born into a caste, a person will face many obstacles
in attempting to maneuver beyond certain stigmas
or narrowly defined possibilities dictated by caste
membership. Alternatively, the estate system, or
feudalism, is based on land ownership, as well as the
power and wealth that come with such ownership.
Under this system, a lowly serf might serve a life
of physical labor with little hope of owning land,
while a lordly landowner would pass down property
through familial inheritance. Thus, families main-
tain powerful status in the feudal system. The slav-
ery system also encourages the power of families in
maintaining ownership of land and slaves. Until the
mid-19th century in the United States, the slavery
system enabled families in the Confederate States
to exercise much economic and political power. This
power did not wholly dissipate after the abolition of
the slavery system.
The caste, estate, and slavery systems are all
examples of “closed systems” of social ranking
(Schaefer 536). Alternatively, an “open system” is
one that offers individuals opportunity for greater
mobility between levels in the hierarchical social
structure. The class system falls under this “open
system” category.
Max Weber, an influential German sociologist
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proposed
three distinctions for the purpose of analyzing and
categorizing people and groups within this system:
class, status, and wealth (Schaefer 191). People in
this system are stratified into social classes that we
normally subdivide based on families’ and indi-
viduals’ monetary income. Along with greater mon-
etary income comes the capability to access certain
luxuries and amenities that a lesser income may not
allow. Accordingly, the stratified levels of this system
are labeled along a continuum of wealth, which, as
we have seen, is concomitant in most cases with
continuums of power and status. W. Lloyd Warner,
in his book Social Class in America, recommends a
six-level ranking system of social class divided into
the (1) upper-upper, (2) lower-upper, (3) upper-
middle, (4) lower-middle, (5) upper-lower, and (6)
lower-lower classes (14).
Along with these differing class levels and their
respective access to wealth and earning power come
capabilities and deprivations closely associated with
such rankings. Literature that deals with social class
often comments on these capabilities and depriva-
tions. According to Warner, authors who focus on
class characteristicallygive their attention to the phenomena of
social inequality—the tragic or comic, but
always strained, relations between the mem-
bers of different social strata, and the rise and
fall of individuals and families, particularly
emphasizing the strivings of people to climb
into the class above and the efforts of those
above to keep them out. (231)In conjunction with this type of commentary, an
author might focus on divisive group characteristics
that are necessarily linked to social class. Gender,
race, genealogy, and locality are among some of the
characteristics that might affect, at least in part, one’s
social class.
In their study Women and Social Class, Pamela
Abbot and Roger Sapsford ask a question, specifi-
cally with regard to women: Are open systems really
open? According to these scholars, current theoreti-
cal analyses of social class do not thoroughly explain
“the subordinate position of women” or “adequately
reflect the full range of stratification, social mobil-
ity and class awareness” of those living within
class systems (1). We can easily expand Abbot and
Sapsford’s viewpoint to apply to other groups that
are similarly limited in their abilities to move from
lower social strata to higher class status.
Various authors, poets, and playwrights establish
similar perspectives. In William Faulkner’s LiGht
in auGust, we see the struggles of a young man
with a multiethnic background. The protagonist,
Joe Christmas, lives in early 20th-century Missis-
sippi and falls victim to a local community’s rumors,
prejudice, and violence. He meets one frustrating
situation after another in his effort to evade the
history of exploitation and hatred directed at him
and others of African-American ancestry. Though
coming, in part, from Anglo-European lineage,
he cannot evade victimization and prejudice. As a
result, he sees no prospects of rising out of the lower
class, even though Joanna Burden, his clandestine
lover and sympathizer, encourages him to pursue ansocial class 101