"The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century"
About this Quote
Lewis’s line lands like a jailbreak report filed in a society column: the middle class isn’t merely complacent, it’s captive. Calling it a “prisoner” flips the usual American self-image. The bourgeoisie prides itself on choice, upward mobility, tasteful restraint. Lewis suggests those virtues are less freedom than a carefully managed confinement, a life hemmed in by mortgages, respectability, and the constant, quiet terror of slipping down a rung.
The sting is in “barbarian 20th century.” He’s not romanticizing the old world; he’s indicting the new one. The 20th century, in Lewis’s view, isn’t a polished age of progress but a modernized barbarism: mass advertising, boosterism, assembly-line culture, civic platitudes that sound like ideals until you notice they’ve replaced ideals. “Barbarian” is the perfect insult because it refuses the era’s own rhetoric about refinement. It says: you have gadgets and slogans, but you’re still ruled by herd instincts.
Context matters: Lewis wrote in and around the boom years and their hangover, watching small-town conformity and business piety harden into a national personality. In novels like Babbitt, he anatomized the middle-class man who confuses consumption with character and calls it citizenship. The subtext here is pity sharpened into contempt: the middle class collaborates with its cage, mistaking the bars for “normal life.” Lewis’s intent isn’t to sneer from above so much as to expose how modern America manufactures consent, then sells it back as comfort.
The sting is in “barbarian 20th century.” He’s not romanticizing the old world; he’s indicting the new one. The 20th century, in Lewis’s view, isn’t a polished age of progress but a modernized barbarism: mass advertising, boosterism, assembly-line culture, civic platitudes that sound like ideals until you notice they’ve replaced ideals. “Barbarian” is the perfect insult because it refuses the era’s own rhetoric about refinement. It says: you have gadgets and slogans, but you’re still ruled by herd instincts.
Context matters: Lewis wrote in and around the boom years and their hangover, watching small-town conformity and business piety harden into a national personality. In novels like Babbitt, he anatomized the middle-class man who confuses consumption with character and calls it citizenship. The subtext here is pity sharpened into contempt: the middle class collaborates with its cage, mistaking the bars for “normal life.” Lewis’s intent isn’t to sneer from above so much as to expose how modern America manufactures consent, then sells it back as comfort.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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