Fabricating Feelings in the Post-War Workplace: Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961)

Abstract

This essay focuses on two satirical works of the early 1960s: Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose's The Middlemen (1961), both of which are set in and around synthetic textile firms. In these novels, synthetic textiles function in analogic relation to the synthetic emotions that were coming to inform the modern workplace. More specifically, the novels document the emerging importance of inner feeling within professional frameworks and contexts. The main character of Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye is in the process of conducting ‘human research’ within his working-class district while Brooke-Rose stages an encounter between psychology and public relations through documenting the psychotherapeutic experiences of her corporate middlemen. Both writers send up new office and corporate jargon that drew on psychological discourse in an attempt to fuse, as Nikolas Rose notes, the values of ‘democracy, productivity and contentment’ (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 1999). Together, the novels offer illuminating perspectives on the complex politics of emotional expertise that was beginning to seep into cultures of governance and work in the post-war period.

Keywords:

• emotion
• feeling
• care
• satire
• emotional labour
• work

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Incidentally, this opening scenario from Brooke-Rose’s novel also seems to prefigure the explosion that is conceived by Spark in her 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means, published just a couple of years later: that novel ends with an explosion surrounding another group of ‘lovely’ girls and it is one that is, likewise, inextricably linked to a Cinderella-like frock (2013: 9).

2 It is worth noting in passing that in C. Wright Mills’ 1951 study of American white collar workers, the term ‘synthetic’ is used several times to describe the particular malaise of the ‘white-collar man’ (1969: xvi, xvi–xvii, 145).

3 Suzanne Keen has provided a rigorous account of the complex nexus of relations between novel reading, empathy and altruism on a general level, discussions further developed by Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim in the introduction to a 2014 volume of essays. See Keen 2007; Hammond and Kim 2014: 1–20.

4 Brooke-Rose’s PhD thesis, completed at University College London, was on the subject of metaphor, resulting in a 1958 monograph entitled The Grammar of Metaphor. See Darlington 2021: 13.

5 Alfred Northcliffe Rose, Christine’s father, is known to have been expelled from the Catholic Church due to theft, amongst other misdemeanours. See also Darlington 2021: 4-5.

6 ‘Middleman, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2022. Web. 14 June 2022.

7 Incidentally, Joseph Darlington reads this ‘mad climax’ as ‘indicative of the turn Brooke-Rose would make in her career during the 1960s’, a turn away from the genre of satire—which was becoming very popular in the early 1960s and also increasingly ‘anti-intellectual’—in pursuit of an ‘entirely new form of writing’. See Darlington 2021: 33–34.