Page 64 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 57
me . . .. Not that she’s got to break out of something, but that she de-
serves something that is hers to take . . .
(Interview 9)

So, middle classness for Madeleine, apart from education, meant a state
of mind where you are an active agent who is capable and confident of your
abilities. All choices and opportunities are, and should be, available to you.
Yet at the same time, Madeleine had transgressed class norms by, perhaps
inadvertently, closing off choices and opportunities. She had decided at the
last minute not to take up a place at university and went to live in a squat
with her boyfriend. She had had a child as a single mother and, as such,
found herself placed in a politically problematised social category:

There’s definitely been times when it’s been a problem and there’s been
times when I haven’t necessarily wanted to volunteer that information.
Which was really in the last 3 or 4 years of the Tories being in. And there
was kind of Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo and everything is single
mothers’ fault [laugh]. And it’s quite amazing in retrospect how much
that affects your self esteem and how you value yourself. If the whole of
society is just saying, you’re useless.
(Interview 44)

Madeleine was now trying to understand just how and why she had trans-
gressed class norms and now found herself in a position where she lacked
not only the material resources that were required to perform middle class-
ness, but also the sense of agency and, in particular, control of the future that
she saw in her friends:

And I do wonder now actually . . . now that my, now that I’m kind of
in my 30s and my friends are, some of them obviously, not all of them,
but some of them have now bought flats and are in stable relationships
and you know. I mean very few of my friends have had children. But you
know that when they do, they’ll make a decision to do it and they’ll have
it with the partner that they’ve had for a long time, and I just think, what
happened to me then? [laugh] what is it about my, I don’t know, I just
don’t really understand when I look back, why I didn’t have that. You
know there’s meant to be that thing, isn’t there about how middle-class
people are supposed to have, they’re into long-term planning, they put
money away for a rainy day and they make decisions based on long-term
things. And I just think that I’ve never had that and I just think that it’s
so ridiculous. And yet I’ve really shaped, you know, my life now is quite
tough because of that. And um, I don’t know, I don’t know anybody
else that I kind of went to school with, or I grew up with or that I’ve
been friends with for a long time that’s kind of taken the same path as
I have, at all [laugh]. In fact, I hardly know anybody, I mean, obviously