CONSTRAINTS: middle-class conventions

     
    Another reason for the discrimination against working-class fiction is because it is measured by middle-class literary conventions: 
                                        The novel as a literary genre has an intimate relationship
                                         with the middle-class, both in terms of its historical emergence
                                         and its continuing sociology, its readership and conditions of 
                                         production. 

     In the classic bourgeois realist novel, the narrative structure is purposive and progressive, beginning with the individual moving out into the social world and finally into individual consciousness. This linear narrative, together with the plot and action, is directed towards an affirmation of conventional values. The novel moves inevitably towards a resolution, where there is a transformation and progression ordered through the making of marriages and fortunes. 
       In contrast, working-class life is less ordered and more precarious:
 
                                       Working-class life shifts uneasily between the static and the
                                        lurching, endless calamity. Its beginnings and end are arbitrary
                                        and brutal; over and over again, working-class novels end with
                                        death, that class’s only reliable inheritance. 

In this respect, working-class experience is incompatible with the traditional bourgeois novel form.