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T here was a square of cardboard in the window where the glass had been smashed. During the night one corner had worked loose and scraped against the frame whenever the wind blew" (Barker [1982] 1999, 9). Like many other novels of the early 1980s, Pat Barker's Union Street (1982) begins with a description of a crumbling home, making manifest the predicament of characters whose security and stability are under attack. The wind here freely enters the Brown household, circulating ominously throughout this novel and its successor, Blow Your House Down (1984), whose very title unites reader and character, suggesting the precarity of the dwellings and, by extension, the economic situations of the women both novels take as their subjects.
Throughout the Thatcherite 1980s, representations of such class-based collectivism were on the decline, even in texts with like themes: "He was going to be alone, there wasnt going to be no cunt, no cunt, he was going to be fucking alone, that was the way he was going to die, he fucking knew it, it was a fucking racing certainty" (Kelman [1991] 1998, 264). This concluding line from James Kelman's 1991 story "By the Burn" resembles the pessimistic endings of Barker's novel, and again a working-class character struggles with social invisibility, but it shifts from an accessible collective to a highly personal and individual isolation. In the move from female to male, from indoor to outdoor, from an ensemble to a lone protagonist, we can trace a transformation in public discourse about the "underclass." Certainly many eras have been a backdrop for similar concerns, but the Thatcherite rhetoric of the 1980s stands out as one of the most potent impositions of an ideological worldview onto the forms and themes of fictional texts since socialist realism.
Thatcherite shifts in discourse have been particularly pronounced in representations of class status. In keeping with Margaret Thatcher's remark that "class is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another" (1992), John Major began his regime with a call for a "classless society" (quoted in Oakley 1990). Tony Blair remarked in September 1999 that "the class war is over" (Blair 1999). Gordon Brown told his party in 2007 that "a class-free society is not...