Class subordination in fiction is spatialized as anxiety about entering elite spaces

Evidence

Characters are forever leaving their comfort zones and risking exposure by venturing into alien spaces. The working-class Sean in particular is struck by social anxiety induced by the spaces he has to enter to speak with the great and the good—for instance, being patronized by Paul at a Madison Avenue café populated by flunkies and hangers-on. He feels he is “a no-name worthy of addressing but not worthy of knowing. An audience not a player, unshaven in his Windbreaker because he hadn’t wanted to be late” (129). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 284

Categorization

Category: Craft and Method

• XREF: Directly useful for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy where class/space dynamics are entangled with the Muslim identity — here Morey shows how spatial anxiety itself carries the power struggle.