Adulthood (5)

When we think of adulthood, what do we think of? A respectable career, home ownership, spare towels in the linen closet, etc. There are of course other, more internal qualities that we associate with adulthood, but those are harder to perceive and to define; it is by the external markers of job, house, etc. that we most readily identify the adult and, by their absence, the one who has failed to achieve adulthood.

Let me then make the obvious observation: these are not in fact the markings of maturity but of membership in a particular class. But, because the class in question is the one that (nearly) everyone aspires to, these markers have taken on a magnified significance: they are not merely the markers of adulthood for the bourgeoisie; they are the markers of the adulthood that everyone is striving for. From the American dream and the fetish of “upward mobility” comes a confusion of concepts: success, maturity, class membership—which is which? There is a suggestion, almost, that the only true adult is the bourgeois adult.

Adulthood, then, takes on an aspirational quality: it is not something that everyone achieves by dint of surviving so many years on earth, nor even by dint of learning something from those years. It is something that one amasses. It comes from particular choices, choices that depend not upon moral strength or courage but on material prudence and conformity. This reorientation runs in strange parallel to the reorientation of class itself, from a fixed category that one is born into, to a kind of ladder that one must climb and climb— or fall!

And yet, at the same time, we seem to find something repugnant about the bourgeoisie, and what we find repugnant is almost precisely their (as we depict it) uptight, stodgy, comfortable, self-satisfied grown-up-ness. Perhaps no boogeyman looms as large as this one in our popular culture. All of rock and roll, all of punk rock rages against it. It is the target of all of mainstream Hollywood’s figurative rebellions: the young Victorian heiress bridling under her family’s uptight manners, the 1980s high-schooler turning the tables on repressive teachers, the suburban dad rediscovering pot and rock & roll—are all figures in revolt against adulthood-as-bourgeois-culture. It is impossible to know where one ends and the other begins.

Thus, at the same time that so many of us doggedly pursue bourgeois adulthood (or wonder what is wrong with ourselves that we fail to pursue it), we also imbibe a steady diet of fictional narrative glorifying the rejection of that form of adulthood and all the aspirations that come with it. As with so many contradictions that exist comfortably side-by-side within our cultural mythology, these fictional narratives do nothing to reduce the force of the command to grow up and become bourgeois. In fact, for me at least, they make that command much more powerful, because they seem to turn my resistance to it into something ridiculous, a playing-out of puerile Hollywood fantasies.

More on puerile Hollywood fantasies >>
More on the bourgeoisie >>
More on adulthood >>