In at least five hundred words and at least three paragraphs, answer the following prompt. Be sure to quote and cite sources in your response.
In Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), Pierre Bourdieu talks about how different social classes perceive themselves and people of other classes. The petit-bourgeois social class is that section of the working class that struggles to rise, in class, to become ‘bourgeois’. He describes the petit-bourgeois subject position in a number of ways. He writes that, because of relative lack of economic, cultural, or social capital, the petit-bourgeois must pay “in sacrifices, privations, renunciations, goodwill, recognition, in short, virtue” (333), in order to rise into the ranks of bourgeois society. He also says the petit-bourgeois “is convinced that he owes his position solely to his own merit, and that for his salvation he has only himself to rely on…To concentrate his efforts and reduce his costs, he will break the ties, even the family ties, which hinder his individual ascension” (337). But the emotional costs of the stressful climb through the ranks of society take their toll: “…the rising petit bourgeois tend to slip from optimistic austerity to repressive pessimism as they grow older and as the future which made sense of their sacrifices turns sour…The future he ‘dreams for his son’ eats up his present…In the end these altruistic misers who have squandered everything on the alter ego they had hoped to be…are left with nothing but resentment—“ (353).
Apply one or more of these quotes to a character interpretation of Victor Grabert and/or Auguste Picou, from Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village” and “The Pearl in the Oyster.”
