Page 161 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

154 How English am I?
Empty Englishness

For Heather, much of what she said about Englishness or Britishness was
placed in a defensive relationship to the United States. She was worried
about England becoming ‘just an island state off America if we are not care-
ful’ (Interview 15). However, for others, Englishness was defined by its con-
trast with continental European countries. Thus, Englishness is shown to be
a fluid and dynamic concept, the content of which varied according to the
boundaries that were drawn around it. Helen, a woman in her early 30s,
had a more elaborated view of identity and cultural difference. For Helen,
difference was marked more by cultural norms and the domestic than by
global power relations. While she had a sense that ‘English’ cultural practices
had more or less disappeared, this was not necessarily associated with a sense
of loss. Helen remembered herself as a child being fascinated with cultural
differences on school trips to France and Germany. French toilets and dif-
ferent ways of eating marked out the Englishness of some of her family’s
habits and rituals. But Helen now doubted that there was so much that was
distinctively English about the way she lived. What she had to pass on to her
children was different from the Englishness that she had experienced as a
child. Most importantly, it was an attitude that difference was not something
to be alarmed by, as it had been for her:

One of the first things, was French toilets, it’s all changed now but,
first of all the ones which were just holes in the ground, which just . . .,
you know really freaked you out when you were 11 and you went on
a school trip. And I remember the ones in Paris which turned upside
down, which we have now. And I remember thinking this is really really
odd. And also the way the French ate their meals, one plate that the
meat comes on then the vegetables come and just thinking this is so
strange. And we were, I suppose, very, just a nuclear family, you know
two parents, kids [. . .] We always ate round a table, we always had
Sunday lunch. You know I think in the last 20 years since that was the
case for me, I think England has changed a lot, but that was very English
then, very sort of middle of the road, ordinary, probably no longer is. So
I suppose, yes, I think I probably did, and it probably came from things
like diet, . . . and just routines, rituals that are very English, like Sunday
lunch, the way we ate, um . . . but they only became noticeable to me
when I had something to compare them with.
(Interview 12)
The example of the toilets was an ambiguous one. At first, France was
portrayed as backward and then as modern and in advance of England (if
toilets that turn upside down are taken as signifiers of modernity). This is an
interesting play around difference because of the way in which hygiene, sani-
tation and the scatological has historically been a way of defining whiteness
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