Seguin "Around Quitting Time"

The review of Seguin's book "Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle Class Fantasy in American Fiction" I have chosen is :

Review: Producing Middle Classlessness
* Amy L. Blair
* American Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 341-348
* Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

on JSTOR. Sorry, I just couldn't seem to get the link to come up correctly!

(I personally found Seguin's ideas very difficult to understand but hopefully the I have got the general idea in the following summary!)

Robert Seguin is of the Marxist school of thought and seeks to correct a postmodern preoccupation with consumer culture whereby class and lifestyle are intertwined - you are defined by what you desire, therefore in a truly American way of thinking anyone can participate in class identity, making the U.S. a classless society (in theory, at least!) Seguin sees that there are differences which are not purely material. Middle classness rather than classlessness. People are identified by the question, "What do you do?" To understand middle class functions Seguin cites 'quitting time' as the crux of this, a shifting and variable state between working and not working as work prepares to end and leisure prepares to start. (Seguin also quotes Andre Gorz who identifies modern leisure with being solitary, compared historically to it being a group activity). While he says that class is at heart about economics, he also says it is about time and this shifting time at that part of the day is one which could be possibly understood in future as important in a non-alienated relationship to labour.

Seguin explains that Dreiser positions Carrie's arrival in Chicago (a big American city at the start of rabid consumerism)at 'quitting time' shows American middle classness with a synthesis of frontier ideology of forward movement and dynamism and pastoralism, citing the text where the street lamps stretch out further and further to the prairie, which can also be read in reverse. Seguin suggests that the twilight time which Carrie arrives at of finishing work is interpenetrated with the approach of leisure - it is a moving, interconnectedness of all these things; what Seguin says of Dreiser as a 'utopian breathlessness' moment.

In "The Toil of the Labourer" Dreiser explains how hard work is artless and thoughtless. It is hard graft with a taskmaster foreman and paltry wages with no humanity, and even when he is made foreman himself he has a problem with equating his ideals with getting the job done or losing it. However, when the work is completed he could see 'that this lovely thing might be' - that all the trials and tribulations of hard graft made something beautiful. As he finishes work in the end, he exhibits that 'utopian breathlessness' at all the incredible sights of the city around but knows the labourers will not get to share it. Ultimately seeing the contrast of this, watching the Italian workers trudge wearily home, he decides he does not want to be a part of it. Both "Sister Carrie" and Dreiser's own labouring experience reflect the time where there is a certain excitement at the end of the day in this transitional period, but of a time when consumerism was coming to the fore but working roles, although changing, were clearly delineated.