Page 153 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

146 How English am I?
English’ suggests that she had an awareness of a discourse that might see
this as an unusual or even objectionable position to take. Yet, when Emma
thought of her pride at being English, a racialised other was immediately
called to mind.
At the same time, Emma was aware that what she was saying was conten-
tious. She did not say that she herself saw the arrival of the ‘gypsies’ as an
invasion, but that this was what it ‘feels like’ to ‘some people’. She also
worried about whether it was ‘politically correct’ to call people ‘foreign’
particularly when they might have been harassed and maltreated. Here, the
liberal values of justice and sanctuary, ascribed to her husband, are compet-
ing with her sense of threat from foreigners. It is possible to see the various
discursive technologies at work in producing both a sense of national culture
and the feeling of being under threat. As mentioned above, it is possible
to trace discourses circulating in the media. Emma also evoked a powerful
sense of ‘we’ the nation struggling financially in the face of external threats.
Her personal experience was read through the nation’s experience: ‘when
you’re struggling, when the nation is struggling’.
Emma herself made a direct link with cultural production in the form
of literature when she tried to describe what Englishness meant to her. For
Emma, Englishness was represented by upper-middle-class manners and tra-
ditions: ‘Well, I sort of consider English and things sort of like Howard’s
End and that kind of thing. And I think there’s something, I mean I know it’s
200 years ago or whatever, but I think there’s something wonderful about
all that’. Emma was aware that her idealisation was based on a fictionalised
account. She emphasised this by exaggerating how long ago the books were
written. Nonetheless, at one time, it had almost had a lived reality for her.
For Emma, Englishness was a romantic and nostalgic vision that was in the
past in two senses: firstly, because it was based on a representation from a
novel, a fictional world rather than a reality. It is, for instance, interesting
that this picture of the past that she painted made no mention of imperialism
or the basis on which the wealth was built. And secondly because, in terms
of her own life, it represented something that was in the past, set in her
childhood. Emma described her childhood, particularly at boarding school,
as having fitted in with this proposed idyll of manners and civility:

And perhaps I’m being swept away on a story, and perhaps it’s because I
spent 7 years of my life in a church, all girls’ boarding school. And spent
my time singing hymns and going to church and it’s a very special thing
to be patriotic. And you know, going to balls and always being treated
very nicely by boys. Who actually on the one hand weren’t treating you
very nicely, but they’d always hold the door open for you and always
pay for your taxi. So it’s kind of weird really. But there’s something that
I’d hate to lose over that, and I think, for me, because where I come
from that’s about being English.
(Interview 16)