Roberta Rosenberg, "I Hate This Book: Middle-Class Virtues and the Teaching of Multicultural Texts"

            While teaching Carolyn Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” Roberta Rosenberg perceived a noteworthy tension among her students when analyzing the novel. While they had spent weeks “analyzing many different racial, ethnic, and religious cultures” to which the students were able to critically respond and handle difference, one form of difference caused them to hesitate and claim that they hated the book: social class.

            Class issues, Rosenberg suggests, are typically hidden as an “unacknowledged impediment to multicultural understanding”; her students could accept disparity in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion, but with class, American middle-class assumptions and values became an obstacle in recognizing—and, furthermore, understanding—socioeconomic inequality. Middle-class views are pervasive, defining different social spheres according to its dominant perspective; in short, Rosenberg argues, a middle-class reading of society is the norm.

            Within the context of said dominant view, poverty is then characterized by “fatalism, helplessness, dependence, and inferiority” (Ehrenreich 49). This also tends to “infantilize” the poor, seeing them as inept and incapable of true adulthood, rendering their decisions and lifestyle in terms of incompetence as a fully-functioning human being.

            Relating this to “The Bean of Egypt, Maine,” the rural poor of the novel are seen through this dominant, pervasive, middle-class lens that depicts them as immature, helpless adults. As Rosenberg’s students read the novel, they projected middle-class norms onto the characters, viewing them as “individuals who cannot or will not grow up and join independent American society.” This not only simplifies the nature of poverty, but also tends to isolate the poor from the structure of class-based society, placing them in what Rosenberg terms the “underclass.” With this negative perception, the self-defined middle-class attempts to distance themselves, detach their values from that of this “uncivilized” existence, withdrawing further from the context of rural poverty. In effect, the readers lose all empathy and connection to these people.

            So long as middle-class perspectives continue to be dominant, continue to define the separate social spheres, poverty will be the “other.” Just as Earlene tried to distinguish herself from the Beans, readers will attempt to distance themselves from this world of the underclass. What does this accomplish? Will there always exist a divide between dominant views and subordinate classes? Can we ever truly avoid creating “normative models” that “present variations from the mainstream as abnormal, deviant, lesser, perhaps ultimately unimportant” (Lauter 9)? If not, will we ever be able to understand difference, accept it, and ultimately, understand ourselves?