It's bourgeois

In Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (volume 3, The Acceptance World, the literary man, Mark Members (who favors psychological literary criticism) is displaced as secretary to the aging novelist, St. John Clarke, by the Marxist J. G. Quiggin.

After St. John Clarke falls under Quiggins's influence, Members relates:

"Then I noticed St. J. was beginning to describe everything as 'bourgeois'," he said. "Wearing a hat was 'bourgeois', eating pudding with a fork was 'bourgeois', Lady Huntercombe was 'bourgeois' - he meant long suits. Then one morning at breakfast he said Cézanne was 'bourgeois'. At first I thought he meant that only middle-class people put too much emphasis on such things - that a true aristocrat could ignore them. It was a favourite theme of St. J.'s that 'natural aristocrats' were the only true ones. He regarded himself as a 'natural aristocrat'. At the same time he felt that a 'natural aristocrat' had a right to mix with the ordinary kind, and latterly he had spent more and more of his time in rather grand circles - and in fact had come almost to hate people who were not rather smart, or at least very rich. For example, I remember him describing - well, I won't say whom, but he is a novelist who sells very well and you can probably guess the name - as 'the kind of man who knows about as much about placement as to send the wife of a younger son of marquess in to dinner before the daughter of an earl married to a commoner'. He though a lot about such things. That was why I had been at first afraid of introducing him to Quiggin. And then - when we began discussing Cézanne - it turned out that he had been using the word 'bourgeois' all the time in the Marxist sense. I didn't know he had even heard of Marx, much less was familiar at all with his theories."

Now, according, to Members, "everything is 'bourgeois'."

To the superficial, unthinking Marxist - and even liberals of a certain squint - 'bourgeois' is one of the most damning of adjectives.

Its use in Britain has virtually destroyed the desire for upward social mobility among the working classes. The fear of becoming 'bourgeois' over-rides all else, and many remain content with the possession of mere money.

The roots of this go further back than one may suspect.

Alfred P. Doolittle probably didn't know the word 'bourgeois', but he knows he doesn't want to be part of it. He laments the effects that the affluence accidentally contrived for him by Henry Higgins have had on him: "Ruined me. Destroyed my happiness. Tied me up and delivered me into the hands of middle class morality."

Oh heavy burden, for the once-free spirit!