Page 65 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

58 Narrating the self
there’s all the other mums at Yasmin’s school, you know many of whom
are very young, single parents, um, and I have nothing in common with
them at all.
(Interview 44)

Madeleine did not interpret this altered class position, as Sally did, as an
‘escape’ from narrowness or a transformation of the self. Instead, Madeleine
expressed a sense of regret at the way her life had developed. She was expe-
riencing the loss of status and security involved in falling outside dominant
class and gender norms. The discourse that Madeleine used to describe this
position was that of ‘sensibleness’. She repeatedly described the lives of oth-
ers as ‘sensible’, clearly implying that her life and particularly the choices she
had made were, at least in the eyes of her parents and others around them,
not sensible. She contrasted her position with that of her brothers, affirming
and then denying the importance of being ‘sensible’ and ‘successful’:

And he was never the bright one, I was always the really bright one
[laugh]. But he was the one who kind of made sensible decisions. Oh,
no, no, no, that’s not true, he’s the one who’s had making lots of money
as his priority, so he has had the successful lifestyle now.
(Interview 44)

The gendered aspect to being ‘sensible’ was also underlined by her joke
about her mother regretting sending her into ‘temptation’, where boys were
present. She was explaining why she had been sent to a public school:
My mum and dad really wanted me to go to a co-educational school,
and there wasn’t one in our area. Although, you know, we were living
in the countryside, so there were good schools, it was absolutely fine,
they were just good girls’ schools. So that was the main reason behind
it [laugh]. I think my mum regretted that ever since, sending me where
there might be boys [laugh].
(Interview 44)

Madeleine’s relative lack of narrative did not come from an absence of
events in her life that were significant to her. But the turning points in life
served as points of disjuncture which disrupted a sense of coherence in self,
rather than pegs on which to hang a story. She appeared set on one course,
then jumped to another. She has experienced living outside normative dis-
courses, but did not have a narrative of ‘I was always different’, as Sally had.
In a situation where she had an ambiguous relationship to the nature of her
subject position, it was difficult for Madeleine to present her self in a storied
narrative. I do not wish to present Madeleine as a confused, incoherent or
somehow dysfunctional individual. This would be a total misrepresentation.
She had a busy life in which she ‘juggled’ bringing up her daughter and work-
ing as a self-employed researcher. She was also comfortable and easy with