education. Christmas internalizes the racial “glass
ceiling” and sees it at each possible opportunity.
Addressing issues of social class has been a pat-
tern in literature for some time, yet facing the reali-
ties of the lower class’s plight has been a somewhat
recent development in literature. Novels focusing
on the lifestyles and scandals of those in the upper
classes were common during the Victorian Age
(1837–1901) in Europe and the United States.
Members of the upper classes steeped in luxury
appear in novels such as Henry James’s daisy
MiLLer and Charles Dickens’s Great expecta-
tions. However, Dickens also focuses on the plight
of the lower classes, a focus uncommon in the early
19th century. Dickens’s open-eyed awareness and
experience of poverty motivated him to tell tales that
depicted the struggles of the poor: a primary theme
in many of his novels.
The late 19th and early 20th century (sometimes
known as the Gilded Age) saw an increase in liter-
ary attention on laborers and vagabonds of the lower
class. Eric Shocket describes this focus as the “gaze
over the divide at the Other” (2), suggesting that
those who read these texts are more privileged than
those under inspection. Stephen Crane, a popular
and groundbreaking author of this period, created
works that exposed the reading public to degraded
images of the underprivileged. In his works, he
paints grim pictures of those who endure many of
the hardships associated with ghetto life. He and
other writers of the naturalist movement likewise
comment on the struggles of similarly deprived
groups: those thought to be racially inferior and
those from purportedly less-refined gene pools.
During the Gilded Age, cultural views of gender,
race, and ethnic equality were much less egalitarian
than those of contemporary Europe and America,
and these dated views are apparent in works of the
period. Crane’s short novel Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1893) shows the heart-wrenching trials of
a poverty-stricken adolescent and the abuse she
endures at the hands of her family, and eventually
at the hands of seducers. The lamentable qualities
of the living conditions in the San Francisco slums
compound our sorrow at her demise.
Many works that deal with social class tend
to take on a “rags to riches” theme by showing
characters striving to move from a lower to higher
social stratum. The American media is particularly
strewn with this trope. “[M]ass magazines and
newspapers print and reprint the legendary story
of rags to riches and tell over and over again the
Ellis-island-to-Park-Avenue saga in the actual lives
of contemporary successful immigrant men and
women” (Warner 4). Some might question the
degree to which this ideal is attainable, though we
may quote multiple well-known examples. By way
of challenging this trope, authors such as Theodore
Dreiser have shown the damaging effects of such
an ideology. Drieser’s novel an aMerican traGedy^
shows a young, intelligent, and energetic member of
the lower class striving to reach the upper class by
becoming a successful businessperson. Elitist ostra-
cism, spite, and misfortune lead to Clyde Griffith’s
eventual downfall after his attempt to climb the
social class ladder. Inner turmoil, failed attempts at
corporate climbing, and a confusing murder pros-
ecution finally cause Griffith to regret his efforts.
In depicting the protagonist’s ruin, Dreiser seems to
suggest that one cannot easily abandon the learned
tendencies of the lower class, nor climb easily
upward in the social hierarchy.
Today, fiction focusing on social climbing and
plights of the lower and middle classes is very com-
mon. Much more than in literature of the 19th and
early 20th centuries, we see novels combining issues
of class with race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
locality. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003)
is a prime example of a novel which confronts
these issues in a tale of a family’s struggle to sur-
vive in cold war–era Afghanistan. A Sunni Muslim
father and son, after enduring unabated turmoil in
Afghanistan, immigrate to California, where they
must make a new start, emotionally and financially.
Louise Erdrich’s tracks confronts the desper-
ate situation of a group of Native Americans in
northern Minnesota. Her characters must come to
terms with a new, dominant culture’s policies of land
ownership and commerce. Nanapush, Fleur Pillager,
and their immediate relatives must confront trou-
bling changes to their local community; they face
difficulty adapting to foreign concepts of property
rights and class division. In the novel, the Indians
are relegated to a remote area on the banks of a lake,102 social class