Page 162 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 155
and marking the other. For instance, in Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock
analyses Victorian adverts for soap and other cleaning products as an illus-
tration of the interconnections between empire, the mission to domesticate
and the Victorian cult of domesticity (McClintock 1995). 9
Helen suggested that her sense of Englishness, or at least the ways in
which it shaped her ‘form of living’, was different from the experience of
her parents. For Helen, these changes were connected to class and locational
changes as well as altered relationships with Europe. Talking of ways of
living identity, of changes in domestic attitudes and arrangement, became,
for Helen, a way of marking her separation from her parents. Her parents
‘became middle class when their parents were working class’. They stayed
in the village in the north of England where they had been born and aspired
to regular habits and traditions: ‘if we didn’t have Sunday lunch at lunch
time when I was a child it was odd, not having a lunch, you were either
having a family crisis, you were on your way to somewhere, you had to have
a reason for it’. In contrast, Helen had become ‘more’ middle class having
gone to university and having a career (unlike her mother). She had moved
to London and was creating new modes of living for her children in a ‘more
homogenised Europe-wide’ context. It was also in a much more racially
mixed context compared with the village in which she grew up:

It’s all about travel isn’t it. People have more money, it’s easier to go
abroad, you pick up different customs and ways of living that you like
and then you sort of make a patchwork quilt of what appeals to you,
you just sort of make it up as you go along, do your own thing, so. And
anyway, how can you be, how can Englishness survive, say in this area
where you’re surrounded by, people have brought with them all sorts
of...um customs from, gosh a huge variety of places. And we have a
lot of mixed marriages around here as well, so you’ve got the mix of the
two.
(Interview 12)

In the face of these new ways of being – what ‘English’ people have
brought from abroad and what has been brought by those who have moved
to England bring – Englishness will not survive. This statement shows a sense
of Englishness that was closed, fixed and white. It could not include new
things and move on to other modes of being, but was faced with extinction.
Englishness could not survive in the face of ‘mixed marriages’. Here, Eng-
lishness was constructed less as a nationality than as an ethnicity or cultural
identity that was bound to be disrupted by the influence of cultural influence.
In fact, Helen’s own children were, as she put it, ‘not totally English’ because
one of their grandfathers was ‘Asian’. Here, Englishness was a ‘genetic’ trait,
much like popular constructions of ‘race’. Note the shifting back and forth
between concepts of ‘race’, nationality and culture: