Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

English Language and Literatures

First Advisor

Eli Jelly-Schapiro

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersection of gender and class identity in British proletarian Bildungsromane set during the General Strike of 1926 and the Miners’ Strike of 1984/5, referred to collectively as “Strike Bildungsromane.” These prolonged industrial conflicts temporarily disrupted the gender division of labor that had hitherto been a defining aspect of pit village life. This development encouraged proletarian writers of the interwar and post-war periods to consider coalfield women as political agents, capable of subverting their preordained roles within the private sphere. These moments of subtle subversion are critical to the General Strike novels explored in this study, including Lewis Jones’s We Live (1939), Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929), and Harold Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field (1929). These tensions resurface more overtly throughout such Miners’ Strike Bildungsromane as Kit Habianic’s Until Our Blood Is Dry (2014) and Janet MacLeod Trotter’s Never Stand Alone (1997). Using both symptomatic reading (Jameson, Macherey) and Marxist-feminist theory (Federici, Hartsock, Hartmann), the study interrogates the affordances and limitations of the class-based ontology underlying the proletarian Bildungsroman. While General Strike Bildungsromane in particular manage to grant visibility to coalfield women’s roles within the home, these duties are still largely treated as leading to an absence of political consciousness. The study concludes that deindustrialization during the Thatcher era forced proletarian writers to reevaluate the primacy of class identity, thereby granting pit village women a political identity essential to, but apart from, the masculinist class struggle.

Rights

© 2025, Carl Clinton Sweat

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