Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture

Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television

Helen Davies, Claire O'Callaghan, Helen Davies, Claire O’Callaghan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the gritty landscapes of The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead, to the portrayal of the twenty-first-century precariat in Girls, this book explores how transatlantic visual culture has represented and reconstructed ideas of gender in times of financial crisis. Drawing on social, cultural and feminist theory, these writers explore how men and women experience austerity differently and illuminate the problematic ways in which economic policy can shape how gender is presented in popular culture. Written from the perspective that the popular is indeed political, this book considers film, literature and television's ideological attitudes towards race, sex and disability. It also takes into account how mass culture has responded to austerity in the past and the present, whilst examining the impact that feminism will have in the future.

1

A Big Neo-Victorian Society?: Gender, Austerity and Conservative Family Values in The Mill

Helen Davies

Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters’s discussion of the term ‘neo-Victorianism’ highlights the way in which this appellation for contemporary culture’s engagements with the nineteenth century implies a sense of nostalgia for that which has gone before:

The term ‘Neo’ when used in conjunction with a political movement, implies a desire to return to the political beliefs of that movement’s past […] and a desire for the reinstatement of earlier, and often conservative, values as opposed to more radical change. Margaret Thatcher’s Neo-Victorianism – her call for a return to ‘Victorian values’ – might be interpreted in this way.

(Johnston and Waters, 2008, pp. 10–11)

Debates as to whether neo-Victorianism is a genre typified by a conservative idealisation of the nineteenth century, or is more clearly committed to politically progressive challenges to the social power inequalities of this historical era have been a central feature of neo-Victorian criticism.¹ In short, both impulses can be at play in neo-Victorian cultural productions, and often simultaneously.² However, whilst Margaret Thatcher’s ideological investment in nostalgia for ‘Victorian values’ has received some notable attention in extant neo-Victorian criticism,³ the extension and development of this ‘neo-Victorian’ rhetoric in David Cameron’s Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government – particularly with regards to the austerity measures outlined to combat the recent UK recession – deserves further scrutiny. In what ways might Cameron’s recent discourse on family values, social responsibility and Victorian-inflected philanthropy in his concept of ‘the Big Society’ become manifest in contemporary and popular cultural representations of the nineteenth century?

Beginning in summer 2013, with the second series screening the following year, Channel 4’s neo-Victorian drama The Mill tells the story of a family of mill owners and their workers employed at Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire during the 1830s. The historical Quarry Bank Mill offers an invaluable insight into the lives of its employees, for a detailed and substantial archive of ‘over a hundred years’ worth of documentation, thousands of original mill records, personal correspondence, [and] thousands of artefacts’ is preserved on site (Hanson, 2014, p. viii). It was this material which formed the basis of the fictionalised version of the community surrounding Quarry Bank Mill in the television series. David Hanson’s book about the original Mill acknowledges the necessary process of condensation, adaptation and reimagining which attended the development of these sources into The Mill’s screenplay:

In the retelling of these stories it is sometimes for the benefit of the writer and ultimately, therefore, to the benefit of the viewer, that characters and events are slipped from their historically accurate moorings, to a place of greater immediacy and relevance.

(Hanson, 2014, p. xi)

