"Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class"
About this Quote
There is a deliciously cutting paradox in Anne Perry’s line: Americans insist they’re classless while obsessing over the one kind of status you can’t swipe a card for. Perry’s intent isn’t to romanticize aristocracy so much as to puncture a national myth. The U.S. sells itself as a meritocracy where money, hustle, and reinvention can remake anyone. Perry replies: every society sorts people, and the sorting doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to name it.
Her subtext is sharper than nostalgia for “good breeding.” “Breeding” functions here as shorthand for coded behaviors: accent, manners, taste, a sense of ease in elite spaces, the ability to treat privilege as natural rather than acquired. The sting is that these signals are learned early, transmitted quietly, and policed socially. Money can buy the theater subscription, the private school, even the vineyard. It can’t reliably buy the unselfconsciousness that comes from never having to wonder if you belong.
Context matters: Perry, a novelist known for Victorian-era crime fiction, writes in a genre where class is practically a character. In those worlds, hierarchy is explicit and brutal, but at least it’s legible. Her jab at America suggests a more slippery cruelty: we pretend the ladder isn’t there, then blame people for failing to climb it. “You can’t buy class” isn’t just snobbery; it’s a critique of how status reproduces itself under the cover of egalitarian talk.
Her subtext is sharper than nostalgia for “good breeding.” “Breeding” functions here as shorthand for coded behaviors: accent, manners, taste, a sense of ease in elite spaces, the ability to treat privilege as natural rather than acquired. The sting is that these signals are learned early, transmitted quietly, and policed socially. Money can buy the theater subscription, the private school, even the vineyard. It can’t reliably buy the unselfconsciousness that comes from never having to wonder if you belong.
Context matters: Perry, a novelist known for Victorian-era crime fiction, writes in a genre where class is practically a character. In those worlds, hierarchy is explicit and brutal, but at least it’s legible. Her jab at America suggests a more slippery cruelty: we pretend the ladder isn’t there, then blame people for failing to climb it. “You can’t buy class” isn’t just snobbery; it’s a critique of how status reproduces itself under the cover of egalitarian talk.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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