social consequence of the alienation experienced by the new American middle classes as a result of their lack of control over both their work and their time: "If their way of earning a living does not infuse their mode of living, they try to build their real life outside their work. Work becomes a sacrifice of time, necessary to building a life outside of it." ¹ Mills's midcentury observation might be seen as a sociological coda to the ambivalent middle-class fictional world Robert Seguin documents in the work of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Nathaniel West, and John Barth. He sets out to unearth what he calls the "middle class imaginary," with both its material underpinnings and aesthetic articulations, a task made both difficult and essential by the novels' constant sidestepping and refusal of both work and class. Beginning with an understanding of capitalism as "a giant mechanism for the capturing of time via the necessity of wage work," Seguin explores the ways in which the fictional texts figure middle-classness as a liminal space or condition in which that time machine can be evaded (6). This is most vivid when the novels engage an "imagined zone of interface between working and not working," such as Carrie Meeber's arrival in Chicago at the end of the working day in Sister Carrie (1900), or the bored violence of the mob that ends West's Day of the Locust (1939) (5). Through all the novels Seguin traces a peculiarly middle-class utopian desire, one that is often distorted and blocked. Its various forms include a desire to step outside of capitalism's control of time, to turn middle-classness into classlessness, and to be liberated not through work but from it.

Perhaps the most compelling exploration of this middle-class liminality comes in his study of Sister Carrie. He shows how the relations between work and leisure and between motion and stasis enliven and redirect long-standing debates about agency that are figured in images of the window and rocking chair. Building on the work of other scholars, he ultimately complicates Sister Carrie's relationship to the emerging regime of Taylorism, with its enforcement of limited and repetitive motion. He sees the rocking chair and the characters' apparent lack of agency as an exploration of the society that Taylorism was beginning to create. The ways in which Hurstwood and Carrie seem to be moved by larger forces are related to the removal of control and knowledge from workers and the routinization of work practices. The means Dreiser uses for exploring these social pressures, however, is the familiar but limited apparatus of the realist novel, with its equally limited "characters." The result is a narrative uncertainty about individual agency which, Seguin argues, "effectively does not exist in the novel at all" (51). His discussion of violence in Day of the Locust is also provocative. He views the novel not simply as a comment on the banality and disappointment engendered by mass culture, but as a response to West's individual political frustrations and the failed possibilities for radical change in the 1930s. Individualized rage and collectivized impotence make the novel "a complete and agonized allegorical summa of ambivalence and frustrated possibility" (119).

The strength of Seguin's analysis is, at times, also its weakness. His discussion of Cather's The Professor's House (1925) highlights how his effort to find a persistent middle-class imaginary overlooks the imaginary's fragmentation, in this case by the equally persistent problem of gender. He argues that the attic where Godfrey St. Peter writes and Augusta sews clothes for the household represents Cather's desire to leave the realm of circulation, where...