That historical adaptations reflect the concerns of the cultural moment in which they are produced is evidently something of a truism, yet the ways in which the plotlines of The Mill engage with the current ‘age of austerity’ in Britain was highlighted in several press reviews of the series. Remarking upon series one, episode one’s depressing emphasis on the exploitation of impoverished workers and the ‘wet smacking of gruel into indentured child worker’s grubby […] hands’, Ceri Radford summarised the opening of the series as ‘history as misery memoir, the anti-Downton Abbey’ (Radford, 2013, n.p.). Whilst Radford does not elucidate the differences between The Mill and Downton Abbey as two examples of historical drama, her comment implies that the latter offers idealised escapism from the gritty realities of poverty and class conflict, realities depicted in The Mill which are as relevant to contemporary austere Britain as they are to the nineteenth century.⁴ Charlotte Runcie’s review of the beginning of the second series of The Mill makes such analogies more transparent: ‘The Mill […] is Benefits Street for the 1830s, except there are no benefits – unless you count the workhouse (which doesn’t seem to benefit anyone) or a kindly neighbour bringing round a load of bread every now and then’ (Runcie, 2014, n.p.). Considering the outpouring of self-righteous indignation and hatred towards the perceived ‘scroungers’ upon the taxpayer which attended the screening of Benefits Street on Channel 4 in January 2014,⁵ Runcie’s remark notes that the absence of a Welfare State in the nineteenth century had dire consequences in times of unemployment and financial hardship. The Mill depicts the conditions of the workhouse as unbearably cruel and squalid, and community charity as precarious in the face of the need for self-preservation. The miserable fates of the series’ characters represent ‘some grotesque failure of pre-Welfare State Britain. It made the modern bedroom tax seem almost like a cuddly indulgence’ (Runcie, 2014, n.p.) This review, though damning of the ‘gloomy and po-faced’ tone of the series (Runcie, 2014, n.p.), casts The Mill’s rendering of austere times in the nineteenth century as simultaneously a justification of the current benefit system in contemporary Britain and a refutation that the Coalition’s austerity measures – such as Bedroom Tax⁶ − are quite as stringent by comparison. Put another way, in Runcie’s assessment, The Mill might critique austerity measures such as benefit cuts, but it also seems to affirm certain aspects of Conservative policy which have ideological implications for the ‘private’ space of the home and family. And, of course, the spheres of home and family are gendered; women have been and continue to be associated with the role of child-rearing and domestic care-giving in a variety of ways, a cornerstone of their marginalisation from the world of work and subject to patriarchal authority and oppression in both the traditional family unit and society beyond.

It is this broad tension between The Mill’s critique and simultaneous support of contemporary policies of austerity, and the ways in which these influence cultural constructions of gender, that this chapter explores. I seek to read the series through the lens of the British Coalition government’s policies on austerity and ‘family values’, and to consider the ways in which The Mill represents the pressures placed upon women in times of economic hardship. I begin with an extended analysis of David Cameron’s rhetoric in his speech delivered at the Conservative party conference at Manchester on 8 October 2009. Although given when Cameron was leader of the Conservative Party rather than the Prime Minister, the speech offers a significant overview of his vision for austerity measures which would begin to take shape as policy when his Coalition government came to power in May 2010. Importantly for my purposes, it also reveals a conspicuous emphasis on family and community in a way which invokes traditional gender roles even as it ostensibly speaks to increased equality across society. Furthermore, the politics of gender also intersect with issues of disability, a theme which foreshadows the changes to the disability benefits system under the Coalition government,⁷ and which become manifest as a source of anxiety in The Mill’s representation of gendered bodies that ‘work’, and those which do not. Cameron’s championing of personal and community responsibility becomes especially acute in his subsequent policy of ‘the Big Society’, which I interpret as a development of Thatcher’s celebration of the ‘Victorian values’ of philanthropy rather than state support. Yet, as we shall see, the concept of ‘the Big Society’ not only rests on an idealised view of Victorian society but also implicitly requires considerable support from the domestic sphere – the unpaid labour of women – to compensate for the shortfall in state funding.

The two series of The Mill can be understood as engaging with different facets of debates surrounding austerity and gender. My analysis of series one demonstrates how poverty is ostensibly combatted by the ‘family values’ of the Gregs who own Quarry Bank Mill. Initially, it seems that their paternalistic care towards their apprentices offers a productive alternative to the horrors of the workhouse; the latter is funded by Liverpool’s ‘rate-payers’ (series one, episode two), and so to offer orphans not only employment but a family structure within the Mill seems to indicate that private, paternalistic enterprise can function as an antidote to inadequate public funding which is a drain on the income of working people. However, via depictions of sexual exploitation, failures of care and the unresolved problem of how to make disabled bodies ‘productive’, series one of The Mill exposes the intersection between gendered and economic power imbalances; the ‘family’ becomes a site of oppression rather than support, and in austere times it is the powerless who suffer most.

