Culture
The ‘Middle’ Is a Muddle
“Americans want policies that give every American a chance to make it to the middle class.” ¶ Middletown ¶ “A leader who understands the middle class because she grew up in the middle class.” ¶ midlist ¶ “We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.” ¶ middlebrow ¶ “We are charting a new way forward. Forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. And I’ll tell you, this is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.” ¶ mid ¶ “Everyone in Middletown runs absorbed in keeping his job or raising his wages, building his home, ‘boosting’ his club or church, educating his children.” ¶ middle of the pack ¶ “Kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great.” ¶ middle of the road ¶ “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” ¶ middle seat ¶ middle age ¶ “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.” ¶ middle school ¶ “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.” ¶ middle finger ¶ Middle Ages ¶ “Be careful: these are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types.” ¶ “Americans want policies that give every American a chance to make it to the middle class.” ¶ Middletown ¶ “A leader who understands the middle class because she grew up in the middle class.” ¶ midlist ¶ “We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.” ¶ middlebrow ¶ “We are charting a new way forward. Forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. And I’ll tell you, this is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.” ¶ mid ¶ “Everyone in Middletown runs absorbed in keeping his job or raising his wages, building his home, ‘boosting’ his club or church, educating his children.” ¶ middle of the pack ¶ “Kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great.” ¶ middle of the road ¶ “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” ¶ middle seat ¶ middle age ¶ “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.” ¶ middle school ¶ “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.” ¶ middle finger ¶ Middle Ages ¶ “Be careful: these are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types.” ¶ “Americans want policies that give every American a chance to make it to the middle class.” ¶ Middletown ¶ “A leader who understands the middle class because she grew up in the middle class.” ¶ midlist ¶ “We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.” ¶ middlebrow ¶ “We are charting a new way forward. Forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. And I’ll tell you, this is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.” ¶ mid ¶ “Everyone in Middletown runs absorbed in keeping his job or raising his wages, building his home, ‘boosting’ his club or church, educating his children.” ¶ middle of the pack ¶ “Kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great.” ¶ middle of the road ¶ “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” ¶ middle seat ¶ middle age ¶ “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.” ¶ middle school ¶ “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.” ¶ middle finger ¶ Middle Ages ¶ “Be careful: these are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types.”
Everybody loves the middle class. Nobody wants to be mid, or middling. “Middle” is a tricky word.
Are you middle class? Am I? Is everybody?
In American politics, “middle class” doesn’t just name a particular segment of the population, a demographic group whose votes are necessary to electoral success. It represents an ideal, a moral principle, a set of values and interests that are not particular but universal.
At the Democratic convention, the phrase seemed to pop up in every other speech. Full-throated tributes to the middle class were offered by, among others, a governor who is also the billionaire scion of a hotel empire, an actor who happens to be a son and grandson of Hollywood moguls, and a congresswoman who once worked as a bartender.
“Americans want policies that give every American a chance to make it to the middle class.”— Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois
“A leader who understands the middle class because she grew up in the middle class.”— the actor Tony Goldwyn
“We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.”— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
And also, of course, by Vice President Kamala Harris, a daughter of an economist and a medical researcher, who was portrayed by speaker after speaker as both a product of the middle class and its champion.
“We are charting a new way forward. Forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. And I’ll tell you, this is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from.”— Vice President Kamala Harris
Allegiance to the middle class doesn’t define the left or the right; it transcends such divisions. Political parties are expected to move to the center, and to prioritize the needs of Middle America, which both is and isn’t a geographical designation.
Nearly a century ago, the sociologists Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd called their classic study of the American heartland “Middletown.” It was about Muncie, Ind., but there are plenty of actual Middletowns out there. The one in Ohio is Senator JD Vance’s hometown.
“Everyone in Middletown runs absorbed in keeping his job or raising his wages, building his home, ‘boosting’ his club or church, educating his children.”— Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd, “Middletown”
The middle is everywhere. Which, when you stop to think about it, is odd, even illogical. The creme may be the best part of the Oreo, but it exists only in relation to the wafers that surround it. If it’s only middle, it isn’t a cookie at all, just a blob of sweet goo.
That may be why politicians seek out the middle so eagerly.
“Kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great.”— Daniel Defoe, “Robinson Crusoe”
The rest of our culture often goes in the opposite direction. In art, up high is where the masterpieces are; down low is where the fun is.
The middle — the midlist, the middlebrow, the just plain mid — is a dead zone. Average. Ordinary. Common. Median. Mediocre. Meh.
“If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow,’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.”— Virginia Woolf
“A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.”— Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult”
“We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.”— James Poniewozik, The New York Times
The middle is not good enough to be great, not bad enough to be trash, and thus comes in for a special kind of contempt. Middle of the pack. Middle of the road. Middle seat. Middle school is miserable, and so is middle age. So were the Middle Ages!
Which, as it happens, is when the middle class got started, as a kind of catchall category between the established feudal ranks. There were people who owned the land and people who worked on it, and then there were people who did other things. Across Europe, those merchants, manufacturers and, well, middlemen tended to congregate in market towns. The French word for that kind of place was bourg, and so this class of non-peasants and non-aristocrats came to be called the bourgeoisie.
“Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty —
How beastly the bourgeois is!”— D.H. Lawrence
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Everybody hates the bourgeoisie. Maybe not everyone, but you rarely hear “bourgeois” used as a compliment. The word connotes priggish respectability, pomp and pretentiousness, a way of life lacking the elegance and distinction — the class — of the old landed elite. It also referred to the ruling class, the factory owners and capitalists whose historic antagonists were the workers they employed, also known as the proletariat.
That isn’t a word you hear much anymore. Working class — a term favored by some of the speakers at the Republican convention as well as a few Democrats — is now a synonym for middle class, which only heightens the contradiction. The modern-day middle class now somehow includes both sides of the historical class struggle.
“Be careful: These are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types.”— Homer Simpson
The middle is divided against itself — an aspirational ideal and a default setting, a state of equilibrium and a place to get stuck. The center cannot hold.
Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.
William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.
“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.
The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.
“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.
In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d
In milky fondness
“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.
Question 1/6
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.
First, the Clod’s perspective.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of 21st-century books that were inspired by ancient myths, legends and folk tales. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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