Masculine Identity, Consumption, and the Ghost of Class in David Storey’s This Sporting Life and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

This paper examines the representation of a newly affluent and socially mobile working-class, and will demonstrate how the anxieties which resulted from an absence of change in the immediate post-war period, return to manifest as anxieties which relate to redefining working-class masculine identities in a period when poverty is no longer an automatic identifying feature of the culture to which they belong. In exploring these tensions the paper will demonstrate how, perhaps perversely, the protagonists of the text attempt to resolve, or relieve these anxieties, at least in part, by invoking the more rigid class structure of pre-war Britain as a means of grounding their identity and maintaining a sense of belonging. Further, the paper offers an investigation into the formation and re-definition of heroic masculinities, by engaging with the protagonists’ struggle to define themselves as hero and examining how their bravado, physical prowess, and conspicuous consumption – tropes which represent the purported power and dynamism of a new upwardly mobile consumer class – are juxtaposed against, and placed in conflict with the absence of an older, more socially static working-class who by implication knew and accepted their place within the conventions of the pre-war structure.