In series two, the neo-Victorian context is more acutely informed by themes of financial hardship; the first episode represents John Doherty, an Irish political activist, informing his followers that the current economic ‘downturn’ has been caused by ‘a banking crisis in America’ which has led to recession in Britain (series two, episode one). The recession means that the Greg family must make cuts to ensure continuing productivity; William Greg, now the patriarch of the business, informs his workers that all must take a 25 per cent reduction in wages to stave off redundancies, as ‘we are all in this together’ (series two, episode five). This direct invocation of Cameron’s rhetoric should give us pause for thought, as series two of The Mill demonstrates the strain placed on a society where financial crisis necessitates a dependency on community support in the place of formal funding: family units must retreat to traditional gender roles, which in turn erupt in violence. Whilst series two seemingly does critique the ideal of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, however, it also struggles to allow women freedom from bearing the primary responsibility for care-giving in the family: the character of Esther Price is apparently punished for her attempts to balance her role of mother with her political conscience by the death of her son. Such a scenario indicates that despite The Mill’s investment in exposing the gendered power inequalities perpetuated by austere times, it cannot wholly depart from the notion that conservative ‘family values’ will act as a balm to fiscal instability.

Dependency, Responsibility and Gendering the Recession: David Cameron’s Family Values

Cameron’s 2009 Manchester conference speech has become somewhat infamous for its repeated refrain of ‘we’re all in this together’; a mantra of sharing the burden of the current hardships of the economic crisis, and a statement of solidarity in the face of the austerity measures that are to come in the form of cuts to government spending.⁸ Unsurprisingly, ways in which such discourse belied evident class-related power differences between various sectors of society came under scrutiny in the media coverage of Cameron’s pronouncements.⁹ In addition, as Claire O’Callaghan and I have identified elsewhere, this statement of equality rings hollow in the face of compelling evidence to suggest that austerity measures disproportionately affect women in both the work place and home.¹⁰ Interestingly, however, Cameron’s speech makes some allusions to improvements in gender equality in society; in a discussion of the situation of those in military service in Afghanistan, he makes reference to the ‘brave men and women’ working in the forces, indicating implicitly that women are now playing a significant role in traditionally male occupations (Cameron, 2009, n.p.). Furthermore, he draws attention to the increase in women candidates for parliament in the Conservative Party, thus suggesting that his party are actively contributing towards gender equality in the political sphere (Cameron, 2009, n.p.).¹¹

Cameron also makes reference to his own domestic situation as a way in to explaining his personal investment in the importance of family: ‘this is in my DNA: family, community, country’ (Cameron, 2009, n.p.), but it is when the personal becomes political that his championing of the centrality of ‘family’ becomes more troubling. Reflecting on the social problems which have perpetuated the economic crisis, he explains:

I know how lucky I’ve been to have the chances I’ve had. And I know there are children growing up in Britain today who will never know the love of a father. Who are born in homes that hold them back […] Children who will never start a business, never raise a family […] This is what I want to change.

(Cameron, 2009, n.p.)

Although the speech makes much of the Labour government’s ‘breaking’ of the economy and society via too much spending and interventions which have ‘undermined responsibility’, the above quotation also casts blame upon certain members of society as well. Signifiers of being a successful member of society – in other words, part of the solution to the recession – are a patriarchal, heteronormative family structure which should be replicated over generations and private entrepreneurship. Why an absent father should be invoked as more detrimental to a child’s future, rather than an absent mother, remains unexplained, but such a formulation points towards a privileging of the patriarch as a guiding force in becoming a productive, financially viable adult. By inference, it is single mother families who are a burden on society; more specifically, a drain on the state coffers, presumably due to the benefits they may claim, but also in their supposed failure to produce suitably industrious children.

Cameron’s example of how this sense of social ‘responsibility’ might be restored is conspicuously gendered. The plan to ‘get Britain working’ instead of relying upon state-funded support is justified as follows:

It means the man w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction: Boom and Bust? Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture
• 1 A Big Neo-Victorian Society?: Gender, Austerity and Conservative Family Values in The Mill
• 2 The Downturn at Downton: Money and Masculinity in Downton Abbey
• 3 Wartime Housewives and Vintage Women: A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods and Reframing Popular Nostalgia
• 4 ‘Thatcher’s Bloody Britain!’: Unemployment and Gender in Neoliberal Britain in The Young Ones and Men Behaving Badly
• 5 From Homebuyer Advisor to Angel of the Hearth: The Development of Kirstie Allsopp as the Female Face of Channel 4 ‘Squeezed Middle’ Austerity Programming
• 6 The Walking Dead and Gendering Zombie Austerity
• 7 Embodying Austerity: Food and Physicality in The Hunger Games
• 8 ‘I Want What Everyone Wants’: Cruel Optimism in HBO’s Girls
• 9 Baring the Recession: Sexual Sensationalism and Gender (A)politics in Contemporary Culture