The Sylvan Ghosts of Class Mobility

Polity Press, in its Key Concept series, favors natural elements for the covers of its books on social issues: lush rice fields for Will Atkinson’s Class; close-up leaves for Muriel Darmon’s Socialization. Far from being green ornaments, these editorial choices point to a trend in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives of emancipation. Texts are developing what could be called an ecology of class mobility. There is a constellation of French narratives on those who leave, that also takes into consideration the countryside of those whose stay. Some parvenus, “de-planted,” “transplanted,” have imprinted the hinterland of their childhood (Véron and Abiven 47-48).1 From this vantage point, the background of class mobility no longer appears as a fuzzy setting, but as a hollowed-out landscape that socially mobile protagonists continue to remember and inhabit through animal and vegetal inlays.2 By comparing Annie Ernaux to Marie-Hélène Lafon, with shorter references to Davy Chou and Marouane Bakhti, I gather here a corpus that portrays social milieux environmentally, turning emancipation into an ecosystem.